I, and I imagine many of you, are tired of the fake-news and dishonesty that invades almost everything now days. We seek out those things, and people, we think we can trust. For me, that seeking out especially include politics, pandemic reporting, and religion. This post is about the last item mentioned.

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I constantly lament the fact that many American Christian institutions are turning off so many people because they spew out hatred instead of love. They have put a fake face on Jesus. They have made him a god who despises so many different groups of people. They have tainted the word “Jesus” to a degree never seen before. I know these are harsh, yes, even damning words, but they are truth filled at least for me.

I have spent more than a decade now studying the history of the church that was started around Jesus. It has morphed into something that is quite unrecognizable from its founding. Anyone who can manage to pull his/her head out of the current biblical text can see that these words are truthful.

Yes, the Bible gives us a fair account of the first couple hundred years of Christianity, but the personal spin started even in that document. There are literally hundreds of sources for its history of the last 1800 years since the bible was written. To me, those years should be studied as much as the bible to see how the church has evolved, too often in a way that has done it more harm than not.

To me, stopping the study at 400AD is kind of like stopping the study of U.S. history at the Civil War and proclaiming that history is all we need. The world is a much different place than it was just a hundred years ago, let alone 15 centuries ago.

The Bible is a good history book as far as it goes, but it needs to be brought up to date.