1a) The notion that God wants us humans to hear, understand, and believe that he, God, incarnated himself as his own son Jesus for the explicit purpose of getting hisself killed in order to not die but rise from the dead in order to permit hisself to forgive us individually for something our way way distant ancestors Adam & Eve did in the Garden of Eden, namely disobeying his instrux not to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. The notion that, for failure to hear, or failure to believe upon hearing, we as individuals remain unsaved despite that sacrifice. Quite frankly, that any portion of this makes even provisional sense. I dont mean compelling or belief-worthy sense: I don’t believe the events described in Jack and the Beanstalk ever occurred, but it parses as coherent sense. Some of the plot-lines in manga and comic books (“See, he’s from another dimension and is here to catch escaped criminals from the Dark Zone, but he has amnesia because he drank from the well of the Elven Princess, so he doesn’t realize his mission although he performs it anyway because it was so written in the scrolls of the Forbidden Tower, of course all that is only true in Reality One, this universe has been reset several times and in Reality Two, which isn’t a real Reality but only an Imaginary World, he does know his missions, but…”) kind of approach the central axiom of Christian Salvation in sheer WTF-ness, but then they don’t generally insist that comprehending the plot is of any particular importance to the reader.
1b) Same as above, but for more of the apostolic / fervent / pushy Christians than not, don’t bother with “understand”. God don’t care if you understand, just say it and believe it. God gonna burn you in hell if you don’t say and believe and mean that you accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart as your Personal Lord and Savior, and it doesn’t matter that you haven’t the vaguest idea what that means, just believe it and rejoice for thou art SAVED!
2a) The notion that God wishes and intends that we humans believe Jesus of Nazareth to have been (/be) God in some sense that the rest of us are not God, could never be God, cannot be God, etc; this despite the perennial & recurrent assertion that God manifested himself as Jesus in order to make himself accessibly known and comprehensible to us. That God would be rather upset if you chose to attempt to comprehend holiness by assuming Jesus was one of us and his behaviors and statements and life meaningful in the same way they would be meaningful had we done the same in the same contexts. All this despite his demonstrating prayer with “Our Father who art in Heaven…”, and despite his referencing Psalm 82 when accused of blasphemy for referring to himself as the Son of God.
2b) The notion that there is one and only one God (monotheism) but God is to be understood as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (triune God). That triune God matters, that if some theologist were to speak on the Fourfold Nature of the One God (still monotheism but tetraform in nature), well by golly that theologist would be wrong because the one true God is triune. That all of this makes sense and you should believe it, as if it weren’t incredibly abstract and undoubtedly not the only way to parse complex theological truths, but instead definitive and absolute fact. And that God cares that you believe it.
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That despite the constant reiteration in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth that there is scarcely any viable framework within which to treat people as enemy or other, the whole life-thing is really about sorting out which folks get to go to heaven and which ones receive a much-deserved punishment of burning in hell for eternity. The notion that God is going to make paradise possible for a subset of divisive, antagonistic people while catering to their need and desire for vengeance by promising that the wicked and undeserving are gonna get theirs. That heaven and paradise are available without successfully ending strife and divisiveness and antagonism. And woven throughout all that, the assertion that in some fundamental sense this life doesn’t COUNT, except as a sorting mechanism to see “how good you were”.
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That divine truth — the true understandings of what God is and how people should live and so forth — is a delicate and fragile thing in an unGodly corrupt world, like the last crystal goblet held aloft in a landscape of boulders, something easly smashed and, if smashed, irreplacable. That the Bible in and of itself contains the word of God in a sense that each individual could not obtain by going directly to God and asking it. That any and all individual attempts to obtain understanding directly from God are futile and heretical except insofar as they ratify and fit smoothly within the confines of understandings already built, which in turn are all in conformity with the Bible. That this body of existing theological understanding is to be safeguarded from dangerous thoughts of a heretical nature, which must be identified and suppressed, lest they take root and destroy the delicate shared understanding of truth. That people cannot discern truth from truthless lies and unGodly wicked assertions (despite our ancestor’s rather expensive chomping on the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, btw), but that somehow the body of Christianity per se, conveniently immune to that, somehow has the real (albeit fragile) truth in its hands, knows it to BE truth, and is doing everyone a favor by censoring dissenting perspectives while asking folks to believe their fragile truth to BE truth without insisting on perceiving it as such of their own accord.
Having said that, I think most of the above represents varying degrees of “babytalk” understandings of spiritual truth which was handed down over the centuries as “Christianity”. And I think that alongside of all that have been many people, including many today, who get an eye-opening revelatory experience, a seeing-for-themselves understanding of God, from Christianity in that handed-down form, and their understandings are not “babytalk” nor unduly literal. They don’t tend to be blind defenders of Christianity by any means. Many of them have sought to reform Christianity, to shake it out of the blind and thoughtless parroting. “That’s not enough, you must go beyond that and experience the actual spirit of the thing yourself, firsthand, you’ve got to be reborn, you have to see the light!” Then a few generations later you end up with apostolic pushy blind parroting people insisting that to be saved you must repeat the phrase “I have been reborn, I have seen the light”, etc.
Mostly I don’t think ANY established body of “aha here is the divine TRUTH” can do much good. No matter how well-intentioned, it ends up getting in the way of people doing their own seeking, it ends up obstructing them, or at least obstructing more of them than it helps.
Christianity is easy to poke at because it’s all around me and easy to observe and describe, but I would make the same general points about any other institutionalized religion, I think.
