Editor,
It is interesting to see the Scientologists on campus again.
Their "clearing" method is like Arthur Janov's primal therapy - memorialized by the band Tears for Fears in the 1980s. Primal therapy can cure a person of neurosis, but the Scientologists' theology looks pretty sketchy.
As a religious studies major at UNM, I've extensively researched current and historical faiths and Christian denominations.
I've also talked with many fellow students on our campus. If they reflect New Mexico's statistics, the majority is Catholic, about one-third are Protestants and about 800 students are Latter-day Saints.
Like 88 percent of Americans, I call myself a Christian. Like 87 percent of Americans, I believe in a deity who personally and individually loves me, which I'd define as wanting nothing but good to happen to me. Like 70 percent of Americans, I believe in an afterlife.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
But there is a good reason why a majority of American Christians avoid church. The problem is the Bible itself - the versions of God in the Old Testament include a destructive God who teaches Joshua to slash throats to gain land and coaches David to lead massacres of whole villages, including women and children.
What is most troubling about Bible-based Christianity is the basic motif of the fall, the cross, armageddon and the millennium. As many as one hundred million Americans believe this false story line:
1. Two people in a garden did something - no one knows what - that caused them to be exiled and caused all of humanity to fall.
2. God was so angry at humanity that the only way he could be restored to a state of mercy was for his son to be sacrificed to death on a cross.
3. Just for saying they believe in the crucified Christ, believers will make it to heaven.
4. Christ will return with vengeance and destruction in a great second coming - crushing all the evil people and establishing the universal reign of Christians on Earth.
What kind of sick God would desire and plan the sacrificial death of his son - and be moved from anger to mercy by it? No Christian has a coherent answer to this - because there isn't one.
The Bible can tell us almost nothing about the afterlife in which 70 percent of us Americans believe.
With the Bible, we are left ignorant of the basic fact that each of our souls inhabits the body of a smart, clever, sexual and aggressive post-primate. Without understanding evolution's impact on us, we cannot achieve anything close to full self-understanding.
Joseph Smith, America's great religious genius, broke through many problems in Catholicism and Protestantism. But Smith added a whole slew of problems, many of these in the last three years of his life, when he was having sex with 30 women and had in other ways become an egomaniac. Mormonism, despite its strengths, is utterly exasperating.
New Thought? Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists deny the reality of matter.
Mysticism? Eastern religion? Hey, Einstein's protÇgÇ David Bohm told us there is an underlying dynamic flowing wholeness beneath the quarks and sub-quantum particles - and Bohm had the math to prove it. It's important. But who needs religion to tell us about it?
Deism? Liberal "Enlightenment" Protestantism? Unitarianism? Whether based on reason or intuition, they're empty shells.
Little wonder that a majority of America's Christians have chosen to pursue spiritual growth on our own.
We 21st century Christians are leaving these false and archaic Christian paradigms - and churches - where they belong: in the dust bin of history.
Michael Weber
UNM student
