ATONEMENT
know that the belief in my sacrifice on the cross
is the cornerstone of most of the churches as stated
in the Bible, and is interpreted by the churches
and the commentators on the Bible. It is said that
my death carries with it a meaning of some price
paid by me for the redemption of mankind from their
sins (Matthew 20:28), and the punishment that they
would have had to undergo would be paid for by
my suffering and death. It is said in various parts
of The New Testament that my blood washes away
all sin (Revelation 1:5), and that my death on
the cross satisfies God's demands for justice.
There are many similar expressions conveying the
same idea. However, these sayings of the Bible
were not written by the persons to whom they are
ascribed, but by writers who, in their various
translations and alleged reproductions of these
writings, added to, or eliminated from, the original
writings, until the Bible became filled with false
teachings and doctrines.
Christianity teaches that God sent
his son Jesus to die on the cross to pay for the sins of the world.
This assumes that the events leading up to my death and the people
responsible were also necessary for this debt to be paid. If that
were so, then why is it that Judas, who betrayed me; Pilate, who
sentenced me; and the Jews, who clamor for my death are not considered
saviors of humanity as well, even if you might say only in a secondary
sense, instead of their being thought of as traitors and villains?
Nowhere in the Old Testament
writings is it found as an essential to God's promise of the Messiah
that I had to die asphyxiated on a cross so that my Father in heaven,
who had just revealed himself in me as a God of love, could satisfy a
supposed sense of wrath for human sin.
Some early Christian cults were mistaken in their
understanding of the old Hebrew offerings and had
made the loving Father the executioner of his own
son, a ritual strikingly condemned in the case
of Abraham. In accordance with this mistaken concept
of the Hebrew offerings, a conception never advanced
by me or by the apostles, but by later pagan converts
to Christianity. They made my blood, in a similar
manner as the pagan mystery cults believed, in
some mysterious way, to immediately cleanse man's
soul of all his evil thoughts, deeds and desires, doing vicariously that which
man himself does not make the effort to do, and which is supposed to make
his soul fit to live with God.
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