"The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don't Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith"
INTRODUCTION
"Human beings want to believe. People are therefore the ideal soil for the seed of religion. There's nothing wrong with that, as long they're dealing with God himself, because people can trust God not to hoodwink them.
But we humans deal not so much with God as with his authorized deputies. Since they assure us that it's all for our eternal happiness and salvation, we let them tell us many tales. Believers accept without question what they're taught to believe and do, because when authority comes forward bearing a mandate from God, doubt seems to be a sin.
Christians have to deal with God's truth only indirectly, because the catechism says: "The Catholic Church teaches us what God has revealed."...
Thus Christians only get the truth secondhand, if at all. But truth has passed through alien hands is censored truth, and the God whom we meet at the end of a series of ecclesiastical middlemen is a censored God. The truth, or whatever remains of it, has degenerated, thanks to theologically dense Christian pastors, into a mass of misunderstood and incomprehensible teaching; in other words, into pseudo faith and superstition.
The Church calls us to believe and not to think. Thus, throughout their lives , believers practice the mental gymnastics of saying amen to everything they're told. In a religion that blesses believers but distrusts doubters, the questioners go unblessed and arouse suspicion in more than a few believers. Yet questioning is a Christian virtue, though seldom practiced by Christians.
The discussions that follow are designed to help this questioning intelligence.
Some people will say this harms the faith, but understanding can't harm faith: actually it's faith that has all too often harmed understanding.
The desire to believe without harming one's mind is, rightly viewed, an act of piety. When people who long for a more immediately , authentic, and large scale truth simply walked away from verbose and empty sermonizing, it sometimes happends that a new truth, beautiful and gentle dawns in their darkness. This is the truth of God's compassion, which has been obscured by the Church's many fairy tales..."
CONTENTS
Luke's Christmas Fairy Tale
Matthew's Fairy Tale of Jesus Childhood
The Virgin Mother
The Angels
Jesus Genealogies
Good Friday
Judas the Traitor
Easter
The Ascension
Pentecost
The Fairy Tale of Acts
Peter in Rome?
The Apocrypha
Forgeries and False Authors
Hell
The Dead Sea Scrolls
Redeption by Execution