So I'm fairly well versed in Christian lore, but I just don't get it. Here's my understanding of the premise of Christianity.
A long time ago God created hell so he could send some rebellious angels there. Later he created earth and people. The people disobeyed him by eating some fruit, and "sin" came into the world. Now, because Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating fruit*, they were doomed to hell, where God sent all those bad angels eons before. I'm not really sure why this is, but it just is. Two to four thousand years later, depending on who you ask, God decided he'd give the people a break and sent his son Jesus to earth to die for everybody's sins. Why it took God a few thousand years to get his act together enough to do this is not clear. Anyway, Jesus, who was born of a virgin (apparently abstinence isn't 100% effective after all) was God's son, but was also God. He had to die, because that was the only way God, an omniscient and omnipotent being, could figure out to resolve the whole people are sinful because the first people ate some forbidden fruit and now they're all going to hell thing. So, because of some rules that God made up (I'm assuming, I mean, he created everything, right?) he had to kill his son so that he didn't have to just damn everybody to hell anymore. Once Jesus was killed after living a completely sinless life he rose from the grave and now all you have to do to get to heaven is telepathically tell him that you accept him into your heart.
Are you confused? Me too.
If any biblical scholars can explain to my why any of this stuff had to happen I'd be grateful. I really don't understand why God had to go through this big multi-millennia long drama in order to get people into heaven. Why couldn't he have just done it from the start? Does anybody understand this stuff, or do Christians just never stop to think about how the premise behind their religion doesn't make any sense? Lots of questions.
*I'll address how the story of the Fall is an illogical and unfair mess in a future post.
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You should check Julian Jayne's Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
It's an interesting book which seems relevant to your post if you correlate religion to some of his ideas, which state that "god" and certain religions were just hallucinations of a sort, and thus literally symbolized human behavior via projected deity.
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