The following article is recycled email.

Christians don't require logic in order to be Christians. The vast majority of Christians have never consciously chosen to believe or used logic to justify the decisions they didn't really make.

If you are to take the Gospels at their face value and regard them as historical accounts of actual events there a number of worrying features that require explanations.

Firstly we have accounts of thousands of people listening to Jesus and many people observing him perform miracles. But nobody notices him do it and writes about it. There is not a single account about the life of Jesus written in his lifetime or indeed within ten years of his death by anybody at all. The first author who mentions Jesus is a man who lived in Jerusalem at the time Jesus was meant to have been doing his miracles and arriving in triumph in the city. He does not meet Jesus at this time. He does not witness the miracles, the triumphal march into Jerusalem, the trial, the last supper, the death or the resurrection or the assumption into heaven. His first contact with Jesus is in the form of a supernatural or psychotic vision. That first author of the Christian era is Saul of Tarsus, better known as St Paul.

Paul barely offers any quotes from Jesus or describes any events in the life of Jesus in any great detail. He is writing letters to members of a Christian church who do not have any written accounts of the life of Jesus and he is giving them theology lessons.

It is assumed by biblical scholars, including Christians, that there must have been some documents circulating around this time which have subsequently vanished because the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke show strong evidence of being based on a common source. The “witnesses” have not come up with identical accounts, there are anomalies, but they display evidence of copying from another source that was at one time obviously valued but vanished without trace sometime between the writing of the Gospel of Luke and the church's great exercise in defining what as The Word of God directly dictated by God himself and what was the scribblings of religious lunatics. (Can you believe that Revelations made the cut? Amazing.) Why was it necessary to have a church committee decide this? Wasn't it self-evident? Why has there never been any review of the process? Is it really possible to justify that a single human committee run by the Church of Rome would be capable of making such a definitive statement and at the same time draw a line under the possibility of any other writer ever writing something directly inspired by God? Doesn't that stink just a tad? You only have to look at some of the decisions that committees of Catholics have come up with in more recent years to know that the process should be regarded as of dubious value.

To take you at your word your grandmother's writing seems to have been inspired by God. So why isn't it a Gospel? There is no sound reason that can be given to justify this. The Bible cannot verify itself and it certainly cannot verify its own editing and later additions. Think about that. “This book, including parts not yet written and added to it up to a certain point to be defined later by an authority not defined here, is the directly inspired Word of God, and as such is incontestable” is a rather ridiculous concept, and of course nothing remotely like it ever does appear in the Bible. The contents and the extent of the Bible was decided separately without reference to the text of the Bible but in response to a decision made by a committee who prayed for guidance. History is littered with bad laws and bad decisions made by committees of men who prayed to God for guidance. Why is the result of the discussions in among bitching churchmen of the third and fourth century regarded as the last word on the matter? You Americans do go in for ancestor worship to an unhealthy degree but even your constitution allows the possibility of amendment, the possibility that something better may come along or new ideas may need to be added. What have you Protestants got to worry about, surely you can't be alarmed at the possibility of schism? That would be bizarre. But it also seems to be the case. Not only are you terrified of new religious nutters adding to the text (as if there isn't enough madness, genocide, hate, misogyny, misanthropy, historical inaccuracy, inherent contradiction and pathetically primitive superstition already) you seem to be terrified that if you allowed people to pick and choose what was or was not directly inspired by God your churches would fall into perpetual squabbling and be held up to mockery.

Christians believe that their god, who is the only one who could and does exist (but is nonetheless jealous) can speak to people. Of course many people experience a god talking to them. Many ancient Greeks were visited by their gods, but none were visited by the only real god. Why? Why does the only real god who is jealous of the other gods that don't exist nevertheless let the nonexistent gods talk to their believers? Is there (another) logical explanation for that? My explanation is very simple, people will believe almost anything, especially if some jerk tells them that believing something that cannot be proven makes them a better person more worthy of social respect than people who only believe what they see demonstrated. No gods speak to people for exactly the same reason that unicorns don't ride bicycles. Everybody who has voices in their head is equally deluded whether they call these gods, Native American spirit guides or alien overlords.

Nobody who wasn't Jew was ever visited by Yahweh the creator of the universe except when they had dealings with the Jews, in which case this universal god of love manifested himself in acts of violence which would have got any Nazi a one way trip to Nuremberg. Can you account for this behaviour? Why was your god such an isolationist? Why did the omnipresent benevolent only-god show so little concern with the sins and practices of heathens who had no contact with Jews? Why did this god seem powerless to make himself seen, known, understood, loved or feared by people who were not exposed to Hebrew scriptures by people in positions of power?

The usual response of "God works in mysterious ways" is simply a cop out. Many times Christians will give huge and detailed explanations for their god's motives and actions with little or nothing to back them up. Any question that stumps them has them reaching for one of the stock replies which suggest that a failure to understand what God could possibly be thinking is due to His being so much more wonderful and powerful than we are and our brains being unable to handle the full explanation, although, have faith, of course there is one. I don't buy that. It is too convenient. Believe our explanations but give us a break when we're stumped because the only explanation that will get you off our backs is to suggest that God is too big to be understood. But if God can do anything why can he not explain himself in a way that can be passed on to other people? Indeed why can not God come up with a myth (or reality, to God what's the difference?) that will work with everybody and help them freely choose to love him?

God seems to fail to live up to his billing. He loves everybody but let millions of people live and die in ignorance of his rules, his will, his love, his name, his grace and his sacrifice. Nobody who lived in the Americas before 1492 had a chance of being saved or had a chance of hearing his voice. Instead they heard the voices of other gods who you say don't exist.

You are of course a very dogmatic and arrogant atheist, you dismiss out of hand the existence of more gods than I do. In my mind there are some gods who I cannot be sure do not exist. To these gods (the gods of modern philosophers, who all go by the name of God, the one and only god) I am agnostic. To your god I am an atheist, as your god is too inconsistent and self-contradictory to be entertained as having even a remote possibility of existing. Your god Yahweh is as obviously mythical a god as Zeus or Thor. I regard Hebrew mythology in very much the same way as I do Greek, Norse and Aztec mythology, obviously nonsense no sane person should ever take at face value but a knowledge of them is a part of a rounded education and a good source of allegory and metaphor.

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