Why I No Longer Believe in the God of the Bible

After 20+ years of pastoring, studying, and being a part of the church (wonderful churches in fact)…

Here are my reasons for no longer believing in the God of the bible.

1. Lack of fulfilled prophecies.  
In Isa 41:21, God challenges idols (gods that are not) with this statement, “Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods” In other words, a god (a real god) can prove that he/she is a God by stating what is going to happen before it happens. That makes sense. I hung my Christian hat on this nail for decades. But here is my problem… There is not a single concrete example in the Bible of God being “outside of time.” I can not point to even one undeniably fulfilled prophecy.

None of the New Testament prophecies have taken place (e.g. Matthew 24) and it’s been 2000 years (come on already). And every supposed fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy can be explained as either:
            A. The “prophecy” was written after the fact (e.g. Daniel 11) or

B. It was snatched from its original context and misapplied (either ignorantly or with intentional deception) by New Testament writers (e.g. Matt 2:15).

Jesus is recorded as having said, “I have told you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe.” Well, that’s the problem. He didn’t. So I don’t.

                                   

2. Christianity is a product of Theological Evolution
Christianity is, for those who care to see and admit, nothing more than the religious views of the Jews, Greeks and Persians shacking-up and having a baby. Many of the central doctrines of Christianity (satan, demons, resurrection, hell, and good ultimately triumphing over evil) came from sources outside Judaism. The Immortality of the soul, the final judgment, and rewards/punishments after death, were not recognized by the Jews until late in their history and AFTER their exile. In other words, Christianity is the product of a theological evolution of sorts. I invite my readers to do some research on Zoroastrianism’s effect on Judaism (and therefore Christianity) - this was big piece of the puzzle for me.

3. The Bible is full of contradictions
I used to HATE it when people would say that. It is an accusation frequently leveled against the Bible by people who have an axe to grind and (usually) only cursory knowledge of the scriptures. Often times the things that are pointed out as “contradictions” are, upon closer inspection, not. However, that being said, there are in fact many contradictions in the bible - and their existence deliver a deathblow to the idea of inerrancy (God’s ability to deliver a reliable message).
 And I would submit that - any god who cannot deliver a reliable message is no god at all.

Below are just a small few of the many contradictions contained in the Bible. None of them, on their own, is a smoking gun, but when you add up the many dozens…

1 Samuel 16:10-11 vs. 1 Chronicles 2:13-15
1 Sam clearly says that Jesse, the father of Israel's King David, had at least eight sons, of which David was the eighth. But 1 Chronicles 2:13-15 indicates that Jesse had only seven sons, and that David was the youngest.  Which is it?

Matthew 2:13-15 vs. Luke 2:22-40

This passage depicts Joseph and Mary as fleeing to Egypt with the baby Jesus immediately after the wise men from the east had brought gifts. But Luke 2:22-40 states that, after the birth of Jesus, his parents remained in Bethlehem for the time of Mary’s purification (which was 40 days, under the Mosaic law). Afterwards, they brought Jesus to Jerusalem "to present him to the Lord," and then returned to their home in Nazareth. 

SIDE NOTE: This section has ALWAYS smelled funny to me. These events seemed very unlikely and contrived. During my entire career, the flight to Egypt sounded like someone (Mathew) was TRYING to fulfill Hos 11:1 “When Israel was a child, I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son.”

Matthew 27:5 vs. Acts 1:18

Matthew states that Judas took the money he had received for betraying Jesus, threw it down in the temple, and "went and hanged himself." However, Acts 1:18 claims Judas used the money to purchase a field and "falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out."

SIDE NOTE: I know there is a way, through mental gymnastics and wishful thinking, to force these two passages to “reconcile.” I have heard that done by others. I have done so myself. But trying to get these verses to not be at odds with one another is yet another example of the illogical lengths a person (my former self included) will go to believe what they so desperately WANT to believe.

Matthew 27:46 vs. Luke 23:46 vs. John 19:30

Regarding the last words of Jesus while on the cross, Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 quote Jesus as crying with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Luke 23:46 gives his final words as, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." John 19:30 alleges the last words were, "It is finished." Which is it?

SIDE NOTE: If the New Testament cannot even agree on something as simple and important as Jesus’ final words… how can it be trusted?

4. The God of the Bible is bit of a monster.
I know that sounds harsh and inflammatory but what else to you call a genocidal, infanticidal, slave owner?

Exodus 21:20-21: “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.

           According to God, it’s ok to beat your slave if he/she recovers within a couple days!!!

