If you’ve followed some of my OPs and comments, you may have gleaned that I don’t consider the traditional Christian narrative (as expressed so succinctly in John 3:16) to be factually accurate. But to be honest, I can’t say I fully get that narrative. Let me try to re-tell it, along with some of the stuff I don’t get. Maybe you can help.
It all starts with God creating Man in His own image. That’s Adam, and presumably Eve, too. (Eve: Yes? No?) God is perfect, so we are perfect. Except for a few things. First, only God is good. So Adam and Eve and you and I are not good. (Or was Adam good, but then after he sinned, only then not good? Already, I’m confused.) Also, Adam and Eve were gullible. A lowly serpent comes along and tells them they don’t have to listen to their Almighty Father, and they say, “guess you’re right, what could go wrong.” God, being omniscient, is not gullible. So we are made in God’s image except for two tiny details: We’re not good, and we’re gullible.
So the combination of being not good, and gullible, and having free will led to one collossally poor choice: They disobeyed God’s command to not eat a certain fruit. The punishment for disobedience is severe, and they were cast from the garden and deprived of eternal life. Due to some toxic combination of being not good in the first place, being free, and a mighty hangover of Original Sin, people went around for thousands of years doing horrible things.
I won’t dwell on God’s first attempt to set things straight via a mighty flood, as it is not central to our story. It was not notably successful, which I find to be a bewildering underperformance for an almighty deity. But. . .moving on.
The crux of the matter comes about 2,000 years ago when God sends his Son to save us. The plan appears to be two-fold: First, teach us good lessons; second, ascend a cross to suffer and die on our behalf, to vicariously pay the price we have been vicariously paying for Adam and Eve’s bad decision. And then rise up from the dead.
And so on to my next bewilderment: This is all necessary because the wages of sin is death. But then what is death? Is it the act of dying, or is it being dead forever? In Adam and Eve’s case and in ours, it is apparently being dead forever. In Jesus’s case, it is merely the act of dying. So how is it then that Jesus really paid the price for us? Or was it just theater? If God’s justice is perfect, and vicarious punitive theater fulfills God’s perfect justice, should we think about revisiting America’s legal code? [Your honor, my son Jesse here has agreed to go to prison to serve my life sentence; great will be the celebration when he comes home on the third day.]
But there’s a catch: In order for salvation to work, you have to believe in its specific mechanism. Which baffles me further. This is unlike shunshine, which warms you regardless of whether you believe in photons, or food, which nourishes you regardless of whether you believe in amino acids. I do not understand how God’s perfect salvation can be less perfect than the sun or a beefsteak. Maybe someone can help me understand that.
What I do understand is that humans haven’t stopped doing evil as a result of Jesus’s previous two appearances. This necessitates a third visit, mysteriously labeled as the “second” coming. We are assured this will result in floods of blood (apparently more cleansing than water, though Lady MacBeth might not think so), and that people will then stop doing evil. Frankly, I’m not quite sure how that works.
Which leads me to my final bewilderment for today: We are told that our current mess is because Adam and Eve were free to obey or not obey. But AFAIK, we will still be free after the third coming (those of us who picked the correct door anyway). If we are still free, will we not still be free to sin? And what then shall assure us we won’t eat some damn apple, or rape our cousin?