2-Minute Christianity

2-Minute Christianity is a project aimed at open-minded Christians who think that if Christianity is true, it can stand a little critique.

Religion claims to answer life’s Big Questions, but look at a map of world religions. Buddhism has one set of answers, Islam another, and Christianity another. Religious answers vary by location. By contrast, there is no map of world science. A compelling new theory will peacefully sweep through the scientific academy in a couple of decades.
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The Noah flood story works as mythology, not history. The ark would have been impossible to build, it couldn’t have held all the animals, the carnivores had nothing to eat, the flood would have killed the fish and plants, animals couldn’t have walked from distant regions to the Middle East and back again, and more.

Saul Steinberg’s famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” takes the same nearsighted view of the world as the Bible does. The Bible’s cartoonish view of the world makes sense coming from an Iron Age culture, not the omniscient creator of the universe.

A first-century steam-powered toy invented in the Roman Empire could have started the Industrial Revolution, but it didn’t. Europe was soon largely controlled by Christianity, and yet there was no flowering of technical innovation. Nor a flowering of social improvement. The Industrial Revolution and the end of slavery were 1500 years away because Christianity had little interest in encouraging science and technology to improve society.

The New Testament gives many ways Jesus healed—he expelled demons, he said that sickness comes from sin, he used potions and powerful words, and he cured by touch. Two things stand out: these healings were based on the folk medicine of the time, not science, and the amount of healing Jesus did was unimpressive. Modern medicine, based on science, heals much more than Jesus. 

This popular Christian argument sees God in innate human desires: we hunger and there’s food; we thirst and there is water; we yearn for the supernatural so there must be God. But this is backwards. We don’t notice hunger and conclude that food exists; instead, animals need food, and evolution selects those that can find it.

Psalm 22 is a popular place to see an Old Testament prophecy of Jesus, but the parallels with the gospels could easily have been added by New Testament authors. And when we read the entire psalm, we find passages with no parallels in the gospel story.

The venerable Ontological Argument tries to imagine God into existence, but it fails on a number of points. Like many arguments, it’s effective because it’s perplexing, not because it’s correct.

The Garden of Eden story is widely accepted as history, but it has plot holes. One moral infraction (before Adam and Eve even had moral knowledge) was hardly justification to punish all future generations. Surprisingly, the Bible agrees, but there goes any justification for Original Sin.