The fundamental problem with traditional Christianity is that it asks us to believe the following statements:
These three statements together are absurd. If humans can't help being sinful, it makes little sense to punish us for it, and it makes even less sense that the punishment should be so severe. Under Christianity, God seems to expect us to be perfect, and then gives us the harshest possible punishment when we're not. This is not reasonable behaviour from the "God of Mercy", nor the "God of Justice".
Some will say that God has provided a way out of the difficulty - Jesus has atoned for our sins, and those who believe in Jesus will be saved. But this just shifts the problem. Now, instead of being given eternal punishment for their sins, people are given eternal punishment for having the wrong religion, which is just as absurd.
In claiming that one has to follow Jesus to avoid Hell, Christians tend to ignore the psychological realities of how people choose a religion. Most people just inherit their religion from their parents or from the societies they're born into. It makes no sense at all that one's eternal fate can depend so heavily on the circumstances of one's birth.
I have read the Qur'an - all of it - and Islam has a lot going for it. As far as I know, there's no doctrine in Islam to say that everyone deserves punishment, and there are passages in the Qur'an that seem to allow non-Muslims to reach heaven:
Nevertheless, this still leaves those who are born into polytheistic societies in deep trouble. The Qur'an tells us that there's almost nothing you can do that's worse than being a polytheist. It is also completely unambiguous that Hell is a place of eternal suffering for all those who are not good monotheists, and for those who do evil:
While you might say that those who do evil deserve punishment, there's nothing you can do that deserves eternal punishment. Ultimately, Islam is false for the same sort of reasons as Christianity. Both religions give us a spiteful, vengeful God who's so pissed off that people don't believe in him that he tortures them forever. A perfect being would be far above such a desire to inflict misery on people. That's what imperfect, flawed humans do.
The strongest evidence in favour of Christianity and Islam is that a lot of people actually believe in them. Most religions lack even that much. If God really existed, and if he cares what we think, you would expect a lot of people to have found the truth, since God wants them to find it.
Obviously I can't go through all the thousands of possible religions I could join and investigate them one by one. But all religions that make actual claims about how things are suffer from a general lack of evidence for their claims. Arguments for the existence of God are very weak. The emergence of life from non-living matter (abiogenesis) can be explained by the fact that the universe is so big, it's bound to happen somewhere. The emergence of complex life has been explained by evolution, despite Creationists' best efforts to confuse people. The strongest argument for a creator is the "fine-tuning" argument, but that argument only works if the number of existing universes is low - which we cannot confidently assert.
In addition, religions suffer from the problem that, although they attempt to explain things by appealing to a god or gods, it's usually left unexplained how such beings came to exist themselves. This is at least as big a problem for religion as any unexplained facts about the universe are for atheism.
At its core, Buddhism can be seen as a sort of philosophy for avoiding suffering by eliminating cravings and fears. All this is good stuff, but unfortunately Buddhism has saddled itself with all sorts of crazy beliefs about the universe that have nothing to do with its core message. Such beliefs include karma, reincarnation, and a whole host of heavens and hells, which have various denizens such as gods and demons. There is no evidence for any of these things.
The good news is that you don't strictly have to believe in that sort of thing to be a type of Buddhist. This is especially true since the Buddha is usually understood to have been just a man, with no divine help to guide him. Therefore, whatever he said about nature and the universe should be taken with large heap of salt.
Ultimately, it should be obvious that the way to find out about life, the universe, and everything is not to consult two-thousand-year-old texts, nor is it to just blindly follow what your parents tell you, as far too many people do. The way to find out about reality is to do science, which despite some well-publicised errors, has given us profound insights into almost all subjects.
Updated: 2008-09-10
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