Let every tongue and every tribe
responsive to his call,
to him all majesty ascribe,
and crown him Lord of all!
– Edward Perronet (1726-1792), from “All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name” (1779)
The Christian religion is all about judgment and condemnation. Its central dogma is built on the notion that Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden by eating a forbidden apple, and all of us are therefore “fallen” and sinful by our very nature. God therefore rightfully judges us, and God condemns every one of us to be alive and aware as we burn in hell forever while never being consumed. Our loving and merciful God refuses to simply forgive us for Adam’s sin and for our own sinful natures, but fortunately God has an alternative solution. He sends his pure Son – not descended from Adam, and therefore entirely immune from sin – to take upon himself all of our own sins, and to die horribly in our place. By being God’s perfect sacrifice, Jesus saves us from burning in hell forevermore.
If you are familiar with the Gospels, you know that this whole awful piece of theology altogether rejects the message of Jesus. Even as a child, I thought it made no sense! Jesus tells me to forgive seventy times seven times, but God can’t forgive me even once? We are all fallen because of what Adam did, and all Adam did was to eat an apple when God told him not to eat that apple? Nobody got hurt or anything! So, why couldn’t God forgive Adam for that? And, worst of all, God will only forgive us if he gets to watch his own child being murdered? But I’m a child! I have a father, too! And my father isn’t perfect, but I know he would fight and would give his own life to keep me from being murdered!
I’m sure I’m not the only one who secretly realized in childhood that the Christian God is a ruthless monster. God is not even as loving and forgiving as our own very fallible parents!
The Christian God is a direct descendant of Moloch, the Canaanite god with a head like a bull who devoured first-born infants in his belly of fire. The Christian God is not even as loving as the rather stern Old Testament Jehovah, whose prophets railed against Moloch and all the other bloody human-made gods. Jehovah contented himself with little non-human sacrifices of calves and pigeons. Given the dramatically loving and world-changing teachings that Jesus brought to us, how can the Christian God be such a judgmental and compassionless being?
You may be thinking that no Christian preacher still teaches substitutionary atonement as plainly as I have set it out above, but you would be wrong. Many preachers still talk about a Christian God who is not only pitiless and judgmental, but is also sadistic. This was written in August of 2021 by an earnest Christian preacher with a large following:
Even though a person may choose to reject Christ during his life, there will come a moment when they die and stand before God when they will bow their knee to Jesus and confess him to be lord before they are sentenced to eternity in hell. When Pilate died, he bowed his knee to Jesus and confessed Him to be Lord! When Nero died, he bowed his knee to Jesus and confessed Him to be Lord! When Buddha died, he bowed his knee to Jesus and confessed Him to be Lord! When Gandhi died, he bowed his knee to Jesus and confessed Him to be Lord! … When any person dies that has rejected Christ, before they are cast into everlasting darkness they will bow their knee to Jesus and confess Him to be Lord!
According to this version of Christianity, God does give us complete free will, but not so we can learn and grow spiritually. We have free will so we can choose whether or not to worship a God so judgmental and barbaric that he enjoys watching his own Son being murdered. And if we choose wrong, then when we die we are going to suffer the ultimate gotcha.
Here is where having the testimony of people that we used to think were dead is important! The plain fact is that nothing that Christians believe about the genuine Godhead is true. We know now that everyone, of every religion and of no religion, goes to the self-same afterlife. There is no powerful devil and no fiery hell. There is no post-death judgment by anyone but ourselves. We have been receiving good and abundant communications from the afterlife for a century and a half, and everything the dead are telling us is wonderfully consistent with what Jesus tells us in the Gospels. It is not, however, consistent with the religion that unfortunately bears the Lord’s name.
And there is no way that we can fix Christianity! I know that, because I have spent decades trying to find some way to lessen the sting of the Christian God’s refusal to forgive us for being fallibly human, and his frankly sick and evil insistence on watching his own Son’s crucifixion. And we haven’t even mentioned here what these Christian teachings do to people, but if you have spent much time with especially devout Christians you know that they tend to be the most judgmental and least forgiving people on earth.
When you have substitutionary atonement in mind as you sit down to read the Lord’s Gospel words, the complete dissonance between the religion and the Man makes your head spin.
He tells us that God never judges us, and He tells us that we also must never judge anyone!
“For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).
“If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47).
“Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).
He insists that we must always forgive, and we even must forgive those who have most harmed us!
“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41).
“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).
“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (JN 6:63).
The whole problem with the dogma of substitutionary atonement for Christians trying hard to follow Jesus is that Jesus makes forgiveness a primary commandment. And yet the Christian religion insists that God can’t forgive us unless God receives the blood-sacrifice of God’s own Son? We know now that learning prevenient forgiveness makes universal forgiveness almost absurdly easy. I have spent this past week proofreading The Fun of Growing Forever – We Can’t Transform the World Until We Transform Ourselves in preparation for releasing its Second Edition, and I am freshly astonished to realize how easily Thomas’s prevenient forgiveness trick works the miracle of teaching us complete and permanent forgiveness. Anyone can do it! But Christianity still insists to us that God can’t do it?
The early Christians who thought up substitutionary atonement had the words of Jesus right in front of them! How can they possibly have gotten the Lord’s teachings so completely wrong? I think it was because Jesus says things like, “I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Which is precisely true! He makes it clear in the Gospels that He came to save us from the false dogmas of all human-made religions and teach us to relate to God directly. But the Emperor Constantine’s councilors at First Nicaea in 325 were unlikely to flout the Emperor’s will and say, “Oopsie! Jesus doesn’t want us to make a new religion after all!” Instead, they edited Gospel passages like the one that follows. Here they turned “believes Him” into “believes in Him”; the italicized sentence was surely added; and what follows it may have been tweaked:
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him. He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God” (JN 3:16-21).
Jesus tells us right in the Gospels that He came to teach us. He didn’t come to sacrifice Himself to save us from a divine judgment that He tells us in the Gospels never happens. But the Christian God is judgmental, mean-spirited, and much too small! Four years ago, Thomas channeled to me The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught; But then he wouldn’t let that book be published. He kept saying the time was not yet right. But now he is saying it will soon be time to begin to help Jesus to lead directly those who continue to love and trust Him, despite the errors and lies of a misguided and dying Christianity. It will soon be time to enter into the Lord’s much more glorious relationship with the genuine, eternal Godhead. A relationship that only and forever is based in the Godhead’s perfect truth!
Oh, that with all the sacred throng
we at his feet may fall!
We’ll join the everlasting song,
and crown him Lord of all!
– Edward Perronet (1726-1792), from “All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name” (1779)