Categorical Aperitif

I think that may become my favorite question re. Christian dogma. P.Z. Myers points out that the most moving thing about the Jesus story—the horrendous self-"sacrifice," like a soldier throwing himself on a live grenade for our sins—is vitiated thanks to that whacky doctrine of Original Sin:

Ask a Christian, and they'll tell us he's saving us from Original Sin, our flawed, weak, inherently wicked natures. But what that sin is is an act committed by a pair of mythological ancestors (they didn't even actually exist), and the sin was being willful, curious and disobedient to an imaginary man in the sky — it was a non-existent crime. I don't believe in being held accountable for my ancestor's weaknesses (as Patti Smith sang, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine"), and in this case I don't even consider what they did to be wrong. So Jesus suffered for an act that I would consider a virtue, committed by myths against a myth? That's no hand grenade, that's a fairy tale. Nobody needs to die to protect me from a fairy tale.

Next problem: what Jesus did didn't even protect me from that fairy tale! Imagine that in some metaphorical sense it was true that there was some heritable taint infecting the entire human race, passed from generation to generation and making us more prone to do wickedness. Instead of a hand grenade, we've been fed a poison that's going to hurt us slowly and horribly.

How does having the sick butcher the doctor make us better?

Indeed, the story's only inspiring when you de-deify Jesus and think of him as a kind, decent man who suffered at the hands of the cruel, short-sighted monsters of his time (who thus serve nicely as symbols of the cruel, short-sighted monsters of all time); when you go instead with the oh-he's-really-God-in-human-form-and-hey-presto!-he's-not-really-dead version of the story, the whole thing seems more like a baroque form of torture p*rn. Which may explain the Mel Gibson movie, I don't know.