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On Christian justice

Jesus's sacrifice wasn't really a sacrifice at all. He didn't lose anything really. He suffered a finite amount of pain for a finite amount of time. He didn't actually die, He simply resumed the existance He had before He was physically born. He just went back to being God. How is that a sacrifice? It is an absurd concept for an omnipotent and omniscient Lawgiver to go through the wasted motions of sacrificing Himself to Himself in order for Him to forgive those who do not live up to the impossible standards that He invented.

The (claimed)punishment imposed by God for the unsaved, is eternal torment in Hell. There is no justice in inflicting any form of eternal punishment for any possible finite crime. Even Hitler or Dahmer, as vile as were their actions, are not deserving of such punishment. Their actions certainly would warrant punishment far beyond the normal scope, but no act justly warrants eternal torture. - Chuck

[Christians] may THINK that it is moral or kind for someone to step in and take another's punishment, whether that be a fine or imprisonment. However - and being a lawyer and legal academic has the advantage of me being able to say this with both knowledge and authority - it would not be legal and it would not in fact be just.

Punishments have a number of purposes but these are aimed at the criminal, not the victim. The clearest example of this is that the money paid in the form of a fine does not go to the victim but to the state. In legal systems where victims of crimes are sometimes compensated with money from a state fund, this money is only indirectly paid for by fines (taxes go into the fund also) and thus refutes rather than supports your argument. - The Legal Theorist


Christian Theocratic Justice:

God is the absolute master of the universe. He answers to no higher authority, and His term in office is infinite. He wrote all the laws by which to govern Man, He decides who has broken these laws, and what consequences they shall suffer. As a result of the very first infraction, God has deemed all men worthy of the highest punishment.

While God is inextricably bound to His own legal system, fortunately, in His infinite wisdom, He has found a loophole. In order to absolve Man of the debt that God arbitrarily decided is owed to Him, God must make Himself a son. This Son of God (who is also God) must be put on Earth and tortured to death by the aforementioned criminal humans, thereby paying the fine owed by these humans back to Him (God).

Did you follow all that? God must allow His Son (who is also Himself) to be brutally executed by humans (with His guidance), so that humans can be forgiven (by Himself) for the crimes that He says they committed. - Prester John

The issue of Christianity is you have to sell damnation and people being horrible by their nature before you can sell them salvation. - Wait What

God is offering to save us from a situation that He ultimately caused. After all, if I am a born sinner because of what two human beings did thousands of years, why I am punished for that?

It's like God is the obsessed teen boy in that movie Endless Love, who starts a fire just so he can "save" Brook Shields and her family. - Rufus

He knew ahead of time what would happen to most of humanity, yet he proceeded with the set up (putting the "fallen angels" on earth where he knew that one of them would deceive adam and eve in the first place), yet he still went ahead with it.

If he'd tossed those "fallen angels" into the lake of fire in the first place, this mess may not have happened.- Reynold

Your God punished the entire human race--all of "creation," really-- because two people ate something He told them not to. Your God decreed that all human beings (except for Adam and Eve) should inherit a sin curse and in essence be born guilty of sin, and all because two people ate something He told them not to.

The default condition of the human race is guilty, and this is at God's command (according to your religion, of course). So no, I'm not very impressed with God's so-called sacrifice. Maybe if He hadn't ordered us to be born under a sin curse in the first place, then He wouldn't have needed to sacrifice anybody? - captain howdy

You guys missed some key plot lines in the story. Adam was told that if he ate from the tree he would what?? Burn in hell for eternity? No. He would die. So Adam, and all his descendants were cursed to die when Adam disobeyed God and ate anyway. Jesus came along and died in our place. Now most folks when they die, they are stuck for eternity in hell. Jesus on the other hand, because He is God, was able to raise Himself from the dead after three days. The death penalty for sin is paid. Those who put their trust in Jesus get new life in Him, and the assurance of resurrecting as He did. - EJ & MJ

The fundamental problem with Mr. [Ray] Comfort's attempted analogy is that he has misrepresented the nature of civil law. He has suggested that violations of civil law can result in imprisonment, when in fact civil torts do not allow for the imposition of such a punishment. He has also suggested that the intervention of a third party could prevent the imprisonment of an individual who has been convicted of a legal violation, yet no aspect of United States law allows for such intervention. This suggests that Mr. Comfort's attempted analogy relies either upon a lack of understanding of civil and criminal law or wilful ignoring of fundamental aspects of it. If Mr. Comfort is wilfully ignoring fundamental aspects of a legal system, then his analogies are inherently dishonest, and thus he should not be considered a credible source of information. If Mr. Comfort is simply such a poor researcher that he is unaware of the aspects of law that he has failed to address in his analogy, then there is little reason to believe that he has adequately studied the subjects that he is addressing and thus he should not be considered a credible source of information. - Dimensio

[about Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit] So, if the penalty for sin is death, then why do most people end up stuck in hell for eternity? That goes way, way beyond the threatened punishment, does it not? On this argument, would not the punishment for unrepentant sinners be that they would never be resurrected at all, to glory or to hellfire -- that atheists, at least, would get exactly what they expect out of death (i.e. an end to existence)?

On the other hand, if the penalty for sin is death, and Christ took that penalty for those who repent and believe, then why do even the most saintly and faithful Christians die anyway? Yes, they'll be resurrected (if you're right), but then, if you're right, everyone will be resurrected; some just will deeply regret the fact. - Steven J.