(Easter) Sunday Soapbox: Sacrificing Logic

April 12th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy

As I write this, the minutes are rapidly running out of Easter Sunday 2009. Arguably the most “holy” holiday on the Christian calendar, Easter is the celebration of the central story that underlies the entire faith; the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The point of the resurrection story is that is represents a shift from the way sin was handled by the Bronze-Age Hebrews, from whose guilt-ridden ranks the Christians eventually emerged. If you were Jewish and you messed up, you had to slaughter and burn a bunch of livestock as an offering, to earn God’s forgiveness.

After a couple millennia of bitchin’ barbecue, God apparently decided he had to watch his cholesterol, so he came up with a compromise. He sent Jesus (who, according to conventional Christian doctrine was simultaneously God and his own son) to Earth as a sort of catchall sacrifice. Jesus died a horribly ghastly death, and this was sufficient to earn forgiveness for the sins of everyone who had ever lived, or would ever live in the future. Then, to prove his divinity, Jesus (God) rose from the dead and did some more preaching before went back to heaven to be with his father, who was also God. One supposes that he was literally beside himself.

I have a question about this. I know, you’re shocked.

For now, we’re going to ignore the squirrely math that says that three guys can be three guys and one guy at the same time, since Dr. Manhattan managed that in Watchmen. We’re also going to look past the wildly improbable claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. He could have been a zombie, or he could have gone to the same apothecary as Juliet. Either way, that’s a mindbender for another time. Instead, we’re going to focus on the internal logic of the story that God sent Jesus to Earth as a sacrifice, to forgive the sins of the whole world

My question is this. Who, or what, was Jesus sacrificed to?

Think about it. A ritual sacrifice generally implies that there’s someone – a god, a king, a godking – on the other side of the transaction, waiting for you to give him the right combo platter of offerings so that he can forgive whatever transgression you’ve committed. So who was waiting to accept the offer of the crucified Jesus?

Doesn’t it have to be God himself? For a couple of thousand years, Jewish folk who strayed off the straight and narrow had to gather some fresh young animals and sacrifice them to God while asking for forgiveness. (The rules for it all are laid out in unbelievably painstaking  and specific detail in Leviticus.) That was the way it worked. You sinned, you made a burnt offering to God, and he forgave you.

If you believe in the concept of a single all-powerful sky-grandpa who controls the Universe from the comfort of his divine lounge chair, there isn’t anyone (or anything) else available to accept the sacrifice. There’s just God, hanging around, jotting down our sins and snacking on roasted lamb (well done, thank you very much). So when he decided that it was time to forgive the sins of the whole current and future population of the world in one go, he had to have a human sacrifice… why, exactly?

I mean, come on. He’s GOD. Doesn’t he, by definition, make the rules at his divine whim? In fact, isn’t the whole reason why sins are sins in the first place because he said so? If he wanted to change the way people were forgiven for the sins they committed, why did he need to do it by letting his son – who may or may not also have been himself – die in one of the nastiest ways ever conceived by a bunch of glorified apes who are really good at coming up with ways to hurt each other?

Before I wrote this diatribe, I actually tried to do some research, to come up with an answer that wasn’t based entirely on my fuzzy memory of Methodist upbringing. We may be the unsalted cracker of Christian denominations, but Methodists can dodge a logical contradiction as well as anyone. The response I repeatedly came across is summed up by the following declaration from allaboutfollowingjesus.org;

Jesus was a sacrifice because human beings sin against God’s holiness. Sin must be and is punished. There is no exception to this rule. Anyone with unforgiven sin in his life faces the horrifying prospect of eternal separation from God. No forgiveness exists unless someone capable of forgiving our sins pays the penalty of shedding his blood. Hebrews 9:22 says, “In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”

No exception to the rule? He’s GOD! How can there possibly be a rule that he can’t change? How can he be bound to follow them if he changes his mind? I see two possibilities. Either he made a rule so powerful that he couldn’t change it, or there is some deeper, more fundamental law out there that even God is obliged to follow. Either way, it suggests that God’s power is fettered, constrained by a rule that he can’t overcome. Isn’t that sort of the opposite of omnipotence?

Of course, there’s another, darker explanation. Maybe God chose to abide by the sacrifice for forgiveness clause in the divine contract. Perhaps he could have forgiven us all, and skipped the brutal murder of an innocent man,  but he didn’t want to.

