McAvoy wrote: ↑Sun May 18, 2025 3:52 am
However imagine, you are not me. You are placed in a more strict church environment where not only do you go to church on Sunday mornings but evenings, but also on Wednesday nights. Your whole local culture revolves around this. Even your own schools semi-helps with this because you are in a Bible thumping area. Your family also has directly benefited from the charity of your church.
You grow up knowing, not thinking that your church is normal and the correct way. Atheists you were taught were God haters. Evolution is false, we didn't come from monkeys. You were taught cherry picked passages your whole life, you may have read the Bible once but you rely on just those Bible passages that was hammered in your head.
You now view the world from nearly entirely of your religious upbringing. You were taught that elevated feeling when you sing and talk about God and Jesus that is them in your heart. So anything that runs contrary to your worldview based on those decades of indoctrination is false.
Now combine that with politics.
Well, there
is one way out of that mindset, which I know because I experienced it: reading the Bible too much. (It is possible that being a huge nerd may also be a requirement, as you'll probably notice from the rest of this post.)
Here's what broke my little brain at 11 years old or so:
Matthew 1 has a genealogy of Christ. In order to say that Jesus is descended from King David, it goes down the line of the Kings of Judah; David, Soloman, Rehoboam, Abijah, Asa, etc.
But, it screws it up. It says that Jehoram was the father of Uzziah. That is wrong. Uzziah's father was
Amaziah. And Amaziah's father was
Joash. Joash's father was
Ahaziah, and Ahaziah was the one who's father was
Jehoram. Now you could make the point that since Uzziah was ultimately
descended from Jehoram, Jehoram could be in some way his "father", but then
Matthew 1:17 goes on to say:
Matthew 1:17 wrote:Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah.
It specifically calls out there being fourteen generations from David to the exile, and that's just wrong. You only have fourteen because you skipped a bunch of them! Somebody fudged things to make their numerology work out. What the heck.
The rabbit hole then goes even deeper when you notice that
Luke 3, famously, has
another genealogy of Christ, but
it has him descend from one of David's
other sons, not Solomon, so the whole genealogy is different. Well, almost all different! The first two post-exile names in the Matthew geneaology, Shealtiel and Zerubbabel, show up in the middle of the Luke one for some reason, another wtf.
(Of course, the standard received wisdom on the two genealogies of Christ is that one of them is of Joseph and one is of Mary. But this also doesn't stand up to a
literal interpretation, because both gospels specifically say that they're the genealogies of Joseph.)
Anyway, there are of course lots of weird inconsistencies like that you can find in the Bible, but that's the one that set my brain off way back then. The irony of it all is that I probably never would have noticed any of that, and consequently might even have still been Christian today, if my religious grade school hadn't made me memorize the names of all the kings of Israel and Judah.
