“What are we to make of the thought that Jesus died for our sins?” asks Elizabeth Anderson in her article ‘If God is Dead’, is everything permitted? “This core religious teaching of Christianity takes Jesus to be a scapegoat for humanity.  The practice of scapegoating contradicts the whole moral principle of personal responsibility.

“If God is merciful and loving, why doesn’t He forgive humanity for its sins straightaway rather than demanding His 150 pounds of flesh, in the form of His own son?”

The doctrine of the Atonement was made by Paul of Tarsus, as Will Durant explains: “Recalling Jewish and pagan customs of sacrificing a ‘scapegoat’ for the sins of the people, Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ: namely, that every man born of woman inherits the guilt of Adam, and can be saved from eternal damnation only by the atoning death of the son of God.

” The idea that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children is contrary not only to the moral principle of personal responsibility but also to every principle of moral justice. In one of his treatises, Kant asked: “How did evil in human nature begin?”  Not through original sin.  “Surely of all the explanations of the spread and propagation of evil through all the members and generations of our race,the most inept is that which describes it as descending tous as an inheritance from our first parents.”

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