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.