Paul’s Epistles: Epitomes of Christian Obnoxiousness

The pseudo philosophy in Paul’s Letter to the Romans

For a religion that’s supposed to have Jesus at its center, we might be surprised by the extent to which Christianity has been distinguished throughout its centuries by its insufferableness. Perhaps all organizations that fall short of their ideals can be accused of being hypocritical or fraudulent, assuming the critic is being uncharitable. But the churches’ failures and betrayals of the elements of spirituality are epic because Christianity has been simultaneously the world’s leader in evangelism.

Christianity has preconceptions like all other institutions, but no other culture has been as zealous or as longstanding in aiming to convert the planet to its ideals, while also straying so far from them, as has Christendom. Thus, Christianity isn’t so much a force for love in the world as it’s an Orwellian champion of effrontery.

From its persecution of pagans, “witches,” and heretics; to its crusades, pogroms, and a plethora of other religious wars; to its convenient rationales for torture, slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalistic greed, Christianity has of course been a disappointment as an alleged receptacle for the revelation of a righteous god. That’s only to be expected, given the universe’s godlessness and prevailing inhumanity.

But what sets Christian hypocrisy and barbarism apart from our innumerable failures to live up to our scruples is that Christians have a habit of being perfectly sanctimonious even when they’re at their least Christlike.

The Indispensability of Paul’s Letters

Luckily, we needn’t attribute this habit to some accident or malevolent force because the source of Christian obnoxiousness can be traced to Paul’s epistles.

Think of it: those epistles had become effectively canonical by the middle of the third century and are among the oldest of the surviving Christian texts, possibly informing the gospel of Mark. Moreover, the gospels present Christians with a problem since those narratives denigrate Jesus’s disciples, thus leaving Christians with the mystery of what it means to be a good Christian. The gospels trashed the reputation of the disciples as part of a campaign to distance Christianity from Judaism, after the Jewish-Roman wars and the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century CE.

Assuming Jesus lived at all, his followers would have been Jewish and caught up in the furor against Rome which led to the rebellions. Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity rebranded traditional Judaism, the former becoming orthodox Judaism, the latter a Jewish heresy that turned into a separate religion. Christians claimed to represent the fulfilment of Judaism since they proclaimed Jesus as the messiah. Thus, this new religion was stuck with the baggage of Judaism. Rome’s termination of Second Temple Judaism made rebellious Judaism anathema.

As a result, early Christians had to placate Rome and disassociate themselves from any threatening form of Jewish radicalism, to avoid antagonizing the empire. Thus, Christians twisted what would likely have been Jesus’s form of Jewish rebellion into a harmless peacenik movement. Jesus would have been executed for threatening the stability of the region, by proclaiming to be the messiah and by whipping up Jewish resentments. But Christians couldn’t tell that story and still claim to follow Jesus without risking Roman retaliation.

The gospels scapegoated the Jewish establishment, alleging that the Pharisees sold out Jesus and forced Rome’s hand by trumping up charges of blasphemy and demanding Jesus’s execution. Likewise, the gospels portray a statesmanlike Pilate as being reluctant to carry out the Jewish orders — a nonstarter in historical terms. (In Embassy to Gaius, Philo of Alexandria says that King Agrippa I called Pilate “by nature unbending and severe with the stubborn,” and added that Pilate was accused of “the taking of bribes, wanton insolence, rapacity, outrages, countless and continuous murders, endless and most painful cruelty.”)

Also, the gospels co-opt Essenic Judaism, the type represented by John the Baptist and the Zealots, who would have been at the forefront of the Jewish rebellion against Rome. Like the Essenes (and the Greek Cynics), Jesus claims to represent the poor and the marginalized, yet the gospels present him as telling his followers not to hate their enemies but to love them and to offer them the other cheek when slapped. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, though, that these uncompromising, ascetic, and patriotic Jews rather detested their oppressors.

In short, according to the gospels, Jesus told his followers to submit to Rome by way of submitting to God, because God will judge everyone’s thoughts as well as their actions, and for some reason God no longer wants righteous people to oppose evildoers — possibly because the world was supposedly ending shortly, in any case, so that any human effort in improving the world would have seemed vain and futile.

So motivated, the author of Mark portrays Jesus’s disciples as subhuman dunces who didn’t understand Jesus and who betrayed him in the case of Judas. The later Christian would have been forced to ask herself how she’s supposed to behave as a Christian, since the gospels answer that question only negatively by showing in detail what not to do.

