For the past year or so since I became somewhat outspoken with my beliefs, I’ve gotten into several arguments with several of my Christian friends. And without fail they all have a certain level of smug superiority about them; we have the right way, and you don’t, it sounds like to me. And PS: you’re going to burn in hell fire
I tolerate that most of the time, because it’s a little sad that they do not see the glaring irony of a loving father sending most of his children to burn in a lake of fire; for ETERNITY. Still, it doesn’t stop me thinking of a way I could get the reasons across for Christianity’s ordinariness in the grand scheme of man’s religious history.
So looking at all the religions man has made up in our history, what makes Christianity special? Nothing, I argue. We have certainly taken it as seriously as nations take the world cup, but the likelihood is that Christianity is just one in a wide expanse of man-made religions, and the reasons for you being one are more fortuitous than anything.
So why is Christianity nothing special?
Man Has Always Had Religion
It’s the oldest social institution, I dare say; though don’t quote me on this one. For Millennia, man has battled many obstacles, and man has always found a way to explain them away.
In the past, when nothing was known about the natural world, it made sense to explain away earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and other massive disasters that occurred arbitrarily and led to massive loss of life as the works of an angry god. We are pattern seeking mammals, the scientists like to say; meaning to us a bad explanation is better than no explanation.
It was always comforting to think there was a deity watching over what was a pretty merciless existence, and to think that we could do something about it, for example, through sacrifice, human or otherwise. That sense of having some say in what would happen to us was very important to us, and why we kept creating gods in our image.
So religion is nothing new, almost every society has had a form of it before. 2,000 years ago, some people built on the supposed works of a Jewish prophet, formed a church, which was lucky enough to get the backing of the Roman Empire at a point. 2,000 years of unimaginable violence later, it is the world’s largest religion.