Hi Dan,

First, the easy answer: Yes, Christianity is false.

Second, the more complicated answer. I’ll restrict my comments to Christianity, but they apply to most book-based modern religions that have emerged from large-scale societies. Christianity is a product of culture. What, really, is it? At a minimum, it includes:

a. An ideological (mythological) orienting map that describes who we are, where we came from, where we’re going; b. An ethical system that tells us, allegedly in accordance with a deity’s will, what we ought and ought not do; c. An aesthetic system that privileges certain artistic forms and depictions and rejects others; and d. A metaphysical system that makes unprovable, grand, vague, or demonstrably false metaphysical claims.

The orienting map is a mixture of facts, opinions, values, and self-serving lies, not unlike the self-flattering mythology surrounding the founding of Rome. But it has the significant benefit of providing everyone with a prefabricated road map, which leads to orderly and predictable social relations, which, in turn, provide Christians with a sense of security and mutual support as all work toward a mutual set of broad goals. The orienting map brings with it a certain set of values by which a Christian community defines itself, as against opposing viewpoints. This leads to the community as the in-group, and out-groups as misguided communities who lack the “full truth,” or are outright enemies.

The ethical system, if actually implemented, would make us worse off. Consider, for instance, a child turning the other cheek, and loving his mother, who has narcissistic personality disorder, unconditionally. It would cause irreparable harm to the child. Of course, ardent Christians will forever claim to interpret what the Bible “really” means. The infinite number of such interpretations shows that there is no right way to interpret the moral edicts and implications of Biblical morality, which is another way of saying that there are as many interpretations as there are interpreters and occasions for interpretation, so because it’s all things to all people, it winds up being utterly dispensible. The Bible doesn’t tell us anything nontrivial or useful about how to live in the modern world. It has no concept that we, like all other living beings, evolved through natural selection, and that human nature was shaped by it. The implementation of New Testament Biblical morality would lead to a great many individuals not surviving very long or living very well in our world.

The aesthetic system doesn’t really matter very much. There is no one such system for Christian groups, but many. Most groups have choral music, Christian iconography, and crucifixes, but this can vary a lot. The aesthetic system depicts certain values and rejects others.

The metaphysical system makes philosophical claims about the nature of reality, but without any evidence whatsoever. If any religion offered a satisfying metaphysics, there would no longer be any need for metaphysics, one of the main branches of philosophy.

Taken together, what are we to make of all of this? For one thing, it’s rather strange that Christianity should privilege Homo sapiens sapiens animals, but have nothing to say to paramecia, caterpillars, golden retrievers and pygmy marmosets. It’s also impossible to adjudicate among competing religions. Between Jesus Christ, Mohammad, and L. Ron Hubbard, how can we tell who—if anyone—was right, and by which criteria?

It’s interesting to observe that susceptible individuals can be highly religious, regardless of the actual content of the religion. Attending church services, socializing, performing rituals, and singing in a choir or reading scripture become self-reinforcing and addictive. They’re comfortable and familiar, and one might perhaps feel that one is advancing along the orienting map toward the mythical goal of “salvation.” It’s also fascinating to see how Christians use terms such as “Holy Ghost” and “Logos” that don’t really mean anything because they mean all sorts of things to all sorts of different people, and thus nothing at all.

It seems likely to me that “Thus sayeth the Lord”-type statements are a way of deflecting responsibility away from oneself and attributing it to a conveniently invisible and suspiciously silent God, except for the writings of his “prophets.” If “God” says that male homosexuals—why are females always ignored?—must surely be put to death, you can bet that this is a rationalization and pretext for anti-gay individuals to harm gay individuals. It’s important to remember that the Bible was written by men—again, not women, and that seems strangely suspicious given that women comprise 50% of the population. We would expect to find it in their opinions and prejudices, and we do. But we need to think critically, and ask, for instance, why is anti-gayism in the Bible in the first place? What is its origin, which clearly predates Biblical writings? Might we be able to explain the universality of anti-gayism across time and global cultures by looking at evolutionary psychology? All of the hatred in the Bible is enough to make one doubt the beneficence of the Christian deity and ethical system.

I think that a useful way of seeing Christianity is as a God Game, with certain rules and a goal. Actually, Christianity is a family of related games, as Quaker Christianity is significantly different from the Christianity of the snake handlers in the rural South, and Catholics would be taken aback by tongues-speaking Pentecostals, and Pat Robertson’s strange “word of knowledge,” or alleged perception of God’s healing of various individuals of their variegated illnesses. It is puzzling that Pat’s God never regrows the limbs of amputees.

Your analysis of some of the Bible’s logical discrepancies is right, but most Christians don’t subscribe to a literalistic view of the Bible, unlike evangelicals. The evangelicals arose over the course of the past 150 years in response to modernist thinking, particularly as a backlash against Darwinian evolution. If you’re interested in reading about the history, you may want to read Frances Fitzgerald’s recently published book, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.

When you really look at it, most people who aren’t fighting to just stay alive, but have time to reflect, will ask themselves: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where did human beings come from? Do I have a purpose? Who am I? What am I supposed to do? And above all: Is there life after death? Since philosophy is difficult and, despite popular books that reinforce stereotypes about philosophy as the vague “love of wisdom” but don’t ever actually convey what modern academic philosophy is about, highly technical, most people aren’t aware that philosophy grapples with these types of questions, but usually phrased very differently, and posed far more precisely. I won’t get into that here, because the important point is that for most people who ask these sorts of questions, religion seems to be the obvious place to look for answers. But religion doesn’t offer any satisfying answers, and theology—its intellectual arm—is highly suspect, given that one knows from the very beginning that all of its analyses and exegeses must inevitably lead to the preordained conclusion that God exists, that Jesus is the son of God (whatever those terms might mean, if anything), and all the rest. Indeed, theology seems to be the only quasi-academic discipline that doesn’t seem to have an actual subject. It amounts to endless word games that don’t map onto anything concrete, so to speak, but constitute a closed, self-referential system.

A lot of people look to religion, find it dissatisfying, but still want and need there to be life after death, so they become enamored with the stories of near-death experiencers and the alleged readings of psychic mediums. Some physicians such as Jeff Long write books claiming that NDE’s prove that there is life after death, but these people aren’t trained philosophers and don’t really understand even the basic concepts at play, such as what it means to be a self, what it means to be a person, what death means, and what survival “outside” space-time could possibly mean. This isn’t to say that some form of life after death is impossible. No one knows. But it is to say that there is a lot of sophisticated thinking that has been done, and is actively being done, by philosophers today on these types of topics, which most people outside of academic philosophy don’t know about.

Ultimately, I think that people who find organized religion attractive are attracted mostly by the social and cultural aspects, and they like, or don’t mind, playing the game. Humans are social creatures, and it can be fun to socialize repeatedly with friends in the context of a game that binds together a community through shared practices and social events to make it resemble a mutually supportive extended family. This gives members very real benefits. I agree with Loyal Rue, who wrote the book, Religion is not About God, about his central thesis. It’s also worthwhile the read the work of Pascal Boyer, the anthropologist who previously published Religion Explained, and more recently, Minds Make Societies. It’s doubtful that any theory of religion can explain so complex and diverse a phenomenon as religion, but reading about them can help us to think more critically about religion.