This is where Paul’s letters come to the rescue and remove all doubt on the matter. However, the problem for non-Christians ever afterward, and for those who’ve had to suffer in the company of evangelical Christians is that Paul sets a loathsome example.

Romans and the Sin of Naturalism

The Epistle to the Romans is the capstone of Paul’s surviving corpus. Romans was written not to answer questions from a particular church started by Paul, but to summarize Pauline theology for a gentile audience. Thus, many Christians regard Romans as the most important book in the New Testament.

Let’s focus on just the first few chapters, on how Paul sets up the need for the Christian “good news” and on the nature of that news. This is where Paul universalizes the need for Christianity by identifying moral law (symbolized by Jewish law) with natural law.

What we’re all supposed to do — namely to worship God — is obvious, Paul says, because God’s existence and glory are clear from the grandeur of nature. But we all fall short of that obligation, which makes sin a barrier between us and God. Just as nature doesn’t exist only as a matter of fact, but has a moral value as God’s handiwork, the barrier has a moral component since our sin condemns us to the punishment we supposedly deserve. In turning away from God, we condemn ourselves.

The good news, then, is that God went out of his way to show us grace, to offer us an unearned escape from our punishment. All we need to do is to acknowledge we can’t save ourselves except by having faith in God’s scheme for our salvation, in the power of Jesus’s sacrificial death to restore or to “justify” us in God’s sight.

Because God’s existence and nature (his “invisible attributes”) are supposedly obvious, according to Paul, we’re all “without excuse” in our relation to God. We know God, but we don’t “honor him as God or give thanks to him”; instead, we become “futile in our thinking,” our “foolish hearts” darkened. Claiming to be wise, we become fools as we exchange God’s glory for images that reflect merely his created world.

For that foolish error God “gives us over” to all our vices and to our destruction — and Paul goes on and on personally attacking everyone who isn’t godly enough for a Pauline monotheist (1:24–32). God leaves us to ruin ourselves on earth as a preliminary punishment for serving “the creature rather than the Creator.”

But Paul says there’s no cause for Christian boasting, though, since sin is a barrier for everyone equally, for Jews and gentiles alike. When left to our devices, we can’t help but sin so we can’t save ourselves from God’s wrath. God alone could set things right, and our task is only to trust in God’s plan.

As Paul puts it, that plan was for God to punish his firstborn son as a replacement for sinners, so that those who associate themselves with that sacrifice can be credited as adopted sons and daughters of God (6:22). Christians are “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an expiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (3:24–25).

The Handicap Principle and the Absurdity of Religious Scripture

Thus, the chief text in the New Testament tells Christians how they should think of their faith; specifically, Christians have been explicitly instructed not to boast, since “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Why, then, have Christians been so adamant that theirs is the only way to glory and to escape death? Why have Christians clung to that conviction even when their religion became an appendage of one godless empire after another, their myths and creeds being so many ways of styling the same old human tribalism, politics, and personal fears and prejudices?

From our late vantage point, Christianity isn’t God’s holy spirit upon the earth, but a religion and an institution like any other. The “gospel” is a myth or a powerful fiction like any other. Christians are people like all the rest of us. They claim they’re in the right and that they have the way, the truth, and the life, just as everyone else thinks they know what should be done. Otherwise, why would anyone get out of bed in the morning? We do so, whether we’re Christian or not, because we trust in our principles, our models, our values, and our central beliefs.

Again, where Christians distinguish themselves is in the audacity of their worldview that derives from the Apostle Paul. Can you picture Paul writing his letter to the Romans, part of which I’ve summarized? Can you imagine him delivering it to gentiles in the Greco-Roman world, to those who had grown up reading the Greek philosophers? Can you contrast Paul’s theological rigmaroles with the arguments you find in Plato, Aristotle, or the Epicurean philosophers such as Lucretius?

Paul says the Christian is reckoned as righteous through faith in Jesus, just as God credited Abraham as righteous because of his trust in God (4:23–24). Abraham demonstrated the blindness of his faith by obeying even God’s commandment to sacrifice his son Isaac. That religious zeal is supposed to be the height of righteousness, whereas everyone who puts nature ahead of God and “spiritual” matters can only store up God’s wrath for them by pursuing all manner of villainy.

But compare this to what Lucretius says in On the Nature of Things, in defense of naturalistic, Epicurean philosophy: “I fear perhaps you deem that we fare an impious road to realms of thought profane; but it’s that same religion oftener far that’s bred the foul impieties of men” (1.80).

