JESUS DOES NOT SAVE
 
The doctrine of the atonement is about how Jesus took the responsibility for our sins and atoned for them in terms of paying a debt of love and punishment for them to God. The doctrine goes is that sin is that which must be atoned for and there is no avoiding it. Unless Jesus deals with the atoning you will have to atone yourself by dying (the Bible says death is capital punishment) and going to Hell to suffer forever. Christians are paying for their salvation with the blood of Jesus. They are paying for it by his murder and agony.  It is striking how fanatical and extreme and barbaric and evil this doctrine is.
 
The weird Christian doctrine that we are to hate sins and treat the sinner as a saint: "Love sinners and hate their sins" contradicts the atonement. If we are not our sins then Christ did not save us by dying for sins for they are not our sins. He is the saviour of our sins not our saviour. If it helps us that is a side effect and not intended.
 
If our sins are so separate from us that Jesus can take them on himself to atone them that means that if you see somebody battering a baby you cannot think badly of that person but only of the action. That totally ruins any hope we have of using fellow feeling as a source of morality and social cohesion.
 
The atonement of Christ is celebrating an injustice regarded as worse than any other collectively. Jesus is believed to be so good that nothing else has value compared to him. Thus it is better for a baby to die in agony than for Jesus to die in agony. It is a horrendous evil. Think on that. It shows that when properly understood your rapport with Christianity is mistaken. The doctrine is sufficient for any decent person to get her or his name removed from Church membership rolls. It is the principle.
 
Remember what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13? "If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing." He wrote that if you commit huge sacrifices for faith but without love then you are just show. And the New Testament is clear that failure to love one person is enough. It is not loving to the victims of the Bible God to worship Jesus. If Paul's insight came from Jesus then that says it all. If the atonement insults Jesus then no true love for Jesus exists.
 
With revenge, the vengeful are often happy to hurt a man's family because they hate the man. Revenge tends to be taken out on the wrong people. The atonement accuses God of having done that with Jesus - he took our sins out on Jesus. That is worse than him doing it to you for Jesus is so great. What God did is evil no matter what you want to think of it. To celebrate the evil is to celebrate divine revenge on an innocent man.
 
The Christians, reading their assumptions into the gospels, say that when Jesus died it seemed to be the end. His followers came to believe that when Jesus died so brutally and shamefully on the cross that he was just another false Messiah like the others for he could not save himself and God was not interested. The gospels never say that the closest friends of Jesus apart from Thomas gave up on Jesus at his death. Christians choose to ignore that and suppose they all gave up on him for the simple reason that they want to silence critics who would have a problem with the apostles expecting Jesus to appear to them after his death. Their expecting it would suggest that the power of faith altered their memories so that they felt Jesus appeared to them or led to them hallucinating the appearances of Jesus. So to keep the evidence looking better than it really does the Church sneaks in assumptions into the Bible.
 
Jesus allegedly rose again. The Church then realised that it could not start teaching that Jesus just died to pull off the big feat of coming back from the dead – for that sounds like bravado and an unfit way for the Son of God to behave - so it began to invent doctrines that Jesus somehow saved us from sin by his death. So the cross as the sign of redemption or salvation has become the basis of Christianity itself. Without it there is no salvation from sin. Just as Christians say that Jesus is the only way to God so the believer says that the cross was the only way Jesus could be the only way to God or the only way to make peace between God and man. The New Testament, which the Christians hold have God working through man as their author, boldly proclaims that Jesus took the punishment due to our sins for us so that we would be forgiven that punishment. This is the rock that Christianity is built on. The resurrection itself was only a testimony to this rock so if the rock is one of talc and not granite then the whole theological structure falls apart and Jesus’ death is God’s Amen to the charge: “Jesus was proven to be a fraud by his death”.
 
Christians follow the thinking of St Anselm of Canterbury.
 
Anselm made the doctrine of atonement extremely degrading by saying that to offend the majesty of God matters and any inherent evil in the crime does not. If you do what God forbids you offend the honour due to God like he was a feudal landlord. The medieval landlord could have you executed for stealing his cow for it offended his majesty though in reality stealing the cow is not that bad. For Anselm, the sin had to be punished in accordance with how it insulted the dignity of God.
 
Anselm declared that God became man in Jesus to atone for all our sins and paid that atonement to God. This presumes that man owes God for sinning and cannot pay what he owes for he is a sinner and the punishment is everlasting torment. Unless he repays he will not be saved. So God came up with a solution, a way to save man. No one can make the payment but God. No one ought to make it but man. So the only answer is that the payment be made by one who is both fully God and fully man, Jesus. This theory derides human goodness. It implies that punishing us is more important than letting us go free. For example, if a man sins seriously and deserves eternal torment, he also should be getting a second chance. If God dropped the punishment, it would follow that God can't administer the punishment for the sake of the man. Though the man should be punished it isn't possible. The view that Jesus had to be man to pay the punishment price to God makes no sense. It is like saying that if a woman commits a crime only a woman should pay the fine. It does not matter who pays as long as it is paid. Even a robot paying would do! If it matters as the argument says then we must reason as follows. It is not a man who needs to atone to God. It is a changed sinful man. The man might need to be purified and forgiven out of mercy and because God needs a saviour before he can atone. The sinless Jesus of the Christians certainly can not be the saviour.
 
