Peel back the layers and Christianity's got something cool to share
You've heard of Christianity. You've probably heard a story or ten from the Bible and perhaps even participated in Christmas festivities. Is Christianity cool? Well, you're probably not quite sure. Especially due to its rocky, crusader-y past and Catholic recent past. We've also got a bunch of frankly weird people that assert themselves on others claiming it's for God's sake but really for their own.
I would like to share and convey a deeper interpretation of Christianity, what makes it cool and special to me, in this article. I ask you as a reader to put a lot of the externalities aside, and take a walk with me through the garden. Let's talk about Christianity.
We're gonna be talking about the bible. There's a ton of content in the bible. I myself haven't read all of it. Let's do a quick recap of its structure. The bible is divided into two parts, the Old Testament (starting with the Torah, or Jewish bible) and the New Testament (Jesus and aftermath). The Old Testament is generally longer, ranging depending on religion to 24 to over 46 books. The New Testament is 27 books.
The most important book of the Old Testament in my opinion is Genesis. For the New Testament, the first four books: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are most important. These four books tell the story of Jesus Christ from the perspective of each respective disciple.
I'm not a bible expert so I'm wrong, of this I am sure. But hey, let's not ruin a good walk. Here we go, a summary of the major parts of the bible.
Step one: (Genesis) God creates everything but humans, and then he creates humans. God makes humans in his image and asks them to maintain the Garden of Eden. Things go downhill from here and in exchange humans get free will. God doesn't like what he sees and corrects quite a bit (hitting the reset button with Noah and the ark for example).
Eventually God chooses a chosen group of people, the Jews. The Jews make a contract with God and they adopt rules and sacrifices, and suffer a lot in Egypt and basically anywhere they go. If we tried to summarize their goal, it was to build the kingdom of God on Earth. Something approximating a utopia. They tried this many times and failed states always resulted.
Eventually the son of God, Jesus Christ makes his appearance. He flexes his powers through a series of miracles, assembles a group of disciples, and gives sermons. He is crucified, portraying an archetypical worst death ever and in that sacrifice frees all others from sin. He resurrects days later and enters Heaven.
The disciples catalog and disseminate Jesus's teachings. The Jewish people continue to wait for their savior, or messiah, to arrive. Christians await the end of days, at least according to the last book of the bible Revelations. That book is a bit of a fever dream that makes you think "wow, not many people have read the bible."
Allow me to go even further and simplify the bible by the broad strokes:
In an even more condensed summary, the Old Testament is an experiment in achieving Heaven on Earth through the group or state. Changing it up, The New Testament is an experiment in achieving Heaven on Earth through the individual.
I'm personally open to believing there's more room for experimentation, but Christianity stops at the conclusion that the world can only be made a utopia through the sacrifice of the individual who lives their best life in service of others.
Atheists who talk to me about the bible always bring up suffering. It's a hot topic for sure. If God is omnipotent and can pick and choose anything that happens in the universe why have suffering?
I think the first place to start with omnipotence is the contradictions that entails. The two main examples:
In this sense, the bible is a story of delegation of power. God created humans to manage the world he creates and in doing so makes a 50+ book treatise on the subject.
As for suffering, we know in the Garden of Eden there was none; so God was capable of achieving it initially. However, in delegating and creating God-like creatures with free will, suffering became a possibility.
Now you've maybe heard all this before, the coupling of suffering and free will and the like is a common point of debate. That's not the coolest part of the bible but it is the foundation for what makes Christianity so cool.
Let's examine the coolest quote in the entire bible, so cool both Matthew and Mark wrote it down:
And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is to say, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” – Matthew 27:46
And at three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). – Mark 15:34
There's room for interpretation to make this quote seem not as cool as I think it is, but roll with me on this. This is as Jesus, the son of God and God on Earth, is being crucified. The crucifixion and the events leading up to it are, if taken as metaphor, an archetype of maximum suffering, and this quote arrives at the climax of that suffering.
For the atheists reading this article, surprise! In my interpretation of this quote, for a brief moment Jesus was one of you. He was under so much suffering that he questioned God and asks why he had been put through this suffering.
God, placed in human form, could deny that God exists.
This is an absolutely crazy concept. The burden of the nature of humanity and the human form is one which even the most supreme being cannot overcome. God may have created humans, but in this brief moment we learn that the patients would overtake the asylum. The human form is so weak, and yet so strong, that it can subdue even its creator.
Christianity teaches us humility and understanding of our neighbors and ourselves. If God cannot act perfectly in human form, what chance do we have? But at the same time, being human can level the playing field. Through hard work, caring about each other, and trying to be our best in our daily lives, we may not build back the utopia God once had.
What we can build in our juxtaposed condition, as fallible beings with free will, even God could not have imagined. The outcome could be absolutely terrifying, or we could challenge ourselves to complete God's mission and perhaps surpass it.
The bible can be taken as a set of God's teachings on how to live and work towards Heaven, but we cannot embrace them absolutely because even God in our form could not. There is no perfect solution we are capable of implementing, but we must try–with an understanding for ourselves and others that even God could not do it alone, anymore.