Indeed, as has become all too familiar, religious dogma or absolute certainty about the most preposterous of contentions inspires otherwise decent individuals to commit atrocities to please their gods.

This religious certainty would be baffling in light of the world’s palpable indifference to our comings and goings, were it not for the evolutionary handicap principle, which points out that handicaps can prove a creature’s hidden merit, assuming that creature can get on with life in spite of the apparent disadvantage. That’s why peacocks evolved such unwieldly, showboating tail feathers, and it’s likely why brainy primates like us mentally take on board such ludicrous notions about gods, miracles, and religious revelations, to show that we can succeed in life despite the grotesqueness of our spare convictions, and to demonstrate our loyalty to a group by sacrificing our intellectual integrity in the group’s honour.

So there’s Paul in Romans, claiming that only certain religious people are sufficiently righteous, and that the greatest righteousness is that which is somehow transferred from Christ to the faithful. Yet we know that religion causes or exacerbates the worst wrongdoings such as by deepening tribal divides, Christianity not excepted.

Moreover, we can compare the tone and style of Paul’s theologizing and of naturalistic philosophy, in which case those Christians who pontificate along Paul’s lines should be embarrassed. We know, too, the reason they’re not duly ashamed, because of the handicap principle, because the absurdity and crudeness of their wild moralizing is socially advantageous in testing their loyalty. The Christian proves her allegiance precisely by the unreasonableness of her religious beliefs and practices. Contrary to Paul’s claim that the truth of monotheism is obvious, there should be no mere intellectual merit in joining any socially central group like Christianity.

The point is that before even entering the thicket of Paul’s screed, we late-modern folks might have expected to find there so many excuses for smug craziness. We who are part of the humanistic, protoscientific tradition that stretches back in the West to the Presocratic philosophers can only admire the careful reasoning of Lucretius’ atomism, for example, written just a century before Paul’s epistles.

A Litany of Parochial Follies: From God’s Existence to Original Sin

What are we to make, though, of Paul’s gospel, assuming we stop to think about it? What of his presumption that the natural order testifies to God’s magnificence? Paul leaves aside the possibility of atheism, strawmanning his opponents by comparing only the worship of creatures with the worship of a supernatural, almighty creator. The former is supposed to come across as harebrained since nothing within nature could be responsible for all of nature.

Alas, by personifying God and by attributing to “him” the Jewish obsession with moral purity, Paul only turns what Aristotle called the “First Cause” into just another contingent thing, namely a person. And by following that philosophical logic to its bitter end, by appreciating the humility in assuming that personhood isn’t so all-important that it’s foundational to all being, Paul might have realized that theism turns into deism or atheism. The fallacy of worshiping any god is that the personification is in the eye of the beholder; for example, Paul’s vision of the risen Christ would have been only a dream, a hallucination, a fanciful way of talking about his religious ideas, or a fraud.

What’s obvious, then, is that nothing within nature could be responsible for itself and for everything else. What’s not obvious is that the natural order entails a personal supernatural creator. But Paul not only takes God’s existence for granted; he also equates the rejection of monotheism and of Christianity with the vice of refusing to submit to the Lord whose existence and intentions are supposedly so obvious.

This is the converse of Nietzsche’s tactic of reducing Christian theism to the resentment of slave morality. Atheism, philosophical naturalism, polytheism, and in general the focus on the natural order at the expense of its creator become so many expressions of sinful pride. We want to take care of ourselves because we’re fine with how we are, and we don’t think we need to be saved.

Paul insists we’d only be foolishly assessing our merit according to human standards, whereas we all fall short of God’s. But wouldn’t we thereby only be inheriting God’s foolishness for expecting limited creatures to be as perfect as himself? Why shouldn’t humans be judged only by human standards? We don’t expect birds or lizards or insects to start acting with high intelligence and self-awareness, so why would a supernatural creator expect his created beings to be perfectly divine?

Paul will say we have no excuse, because Jesus’s flawless humility and self-sacrifice showed us how a person ought to behave. But contrary to the comparison of Jesus and Adam, that character from the New Testament doesn’t represent the full scope of humanity. Empathy and love are only some of our facets. What of reason, ingenuity, and imagination? What of the drive to understand reality and to use our wits to improve on the world we find, to humanize the inhuman?

Paul will say that such curiosity and creativity are mere vanities since only God can heal the fallen world. But what’s more vain, using our objectivity to understand how things work and our imagination and industriousness to attempt to build a more hospitable environment, or proclaiming the imminent end of the world and the second coming of Christ to terrorize gullible people into joining your cult? It’s because we can understand not just nature but history, including the history of cults that indulge in apocalyptic speculations, that the enterprise of progressive civilization ignores Christian prophecies.

