In the same way many ancient Mediterranean societies told tales of gods born to virgins (some on December 25) before the time of Christ, the archetype of gods rising from the dead is likewise older than Christianity, an uncomfortable historical fact for many religious people but not necessarily unforeseeable given the power of human imagination and the long stretch of human history before the Common Era (or Anno Domini, A.D., if you prefer).

In human religion, gods often die and return to life, sometimes in their old form, sometimes in a new one (see All About Adam and Eve, Richard Gillooly, and Godless, Dan Barker). They also often came to earth disguised as mortals, especially in Greek and Hindu myths.

Dionysus was killed, descended into hell, and was reborn — in Zeus’ thigh of all places. Greek gods, goddesses, and mortals often descended into hell for various reasons and later rejoined the living. Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, descended into Hades and returned in the spring.

Attis, a Phrygian-Greek vegetation god born of the virgin Nana, castrated himself and, depending on the version, either bled to death from this or was hanged on a pine tree. He was reborn after three days, his blood redeeming the earth as it fell from his body. His worshipers celebrated the salvation from death offered to them by Attis by decorating a pine tree each spring.

This took place on March 25, a date later used by Christians for the Easter celebration (while no longer used for Easter, Catholics still use it to celebrate the Feast of Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary).

In Egypt, Osiris died, was resurrected, and ascended into heaven. Horus came back from the dead. Like many gods related to vegetation, Adonis, worshiped in Babylonia and Syria as early as the 7th century B.C., died annually (in the fall) and was resurrected (in the spring). In Greece, Heracles was mortal but rose into heaven to take his place among the gods just before he died.

In Hindu mythology, Shiva cut off Ganesha’s head but Pavarti convinced him to bring the god back to life. Krishna is accidentally killed by a hunter, but comes back to life and ascends into heaven. The Sumerian king Tammuz was killed but resurrected by the gods and made a god himself. According to the Mesoamerican people, Quetzalcoatl killed himself, but after a few days in the underworld returned to heaven. 

Then there’s Mithra, made the “Protector of the Empire” by the Romans in 307 AD, right before Christianity was declared the official religion, but actually a Persian god worshipped before 200 B.C. Some versions of Mithra’s story make him the son of a human virgin. His birth, on December 25, was seen by shepherds and Magi, who brought gifts to a cave, the place of his birth. He performed miracles like raising the dead and healing the sick and blind; he had 12 disciples, representing the zodiac; he died, was put in a tomb, and ascended into heaven; the spring equinox was when worshipers celebrated his ascension. Believers predicted that in the Last Days, the battle between good and evil would consume the earth. The righteous would be saved, the wicked would go to hell (see Barker).

Just as the winter solstice inspired the celebration of the birth of many gods and demi-gods in the northern hemisphere, the spring equinox saw feasts for countless deities around the world. Some cultures in the Middle East made it the start of their new year. During the two days of the spring equinox, day and night are the same length. The Council of Nicaea in 325 decided Christ’s resurrection would be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after (or on) the spring equinox.

Interestingly, the ancient Saxons had long celebrated a feast day for Eostre (a goddess stolen from Germanic peoples, originally Ostara) on the first full moon after the spring equinox. Eostre allegedly saved a wounded bird by turning it into a hare, a hare that continued to lay eggs, which it decorated and presented to Eostre. Both “Eostre” and “easter” are derived from an ancient word for “spring”: eastre.

Many other related religious ideas, such as sacrifice, communion, baptism, and the trinity pre-date Judaism and Christianity.

The notion that sacrificing one human being to the gods to benefit or save others is an ancient and common belief, expressed most horrifically in Mexico, India, and elsewhere. Sacrificing animals and first-born children were practices among the ancient Hebrews but also groups in Australia, China, the Americas, Africa, and Russia.

This was done to atone for sins, nourish the gods, or bribe them for a good harvest, victory in battle, and so on. Many cultures believed they could transfer evil or sin to other people or animals and then eradicate it by putting the victim to death. “In certain African tribes, monkeys or rats were paraded through the village to attract evil spirits and then crucified to save the entire community from demonic attacks” (Gillooly) and the Aztecs thought sacrificing a man-god would take away their sins against the deities.

Jews transferred sins to goats, hence the modern term “scapegoat.”

