I don’t despise believers, of any faith. Nor do I turn their sincere belief into some joke or pun. The reason, as many of you already know, is because I, too, was once a believer and struggled with that belief for a long time before I finally stopped wrestling with the idea of belief and realized that I could no longer believe. Atheism, as I have written before, was not a choice, but a conclusion.

I admit that initially, maybe I wasn’t really a non-believer, just skeptical, having seen no proof of the existence of god(s) in any context but under the stifling edifice of “church”. So, that would make me agnostic, still having the capacity to believe, without declaring with any amount of knowledge that there is no god. I was playing that game, I think, known as Pascal’s Wager. At least a version of it because, in some way, I wanted to believe, but reason, something those in churches told me I was born with, from God, instructed me otherwise.

Maybe that’s what I should do, I thought at the time, like other people that say they are Christians, yet do not uphold a single ideal as expressed in the New Testament. These same “Christians” not only cannot express any doctrine, but also never attend a gathering where they may be enlightened by what the faith they profess actually believes. What is it that makes those better than me? Is it that they say they believe or that the actually believe?

I think the struggle to believe in something is with us all no matter our current state of belief. Even our cousins, the Neanderthals buried their dead with grave goods as did the earliest of humans (Homo Sapiens). None of these, as far as we know, had an organized religious belief as we know today. But these early peoples somehow thought there must be something after this life. Why else go to the trouble? Why do we, today, go to the trouble, the ceremony, or ritual, for the dead?

I now, after some years of self-study, question whether the person we know from the New Testament as Jesus, actually existed. Consider that none of the Gospel writers were actually witnesses to what thet described in their books. In fact, those books known as The Synoptics (Mathew, Mark and Luke) are mostly the same book! Matthew and Luke copied from Mark, the earliest Gospel (around 70 CE). John, the fourth, is completely different from the other three and is more of a gnostic-like writing than an orthodox Christian writing of any time. It maes one wonder of the Bishops that canonized the works into what we call the New Testament only added John to appease some that were not heretical, but a little out of the mainstream of belief.

The earliest writings about Jesus, were from thr Apostle Paul (Galatians, ~48 CE). Paul, though, never met Jesus in life and never once, in any of his writings to the various churches he either started or supported, mentions any specifics concerning Jesus’ life or his death, burial, and resurrection, as are later described in detail from those much later writers of the Gospels. Paul was the most prolific contributor to the New Testament, but several of his writings have been proven to be either pseudepigrapha, or outright forgeries.

Other books, however, are wonderful, if not difficult reading and understanding. Th book of Hebrews is a class in Christology, written by an unknown, very well educated in rhetoric, author. It’s one of my favorites in attempting to understand the dept of belief. Yes, I still read the Bible. As I do the Koran. How can one argue against belief without having an understanding of the same?

Jesus was such an influence on the Roman province of Judea that no other author during Jesus’ life nor immediately after, ever mentioned him. Not one. The mentions of Jesus in any writing come from authors in the very late first century, and early second century and these only write about the phenomena of the believers. In fact, most of the literature concerning the persecution of early Christians come from Christian writers, not Roman pagans. There is a small school of scholars that now think that the once great persecution of Christians, was overplayed. Consider that Rome didn’t care who you worshipped as long as you paid your taxes and were not unruly. Of the thousands of extant documents from the first two centuries of Christianity, little is mentioned about this cult.

And I could go on, for pages and pages but if you have any interest there are a lot of books published by well known scholarly atheist authors you can buy online. I don’t want to give any specific authors (umm…Fitzgerald, Price) but there’s a large selection at Amazon as I’m certain at other online booksellers.

As I end here, I want to leave you with a question, if you’re a Christian: Why is it we celebrate Christmas, the birth of Jesus, more than Easter, the death and resurrection of Jesus? Doesn’t the latter constitute the beginning of the religion?