As is evident from the dates of my posts in 2010--one on January 2, one today on December 25--my passion for blogging about religious bullshit fades considerably. But I did find myself today, on the alleged birthday of the savior, considering again the inanity of the entire foundation of Christianity.
Why, I wonder, does an all-loving, all-powerful God, require the torture and death of a supposedly perfect, innocent God/Man being, in order to "save" the rest of humanity (past and present) from eternal torment?
I've never once heard any argument that makes any sense, rationally or emotionally.
I looked up C.S. Lewis' writings on the topic, and found it to be a typically tortured and abstruse "explanation" for the atonement. Here's an excerpt:
Remember, this repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off of if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go through with it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it. Now if we had not fallen, that would all be plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all - to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.
But supposing God became a man - suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and he cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.
Well--that certainly clears things up! What gibberish.
I can still recall with great clarity being a child, reading the Bible fervently and praying my prayers every night and singing my little lungs out at Church, and yet honestly and deeply puzzling as to why this guy Jesus had to die for everyone else. It just didn't compute. No one could ever give me an answer that made any more sense than old Lewis's, above.
And so I feel sure, all over the world today, millions of kids have listened, quietly and secretly confused, to the pious proclamations of parents and preachers solemnly intoning about the birth of the man who "died for our sins."
They are wondering why it's never OK to kill, but God could kill him. Some are quietly trembling, troubled specifically by the gruesomeness of his particular sacrifice, nailed to a cross until he bled to death. Many are trying to do the math of "two wrongs don't make a right--unless it's God."
Future rationalists, many of them. But the majority will probably just, well, go along. "I'm just missing something," they'll think. And later, somehow, after pushing thoughtfulness aside, they'll find it a beautiful and inspirational notion that a being powerful enough to create the totality of the universe, felt it necessary to torture a nice young Jew a few thousand years ago so that every homo sapien who's ever lived or will, can be spared an eternity of hellfire and torment.
Merry Christmas. And God bless us, every one.
