Category Archives: toxic christianity

October 13, 2017

10 Ways The Bible Will Drive You Insane

By wise sloth
in·sane
adjective

 

1: The Bible teaches everyone is wicked.

Isaiah 64:6-7 says, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind, our sins sweep us away. No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and have given us over to our sins”

The Bible teaches you that you suck, and you have to spend the rest of your life making it up to your disappointing God-parent and hope he doesn’t shoot you in the head anyway. That’s a crippling guilt trip that doesn’t have to exist.

 

 

2: The Bible teaches believers are righteous.

The Bible teaches that if you take part in Christianity’s indoctrination rituals, they will transform you into a higher form of life who deserves eternal peace and joy. That might not be such a bad thing, but since the Bible also teaches you that you’re a bad person, it teaches contradicting messages. You’ll experience anxiety and stress as you try to come to terms with this and many other riddles in the Bible.

 

 

3: The Bible teaches non-believers are evil and deserve to suffer for all eternity.

John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, so that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.”

Everyone else is so evil and depraved that they deserve to be tortured for all of eternity. This isn’t an accurate assessment of reality. That matters, because it sets Christians up to pass judgment on sinners and non-believers. Christians have killed people because of this.

 

 

4: It teaches your self-worth is based on believing in a story.

The determining factor between what makes someone deserve to burn for eternity and what makes someone deserve paradise for eternity is believing in a story. Believing in a story doesn’t have anything to do with anything. That’s not a valid factor to determine anyone’s self-worth by.This is a warped perception of reality that sets up Christians to judge and hurt others at worst and sets them up to waste their fleeting lives chasing fairy tales.

 

 

5: The Bible teaches psychotic morals that you’re not going to follow anyway

Most Christians don’t want to sell their daughters into slavery, beat adulterers to death with rocks, give away everything they own or avoid wearing clothes with mixed fabric. So they ignore the rules they don’t like, but they’re set up to feel guilty about it. And they have to come to terms psychologically with the fact that they’re committing acts of evil in complete disregard for the threat of Hell. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

 

 

6: The Bible teaches you to repress your sex drive.

Humans are sexual creatures, and that’s good because having sex ensures the survival and evolution of the species. That’s why sex feels so good. If God designed us, then God designed us to crave and enjoy sex. That rule was written into our DNA by God. It’s a commandment written in God’s own handwriting… yet the Bible tells us that lust is evil. We should feel ashamed for wanting sex, and we should kill people who have too much of it. This is not a sane perception of reality. It’s a crippling guilt trip and a recipe for deep-rooted anxiety.

 

 

7: The Bible discourages critical thought.

The cornerstone of sanity is critical thought. The Bible commands you to turn that part of your mind off. From beginning to end the Bible constantly stresses the importance of faith. The definition of faith is “belief without proof.”

Since the Bible claims to be the word of God and constantly stresses the importance of faith, a lot of Christians have extrapolated those two facts to come to the conclusion that the Bible has all the answers you’ll ever need in life and is the only book you’ll ever need to read. It would be unhealthy to believe everything you need to know about life you’ll learn in school. It’s far more crippling to believe that about one archaic book.

Doubt isn’t immoral. Doubt is the door to truth. Faith is close-minded, willful ignorance. And anytime anyone tells you it’s immoral to question their authority, you can be sure you’re being manipulated.

 

 

8: The Bible teaches false science and false history.

The Bible teaches false science and false history beginning on page one. Believing things that aren’t true is the definition of insanity. If you believe the Bible you will believe things that aren’t true, and that will make you automatically, by definition, insane. Understanding science and history are important because it’s the bedrock of your understanding of life. In order to survive and thrive in the real world, you need to know how the world really works.

 

 

9: Prayer is just talking to yourself and wishful thinking.

The Bible teaches that if you believe in Yahweh with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, then you’ll have the power to move mountains. God is listening, and He has the power and the motivation to give you guidance and create personal miracles for you.

That’s not how reality works. Wishing and begging an imaginary friend doesn’t accomplish anything. Your prayers aren’t going to be answered, and when they’re not, you’re going to have to come up with an excuse to explain the disconnect between your expectations and reality.You’re also going to waste valuable time that could be spent on growing and solving your own problems.

 

 

10: The Bible teaches you to believe in psychotic imaginary beings.

You will believe in a mysterious God who loves blood so much that He came to Earth as a mortal to die for it. Yet He hates women’s menstrual cycles, You’ll believe in an evil tyrant who lives in a lake of fire and plots against you all day for no reason. You’ll believe in invisible minions who serve both of these characters. You’ll believe in superpowers and magic. You’ll believe in an invisible universe just around the corner from our own just as fantastical as Narnia or Middle Earth, and you’ll be so convinced of your delusions that you’ll believe anyone who doesn’t accept this fantasy is insane. That’s insane. Living like that is a waste of your potential.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Bible is mythology
Christianity is Harmful to Society
Preaching, witnessing and arguing with Christians
Christian Culture
My Tweets About Religion

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October 30, 2009

10 Ways The Bible Ruins Society

By wise sloth

1. The Bible’s archaic, arbitrary code of ethics is ineffective in the real world.

There are a few common sense rules in the Bible that are good, but when you take every single rule into account you find vagueness, contradictions, absurdities, immorality idolized and morality demonized. The rules in the Bible are all over the place. To make matters even worse, the determining factor of whether or not you’re forgiven or punished for violating these vague, contradictory, absurd rules is whether or not you believe in a story.

