I'm glad you left! The main problem with Christianity (and Islam as well) is that they persistently mistake BELIEF for FAITH. But these are very different concepts. Unfortunately, this fundamental error began with Paul, who insisted his followers put belief before knowledge--something Jesus never actually said, according to the Jesus Seminar, who carefully evaluated words attributed to Jesus, in order to distinguish the thematically coherent but provocative "voice" of Jesus from Pauline ideology conveniently put into the mouth of Jesus. (The Gospel of John is almost entirely the latter).

This error was compounded when St. Jerome, translating the Greek New Testament into the Latin Vulgate, mistranslated the Greek verb "pisteuo" to the Latin verb "credo." "Pisteuo" does not, however, mean "believe" but rather means "trust."

And therein lies the essential difference: "belief" means unquestioning assent to a set of question-begging propositions (which is what Paul and the "believing" Christians insisted upon). Propositions like "Jesus was the Only Begotten Son of God, who was Born of the Virgin Mary, Died for Our Sins, Rose from the Dead, and will come again to judge the Quick and the Dead..." How many questions are begged by this creed? Here are a few:

1. What do you mean by "Only Begotten Son of God"? Are we not all sons and daughters of God?

2. Wjat do you mean by "Begotten, not made" (from the Nicene Creed, not the Bible)--Are we not all "begotten, not made?" This is the essential difference between us living beings and computers! They are made, not begotten.

3. "Born of the Virgin Mary." How??

4. "Died for Our Sins" How could this be, when none of us would be born for another 2000 years or so?

5. 'Rose from the dead" How?

6. "And will come again to judge the Quick and the Dead?" How? when most of us will have long since rotted away into compost.

In short, this is all balderdash! Yet anyone who joins a Christian church is required to affirm his belief in this nonsense, as a mark of his "faith."

Balderdash, yet again. Faith is not, after all, mere credulous assent to question-begging propositions. Rather, as the Greeks knew, faith is TRUST--not in propositions about God (How do you "trust" a proposition written in an ancient text?) but trust in God, even if we cannot possibly know him, her, or it, because "God" is a mere personification of the Sacred. What is the Sacred? Well, as Louis Armstrong once said when a white reporter asked him "What is jazz" he said, "If you have to ask, you'll never know. So beliefs can and do differ, but faith is what I have in common with everyone on the planet who loves life and takes care of others, regardless of what they "believe." When Jesus was asked how to distinguish between true and false prophets (i.e. different religious ideologies) his answer was distinct and unequivocal: "By their fruits shall ye know them." NOT, that is, by the ideologies to which some people cling so credulously and violently, but by the consequences of our being in the world, regardless of what we "believe." So I happily count myself as a disciple of Jesus, but not as a "Christian."