Transubstantiation, the belief that food or drink can be converted to or can represent the flesh and blood of a person or god, is likewise very old. People often tried to eat the gods, in order to take on the characteristics and strengths of divine beings. Followers of Attis “ate” his body in the form of bread. The Creek and Seminole Indians believed corn was the manifestation of the corn god. The Aztecs ate bread, which they believed became the body of Huitzilopochtli or Vitzilipuztli. The people of Crete thought Dionysus became a bull, so at their ceremonies they would eat a bull live and drink its blood.

There were many groups around the world that ate their human sacrifices as well, and some who believed that by eating a man-god they could receive his divine nature.

Baptism by water, spit, or blood was thought by the ancients to wash away evil spirits, guilt, and sin, and has taken place in many societies. The Romans would huddle under a platform and would be renatus in aeternum (“born again for eternity”) en masse when a bull above them was killed and blood rained down. The Aztecs were baptized in water, as were the Indians in the Ganges River. Many peoples baptized their babies with spit or water to protect them from evil spirits or to free them from sin.

It is also important to note the idea of original sin, or primal sin, inspired communion, sacrifice, and baptism in many pre-Jewish cultures. It wasn’t all about appeasing bloodthirsty gods or warding off demons. The Aztecs believed sin was inherited, that it existed before the creation of the world; the ancient Greeks, beginning with the cult of Orpheus, believed humans were innately evil and that the soul had to be cleansed.

Finally, while many Christians believe the trinity — God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit as separate entities yet one — to be unique, this is not so. The idea of multiple gods in one predates Christianity. Hindu scriptures like the Vedas, the early Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, written long before the time of Christ, establish Brahman as the ultimate spirit made up of the souls of the many Hindu gods, as well as all other living things. All the Hindu deities are expressions, extensions of the one supreme being, a godhead not of three but of countless entities.

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The central difference between Islamic extremists and peaceful Muslims is how seriously these groups take certain edicts in religious texts written in more primitive times.

That is also a large difference between Christianity and fundamentalist Islam. Most Christians today no longer take seriously the barbarism of “God’s laws” in the Bible (Old Testament and to a degree the New Testament), such as God-ordered and approved genocide, execution, human sacrifice, oppression of women, slavery, genital mutilation, and sex crimes. This is without question a positive step for humanity.

Likewise, many of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims tend to focus on more ethically defensible ideas in their holy books, such as “Do not take any human being’s life — that God willed to be sacred — other than in justice” (Qur’an, al-Israa 17:33), and ignore savagery (“Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you” (Qur’an, at-Taubah 9:123).

Christians and Muslims alike are rightly horrified at the evil of extremist groups like ISIS, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda. These groups commit mass murder against nonbelievers, wage war against other Muslims for supremacy, torture enemies, oppress women, rape children — all in the name of God.

Yet Muslims who support religious peace, the right to life, equal rights for women, democracy, freedom of speech, and the separation of church and state stand in opposition. Extremist groups and military dictators controlling Muslim populations far less conservative and authoritarian than they often find themselves sabotaged by acts of resistance, some massive — as when millions in several Muslim nations in the Middle East and Africa rose up in rebellion during the Arab Spring starting in 2010.

It is vital to remember that, rather than a defect particular to Islam, extremist violence is common in world history among religious people who believe their actions align with the will of a higher power. Raised to believe in God, and holding a book he or she believes a divine guide, the extremist commits murder and other appalling crimes without question.

That is the story of Christianity as well as Islam. True, we happen to live in a time when Allah-motivated violence is more prevalent than Christ-motivated violence, but it was not so long ago that Christians took what they learned in their holy texts quite seriously indeed, and countless innocent men, women, and children perished because of it. After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 300s, Christians throughout Europe and Europe’s overseas conquests often showed extreme violence toward skeptics, people of other religions, and the faithful who stepped out of line in any way. This violence was conducted by state and religious leaders, from Christian Emperor Maximus executing Bishop Priscillian in 385 for heresy (gnostic-esque teachings, in his case) at the request of the Spanish bishops to Christian King Olaf Tryggvason, who said “All Norway will be Christian or die” before beginning a campaign of terror, slaughter, and forced conversion (Reston, The Last Apocalypse) in that nation just before the year 1,000. In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, doctrine and biblical canon were frequently decided through murder and war among Christian sects (Jenkins, The Jesus Wars; Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God). The violence was also perpetrated by ordinary people, as with the pogroms — when mobs of Christians would kill and drive out Jews, as happened in England in 1189 and 1190.

