There are some rather profound paradoxes at the heart of the Christian narrative. One of those paradoxes comes from the fact that it is only because Adam & Eve sought to be like God, by believing the serpent in the garden of Eden, that God would eventually become like Adam & Eve.
It is a only because humanity sought to become divine, in other words, that the divine would eventually become human. It is as if God, who had destroyed humanity once before for being overly defective, had finally decided he would have to come down here and show us all how to be the kind of humans he had always hoped we would be. And in our constant striving to be like God, we killed him for failing to follow our religious rules and dogmas.
Perhaps even more ironic is the fact that Christianity is a religion that calls people to be like Jesus (i.e. like God) by eating of a Jesus who hung upon a cross, in the very same way the serpent in the Garden of Eden lured Adam & Eve to eat of the fruit that hung from the tree of Knowledge, with the promise that by doing so they would become “like God” (i.e. like Jesus).
This paradox reflects yet an even greater one, which is that Christians would have had to condemn Christ to crucifixion, much as the Jews are alleged to have done in the courtyard when they choose Barabbas over him, in order to save not only their Christianity, but their own everlasting souls.
As such, even if the Jews who cried “crucify him” ultimately “knew not what they do,” as Christ said as he hung in agony upon that cross, Christians would've had to make the very same choice as the Jews had made, as much to save humanity as to fulfill Gods divine plan for our salvation.
On the one hand, then, the story offered by religion is one that tries to teach humanity a moral lesson, even through Christians would’ve necessarily had to make the same choice to crucify Christ as the Jews, in order to learn that lesson, fulfill God's plan, and secure their ticket to paradise. Jesus's fate on the cross, in this respect, was sealed as soon as Adam & Eve ate a piece of fruit from the tree of knowledge; for as soon as they had condemned humanity by pulling down the one, they had ensured that we could only redeem ourselves by hanging up the other.
On the other hand, modern society has only increased the levels of abstraction between the choices we make and the consequences those choices have in the real world. The distance between cause and effect, illustrated by the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a hurricane in Florida, has today grown to such a level of complexity and abstraction, that virtually every person on the planet "knows not what they do."
The person who drives a gas guzzling SUV or flies around the world every day, is certainly not seen as in anyway responsible for climate change or environmental pollution, in the very same way that Wall Street traders at giant financial institutions never see themselves as the cause of wars or famines. In fact, not a single German in the docket at Nuremberg saw themselves in anyway responsible for the Holocaust. And this is because no snowflake ever saw itself as responsible for causing an avalanche, even though Christians around the world all see themselves, along with every other human being, as being equally guilty of killing Christ.
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