Paul condemns humanity for having a “debased mind” which compels us to act poorly as “gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (1:28–31).

But this is like an American liberal scapegoating Ex-President Donald Trump, by way of deflecting attention to that liberal’s waywardness. God is morally perfect, says Paul. How, then, to account for the obvious amorality of creating new species by the process of natural selection which is fuelled by millions of years of genocide? Where was God when trillions of his sentient creatures were hunting and eating each other? Where was God when our species evolved the capacity for high intelligence which traumatized us when we realized we’re all alone in the universe, as far as we can tell from a rational understanding of the evidence?

Paul’s epistle can afford to personify and glorify God, because Paul was labouring under the human-centered biblical cosmology, according to which the universe consists of a flat plane covered by the vault of the visible sky which divides cosmic waters above and below. Paul was evidently ignorant of the trillions of other stars in the universe — with who knows how many other planets — since that more informed perspective can only deflate Paul’s theistic and moralistic presumptions. If our planet isn’t central to the universe, why expect that human moral concerns are integral to the laws of nature or to a supernatural lawgiver?

If, then, we tend to be insolent, haughty, boastful and so forth, perhaps such pride is our only real mental defense in the wilderness that’s indifferent to anyone’s survival. Perhaps we can progress only by trial and error because no sky god holds our hand. Perhaps we’ve had to learn to be heartless and ruthless to survive in a mindless world that prunes the dead weight, evolving new creatures to suit new environmental conditions by extinguishing the less-fit body types.

But no, not only are our human dispositions all wrong for Paul and for his small, all-too Jewish god; on top of that ad hominem, there’s the threat of our punishment. It’s not a question of being punished personally, since the sins in question flow from our shared humanity, for Paul. The sins that require Jesus’s sacrifice aren’t accidental; we inevitably sin as fallen creatures that can’t possibly save ourselves. We’re condemned for being what we are, rather like how the Nazis condemned the Jews for the alleged vileness of their “race” or like how American white supremacists sneer at African Americans and other foreigners.

Indeed, most cultures have racist words like “barbarian,” “gentile,” “pagan,” “gringo,” or “gaijin,” which carry tribal connotations. What’s more likely, then, that the creator of trillions of stars would be so prejudiced or that self-hating Jews like Paul would project their preoccupations and biases onto the more fundamental conditions of being? The question, of course, is rhetorical.

Paul says, “God shows no partiality,” since God will judge everyone equally by their deeds, regardless of whether they’re Jews or gentiles. But Paul lacks the philosophical perspective to appreciate how parochial even such an impartial judge would be, in that such a deity would nevertheless be preoccupied with morality and justice despite the palpable amorality that’s prevailed on this planet for hundreds of millions of years, and despite the alienness of the rest of the vast cosmos.

Does the Creator of Billions of Galaxies Condemn Homosexuality?

Compared to the greater objectivity of the philosophical naturalism of his day (let alone of ours), the small-mindedness of Paul’s conservative Jewishness is perhaps most apparent from his condemnation of homosexuality (1:26–27). Paul attributes those “dishonourable passions” to the pride that supposedly underlies all sins, the pride of exchanging God’s glory for favoured things from the mere created realm. Presumably, the idea is that homosexuals depart from God by opting out of the kind of sexuality that God ordained, namely the kind that ends in reproduction.

Of course, we know now that sexuality comes in a spectrum just as every trait can have mutations or exaptations that aren’t strictly functional, precisely because biological functions aren’t sanctified. Sexuality evolved two billion years ago from asexually reproducing bacteria as a more efficient way of generating genetic diversity. In turn, we evolved personhood so that we’re no longer subject to the same animal limitations which were never, in any case, morally imperative.

Thus, we evolved the intelligence to develop birth control devices and adoption programs, so that regardless of where our lusts fall in the biological spectrum that God would have implanted in us, we can choose to look past our animal constraints to honour not the Bible’s tribal logic but our human personhood, our desire to make something of our limited life span such as by raising children in a loving family.

Paul says this is all so much wickedness and vanity. But where’s the superior righteousness in creating species by natural selection, by a process that imparts a spectrum of sexual orientations, owing to the element of randomness in genetic variation, and then condemning and punishing for all eternity those creatures who are as that deity would have made them?

