Yes, folks, the Christian religion is really not all that complicated. In a mere twelve simple lessons, you, too, can learn to participate in the world's weirdest and most irrational religion.
It's very important that you have the correct Bible for your denomination. Everybody knows that every word in the Bible is true, but which Bible and whose interpretation is a matter of considerable debate. There's the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Geneva, the King James, the NRSV With Apocrypha, and innumerable translations of all of them. Historians have never figured out which version God actually wrote, so our various denominations are continually fighting about it.
God is a vague sort of disembodied intellect, credited with having created the universe. In fact, we claim that the universe couldn't have come into existence any other way. Our theologians have ascribed to God a number of attributes such as a conscious will, eternality, sacred mystery, omnipotence, omniscience, omni-this, omni-that, etc. Unfortunately, these attributes do not appear to imply specific creative powers. Thus, it looks like God bears a striking similarity to the mere cosmic accident that we take great delight in accusing atheists of believing in.
Jesus is our mythical man-god hero. We're all quite certain that our Jesus myth is based on an actual historical person, even though all available evidence overwhelmingly suggests the contrary. But that hardly matters, because nothing has ever been preserved that indicates that Jesus had any particular intellectual prowess or depth of thought. In fact, all of our sacred literature portrays him as a slightly confused dimwit whose most memorable accomplishment was to wangle twelve gullible morons into traipsing round and about the countryside with him.
A few of the antics of this sorry little band apparently got the local authorities all riled up so they executed Jesus by crucifixion but he magically got alive again and resumed strolling around for a few weeks before zooming off to Heaven. Somehow this is supposed to save us from something or t'nother, but the logic escapes me just now.
The Holy Ghost is a murky spectral visage lurking in the shadows. Nobody seems to know what it does for a living, but it has caused considerable hate and discontent. Our Eastern denominations insist that the Holy Ghost proceeds from only the Father and not the Son, and our Western denominations are equally adamant that the Holy Ghost proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Nobody has ever proposed any method of conducting an objective observation to watch the Holy Ghost proceeding so that we'd know which is true. So we just continue to fight about it.
Our religion provides us with several benefits, such as Salvation, Redemption, Justification, etc. These benefits have never been defined in such a way that would permit any rational person to make an informed decision as to whether you would even want them. Not only that, but there's controversy over what merits these benefits. Saint James tells us we receive these benefits by faith and good works, and Saint Paul says we receive them by faith alone. Nobody has ever proposed a demographic study of who has actually received these benefits and who hasn't.
Faith is believing stuff that's obviously hogwash. Faith sounds an awful lot like intellectual debauchery to me, but our fine and worthy Christian leaders have assured me that it's a good thing. Doubt is evil, because doubt is the necessary first step toward discovering knowledge, and knowledge is likely to contradict faith.
As Christians, all of our sins are forgiven. This means if we believe in Jesus everything that's our fault magically becomes not our fault. But if we don't believe in Jesus then a buncha stuff that's not our fault magically becomes our fault. This concept just overwhelms any reasonable sense of justice.
Prayer is trying to boss God around by mumbling mystic incantations at your own belly button. I can't imagine a more futile waste of time. When you pray, nothing happens. But failure to do sufficient prayer is one of the most grievous sins of omission.
Baptism is pretending to wash away non-existent sins. We usually baptize babies while they're too young to realize it's a buncha hokum.
Holy Communion is a symbolic cannibalistic human sacrifice ritual where we take some ordinary bread baked by one of the church ladies and some ordinary wine that Port O'Call Liquors gives us a good deal on and pretend that they're the body and blood of Our Hero Jesus. This ritual is the source of considerable controversy because some denominations believe in Transubstantiation and some denominations believe in Consubstantiation and I don't even know what those words mean.
Oh by the way, the most important person in our whole church is the crotchety old lady who bakes the communion bread. You see, if the priest offends her in any way, she'll bake it extra crumbly so that when he gets to the point in the ritual where he bears the Sacred Loaf aloft and breaks it in half while intoning the mystic incantation that magically turns it into the Body Of Christ, he'll get crumbs in his hair.
We have specially ordained priests to lead us in our mystic rituals. Never you mind that all the rituals are precisely described in our Book Of Common Prayer, and anybody can do them. If you do these rituals when you haven't been ordained, they don't work. It's all magic, you see.
God gets his rocks off by watching us fuss endlessly over the minuscule details of what color of altar covers to use, which candle the acolyte lights first, how to use up the leftover communion wine, how many times the church bell is rung, and so forth. Unfortunately our chapels are not instrumented with salvation meters so we can't make a scientific study of exactly what God likes best, so the different denominations just hafta fight over it.
So there you have it, folks. With all this knowledge you can now participate in any church service and all the innocent pew-warmers in the congregation will be fooled into thinking you're a True Believer.