I have encountered a significant rebuttal to my assertions against a Christian God. I believe that it adequately addresses the argument I have made, and shall display a form of it below. However, before I do that, I would like to detail what the previous essay DID discover.

In the previous essay, I said the following statement which I still believe to be true:

“Now I must ask, for what reason would God create the necessity of sacrifice to forgive sin, if he were to later crucify himself (i.e. Jesus) to make love the only necessity to sin? It’s like glorifying self-mutilation; for no reason other than to mutilate oneself, because God did not need to be sacrificed.”

(Briefly, I would like to correct one word. Many Christians believe in the Trinity, which is the reason I used the word “himself.” Looking back, it would work equally well to simply use “His son.”)

The truth to which I am speaking of is that God himself would have had to create the rule to sacrifice; he would have required it because of either two reasons: (1) by his choice, or (2) by his nature, or, perhaps, (3) a mixture of both. Let us briefly address each.

(1) seems obviously false, at least at first. Why would God inflict pain on Himself, if there were no other reason to do so? (note: if God is all powerful, shouldn’t He be able to simply forgive our sins?). I will quickly dismiss this contention, as I do not think it will be contested.

(2) seems more plausible. What part of God’s nature would require self mutilation? I am not one to follow the C.S. Lewis argument that Jesus died essentially, so He “could see from eyes of flesh,” as Job accused him of not being able to. And the reason He needs to do this, according to Lewis, is because “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.” (I forget which one of his essays this came from, apologies for that). This seems absolute ludicrous, God is all knowing—how could Lewis assert that He must die in order to learn?

That doesn’t make any sense; so in my opinion, Lewis’s argument is false. However, there may be something to number (2). I will explore it more deeply in my analysis of (3)

(3) is that God had Jesus die because it was both his choice and his nature (some, determinists would argue that they are the same thing. I will not go into that here). This seems to have much more plausibility to me. To analyze it, let us take a step back and attempt to analyze God as he was creating mankind.

In the Beginning, there was nothing except God (or so we assume). Why then did he create men? I answered this in the last essay; and I still hold to it—he did so to allow love into the world. But to have love, one must have free will; love is meaningless if comes from a being who cannot choose whether to love or not. But this meant a great paradox—in making love, God had to allow evil to enter the world. But he is God, how could he let evil in! What was he to do?

The necessity of this evil must have despaired God greatly. So what was he to do? Repent. Yes, strange as it may seem; God repents for creating evil; and he takes on each of our repentance—a repentance which we had no way to avoid, through the death of his son. (This is where the Trinity makes much more sense; as God would indeed be punishing himself by having his son killed and tortured) Does this mean that God himself committed a sin? Of course not; God is infallible and would never commit sin. But choosing the lesser of two evils is hardly being sinful. If a man points a gun to my head and orders me to kill either my child or two strangers, would it be a sin for me to kill the two strangers? I do not believe so (if you do, reduce it to one stranger and ask the same question). Although I would kill the strangers, would that mean that I would have no remorse over what happened? No, I would feel horrible remorse over what I was forced to do.

So God was sad that he had had to create evil along with good, so again, what did he do? He took the sins of those he had created upon himself—that seemed to be the most loving thing he could do—in order to return the love his creation showed for him (Appendix A). As long as his creation believes in him and that he forgave their sins, they will go to heaven. This allows God to balance out the evil he created through his own divine repentance (Appendix B). This makes sense since. In human terms, it takes some kind of self inflicted pain, from simple remorse to personal torture, for us to forgive ourselves the evil we chose to create. God, being completely good, would undoubtedly feel more remorse than we do.

In summary, Jesus died on the cross to remove the sin which was inevitably created by God’s desire to have love enter the universe. He died willingly, of his own will, because there was no other justified alternative. When he created evil, he felt the need to repent for it; which in turn forgave us the evil we cannot control. This fits with the loving and just God whom I personally believe is the only being worth believing in.

(note: this essay does not, in any way shape or form, dismiss “My Religious Treatise” (also published on this site). In that essay, I plainly said that I believe almost nothing which is proclaimed in the bible—particularly the Old Testament. Just because I now acknowledge the historical evidence that Jesus died and was reborn (there may be another essay on this in the future), that does not mean I accept the bible as infallible. I accept reason as the only infallible thing, with faith being a necessity to simply surviving (Appendix C). This essay’s intention was to acknowledge that I may have been mistaken in my initial reasoning, not to revert myself back into a Fundamentalist Christian.)

Appendix

A: If his creation does not show him love, then he does not give them forgiveness—hence the existence of hell. Personally, I am unsure as to who goes to Hell, and I tend to believe that there is a realm similar to Purgatory for those who are simply unbelievers but live a moral life. However, I could hardly consider myself a good guide for your spiritual path. Hell is used to bring fear into the hearts of men who do not know where they go after they die (as none of us do); thus hell can bring us out of the irrationality in believing in Atheism (see my “Irrationality of Atheism”).

B: This does not absolve of humans repenting—it simply absolves us of the mistaken idea that we must repent for sins which are caused because of original sin. For instance, a twelve year old going through puberty should never have to repent for having exotic fantasies about girls in his class—and neither should any other person have to repent for feelings, emotions, and thoughts which they cannot control. Such things are not our fault, and thus we cannot be held accountable for them (whether they are a sin or not is debatable; but I hold it as self-evident that we cannot be held accountable by a just being for something which we have no control over).

However, if you murder someone or commit rape, or willingly steal from the local grocery store—then repentance is up to you. With the help and love of God, you may be forgiven (I, personally, hope there is no forgiveness for murderers and rapists. However, I do not claim to know what God thinks).

C: i.e. you don’t KNOW that reality exists and is predictable, there is no logical necessity to the laws of physics (as we can yet observe). However, it is extraordinarily convenient and helpful to human existence to put faith in the truth of the reality of the senses, just like it is convenient to believe in God. As Voltaire once said, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him."