I'd say one of Christianity's biggest problems is the teachings about the afterlife. It's a bunch of insanity at this point that really traces back to the Catholic church.
Long ago the Catholic church was faced with deciding what their afterlife doctrine would be. Generally, perspectives were in 3 categories with possible variations for each theme:
Everyone or nearly everyone will be saved and restored after a period of rewards and punishments.
The condemned will be annihilated and removed from existence.
The condemned will be tortured for an eternity.
Well, the Catholic church loved the idea of threatening their populations with eternal torment, so they chose number 3. According to a Jewish source, about 2/3 of Jews believed in number 1, 1/6 believed 2, and 1/6 believed 3. Since the world didn't involve international travel to far away places, people could just not care about all the people in China or wherever, people they'd never meet or hear much of anything about. Later on in history, the Catholic church added purgatory to buffer the insanity. Now only murderers, rapists, and heretics were gonna go to hell for an eternity.
Well, the corrupt Catholic organization was doing all kinds of nonsense like selling indulges and claiming salvation came through them, kind of like claiming salvation from covid comes from the system and their medical industry. Well, someone started actually reading the Bible and found salvation simply comes from trusting in God. Martin Luther was ultimately trying to fix Catholicism, but he ended up getting things started for protestants. I heard he was really anti-semitic after finding out about the Talmud. Protestants did a lot to fix Christian practice, but they didn't do a good job with afterlife doctrine. They ultimately read the Bible from a Western and formerly-Catholic perspective, and didn't see anything about purgatory in there. So they discarded that and ended up with a crazy doctrine where 99% or more of people in the world are going to burn in hell for an eternity. Some people have decided to soften this with age of accountability and "if you haven't heard, you won't be responsible" buffers. This lead to a clever Inuit saying to a Christian missionary, "If I wasn't responsible before you told me, then why did you tell me?"
There also seems to be an oversimplification in protestant teachings about the afterlife. The Bible mentions certain groups being punished more or less, but according to typical protestant doctrines, the bad people are going to be tortured for an eternity in hell. I suppose they could say that some people have it hotter or others have to swim in human feces or something.
Ultimately, there is a failure to understand Hebrew terms and references to the afterlife. There is sheol (represented by hades in Greek), the Valley of Ben Hinnom (gehenna in Greek), Abraham's Bosom, the lake of fire, and the New Jerusalem.
Sheol is the place where dead people go. The Bible mentions people sleeping there. The Valley of Ben Hinnom was literally a burning garbage dump outside of Jerusalem and was used as a representation of a fiery, afterlife place. This was accompanied by the good place that was referred to as Abraham's Bosom. These two places are said to be part of sheol and a place where people are prior to judgment. The Bible briefly references this in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Nobody believed these places were for an eternity.
Post judgment there is said to be the lake of fire for demons, devils, and bad people, and the New Jerusalem for good people. Actually, with a proper understanding of Hebrew, there are no words that mean eternal or eternity. This generally comes from a mistranslation of olam (aion or aionios in Greek). Olam is like saying ages. It's an indistinct, long period of time. Then they even had something like into olam and into olam again, which was an intensification of olam like a double olam. This made it's way into Greek as something using aion twice (into the ages of ages). I once heard a rabbi say to indicate eternal in Hebrew, you would have to say, "Without end." The idea of an eternal past is not valid, since God created time and space. God exists outside of time and space. Anyway, in English Bible translations, you have aionios (olam in Hebrew) being translated as eternal instead of age-enduring and into the ages of ages (whatever the Greek is) being translated as forever and ever. These misunderstandings support the ridiculous, insane beliefs of protestants. Everything is about eternity to them when the message of God came from people and a language that didn't even have a word for eternity.
In the book of Hebrews, it says Jesus will rule into the ages of ages, but it's translated as forever and ever. This mistranslation produces a contradiction with Revelation, that says Jesus will rules for a time and then the rulership will be restored to the Father. The Bible doesn't mention anything about what will happen when this takes place. This shows that there is a period of rewards and punishments prior to the Father taking over again. At this point we can only assume that the Father will end up making things as right as possible.
I have an inlaw that's a professor of religion. He can't stop talking about Jesus and fish references. He also told me about that mistranslation of the bible around Jesus ruling for an age vs. eternity. His theory is that Jesus's age is Pisces, which is ending now, and Jesus is on his way out. That the churches are dying (and they are, no one attends). He thinks unknown times are ahead.
What's also interesting are ties into catastrophism. There's a 12,000 year or so clock where there are massive floods. The timing of this seems to coincide with the collapse and reversal of the earth's magnetic field, which ties into "The Adam and Eve Story" by Thomas Chan (highly recommend reading this, it was classified by the CIA - there's an unredacted version floating around out there from 1993 if you look).
That 12k year cycle is also almost upon us, and could easily explain the "great floods", petroglyphs that resemble plasma discharges (youtube.com) (super interesting).
Anyway, thanks for the good read. I'm guessing you are a rabbi or some kind of wacky unitarian type, but whatever.
I'm Christian and not Jewish at all. I just learned a lot of random things and read about Judaism at one time in my life. Christian culture is dying, where people pretend to be Christian or are minimally Christian. Serious, dedicated Christian people will never go away, though. They are just few and far between.
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