Introduction
I started writing this on 27 October 2026. It is the day I decided to quit watching YouTube videos critiquing or analyzing Christianity.
I have never been a Christian. When I was aged 6, I formed an aversion to it. I grew up in a family deeply informed by Northern Irish Protestantism, which I found repellant. My family had migrated to Australia when I was 4. So, I wasn’t growing up in a culture (rural Victoria) with a strong religious orientation. My parent’s attitudes stood out, and I could see they were clearly extreme, even at my tender age.
My interest in Christianity arises partly from a broader interest in religions and from wanting to know its impact on my own culture.
As a consequence, I have been reading in Christianity for many years – almost exclusively critical scholarship on the faith, its history, its dogmas, its cultural and intellectual impacts. I have a particular interest in the nature of belief. Why do we believe what we do?
Today I finally decided I didn’t need any more input.
Below I want to reflect on why I hit this watershed moment.
Motive and reason
I enjoy good scholarship and listening to informed argument. The scholarship and argument I have been enjoying has persuaded me that Christianity isn’t fit for its stated purpose. Its ideas are 2-3,000 years old and are inconsistent with our contemporary understanding of the world and human behaviour.
I am not arguing that its ideals and higher values are out of date. They are consistent the generally agreed principles of moral philosophy and our understanding of human psychology. Subject to cultural nuances, these ideals and values are shared among psychologically healthy people globally. There is a common sense of a metaphysical dimension – which is generally inoffensive. They are consistent with a general notion of spirituality.
Christianity asserts that its god is the only true god – a claim not asserted outside the Abrahamic tradition to my knowledge. This is a ludicrous notion that is meekly accepted by those with neither the psychological maturity nor the mentality to comprehend just how ridiculous it is.
This claim of unique and sole legitimacy has generated paranoia, delusions of power and authority, permission to engage in torture and murder and to engage in tyrannical control of other peoples through invasion and cultural destruction.
I spent the last 5 years trying to make sense of what belief is. I concluded that it is what satisfies our psychological needs – which we then ‘rationalize’ to the best of our ability. In asserting my position on Christianity I am not belittling those who believe. I recognize that they are doing the best they can. Belief is not a monolith. It is complex and nuanced. What I believe serves my psychological needs. I believe what I think is right for me. But this isn’t a zero-sum game. Other people can believe things I don’t and not pose a threat.
The line is drawn between what is right for me and what is right for others. In terms of belief content, diversity is cool. In terms of the attitudes and actions that are promoted, imposing my ‘right belief’ on others is deeply problematic. In tribal settings, when survival is precarious, enforcing uniformity of belief, attitude and behaviour can make sense. It is often observed that our culture and communities have evolved way beyond psychological reflexes – stone-age minds in space-age settings. When it comes to Christianity, we have the disparity of ‘iron-age mentality’ in a ‘space-age’ setting. Our outer evolution isn’t matching pace with our inner evolution.
Any religion is problematic when it comes to making ‘objective’ truth statements. The same can be said of politics, philosophy, the arts, and cultural activity in general. In fact, any human behaviour that fuses subjective (inner) sensations with the objective (outer) world has the same problematic element – let’s call it ‘life’.
Science is a method of inquiry that employs disciplined methods that minimize factual error, organize evidentiary data in cogent manner and which seek to reduce the impact of subjective bias in interpreting the data. There are other definitions and I encourage you to explore them and arrive at your own summation.
Science as a method isn’t just what is meant by those who employ the term as an assumed body of beliefs. It’s a discipline of inquiry, not a philosophy. It applies as much to the physical as it does to the metaphysical. This is something that might outrage a materialist – for whom the metaphysical cannot exist. That outrage is an expression of a dogma, regardless of protestations of being devoted to science. This dogmas is what emerge when science as a method of inquiry is replaced with science as a belief system.
I have been watching YouTube shows featuring ‘atheists’ engaging in verbal combat with believers. On a rational level this isn’t a fair fight. The rational evidence against Christianity is compelling. This is especially the case if a believer’s primary source is the Bible. But this is a valid format for argument – if only because it works as a form of entertainment, emotional martyrdom or therapy for those suffering very real religious trauma. For the most part, though, it is useless as means of inquiry beyond giving evidence of how folks believe..
