Any Christian will tell you that Jesus Christ is "our Lord and Savior." But anyone unfamiliar with such a idea (Christians are only too willingly to accept they need a "savior"), is left to scratch their head and wonder, "savior from what?" The most obvious answer to this question is, of course, his own heavenly father, who is as responsible for creating the "devil" and his minions as the U.S. is responsible for creating Osama Bin Laden and wahhabism. .
To the extent a person is simply willingly to "believe" that they needed to be "saved," even though they often have no idea from what exactly, they may still be left to wonder "well, who asked him to do that?"
And this is the problem.
Not only does every single person born after Adam & Eve, have absolutely no say in the circumstances they are born into, one where they are bound as much by a soul stained with original sin's guarantee of death as by the need to spend their life groveling to the God who threatens them with eternal hellfire if they do not, but they also had absolutely no say in the manner in which they were "saved."
That the death and resurrection of Christ, so the Christian claims, is said to have "saved" humanity, is a curious claim indeed, seeing as we have only used our technology to surpass even God's ability to kill in mass. In fact, to anyone who bothers to look across history, one can scarcely see how anything has changed in human behavior prior to the crucifixion of Christ,let alone the flood of Noah, other than that we have improved dramatically in both our ability to kill each other in ever greater numbers, and our ability to convince ever greater numbers of people that it is perhaps the greatest Christian virtue of all to do so (under the right circumstances).
All of the Christian churches in America prior to World War I, for example, argued that it was treason before the state and God to advocate for peace, which is why peace makers like Eugene Debs and others ended up in jail. The Nazi's used the same Christian justifications for killing Jews during the 1930s that the British had used for selling opium in China and killing Bengali's in India the century before, and the United States had used in murdering Native Americans and bombing Japan in World War II.
Sure, we gave the gods we used to rationalize our genocide of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans different names from the ones used in the Old Testament to justify the very same things, but besides that fact, the only difference is that our ability to commit such acts in the name of the God of the New Testament were done in ever greater numbers.
So whether Jesus came to die for our "sins" and "save" us from his own heavenly Father's wrath - which was used so famously to waterboard the entire planet in the days of Noah, and which had apparently resulted in that same God slamming shut the gates of Heaven like a church shutting its doors to the hungry throngs in the streets because someone had dared to drink from a chalice of wine left on the altar - or to save us from the "devil" or the power of death itself, one thing he apparently failed miserably at, was his ability to save us from ourselves.
And worse, he left the world infested with a philosophy that has so often turned the followers of Christ into the most enthusiastic pawns of the Devil.
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