| After being raised a Catholic through High School and then being a Protestant for the next thirty years I have, with much help, come to this information which I am offering to all interested souls who don’t care to learn the long and hard way as I have. An understanding of the evolution of the Judeo/Christian religion and of the Bible is essential to put both in perspective. With such an understanding it will be hard to keep them up on a pedestal. My wish is that people will just follow the humanitarian teachings of Jesus without the extremism and unreality of religion. This booklet is written as if to Protestant Christians who may be ready for the truth in all its maturity which can lead them out of immature superstitious religion. A familiarity with the basic doctrines of modern Christianity is helpful to understand how these pages correct those doctrines or eliminate their supposed validity. Although the Bible will here be defrocked of much of its validity I still think much of it is based upon true happenings and that Jesus did exist as a Jewish teacher who probably was a healer although around 70AD unscrupulous Jesus cult promoters took his original sayings from the "Q Gospel" and the stories from the aged apostles and added and amplified a lot of it to attract much attention and make more of it all than was intended in order to have their money-and-status making religion which ended up being the Catholic religion. Martin Luther, the "creator" of the Protestant religion, in the 1500’s then protested against the authority of the church and the Pope but didn’t renounce all the superstitious beliefs of the "Jesus/Bible cult". Other than a rebirth of emphasis on the "gifts of the Spirit" the modern Protestant churches haven’t made any progress at all. They still ignore the true Bible scholars which can help them stop worshiping the Bible and return to the plain and simple life of compassion that Jesus taught. My sentiments about how modern Christianity has deviated from the original intentions of Jesus was expressed by the main author of the United States Constitution, Thomas Jefferson. He wrote in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in 1803: "In some of the delightful conversations with you ... the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you that one day or other I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to him every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other." NO RELIGIONI don’t see religion doing anything but ruining the best future for humanity. It hasn’t made people any freer or the world more peaceable. It has enslaved people with rules, debt to churches, and inhumane ideas. It has caused division between churchgoers and the non-churched. It has caused people to have a relationship with their religion instead of with others (as Jesus taught). It has caused the "prophets" to be shunned and outcast. When religious people cross over to the other side (after death) they are going to be sadly disappointed to find they are in the lower realms reserved for the nominally "good" who are not very enlightened. Then they’ll realize that they’ll have to "go back" to Earth once more to try to get it right.Jesus made no plans for his disciples to organize a new religion. All he wanted was for the disciples to make more disciples in the Judaic religion but with a more spiritual emphasis. Religion emphasizes doctrine whereas discipleship is about living to love and enlighten others without any emphasis on doctrine. Doctrine became the foundation of religion in 325 AD in the Catholic council of Nicaea. That’s when they decided that agreement with their creeds was essential to being a Christian. "Christianity" became a bland lukewarm half-hearted commitment to a set of beliefs that has nothing to do with loving your neighbor. Does believing that Jesus was "born of a virgin" affect how you love? NO. Does believing in bodily resurrection affect how you love? NO. Does believing in the trinity affect how you love? NO. Discipleship is a full commitment to following the example of Jesus to not live for money/pleasure/status, but rather to love God and humanity. Discipleship is as far above "Christianity" as the heavens are above the Earth. Discipleship is the real thing, Christianity is a fake imitation. Externally "Christians" look morally upright but internally they are still full of themselves and the world. Disciples empty themselves of their own ideas/control to humbly live to serve others. Churches are a money-making business whose leaders try their best not to lose customers by telling them they need to change their ways and their thinking to be as incredible as Jesus was. They teach them that being "Christians" is sufficient. They make them feel they are OK because they believe all the "correct" doctrines. They teach them that their passage to heaven is guaranteed because of a little salvation prayer instead of telling them the truth that only a life of love guarantees them a place in the heaven of love. Living in harmony with humanitarian teachings has a universal quality to it that can’t be bound by any one religion, including Christianity. The truth is that Christianity is a branch of Judaism. The core of Judaism is the 5 books of Moses, the Pentateuch, the first 5 "books" of the bible. Supposedly they were written by Moses although almost all the non-religious bible scholars agree that they were written by 5 different authors, one of which were the priests while they were held captive in Babylonia the first time many hundreds of years after Moses. These writings were an effort by the priests to give the Jews a source of national identity under the care of their God who they hoped would cause them to be free again after the people turned wholeheartedly back to him. There are some great spiritual values taught in the Pentateuch’s stories although they can’t be taken as historically accurate. How could a God of love order the Jews to slaughter entire cultures that were in their way? How could hundreds of thousands of people live in the deserts of Arabia after leaving Egypt unless they always camped next to a river (which didn’t exist) so they could have hundreds of thousands of gallons of water daily? How is it that there are no recordings in Egypt of the Jews stay and their delivery? How is it that a God of love and liberty could command 600 laws for the Jews to live strictly by? No, most of this was just stuff made up. Look in the New Testament to see what Jesus’ opinion was of the priests. He called them "snakes" and white-washed tombs. Jesus was keeping to the idea of God as loving and liberating. Scriptures tell of him going against religious laws at least 3 times. When you eat chicken you spit out the bones but swallow the meat. So you should do when you read the Bible. Take into your mind the parts that engender love and liberty and spit out all the hatred, cruelty, and legalities. To read about loving God you can read the Psalms. To read about wisdom you can read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. To read about the best example mankind has ever had to follow read about Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. (John was the gnostic gospel that tried to present Jesus as God. It wasn’t considered authentic in the early years after Jesus died.) The following pages cover many topics from the perspective of a spiritually mature independent thinker. These are the links to the pages. You can just click on the first one and then follow its own links to eventually read all the pages. Questions to Christians from non-believers Scripture amplifications and changes Bad Protestant and Catholic doctrines What the phrase "son of God" originally meant Did Jesus "die for your sins"? Tithing (giving one-tenth of your income) to the church Gospel of Jesus versus the Gospel of Paul Lack of any real proof of a miraculous Jesus My email discussion with a christian My personal journey of discovery BOOK READING LIST Zeitgeist: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Part 1
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