Heh.
You know what makes it harder to believe in certain aspects of Christianity? Learning the specific dates that religious concepts were brought about:
- 325 CE - Nicene Creed - Concept of the Trinity
- 451 CE - Creed of Chalcedon - Christ as both 100% human and 100% divine
- 529 CE - Council of Orange - Concepts of grace, original sin, free will, mercy of God
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Perhaps in an "official" light perhaps, but most of these dogmatic adoptions are merely formalizations of informal assumptions held by the early Christian community based on their interpretations of Christ's message. I mean, you read the New Testament and you get a specific impression of his intentions, relative to your personality. Jesus talks specifically about the Trinity in the Book of John, and he names himself the "Word" and "the begotten Son of God" many times in the New Testament text.
Actually, these dates are irrelevant to Christianity proper. Each of these councils were convened in cooperation with the Roman imperial government, to streamline the tremendously burdensome imperial conversion from paganism to Christianity.
Off the top of my head, some other ones that I have heard:
The word for "virgin" is the same word for "young woman", or something like that, in one of the important languages of the time. With this in mind, the concept that Mary was a virgin was a mistake, a translation error. In the old testament, it's only mentioned in this one place, and is not played up at all, etc...
Lots of people who knew Jesus went around writing stuff about him after he was gone. Those writings which the church liked became the Gospels, the others were left out. (Perhaps these recount Jesus's "missing years" as a combination gambler/gigolo/con-man... j/k for those who are humor impaired)
The 7th commandment (adultery) only applied to married woman. Men were allowed to have sex outside of marriage with concubines. This was later changed by people who didn't like this concept. (I think it was independently changed by Jews, and then by Christians). (I want to say Catherine the Great had a hand in changing this (for the Christians) by editing the Bible, but I may be getting my memories mixed up).
On adultery, the specific rule was "if a man has sex with an unmarried woman, he must marry her." Hebrews were allowed as many wives as they could afford.
It's just like Christian faiths today proclaiming sex out of wedlock to be a sin, but if you marry the woman afterwards there is no penalty. It goes hand in hand with the "time irrelevance" concept that Yahweh makes much of in the Old Testament: what you feel you have always felt, and you will be judged accordingly.
The condemned are the condemned, from the beginning to the end.
One final note: nowhere in the New Testament does Jesus suggest that the Law of Moses applies to Gentiles. No where. Not only that, He refutes man's ability to understand the Law at all, and replaces existing interpretations with His own parable set. These lessons, He says, are as close as man can get to understanding God's law.
CHristams Day is nowhere near when Christ was actually born either. It was relocated and observed on December 25 to stamp out other popular religions' Winter Solstice Rituals. Ironically though, Easter is accurate, but has been permeated by pagan fertility festival rituals (the bunny and eggs)