7 Reasons Why I will Never Become a Christian

Quite simple: I can never become what I do not believe in. Here are some very simple reasons, from a Pagan and Gnostic perspective:

1. I do not believe an ancient Hebrew tribal god created the cosmos. Nor did this entity create everything within the cosmos, including humans. Nor do I believe this Hebrew tribal god is anything more real than a literary creation.

2. I do not believe that the Hebrew scriptural canon, i.e. the Tanakh, which is known to Christians as the Old Testament, is the inerrant "word" of any divine being, much less a single divine being who created the cosmos.

3. Because I do not believe that the Hebrew canon as a complete narrative is of a divine source, nor do I believe that ANY of the stories or myths contained within should ever be taken at literal face value as matter-of-fact historical accounts or ontological axioms, I cannot buy into concepts like "original sin" as being real or relevant to the human condition. And most importantly, I do not believe that one culture's gods, religion or mythology should be forced upon other peoples, nor should any dualistic "us vs. them" ideology be built around the acceptance or rejection of a particular belief system.

4. I do not believe in the factual reality of Hebrew prophecy, as depicted by the prophetic books contained with the Tanakh. I do believe that Jewish temple priest-scribes did write these prophetic accounts several centuries after the events depicted within each respective accounts; they wrote these stories as a way of explaining real historical events as having divine significance in accord with the overall religious and political narrative they wanted to convey.

5. Because I do not believe Hebrew prophecy to be anything more than mere myths, I do not see any validity or significance in the attempts of the New Testament to tie in the Gospel narrative of Jesus Christ with Hebrew prophecy. My own take on this is that the early churches concocted the prophecy narrative out of thin air in order to sell their new cult (i.e. gain converts) to the many Hellenized Jewish communities spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean region of the Roman Empire. These prophecy shenanigans were nothing more than a cheap conversion tactic.

6. I do not believe the Gospel narrative of Jesus Christ to be a factual depiction of real historical events. Since I don't believe in original sin, I cannot believe that Jesus came to die for our nonexistent sins. I do not believe that Jesus even "came" in the first place, at least not in any fashion as depicted in the Bible. I am however open to the idea that the Jesus character may have been based on one or more real historical figures from the 1st century CE Levant region.

7. Since I don't believe that the Jesus of the Gospels was a real historical person, I cannot believe he was the son of anyone, be it a mortal or a god. Of course I don't believe that humans can ever be the offspring of anyone other than other humans. However, I do recognize that a person being a "son of" a god or gods is a mythological trope that long predates Christianity. IMHO, there is great allegorical value contained within this trope.

In short, I don't believe Jesus existed according to the canonical Gospel accounts. I don't believe Jesus was the "son of God." I don't believe the Hebrew god is real, much less that he/it created the entire cosmos. I don't believe that Hebrew prophecy is anything more than mythology or a literary narrative. And I wholeheartedly believe that sectarianism is poison, along with all the nasty trappings that come with sectarianism.

Basically, I'd fail every checkbox requirement for having faith in any variant of mainstream Christianity.

But having said all that I do earnestly believe there's many wonderful teachings contained within the New Testament and that from an archetypal perspective, the figure (what I like to term a 'godform') of Jesus Christ has been an unceasing source of goodness/righteousness, love, divine inspiration and blessings upon people for many centuries. Hopefully a church body devoted only to the archetype and magical essence of Jesus will live on long after the institutional religion and all its assorted baggage dies off. This body can live on side-by-side with religious orders devote to many of the other great teachers, sages and divine personages that have graced humanity over the many centuries.

Opinion: There is No Original Sin, but there is Default Ignorance

I feel like I need to expand upon one of the points I made in my previous post on why I can never be a Christian. I said:

Because I do not believe that the Hebrew canon as a complete narrative is of a divine source, nor do I believe that ANY of the stories or myths contained within should ever be taken at literal face value as matter-of-fact historical accounts or ontological axioms, I cannot buy into concepts like "original sin" as being real or relevant to the human condition.

Having said that, I do believe that humans do indeed suffer from a sort of "default ignorance," owning to most of us being alienated from out higher spiritual nature. Of course this condition is very poorly explained by the Garden of Eden narrative. In fact, I believe the Garden myth actually inverts the truth on the human condition. Knowledge of "good and evil" (or duality in general) is what separates humans from mere beasts. We are endowed with the ability to make decisions using criteria more elaborate than animalistic impulses and whims. We have higher consciousness and sentience.

With humans, this great power falls on a spectrum. Many people go though life barely ever using their powers of higher reasoning. Instead, they merely react to external stimuli. People usually just acquiesce to the commands and suggestions of people much more powerful, dominant and influential than them. And even without direct commands from others, the path of least resistance is for people default to ingrained habits that have accumulated though years of life experience and solidified confirmation bias.

Default Ignorance is the result of people turning away from their inner divine spark and instead giving into their desires for quick and easy material comforts and conveniences. Default Ignorance is just sticking to what we know and refusing to look inward or outward for higher wisdom. IMHO, Plato's dialogues (among many other pieces of wisdom literature) do a much better job at explaining the ignorant state of humanity than the silly Garden Myth can ever do. The cynical side of my mind wants to say that the purpose of that myth was to keep the common rabble away from dabbling with mysticism and magic, which is something organized priesthoods have been scaring away the little people from doing for quite some time. We even see a modern equivalent of this attitude somewhat reflected in the knee-jerk evangelic Protestants have to any and all expressions of spirituality which fall outside the scope of Biblical liberalism; they declare anything deviating from that as being "Satanic" or "Luciferian" or "Demonic"..ect; you get the picture. On an esoteric level, "Lucifer" is just a catch-all term for the various Titanic powers occultists would associate with magic, esoteric mysticism and higher metaphysical inquiry. In actuality, these higher powers are tools. And just like any other tool, this set of tools can be used for both creative or benevolent or destructive or malevolent purposes. By itself, it is neutral.

We could look at the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" as symbol of these higher powers. It is the secret sauce that scared the shit out of muggles and normies. However I'm not going to single out the ancient Jews for demonizing our higher powers. There was a general Iron Age Mediterranean attitude which embraced fatalism and took an antagonistic attitude toward Titanic spiritual powers. The Greek attitude expressed in the Prometheus myth has some thematic similarity (though in a more nuanced manner) to the act of Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Both are presented as beings acts of divine disobedience. For Prometheus, reaching up into the heavens and grabbing onto the higher powers suggested the moral hazard (slippery slope) of "stealing the fire of the gods" and proceeding to torch everything in sight. Ya know, just for the lulz. In the case of Eve, it's subtly implied that the "god" of the Garden of Eden wishes to keep his human creations ignorant. Or maybe it was just a test. Who knows; the "god" of the OT actually seems like a whole plethora of different beings rolled up into one.

Anyway...no, mankind is not cursed with "original sin." All we are "cursed" with are the material bodies our souls are chained to. Another way of looking at this condition is that of a training process rather than a curse. Of course this training process narrative requires the belief in some form of reincarnation. Priesthoods obsessed with controlling people's thoughts and behaviors tended to shy away from accepting reincarnation as valid. Or they developed perverted interpretations of Karma. The latter would function as a sort of backdoor "original sin" whereby a priest could claim a person is cursed by the misdeeds of many previous lifetimes. Of course, from a higher spiritual perspective, no fallible person like a priest has any business pretending to know all about another person's soul business beyond that of a current lifetime.