A great many Christians are sailing awfully close to the edge of atheism in trying to justify those things in the Bible that are distateful to them. Say what you want about the moral lessons therein and the Word of God, there's a lot of truly hateful things in the Bible as well. Anyone who truly believes that every word of that book is the absolute Truth, direct from God himself, is a potentially dangerous person and I sincerely hope somebody is keeping a close eye on their actions. The Bible, after all, condones slavery, rape, and murder in countless passages. Those who truly believe that when God says "kill", you shoudl kill, are dangerous people.

Most Christians I know, however, are basically hypocrites, something I'm deeply thankful for. They waffle on the whole Bible being a perfect thing, picking and choosing the bits they like as though they were at a Chinese buffet, unsure of what everything is but indulging in the things they're comfortable with, like the deep fried chicken balls and the egg rolls. They ignore the vast majority of the Bible and instead focus on Jesus, the God made man. He's the hero of the story, after all, and the other 85% or so of the Bible can pretty much be ignored if you just focus on Jesus. Right?

If God is indeed God and Jesus an incarnation thereof, then pretty much every shred of evidence of his existence comes from the Bible. If you do not choose to believe in what the Bible says, or you elect to pick and choose the bits that matter to you, then you might, deep down inside, really be an atheist or, minimally an agnostic. No Bible pretty much adds up to no Jesus.

One Christian friend of mine argued that Chist didn't actually die on the cross. He points to a book called, "How Jesus Became Christian". The book challenges the modern Christian church on its not being Christian at all but a church of the apostle Paul. It lays a lot of the problems with Cristianity at Paul's feet, blaming him for taking things literally or misinterpreting the text. "Get back to the teachings of Jesus and the church is better off," my friend argued. He told me that Chist did not die on the cross, but rather endured great pain and pulled through; after attending a seminar called "A Coroner at Calvary", where forensic evidence to that effect was presented.

All right, let's talk about that one, mostly because it's pretty important in the Christian canon. If Christ did not die on the cross, then there is no miracle of the resurrection and he wasn't God. If he was merely (and I mean no disrespect by the word 'merely' here) a great teacher and healer, then he was a man. He could be as great as you want him to be, but he is still a man and, therefore, not somebody you worship. 

And, to push this to the breaking point, if we accept the 'teachings of Jesus' as the basis for a religion, then we also accept the evil he did and the evil he condoned as somehow being good. If I accept that he lived as the Bible states, then Jesus was far from perfect. He may not have been a bad guy, all in all — he may have been a great guy — but he was just a guy.

There have been plenty of great men and women on par with, and surpassing, Jesus Christ. Some, I'm sure, have worshippers. They, however, don't get the credit, or the social acceptance, that the borderline believers of Christ do. In short, most people do not worship somebody for being 'just a guy', no matter how wonderful a guy (or gal) they were. So what about you, my nominally Christian friends. Do you? How much of your holy book, of your religion, are you willing to turn a blind eye to before you accept that maybe, just maybe, you might not be as much a Christian as you think?