Consider the Inquisition, in which the Church, beginning in the 12th century, tortured and murdered thousands of people who questioned or rejected Catholic doctrine in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere. (The Church committed mass murder of “pagans” and “heretics” in South America as well.) Even translating the Bible was heretical. When William Tyndale translated the Bible into English (his work later became the King James translation), he was chased down and burned at the stake. In 1633, Galileo, even after recanting, was convicted of heresy for entertaining the Copernican notion that the Earth orbits the sun, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Those individual cases are more famous, but countless others exist.

James A. Haught, in 2000 Years of Disbelief, notes many more instances of people being slaughtered or otherwise punished for different views or for questioning religion or for pursuing scientific discovery. “Around 550 at Constantinople, Byzantine Emperor Justinian executed multitudes to impose Christian orthodoxy.” Authorities killed Michael Servetus in 1553 in Geneva for “doubting the Trinity,” and England executed Matthew Hamount in 1579 for similar reasons. Giordano Bruno dared suggest the earth circled the sun, and was burned in Rome. Chevalier de La Barre, a French teenager, was beheaded for disrespecting the faith in 1766. Richard Carlile was imprisoned in 1819 by Britain for blasphemy, Denis Diderot in 1749 by France. For questioning Christianity, Massachusetts jailed Abner Kneeland in the 1830s, and Britain did the same to George Jacob Holyoake shortly thereafter, then to George William Foote for “publishing satirical sketches of Bible stories.” Viktor Lennstrand was imprisoned in Sweden in the 1880s and 1890s for spreading atheistic notions. Beyond death and prison, there was torture, fines, censoring, exile, and so forth. Plenty of others were attacked not by the state and its church, but by vigilantes, from the scientist Hypatia, beaten to death (415, Egypt) by Christian monks “who considered her a pagan” to scientist Joseph Priestly (he discovered oxygen), who had his home, church, and lab burned in a riot in 1791 in England. 

A subplot of the Inquisition was the 15th-18th century European and North American witch hunts, which saw 40,000-50,000 people executed, mostly women (see Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World). To be accused of witchcraft was a death sentence.

Christians widely believed (and the Pope taught) that witches had sex with demons or the Devil, so the genitals of women of all ages, from young girls to the elderly, were inspected closely by male judges for “Devil’s marks.” Regardless of whether any “marks” were found, the women were tortured and burned alive. During torment, women were pressed to name other witches, and thus more innocent people were labeled and hunted down. In Europe, members of the courts were handsomely rewarded for each witch burned, the victims’ properties were seized by the Church and State, and in England “prickers” were paid to find more witches — all providing a nice financial incentive to continue the slaughter. Towns would burn to death hundreds of citizens a year (see The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan).

The Inquisition lasted 700 years; the Vatican did not condemned torture until 1816.

Sam Harris (The End of Faith) describes Christian torture during the Inquisition:

Your jailers will be happy to lead you to the furthest reaches of human suffering, before burning you at the stake. You may be imprisoned in total darkness for months or years at a time, repeatedly beaten and starved, or stretched upon the rack. Thumbscrews may be applied, or toe screws, or a pear-shaped vise may be inserted into your mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced open until your misery admits of no possible increase. You may be hoisted to the ceiling on a stappado (with your arms bound behind your back and attached to a pulley, and weights tied to your feet), dislocating your shoulders. To this torment squassation [an up and down jerking motion] might be added, which, being often sufficient to cause your death, may yet spare you the agony of the stake.

If you are unlucky enough to be in Spain, where judicial torture has achieved a transcendent level of cruelty, you may be placed in the “Spanish chair”: a throne of iron, complete with iron stocks to secure your neck and limbs. In the interest of saving your soul, a coal brazier will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded with fat to keep it from burning too quickly. Or you may be bound to a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice placed upside-down upon your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in search of an exit.

Should you, while in extremis, admit to your torturers that you are indeed a heretic, a sorcerer, or a witch, you will be made to confirm you story before a judge–-and any attempt to recant, to claim that your confession has been coerced through torture, will deliver you either to your tormentors once again or directly to the stake. If, once condemned, you repent of your sins, these compassionate and learned men–-whose concern for the fate of your eternal soul really knows no bounds–-will do you the kindness of strangling you before lighting your pyre.

Torture included the use of the wooden horse (you were straddled over a sharp edge that pierced your crotch, weights added to your legs), racks, thumbscrews, heated iron chairs, and boots you wore that had boiling water or molten lead poured inside them (Sagan). You could be sawed in half, strapped in a chair with spikes, eaten from the inside by rats, or seen your head crushed, limbs broken, or breasts torn off.

