Christianity 2.0: A new evolution of Christianity

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Hello everyone, a warm welcome to you all. This is my first post here. I have a new interpretation of Christianity that I would like to share. Many of you may be wondering, what is the point of a new version of Christianity. I believe that just as science evolves as our understanding of the universe evolves, religion should evolve as our understanding of human values evolves and Christianity is well past its due date to evolve. My version of Christianity takes into account the fact that there is no evidence for the supernatural and so there is no reliance on supernatural claims to my Christianity. You might ask yourself then, why even call it Christianity in the first place? Well, many humanist atheists would like to deconvert Christians so that they may become less dogmatic and more humanist in their values. I share similar goals, but I wish to do so by reforming Christianity rather than deconverting people. I don’t have a problem with deconversion at all, but I have a feeling Christianity itself is not going anywhere anytime soon. So between my reforms and your de conversions perhaps every Christian might gain a more humanist perspective. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that I believe that “authentic” religions are seeking truth in some ways and its up to us to draw the “truth” out of these religions. I put truth in quotes because I do not think religion can or should contest with empirical truths, but strictly address value and morals truths in the same way that great fiction does. Ok, this is my proposed framework for the new Christianity and I’d like to know what you think. Thank you for reading.

Let’s start with Adam and Eve. I believe the story of Adam and Eve represents the first hominids that gained an awareness of mortality. Before they “ate the fruit” they were living forever in “paradise”. This is not literal, but a statement from the perspective of the versions of Adam and Eve that were living in a state of “pre-human cognition”. From their perspective, they would “live forever” because, like other animals, they were living moment to moment without an awareness of their own mortality. Similarly, from their perspective, they “lived in paradise” because they lacked the abstract thinking capabilities that would allow them to imagine better conditions.

Now, it says that after they ate the fruit, sin entered the world. In my interpretation, sin is not some ambiguous evil force that makes people do bad things because of “the devil” or whatever. Sin is the self-aware fear of death that plagues humanity and is the root of all actions (or nearly all actions) that we call evil. Now, all animals or at least all conscious biological beings have a “fear of death”. That is part of the survival mechanism that drives all life on the planet. But for other animals, their fear of death is simply a reactive instinct that ignites in the moments they are in danger. However, since we as humans have become self aware, fear of death is something that lingers in our subconscious at all times and has an effect on our actions beyond instinctual survival. And since we have the abstract thinking skills to imagine eternity, we have the potential to project our fear of death infinitely. This is why humans are at once the most ambitious as well as the most destructive animal on this planet. This is the “curse of sin”, our self awareness of death that drives evil actions. Furthermore, I believe what we may call “original sin” is slavery. When the god character tells Adam and Eve their punishments, they resemble versions of slavery that are gendered appropriately for that time’s understanding of gender. Adam must work the fields, Eve must have “painful” childbirth (this is a euphemism for sex slavery, of course literally, birth has been painful ever since our heads have been so big, but I believe this is talking about emotionally painful childbirth). Of course, these “punishments” are traditionally seen as conditions that God placed on humanity, but in my interpretation they are simply consequences of humanity’s over ambition to overcome their fear of death by attempting to control their environment as much as possible, which involves controlling people. We can see the beginnings of this phenomenon in Chimpanzees as well, as their treatment of female chimps in chimp society demonstrate a kind of proto-slave society.

The Old Testemant then, in my version of Christianity, acts as a perfect demonstration of the phenomenon of “sin”. The ancient Israelites fear their death, they fear the death of their culture, they fear the death of their bloodlines, they fear death at the hands of their enemies. From this fear, what is born is slave society. A society and a god based on domination and destruction of others. They attempt to overcome their fear by destroying and dominating that which they perceive to be the source of their fear. That’s why the god that their collective consciousness manifests becomes a tri-Omni god. Since they build a society based on domination, it logically follows that the god that represents their values and consciousness must be one that dominates all. This is the mindset (and god) that is born from slave society. But the problem is slavery, domination and violence can only beget slavery domination and violence. This is why, over and over again, it is demonstrated in the Old Testament that the violence they commit towards others only ever boomerangs back on them to wreak destruction on their society. Thus is the nature of a violent slave society that we see borne out even today (of course, Ancient Israelites aren’t the only example, this has been the pattern of most societys since the beginning. The ancient Israelites are simply the example shown in the Bible).

