For me all of the debate regarding interpretation of the bible is wrapped up in the way the religion is practiced. I am not a stickler for the bible being authentic although it would help.
My reason for not believing in Christianity is that according to the books own statements God is an evil creature.
Many things in the bible condoned by God are immoral in my opinion. Immoral totally through, so you can't make the argument that back then things were different.
Murdering children for example is immoral. Owning slaves is immoral.
I know this. And you know what else? Every Christian out there knows this. There are no two ways about it.
You know it is wrong to murder a child. Its a tragedy. One of the hardest things that soldiers experienced in Vietnam was when the enemy would hand a child a live grenade and tell him to walk towards the American soldiers and so the American soldier would have to shoot the child to protect the troops.
It was considered horrific. So God doing stuff like this is just immoral. No matter what reasons. The situation is immoral regardless of Gods choices. That a God would allow this causes me to reject him. And the action of rejecting God is so ridiculous that it has made me realize that in all likelyhood there is no God to reject. We are shaking our fists at the sky and raging against nothing. For the moral depravity on this planet lies solely in the actions of people. It is by clinging to the salvation of God that we prevent ourselves from taking a cold hard look at reality and to see that the lack of morality in our "creator" makes itself know in the lack of morality in life.
Here is an excerpt from an article discussing Ivan Karamazov who is the complete mirror of my opinion of God and why I reject especially Christian views of God.
QUOTE
Despite his eager embrace of the world, therefore, Ivan wants to remain a solitary and transcendent judge over it, a godlike withholder no less than a gracious giver of praise. Others must satisfy his own criteria before he will embrace them. And because God does not satisfy the requirements of Ivan’s logic, he will not believe in God.
Yet Ivan’s logic is not sophomoric. He makes a strenuous case against God’s goodness. He refuses, for example, to cite the many natural calamities-typhoons and tornadoes, floods and droughts, fires and earthquakes and disease-that seem to disclose a ham-fisted Creator. Ivan knows that such cosmic evils might be attributed to a natural process that is divinely ordered. Like Job, he might discover that, while the natural order seems inimical to human happiness, its operations might have their own purposes, not revealing any divine hostility toward human well-being. But Ivan is not vexed chiefly with natural evils. He cares about moral evils, about the crimes that we human creatures commit. The standard explanation of such moral evils is that they are the unfortunate consequence of human freedom. God’s uncoerced creatures, so the argument runs, are capable of grossly misusing their liberty. If God were to prevent evil human actions, His world would no longer be free.
Ivan subjects the standard free-will defense of the divine goodness to devastating critique. At best, he says, the free perversion of human will explains only the suffering of adults, the grown-ups who are accountable for the evils that they both cause and suffer. They have eaten the apple of knowledge, says Ivan. Because they have followed the demonic temptation to become "as gods," they deserve their self-wrought misery. What this standard theodicy cannot account for, Ivan maintains, is the agony of children whose wills are still innocent. That their suffering results from human cruelty more than natural mishap makes it all the more horrible. As Ivan notices, animals rarely torment their prey. Only our human kind derives erotic pleasure from its savagery, becoming virtual voluptuaries of cruelty. In a passage that would have made even the Marquis de Sade tremble, Ivan declares the awful allurement of unprotected innocence. "It is precisely the defenselessness of these creatures that tempts the torturers, the angelic trustfulness of the child, who has nowhere to turn and no one to turn to-that is what enflames the vile blood of the torturer."
Ivan offers searing examples of such wanton and motiveless malignity. Indeed, he creates a virtual phantasmagoria of suffering from actual instances of human barbarity that he has read about in Russian newspapers: Turkish soldiers cutting babies from their mother’s wombs and throwing them in the air in order to impale them on their bayonets; enlightened parents stuffing their five-year-old daughter’s mouth with excrement and locking her in a freezing privy all night for having wet the bed, while they themselves sleep soundly; Genevan Christians teaching a naive peasant to bless the good God even as the poor dolt is beheaded for thefts and murders that his ostensibly Christian society caused him to commit; a Russian general, offended at an eight-year-old boy for accidentally hurting the paw of the officer’s dog, inciting his wolfhounds to tear the child to pieces; a lady and gentleman flogging their eight-year-old daughter with a birch-rod until she collapses while crying for mercy, "Papa, papa, dear papa."
Such evils cannot be justified, Ivan argues, either by religious arguments based on history’s beginning or by secular arguments that look to its end. The Edenic exercise of free will is not worth the tears of even one little girl shivering all night in a privy and crying out from her excrement-filled mouth to "dear, kind God" for protection. Yet neither will Ivan accept the Hegelian-Marxist thesis that the harmonious final outcome of history sublates its present evils. The notion that such savagery reveals the necessary consequences of human freedom or that it contributes to history’s ultimate result is, to Ivan, a moral and religious outrage. Neither is he any more satisfied with the conventional doctrine of hell, which holds that the monsters of torment will themselves be eternally tormented. Hellish punishment for heinous malefactors would not restore their victims, Ivan reminds us. The impaled babies would not be brought back to life nor would their mothers be consoled, the dismembered boy would not live out his years, the weeping girls would not be comforted. Ivan rejects all such theodicies because they belittle innocent suffering and thus commit unforgivable sacrilege against innocent sufferers. With a dramatic metaphor drawn again from Schiller, he refuses to offer his hosanna for such a world: he returns his ticket to such a life.
ETA source
And to note that even if it turned out that there really was a God I would be so offended at what he'd allowed to happen on his watch that like Ivan I would throw back his entrance ticket into heaven in his face and tell him to go eff himself.
At least I'd hope I'd have the strength to do so.
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=2110