1 Samuel 15:3: Here the prophet Samuel gives King Saul this commandment from the Lord, "Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."

Understand, God (therefore Jesus), ordered the murder of babies! I know that is not news to most of you - but think about that. Think about how much we “clean up” God in ignoring stuff like that?  It’s not like when the US drops a bomb to kill bad guys and inadvertently kills innocent women, children and babies. That is unintentional and very regrettable collateral damage. But THIS is during a time of hand-to-hand combat. Think about it… A “holy God of love” ordered his followers to murder babies.

Hosea 13:16: This verse describes a punishment from the Lord: "Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up."

Numbers chapter 31: Here the Lord approves of these instructions that Moses gave to the Israelite soldiers about how to treat certain women and children captured in war: "Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves."

Isaiah 13:9,15-18: This contains this message from God, "Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger. . . . Every one that is found shall be thrust through. . . . Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes . . . and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them. . . . They shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eyes will not spare children."

SIDE NOTE: These passages are a good example of how the Judeo-Christian religion has evolved. These passages depict an ancient time’s, and an ancient god’s, horrific, ignorant, and primitive beliefs about women and children. We mostly ignore these passages today; scratching our heads, wishing they weren’t there, and mumbling phrases like, “God is mysterious and sovereign.” But they are there. And they are damning.

5.  Lack of the Supernatural

During my 20 years as a believer I saw no evidence of a supernatural world (nothing that couldn’t be chalked up to coincidence). No angels, no demons, no unexplainable healings or words of knowledge or people speaking in foreign languages without knowing them. Not one. Wish I had.

The church should be a place of amazing wonders and miracles. It is not. The church and the world are exactly what you would think they would be if there is no God.

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So, that's it. Well, not really. I could write much, much more (and many have). But what I have written is enough to give a cursory answer to those who have wondered, "Why did you stop believing"

To those who want to argue…

I have neither the time nor the interest to engage in endless debates. I’ve spent decades of my life discussing/debating/studying the scriptures - I really don’t want to spend any more. But I did want to answer the dozens of requests that I have received to share the reasons behind my loss of faith in the scriptures.

To those who want to ignore….

Some have said that I no longer believe because I never actually/truly believed in the first place. Others have said that I gave up my faith (walked away) because I wanted to live a life of sin. That’s fine. Believe what you want about me if it makes you feel better (you can get the real story here: What the Hell/Heaven Happened to You?).

It seems that concluding the problem was “Jim” (he believed the wrong things, in the wrong way, or with wrong motives) and not with God or the Bible makes folks feel safe about their own faith. And yes, it is convenient and easy to discount my reasoning and experience by discounting me personally. But here is the truth: I stopped believing in the God of the Bible because there is no evidence to do so.

Why Do You Believe?

Dear Christians,

I don’t mean this this to be insulting or incendiary. I am merely trying to start a conversation, and perhaps even learn something new. Really. But it was been my experience during my career as a pastor (20+ years) that very few Christians know their Bible - because very few actually read it. I can’t tell you how many times a church-attender has confessed to me how difficult it is for them to be consistent in the reading of God’s word (“It’s hard to understand” or “It’s boring” or…). In fact, I have heard it said (and also found it to be true) that, “If you want to make a Christina feel guilty? Ask them how much they pray and how often they read their Bible.” Resonate with anyone out there? Again, this is not an indictment, just an observation.

Ok now, that being said (and stick with me here, and try not to get mad at me simply for asking an important and honest question), for those of you who consider yourselves Bible-believers…
Why?  Why do you believe that the Bible is the word of God?

Someone once said, “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”

So for you, what is the evidence (proof?) that gives you certainty that God (by inspiring holy men through his holy spirit) has indeed delivered a written message to mankind?

I’m honestly and sincerely asking.

Go.

What the Hell/Heaven Happened to You?

I was at the end of an ever-fraying rope when I wandered into a southern California church. Sick of who I was, and how I was living, I sat down on a pew and nervously awaited what I hoped would be a divine intervention (I sure as heck needed one). Years of drug and alcohol abuse had left me desperate for a fresh start and a new way to “be.” One hour and fifteen minutes later, I found exactly what I had been looking for (funny how that works, right?). A faithful congregant led me in the “sinners prayer,” gave me a brand new cellophane-wrapped bible, and sent me on my way with the belief that God had created me, sent his son to die for me, and had a wonderful plan for my life. 

I ate it up and drank it in. I needed it.

