Browse more articlesAaron Scott Hildebrandt > Religion > Lies my pastor told me

The details of exactly when I became a Christian are fuzzy for me. I know that I was very young, but I also know that on a fundamental level I knew what I was getting myself into. I lived in a world of Us and Them, and it was easy to decide whose side I was on. Either I could live my life on Earth with purpose and happiness, and enjoy life after death in eternal bliss, or I could spend my days as the walking dead, doomed to spend the afterlife drowning in lakes of boiling puss. Peter and John didn’t necessarily have the most creative views of hell – Milton and Dante outdo them several times over – but the young mind has no trouble filling in the mental gaps.

This was the world I was born into: There’s an eternal struggle between good and evil. And let’s face it, a struggle between the enlightened and the stupid. The immortal, perfect being we called God watched over us, and in exchange for embracing his sovereignty, every good thing would be bestowed upon us: fulfillment in this life, bliss in the life to come. To reject that sovereignty was asinine, and was really only a choice you could make out of spite. After all, how could one reject bliss? Not only that, but I was told from a young age that everyone in the world who isn’t a Christian has a “God-shaped hole” in them, an emptiness that prevents them from ever truly feeling happy or fulfilled in this life.

Of course, I make it sound so easy. In truth, God was a little fickle. He compiled a book for us to follow, a veritable Greatest Hits of him at his most jealous, his most vengeful, his most petty. This was a guy who would condemn the world for eating an apple, drown the multitudes in anger (but let’s not forget that he saved the baby animals, which makes this an excellent Sunday School story), order the pillage and rape of entire cities because they dared to ignore him. He took promised lands away for striking rocks. And yet, he could be reasoned with – if you caught him in a good mood, you just might be able to change his mind about things.

Even if you could stay on his good side, there was a narrow margin for error. The damned Catholics made up a whole host of rules in addition to the ones God gave us. The foolish Jews took the rules entirely too seriously, too blind to realize that most of the rules they followed don’t matter anymore. We were the ones that got it right. That didn’t mean that everyone else was going to hell; it just meant that, at the very least, they were going to feel very foolish standing before God at the pearly gates, suddenly realizing how close they were to taking the escalator down.

None of this struck me as particularly odd growing up. I was surrounded by wise and mature people who believed these things. My questioning mostly stuck to the shallow end. I especially loved prophecy: Was there really going to be a Rapture? Is the name of the Antichrist hidden in the margins of Revelations? My parents did their best to point me in the direction of answers, and this kept me occupied for quite some time. It’s around this time that the first seeds of doubt crept into my mind. Reading through all these theories, it occurred to me that there were some crazy Christians out there. And by “some”, I mean “a lot”. In particular, Thomas Ice and Timothy J. Demy’s “Fast Facts on Bible Prophecy” raised my eyebrows more than a couple times – Amazon reviews include “It’s a great book for anyone who is interested in learning more about Jesus’ return and what will be happening soon,” and “Good book to add to your reference library or helping to explain some prophecy events to a non-believer.” But it wasn’t just in books that I was starting to feel a little weirded-out. I remember sitting in church, listening to my pastor tell a harrowing story about the time he came face to face with a demon. The demon had possessed a young girl and was making her float around the room, occasionally throwing her against the wall. He rebuked the demon in the name of Jesus, and for the first time I wondered if my pastor might not be entirely sane.

Another blow came from Sunday School. The teacher of the youth class thought it best to, week after week, leave us alone with a TV, VCR, and old Jack Van Impe tapes. This, she was sure, was the best way to reach us. Jack Van Impe was a huge prophecy buff, something that would be a sure-fire hit with the youth had it not been for his wrinkled face, preposterous and nonsensical claims and larger-than-life co-host and wife, Rexella. There was something completely wrong with every word that left his mouth, only accentuated by his pleas to be taken seriously. But it wasn’t necessarily Van Impe who caught me off-guard. It was my Sunday school teacher. Even though this guy was off his rocker –and the entirety of the Sunday school class agreed on this point – the teacher thought that not only was he creditable, he was exactly what we needed to hear. My faith in the wisdom of the older generation waned slightly, but was still targeted at individuals (and not the faith community at large).

No one would claim that, in the midst of all this, I was a particularly devout Christian. I was at the church twice a week – once for the Sunday morning service (and Sunday School), and again for the mid-week youth group. I believed all the basic tenants of our faith. I went on a missions trip to bring the word of God to the underprivileged. I was baptised – a decision that was made when I realized that a girl I really liked had responded to the call for baptism, and if I responded as well I’d conveniently have to take baptism classes with her. Like I said, not particularly devout, but I don’t think I did anything that would cost me my salvation.

