So too many hymns seem to say, and so too many preachers have claimed. Why? Christianity teaches that we are so fundamentally flawed that we deserve the electric chair; that we can do nothing good in our own power; and therefore that most of what we are will have to be burned off us before we are fit to live in God's house. So a truly Christian life is a constant struggle against evil to produce something fit to be saved - and the only comfort is the comfort of a BFG, the Holy Spirit in us.
Yes it is. But only in Britain, and only at the moment. This is the inevitable result of two separate effects: first, for most people once a Christian always a Christian, so there is a built-in skew to the elderly; and secondly, the churches in Britain are declining, and so there are fewer people coming into the church at any age, but especially young people because they haven't had time to learn about Christ.
It shouldn't be - there are many warnings against it in the Bible. But unfortunately civil authorities always regard religions as a means of control, and try to make them authoritarian, and inevitably this sometimes happens. This is not just true of Christianity; it is true of atheism and islam and buddhism and all religions.
The two (the only two) commands to a Christian are:
Love God, and
Love your neighbour as yourself.
There is no way anyone truly following these can be selfcentred! But both of them threaten worldly authorities and structures; and both of them are bloody difficult to do; so there is always pressure to replace them with something easier and more socially acceptable - the pursuit of one's own salvation, one's own warm cosy feeling inside. So-called Fundamentalists seem particularly prone to this heresy.
Jesus was remarkably pro-women, and so were his immediate followers. But Judaism was already contaminated by the anti-feminist attitudes of Egypt and Greece, and so these ideas crept into Christianity. They were reinforced later when Christianity came in contact with Celtic paganism, which treated women as mere animals. In England and America the situation was worsened by the dependence on the 'King James' translation which deliberately distorts the text against women - as you would expect from a gynophobic homosexual like James Stewart.
One entire chapter of the Bible (Hebrews 11, for the technical) is dedicated to exploding this idea. But it is easier to make money and to gain power by teaching exclusiveness than by teaching truth.
Yes. And it should not be - especially as it is directly contrary to the teachings of its Founder that it should be. Indeed, there were no lasting divisions until the church gained political power, just an occasional splinter group that didn't outlive its founders. But where any organization has power in the world, others will be trying to grab a share; and the structure of Christianity has always been fragile.
Not openly any more, but antisemitism has been a plague of christian communities for a millennium, and some groups, especially in middle Europe, have openly espoused it. In modern Christianity even apart from any nutters (which no doubt there are: every group has them) the stain of antisemitism has never been properly faced or erased. More information?
It is not helped, of course, by the antichristian prejudices of so many Jewish speakers - those who claim it is better for a Jew to become an atheist than to become a Christian have blood on their own hands.
OK, yes. Certainly its opponents project it as boring, but this is not wholly false, now, is it. We haven't struck a proper balance between change and stability; we have under resourced the potential growth areas in order to featherbed the cosy and ineffectual; our services are stuck apparently immovably in the nineteenth century.
But there is nothing inherently boring in Christianity. Look at New Age stuff: they have far less material, far less inherently interesting material, yet people lap it up, because it isn't stuck in old forms, tatty buildings and sourfaced morality.
Christianity should be able to do far better - and we could, if we really wanted to.