Have you ever seen anything like this:

The Examination.

You have one and a half hours to complete the examination.

1] Read all the instructions before opening your answer book.

2] In your answer book copy out the 5,000 word passage from Beowulf.

3] Underline in red all verbs.

4] Underline twice in blue all words in the past tense.

5] Circle in green all proper nouns.

6] Draw an amusing caricature sketch of the examiner in the margin of your answer book. If you can include racial stereotypes you will earn extra credit.

7] When you have completed your sketch call the examiner over and discuss the sketch with him. Ensure you point out all the most insulting characteristics you included.

8] When you have completed the criticism of your sketch with the examiner feel free to telephone for a pizza.

9] Ignore all the instructions in this document numbered 2 through to 8.

10] Put your pen down and sit quietly until the examination is over. If anybody offers you a slice of pizza you must decline the offer.

Religion is like that. A whole lot of complicated instructions and ideas but with a fundamental error, a divide by zero hidden deep inside the equation which renders the entire thing, the huge edifice, meaningless and futile. The difference is there is a lot more stuff involved and you run the risk of doing a lot more stupid things than ordering a pizza.

The Bible is an account of some ideas about God. That's it. Some people say it's true. But they are the people who believe it is true and believe that believing it is true is the only way to be a good person. Surely they are the least qualified people to judge the accuracy of their beliefs. It doesn't matter what else you say or do with your life this fundamental flaw remains.

If you accept what the Christian message is (ignoring its fatal flaw) you find it makes perfect sense, eventually, after a lifetime of juggling ideas. If you accept that it is fatally flawed you can also make perfect sense of it, without going to all the trouble of listening to the messages it is putting out or trying to make sense of the contradictions because you simply know that it isn't important to resolve those contradictions because the whole thing is, was and always will be fatally flawed.

There are times when I think of Christians with pity as I see them struggling to make sense of something that is fundamentally absurd and cannot ever be made to make sense. It is like watching people struggling to work out whether to underline past tense verbs in blue then red or the other way around, and then burning at the stake those who did it the other way!

If I accept that the Bible is a true account then I see the verse you quoted at me and I read it and there is no choice but to believe it. But it's a very big if. I have to assume that there is a God. I have to assume that the Hebrew people's idea of what counts as authoritative scripture is correct, I have to assume that God worked through Hebrew culture and Hebrew committee politics. I then have to assume that he suddenly stopped doing that despite the fact that Hebrew culture continued as before without them noticing that he wasn't interested anymore. Then I have to assume that God started to work through the culture of the power politics of bishops and the Roman empire. Then I have to assume that God didn't want another word added to the Bible, ever, under any circumstances. That's an awful lot of big ifs.

The alternative explanation is much simpler, much easier to believe and does not require any faith. The alternative explanation is that mankind likes to have answers and if there are not good answers for good reasons he will invent other answers for other reasons and will sincerely believe them. Stories about gods don't need gods to explain why they exist, and neither do they require devils and angels to inspire them. All human cultures have contained explanations for the unexplainable and the frightening unknowns such as death and suffering. Why should anybody expect these stories to be true? Likewise why would anybody expect an idea or story that admitted it was false to be spread as well as one which maintained it was true? What makes a good story a good story? You can never understand religion and human culture unless you ask that question and allow yourself to answer it truthfully.

The human mind is incapable of directly discerning truth just by cogitation. If somebody tells you a story how can you know whether or not it is true? How can you feel if it is true? I might have to point out here that the human brain cannot do it directly, that is why there are so many stories of juries making mistakes. If we had an organ in our bodies that could directly perceive truth then we would lead very different lives. Nobody would make mistakes, crimes of deception would be impossible, adultery would be discovered almost at once, politicians and used car salesmen would have to tell the truth... You have to accept that we cannot know truth. You have to accept that people can be sincerely mistaken. You must accept it in order for you to function in your day-to-day life even if you will not admit it in debate for fear of weakening the case for your faith. When people lie to people the devil isn't involved, there is no need for such an explanation, people are simply imperfect lie detectors.

Religion is not lies. Religion is, in the vast majority of cases, spread sincerely. That is because stories that are believed by those that tell them spread more effectively than known lies. If you accept those two truisms, we cannot know the truth and we are more prepared to believe sincere people, it should not be hard for you to see that untrue stories can spread easily if they are believed.

Religion is a system of stories around the idea of faith. The central dogma of most religions, certainly of the Abrahamic religions, is that believing in (the officially sanctioned stories about) God with faith is the highest human virtue. I ask you to please try to understand how dangerous that combination of ideas is. We cannot know the truth and yet we are told that our worth is measured by how faithful and pious we are, by how we accept the stories we have been told are true and must be believed with virtuous faith. For somebody who does sincerely believe that there is a God and the nice faithful people in the church wouldn't be lying to him this might not seem a problem. But it is. It is a fundamental problem. There is no need for there to be a god in order for there to be a religion that believes in him and kills for him. Once the rather simple idea of a story of a creator, who must obviously be rather superhuman in powers, gets involved with the idea of faith and the idea that having faith is a virtue religions must grow and will be immune to logical attack as long as those who believe in them have no big reason to doubt them.