Belief is a powerful thing - and I BELIEVED. I got a job (and actually kept it), gave up drugs and alcohol, and threw myself into service for God with abandon; tri-weekly church attendance, intensive daily bible study, street evangelism on the beaches of Orange County. Within three months of my conversion I was teaching home bible studies, and within a year or so I was off at bible college: learning how to plant churches and teach the scriptures verse-by-verse. A zealot was born.

When I think back to those early days of my conversion I think about cassette tapes. Remember those? During the first couple years I had them (almost literally) coming out my ears. I devoured hundreds of hours of bible-teaching taught by ardent proponents of the scripture’s inerrancy. Good and sincere men provided me with reason after reason after reason to KNOW that the Bible is a divinely inspired book. Their chief argument? Fulfilled prophecy proves that God exists, is outside of time, and that his word can be trusted. And so I trusted. Big time.

Side Note:

For me, my faith was never as much about feelings as it was about facts. But that is not to say that I didn’t have feelings. I LOVED Jesus with all my heart. I had intense feelings for and about God. He who is forgiven much loves much. I had been forgiven a ton and I therefore loved him so very much. In my mind, Jesus had given me life, true life, and every good thing I had ever experienced was from him. I reveled in the immeasurable grace that had washed me clean and given me access to Heaven and a relationship (not a religion!) with God.

Ok, back to the facts ma’am.

But despite my intense passion (feelings) for God and His Son, I knew (and still do) that feelings are very subjective. And that if we, as Christians, are going to be able to say to Muslims and Hindus, and Buddhists (and atheists) that WE have the true faith, well… we need some facts! And so passages like Genesis 22, Genesis 37, Genesis 49, 1 Samuel 7, Psalms 22, 110 and 118, Isaiah 53, Jeremiah 31, Daniel 9 (oh! Daniel 9!), Matthew 24, and Revelation 13 - (and many more) gave me undeniable “proof”(facts!) that the God of the Universe had indeed delivered a reliable and trustworthy message. And so, with these faith-building facts in hand, my new bride and I moved halfway across the country to plant our first church.

Calvary Chapel of St. Joseph, MO started in my basement. We had a full band (the drums had to be setup in the laundry room), a “kid’s ministry” (which took place upstairs in the living room), an impassioned young bible teacher (yours truly), and a God given mandate to change the city and make disciples. After just a few short months we were able to secure a 110-year-old brick behemoth of a church building (stained glass and all) in the downtown section of the city. We plugged in the guitars, set up the drums, and I preached my newly converted heart out (I’d been a believer for less than 3 years at this point) and waited for the pews to fill. And they slowly did.

8 years later we were a church off 400+ adults running two services on Sunday morning, one on Sunday night and a mid-week on Wednesday. We had purchased an adjacent parking lot, a small office building, and two houses across the street for children’s and youth ministry. And somewhere along the way (insert guilty sigh) I became yet another voice of theological certainty (yes, also recorded on cassette tapes!) regurgitating and parroting the same set of undeniable biblical proofs that had been preached to me by respectable men with impressive ministries. And I took my place in the cycle of convinced but misinformed people creating others who are convinced but misinformed, creating others who are convinced but misinformed. Ugh. I began to, unknowingly and without any conscious deceit, do unto others what had been done unto me.

After 8 years at that first church I grew tired of Midwest weather (I am a southern Californian through and through!) and I moved my wife and (at that time) two kids to the Philippines where I had taken a position teaching at a Bible college. And (yup, you guessed it) the cycle continued… The students listened to me the way I had listened to my instructors/pastors and absorbed my teaching as if I were an expert on history, ancient languages, archeology, and evolutionary biology. Why would they not believe me? I was a pastor after all. I had a successful ministry, I was a decent and sincere guy, and (and this is important) I knew more than they did.  Who were they to question? But my students in SE Asia were no different than I was in Bible college, no different than the people back at my church in St. Joseph, no different (in my opinion) than the vast majority of people who fill the pews every Sunday in churches across the world. We believe because we want to believe and we strengthen our belief by setting ourselves before people we respect and absorbing their teachings as (pun intended – wink, wink) gospel truth. How can good men with good intentions (and the Good Book!) be wrong?

But over the course of the next ten years I would in fact slowly come to the realization that I was wrong; that my teachers and pastors, all those voices on the cassette tapes, were themselves very wrong. Not evil, not dumb, not charlatans – just… blinded by good intentions and wishful thinking, ignorant and misinformed. Just like me.

