Why I Am Not A Christian - An Interaction With Evilbible.com

Freshness is always necessary in the apologetic endeavor. By that I mean we face the same basic objections to the Christian faith year after year, but we need to be able to speak to those objections in new and fresh ways to every generation. This being the case, I want to interact with an essay that is totally hostile to Christian belief, unoriginally titled “Why I Am Not A Christian” by Charlotte Schnook. The essay is posted on the antichristian website, evilbible.com.

Over the course of several blog posts, I will go through Ms. Schnook’s essay bit by bit and point out the many problems with it, demonstrating hopefully how a believer might respond to someone who is hostile to Christian belief. At the outset, I want to stress my desire to show kindness and grace through this process and I appreciate the author’s permission to interact with her article in this fashion. So let us begin with the introduction.

“Introduction:

This essay was inspired by the consistent assumption of Christians that if I believed the Bible were true, I would become a Christian. There are several reasons for my atheism, the leading of which is the idea of a higher power is not probable in light of current scientific data. The second of which is I do not find the state of the world in accordance with an idea of a loving and merciful higher power. Then of course there is the factor that the basis of this essay shall be about; I do not find the Biblical God fit for worship. Over the course of this essay there will be some times when I will speak as if I believe in the Bible, when in fact I do not.”

The author lays out several problems she has with Christian belief, which I shall summarize. 1) She thinks that Christians regularly assume that believing the truthfulness of the Bible leads to an embracing of Christianity. 2) The scientific data does not lead to the probability of a “higher power.” 3) The problem of evil is big for her – she cannot reconcile a loving god and the “state of world,” by which I assume she means the evil in the world. 4) She does not find the Biblical God fit for worship.

Now let me point out here, for the sake of clarity, that Ms. Schnook lists several objections to Christianity here, but she plans on dealing only #3 and #4 in this essay. Read her next paragraph.

“I plan to examine the Bible with critical inquiry. This essay will not be based upon scientific facts and how they disprove the Bible. It shall be an application of my emotions regarding compassion, love, mercy, patience, and justice. I hope to explain more clearly why the God depicted in the Bible violates my idea of a moral being. This shall be done over a series of topics. Each pointing out how Jehovah is undeserving of my worship. I will utilize Biblical verses to support my claim as well as what I consider to be logical reasoning.”

Note carefully her proposed method of approaching scripture, “with critical inquiry.” I truly appreciate this desire and would hope that all who object to Christianity would strive for the same. Frankly, even many Christians fail in this regard. I will say up front, however, that she does not follow through with this stated objective, which will become more apparent in later posts. Rather than approaching the Scriptures with true critical inquiry, this author already has her mind made up about the so-called impossibility of a loving God being reconciled with the actions of the God described in the Bible (such as Hell and genocide), and so she is looking for those scriptures which seem to support her perspective. We must admit that we all do this to some degree. We have presuppositions about who God is before we ever look to inquire in His Word about Him. For the sake of this interaction, I will attempt to let all Scriptures speak for themselves within their contexts, thus letting the Bible say what the Bible says. Now, notice that she narrows her focus by dismissing any desire to disprove the Bible via scientific fact. I suppose we might deal with that particular issue in future blogs.

Now we get to the foundation of what this work is all about, for she states that her essay is an “application of my [her] emotions regarding compassion, love, mercy, patience, and justice.” So, the standard of judgment is the author’s own emotions. {Reflect on that for a moment.} She further states that God “violates my [her] idea of a moral being.” Again, by the author’s own admission, she is setting the standard of what God can and cannot be based on her own opinion.

But can we trust our own emotions and our own constructions and opinions of what is moral and what is not? After all, just by observing humanity, we know that human emotion is a roller coaster ride, and that on a good day. We also know that what humans believe to be moral can actually turn out to be highly immoral in the end. Hitler, who would have made the case that he was doing humanity a favor through ethnic cleansing, truly thought of himself, I believe, as a moral person. In other words, right from the beginning, and regardless of anything else she says, Ms. Schnook’s foundation is shaky at best and useless at worst.

Now the last paragraph of her introduction:

“Now would be the time to ask you to please take out your bibles for consultation. (I personally prefer the NIV or KJV) I will only cite the verse and a brief over view. I do not have the space to write out the verse in its entirety. I especially don’t wish to spew out so much information that I run the risk of overloading those people who dislike reading. (Funny confliction here, isn’t it? We are online, in a purely textual world, and people still have the audacity to complain about reading.) In the case that you dislike reading online essays, I recommend you print this out and thumb through it at your convenience.”

In the next post, I will begin interacting with her argument that the Biblical God is not worthy of worship and I will be printing out the texts. Here is the problem. I believe that a huge part of the misunderstanding of scripture comes when we do not read scripture in its context. Stay tuned to part 2, and here is a glimpse at Ms. Schnook’s first words in the next section.

“Hell:

Hell, of course, is the mother of all of my problems with the bible. It is perhaps the most despicable and hideous of all of the Christian God’s crimes. Indeed, the cruelest of all concentration camps.”