Today, I'm starting a new email list about Christianity as the anti-religion.

I care a lot about my religion. And the thing that concerns me the most is that, as the major institutions of Christianity begin to fall apart, and new forms of spirituality begin to rise, that the peculiar genius of the Christian idea is being missed and obscured.

Baptism is a ceremony or ritual where some individual pledges themselves to a larger religious group or movement. John saw it as a pledge to repentance, Peter saw it as a pledge to forgiveness, Paul sees it as a pledge to death. Wearing a cross, like wearing a skull and crossbones, was a declaration that one had passed out of the systems of the world and into the realm of death.

A lot of people who really like Jesus, really don't like Paul. One book puts it like this: everything good in Christianity came from Jesus, everything bad came from Paul.

This sort of makes sense. After all, Paul never met Jesus. Paul doesn't sound like Jesus. Paul doesn't seem that concerned with the details of Jesus' life. Paul says a lot of things that you'll never find in the gospels. It would be easy to say that Paul was a hijacker, who turned Christianity into something it was never supposed to be.