The Christian likes to emphasize that we’re free to redefine ourselves or to suppress our natural urges. But positing freewill doesn’t rescue Pauline Christianity from the grotesqueness I’m laying bare. Suppose we do have this freewill, and homosexuals have the power to suppress their sexual orientation or to pretend to be attracted to members of the opposite sex. Now suppose homosexuals freely choose not to fool and to torture themselves in that fashion but to act on their natural sex drive. Once again, we’d have the prospect of God punishing people for exercising the freedom he’d have given them.

The Christian would want to say instead that God condemns not their freedom but the inherent wrongness of their choice, just as God would condemn people for freely choosing to rape or to murder. It’s not our free nature that’s condemnable, but the sinful choices.

The Christian would then be obliged to explain why homosexuality is inherently wrong and worthy of punishment. To be sure, homosexuality may not be functional in strictly evolutionary terms, but neither is scientific reason, altruistic morality, or religious faith. In the cultural context, those are exaptations (not adaptations) that often go against the grain of our animal nature.

On what grounds, then, could we judge gay sex to be degrading, without entailing the equal embarrassment of heterosexual sex? Isn’t that why we keep our sex life to ourselves, because we’re ashamed of having to relate to each other as animals, to be reminded that we’re not just minds or people, but bodies that age and decay for no good reason?

Indeed, in 1 Corinthians 7:25–35 (in line with Matt. 19:12), Paul warms to this platonic attitude, pointing out that sexuality in general is a disgrace, given that the whole world was supposed to have been ready to pass away. God was about to break into the natural universe, judge humanity, and demonstrate why human pride was so vain and all our productive secular efforts so futile.

As Paul says, “the time is short.” So we should all stop our normal behaviour to take into account the supernatural magnitude of what was about to happen: “this world in its present form is passing away,” says Paul. “I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs — how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world — how he can please his wife — and his interests are divided.”

Of course, the eschaton didn’t materialize as expected, so even the canonical Christian scriptures are based on a provable lie. But leave that aside.

Something else Paul doesn’t realize here is that the alleged imminence of the world’s end should have vitiated Judaism’s conservative attitude towards sexuality and family life. Why consider the biofunction of heterosexuality to be supernaturally righteous if God was only all along commanding people to reproduce in futility? Why was Paul still condemning homosexuality on the very cusp of the world’s presumed end when heterosexuality could no longer then have been functional, when that last generation of offspring wouldn’t even have a chance to grow up as normal?

Far from being the Christian’s strong suit, this biblical grudge against homosexuality clinches the small-mindedness and mere humanness of the whole affair. Paul was speaking for his prejudiced, tribal self and pretending he was on speaking terms with the spirit of a risen Christ. Apparently, that spirit didn’t get around to informing Paul that the mainstream preference for heterosexuality was all along a vain human pastime since the whole material world was about to pass away.

The Necessary Barbarity of Human Sacrifice in Christianity

Let’s turn, finally, to the pièce de resistance, to Paul’s bizarre notion that a blood sacrifice can or should solve all our problems. Let’s concede, for the sake of argument, that Jesus lived in history as depicted in the four gospels, and let’s assume Jesus was a righteous man who intended to suffer and to die on everyone’s behalf. Where would be any justice at all in such a sacrifice, let alone a paragon of justice?

What this notion of a sacrificial death is supposed to solve is the conflict in Jewish monotheism between God’s love and his justice. In a polytheistic system these traits could be separately personified, but in monotheism they must animate a single divine entity. God both wants to forgive everyone for our sins, out of love, but he also refrains from overlooking any infraction out of a bean-counting sense of Jewish purity and retaliation. Christians reconciled that incoherence by positing an act of human sacrifice that would allow God to have his cake and eat it, to vent his wrath and to overlook the more logical punishment for our sins, which would be to punish the sinners.

So it’s a case of the blind leading the blind: one bit of tribal smallness leads to another to try to rectify the first. You have a parochial conception of God that turns the deity into an internally conflicted father figure, whereas the kind of human, inner conflicts Paul speaks of in 7:21–22 and that Augustine likewise made famous in his Confessions is due to the evolution of the human brain. Our evolving brain could only add our more personal cortical functions to our older, more instinctive, animalistic ones. Assuming God didn’t evolve by comparable trials and errors, as it were, there should be no reason he’d have such an inner conflict; moreover, a supernatural being would have no use for tribal morality or justice.