Also consider the Catholic-Protestant wars during the Reformation, which reminds one of the Sunni-Shiite conflict among Muslims. In the early 1500s, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and others broke from the Roman Catholic Church to create a more “pure” Christianity (which involved many executions; Luther even supported the execution of a close friend).

Likewise, St. Thomas Aquinas saw “reason” for “putting to death one convicted of heresy” (Summa Theologiae). In England, Mary I executed over 300 heretics, mostly Protestants, following in the footsteps of her father Henry VIII, who executed 81 people for deviating from religious doctrine.

Yuval Harari writes in Sapiens that

…theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors). More Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.

Northern Europe became dominated by Protestant states, Southern Europe by Catholic states. Central Europe (primarily Germany) plunged into violence that lasted more than a century. It then culminated in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which devastated Europe and killed some 8 million people (see Harman). The Eighty Years’ War, the French Wars of Religion, and the English Civil War were also influenced by this religious divide; while not the only factor, it contributed to millions more deaths. And, of course, within many states there was unspeakable persecution and violence toward minority Christian sects, such as the long conflict between Catholics and Protestant Huguenots in France.

In a close parallel to extremist Muslim hatred and persecution of other religions, consider Christian persecution of the Jews, which began to intensify as soon as Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Jews were demoted to second-class citizens, with curtailed legal rights, economic opportunities, and religious activities. They were kept out of public office and could not marry Christians or own Christian slaves. In 423, Rome made it illegal for Jews to build or repair a synagogue. Christians committed acts of violence against them — murder, theft, destroying synagogues — without fear of consequence. For example, in 388 the bishop of Callinicum incited his churchgoers to burn down the local Jewish synagogue. There was no punishment for this (see Ehrman, How Jesus Became God).

All this was inflamed by the anti-semitic attitudes of Christian leaders. After all, the gospels blame the Jews for Christ receiving the death penalty, most explicitly in the book of John (and many saw John 8:44 as Jesus calling Jews who wouldn’t believe in him sons of the devil). In the second century, Ignatius of Antioch called Jews the “Christ-killing Jews,” while Justin Martyr said to a Jewish philosopher that “other nations have not inflicted on us and on Christ this wrong to such an extent as you have,” casting blame on the entire Jewish people. Later, Pope Leo spoke of the “blackest darkness” in the “naughty hearts” of the Jews who wanted Christ killed. A church leader named John Chrysostom wrote Orations Against the Jews, saying, “The Jews are more savage than any highwaymen.” Martin Luther wrote a book called On the Jews and Their Lies. To him the Jews were “poisonous envenomed worms,” a “base, whoring people” full of “devil’s faeces…which they wallow in like swine.” He recommended forced labor for the Jews, with their holy texts, schools, and synagogues burned, their property and wealth seized.

During the centuries of the Crusades, Christian hatred for Jews escalated. (The Crusades are another fine example of senseless slaughter in the name of religion: Some 3 million people died in the conflict. Launched by the Pope in 1095, European Christians attacked the Islamic Empire, desperate to free the Holy Land from Muslim control. The Pope, Urban II, declared those who killed unbelievers would have all their sins forgiven. Christian and Muslim armies battled each other off and on for 200 years, until finally the Europeans gave up.)

While protecting Christians and Christian holy sites was important, the lives of Jews were not. In the Rhineland Massacres of 1096, German peasants and knights attacked Jewish communities and slaughtered the inhabitants. As Ian McEwan writes (“End of the World Blues”), “Jewry and Islam were both victims of the Crusades,” as the “impoverished mob that trailed behind the knights of the first Crusades started their journey by killing Jews in the thousands in the Upper Rhine area.” French Christians did the same in 1147. Hundreds of French Jews were murdered during the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320. 3,000 Jews were murdered after a single accusation of “host desecration” (since during communion bread and wine literally became the body and blood of Christ, Christians suspected Jews of trying to “kill” Christ again by desecrating these foodstuffs).

Around the continent, hundreds of communities were wiped out. Jews were forced to convert to Christianity. They were accused of “blood libel,” kidnapping Christian children and using their blood in religious ceremonies; Christians believed Jews could not be fertile unless they rubbed the blood of Christians on their genitals (see Harris).

Jews were blamed for the Black Death and many other social ills. Hundreds of thousands were driven out of England, France, Austria. Protestant King Edward I ordered the “Edict of Expulsion” in 1290, exiling all Jews from England. In 1348, 900 Jews were burned alive in one German town, the Strasbourg Massacre. June 1391 saw hundreds of Jews slaughtered in Spain, in cities like Barcelona. In 1492, the Catholics King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I expelled all Jews from Spain. In all, Christian persecution of Jews in Europe lasted some 1,600 years, laying a foundation for later attacks on the Jews by Nazi Germany and other European states.

