Why Jesus Can’t Save Me From My Sins

Escaping the cannibal cult

My girlfriend asked my why Christians celebrate Good Friday, the day that their god was horrifically murdered. I told her that his death gave them the opportunity to drink his blood and eat his flesh so that they could gain immortality.

Why are Christians obsessed with human sacrifice?

In the Christian mindset, all human beings have sinned and fallen short of the glory of god. This is a fundamental tenet of their faith. They think that we are born as evil sinners, and we all need the intervention of god in order to be forgiven. In their worldview, that intervention came in the form of a god that impregnated a woman who gave birth to a divine baby who grew up into a holy man who lived without sin and eventually become a human sacrifice for us all, so that we would not perish and have everlasting life.

In order to accept the idea of a god who sacrificed himself for our sins, first we must accept the idea of a god as well as the idea of sin, a transgression against a god. If we don’t believe in a god, than there is no way to sin. Logically, our transgressions against a god are our own transgressions against a god. Transgressions are acts by individuals, and cannot be traded like physical commodities. Nobody, not even a god, can change that simple fact. Still, humans feel bad about our own bad behavior some times, and so we invented human sacrifice.

Human beings have a long, bloody history with human sacrifice. Noted historian Joseph Campbell points out that human sacrifice is found at the early stages of most literate cultures. He “identifies two orders of sacrifice in the pre-historic world. The hunting cultures of Paleolithic and Neolithic eras centered around a shamanic ‘animal master’ — most often the primary food animal — who is hunted and killed, but then reborn through rites the hunters perform… In planting cultures what develops is the myth of the dead-and-resurrected god: a man (or sometimes a woman) is told to kill the god and bury his corpse, out of which grows the primary food plant that feeds the region — from the coconut in the South Pacific, to the corn in Longfellow’s treatment of a Native American version of this myth in ‘Hiawatha’ — and we find echoes sounding through…