Sure it’s easy to find faults in Christianity if you’re an atheist and so on. But you have no idea how frustrating it is to see Christianity in action if you actually have some understanding of spirituality in general. I got into meditation through therapy, though I was suspicious of it first, being your typical “all religion is nonsense” atheist but I had some experiences that prompted me to start listening to some dharma talks and the like online and I started to get what the word “divine” and so on was pointing to. I realized that I had had a really naive understanding of the word “belief”, assuming it’s just… a nice thought you purposefully choose to entertain against all the evidence to the contrary. Through meditation I experienced things though that did map on to the descriptions of religious experiences. Real, visceral experiences, not just beliefs, it’s just that the experiences can’t ever be perfectly captured by words. “Peace that passeth all understanding”. The dharma talks explicitly point this out. Christianity however has people taking the Bible literally though I’m sure plenty of Christians have similar experiences as I do through their practices, it’s just that they word it with Christian lingo where as I would prefer more abstract language. But then the conceptualization of the experience hijacks the experience itself. Another thing dharma talks explicitly warn against. Christianity just rolls with it. It’s a system built on capitalizing on people’s very real “spiritual” experiences and giving them supernatural spin to sell their ultimately, extremely materialistic religion.

You can be mad about Christianity for all the usual things but I’ll add to the pile being mad about it because of how badly they fucking fucked up with actually “shepherding” people and providing real spiritual guidance and instead they focused on accumulating material power and control. There is a subjective, experiential corresponded to words like “god”, “grace” and “divinity” but Christianity (and many others too) focus on generalizing their particular conceptual map to everyone, and tack their dimwit logic and theology on top.

So they had the appeal and power.
They had the spread.
They actually can point to people’s own subjective experiences.
They had one fucking job.

Result: they make Christianity into a significant tool of oppression AND alienate a huge number of people from any kind of spirituality, to the point that many non-spiritual people lowkey really believe themselves supernaturally separate from everything around them, completely isolated in their thinking mind. Then people get existential angst, sense of meaninglessness, loneliness. Sure there are other factors but Christianity is pretty high up there in making people averse to any kind of experiential investigation of metaphysics, despite it being right fucking there for everyone, all the time (“the kingdom of heaven is within you”). And even if people make the mistake of talking to a priest, there’s a good chance the priest just comes from a long line of academically religious people with no experiential understanding of spirituality themselves, they just follow a system. As such, they just repeat Biblical platitudes and not actually connect with the person talking to them (“god works in mysterious ways!”), and they certainly can’t point to “grace” because they don’t have the experience of it themselves.

And as a final fucking stumbling block they introduce themselves is the concept of absolute evil and sin in general. They insist on the idea of an all powerful god but don’t have the fucking balls to admit that yes, that has to mean that “God” is responsible for all the awful things in the world too. It’s fucking lazy. Dealing with that particular issue would require that Christians actually do the work on their own damn asses to build resilience and acceptance in face of adversity and then, provide compassionate help for others (which would only be possible after actually fucking facing their own hell, instead of kicking the can down the road and avoiding the “sin flags”). Instead, they handwave it with “the devil” and “evil” and excuse themselves from any fucking kind of hard psychological work. The absolute fucking hubris. But I suppose a religion that says “face your fucking issues” wouldn’t be popular, much more fun to provide a system that names issues that people can gleefully judge others for.