Likewise, scapegoating Jesus on a cross makes no sense - even if you believe that punishing someone else can magically absolve your crimes, even before you commit them - without believing that whole fairy tale in the Garden of Eden.
I know a lot of Christians who aren't crazy enough to believe that primitive story in Genesis, but - somehow - they still believe that Jesus had to be sacrificed to make up for it. Of course, they're not thinking it through.
The whole point of scapegoating - a primitive practice which pretty much no one accepts today - is that you magically transfer your sins (often to a goat, thus the name) and then drive off or kill the creature, to take your sins away. But big sins might require a human sacrifice, rather than just killing an animal.
And for really big sins, like that of Adam and Eve in the Garden, even a human sacrifice isn't big enough. (After all, God killed every man, woman, and child on Earth, nearly, in the Great Flood, and that wasn't enough, apparently.)
No, the whole point of Jesus was that you needed to sacrifice a god in order to do magic that powerful.
Well, maybe that made sense to primitive goat-herders who believed in magic and in scapegoats, but it certainly doesn't today. We've grown beyond that.
But if you don't believe that Garden of Eden story literally happened - Adam and Eve, the talking snake, eating the forbidden fruit, the whole bit - then Jesus doesn't make any sense even by those standards.
Of course, making sense isn't a requirement for religions, is it?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment