If you are looking for an easy way to prove to yourself that Jesus is not God, try this simple experiment. Take a small child, perhaps age 4 or 5, to church on Sunday and let the child watch communion. You may experience something like this:

Child: Daddy, what are they doing?

Daddy: Well dear, this part of the service is called communion.

Child: What's communion?

Daddy: Well, it's where... Well, it's... you know, what we do is we eat Jesus' body to... Well, it's complicated. Let me see...

Child: We eat Jesus' BODY???

Daddy: Yes. Well, no, but...

Child: Why do we need to eat Jesus??? I don't want to eat Jesus!!!

Daddy: No, no, no. It's OK honey. It's OK. Be quiet now, don't cry in church. Shhhh. Shush. Now it's OK.

Child: But Daddy, I don't want to eat Jesus!

Daddy: Mom, help me out here.

Mom: Honey, it is a holy sacrament. You see, we eat Jesus' body and we drink his blood because...

Child: I have to drink his blood too??? Mommy, I don't want to drink blood!!!

Mom: Honey, calm down! You don't actually drink his blood.

Child: But that man up there is holding up a cup and he is saying that it is Jesus' blood! Mommy! I want to leave! I am leaving!

Mom, Dad: No honey! Wait! We can't leave now!

Because Christians have been participating in the communion rite for many years, they tend to forget just how bizarre this ritual is. But any child sees it with fresh eyes. And many children are, naturally, horrified at the thought of eating Jesus' body and then drinking his blood. It is grotesque in the extreme and a child implicitly understands that.

Have you ever wondered where this ritual came from, or why billions of people would participate in a ritual that is this bizarre? First, let's look at the part of the Bible that prescribes the ritual. You find it in Mark, Chapter 14:

And as they were eating, he took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them, and said, "Take; this is my body." And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.

Jesus gets far more graphic, however, in John chapter 6:53-55:

So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.

Imagine that you are a normal person, and you have never been exposed to Christianity before. Now imagine that a Christian comes up to you and quotes John 6:53. Any normal adult would rightfully assume the Christian to be insane. Thus, you never see a bumper sticker that says "John 6:53."

However, the assumption is accurate. The dictionary describes cannibalism in the following way:

The usually ritualistic eating of human flesh by a human being

You may be beginning to see a pattern here. We have already discussed in chapter 14 that God, in the Old Testament, is quite captivated by animal sacrifice. God tells people how they are to sacrifice animals in minute detail. In the New Testament things move to a completely new level and God requires human sacrifice. God is not the only one who gets excited by human sacrifice -- a flood of Christians saw the movie "The Passion of the Christ."

Now we learn that the human sacrifice is not enough, and we need to ritualistically cannibalize Jesus' body, and satanically drink his blood, to have "eternal life."

What does your common sense tell you about all of this? Look at it through the eyes of a child. What we are talking about here is cannibalism, and what Christians are doing looks exactly like a pagan/satanic ritual. If you are a Christian, the two questions you may be asking yourself right now are:

1. Why in the world am I, as a sane individual, participating in ritualistic cannibalism? How in the world did I stoop to this point?

2. Why would an all-powerful, all-loving God demand that I do this? What sort of God am I worshipping?

The source of the ritual

If you are curious, here is why Christianity contains this bizarre ritual. It is not the case that an all-powerful God in heaven demands this behavior. All of the rituals in Christianity are completely man-made. Christianity is a snow ball that rolled over a dozen pagan religions. As the snowball grew, it freely attached pagan rituals in order to be more palatable to converts. The process is described succinctly and accurately in the book "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. The book offers these two accounts of the acretion process:

• "The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual - the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of "God-eating" - were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions."

• "Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian God Mithras - called the Son of God and the Light of the World - was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. By the way, December 25 is also the birthday or Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Even Christianity's weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans."

When you research it historically, you realize that Jesus was a human being like any other. The mythology of his birth, life and death are pagan stories that are all man-made.