Chapter 2

What is Christianity?

From the beginning of Christianity, Christian's were commissioned to spread something called the "Gospel" or Good News. One look around at the Christian world today and you will find a bewildering variety of churches calling themselves Christian and proclaiming "Good News". The question is, "What is it?", and "What was so bad about the old news anyway?".

To answer some of these questions we first must make some order of the confusing variety of beliefs in the Christian world. We will look at what led up to the Gospel, what effect paganism had, how the beliefs of paganism and Christianity became mixed, and what the ultimate effect was on the "Good News" itself. In fact, as we examine specific beliefs in later chapters, we will see how pagan beliefs are in fact direct attacks on the original Gospel.

Some chapters will be short and to the point, others lengthy. Some will be mostly text and others will be almost completely pictorial in nature. Some of the most compelling information is based largely on photographic evidence. Seeing is believing and since a picture is worth a thousand words, I will let them do the talking at times. Fair enough? Lets begin.

Common Beliefs

First let's look at beliefs that virtually all Christians at least appear to hold in common. Since Christian churches are all about religion by nature, their belief centers on God and His relation with man. I hope we can agree on that. In time sequence they all appear to believe that God has existed forever, or to put it another way, the Omnipresence of God.

While most Christians believe that there is a God that created all things, recent comments from the head of the largest Christian church, Pope Benedict XVI,(who now appears to endorse evolution), make even the assumption of a Creator God very hard to take for granted. Still while Catholics seem to be weakening on method at the very least, I believe that they still would agree that God at least played some role in bringing man into existence. Some Protestants as well seem to talk out of both sides of their mouths. On the one hand they insist on evolution being taught in class rooms, and on the other, casually talk about creation when it suits them.

To ride both sides of the fence, some of the players have at times desperately tried to marry the two ideas by stretching the creation story out over millions of years. Have they ever thought about the size of birthday cake Adam would have needed?

The very process of evolution would involve death and require generations of change. It would cause God to use death as the creative process needed to make man in His image. Evolution destroys the account of an Eden of Perfection, results in a denial of the original deathless state of mankind, and a denial of the story of the first sin, and a denial of it's ultimate consequences. To put it bluntly, attempts to join these two beliefs in the origin of man are not intellectually honest.

The next common belief after the appearance of man on the cosmic stage, was that at least at the beginning, things were perfect. Peace was universal, and the relation between God and man was intact.

Christians also believe that at some point, evil came into existence, personified by someone called the Devil and Satan. This being was in opposition to God and through him, the first couple, Adam and Eve, were tempted and "fell". The fall involved disobedience to commands from God and resulted in a trail of death and destruction to for the entire human race. The "Gospel" is about the remedy to this tragic sequence of events with the ultimate restoration of man to a perfect heaven as the end goal.

Christians also believe that at least for a while, there was a standard of law, written in stone called the Ten Commandments. These were given by God Himself. What became of them, what is required by them, and how man relates to them today gets a little fuzzy as you look across the Christian world. A lot of controversy about them has occurred lately and as we shall see, they play an important part in defining the differences in the Christian world.

Broadly stated, this is the rough points in common for virtually all Christians, but as they say "The devil is in the details". What the basic divisions of the Christian world are gets progressively more complicated. This is made more complicated by the question of reliable arbitrators. By what standard are disagreements to be judged? Who is the judge and what difference does it all make anyway? Some of these questions will be answered along the way, but it might help some, to look at some broad divisions among the various Christian denominations. As the writer, I of course have a bias, but I will try to state each side's case as gently as I can and hope the reader can understand the point.