The atonement doctrine in teaching that Jesus died to save us implies that if you could get hold of the baby Jesus you would save the world by cutting his throat. It blesses child sacrifice or at least sees this evil as a beneficial thing. The pagans thought that the slaughtering of babies was a beneficial evil.
 
The atonement is an evil doctrine but the Christians put their spin on it to make it look like something that God prepared for us out of pure love. But its nastiness cannot be so easily concealed. The doctrine makes Christianity obsessed with sin rather than good works. Jesus said not that the greatest commandment was to love others but to love God with all your mind and capabilities not part of them. By implication, he asserted a duty to believe in God. You cannot love God unless you believe. Teachings that bully people to believe and to persuade themselves that God is good while the voice inside says "rubbish" are not healthy or good for society. They lead to defensiveness and bigotry. God's mercy becomes sour as it means, "God has the power and right to harm me for my sins and he has forgiven me and that is mercy." That is a self-punisher mentality. You want punishment but you want mercy too and you take mercy because you prefer it a little more. The atonement holds up the justice of God as great but it is unfortunate that its focus is on his punitive and vengeful justice.
 
The Christians argue that Jesus would not give Peter a bath but washed his feet indicating that he took all Peter's sins away and so he did not need a bath. So what did he wash his feet for? They say it is symbolic of how even though sin is pardoned we still damage ourselves with it and need to wipe our feet. A doctrine that turns sin into near-nothing is not a good doctrine.

Jesus’ death had no meaning. The notion that it saved us is indefensible. His death was suicide for he deliberately walked into it and provoked Pilate and the Jews. It was the strongest evidence that he was not from God. It is useless to present his miracles as evidence that this was not so. Evidence has to be subjected to the strongest evidence and made to bend the knee before it. The miracles would be shown to be satanic by his death.  Also, even if they did back Jesus up it is more logical as in easier to believe that he died than that he did miracles – which even Christians admit - so the death evidence would be the victor.
The death of Jesus expresses the duty to give one’s happiness and even one’s existence for the love of a God you cannot see or hear or prove. The message of the cross then is a sinister one. It gives its blessing to fanaticism. The crucifix is pornography of the worst possible kind. As people get familiar with the cross they become insensitive to it. The Church bans pornography for the sake of allowing worse. All psychologists agree that sexuality has a role to play in all we feel. To love the crucified Jesus and make an obsession of him is undeniably perversely sexual. There is a homo-erotic flavour in devotion to Christ among devout Christian men. It has a sadistic strain. Christian women also are conditioned to develop a sick subconscious sexual attraction for the mangled man on the cross. 

BOOKS CONSULTED

 
A SUMMARY OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, Louis Berkhof, The Banner of Truth Trust, London, 1971
APOLOGETICS AND CATHOLIC DOCTRINE, Most Rev M Sheehan DD, M H Gill & Son, Dublin, 1954
DOCUMENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, edited by Henry Bettenson, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979
ESSENTIALS, David L Edwards and John Stott, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1990
JESUS THE ONLY SAVIOUR, Tony and Patricia Higton, Monarch Tunbridge Wells, Kent, 1993
KNOW WHAT YOU BELIEVE, Paul E Little, Scripture Union, London, 1973
OXFORD DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY, Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996
PROFOUND PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY, Rev George Jamieson BD, Simpkin, Marshall, & Co, London, 1884
RADIO REPLIES 3, Frs Rumble and Carty, Radio Replies Press, St Paul, Minnesota, 1942
THE ATONEMENT: MYSTERY OF RECONCILIATION, Kevin McNamara, Veritas, Dublin, 1987
THE BIBLE TELLS US SO, R B Kuiper, The Banner of Truth Trust, Edinburgh, 1978
THE CROSS OF CHRIST, Christadelphian Publishing Office, Shaftmoor Lane, Birmingham
THE CROSS THE VINDICATION OF GOD, DM Lloyd Jones, Banner of Truth, Edinburgh
THE LIBERATION OF PLANET EARTH, Hal Lindsey, Lakeland, London, 1975
THE METAPHOR OF GOD INCARNATE, John Hick, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1993
THE POWER OF THE CROSS, Tony Ling, CMI Publishing, Coventry 1995
THE SACRED EXECUTIONER Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt Hyam Maccoby Thames and Hudson, London, 1982
WHO WILL DELIVER US, Paul Zahl, Fount Original, Collins/Fount, London, 1983
WHY DID CHRIST HAVE TO DIE? Radio Bible Class, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1986
WHY GOD PERMITS EVIL, Dawn Bible Students, East Rutherford, New Jersey

BIBLE VERSION USED

The Amplified Bible