And so we’re left with a fundamental paradox of human nature. The fear of death that has kept us alive as biological beings for 100s of thousands of years is simultaneously fueling our potential extinction. What is the way out then?

This is where Jesus comes in. I don’t believe in the traditional idea that Jesus died as some supernatural atonement. But the significance of his death is simply the fact that he overcame his fear of death and accepted his death for the sake of not continuing the violent cycle of slave society. That’s the short of it, allow me to elaborate a bit on who I think Jesus was.

Now, these are just personal hypothesis of mine, none of it can be confirmed historically, but I would love if historians could look into the possibility of my ideas about Jesus.

First, I do not believe Jesus was Jewish or connected to Judaism at all. I believe he was someone who understood the unsustainable nature of slave society and preached against it. Furthermore, I believe that the “end times” that Jesus preached about was not the rapture apocalypse that Christians have traditionally imagined, but simply the collapse of slave society. Heaven and hell I believe were euphemisms for the possible outcomes of societal collapse. So when he talks about the “Meek inheriting the kingdom of heaven”. What he is talking about is those oppressed by slave society building society up again from the ashes of the previous society. When he talks about “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it” He is not speaking as an endorsement of Judaic law, but saying to those who wish to reform and revolt against slave society “We’re not going to revolt because it will collapse anyway, we’re simply going to comply until the collapse comes” These are just a few examples of how I interpret Jesus’ words. After all, if the “end times” were supernatural in nature, why were the early Christians building communist-like self reliant societies? It seems to me they were clearly preparing for a collapse of material society, not a heavenly rapture.

Now, if you’ll notice and most atheists will agree, the messianic prophecies, and indeed all the elements that supposedly connect Jesus to Judaism are shaky AT BEST, as if the people attempting to connect Jesus to Judaism were not properly familiar with Judaism at all. This is why I suspect (of course this is my personal hypothesis) that, because the Sanhedrin had a part in Jesus’ execution, the gospel writers and Christians that followed feared further persecution at their hands, so they half-heartedly attempted to market their religion as something connected to Judaic prophecy as a way of easing tensions between these two groups. This is why scholars have discovered that Christianity may have started as a “mystery cult” where the public facing religion was one thing, but once you joined you learned the “real truth”. The real truth in this case being the version of Christianity I have laid out that is not connected to Judaism.

Well, that’s about all I got for now. What do you guys think?

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It sounds very much like you’ve decided upon your own ideology, and are then attempting to shoehorn it into an existing and completely incompatible belief system.

Your appeal to historians is from a position of ignorance - Historians have already examined and addressed history - it sounds very much like you have made no attempt to look into the consensus of historians or the relevant corpus of knowledge, and I’m not sure why you’re stating that “most atheists will agree” as if atheism is anything more than a lack of belief or a disbelief in any/all gods.

As a whole, it is very much misrepresentative of Christianity, of the bible, and even of atheism. If you want to form your own ideology, go ahead, but trying to overlay it on Christianity, especially in such a manner, is a complete non-starter from my view.

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I interacted in the past on another site with a panentheist who was a very pedantic retired academic who was promoting a long-winded “Synthesis” that tried to do just what you’re talking about … in his case, overlaying panentheism onto Christianity (or trying to retcon Christianity to be compatible with panentheism, if you prefer). It was something of a Frankenstein monster, to say the least. The only one who didn’t find this a forced fit was the academic. The impetus for him doing this was a peak experience he had in meditation once … as is not uncommon, he was never able to reproduce it afterwards but he became obsessed with the revelatory vibe of it and constructed a whole iconoclastic belief system around it and promoted it to anyone who would listen.