But once you’re stuck with that narrowness of religious vision, you need a resolution, a happy ending for your myth. The absurdity of God’s inner conflict is resolved by the absurdity of Jesus’s sacrificial death. Instead of a resolution, however, the Christian has a negation: the father’s love of his son which ends in the former’s murdering of the latter is no love at all. And the justice that punishes the wrong man isn’t any kind of justice in the first place. The two motives cancel each other out, leaving just the audacious myth that tests the Christian’s thralldom for sociological reasons.

The Null Value of Jesus’s Sacrificial Death

Never mind, also, that Jesus didn’t really die because he supposedly rose again three days after he was crucified. He might as well have suffered in a hospital bed and been put in a coma only to awaken some time later. What would an ancient Jew have said if his community had sent into the wilderness a scapegoat symbolically carrying away the people’s sins, only for the scapegoat to return and to be welcomed back? Isn’t the point for the scapegoat to stay gone? Doesn’t the prospect of a recyclable scapegoat cheapen the concept?

And never mind that the talk of transferring Christ’s greatness to the Christian via religious faith is so much hand-waving. Yet the Christian trusts that Jesus died for her sins and that God is content with that resolution. Why, then, is the faith needed in addition to the sacrificial death? Why wouldn’t the sacrifice have automatically saved us all from hell because God would have vented his wrath in that one act? Why the persistence of tribal allegiance to receive the benefits of Jesus’s sacrifice?

Suppose a philanthropist pays for everyone in a community to attend an art exhibition so that theoretically entrance is free for all of those people. Yet at the door a doorman lets in only those who’ve managed to find one of various special bracelets the philanthropist has hidden around town. In that case there would be two conditions that would have to be met, neither of which is sufficient. The art gallery must be paid to exhibit the works and the attendees must demonstrate their hipness by showing that they appreciate the philanthropist’s generosity.

Again, the generosity of the first act would be largely undone by the attention-seeking second one. Suppose it turned out, though, that entrance was free all along, that there was no philanthropist and the deranged doorman himself had hidden the bracelets. All the doorman wants is to feel important by seeing the fruit of his labour.

Similarly, might it not turn out that even if there were no God, Jesus Christ, or sacrificial death of God’s Son, the Christian insistence on acts of religious faith empowers the church and a host of Christian charlatans? More charitably, wouldn’t the mere empty belief in Jesus’s sacrificial death have various psychological benefits, including one of enabling the Christian to cope with life’s travails? At the very least, Paul’s slipping in of this second requirement, of the need for faith in addition to the sacrifice of the godman is suspicious.

But never mind any of that or numerous other dubious implications of Paul’s so-called gospel because this is all a tempest in a teapot.

Aping the Egregiousness of Scripture

Now, Paul doesn’t tell his readers to be insufferable and sanctimonious in their evangelism. On the contrary, he warns that God will punish people for their vanities.

Nevertheless, for two millennia the audacity of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans has caused Christians to be obnoxious. Just as children ape their parents even when the adults aren’t looking or meaning to teach a lesson, Christians absorb the New Testament’s moods and subtexts regardless of what the scriptures explicitly state.

Again, scriptures in any religion are bound to be preposterous, to test the member’s loyalty to the group. The bigger the lie you can convince someone to swallow, the stronger the latter’s faith or the deeper that dupe’s commitment to the religious organization. Romans is full of foolishness and of tribal prejudices, as I’ve shown. But that’s supposed to be God’s small-minded foolishness. That very juxtaposition, the obviousness of the implicit effrontery of this so-called divine revelation invites the Christian reader to equally outrageous demonstrations.

For one thing, of course, the Christian is invited to repeat Paul’s foolishness, which is bad enough. But beyond that, the Christian is indoctrinated with Paulinism, with the attitude of someone who claims to speak for God even though he obviously doesn’t, given the content of what he says.

The hollowness of Christian boasts that the Christian is quick to retract; the pretense that this gospel can withstand philosophical scrutiny or that the epistles don’t need to since by definition God’s ways make naturalistic thinking foolish (1 Cor. 2:14); the flagrant human bigotry which is being put in the mouth of an alleged transcendent, cosmic being — all this the Christian reader absorbs because of this epistle’s mystique.

And what he or she learns implicitly — and has learned for many centuries — is that Christians can make an exception of their faith and of everything done in its name. The rules of polite discourse, of respect for fellow people and of honesty, intellectual integrity, commonsense, and reason don’t apply to Christianity since they obviously didn’t apply to Paul. That obviousness is insidious for being registered at an unconscious level, because the Christian is captivated by the scripture’s prestige.