Life after death?

[Purplundy]

Does the idea of sacrifice itself, especially (and perhaps doubly so) as a part of a redemptive pass to heaven ever strike you as being poorly thought out?

That's an entirely different argument to be made, and truthfully it's hard to make sense out of it.
The way I see it is that, in the Bible, the human race loses sight of how to be good because the first human beings set the bar pretty low, and, in their search for God, resorts to the Torah, a set of rules that contain legitimate guidelines for social justice tampered with the regressive culture of the time.
Jesus walks onto the scene and claims that God can be found in him. He appears to be correct; his teachings filter out the good that is in the Torah and use it to create a model of how to live a moral life based on altruism. This upsets the Jewish elite and on the charge of attacking the societal norm, he is publicly humiliated and executed by the Roman government.
Of course, this is not absolute truth, but basically, the storyline of the Bible asserts that:

1. Mosaic law is all you have.
   
2. You would have gone to hell if you followed Mosaic Law because it sometimes advocates for bad things.
   
3. Jesus needed to give you something better than Mosaic Law, something that would get you to heaven.
   
4. For Jesus to give you a law that would get you to heaven, he would need to die.
   
5. Therefore, Jesus chose to die so that you could get to heaven.
   

Again, those were all blatant generalizations. That's just how it plays out.