Beware Furious Christians on the Warpath to Defend Their Faith

Christian love shatters into denial, rage and hate

By the time my first book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief, was published in 2016, its Facebook page was up and running. I decided to do paid boosts on weekends to promote the book. I selected my preferred target audiences carefully: atheist, agnostic, humanist, secularist— but was surprised to find out that the boost had also appeared on the newsfeeds of devout Christians. This was not a happy event: there was an outbreak of Christian hate as they responded to the ad. I was called all sorts of names and was accused of never having been a real Christian. I was assured that I was going to hell. After a while I discontinued the paid boosts. The biggest irritant, actually, was that not one—not a single one—of the furious Christians chose to engage in any of the ten issues I raised in the book, any one of which is enough to falsify the faith. They were interested in lashing out, not learning.
 
When my second book, Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught, was published in 2021, I took a different approach. It has a website instead of a Facebook page, and by that time I had established a YouTube channel. I recorded eleven videos (under five minutes each), which are assembled in a Playlist of the same title. Since 2021 there have been a few comments on Video 1, most of them positive.  
 
This is the script I used when I recorded video 1 
 
So now I’m launching a series of videos in which I’ll describe what this book is all about. Something has puzzled me for a long time: Why aren’t Christians bothered by the many negatives about Jesus in full view in the gospels? No, I’m not kidding. Here are a couple of hard facts:
 
Fact Number 1: For centuries the church has promoted an idealized Jesus. We can see Jesus depicted in stained glass windows—and in Handel’s Messiah we find the words of Isaiah 9:6 applied to Jesus, For unto us a Child is born, Unto us a Son is given… And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Priests and preachers, when they speak about Jesus from the pulpit, the folks in the pews usually hear positive, feel-good verses from the gospels.
 
Fact Number 2:  most Christians don’t read the Bible very much. We rarely—if ever—hear Christians say, “Tonight I’m going to read the gospel of Mark straight through.” There are too many other options: TV, movies, sports. 
 
So, the many negatives about Jesus go unnoticed, undiscovered. In my new book, the bad, mediocre, alarming things Jesus taught are sorted into ten chapters. It’s not hard to spot them, if you’re paying attention—in fact many of them are so obvious. Here’s a little exercise to help you spot one. What do you do when Mormon missionaries or a Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on your door? Most of us send them on their way—we can’t be bothered. So what would you think if one of them, as they walked away, shouted back at you, “Just you wait, God will burn your house down for not listening to us!”  You’d think: “What a nutjob,” right?
 
In the 10^th chapter of Matthew, we read that Jesus sent his disciples out to preach in villages and towns. So here were itinerate preachers like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, going door-to-door. But Jesus includes this promise:
 
^“If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town” (vv. 14-15).
 
Sodom and Gomorrah were burned to the ground—that story is in Genesis 19. So Jesus says that the same thing will happen to people who don’t listen to his disciples. My bet is that most Christians would agree that this is something they wish Jesus hadn’t taught. 
 
When we read the gospels carefully, we keep bumping into so many Jesus quotes that fail to qualify as great moral teaching. When I was working on this book, I reread the gospels carefully for the umpteenth time in my 78 years, and I made an excel table of bad, mediocre, alarming Jesus quotes. The total came to 292, and I sorted them into four categories: preaching about the end times, scary extremism, bad advice and bad theology, and the unreal Jesus of John’s gospel. The complete table can be found on the book’s website.  
                                                  ******
 
A few days ago, I found this comment on Video 1:
 
“LOL what a crock. Jesus did not say that the towns would be burned to the ground. He is comparing the teaching they received vs. the teaching that the towns reject. S&G were deceived by the flesh, as we all are. It will be tolerable for them because on the cross, Jesus said: Forgive them, they know not what they do; referring to more than the Roman soldiers. Those who reject the teaching of Jesus are rejecting the very Kingdom of God. Their rejection does not result in the burning of the town, but a much worse burning.”
 
Here, for the first time I might add, is a Christian willing to engage with ideas I presented. But it doesn’t work very well because of indoctrination—about the nature of Jesus and the gospels— imbedded in his mind. He seems to assume that the gospels can be trusted because of their divine inspiration. But that is a faith claim. It is impossible to verify any Jesus quote—or any event about his life cited in the gospels—because the gospels authors don’t mention their sources, and they were written decades after the death of Jesus, by theologians, not historians. These authors do not cite any documentation contemporaneous with Jesus, such as letters, diaries, transcriptions. Was someone standing at the foot of the cross, taking notes? My critic wrote, “…because, on the cross, Jesus said…” 
 
How can that possibly be verified? It is part of the author’s theology. Matthew’s author created Jesus-script, Matt10:15: “Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.”  
 
My critic also assumed the fundamentalist view that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was homosexuality: “S&G were deceived by the flesh, as we all are.” In Ezekiel 16:49-50 we find this text, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it.”    
 
