The pinnacle of all Christianity is Jesus Christ. And the most essential part of Christ’s life, his main purpose for descending from heaven, was to be the Savior of all humankind and drink from the bitter cup. Bleeding from every pore then being nailed to the cross was the ultimate sacrifice. Jesus was perfect and so was the plan of atonement. Supposedly.
Just as a recap, the story goes that God created the world and the humans to live here. However, he knew that we’d all inevitably mess up and not live according to the perfect criteria for admittance into heaven. Since we’re all set up for unavoidable failure, God came up with a plan to fix this problem. He decided to send his most beloved son to this earth as a sacrifice, require him to suffer in the garden of Gethsemane, and then allow others to torture and crucify him until dead. Rough day for Jesus! But then a few days later, Jesus Christs is resurrected perfectly in a glorified body as the savior and redeemer of all mankind to be praised and loved for all eternity in heaven. Forever and ever. The cost? A few hours of suffering.
Aside from a few minor details that’s the jist of the story. To illustrate my further point I’ll use the often symbolic ‘animal sacrifice’ scenario. Imagine you take the most loved sheep of the field and sacrifice it to appease some law of the gods. A knife to the heart and you’re sad because your favorite sheep is now dead. Oh, but WAIT! Suddenly your beloved sheep is alive again and now it has magical superpowers and better yet the gods are happy. How fortunate! Now, imagine you knew all along that your sheep would be perfectly resurrected and all your friends/family would be saved. Would you even hesitate to sacrifice your sheep? Would you even consider it a “sacrifice”?
Let’s say you have an opportunity to invest or ‘sacrifice’ some of your money. You currently know of a really great deal that will return infinity dollars on every dollar invested. The return on investment only takes a few days. You heard about this particular deal, because you created it.
This is god’s plan for redemption. I do not consider the atonement of Jesus Christ a sacrifice in any sense of the definition. A real sacrifice is a non-refundable offering that you will never get back (like my tithing that I paid to the Mormon church). However, this flawed “sacrifice” story is absolutely essential to all believers of Christ. I might be able to accept the idea if it was intended as a symbolic metaphor, but it’s taught as hard fact.
Aside from the story being flawed, why couldn’t god just forgive us like a true loving father? Considering God was the one who set up the perfect criteria for heaven admittance in the first place, then why did he also have to create the rules for sacrificial forgiveness? God paid the price of his beloved son to meet the requirements he set up for himself. He made a deal with himself. Why didn’t he just cut out the middle man? If I’m extremely wrong in my thinking, please help me understand.
This was the main issue I wanted to address in this article. For those of you who would like to extend the discussion I will bring to your attention the argument that goes further by saying the atonement was actually immoral or unethical. In what way is it appropriate to be forgiven of your sins by having someone else suffer sacrificial death? The punishment of an innocent person for the sins of another is not justice, it’s scapegoating.
I will leave you with this eloquent presentation of Christopher Hitchens’ explanation of immoral atonement.
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