However, I cannot find a Christian who will even discuss the cruel things that Jesus said, or the absurdities, or the acceptance of ridiculous rules, slavery, subjugation of women, the ridiculous Bronze Age superstitious beliefs, and on and on.
I've had Christians on DU tell me, when I ask them when they will reject and repudiate the nasty stuff Jesus allegedly said, "Oh you can be a Christian and believe anything you want." Or say, "Jesus was speaking in metaphors." And I reply with "Nope. Starting premises are original sin and substitutionary atonement. If you don't accept that people are flawed sinners due to Adam and Eve disobeying God, just because the people here and now are breathing, then you don't need substitutionary atonement through Jesus for your sins. And his suffering is supposed to give you complete redemption and salvation from that original sin."
I still don't know what "being saved" means and I probably never will.
To scare people into accepting Jesus as their savior then you have to first scare them with a human condition that will apply to everyone--original sin. For some reason, Christians refuse to see this and understand this.
The best analogy I could come up with was the statement, "Everyone has dandruff. This is a true statement and you must not disagree. Therefore you MUST use this ONE shampoo (Jesus Christ) to get rid of the dandruff. That one shampoo. And none other, or you will still have dandruff, as that is part of the human condition."
Indeed, I find it maddening that Christians who are so adamant in their faith and beliefs refuse to discuss the many hundreds of contradictions in their bible, and then dishonestly say "Oh you can believe whatever you want." All the churches I went to made us recite the Apostles' Creed. I have yet to see a Christian church without a creed or statement of faith.
The only church I will set foot in is basically no longer Christian, and that is the Unitarian Universalists. Unitarians used to believe in one god (starting with Michael Servetus, who was barbecued at the stake by John Calvin in Geneva) and the Unitarians, who believed in one god and not in the trinity. These two denominations merged in 1961 and have two seminaries in the United States.
They accept atheists, agnostics, the questioning, the pagans and anyone else who can't find straight logical answers in Christianity. The UUs are the only non-creedal religion I know of. They have statements of principles, but you don't have to say you believe in anything in particular, except that they draw from the diversity of many spiritual traditions.
I was reading about Zen Buddhism in the 1970s when there wasn't much to read in English other than the writings of Alan Watts, who was an Anglican minister turned Berkeley hippie Zen master. Now that the pre-boomers like Robert Thurman and also baby boomers have gone to Asia, studied and learned Sanskrit and Pali, and thoroughly understand those concepts for decades, now there are excellent books written about Buddhism in English, and even new translations of the Four Books of Discourses, by Bhikkhu Bodhi, who is a native English speaker.
The Hindus say that their many gods are just manifestations of the one god. I never could figure out why the Abrahamic religions think that polytheism is bad, or that graven images are bad. The Catholics have statues and the Protestants hate them for it. The Protestants also hate that Mary is prayed to as an intercessor, because they want an all male trinity with no balance between male and female deities. The Hindus take the graven image thing a step further and believe the spirit of the deity actually resides in the picture or the statue. I would think that concept would be a good thing for people who are not very capable of abstract thought.
I go back and forth reading Hinduism and Buddhism. Both are complicated but Hinduism gets really complicated. I think Gautama the Buddha, raised as a Hindu, got rid of the gods and goddesses to simplify the teachings, and kept the concepts of karma, dharma(the teachings or truth) and reincarnation, giving us a more condensed philosophy. There are lists such as the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. And there are books like the Numbered Discourses, saying the truth is like ____ because it has the same characteristics as _____. But there is not a statement that "The truth is _____" that is definitive. That takes a lot of deep thought. And there is more weight given to individual circumstances than in the Ten Commandments. Basically, don't lie, cheat, steal or indulge in sexual misconduct, which is given to the individual to judge.
