How Can We Know Whether Organized Religion Is a Big Scam?

The answer is quite simple.

I have read several books by Bart Ehrman, and am currently reading How Jesus Became God. Like all his books, this one is clear and delightful and reasonable. I will have more to say about this book a little later, but for now I would like to briefly examine something that Ehrman has said in book after book after book. He always says that the things in his book are common knowledge among pastors.

Nearly every divinity school teaches about scriptural contradictions and historical influences on the Bible. Nearly every divinity school teaches that the Bible is a human document, not dictated by God, and it contains within it the evidences of its own evolutionary ancestry. Of course, places like Bob Jones University do not teach this, but every mainstream divinity school does.

This does not mean that we should not esteem the Bible; its authors were making the best attempt they could to understand what was going on. In Ehrman’s current book, it is clear that early Christians had numerous ways of trying to understand how Jesus could be both human and divine, how he could be both killed and resurrected. They did the best they could. They were not liars. But neither were they dictating fully-formed truths from God.

But apparently most people who go to church—not just fundamentalists—want to believe that God wrote the Bible. And so their pastors do not tell them about the very human origin of what we call scriptures.

This does not mean that clergy are lying (although many do). But it does mean that they take their role as pastor (shepherd protecting stupid sheep from confusing truths) more seriously than their role as guide to the scriptures. They quite rightly assume that, if they told people the full truth about the Bible, they would make them upset; and clergy, in their role as pastors, have a duty to try to help people cope with life. And with death.

So is organized Christianity a scam? Sometimes. But in general it is deceptive, even when it is not a scam. Pastors in general believe that we cannot handle the truth. And they are usually right.