New Year Resolutions for Christians, 2024

Embrace curiosity, question everything!

It’s probably a safe bet that Christian bookstores don’t have shelves marked, “Books by Our Atheist Critics.” There would be few sales—perhaps zero sales, because there is zero curiosity about critiques of Christianity written by serious thinkers. Thus I won’t encourage curiosity in this direction. I suspect most of the devout remain unaware of the boom in atheist publishing during the last couple of decades. This boom was stimulated by the best-selling atheist books written by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris; these seemed to open the floodgates. By my count, there are now well over 500 books—most published since 1999—that explain the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. The owner of this blog, John W. Loftus, has made a major contribution to this growing body of literature (see the books pictured at the right). Even if some churchgoers are vaguely aware of this, they look the other way.
 
 
But there are other avenues for their curiosities to take, although curiosity is not considered a virtue—at least since the time of St. Augustine (born 354), who considered curiosity a disease:  
 
“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”
 
Augustine had no way of knowing that 1,500 years later humans would be in hot pursuit to figure out the secrets of nature, thereby enriching our understanding of the cosmos. But far too many Christians today are stuck in the Augustine-mode. Mike Pence doesn’t “believe” in evolution, and says he’ll ask God about it after he dies. If Pence had anything above zero-level of curiosity, he’d read a few books on biology, on the enormous impact of Darwin’s discoveries on our understanding of the world. How evolution works is not that hard to grasp. 
 
But, moving on: as a New Year Resolution for Christians, 2024, I would recommend 
 
·     Above all, curiosity about the Bible
·     Curiosity about Christianity itself, including the origins of the faith
 
It must be a great relief to the clergy that most of their parishioners are not obsessed with reading the Bible: there are 1,001 verses that are embarrassing, hard to explain, that work against their idealized versions of god and Jesus. Any careful reading of the gospels can provoke troubling doubt, as I discussed in my article here last week, Rampant Gospel Confusion. If the gospels aren’t eagerly read, the letters of the apostle Paul get even less traffic. Yet, Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a gigantic element in Christian theology. Martin Luther suggested that Christians should memorize it. No surprise there, since he was obsessed with theology, which cannot be said of contemporary believers. 
 
Many other theologians as well have been obsessed with the Letter to the Romans. C. S. Dodd began his 1932 commentary on Romans with this claim:
 
“The Epistle to the Romans is the first great work of Christian theology…For us men of Western Christendom there is probably no other single writing so deeply embedded in our heritage of thought.” (p. 9)
 
Ben Witherington III opened his 2004 commentary on Romans with this statement:
 
“Embarking on a study of Romans is rather like beginning a long journey—it requires a certain amount of preparation, patience, and faith, as the goal of understanding this formidable discourse is not reached for a considerable time.” (p. 1)
 
Shouldn’t Christian curiosity kick in if Dodd and Witherington are right? “How is our faith sustained and strengthened by what we read in Romans? Does this epistle capture our faith perfectly?” 
 
So, put curiosity into full gear and plunge into study of Romans.
 
Even in the first chapter, however, we see Paul in a bad, vindictive mood. God abandons those who refuse to acknowledge him. Somehow, “love is patient, love is kind” (I Corinthians 13:4) doesn’t apply to his god:
 
“…God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die…”   (Romans 1:28-32)
 
Is this part of your faith, that gossips and rebellious children deserve to die? This is severe theology, and in the next chapter, Paul stresses the horrible punishments that his god has in store:
 
“But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will repay according to each one’s deeds: to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life, while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but injustice, there will be wrath and fury.” (Romans 2:5-8, emphasis added)
 
A far more cherished idea among the devout is that God-Is-Love, and perhaps they do worry what will happen to them if they commit too many sins—and they can probably identify with Paul’s confusion about his own behavior, as he confesses in chapter 7 of the letter:
 
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.  Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.” (Romans 7:15-20, emphasis added)
 
So it can be an uphill battle to be a good person; it would seem, based on this text, that Paul knew this very well. Yet he managed to be so nasty, so vicious at the opening of the letter: those who deserve to die include gossips, rebellious children, people who are “foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” Why couldn’t Paul have cut them some slack? Good Christian folks who can identify with Paul’s self-evaluation—sin dwells within them—are probably more patient with other sinners they see around them: no, they don’t deserve to die. Paul’s theology here is extreme. 
 
Is this part of the faith of devout believers?
 
Paul’s disinterest in sex comes across in his letters as well. In Romans 13:14 he wrote, “…put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” He is even more emphatic in his letter to the Galatians: “And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (Galatians 5:24) 
 
Is this also part of the faith of devout believers? 
 
The opening paragraph of Romans 13 is one of Paul’s most bizarre statements. He claims that all government authorities have been put in place by God. 
 
“Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” (v. 2) 
 
“But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.”  (v. 2)
 
It would appear that Paul was not aware that Jesus had been executed by Roman authorities. We know the story because of the gospels, but they hadn’t been written yet when Paul was active. 
 
Peter J. Brancazio has noted correctly that Paul’s teaching here “…is incredibly naïve, and the idea that governments are inherently just and God-ordained is no longer taken seriously. It is a sad fact that on too many occasions Paul’s words were cited by Christians to justify their cooperation with totalitarian regimes.” (page 458, The Bible from Cover to Cover)
 
Believers who undertake this adventure in curiosity regarding Paul’s Letter to the Romans are likely to make many other unpleasant discoveries. Theologians often live in their bubbles of delusion: how else to explain C. H. Dodd’s boast that Romans is “the first great work of Christian theology.” It is anything but. Paul was a mediocre thinker, obsessed with mediocre theology, based on—he admits it, brags about it—his hallucinations. 
 
Christian curiosity will probably bring the most stress when the origins of the faith are examined carefully. This will require a lot of courage, and willingness to look below the surface, by which I mean studying other cults that influenced early Christian beliefs. 
 
It can be a shocking discovery that there were other dying-and-rising savior cults that promised eternal life. For a thorough examination of this issue, see Richard Carrier’s 2018 essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. Carrier has pointed out that “Jesus was late to the party.” 
 
It’s also appropriate to be curious about verification that Jesus was a real person. How would a devout Christian go about citing the evidence for that? This requires a certain level of awareness about what has been going on in world of scholarly Jesus studies in recent decades. Quite a few scholars now have serious doubts that there was a historical Jesus. Vital homework here is Richard Carrier’s 600-page 2014 volume, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. In his conclusion, Carrier states:
 
“Right from the start Jesus simply looks a lot more like a mythical man than a historical one. And were he not the figure of a major world religion—if we were studying the Attis or Zalmoxis or Romulus cult instead—we would have treated Jesus that way from the start, knowing full well we need more than normal evidence to take him back out of the class of mythical persons and back into that of historical ones.”  (p. 602)
 
A crucial part of this book is pp. 65-234, in which Carrier describes, in detail, 48 elements that form the backdrop of Christian belief. In 2020 Carrier published Jesus From Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed About Christ, intended as a summary—aimed at the lay reader—of his primary points in On the Historicity of Jesus.
 
It doesn’t take too much digging—but true curiosity is a prerequisite—to discover the New Testament roadblocks to proving the historicity of Jesus. So a very good resolution for Christians for 2024 is rise to the challenge of doing serious homework about where your faith came from. 
 
 
 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.