Fair point. I am not very familiar with Orthodox Christianity at all, save a little of the very early history. You also sound fairly well-educated on the subject, which makes you twice over not the usual kind of person who responds to my comments about religion.

So, first, let me apologize for making assumptions; the usual kind of person I get is an American evangelical protestant who hasn’t read most of his or her own bible and is of the opinion that anything important for them to know would be whispered on the wind directly into their ear by god himself, so they have a pretty dim view of learning in general, but also of learning about their religion in specific. That’s clearly not you. My bad.

Second, it’s my understanding that Orthodoxy (probably not the right word, my bad) uses fundamentally the same scriptures as Catholicism and Protestantism, with some additions to the Old Testament. My issues come from the bible’s descriptions of god, events, and people, so I’m going to assume there’s enough common ground that my these translate to Orthodoxy as well as the others. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

I have 3 core issues with Christianity:

1. Original sin: imposing the consequences of one person’s actions on others is called collective punishment and it’s a war crime, and needless to say baking a metaphysical war crime into the very heart of a religion - its origin story - is just not ever going to fly with me. It certainly doesn’t help that this is further complicated by #2.
2. Omniscience/free will: either god is omniscient (lit: all knowledge, which includes perfect knowledge about the future) and free will is impossible so we can’t choose to love god, or he isn’t omniscient. His claims about moral authority are held together by this linchpin, and honestly either way it falls doesn’t look great. If we can’t choose to love god then punishing us for ‘choosing’ otherwise is effectively god punishing others for his own crimes since he made us unable to choose otherwise, so we’re right back on the war crimes train. If he’s not omniscient then he doesn’t have a plan, can’t judge sin in the hearts of men, etc. Is he even still a god at that point? Also that would make him a liar, which again is not a great foundation upon which to build a claim to moral authority.
3. Vengeful/loving god: the Old Testament is full of examples of god as an angry, petty, vengeful tyrant, only for him to change his ways or something in the New Testament and be all about love. There are exceptions in both, obviously, so I’m referring to general trends. I think Jesus had some great ideas (best summed up by Bill & Ted as, ‘Be excellent to each other’), but the rest reads like infantile revenge-porn. And I’m not buying that ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ thing either (that’s probably an evangelical thing), because god sure wasn’t raining fire and brimstone and calling for the wholesale slaughter of the sins, that was inflicted upon the sinners. And their sin mostly seems to boil down to not believing in god.

These, to me, seem like unsolvable, unavoidable paradoxes. I see two paths when faced with them:

1. I’m forced to admit that the ‘perfect eternal Divine Truth’ is neither perfect nor eternal (re:god’s nature purportedly changing) and therefore also not true.
2. What is being passed off as divine truth was either created or corrupted (which doesn’t necessarily imply malicious intent; simple error will suffice) by flawed humans and thus is also not true.

I don’t begrudge people who believe or find comfort in it, mind you, but it’s not for me. I’m searching for Truth, not a search for ‘it’s probably not true but I guess it’s a nice idea?’