A short YouTube monologue (By Asif Osman) listing five historical church topics that prompted the speaker to question Christian faith: (1) the Council of Nicaea and later canonical decisions made by bishops who never met Jesus; (2) the King James Bible’s changing contents—specifically that the Apocrypha was treated as canon until the late 19th century; (3) the etymology/political history behind the term "Lucifer" and its association with the devil; (4) translation/editing decisions about passages thought to condemn homosexuality (mentions the Greek term often rendered as arsenokoitai and a claimed 1946 reinterpretation linking it to child molestation); and (5) numerous atrocities historically justified using scripture (witch hunts, satanic panic, burning accused women). The speaker frames these as reasons they began to doubt their faith.
Chapters
Top five bits of church history that made me start to question my faith. Number one, the Council of Nicaea. If you're unfamiliar with it, go look it up. It doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. Basically, a bunch of dudes got together, took all the Christian writings that had previously been considered canon and decided, some of these are canon, some of them are not. Who said those dudes got to do this? Who said those dudes had any right? Those dudes. They said it. Interestingly, this all happened way after Jesus died, and not one of those dudes had ever met the man. Number two, the King James Bible. So if you're unfamiliar with the King James Bible, it is generally the only Bible accepted by very conservative evangelical Christians. I've even heard it described as the re inspired word of God. That's a bit of an outlier. You have to be real conservative to believe that. But there are churches and seminaries that teach that it's the reinspired word of God. My real beef with it, though, is that it contained the apocrypha until the 1880s. So the apocrypha was canon, and then suddenly it wasn't, and we were all just like, okay. And now you'd be pretty hard pressed to find a pastor who knows much about the Apocrypha because they didn't have to learn it in seminary. Their ancestors did, their heroes of the faith did, but they didn't. Number three would be when you kind of look into the origins of why we call Lucifer the Devil, there was actually a bishop, Lucifer Caligari, I think it is that he was sainted. And the term Lucifer doesn't actually appear in the Bible. It is translated that way from the word morning star. But the Hebrew word is Halel. How did we get from Halel to Lucifer? They don't sound much alike at all. Do they give you a. It had to do with church politics. It had to do with an appointment to a very important position. Number four, the way that they edited the Bible to be anti gay. Now, you might be thinking, but the Bible is anti gay, dude. There are only two words, two in the entire Bible that right now we think apply to being gay. The word is arsenokoi. I'm totally mispronouncing that. I am confident that I am mispronouncing that the word in Hebrew refers to child molesters. It wasn't until 1946 that anyone even tried to say that it referenced homosexuality. Let me repeat that. 1946. 1946 is when they made that adjustment to the Bible. Number five. I'm just gonna say atrocities as a general headache. Studying church history is studying atrocities. A lot of them that have been justified using scripture. The witch hunts, the satanic panic, the fact that they regularly burned women alive for casting glamours, which, if you don't know what that means, it means that she got graped. And then the guy said he couldn't help it because she had cast a spell on him. We burned women alive for being victims.