I graduated from high school, sneaking in one more missions trip that arguably left me more conservative and frantic about my beliefs than I had ever been before. After a lot of praying and meditation, I decided that it would be best for me to go to Bible College. I had no desire to go into long-term missions, seminary, or pursue work in religious fields, but it seemed like a good choice. If I was going to live my life as a Christian, I might as well learn a little bit more about what I believe.

If I came out of college with one fundamental change, it was the belief that it was okay to look at religion objectively. It was okay to not only take the Bible for face value as the holy words of God, but to examine exactly how the Bible came into being. As much as Christianity touts itself as a relationship, a here-and-now moment in time between you and God, there’s thousands of years of history behind it that has very real repercussions for the things we believe.

At a Bible study I attended with a friend, I met someone who had used a single dab of white-out in his Bible. He was proud to point it out – a correction to “the single error” in the modern Bible, a noun that was pluralised when it should have been singular. I was awestruck – not just that someone had made a change to their Bible, a move that surely reserved his seat in hell (Revelation 22:18-19*), but that someone at a Bible study had openly claimed that the Bible contained an error. It doesn’t matter if the error was purely a translation hiccup – if the Bible was indeed the word of God, then errors were unacceptable. This was the textbook for salvation. It’s like discovering an error in the Guide to Cutting the Red Wire or the Blue Wire. A single mistake could have deadly consequences.

After college, I continued my Biblical studies on my own. I read modern philosophers and theologians. I learned the histories behind the various books and the canon that was so often in flux. And I found more than I was expecting. I found errors. Inconsistencies. Contradictions. At first, I wrote them off under the Car Crash rationale – if multiple people witnessed the same event and were asked to retell it, each person would get the details slightly wrong. That doesn’t mean the car crash didn’t happen, and together each view paints a complete picture. For a while, this was an acceptable answer, a bit of tape on a torn page. But once that tear was there, the Bible started disintegrating in my hands, whole pages, then books, then the entire tome turning to dust between my fingers.

Some things were easy to let go of. I never believed in young-Earth creation – that is, the belief that the world is only six thousand years old. There’s zero scientific support, and even Biblical support for the theory is weak at best. In addition, there are mountains – one might say an entire world – of evidence to the contrary. Then there’s the issue of a world-wide flood. Again, it’s completely impossible for a man to have built a boat capable of housing two of every animal in the world. And even if such a feat were possible, the abundance and diversity of animal life on every continent shows that there was no great world-wide extinction. And if that’s not enough, there’s zero evidence that the world was ever covered in water, and there isn’t enough water in the entire world – including our atmosphere – to cover every land mass. So, it’s allegorical. I’m okay with that. It makes sense.

There are plenty of problems with the Bible that are obvious to anyone looking at it objectively. There are few Christians left who would vehemently argue for a young earth or a world-wide flood – it defies both rudimentary science and basic logic, and these things generally aren’t considered matters of faith (that being, faith that if something contained in the Bible is scientifically or historically impossible, God must have still “just made it happen”). Likewise, most Christians don’t believe that the story of Adam and Eve and a rib and an apple is literally true – or at the very least wouldn’t condemn you for calling it allegory.

The problem is with the 99% of the Bible that lies outside the obvious. This is the realm of things that we were told as children and still cling to, though we don’t know why. It’s interpretations that we’ve internalised, things that we’ve never thought to question. The moment these things come under scrutiny, conversation breaks down. Suddenly, every statement needs a citation and solid proof to back it up. So many false beliefs have been spread within Christianity – and indeed, most religions and sects with Abrahamic roots – that pure and simple fact no longer has a place in the discussion. These are holy issues. As luck would have it, these are also the issues that most need to be discussed.

The fact is, the Bible is the centre of Christian life. To criticize the Bible is to criticize God himself. It’s not only the primary source of information about the spiritual word in which we semi-reside. It’s also, as I mentioned earlier, the guide to salvation. It’s God’s step-by-step instructional guide for living eternally, written by the perfect being and penned by human hands. The problem is, only half of that statement is true.

There’s no particular belief in Christianity that I want to attack. I don’t want to debate whether or not the Bible makes a case for the existence of a hell. I’m not interested in arguing the concept of the Rapture. In the grand scheme of things, they’re moot points. At the heart of these debates is an assumption that every statement in the Bible is true in some way, whether it be literal or metaphorical. This was one of the greatest lies I was ever told.

* When looking this up this verse, I came across a fantastic website that claimed “If you are using the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible, and continue to do so after reading this article, then you are truly blinded by Satan, or just don’t care.” Also on that page: “What Does the NIV, the Satanic Bible, and Gay Sex Have in Common?” I really want to write that down and slip it into a game of TriBond.