I wonder if Christianity started out as a joke. Just think! Here's Saint Paul, an educated Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor, a primarily Greek speaking area whose culture is highly Persian-influenced. He's come to enhance his education in Jerusalem in Palestine, a primarily Aramaic-speaking area with a substantial Greek-speaking minority whose culture is influenced by a proliferation of rustic mystery cults and street magicians and all sorts of crude charlatanry. He hears about Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Jesus is a Greek form of the very common Aramaic name Yeshua, familiar to the Greek speakers of Palestine, but rather exotic-sounding to the Greek speakers of Asia Minor. Christ means literally "Anointed One" which sounds pretty awesome to an Asia-Minorian, sorta like he's maybe one of the Gods, but to a Palestinian it just means he's sort of a cool dude. Nazareth is unknown on Roman maps and tax records of the era, and may have just been a made-up name for some unknown obscure place.

So here's Saint Paul after classes one evening sitting in this bar sipping a bit of wine with a few Palestinian Greek-speaking classmates who are regaling him with the marvelous exploits of this here Jesus Christ of Nazareth (Joe Cool of Possum Holler, giggle snicker) and Paul is hearing Jesus Christ of Nazareth (Grandioso the Divine from El Dorado, Awesome, Dude) and he's just lapping it up, believing every word of it.

Later, back in Asia Minor, Saint Paul has been telling all his friends about this awesome Jesus Christ and they're all believing it and have got up this new religion of thousands of believers already, when it begins to dawn on Paul that his chain has been jerked. But it's too late to retract everything and admit that it's all a fraud, so he tries to recoup as best as he can by writing a bunch of epistles to try to redirect this wild and crazy cult mania into some sort of sane and rational religious practice.

So now you're probably wondering why I'm still a Christian if I think it's all a big joke. Hey folks, it's great fun! If there's a good joke going, count me in as a willing participant! It's also great fellowship and an opportunity to be a part of a constructive (I hope) force in society.

Oh by the way, I am aware that any conjecture about Saint Paul having invented Christianity by himself, by mistake or otherwise, is probably not credible since some scholarly evidence has turned up that there were several thriving Christian communities as early as 44 AD and Saint Paul is believed to have become active in the Christian scene about 48 or 49 AD. But hey, I thought it was sort of a fun story, and since this is my website, I'll tell all the lies I want to.

Forward-thinking Christian leaders are making a valiant attempt to shed the ugly baggage of the horrible hate-mongering misuses to which Christianity has been put in the past, and continues to be by devoted but misguided believers. Perhaps, in a few more centuries, the rank-and-file of practicing Christians will begin to see the truth of the quote at the top of this page and stop using the Bible as a source of excuses to hate most everybody in sight. Don't hold your breath.

On September 11, 2001, our great nation was thrown into shock by a terrorist suicide mission that destroyed three of our nations finest buildings and four of our most valuable airliners and ruthlessly slaughtered an estimated 5,000 of our citizens. The motivation for this attack appears to be largely religious. Now, we somehow imagine that if we got more religion ourselves we'd be in a better position to protect ourselves against this kind of assault. I don't think so. I think we'd better get off of the idea that somehow religion is the way to a perfect world.

And then there's the notion that if we'd been nicer guys in the Community of Nations, other people would like us better and they wouldn't have attacked us. Now I'll admit that our nation has made a very large number of serious mistakes in dealing with the various and sundry political crises in the Near and Middle East, and this has caused considerable hatred. We haven't been very nice guys. But people convulsed by religious hatred don't care about whether we're nice guys. All they care about is the fact that we don't do the same religion that they do. Basically, the terrorists attacked us because they are a bunch of creed-crazed religion spastics. It would behoove us greatly not to fall into the same trap.

Contrary to present-day appearances, Islam has no monopoly on creed-crazed religion spastics. Christianity has more than its share, and I've personally met disturbingly large numbers of them. I even dated one once! Judaism also has a few extremists, and so do a few other religions. Islam currently has the most obvious extremists, probably because Islam happens by chance to be the dominant religion in the most politically unstable parts of the world right now. But just let the political scene shift, and you'll see some other religion take over the world terrorism scene.

In my church it's often observed that if we don't get our children thoroughly interested in religion from a very early age they're going to be "lost forever" and we'll never see them in church again. I wonder why this is? Could it be that we haven't got much to offer?

By the time children are in their teens they're probably reading the works of Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Seneca, Plato, Archimedes, Philo of Alexandria, Lucretius, Epictetus, Plutarch, and many other great minds. Now at this age if their brains haven't been soaking in Jesus Jesus Jesus from infancy and they read the Gospels for the first time in their life, what do they see? They see a Jesus who has nowhere near the intellect of these other great minds from the same era of history. In fact, Jesus comes off as a slightly confused dimwit, a bit less than normal human intelligence. And we haven't got anything better than the Gospels for them to read.

Now the average teenager is probably familiar with Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Febold Feboldson, and other purely mythical characters, and the Gospel accounts of Jesus's marvelous exploits appear very similar. Perhaps our teenager has seen a few modern newsreels of Sai Baba's silly antics and wonders why he's got a half a million followers in India who are ascribing a Godlike status to him. Many teenagers have read Philostratus's account of the life of Apollonius of Tyana and have compared the wondrous miracles described therein to the slight bits of actual information we have about the real (rather uninteresting) Apollonius of Tyana. The Gospels describe Jesus's miraculous deeds remarkably similarly. Do you really think anybody with a functioning mind is going to be impressed?

I really think if we want to make our religion appeal to thinking adults without having to cram it down their throats from infancy, we've got to have a religion with some real substance. Christianity simply has no real substance, nor does any other religion I know of.