The Evangelical Distortions Of God

The evangelical distortions of the Biblical God are as numerous as they are erroneous and damaging.  So widespread are these errors that, inside and outside of the church, they are regularly mistaken for Christianity itself, which anyone with access to a Bible and the willingness to reason out what it does and does not teach is capable of understanding.  Only such a person will see just how thoroughly the evangelical ideas about God deviate from the actual contents of the Bible, especially when combined as they often are.  The typical evangelical misrepresentation of Yahweh is a being that demands that people abstain from things that the Bible ultimately classifies as nonsinful, only to damn those who commit these "sins" to eternal life in hell (an obviously irrational concept since it is the humans who do not have eternal life that the Bible says hell is for), where they are forever unable to either cease to exist as the Bible promises they will or reconcile themselves to God and join him in Paradise after a deep change of mind.

Whether or not the Bible teaches this would not make its theology true or false by default.  However, since there is a great deal of evidence that Christianity is indeed true and there are even parts of Biblical theology, like the uncaused cause and substance dualism, that are objectively true even if the rest of the Bible is false, it is vital to clarify that the Bible never teaches many evangelical ideas about God.  In fact, the very claim that God condemns things like bikinis, profanity, sexual attraction, or alcohol use (or whatever other things Deuteronomy 4:2 and other passages clearly permit) and the claim that he has destined all unsaved humans for eternal conscious torment are heresies of immense destructiveness.  Each one of these stances, like the fatalistic Calvinism some evangelicals would add to them, are outright idiotic abominations that misrepresent the core of Yahweh's character as described in the Bible itself.

This means that anyone who rejects theism or Christianity out of terror at the kind of God evangelicals claim to represent--which is a philosophically asinine basis for rejecting any idea at all, as terror reflects a person's psychological state and not other aspects of reality--has rejected only a straw man version of Yahweh that has ironically been backed by professing Christians rather than ideological enemies of true Christianity.  These heresies that evangelicals and their anti-Christian enemies focus on as if they were acknowledging the true doctrines of the Bible only show how easy it is for non-rationalists to misunderstand their own supposed worldview (in the case of evangelicals) or the worldviews of others which they are supposedly intelligent enough to criticize (in the case of non-Christians).

All philosophies and ideas have consequences, and evangelicals seem particularly blind to the personal and cultural consequences of so deeply misunderstanding the book they are stupid enough to think they truly understand.  The kind of person who holds to such blatantly contradictory and slanderous ideas about the Christian God is not someone who would be pleased to discover their actual ideological state.  Isaiah 29:13 and Matthew 15:8 describe such hypocritical pseudo-Christians who are so psychologically and philosophically blind that the obvious, crucial nature of their relationship with Yahweh eludes them: "'These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.'"  It is one thing to believe something fallacious, logically impossible, or distorted out of sheer ignorance after being raised in evangelical communities for a time.  It is another thing to carry this philosophical blindness about one's own supposed worldview well past the onset of adulthood.