I like the fact that you can follow original Theravada Buddhism and be an atheist. If you want to investigate the other flavors, you can have as many gods and goddesses as you like. I see the different deities, like the Taras or Kwan Yin, as different qualities or characteristics of humanity. The version I personally feel drawn to is Mahayana Buddhism which is Chinese. For some reason, maybe past lives, I am very attracted to Chinese culture. I used to go to a Mahayana temple in the city with a monastery attached, and I enjoyed the monks and nuns giving lessons on Sunday morning to the English-speaking group. They were all bilingual Chinese or Taiwanese people.
I also find it interesting that you can have a favorite god or goddess in Hinduism, an ishta devata, just like the Catholics have patron saints for people in different situations or professions.
I live in a very conservative part of the US where the Christians want to either convert the atheists, tell them to go to hell, or make them leave. The idea of not being in a Christian bubble where everyone is not just like them is something that they cannot even understand. If you're different in your spirituality, you must be bad or a terrorist. If you're an atheist, you must be a Satan worshiper and eat babies. You are only allowed to speak of certain narrow forms of Protestantism to be accepted. The most sensible denomination is the Methodists, and they are a lot more conservative than big-city Methodists. The Methodists at least go to proper seminaries where they have to learn ancient languages. Around here they all go to Southern Methodist University in Dallas. I don't know how much education the Southern Baptists have, but they seem to have a lock on power in the little towns and even some bigger ones.
They don't know what a Catholic or a Presbyterian is in these little towns. They have probably never met a Jew or a Muslim. Many of them have extremely untrained preachers in tiny churches. They know nothing but what some probably uneducated preacher has told them, and it's wrong. They think Muslims worship Mohammed. They think Buddhists worship Buddha as a god. They are ignorant and don't want to know about any other religions or spiritual traditions, because they are taught that everyone else is going to hell. They don't understand that their religion is an ethnic and geographic accident, based on where they were born and what the majority religion in their ethnic group is. They don't understand separation of church and state, because they think everybody is a Christian like they are, so they see no problem with crosses on sheriff's department cars, and nativity scenes with Jesus, Mary and Joseph on the courthouse lawn.
If you want to meet other secular humanists, you have to join secret Facebook groups. People invite you to their church just to be friendly, and if you turn them down, they don't understand. My husband and I tell them we are Unitarian Universalists, and that completely baffles them. They blank out because they don't know what that is. We met at a large UU church in the big city many years ago. We were both disgusted with the idiocy of Christianity and decided we couldn't accept it. We did this separately. I decided that since God was supposed to come into my heart and nothing happened, the people were suffering from a mass delusion and trying to MAKE me have a religious experience. It also helped that neither of us could deal with inconsistent and illogical religion. I have one science degree and my husband has two of them. He has also taken a whole lot of math, about 40 college hours' worth. I loved undergraduate chemistry because it made more sense than biology, which was my major.
And they certainly couldn't pass the religion courses I had to take at the small Presbyterian university I got my Bachelor's degree from. Everyone had to take 6 hours of religion, no matter what their major was, and it was sociology, anthropology and psychology of religion in the intro course. It was the most basic questions about why we have religions and rituals in the first place. Freud, Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Otto, Jacob Needleman, Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky, Ludwig Feuerbach, and many other authors. It was practically a survey course in philosophy. The professor was a Princeton Divinity School graduate who knew many ancient and modern languages. He would casually say things like, "Oh yeah. I had to read Saint Thomas Aquinas in divinity school. In the original Medieval Latin." (((CHOKE))) I had taken Roman Latin in high school so I was absolutely stunned.
I also took Old Testament as History from him. That's when I found out what a horrendous mess the Bible was due to the committees of the Council of Nicaea ordered by Emperor Constantine, and the JEDP theory.
I had conservative cousins who were sent to Baylor University in Waco which is Southern Baptist, or Texas Christian University which is conservative Christian. My parents were horrified at that. I went to a true liberal arts college and got an excellent education where nobody was shoving doctrine and beliefs down my throat in religion class.
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