[split] "Christianity makes me afraid."

[Monica]

And understand, I've got nothing against Christians who are honestly trying to follow in the footsteps of what Jesus actually said to do.  I wish there were more of 'em.  But so much of Christianity today just has no resemblance to what Jesus taught.   His ministry was too short, and his teachings were corrupted by misunderstandings (he says kindly) by the apostles and, especially, Paul that it never even had a chance to reach the mainstream in its original form.  

The entire Catholic Church is an idea I have a hard time imagining Jesus approving of at all.  (There's even a passage in Thomas that appears to be openly condemning organized temple-based worship entirely.)  It almost immediately turned into exactly the sort of socio-political institution that Jesus DIDN'T want to see.  Then it set about spending centuries inventing theology, justifications, and outright fabrications until, like I said, we got to the point that the Crusades were launched.  Suddenly the theology of a pacifist carpenter was being used to justify salvation via slaughter for the sake of grabbing land.

And the really sad thing is that, in many ways, the Protestant Reformation made things WORSE.  The entire concept of "sola scriptura" -Biblical textual supremacy- was completely wrongheaded, both in terms of what Jesus taught and in terms of any realistic overview of how the Bible as a text came into being.  They turned Christianity from being about faith in God/Jesus to being about faith in a book.  A physical object.

They de-mystified Christianity so much that they eliminated what it was actually about.

I honestly do not think there is any other major religion on the planet which has fallen so far from where it began, at least among those where we have enough of a historical record to track the beginnings.  Sure, Buddhism ended up getting synthesized with other local religions and there's a lot of spirit-worship and tribal tradition that the Buddha probably wouldn't have wanted.  But the core teachings and goals have remained relatively unchanged.  It still centers on the Eightfold Path, and still teaches the virtues of meditation and selflessness and all that.

Agreed! The various flavors of Christianity are more about an entire doctrine, the centerpiece of which is salvation. In Catholicism, salvation is based on being Catholic, whereas in Evangelical Christianity, it's based on total acceptance of the bible as a whole. Either way, it's really self-serving; ie. getting one's 'ticket' to heaven is deemed most important, with everything else secondary.

Having been both Catholic and born-again Christian, I'd have to say that at least the Catholics focus more on the actual teachings of Jesus than the evangelicals. The Evangelicals say they're all about Jesus, but in actuality, they're all about being 'saved' and talking about Jesus, with very little emphasis on actually following his teachings. At least the Catholics seem to value compassion and being of service to others, whereas the evangelicals say that "good works are as filthy rags unless you're saved."

But in both cases, really in all flavors of Christianity except Gnosticism, the religion is more about the doctrine, whether that be based on the bible or the institution of the church headed by the pope, with the teachings of Jesus only a tiny part. Jesus is just a symbolic figurehead.

Or even Islam, which is heavily centered on a book, at least has a book whose text truly has survived unchanged for over a thousand years, and is agreed to still be an accurate transcription of Mohammed's teachings.  Literally only a handful of individual words are in doubt, which is unprecedented for texts of its age and length, historically speaking.

Don't all 3 religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) have the first 5 books of the old testament as their common foundation? Those books that have the creepiest of the creepy stuff, including jihad...found in all 3? and which predate both Jesus and Mohammed?  

And, of course, any texts which came along after the invention of printing are preserved just fine.  No one doubts the authenticity of the Dao te Ching, for example.

True. But authenticity is only a little part of the issue. Even if it could be verified that Jesus really existed, that still doesn't mean that the whole bible is 'the word of God'. It's just a collection of scrolls that Emperor Constantine decided to put together as canon. Rather random, actually. Many other books exist that got left out. It was all based on human decisions, yet people have been taught for generations that the bible is the 'complete and perfect word of God' which is just outrageously ridiculous, in my opinion. It's so deeply ingrained in the collective psyche that it's often difficult and scary to disentangle from it.

But Christianity got broken along the way, to the point the only way I could imagine someone divining Jesus's actual intent is if they read nothing but Christ's quotes and whatever bits of the OT Christ refers to in his ministry.  (The Mosaic laws, for example.)  And maybe the various accounts of his death.  Everything else is distortion piled upon distortion over the centuries.

Why the Mosaic laws? They have nothing to do with Jesus, except for historical continuity. If anything, the old testament books, including those at the time of Moses, are the most tainted of all. They have a clear STS influence.

The accounts of his death are completely contradictory. The oldest fragment of the gospels is dated several decades after his death, and that fragment is the size of a credit card. No, they aren't verifiably authentic at all!

I do agree that the words of Jesus are profound. This alone speaks to their authenticity. The value of his words stands on its own merit.

Some religion had to pick the short straw.  In this corner of the multiverse, it was Christianity.  At least from everything I've seen.

Christianity is such a mixed bag. It's an excellent example of mixed STS and STO, so people can choose. It's a tossup as to whether it's done more good or damage over the centuries. The same could be said of the other 2 Abrahamic religions too.