Anyway the OP here isn’t quite that bad but my general reaction to it is that humanity has already sorted itself broadly into dozens of major religions and specifically into tens of thousands of sects / subvariants and inventing just one more for anything but personal amusement seems like a fool’s errand. I don’t really see the point.

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Probably the best authorities on this point are Jewish folks. The would laugh uproariously at Christianity’s alleged messianic prophecies if they weren’t so appropriative and offensive. The New Testament retcons bits and pieces of the Torah to pose as the fulfillment of Jewish yearnings for a Messiah figure (in some cases outright misquoting it). One way to understand that is that the ancients had a mindset that new religions were inherently suspect: if what a new religion teaches is true, we’d already know about it. Who is going to come along several millennia into recorded history and suddenly correct everyone who came before?

So Christianity piggy-backed itself on a more ancient religion (Judaism) to get around that. Whether it was justified or not is beside the point: it worked.

One of the many other alternate orthodoxies in the early years of church history, Marcionism, is instructive here. Marcion believed essentially that the Jewish god was degenerate and that Jesus was a superior god who came to save the world from Jehovah’s false ideology. Predictably, Marcionism had distinct anti-Semitic tendencies, but it really saw success only in Marcion’s lifetime, on the strength of his personal charisma (and wealth). It didn’t endure because it carved out a version of Christianity that was indeed a new thing under the sun, and the ancient world would not embrace it or trust it. The only thing Marcion ended up contributing to church history was the first proposed canon of NT scripture, an abbreviated version of Luke and the oeuvre of the Apostle Paul. It ultimately motivated the proto-orthodox to pull together the more comprehensive canon we know today – in some measure that was a response to Marcion’s canon.

I say this was an ancient bias against new religions, but it survives to the present day in similar forms. That is what anyone inventing a new religion or reforming or redecorating an old one faces: a credibility problem.

My late / previous wife’s faith (essentially rural Methodism) survived to the end while mine didn’t. One of the things that made it credible to her was her sense that millions of people can’t believe something if it is not at least partly true. I loved her, but … how wrong she was, lol. You have only to look at Scientology or Trumpism or any number of bizarre belief systems, religious or otherwise, to see the falsity in that.

A cult is just a religion that hasn’t reached critical mass. So that’s the other problem, you’re starting a cult. You’re inviting persecution. Today the Mormons have gotten themselves widely classified as Christian despite not hewing to the historic church creeds, but it has taken them a couple hundred years of strenuous effort to achieve that and they are still considered heretics by fundamentalists.

So I’m not sure why you are even taking this on. It’s rather quixotic.

Speaking as a former Christian FWIW, when I could no longer believe the dogma, I considered alternatives and decided they all suffered from the same problem: the failed epistemology of religious faith. The only response I could honestly have to that was to withhold belief from the lot of it. I think that your line of thinking is an unproductive one, personally.

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When do you get to the evidentiary part of your new religion? You also don’t mention the deity part, though as an agnostic I’d be suspicious if you started making assertions about any deity.

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They didn’t base their religion on evidence - in fact, it runs contrary to evidence in a number of places.

They stated their religion doesn’t have reliance on supernatural claims as it can’t be evidenced. They explain “god” as borne from collective fear and a need to overcome that fear through domination and destruction, etc.

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Not what I asked, and I don’t believe them, and nor will I believe your unevidenced claims, for the same reason.

I didn’t ask them about their BS, I asked you about yours, you have failed to answer.

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what unevidenced claim are you referring to?

you asked “when do you get the evidentiary part…” and I pointed out they weren’t basing their new religion on evidence.

I don’t see how this isn’t what you asked?

No you didn’t… you weren’t responding to me, you were responding to them. You didn’t quote me, you didn’t mention my name, and you also said:

which makes it clear you were referring to the OP whose profile says agnostic, whereas mine does not.

