Mark Fulton's book "Get over Christianity by Understanding it" questions the origins of Christianity through an exploration of who the Biblical players were, and the authors' motives. The book reveals many obscure facts, and exposes a large number of fictions for what they are. The book's conclusions are based on assessments of primary sources such as the Bible itself, as well as the opinions of numerous respected historians, and are the product of many years of exhaustive investigation.
The book concludes that the Old Testament is largely fabricated, is profoundly immoral, and has been the primary cause of much human suffering and ideological baggage.
Fulton thinks that Jesus may have existed; yet that the man described in the Gospels is not a true depiction. He thinks Jesus was actually a fundamentalist Jewish zealot, and not a Christian, and that Jesus had no delusions that he was the Son of God, and no wish to die for humanity's sins. Instead, Fulton has Jesus as a hopeful Jewish messiah who tried to start a war with the Roman garrison in Jerusalem, yet was outmanoeuvred and crucified before his ambitions had a chance to come to fruition.
Decades after Jesus' death, the Roman government may have used the memory of Jesus the zealot to help create a new god, the Christ. Jesus was depicted, paradoxically, as a benign passive preacher and a willing taxpayer.
Fulton considers the New Testament not as the Word of God, but as Roman government propaganda. Fulton thinks that religion then, as now, was used for political purposes, and that the government created Christianity to control trouble-causing Jews by claiming their Messiah had already been and gone. The book portrays Saint Paul, the real originator of Christian theology, as a paid government employee and an over imaginative charlatan. The book reveals why the Vatican's story of a Pope Peter in Rome is a crass fiction.
Fulton postulates that in the fourth century, when militant Jews were no longer a threat, the Roman government under Constantine realized that Christianity, with its ecclesiastical hierarchy, could prove a useful ally when it came to crowd control. He discusses how many different stories about Jesus were discarded, and others stitched together, to create a god suitable for common consumption. A population united and ruled over by one god and obedient to the government was attractive to an administration trying to keep order. Jesus replaced a horde of other gods to become the only government-approved deity in the empire, and Fulton thinks this was how Christianity formed such a firm foothold in the wider world.
Fulton concludes that Christianity is based on numerous deliberate falsehoods, and is therefore fundamentally flawed, and that this has profound implications for the legitimacy of today's beliefs.
Fulton also examines the Bible's ethics from a modern humanist's perspective, and concludes that they are the source of many personal, social, and political problems. He thinks churches and governments are still using the Bible to control people and popular opinion, and that this is profoundly immoral.
Thoroughly researched, and always thought provoking, the book leaves no stone unturned. "Get Over Christianity by Understanding It" will change the way you perceive Christianity.