Indeed, Hitler often called destroying the Jews “God’s will,” writing in Mein Kampf for example, “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” The Jews are the “enemies of the human race.” Hitler was not actually a Christian, but he clearly understood how stirring up Christian prejudice could aid his effort to wipe out the Jewish people.

In a speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, Hitler declared:

My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice…

He received ample support from German Christians, who made up most of the population, from the Catholic Church, and so on.

The recent past demonstrates that the kind of oppression and violence extremist Islamists partake in today is not as unfamiliar as Christians suppose.

350 years ago, people who expressed different religious views were executed by Christian communities in the American colonies — Quakers were whipped, tortured, had ears cut off, and hanged. Look up the stories of Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and Samuel Gorton, people arrested and banished in the 1630s for slightly different religious views — like, respectively, believing only grace saved, not works; or that God held covenants with individuals, not societies or congregations, and therefore church and state should be separate; or defending a maidservant who smiled at a Sabbath meeting. Conservative Paul Johnson writes of these examples in A History of the American People. And others:

In July 1641, for instance, Dr John Clarke and Obediah Holmes, both from Rhode Island, were arrested in Lynn by the sheriff for holding an unauthorized religious meeting in a private house, at which the practice of infant baptism was condemned. Clarke was imprisoned; Holmes was whipped through the streets. Again, on October 27, 1659, three Quakers, William Robinson, Marmaduke Stevenson, and Mary Dyer, having been repeatedly expelled from the colony, the last time under penalty of death, were arrested again as ‘pestilential and disruptive’ and sentenced to be hanged on Boston Common. Sentence on the men was carried out. The woman, blindfolded and with the noose around her neck, was reprieved on the intervention of her son, who guaranteed she would leave the colony forthwith. She did in fact return, and was finally hanged on June 1, 1660.

At the same time, in 1654, as Johnson documents, Jews in New Amsterdam were denied all rights and could not build a synagogue.

250 years ago, if you weren’t a Protestant, you could not vote or run for office in the English colonies or early United States; Jefferson and Madison fought viciously to undo this, and succeeded in Virginia. The states did not begin to do away with the execution of homosexuals until 1786, and it didn’t stop until 1869 (North Carolina).

John Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1825, marveling that

There exists I believe throughout the whole Christian world a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or to doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the old and new Testaments from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel: in England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red hot poker: in America it is not much better, even in our Massachusetts which I believe upon the whole is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States A law was made in the latter end of the last-century repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the old Testament or new.

In 1834, protestants in Boston burned down a convent, thinking Catholics killed children in dungeons below it (Johnson).

150 years ago, Southern pastors were defending black slavery using the Bible. As John Blassingame writes in The Slave Community:

Pointing to a long list of Bible verses, white ministers argued that Christianity would make the slaves easier to manage because obedience would be inner-directed rather than based on the whip…. Indeed, the Bible verses the white ministers quoted frequently admonished slaves to be orderly and dependable workers devoted to their owner’s interests, to be satis ed with their station in life, to accept their stripes patiently, and to view their faithful service to earthly masters as a service to God…. White ministers often taught the slaves that they did not deserve freedom, that it was God’s will that they were enslaved, that the devil was creating those desires for liberty in their breasts.

Only God’s will could justify the horrors of slavery: “Floggings of 50 to 75 lashes were not uncommon. On numerous occasions, planters branded, stabbed, tarred and feathered, burned, shackled, tortured, maimed, crippled, mutilated, and castrated their slaves.” The rape of black women was also pervasive. Proponents of Jim Crow laws denounced desegregation as an attack on Christian values (see Racism in Kansas City: A Short History).

60 years ago, just a short while after Hitler’s supposed God-approved Holocaust of Jews, Slavs, gypsies, and homosexuals, gay men like Alan Turing in England were being chemically castrated by political leaders upholding Christian values, in an attempt to “cure” them. Turing committed suicide.

As recently as 50 years ago, it was common practice among American Christian men to oppress women (thoroughly indoctrinated women accepted this without question) using the Bible — women were told to submit to the man in all things, forget an education or career, care for the home, bear children. Today this is far less acceptable, but still perpetuated by some members of the religious right, who insist the Bible “tells us that women who fail to obey these divine priorities have turned aside after Satan.”

