What turns many away at the gate of Christian understanding is its bigotry, the anti-sexual viciousness and exclusion to the point of ostracism and worse.
Every bit of that comes from the Old Testament as it's called, with a ballast and confirmation coming from the psychedelically ornate visions of the Book of Revelations, and a kind of bureaucratic emphasis in the Epistles.
The Christian gospels, the ones in the New Testament itself, are about inclusion and mercy, compassion and forgiving acceptance.
This makes axiomatic the question of how those gospels became firmly attached to something so violently rejecting and exclusive, not to mention what caused the reversal of a dynamic that demanded the uplift of the poor and outcast - a reversal that re-placed the poor and outcast firmly back at the bottom of society unless they subscribe, willingly or coercively, to the official rules and regulations of the dogma.
Almost all of us who were raised inside Christian churches, in the sense of receiving instruction and lessons in a traditional way, were raised with the unquestioning fact of the indivisible linkage of the Old and New Testaments, even though much of the difference between them is diametric and fundamentally contradictory.
How is this? How were people who were hunted and persecuted wherever they went able to carry a literature of dogma that was the intellectual property of those who persecuted them?
The Jesus of the gospels was consistently challenged on his rejection of the outward law, and ultimately imprisoned, tried, and executed on that basis.
The weight of the two Testaments is nowhere equal.
There's a stigma of anti-Semitism to the acknowledgement of rabbinical persecution of early Christianity, or an attempt to stigmatize it so. But the record's there. Paul himself, the secondary founder of Christianity as we now have it, was a Jew whose employment was the persecution of Christians, and after his Damascene illumination he was himself driven from place to place by that same active and threatening persecution. This is not anti-Semitism - it's an accurate reading of what's there.
We have people who were illiterate, who had no books, who had only an oral tradition, who were peasants and worse - whose leaders as the gospels have it were fishermen and carpenters - tradesmen, at that time most definitely an illiterate class - and we are asked to believe that the body of Christian teaching and guidance was built from complex narrative documents taken intact out of Jewish scholarly archives, and carried into the underground by those same illiterate peasants.
This seems preposterous, because it is.
At some historically vague moment someone decided that the drive and excitement of Christianity as it was being and becoming would be linked inextricably to the books of the Old Testament. Who that was is a matter for scholars and historians.
What we know is Joseph Flavius was an intimate member of the Roman emperor's inner circle at around that time.
And what has obviously played out in our own time is a blindly unthinking and unquestioning material, spiritual, and emotional support for the nation of Israel on the part of fundamentalist Christians. Whose bigotry and vicious exclusiveness have driven many away from the gospel of Christian love, as it's being presented.
Once you begin to question the official documents though, where do you stop?
Doubt is like fire, it oxidizes, disassembles, evaporates.
Once you question the accuracy of the book as a whole, everything is in question, nothing has any solidity - and it becomes another consumer choice, a selection of what appeals, a choosing and discarding that's entirely individual and, ultimately, isolating.
What's lost in that consumer relationship is the cohesion of belonging, the inclusion that is the reward for the bigoted exclusivity of the fundamentalist.
The bind is the demand for total acceptance, or none. It's a proprietary assertion, an ownership of what's presented as the only path toward the divine.
This is comforting to those on the inside, and not insignificantly it has important material benefits as well. A lot of people over the last two millenia have been seduced and corrupted by those material benefits.
What offers itself as a path to salvation for an elect and privileged membership holds up as exemplars saints, whose lives were the opposite of privilege and often ended crowned with martyrdom.
It's a dark riddle with unnecessary suffering as its consequence.
That exclusivity rejects the teachings it avows - and its rewards are earthly, and profane.