As an atheist myself, I take issue with the hosts of these shows who are, in fact, materialists. All materialists are atheists, but not all atheists are materialists. This matters because it defines the limits of discourse and marks the lines of conflict – in what can be a misleading way.
For example, there’s a YouTube show, Unconvinced, whose main host, Jon Cohen, is impressively articulate and rational. I can’t fault his objections to Christianity. But his assertion that he would be open to evidence that a god is real is misleading. As a materialist he has set an array of seemingly rational conditions that frame that ‘openness’ in terms that make any evidence unacceptable – unless it was the equivalent of being clipped round the ears with a length of 4×2. He asserts fidelity to the ‘scientific method’ – described in terms relevant to physical science, not human experience, and certainly not ‘metaphysical’ experiences.
As an atheist who accepts the reality of a complex metaphysical dimension, I am open to subtle, sophisticated intimations of the prospect of a divine dimension. To me the passion to build an intellectual suit of armor constructed from rigid precepts from a definition of science as the only way to know truth comes across a touch extreme. Especially when it is accompanied by protestations of openness to the possibility of a god being real once impossible conditions are met.
I am a huge fan of reason and science – always have been. But the post-Enlightenment passion for reason as the exclusively valued sense of human consciousness that led to materialism is only one of the options available. The others accommodate the metaphysical as a rational, even necessary dimension. I have just finished Steven Pinker’s ‘The Blank Slate’. Pinker is a good writer and a very good thinker. But he is a materialist. Hence his arguments about what generates human behaviour locks him into genetics – because insights available to anyone who accepts reincarnation are not available. The scholarship on reincarnation is compelling – but only if it is examined. I am not arguing ‘case-closed’, just that the merits of solid scholarship merit evaluation with a genuinely open mind.
Cohen has argued that while ‘science’ may err, it is inherently self-correcting. This is true. But the same is true of other forms of inquiry, knowledge and skill acquisition. The error he makes is that callers to his YouTube show are not inquirers. They are seeking affirmation of inner psychological states. They are using the language of reason, not because they are committed to reasoning in the intellectual sense Cohen assumes, but because that’s the language our culture uses.
The reality of this was brought home to me a few years back when I was watching an episode of ‘Dynamo, Magician Impossible’. A witness to one of his performances was asked for her reaction. She said that what she had seen “ain’t scientific”. We all knew what she meant. But nothing about her suggested cultural or intellectual sophistication. Even the expression itself gave evidence of this.
Christianity committed ecological mayhem upon our inner worlds and materialism just kicks the corpse. The two were foes when it came to belief, but allies when it came to outcomes. Christianity emerged as a savage opponent of any contrary, or non-conforming worldview. Its methods were brutal. Materialists hold up Galileo as their poster boy for evidence of religious oppression. Yeah. He got house arrest for his indiscretion. Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, was burned at the stake by the same Church. He had way more radical objections to the theological orthodoxy of the day. But he was an occultist, so that’s okay. Framing one’s values to conform with a dogma is easy and natural. But it’s not reason that’s being employed – but personal sentiment dressed up as rationality.
I have tired of the materialist in atheist’s clothing presenting reason as a salve when it is in fact a cudgel – a blunt instrument. Materialists have worked hard to convert those injured or disappointed by faith to its closed cause. Because all gods are false, the Christian god is false. Because a Christian believes there is no god other than their god, demonstration that this god is false leaves no other option than materialism. Well, supposedly.
I get the appeal of materialism. It makes things easy. But does one lousy fuck turn you celibate? Maybe. Do you go on a hunger strike because you had a badly cooked meal? To me materialism verges on being the intellectual version of being an incel.
In this context I want to record why listening to materialists presenting themselves as atheists bugs me. I am an atheist, and I am nothing like them.
Materialism is a dogma – a faith. It may be claimed to be shored up by science –but that’s a very selective reading of thinking on the subject. It is fueled by a fallacy – that reason is the highest for of consciousness. Quite some time ago reason was an attribute of the soul, but now it is of the intellect – and for the materialist that means the brain.