Religions spring up relatively easily. It just requires the juxtaposition of a few concepts that work together quite well. Here's a story that explains a few things... no there's no proof... you just have to believe me... no I can't prove it's true, but neither can you prove it isn't.... it's a matter of faith.... having this faith makes you one of us... we are the good people.... if you don't share our faith you cannot be a good person... spreading this faith is good, spreading the message is the best thing you can do... That's it. That is how religions work. Just add a lot of traditions such as holy books, genital mutilations, feast days, fasting, food taboos and prayers. Then ideally mix in a lot of other traditions of a secondary and tertiary nature, further removed from the central dogma that can be emphasized and de-emphasized through time as fashions change, examples of these include hymns, dress codes (collars and ties for the congregation, dog collars for priest, veils for the women and those silly mini-frisbee hats for Jewish men etc.), blessings and curses, greetings (in the name of Allah the most merciful most high and his prophet.. etc.), recipes for "sacred" food, hairstyles, symbols for jewellery and bumper stickers as well as fashionable causes which can be taken up or dropped according to fashion such as the persecution of witches, homosexuals, heretics, abortion workers, Jews, communists, atheists etc.

Religions, churches, are run by sincere people who were taught by sincere people. However, some religions, when you trace them back right to their roots have charismatic madmen or charlatans as founders. We tend to call these churches in embryo by the name of cults. Most cults do not survive the transition from the ravings of their charismatic founders to the mature stage of sincere belief and steady succession. But some manage to come through this period and as soon as they become run by sincere people who sincerely believe they are right the cult has become a church and there is no reason for it ever to die out unless it is turned on its head by some great social calamity.

Were Christianity and Islam originally charlatan cults?

Who can say? We have no surviving evidence from those who knew what the earliest days of those religions was like except the accounts of those who expressed their faith in them. We know that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, was widely ridiculed and considered to be a charlatan. We know that today there is a cult trying to turn itself into a respectable religion which was founded by a science fiction author who is widely accused of being a manipulative calculating money-grabbing charlatan. We know this stuff happens, it isn't hard to understand how the mix of gullibility and the idea that faith is a good thing can combine with charisma and showmanship to convince a significant minority that something miraculous is going on. If it can happen in these enlightened times why should we assume it could not happen in earlier, biblical, times? Why should we assume that Saul of Tarsus was immune to the idea of founding a religion as a career move?

Why would a mature empire fear a new religion? It really doesn't make sense to think of the Romans as sincerely worrying about whether Christianity had discovered some great new truth that would somehow destroy the empire. Of course they wouldn't believe it. You don't get to run an empire by being gullible superstitious cowards. So why would they “persecute” Christianity? The simple explanation is that new cults are always seen as dubious undertakings out to con vulnerable widows out of their nest-eggs. Paul was teaching about salvation through belief in Jesus and Christian ideas had very convenient ideas for cults. They broke up families and made a virtue out of it. They had teachings about wealth, giving up money for the good of the immortal soul, charity, inspired teaching and missions to spread the word, all of which made it very easy for a plausible rogue to get all the money he needed to fund a life without work. When I was a choirboy I thought being a bishop would be a great life, travelling around, being respected and listened to, not doing a lot of work, working one day a week, getting to wear a lot of smart clothes and carrying a big stick. It was better than being a farmer or a policeman, I could see that much.

“Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous.
If a man really wanted to make a million dollars,
the best way to do it would be start his own religion.”

Some second rate author whose name escapes me

Nobody running a mighty empire with dozens of religions coexisting side by side persecutes people simply for having wild and wacky new religious ideas. It doesn't make sense. Christianity was no threat to the state. So why pick on it? The obvious answer to me is the simple one, it was acting like a cult, it was doing dangerous things, it was acting in quasi-criminal ways, it was using charismatic preaching to con people out of money. As cults often do.

The key is sincerity.
Once you can fake that you've got it made.

It only takes a generation or two to turn a cult into a church, if the charismatic cult leader picks a sincerely deluded follower who is good at putting across the leader's message as his successor. From that point on the church is on relatively safe ground. From that point on the church believes in the rightness of its cause, there is no doubt, there is no deception except willing self deception. The leadership of the church will come from those who have leadership skills and who have no doubts. As time goes on the last traces of doubt and suspicion fall away. The cult is transformed into a church, their belief is as sincere as any religion.

If you compare the Catholic church of today with the Mormon church can you find any significant difference in the credibility of the organization? Of course their beliefs are different, but they are not fundamentally different kinds of organization. You will not find any secret committees in either church where the leaders sit around and discuss how to keep the deluded flock from finding out the real truth. Both churches are run sincerely by sincere people. But in the case of the Mormons we know that the church didn't grow up from the bare earth in pure form, believed by all who heard the revelation. We know there was huge scepticism about the revelation. Why should we assume things were so significantly different all those centuries before? St Paul was put in prison, so was Joseph Smith. We know how churches grow from cults, we've seen it happen. Why should we assume there is another way?

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