Only 20 years ago, the Troubles — the 1968-1998 period of violence in Northern Ireland during which nearly 4,000 people were killed and 50,000 injured — came to an end. While this low-level civil war concerned national identity, it was seeped in religious hatred and violence between the Protestant majority, who wished to remain with mainly Protestant Britain, and the Catholic minority, who wished to join mainly Catholic Ireland. The conflict began after a civil rights demonstration by Catholics pushing for an end to discrimination and inequality. And those looking for examples of Christian riots over blasphemous media, to mirror Muslim riots, don’t have to look too far into the past either. For instance, in 1988 French Christians rioted after the debut of The Last Temptation of Christ.

Anyone who pays attention to events around the world today knows there are Christian-Muslim wars in places like Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Ivory Coast, the Philippines, and the Central African Republic (where Christian militias attacked the minority Muslim population with machetes and burned down their villages, causing tens of thousands to flee for their lives in 2014; the nature of religious war is both sides are usually guilty of atrocities…but why not, when each side believes God is with them?). One might also study far-right Christian groups in the U.S. like the “Army of God,” responsible for the murder of doctors and bombing of abortion clinics. The Ku Klux Klan often says it is a Christian group. 

And of course, every so often, an American pastor comes along who says gays should be executed.

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When you grow up in a conservative Christian household, and believe for a quarter-century in God’s existence and the resurrection of and salvation through Jesus Christ, you never suppose atheism might be in your future.

Atheism is an idea, a thought: “It seems more likely God is fictional than real.”

I never expected this thought to come along, because, after all, how can you predict your next thought? Or contain it? And after you’ve thought it, how can you “unthink” it?

Christians, my former self included, tend to believe people leave faith behind either A) because something horrible happened to them and they can’t understand why a loving God would allow that or B) because they wish to live a life of “sin”–usually meaning enjoy sex, drugs, or alcohol–without eternal consequences.

A third option is less comfortable and is largely ignored: that someone might simply conclude the arguments for disbelief are more convincing, more reasonable, than religious arguments.

A great deal of thought and reading comes before that conclusion. Obviously, you have to investigate and consider specifically why atheists suppose there is no God–you may have to read some books that will make your pastor go ballistic. This process, for me and I’m sure many others, was long–it took years. This is unlike A or B above, which can likely happen quickly by comparison.

Note that in all three scenarios Christians point to lack of faith as the principal cause. If you’d trusted God’s plan, you wouldn’t have abandoned faith when your spouse died. If you’d been a stronger Christian, you wouldn’t have traded God for sex. Sometimes friends tell me I must not have been a true believer if I was convinced by atheistic arguments.

Considering under that premise there’s no way to prove you were a true believer before any of those things occurred except by not becoming an atheist (and preventing such a conversation from ever taking place), there is little one can say in response. Telling people about the nonbelievers I tried to bring to Christ in my youth, or my study of Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, C.S. Lewis, Paul Little, etc., doesn’t convince them of my former piety.     

Before one decides it’s more likely man created God, rather than the other way around, there has to be a moment where one changes in some way, becomes open to change.

I don’t mean to insult people whose road to atheism started in a different way than mine. There surely are many who, after losing a loved one or deciding they didn’t want to live by the moral codes of primitive Middle Eastern tribes, started investigating the arguments for disbelief seriously. But in my case, it was a simple crumb of knowledge that started me on a journey.

I was in graduate school at the time. I remember the book, and the two short sentences presented in such a causal, side-note sort of way, that heralded a metamorphosis. It was The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, a famous evolutionary biologist, though the book explored how racism affected scientific findings of the past few centuries.

Gould was, for whatever reason, discussing archaeology in Egypt:

The tombs also contained blacks and Caucasians. [Samuel George] Morton dated the beaching of Noah’s Ark on Ararat at 4,179 years before his time, and the Egyptian tombs at just 1,000 years after that–clearly not enough time for the sons of Noah to differentiate into races.  

Something in my mind clicked.

It was as if a gear, never used and covered in dust, began turning. I remember frowning, not in discomfort but in amazement, and I began to ponder.

Could one family incest its way to multiple races in a millennium? Wouldn’t that take longer? Maybe Christian teachings are wrong and the human race isn’t 6,000 years old, as scholars mapped out using bible characters beginning with Adam. Maybe the flood occurred 10,000 years ago. Would that give Noah’s sons enough time?               

And worse: If there isn’t any flexibility with the age of the human race, did the flood even happen?