Humans share their intellects with their emotions and their instincts – both of which are more likely to dominate. While we use the language of the intellect, it is more usually emotion that frames the content and instinct that drives the action.
The notion that there’s no metaphysical dimension to reality because ‘science’ has no evidence, and the materialist has no experience is, at best, a churlish conceit. It makes as much sense as claiming the god of Christians is real. Materialists place high expectations on ‘science’ to do what it was never designed to do – define the limits of human experience on the basis of presently agreed and formally determined empirical knowledge within one domain of human inquiry.
This is what materialists who object to Christianity do not acknowledge. Scientific arguments against Christianity are the least of the complaints against the faith. Christian dogma offends against reason, against ethics, against moral philosophy, against psychology and against human dignity. Apart from Genesis, science doesn’t get much of a look in. You will hear arguments that miracles aren’t supported by science – well, of course not. They are scarce, for starters. They are anomalous and fleeting – and hence not available for examination. To progress to assert they are, ergo, ‘unscientific’ borders on being idiotic.
I am not about to assert the ‘miracles’ in the Bible are evidentiary. These are fictions. But the literature on ‘miracles’ is substantial. We need a less hostile spirit and more one of inquiry. Seriously weird and anomalous stuff does happen. Do we know why? No. Do we have theories? Of course, but none yet make any sense to me.
And despite all this the hosts of Unconvinced have articulated principles of science as the foundation of their objections to Christianity. All that does is craft an illusion of rational objection using intimidatory terminology – because they are not comfortable with objecting, using the more open-ended concerns. What they have done is select a method of argument that doesn’t apply, but which shuts down any more nuanced or subtle conversation.
What if there is a more subtle level of reality we have called ‘divine’ which does not accommodate the confused dogma of the faith, but which leaves open a more sophisticated and subtle understanding? As an atheist, that’s something I am open to. A materialist in atheist’s clothing is not.
But who runs the YouTube challenges to Christianity? Almost exclusively materialists claiming to be atheists. And why? First up, its easy pickings. Second there’s a gullible materialistic audience and an endless supply of religious fools. It’s a market, and there’s money to be made.
I have come across a host of such a show (The Deconstruction Zone) who claims not to be an atheist. I have emailed to find out whether he might be into a dialogue. I don’t expect a response, to be honest.
Christianity is ‘wrong’ for far more interesting reasons.
Dogma, pride and bias
I am conscious what I am about to say may come across as preachy. Please, look up the meaning of ‘dogma’, so you know why I am saying what I about to.
Dogma is an assertion of something as true in the absence of a balanced, informed and reasoned basis for the truth claim. The claim that the Christian god is the only ‘true’ god is a dogma. So is the claim that gods do not/cannot exist.
The psychological motive for being willing to assert the reality of your god and the invalidity of all others isn’t widely explored, which is a huge pity. For me there’s a kind of self-referential pride and immaturity that leaves me utterly unimpressed. Imagine someone telling you that their friend is the best possible friend and all other friends that other people have are rubbish. How would you feel – if you disagreed.
Bias is a normal, natural and healthy reflex, despite what you have been told. We’d go crazy if we weren’t biased. The real issue is inappropriate bias. I spent most of my working life as a public servant – and I had a clear professional and moral duty not to be biased in the performance of my duties. But in my private life? I have a bias toward smart, sensitive, ethical people with a leaning toward the metaphysical when it comes to my inner friendship circle. I have a bias against dogmatic, intolerant know-it-alls – and bastards.
I am sure that we all know people in whom [in our eyes] dogma, pride and bias are blended. They are folks whose company we avoid, whose opinions we discount – but who we’d help without hesitation.
Disliking Christianity doesn’t mean disliking Christians. There are Christians I dislike, but this isn’t because they are Christians. I don’t know many Christians because they don’t fit my preferred profile for friends, not because of any hostility. I don’t know many religious people either, or materialists. The people I am closest to are ‘spiritual’ – an awfully vague and unsatisfactory term – and curious and thoughtful.
Christianity in evolutionary terms
The reality of Christianity as an invasive mentality is beyond dispute. Out of the relatively modest foundation of Judaism two of the most aggressive and invasive faiths have arisen – spiritual cane toads.
