The Most Powerful Evidence Against Christianity. 

That is easy: by the fruit you know the tree. It is the people who call themselves Christians and yet do nasty things great and small in the name of Christ: wars against non-Christians; persecutions of heretics; justifications of usury, wars, and slavery; stealing children from the very arms of their mothers to “re-educate” them. The people who profess the truth revealed in ‘The Good Samaritan’ hate and denigrate immigrants. People who embrace the truth revealed in “The Prodigal Son” look down in scorn on those who fail to meet their standards of pure behavior. People who profess to love the man who gave us the “Sermon on the Mound” worshipping idols: the machines of war and the wealth of billionaires; Trump or some sentimental version of their country. People of the South wouldn’t let a fellow creature of God worship with them because God had created their skin darker, despite the fact that their own people had perpetuated unspeakable evils again the recent ancestors of these same people. I could go on and on and on ad nauseum. To make a list of the crimes of the servants of just the Catholic Church - from the sex abuse scandals, the concordats with Hitler and Mussolini to the conquest of the Americas to the Inquisition to the sacking of Constantinople: we all know this terrible history. 

     And of course on a less drastic note, most of us who want to be Christians fail to love and seek the Good in many ways in our daily life, and somehow all these private failures are like a matrix from which the big failures grow. Few of us can disassociate ourselves completely from this terrible history. Christians themselves have put the dark glass over God’s light, right from the beginning. 'Original sin' does not relativize this evidence. Nor do other examples of human depravity found in non-Christians, of which there are of course many. I see no evidence that being atheist makes it less probable that a person is decent. That fact alone should trouble every Christian.

       I am been blessed to have known some good people who were Christian, and see even that there was some connection between their goodness and their trust in Jesus: my grandfather Lovan and my grandmother Emerson, in very different ways. But the history of Christian people - which to be fair throws up the rare saint from time to time and many cases of ordinary decency - is so dismal compared to the ideals of its teacher: it is hard to see the tree as good when the fruit has been, in general, so bad.

   This was not very original. Others have made the point better. But I feel the need to make myself conscious of it as a weapon against my own tendency to sentimentalize.