Consider this an intervention

by John Winsor

If members of your family joined a cult - a really dangerous one with a charismatic leader like David Koresh or Jim Jones, you'd want to try to save them, wouldn't you?

As it happens, modern Christianity started out as a cult, too. You've been taught that it's a peaceful religion but, in fact, it has directly caused some wars (e.g., the Crusades) and exacerbated the damage in countless others (e.g., during the centuries of European colonial conquest across the globe). I haven't singled Christianity out because I believe that it's worse than other religions. My position is that all religions are bad because they replace rational and logical thought with a sort of "magical thinking" that leads to bad conclusions about how to solve real problems in the real world. Furthermore, religious leaders present dogma as simple fact. There's no question-and-answer period during a sermon. There's no debating. All of the "facts" were decided long ago. This is problematic in a democratic society because it grants a priori superiority to priests and rulers.

Christianity was invented by a half-Jewish Roman citizen named Saul of Tarsus. You know him as "Saint Paul." By his own admission, he never even met Jesus and, furthermore, his job was to persecute Jewish commoners like Jesus. Indeed, he achieved a large following among anti-Semites precisely because his view opposed that of the 1st Century Jewish community.

Most remarkably, Paul's description of who Jesus was directly and completely contradicted what the gospels tell us Jesus said about himself. A proper reading of the gospels reveals that Jesus believed he was to become the ruler of an earthly "Kingdom of Heaven" - not that he was a god or that he or anybody else was bound for heaven itself, but Paul's sect believed that Jesus was Yahweh's son and a god himself.

The only real distinction between a religion and a cult is the number of participants. If you're a member of the Christian cult, please try to understand that you've been duped - that you're undercutting your own ability to think clearly and rationally. If members of your family are Christians, please try to persuade them that it is a dangerous, mind-numbing cult.