Here’s why that’s bad. Imagine if you were trying to control a class of 6 year old children and you gave them an arbitrary set of rules and told them that the only way to escape punishment for breaking the rules is to believe in a story. What would happen? Chaos would break out.

Children who are raised their entire life on vague, contradictory, arbitrary rules grow up into adults with a warped perception of reality. They often feel guilty for doing innocent, natural things, believe they deserve to go to Hell, believe in magical spirits and powers, distrust science, fear pleasure and celebrate selflessness to a fault. These are not the habits of an enlightened society. They’re irrational, and they contradict reality. If you live your life according to beliefs that contradict reality you’re going to have a bad time.

Also, children who grow up believing the archaic, haphazard morals in the Bible, will grow up and become politicians who often try to pass laws enforcing or favoring those morals.

 

List of Bible verses that condone behavior generally accepted as evil including: Proverbs 20:30, Leviticus 25:44-46, Exodus 21:15

 

2. The Bible grants you immunity for your crimes.

If you firmly believe that the threat of the death penalty is strong enough to dissuade people from breaking the law then you had better believe that the promise of unconditional release and immunity is strong enough to entice people to break the law. Christian doctrine creates an environment that encourages, or at least excuses, inhumane behavior by removing the perception of consequence for those who believe.

 

3. Christianity places subservience as one of its top virtues.

This is great for a nation if you want everyone to be slaves. This is terrible for a nation that wants to progress and grow uniformly strong. If you want a nation to excel, you need to teach your children that genius is the highest virtue. A society raised on that value will create beauty you could never imagine possible, but we’ve chosen not to go down that path. We’ve taught people they’re dogs who deserve to be beaten. We’ve taught them that logic is evil and ignorance is strength. It should come as no surprise that every night on the news are stories about people acting like beaten dogs and tearing each other apart.

 

"Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the cruel." 1 Peter 2:18

 

4. Christianity places faith as one of its top virtues.

The bible teaches that blind faith is virtuous and doubt is evil. Every atrocity committed in history was done by people with blind faith in an ideology. Blind faith is a recipe for exploitation and oppression.

On the other hand, every advancement we’ve made in science, government, economics, the humanities, etc. were achieved by doubting, questioning and improving on the ideas our ancestors came up with. Curiosity and doubt open the door to truth, clarity and genius. Christianity takes those keys away from individuals and society as a whole.

 

5. Religion siphons money from the public that could be spent saving the world.

 

"If churches paid taxes, it would pay for all the food stamps for every person on welfare with enough left over to house the entire homeless population."

 

6. Making pleasure taboo is harmful.

The teaching of the Bible inspired countless people to regret and deny their sexuality, adopt an austere lifestyle and even revel in suffering. All of that sacrifice is irrational. There’s no sane reason to deny yourself any pleasure or happiness to honor the creator of the universe. All that accomplishes is making the world a less enjoyable place for you and everyone around you.

 

7. Christianity has a long tradition of holding back scientific progress.

There have been Christians who have made invaluable scientific breakthroughs. For example, a monk named Gregor Mendel proved the existence of genetically inheritable traits. However, Christianity has a long history of stifling scientific thought.

The Catholic church forced Galileo to withdraw and deny his research that proved the Earth is not the center of the universe. Christians regularly pressure public schools to teach children that the creation story in the book of Genesis is real and humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe if false. Christians have opposed the use of condoms and blocked stem cell research. Children have died because Christian parents had faith that God would save their sick child. I’ve even once heard an elderly Christian say that humans didn’t need psychology since the Bible is all you need to solve any problem in the world. When the majority of a population hates the instruments of progress then it becomes much more difficult for that society to progress.

 

8. Life sucks for everyone else when Christians rule the world.

The Apostle Paul ordered Christians to spread the Gospel until everyone in the world believed in Christianity. Christian missionaries have a good track record of converting entire societies to the point that Christianity became merged with those society’s governments. It happened in Rome, Germany, The United States of America and many other places. All of those governments created laws that oppressed and punished people who didn’t live by Christianity’s archaic, vague ethical code.

Christianity likes to claim it loves everybody, but if you study the history of Christianity you’ll spend an awful lot of time looking at bloody warfare, economic exploitation, the oppression of minorities and slavery. Whenever you have a group who is supposed to be more favored by God than everybody else, and everybody else is so horrible and evil that they deserve to be tortured for eternity, blood will be spilled eventually.

 

9. Prayer is useless.

Somewhere out there in the world right now someone is praying to God, asking Him to help a starving third world child. Somewhere else out there is a starving child in a third world country praying for some rich, SUV-driving, Starbucks-drinking, Gucci purse –carrying, church-attending Christian to do something about the problems in the world.

Prayer doesn’t work. You know what does work? Work. That’s how every advancement in human history has ever and will ever happen. Prayer keeps that from happening.

 

10. The Bible teaches people to loathe themselves.

When you tell an entire nation that their righteousness is like filthy rags and they deserve to burn in Hell you’re going to create a nation of self-loathing people. You won’t have the time or motivation to fulfill your potential if you spend your days loathing yourself. And since people tend to treat others the same way they treat themselves, they’re probably going to treat others worse than they deserve.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Bible is mythology
Christianity is Harmful to Society
Preaching, witnessing and arguing with Christians
Christian Culture
My Tweets About Religion

 

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