As one who accepts evolution, I ask myself what the evolutionary advantage of such invasive faiths might be. I am not about to offer you a theory – because I don’t have one. But I have been inspired by Larry Siedentop’s extraordinary book – Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism.
An historic sociology of religions hasn’t, to my knowledge, been written. Buddhism’s eastward spread into Asia is little commented upon but has had an extraordinary impact. Christianity’s spread west (and around the globe) is transformative in ways little appreciated as a coherent narrative. Siedentop’s book is, I think, a downpayment on a yet more remarkable story.
I don’t quibble about whether Jesus was an historic character. I assume he is because doing so can be a useful starting point for an inquiry. He most certainly wasn’t as described in the New Testament because that character is confused, incoherent and contradictory. When historic characters are mythologized this always happens. In essence, it doesn’t matter now because the myth has overlayered all.
Because I am an atheist, I don’t try to imagine whether ‘god’ had a plan. But I do try to imagine what impulse in human evolution might have generated Jesus, and Buddha and the other seminal religious/spiritual figures. Significant individuals, often bordering on the mythic have disproportionate influence in the world – think Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler and Trump – to name only adverse ones in the past few centuries. There are many positive ones, but none eclipse Jesus in reputation – maybe other than the Buddha.
My point is that if we can step away from Christianity as the complex, vexed and often malignant influence for the past 1,600 odd years, can we see it in evolutionary rather than moral terms? I have tried, in my own way, to tally up my sense of whether it is ultimately a positive or negative force and I struggle to imagine an assessment more that 3 degrees either side of neutral.
Concluding thoughts
Christianity is a phenomenon in our reality. That suggests to me that a materialist, with a passion for science would demand a critical, disciplined intellectual (scientific) inquiry. But I listen carefully, and I hear no such call.
Taking Christianity out of its embedded place in human history because we love it or hate it serves only our dogmas, pride and biases. It adds nothing to our rational understanding of our human striving.
I don’t like the religion. I didn’t when I was 6, and nothing in the intervening 6+ decades of inquiry into it has shifted me even a micro-meter in favour. The kindest thing I can say about it now is that it is way out of date – intellectually, morally and psychologically – to most of us. It is an anachronism. Like any wave of change, its peak has moved beyond us and now we enjoy its ebbing phase. What next?
Might there be a future path that embraces the essentials of a religion? A sense of the sacred, a sensitivity to ritual, a moral philosophy and a sense of the inner dimensions of our reality bundled into a coherent communal phenomenon? Maybe. That’s something that could be explored from a rational, scientific, perspective.
I style myself as an atheist in that I do not believe in the god of the theists. I do think there’s a deep coherent consciousness that underpins all that is. Long ago the mystics of the 3 Abrahamic faiths agreed that the divine was not knowable and was beyond imagination. My teaching source referred to this as ‘the One’. That’s as vague as you can get – just imagine all of whatever as one thing/state/being/consciousness.
There are hints of this deeper insight. There is the assertion that I first encountered in Vedic philosophy, “I am that I am” that conveys a similar sense of being beyond description and theory.
But out of that comes what we call ‘gods’ – vast agencies of intentional consciousness. I do not know whether this is true. But it is not intellectually offensive. Why not? Do I accept it is a ‘true’ statement? No. But I acknowledge it as possibly true, subject to confirmation. I am okay with gods, but not God.
This model of thought is at the foundation of the great pantheons of human history. Hence, I am disposed to allow it may be a useful model to allow as a basis for imagination or meditation or thinking.
I think the Christian god isn’t real because nothing about it makes any sense to me. Christians believe in a god that cannot exist as they describe. Materialists understand this only because the illogic of the belief is flagrant and they assume that the insight becomes a universal truth – because they want it to be true. But there may be gods that can be understood differently.
True atheism denies the existence of god-claims that are silly and incapable of being substantiated by direct evidence or disciplined and informed argument. It does not close down the subject
Some Christians have done a lot of good in the world. Some have done so because they were good people on their own account and their faith was a means of articulating and living their values. Others have had their lives transformed because of Christianity – but because it was a trigger for an inner change or a cause? Others have done evil things in Christ’s name, which was insufficient in its claimed power to prevent the evil.
