Red Pill Gospel: Christianity, before it was ruined by Christians.

by Forrest Maready

As Christianity, the world’s most popular religion, approaches its 2,000-year anniversary, more have begun to question mainstream dogma than ever before. Whether political corruption, scientific fraud, medical tyranny, or many other topics, humans are waking up to the fact that much of what they were promised to be true was instead deception—lies meant to cloud the truth and give power to those who deceived them. This realization has caused many to question whether global warming is a man-made phenomenon. It has caused millions of parents to reconsider vaccines—once considered a sacrosanct rite of passage for any newborn child. What if the Christianity we were taught was similarly misrepresented? Within a few hundred years after the resurrection of Jesus, distortions began to creep into Christianity from the pagan belief systems which surrounded it. Over the course of hundreds of years, man-made doctrines have accumulated and warped the Christian faith so drastically many of its early believers would scarcely recognize it. The world’s most popular religion is a far cry from the message Jesus preached through villages and towns during his ministry. For those unafraid to look, Red Pill Gospel peels back the layers of lies man has added to the gospel and reveals the beautiful hope inside.

201 pages, Paperback

Published April 6, 2020

About the author

After graduating from Wake Forest University with a degree in Religion and Music, Maready plied his trade in the film industry for several years, working on several Muppet movies, four seasons of Dawson’s Creek, and many other films and television shows as an audio engineer, editor, composer, and animator. He transitioned into technology as a designer and developer for visual effects software and CTO at NextGlass (now called Untappd). While at NextGlass, he helped develop machine learning software to wrangle the gigabytes of data being generated from their mass spectrometer and liquid chemical analyzers.

Creator of the popular “My Incredible Opinion” and “VaxBaby” video series, he has spent the last few years researching and writing about some of the most enigmatic riddles of science and medicine, notably autism and polio. Forrest has spoken at events and conferences around the country but prefers to stay close to his writing home in the cab of a 1992 F-150, where many of his manuscripts were composed. He lives with his wife and son in Wilmington, N.C. and enjoys tennis, piano, and competitive shooting.

Reviews

[Jonathan Roseland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll tell you about something I WISH I could unsee - A while back for some stupid reason I had followed these Twitter accounts that would share morbid news coming out of South Africa. A video of a "necklacing" autoplayed in my feed one day; three skinny, young black men are tied up (badly beaten) with a mob jeering at them, they place tires around the men, douse them with gasoline, and they writhe and shriek - trying to escape their fate - as the flames devour them.
I unfollowed all those morbid Twitter accounts after that - It was the worst thing I've ever seen on the internet and I wish I could unsee it.

Hell, as we're led to believe by the church, is what I saw there on Twitter, times billions of people, times FOREVER.
An argument that once convinced me to be an atheist was if God wants us to choose by our own free will to be Christians and accept forgiveness WHY is the alternative the most terrifying and awful imaginable scenario - being on fire permanently?

Might the idea of hell be something Christians got wrong? Exogenous dogma borrowed from pagan religions that the early Roman church adopted for the purpose of political control?

Red Pill Gospel: Christianity, before it was ruined by Christians by Forrest Maready suggests that hell is not, in fact, a biblical idea...

While this may surprise you, most people are shocked to learn that when it comes to the Old Testament and mentions of the infinite suffering of hell, there is nothing about that either. Before you go run grab your Bible to find a mention of the word hell, notice I did not say the word hell doesn’t appear in the Old Testament. I’m saying where the word hell does appear, it never means eternal suffering.
When we see the word hell appear in the Bible, specific imagery comes to mind—often ghastly scenes of suffering and anguish. In reality, the word Sheol was used literally—to indicate a place of the dead, or metaphorically—as a source of tremendous anguish. The concept of an actual physical or spiritual place of eternal, never-ending suffering simply does not appear in the Old Testament.
This may be difficult for you to accept, but at least consider something: Throughout both the Old and New Testament, all of the words our English bibles use for hell always refer to a specific physical thing or metaphorically as something horrible. They never make reference to perpetual suffering or torment, something that was completely at odds with the God of the Bible.

Might the lake of everlasting fire and suffering be something the church got wrong?
I'd argue that the idea of hell does much to undermine Christianity - the most terrifying conceivable idea robs us of our capacity to make a sober decision about accepting salvation and it presents God as this bipolar psychopath.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love the author so I got the book. This book is really quiet horrible in all ways. For the good, I did enjoy the section on John Calvin. Good info and was eye opening. The section on Catholics was nothing new to me. But the rest was pretty bad. I gave it an effort too. I wanted to see his point of view and understand his argument, and not just brush it off. I about threw the book across the room in the last leg of the book when the author says he won’t use scripture as a way to argue his points because they can be twisted. I wanted to yell at the book “well if you can’t quote scripture because it can’t be trusted, what are we basing any of this discussion on?!” I found my self segueing scripture after scripture in my own head to the arguments. It almost feels like a call for a cult of some sort. I do believe the church in America is deeply sick. I know it’s got problems. But this book isn’t the answer.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great place to start with questions

The parts about Calvin drone on a bit too long. There are other topics that could be addressed, but that's really the point of the book. It's a red pill wakeup call, and it does that well.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I actually really enjoyed this book. I like the fact that he goes into the history of Catholicism and Calvinism. I also really like that he was able to question some concepts of Christianity to form his own ideas, instead of blindly believing everything he was taught. I don't agree with everything in the book, and would really like to ask him some questions, but overall I enjoyed hearing his unique perspective.