Conflict had struck. Were the human race so young, different ethnicities seemed unlikely to me. That would require procreation and evolution at a rate that would make Darwin laugh in your face (there are actually Christian scholars with Ph.D.s that still argue this is exactly what happened; their writings are…unconvincing).

I decided something was likely off. But if one story was wrong, which one? Was the human race so young and the flood story false? Or was the human race older and the flood story true? (My conclusion later in life, that the human race was much older and the flood story false, was still not an option.)

I’ll let you wonder which one I settled on. That’s not the important part of the tale. In that moment, I did something I’d never done: I allowed a new idea to (ever-so-slightly) modify my religious beliefs. Generally, you’re not supposed to do this. Pastors like to say doubt is a good thing (“Even King David wrestled with doubt!”), but what they usually mean is doubt is a good thing if you end up right where you started. If your views don’t change.

It was possible Gould was lying or misinformed. Perhaps there never were multiple races discovered in Egyptian tombs; perhaps dating methods were (are) flawed and those mummies were enshrined much later in human history. Yet I imagined with enough serious investigation I would determine he was right.

In other words, I believed Gould. I found his view more convincing. He persuaded me not to take the flood story so seriously–to question it.

Atheism often begins not with despair or rebellion, but with questioning and critical thinking.

When I put down The Mismeasure of Man, I wasn’t an atheist. I honestly didn’t think that much of this event, instead comfortably absorbing a new idea, opening my mind to a new possibility, and then going about my business. I remained a believer in God for a couple years. But something was different, as a seed of thought was planted: Perhaps I’m wrong.

That thought–such a simple idea–couldn’t have been predicted. Afterwards it could not be unthought. Inherent within it was the dismissal of blind faith. When you experience that (experience it seriously, not just saying “Hey, I might be wrong” as some Christians do who are completely closed to the possibility), you can’t “just have faith” anymore. Not when you suddenly realize you’re possibly–likely–wrong.

That’s the how. Why I became an atheist would include this tale of doubt and a million others, encompassing a multitude of later ideas: that if the horrific actions of God in the bible were attributed to Allah, Zeus, or Shiva, Christians would call that deity a monster; that many bible stories, such as the virgin birth of deities, are found in cultures that existed long before the Jews; that the story of Jesus, like many in holy texts around the world, could simply be a manmade myth; that “the existence, immensity, and complexity of the universe can only be explained by a designer” argument is weak because said designer, if he created the universe, would have to be even more immense and complex than the universe, and how is his existence explained?

Perhaps the two most significant ones would be, as any reading of history–no matter how subjective–would tell you, that human beings love to invent gods. Further, they love to attribute divine powers to religious leaders after said leaders die. These kinds of thoughts form the foundation of atheism: perhaps it’s more likely God is fictional, like so many millions of other gods.

It could well be that I’m wrong. Perhaps God does exist. As much as I doubt it, I remain open to the possibility. 

Yet after reading the most thoughtful Christian apologetics and most thoughtful atheistic arguments, one stood out as more reasonable to me. That’s why I’m an atheist. Most Christians claim to understand atheistic arguments, and reject them, without ever reading a book, an article, even a single sentence by an atheist. Who’s to say you won’t find a book by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, or Dan Barker (a former pastor) in your hands someday? And find their arguments better? Even before that, who’s to say something won’t click for you, that new information won’t make you rethink long-held ideas?  

Like me, you never know what your next thought will be.

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There are common themes in ancient religion that make one wonder if Christianity was not the one exception to the rule that societies tend to adopt beliefs, stories, and traditions from one another.

True, it’s not always clear whether common themes are a testament to the human exchange of ideas or to the universal imagination of early human thought (parallels may exist between religions on entirely different continents, for example, but that does not necessarily mean one influenced another).

But what is clear is where certain ideas in human history did not originate.

Long before Yahweh and Jesus Christ, many religions had gods who were born in strange, miraculous ways, at times to virgins, who came to earth, and (though these are not the focus of this article, but rather another) performed miracles, taught about judgement and the afterlife, were killed, reborn, and ascended into heaven.

True, these stories are different from those of Christ, but the common archetypes in cultures in close proximity to Palestine suggest pagan influences on the biblical story of Christ’s birth.

For example, December 25 was an important birthday for many human gods.

Most Christians understand Christ was not actually born on this date (biblical scholars believe he was born in the spring, because the Bible mentions shepherds in the fields at the time of his birth).

The idea that Christ was born on December 25 doesn’t appear in the historical record until the fourth century A.D.; the earliest Christian writers, such as Origen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and the gospel authors, are silent on the subject.

