He sewed his eyes shut
because he is afraid to see
He tries to tell me
what I put inside of me
He's got the answers
to ease my curiosity
He dreamed a god up
and called it Christianity
— Nine Inch Nails, "Heresy"
Was Jesus's sacrifice even that significant? What does it even mean for a God to experience death, knowing they will be resurrected. Knowing they could never really die. Knowing they could end the suffering on the cross at anytime if they so chose. The passion of the Christ only has weight if we think of Jesus as a man. A human suffering for us. For a God, it doesn't even matter. It is nothing.
What pain does a God suffer in the equivalent of a blink of eternity? All the torture Jesus underwent and even crucifixion itself pales compared to the pain some humans have endured. Children in our world are raped to death. Men and women have been flayed alive for witnessing some crime or being born the wrong color or to the wrong tribe. Those burned at the stake for witchcraft suffered pain a hundred times over the crucifixion. Nerves firing off endless pain until they are mercifully burned away from the heat. Torture that would be unimaginable to the unknowing and ignorant goes on each day somewhere in our world. For a God it was nothing, a blip of a moment in forever. So small a time period to a deity it hardly even matters.
So why does eternal salvation hang on accepting this farce? This sham sacrifice that cost God almost nothing. Cost God less suffering than he allows some human beings to endure.
What does the cross represent but the shrug of an all powerful deity. A puppet show hung with the weight of eternity by a jealous God who hates competition or worse, being ignored.
A God of eternal Ego, so self centered that the smallest pain it must endure should be our whole life's center. In a human life it would be a stubbed toe, at worst a fractured finger. Healed in weeks at the outside. Suffering that amounts to nothing against the span of eternity.
Yet it is to be our center. Our life is to revolve around it. Our eternal salvation hinges on us accepting it as the greatest event of galactic history. That God would suffer a broken nail. That God would experience just a taste of the death he condemned all living things to but for an instant.
We are to be grateful and grovel before Him for tasting what we must endure. Forget not that the cost of sin being blood sacrifice was a choice by God. He chose to make the penalty for our so-called defiance. He chose to require suffering and bleeding for salvation. While earth drowns in the blood shed by God directly or with his allowance, his pitiful gasp on the cross is to give us pause and change our lives. His taste for blood only slaked when he spilled a bit of his own.
Tell the starving child that her sins are forgiven. As her belly bloats and death becomes certain tell her the Saviour suffered for an eye blink in eternity that she might have life eternal. It does not take away her pain. She will still fall, never to rise, with hunger gnawing her innards in suffering she has known for all her short life. Tell me she will go on to eternal fiery suffering because she didn't accept the great religious joke that is Jesus's salvation.
Tell me again of the great cosmic horror that awaits unrepentant sinners. The eternal flames of Hell that await those who turned away from God. From a God of Love and Compassion. A bad joke before you've even finished saying the words.
For God so loved the world he created hellfire and suffering. For God so loved the world he created eternal torment and pain. For God so loved the world he abandoned it to great evil and agonies.
But don't worry, he'll be back to judge how you've spent your hungry, loveless life. And if you haven't said the magic words, groveled before him, submitted fully to his iron rule, he's kept those fires of Hell hot for you.
Your God is dead
and no one cares
If there is a hell
I'll see you there
— Nine Inch Nails, "Heresy"
Indeed, I'll see you there.