In the end, it all comes back to Epicurus, and a version of the dilemma he described some 2,300 years before Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ treated moviegoers to the snuff film that the Bible mostly just hints at. God was either not powerful enough to forgive sin without a sacrifice, or too bloodthirsty to give us a pass without some serious crucifying. Either way, I don’t see much there worth worshipping. And if I ever meet him, I’m definitely going to tell him so.

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Discussion (6)¬

  1. DanTV says:
    April 13, 2009 at 6:08 am

    As an atheist, I agree wholeheartedly that there’s something very wrong with the convoluted, unjust, and often revised set of rules God lays down in virtually all major religions. As a pedant, I feel obliged to point out that I think the conventional answer to the forgiveness thing is that because God is good, he has to keep any promises he makes, including the one about needing a sacrifice. And being good is pretty much the one thing that *can* constrain him. Why a good, omniscient being needs to keep adding to his promises and generally tweaking the details over a thousand years or so, and then decides he should start over and dies a painful death to get rid of the most inconvenient ones is anyone’s guess.

  2. wapy says:
    April 13, 2009 at 6:14 am

    O_O I am amazed.
    Well, maybe Chrisitanity is a funny thing :3 I am a Christian (so far as I can tell), but I never believed that God and Jesus could be one and the same thing – if one is called Father, someone else has to be called Son – that’s how it seems to me. About the third one… Let it be.

    Now that I’ve read this all through, I think that maybe you’re skipping one or two things. I am nobody to tell you that, but I can try to tell what I think (that probably doesn’t have to do with most religious people, but anyway) – the sacrifice was not made to God. It was made to Mankind. We were the ones needing it, not God. God doesn’t need to shed his son’s blood out of anything, we needed. We wanted to do it and we did it (blah, the Romans and everybody who said ‘Yes’ at the time). But then again, I do not think this makes it easier anyway – it doesn’t steal away my idea that, if you wish to be Perfect, you cannot be Free and you cannot make your own choices. For Perfect beings do not make unperfect choices, isn’t it ;3 If they can’t do something, they can’t be free…
    But then again, I’m sure someone will drop here and say: ‘It’s God’s will, and we humans are too small to see it entirely’. (that’s what they always tell me).

  3. catgirl says:
    April 13, 2009 at 1:23 pm

    For now, we’re going to ignore the squirrely math that says that three guys can be three guys and one guy at the same time,

    Actually, I think it was originally just the two of them, and the Holy Spirit was invented sometime in the 4th or 5th century by a priest because people in general really love the number 3.

    Either way, I kind of think of the trinity as similar to some views of the Hindu Brahman, where all the gods are part of the Brahman. They are individuals while still all being part of the main thing. It’s like if you have a piece of taffy, you can pull of little individual taffy pieces, and you can put them back and keep taking them off. In that way, they are all individual pieces while simultaneously being part of the main taffy. You can even pull off pieces without tearing them away completely so they are still connected. (I apologize for the ridiculous but apt analogy.)

  4. RyogaM says:
    April 14, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    Thanks for the Linkee!

    This, more than anything, drives me nuts about the Jesus story and the bible god. According to the Triple “All” Bible God Hypothesis, God had to make the rules for sacrificing. He did it. He’s the one that decided the blood of animals had “magic power” to “cleanse” sins. He could have used fruit juice, olive oil, piss, water, any liquid, but, no, he choose one (of a few) liquids which you obtain by violating the bodily integrity of a living being.

    What a moron.

    Think of it, if god said, “I’ll forgive your sins if you piss on this holy boot” Jesus would have had a MUCH nicer time.

    Now, the second part of the story that drives me nuts, is the idea that we should feel gratitude because Jesus “suffered” for our sins by being tortured and dying and going to hell for about 36 hours. So, lets say Jesus suffered 6 hours of torture before his death. That’s 42 hours of suffering. That’s 2520 minutes. That’s 151200 seconds. 151200 seconds of suffering. There are, currently, about 6,000,000,000 people living on Earth. Since the beginning of human history, there may have been as many as 10,000,000,000. And god suffered for all of their sins. All of them. That means, god suffered, for me, personally, for my sins, .00001512 seconds of pain.

    Yeah, thanks, but, you needn’t have bothered.

  5. Scooter Grant says:
    April 22, 2009 at 4:30 pm

    @wapy: “I am a Christian (so far as I can tell), but I never believed that God and Jesus could be one and the same thing – if one is called Father, someone else has to be called Son – that’s how it seems to me”

    So you’re a Christian, but you don’t dig the Nicene Creed?

    I’m trying to understand where you’re coming from.