The fault is the faith and the dogma. It is not the myth. It is not the history or the culture. It is not religion. Religion is not a thing apart from culture that can be judged.
I was finally persuaded to end my exposure to scholars and critics of Christianity because I started hearing scholars talk about texts as if they were history and not myth and fiction. That’s the language of believers, not scholarship. I figured I had had enough and it was time to move on.
The critics disappointed me because they felt they needed to assert their interpretation of what an alternative explanation might be. Just because you show that ‘a’ isn’t right you are not obliged to propose ‘b’. You can say’ “I don’t know.” and that’s okay.
We know very little about the nature of our reality as it is. So, impeding our capacity to discover more by crafting dogmas of belief and disbelief seems self-defeating.
We have all crafted our own subjective niches within which we find comfort, respite and a sense of security from which we can promote or defend what is of deep existential importance to us. But what is ‘true’ to us may not be true to others. Why does it matter? What is ‘good’ to us may not be good to others. Why does it matter?
Whether both matter depends upon whether and how we engage in serious self-reflection about our motives, our insights, and our hopes/fears.
I have tried to comprehend Jesus as a real person because my memory of him at age 6 was as a ‘nice man’ whose niceness was drowned in a flood of religious awfulness that made him irrelevant. I think the mythic renderings of him are utter bullshit.
I preserve my personal ideal that he had two ‘commandments’ – to love ‘reality’ (god) with all your heart and mind – stay curious – and to love your neighbor as yourself – in other words be a decent person. Don’t lock your curiosity away behind the prison bars of dogma. Become self-aware and learn to discard the conditioning of self-loathing. You can’t sensibly ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ if you are filled with self-loathing.
I think about the impact of the dogma of ‘original sin’ on our culture – the idea that we were ‘born bad’. The idea that we must be spiritually ‘saved’ or ‘redeemed’ seems like a perversion of the Buddhist notion of enlightenment – one intended to put the individual in a subservient position to those with the power/authority to grant salvation. It seems made for corruption and abuse.
I have a deep regard for Buddhism, but I have no desire to become an adherent. I recently discovered that my great grandfather was among those who introduced Buddhism to Northern Ireland. He called his farm ‘Nirvana’.
I think Buddhism fits with humanism because there’s a shared set of values. I might say that Buddhism is humanism with metaphysical leanings – and with a cultural legacy. I think all the great spiritual thinkers are ‘humanists with metaphysical leanings’ simply because we humans share a common inner nature. There are distinctions how we describe shared insights about it because our cultures are distinct. We have different traditions, myths and languages.
That’s how I recall the Jesus I met in Sunday school – a humanist with metaphysical leanings. Nothing has since persuaded me that this wasn’t an accurate intuition. Religion isn’t a substitute for psychology or philosophy, though it has become that to those who exploit the gullible and innocent.
It was believed that we naturally grew up with a defective impulse to be animistic – until rational and civilizing influences ‘cured’ us. Children’s stories pandered to this instinct, and then we grow up and grow out of it. But animism (do please look it up) was also a global thing among ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ people – and ‘civilized’ folks as well. The assumption of a perceptual defect was pushed by Christians, for whom anything outside the faith was unacceptable, and by materialists, for whom the idea must necessarily be absurd.
And what of those uncontaminated or distorted by these dogmas? There is a vast community of people – highly educated, intelligent, sane, rational, or just sensible and who feel free to think for themselves – who intentionally people who are ‘humanists with metaphysical leanings’.
I like the idea of humanism as a primary locus of what we think about. It makes so much more sense than ridiculous ideas about chosen or fallen people. We can be theists, atheists or materialists and nobody cares – so long as our beliefs don’t induce us to violate the rights and dignities of others. There’s still plenty to debate – but via reason and evidence rather than 2-3,000-year-old myths and dogmas.
We humans have always had a metaphysical dimension that partners our physical dimension. That is indisputable. Our arguments should not be about whether this is real, or how experience of it should be managed, controlled or described. If we must argue let it be about how to ensure both dimensions are engaged to deliver common goods.
It’s time to move on. Its now 1 November 2026. That’s a good date for a new beginning.