I was just simply providing answers to your questions posed to the OP, based on what the OP had already said. Was just trying to be helpful in the discussion.

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My apologies, I got my wires crossed there. I hadn’t realised you had responded to my request to another poster.

Clearly this was aimed at the thread author.

Who is they, and what has this to do with my question to the thread author?

Did I mention the supernatural? I never meant to, and was sure I had not.

Yes I know, they made multiple claims, and I asked when they would get to the evidentiary part of their new religion’s multiple claims. I made no comment on the religion they claimed to be filching this new ideology from.

Correct, again my apologies for my error. I also suspect this might be another drive by, but time will tell.

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“they” were the thread author

I didn’t say you did. I was just stating what the thread author had stated. You mentioned deity, a deity would come under “supernatural”, and the thread author was referencing the supernatural as an encompassing term.

You had stated they hadn’t mentioned the deity part, I was explaining how they had addressed the “deity” part.

In short, they were re-framing a particular belief system by removing the deity/supernatural elements, and explaining the reason for those aspects existing in the original belief system.

I was just trying to link elements of what they had said to the questions you had asked, wasn’t trying to challenge your questions or anything.

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There have been numerous attempts to relaunch/renew/sanitise mainstream catholic based protestant christianity. Its almost a spectator sport.

Those who know me here will be aware of my several specific scrawlings on this very point: I covered Marcion, Simon Magus, several of the schisms, cults and sects of ancient times all of which had relatively large followings and in the case of Marcion and Magus eclipsed the Roman Church…

Of course nowadays two of the most successful rewrites have been the fabulous con that is Mormonism, followed by the nastiness of the JWs, hot on their heels are the Christadelphians and the 7th dayers plus all the "Brethren " cults, the Nigerian “prophets” etc ad nauseum.

If you like wasting your time reimagining a dying creed, fine, but its been said, been done and is relegated to footnotes of history.

Good luck with it all.

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Ah, well that is of course what prompted me to ask when they would be getting to the evidentiary part of their religion, as I saw only bare claims.

Oh, I don’t like to assume, that’s why I was asking. though again I get the sense this was another “drive by” proselytising.

They addressed what they believed wad the case in the current religion, I did not want to assume what this author was imagining about his new version.

Fair enough, I also responded in haste, and in error, mea culpa.

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Having seen how the vast panoply of Christian denominations have nothing to offer me, and indeed espouse much that I find repellent, why is your version any different?

Does your version involve denial of valid scientific postulates? If so, I’m not interested.

Does your version involve dehumanising and “othering” anyone who doesn’t subscribe thereto? if so, I’m not interested.

Does your version involve posturing as being in a position to subject the rest of us to gender or sexual policing? If so, I’m not interested.

Does your version involve cosying up to the sort of people who, by any reasonable measure, are ethical pariahs? If so, I’m not interested.

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my mother usually says this to me whenever i tell her religion is a rigid outdated system. she would usually say:

why can’t religion evolve? why do you atheists keep insisting that the way we see god couldn’t be different than how people saw it thousands of years ago. you keep quoting all the old testament’s genocides and babykilling in deuteronomy but that’s not my god. my god is christ and he loves everyone unconditionally.

i could point out the problems with this statement, especially the “my god” part (you just lost the backing of your institution and now must prove the existence of this ‘my-god’ all by yourself) but i guess that’s what makes belief adaptable.

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Then your god isn’t perfect, immutable and unchanging like you claim it is. Or it’s a different one from the one in the OT.

In fact, Marcionism was one of the competing proto-orthodoxies back in the beginning that drew this exact conclusion. Jesus was a superior god who replaces the evil Jewish god.

Yet somehow I doubt that modern Christians would embrace that conclusion – in fact they would reject those who would as heretics.

Also there would be the practical problem that Marcionism ran into which was that it was a magnet for anti-semites.