Written as a compliment to Hitchens, who may not be with us much longer.
How long as humankind been around? Some say as long as 250,000 years, others more like 100,000 years. Let's take the conservative value of 100,000 years.
For 97,000 of those years, god regarded his ultimate creation with folded arms. We often died in childbirth, or our mothers did. Few of us survived childhood, and those of us who did lived to about 40, if they were lucky. Dental disease, ignorance of sanitation, and other things our primitive ancestors could not have imagined killed us slowly, painfully, and in the youth of our ancestors.
But about 3000 years ago, God said "Enough, it's time to intervene. And the best way to do this is by a human sacrifice in the illiterate, backwards Levantine. Not China or India, where people could write, No, but in a savage backwater of the Roman Empire that even Rome despised."
And so a human sacrifice that was sufficient to God did the trick. Of course, it was not much of a sacrifice, since the sacrificed arose two days later, but let's not split hairs.
But human sacrifice it was. This is totally OT stuff. Blood and death pleases god. In this situation, however, the sacrifice was of himself, to himself, and fairly temporary (He arose). Jesus, presumably knowing he would arise, sacrificed little. Certainly he sacrificed less than the thousands of other "criminals" similarly sacrificed for whom death was final.
What thinking person can accept this? What person of self-respect can allow vicarious redemption of his/her sins, especially on such thin grounds? One may be forgiven for sins, but one cannot say they did not happen, that there is no responsibility for them. And one can only really be forgiven for sins by those affected, not Jesus, who allegedly took all sins onto himself. That concept is not only fantastic, but immoral.
It's madness.
C.S. Lewis wrote that either Jesus was the son of god or a madman. His preachments, Jesus, that is, to abandon responsibility for the morrow, to leave one's family, to live for only the moment were either the preachings of a totally mad person who thought the world was coming to a prophesied end Very Soon, or the words of god. Poor Lewis, he never could finish a syllogism, and he concluded that Jesus was god. Even though the end of the world eluded him.
It gets better. From what was Jesus supposed to redeem us? Hell? Jesus invented Hell. The OT does not curse unbelievers to Hell, that is a NT invention, and a somewhat more advanced recognition of the human response to the carrot/stick reaction. The Prince of Peace invented the most hateful, violent, and despicable institution imaginable.
So much for his love for us all.
The Christian idea of Original Sin is now obviously absurd. Fundamentalists, and their moderate enablers, cite Eve's Fall as the source of this hateful and wicked institution. We all know now that there was no Eden, nor were there literal Adam and Eve. The story is metaphorical, at best.
The time has come to regard life, the universe, and everything for what the are. This is why atheism is growing so quickly. It's liberating. Atheism strips away the mind-forged manacles of superstition and allows the mind to function honestly.
We know the story of Noah's Ark is fiction. It belongs in the book between Rapunzel and Hansel-and-Gretel. The data are known, and the conclusions are iron-clad.
Now is the time to free yourself, and especially your children, from the self-imposed slavery of religion. The Hubble Telescope is a far, far, more impressive and humbling instrument than the Bible could ever be.
nsns
Original Post