Late December, the time of the winter solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year), was full of pagan European celebrations. The Roman Empire declared December 25 a holiday to celebrate the birth of their adopted Syrian god Sol Invictus in 274 A.D. Some 50 years later, Roman Emperor Constantine officially adopted December 25 as the day for celebrating Christ’s birth.

Before 1,000 B.C. we have the following gods or demigods born on December 25: Horus, Osiris, and Attis. Before 200 B.C. we have Mithra, Heracles, Dionysus, Tammuz, Adonis, and others (see All About Adam and Eve, by Richard Gillooly). Some of these characters, you will see below, were also born to virgins.

Interestingly, in ancient mythology, many gods are born to women with names derived from “Ma,” meaning mother: Myrrha in Syrian myth, Maia in Greek myth, Maya in Hindu, Mary in Hebrew.

A god or demigod’s birth was often accompanied by incredible sights and came about through the actions of another god.

John D. Keyser writes,

We learn, from classical authors, that the notion of the gods visiting mortal women and becoming fathers of their children was commonly entertained throughout the near East in Greek and Roman times…

‘The gods have lived on earth in the likeness of men’ was a common saying among ancient pagans, and supernatural events were believed in as explanations of the god’s arrival upon earth in human guise.

Stars, meteors, and heavenly lights allegedly signaled the birth of many man-gods, including Christ, Yu, Lao-tzu, various Roman Caesars, and Buddha (see Gillooly). This parallels the strange and fantastic events that surround the births of purely mythological figures, such as Osiris in Syria, Trinity in Egypt, and Mithra in Persia.

But nothing was more spectacular than virgin birth.

Virgin birth, and a reverence and obsession with virginity, was a common theme in ancient religions before the time of Christ and near where Christianity originated (see “The Ancient Beginnings of the Virgin Birth Myth,” by Keyser). It marked the child as special, often divine.

Two thousand years before Christ, the virgin Egyptian queen Mut-em-ua gave birth to Pharaoh Amenkept III. Mut-em-ua had been told she was with child by the god Taht, and the god Kneph impregnated her by holding a cross, the symbol of life, to her mouth. Amenkept’s birth was celebrated by the gods and by three kings, who offered him gifts.

Ra, the Egyptian sun god, was supposedly born of a virgin, Net. Horus was the son of the virgin mother Isis. In Egypt, and in other places such as Assyria, Greece, Cyprus, and Carthage, a mythological virgin mother and her child was often a popular subject of art and sculpture.

Attis, a Phrygian-Greek vegetation god, was born of the virgin Nana. By one tradition, Dionysus, a Greek character half god and half human, was the son of Zeus, born to the virgin Persephone.

Persephone also supposedly birthed Jason, a character with no father, human or divine. Perseus was born to a mortal woman named Danae, and fathered by Zeus. Zeus also slept with a mortal woman (though daughter of a nymph) named Io, and they had a son and a daughter. He slept with the mortal Leda, who gave birth (hatched, actually) Helen of Troy and other offspring.

Even Plato in Greece was said by some to have been born to a virgin, Perictione, and fathered by the god Apollo, who gave warning to Ariston, Perictione’s husband-to-be.

Some followers of Buddha Gautama decided he was born to the virgin Maya by divine decree. Genghis Khan was supposedly born to a virgin seeded by a great miraculous light. The founder of the Chinese Empire, Fo-Hi, was born after a woman (not necessarily a virgin) ate a flower or red fruit. The river Ho (Korea) gave birth to a son when seeded by the sun. Zeus, in snake form, impregnated the mother of Alexander the Great. Krishna was born to the virgin Devaka. In Rome, Mercury was born to the virgin Maia, Romulus to the virgin Rhea Sylvia (see “An Old Story,” Chapman Cohen).

Though not a virgin birth story, Augustus Caesar was supposedly born when Apollo slept with a mortal woman named Atia, and was later called a “savior” and the “Son of God,” whose birthday was celebrated — a birthday that “marked for the world the beginning of good tidings through his coming,” to quote the Romans (see How Jesus Became God, Bart Ehrman).

The Persian god Mithra was made the “Protector of the Empire” by the Romans in 307 AD, right before Christianity was declared the official religion. Some versions of Mithra’s story, predating Christianity, make him the son of a human virgin. His birth, on December 25, was seen by shepherds and Magi, who brought gifts to a cave, the place of his birth (see Godless, by former pastor Dan Barker).

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