So how does a faithful pastor come to the place of losing his faith? I describe it in these terms…
Imagine two folders in your brain. One folder contains all the things that that strengthen faith (remember that long list of scriptures I shared earlier?) and the other folder contains all the things about God that we don't understand (God-mandated-genocide, Torah endorsed slavery, Heaven’s command to kill babies, etc.). For me, and for years, the folder that contained faith-strengthening evidences was far larger than the folder containing faith-depleting evidences. And so I continued on because, “Who am I to question God? A God who can be fully understood is not a God worthy of worship! God is mysterious. His ways are not our ways” (so on and so forth). But then, one by one, without me even really being aware of it, things in the first folder were making their way into the second folder. Faith-building passages were becoming faith-depleting passages. The folders were tearing.

And so, ten years into my second church plant (The Edge, www.EdgeCF.com), on the morning of November 12, 2012, I woke up to spend some quite time with God and his word. And as I read the passage about Jesus casting a multitude of demons into a herd of swine - it hit me (based on what I knew about the evolution of demonology in the intertestamental period)… this is ridiculous. And poof, just like that, I realized there was nothing, not one thing, left in my “faith folder.” Please understand and hear me; I was not “in sin,” I was not looking at porn, or embezzling money, or sleeping with anyone’s wife – I was a born-again believer who loved Jesus and His church and was desperately trying to be the very best Bible teacher and pastor I could be. I did not lose (or abandon) my faith because I wanted to justify an unholy lifestyle. I lost my faith in the course of doing my job as a pastor. I lost my faith by studying the Bible.

“What the heck am I going to do!?” That was the question reverberating in my now faithless brain. What does one do when they are the founding and teaching pastor at a church of 500 adults with 2 locations and a large mortgage and they no longer believe in the book they are paid to teach? What does a man in his mid-forties do when his only marketable skills and mean of financially supporting his family are tied up in preaching faith in a God in whom he no longer has faith? Do I tell people the conclusions I have come to, quit, and hurt hundreds of good people? Do I, in the name of integrity, leave my job and put my family (by now I have 4 kids) in financial peril? I felt stuck. Unbelievably stuck. It was a daunting and complicated puzzle that I could not seem to solve. And so I pressed on.

For a little more than twenty-four months did my job to the best of my ability. While I was no longer a believer in orthodox Christianity, I knew what orthodoxy was - and so I gave the people what they wanted to hear (I also threw in a good amount of practical wisdom and life advice just so I could live with myself and feel like I was doing something worthwhile). Most of the time I was content to keep things going as they were (thinking it was best for all parties involved). But there were many days of deep and great misery where I felt (rightly so) that I was a liar and a fake. I searched for a way to extricate myself, my family, and my church from this unsustainable (and, let’s face it, ridiculous) situation in a way that did not cause great pain to beautiful people – but I could not find one. Perhaps a better man could have. I could not. And so, tired of being a pretender, worried that my children would never truly know me, weary of letting “fear” of ruin be the guiding factor in my life… I just quit. Because I could not see a scenario where drawing things out and making a slow departure caused even one less tear to fall… out of nowhere, without grace or elegance or warning – I just quit. I walked away from it all. I ripped off the band-aide. And I’m happy I did.

These days I sell network security to school districts and medium to large sized businesses and live in a rented house with a woman I dearly and deeply love and will one day marry (that’s another story all its own). My kids are with me often (as I write they are all sleeping soundly in their rooms) and I am at peace in a way that I have never been.

To those of you are angry and/or disappointed with me…

I didn’t go into the ministry, leave my family in CA, move to NW Missouri, and limp along financially for two decades for any other reason than that I was head-over-heals in love with Jesus. I was a true believer that happened to (through no fault of my own) get a glimpse behind the curtain and see that there is no wizard after all. I did not “abandon” my faith because I was not looking for a way to justify a desire for a sinful lifestyle (even as an unbeliever, for two years, I lived as a squeaky clean choirboy) I did not suffer “burnout” or get angry with “the Lord” because I have a handicapped daughter. It may make you feel better to think so, but it’s not true. I was just doing my job; studying the Bible, asking questions, and seeking answers.  If it makes you uncomfortable that a devout and passionate pastor can come to the place where he no longer believes in the God of the Bible – so be it. Be uncomfortable. Be bothered. You really should be (we all should be). But, please, resist the urge to make me a villain. If you are angry that someone stood in the pulpit and told you things that aren’t true. I hear you. I know your pain. The same exact thing happened to me.