Added Bad Faith: A Concise Criticism of Christianity (2024) by Vito Lear to the Christian Worldview page under Christianity in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
In this short online book, Vito Lear presents a primer that outlines questions, issues, and evidence illustrating that Christianity has failed to meet its burden to prove its extraordinary claim to have the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Lear’s concise inquiry focuses on three core issues: Are the fundamental claims of Christianity consistent with reason and morality? Is Christianity’s sacred text, the Bible, historically reliable? And since its advent, has Christianity overall made the world a better place, or a worse one? Lear argues that these questions should be widely asked, but are rarely considered by the general population in the predominately Christian culture of the United States.
New in the Kiosk: A Gaggle of Prophets and an Ocean of Sin (2024) by Vern Loomis
In this satirical article Vern Loomis breaks down the prescribed paths to Heaven or Hell laid out by the three Abrahamic religions currently dominating the Western world, as well those laid out by the Baha’i faith. In order to clarify the contradictions between these religions on such a crucial matter for humankind, Loomis speculates that perhaps one day God will directly and miraculously set the record straight himself. Until that day, Loomis hopes that God’s supposed emissaries will find peace among themselves while maintaining that the others are deeply mistaken about an issue for which no one can afford to be in error.
Recommended reading: Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 by Peter Heather
In the 4th century a new faith grew out of Palestine, overwhelming the paganism of Rome and resoundingly defeating a host of other rival belief systems. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion exercised a monolithic hold over its population. From Constantine’s pivotal conversion to Christianity to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire—which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction—to the astonishing revolution of the 11th century and beyond, out of which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom’s chameleonlike capacity for self-reinvention, as it not only defined a fledgling religion but transformed it into an institution that wielded effective authority across virtually all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe.