The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Christianity is the privilege to know a God who would take on your rightful punishment in order to be like Him and with Him for all eternity no matter what the world says about you or God. None of what you said is taught in the Bible.

"Rightful punishment"?

Look, it's really simple:

1) Your Yahweh is a storm-god of the Canaan region (worshiped by the Israelites as El, from which Isra-el gets its name, and later YHWH from the Edomites' YHW), whom the priests of the people who would become known as the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews decided was more powerful than all the other regional gods (such as Baal). We see the roots of this deity's promotion to the Most High Among Other Gods™ in verses like Psalm 82:1, which modern monotheists write-off as talking about human Powers that Be™, but to anyone without a "there must only be one god and that is God" prejudice, it's as plain as day that they failed to excise one of the origin roots of the religion... because the Psalms were precious tradition, I suppose. Or perhaps the priests who did the redacting didn't catch it.

In short, your roots are showing.

2) This being you call God, named Yahweh (or whatever), supposedly created the universe and everything in it; every law of physics, etc, is at the divine behest, who willed it into being. That means that this "rightful" punishment was made by this God when he supposedly created us the way we are. There is no reasonable way to tell me that Yahweh wouldn't have known the nature of his creations when he created them, as your story goes. That means he deliberately laid a trap into which he knew we would fall, then murdered almost everyone, and finally sent himself in human form to be murdered on our behalf, instead of simply forgiving us for behaving as we were created to behave. What a sick, sick fuck!

There is no need to punish us, and thus no need to forgive us of anything... and a vicarious blood sacrifice is about the most disgusting, sick way I can think to accomplish the thing you claim God had to do. It's not really a surprise development when you realize it's the evolution of an idea originally cobbled together from twelve tribes of sheep-sacrificing nomads led by priests who genuinely believed blood was a magical cleanser (see for instance, Leviticus 14).

In short, your story is about an appalling being who is not deserving of worship. But, like the spouse of a violent man, when we point this out to you, you simply go on about his good qualities and ignore the points your friends are making about how abusive he is.

3) All of what we say is taught in the Bible... or is absorbed from Christian culture, which is often less-Biblical than it thinks (for one easy instance, their fierce and fanatical opposition to abortion when the Bible has nothing to say on the subject, and in fact spells out a method for a forced miscarriage of a woman who cheats on her husband, in Numbers 5 : 11-31), and amounts to the same thing. Like I said, above, you are simply picking out the good stuff and ignoring the stuff that's tricky for you. The term for this is "cognitive dissonance", and I know from experience (as does Redbeard) the difficulty of maintaining that wall of separation between facts and your beliefs. We hope you can free your mind, someday.

In short, if you would truly take a step back from your emotional attachment to this idea and REALLY LOOK at what the claims of the Bible are, as told to you by people who are not in your social circles, you would be surprised at how obvious this is.