system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I think Christianity is ultimately detrimental to society, CMV.

Okay, here's my reasons:

**1. There is no distinct Christianity.**  There are thousands of *very, very* similar belief systems that all read the same Hebrew and Greek texts (albeit different translations) and profess, at the very least, similar ideas about a prophet/man-God named Jesus Christ.  Together they collectively contain "Christianity," but if you look to any specific denomination you'll find lots of different ideas about minor issues like cessationism or transubstatiation, but also very big differences over who Jesus Christ even was (many mainstream Methodists, for example, profess the Nicene Creed and the belief in Jesus as a man-God but don't believe in a literal kind of atonement they way an Assembly of Gods church would.)

**2. The good stuff about Christianity is overhyped.**  What has Christianity given the world?  If you ask a Christian, it's love, peace, understanding, forgiveness - hardly values that exist alone in the Christian belief system (they are universal human values found throughout all cultures and belief systems).

If anything, the Christian belief system is rather misanthropic in its diagnoses of societal ills - diagnosing symptoms as the cause, encouraging a belief that humans are not capable of charity, grace, and good works without the enabling or encouragement of a God (without whom they'd be "disgraceful sinners").  And that's not even to mention anything about hell (that's number 5).

Or maybe they'd point to history and the overwhelming good Christians have brought to the world - from hospitals to schools to orphanages (why do you think most hospitals are named after saints?).  Again, this assumes that hospitals or schools couldn't have been built without Christian charity or grace or initiative - but about the U.S. public education system, which has built *far* more schools in the U.S. than any religious institution?  Schools and hospitals are great tools of society and will be built with or without Christian influence.

**3. The bad stuff about Christianity is often ignored (or written off as "not real Christianity".**  Ever hear the phrase "This is not what Christianity is about"?  It's kind of a subjective statement, often invoked by people who align with Christianity's softer side - but it creates a false dichotomy, it assumes there is a standard people are falling short of (again, a standard that is different for every branch of Christianity.)

But Christianity has a whole host of side effects that, endorsed by Jesus or not, have come to accompany Christian practice around the world.  Homophobia, racism, and sexism are all encouraged in the Bible, including bizarre laws that demand death for a young woman's sexuality - in other words, the philosophy that's supposed to unite everyone also has some pretty compelling reasons why you're allowed to condemn and judge those that are different from you.  How many Bible verses were able to support slave owners, opponents of the Civil Rights movement, or opponents of marriage equality?

**4. The bad stuff about the rest of the world is overhyped.**  A central idea to Christianity is to be "not of this world" (John 18:36).  In vague terms, society outside the church is often spiritually bankrupt, or deficient, or guilty of a whole host of sins.  This is another misdiagnosis that manages to ignore the huge amount of good - pick any benefit of modern society, from cell phones to the internet to healthcare to entertainment.  They do not stem directly from the Christian belief system, is there something morally inferior about them?  

In addition, this encourages a black and white view of society that only sees good and evil winning or losing rather than complex issues and events with a whole host of factors feeding in to each other.  It is considered evil that there is enough food in the world to feed everyone but there is still starvation - but starvation is a problem that stems from much more than a blanket term like "evil" or a character like "Satan" (if you subscribe that far) and are results of political systems and economics and bureaucratic corruption - perhaps resulting in evil, but correctly diagnosing helps us to fix problems better.

**5. The idea of hell is barbaric and outdated.**  One of the most powerful ideas in Christianity is the doctrine of hell.  Again, depending on which Christian you talk to, you'll get different ideas about what hell is.  For some, like the Catholic church and most protestant denominations, Hell is a real place - maybe not physically, but definitely spiritually - of punishment for "bad deeds" on earth.  Maybe it's a lake of fire, or maybe it's just "separation from God's love," it's all the same concept - or actions are being recorded and observed, and universal justice will be eventually applied.

This belief promotes irrational fear - many people suffer from unnecessary anxiety about the threat of hell, and the worst that most of them has done is get a speeding ticket.

**6. It encourages a fear of human knowledge outside of the belief system.**  Today, thanks to discoveries in the past 2 centuries, we can tell a newborn child how they got here, what their made of, and how their bodies work.  Yet Christians are usually the first to question these answers, and support ignorance rather than the facts that modern biology, anthropology, and archaeology are built on.  They can be the first to dismiss climate change because it doesn't fit into their worldview that God would allow something like that to happen, or that man is that powerful, or even because they don't care if the world ends (God's going to build a new one.)  Which leads me to...

**7. It's fatalistic and small-minded.**  Christianity promises a destroyed world and the birth of a new one.  It answers questions so we don't need to keep asking them (where did the world come from?  why do we die?).  It discourages curiosity.  Could we become a space-faring species?  Christianity doesn't care, there's not much of a blueprint in the Bible or an appreciation for what humans can become.  The world gets destroyed, God fixes everything.  Why invest in the future, or work on society's problems if it's all going to fall apart anyways?

**8. It's not true.** This is easily the most contentious of my points, but I guess what I mean by true is "objectively testable."  In the past few centuries humanity has drastically changed the world into something better capable at supporting humans (we've managed to create 7 billion of us from a hard-luck species that emigrated out of Africa in an evolutionary blink of an eye) and we're quickly finding fewer and fewer limits when it comes to technology and innovation.  We've figured out how to travel from one planetary body to another, and we're the first creatures in the earth's history to know where how we got here and where exactly here is.  

This knowledge and level of innovation was encouraged by the scientific method, a rigorous commitment to testing ideas and following patterns, and a belief that if it can't be tested (wether logically, like Einstein's thought-experiments, or practically, like most lab tests) or observed, then it isn't worth considering (why waste time positing theories about invisible creatures playing croquet in space until we see the data that points to such strange ideas?).

The scientific method cuts through our brain's superstitious, pattern-hungry and easily deceived senses to find *universal truths* rather than subjective ones (and, unless Jesus comes back, or Allah opens up the sky, or Vishnu appears in Washington D.C. to hold a press conference, religious views are subjective).  It allows us to connect as creatures over the universal laws that govern the world we live in (phsyics, chemistry) as well as the complex functions that keep us running, and allows us to adapt even better to this world (technology).  Best of all, the scientific method allows for innovation and adaptation because there are no hallowed truths - only evidence.

Christians can claim faith in spite of evidence, or a lack of beauty and mystery in a science-dogged world, but the commitment to scientific reasoning has put cell phones in their pockets and Modern Family on their television or laptop every week.

But back to the main point - **"a fool builds his house on sand."**  This nugget holds true despite whether or not Jesus was God, and I don't think I have to go very far to explain why idealogies built on false premises, while sometimes benign, can lead to problems (witch trials, faith healing, the mother f-ing Holocaust).

So, CMV!  What's so great about Christianity that can't be found elsewhere?  How is Christianity misrepresented?

EDIT1 - I've been on a shoot, now I'm reading everybody's responses....will respond soon!
EDIT2 - Okay, done for today, looking forward to continuing discussion tomorrow.  Thanks for some great posts and ideas, fellow redditors!
EDIT3 - I've bitten off more than I can chew!  I've thought of a better changemyview that's more limited in focus, there's simply too much here - I can give in on a few points, here, but I still don't see how Christianity, *if* built on a false premise, is healthy for society.  But I also see that it does a lot of good (with some side effects).
gpt
A good man can exercise his Christian faith and help a person in need. A bad man can wear a Christian facade to elevate his own needs. It is the same with anything- people are good and bad. Atheism has as many assholes as Christianity.