The meaning of the story in Genesis 19 hinges on the Hebrew word yada, which means to know. On rare occasion (as in the story of Adam and Eve), it is a euphemism for sexual intercourse. But most of the time it means get to know, find out about. Lot was a stranger in the city, and he had just welcomed strangers to his abode. We read that all of the men of the city—to the very last man—came knocking on Lot’s door, wanting to know who the strangers were. Is it really likely that they all were homosexuals? And if so, why would Lot offer them his daughters? Well, maybe because he was a misogynistic prick. At the end of the story, by the way, his daughters get Lot drunk and have sex with him. The babies, so we’re told, turned out to be the ancestors of the Moabites and Ammonites. This is ribald folklore, and can hardly be taken seriously as sound theology. 
 
My critic also wrote: “Those who reject the teaching of Jesus are rejecting the very Kingdom of God. Their rejection does not result in the burning of the town, but a much worse burning.” This is yet another example of indoctrination-based thinking. Please show us the reliable, verifiable, objective evidence for this claim.
 
Then my critic moved on to another chunk of silliness: 
 
“If someone is going to spend the waning years of his life hating on Christ, he should at least try to do a good job of it. The title should be ‘Ten things that if I were an ignorant Christian I would wish Jesus hadn't taught.’ Do I dare look at his spread sheet? 1. 1 - Mark 1:15 The Kingdom of God is at hand/near. Since the Kingdom is 'teaching' and Jesus is teaching, it is pretty clear that this is a true teaching and David wishes it not to be. Prior to the cross, the mystery hidden from the beginning was hidden because if one could 'get saved' prior to the cross, the cross would not be necessary. David has no concept of that mystery. Jesus taught how to read it on the road to Emmaus. David takes none of that into account.” 
 
“…the waning years of his life hating on Christ…”
 
Hating on Christ is not something that interests me at all. I just find it so baffling that the devout don’t bother to look behind, beneath the idealized Jesus promoted by the church, which is sabotaged by the Jesus-script we find in the gospels. 
 
“Do I dare look at his spread sheet? 1. 1 - Mark 1:15 The Kingdom of God is at hand/near.” 
 
I wonder how many devout Christians today—outside of evangelical, fundamentalist, Pentecostal circles—believe that the Kingdom of God is near. That was the obsession of the author of Mark’s gospel. His Jesus-script includes Jesus assuring the people at his trial that they will see him coming on the clouds of heaven. This seems to reflect the apostle Paul’s claim in I Thessalonians 4 that he will be alive himself to “meet Jesus in the air.” Both Mark and Paul were dead wrong; this was part of their fantasy theology. John Loftus has put it bluntly, “At best Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet” (the title of one of his essays in his 2010 anthology, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails). 
 
“…it is pretty clear that this is a true teaching and David wishes it not to be.”
 
Pretty clear? Maybe to those who have endured Christian indoctrination. Again, please show us the reliable, verifiable, objective evidence for this claim. It is abundantly clear that a Kingdom of God has never appeared on this planet. Believers have to be obtuse, oblivious, aggressively ignorant to suppose that it has, in view of the horrendous suffering and evils that humanity has endured, millennia after millennia. One of the favorite theological dodges is the claim that the Kingdom of God is an inner, spiritual reality experienced by the devout. I have known a lot of Christians in my time, and I have detected the Kingdom of God in very few of them. 
 
“Prior to the cross, the mystery hidden from the beginning was hidden because if one could 'get saved' prior to the cross, the cross would not be necessary. David has no concept of that mystery.”
 
He can call it “that mystery,” but in fact it is an example of magical thinking, the supposed power of the cross. “Mystery” is a category into which the faithful toss items they don’t understand, such as the endless, tedious theobabble generated by theologians and clergy. 
 
The parting shot of my critic was a criticism of my list of 292 bad, mediocre, alarming Jesus quotes: 
 
“It is one of the worst straw man presentations I have ever encountered, where no effort is evident of actually attempting to understand the text. There are legitimate criticisms of Christianity and Christians. This is not one.”
 
The irony, of course, is that Jesus of Nazareth—as presented in the gospels—is one of the best examples imaginable of a straw man. Nothing in the gospels can be verified by accepted historical methods, and the gospel authors disagreed—which is what we expect of theologians! The Jesus of Mark’s gospel is so very different from the Jesus in John’s gospel: they can’t both be right—and John adds the absurd boast (John 21:24) that the “beloved disciple” (unknown in the other gospels) is the one “who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.” How strange that this beloved disciple failed to include the Sermon on the Mount!  
 
My purpose in compiling the list of 292 inferior, questionable Jesus quotes was to bring to the attention of churchgoers their failure to read, study, and critically analyze the supposed words of their lord and savior.  
 
 
 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.