The Irrationality of the Crucifixion Doctrine

Introduction

Not all Christians believe in the doctrines involved with the crucifixion. Some (I have met several like this in person) practice bare bones Christianity, which is simply to follow the teachings of Jesus (on whom be peace) and try to be like him in everything they do, and leave it at that, no other doctrines being involved. Christian fundamentalists (Protestant, of course) freely engage in the blasphemy of declaring these folks to be "not Christians", as if they have some divine authority to do such a thing, but in the personal view of us Muslims, these practitioners of bares bones Christianity are the only true Christians-the only people who practice Christianity as it was originally taught. But naturally this article (and by and large, this entire site) is not addressed to these bares bones Christians.

Modern, mainstream Christianity teaches that Christ (on whom be peace) "died for our sins", typically meaning that he paid for our sins with his supposed suffering and death by taking our place, taking the punishment we have earned on himself. Modern day Christians have, in fact, even redefined the word "Messiah", Greek "Christ", so that it now refers to that when the word in its original definition never referred to anything of the sort. (See the FAQ for more on this.) That is the Christianity to which this article is a response.

It should also be noted, before we begin, that the Koran denies that Christ (on whom be peace) was crucified in the first place. Rather, we Muslims tend to believe that someone was substituted for him and made to look like him. Christian missionaries insist on missing the point here, going to great pains to point out numerous ways in which the crucifixion of the man is a well established historical fact when we are not denying that it is considered a fact in secular history, as we would expect it to be, all the same, if we are right and the Romans thought they had crucified him when they hadn't. Also, there is some evidence that we are right about that, which I detail in this site's article Evidence Against the Crucifixion.

Finally, I am aware that even among the category of Christians who believe in the crucifixion doctrine, who are the current majority but nonetheless not the only category of Christians, not all of them subscribe to the "substitution" concept-that is, the idea that Christ (on whom be peace) took our sins upon himself. This is the case even though the Bible's teaching of the crucifixion doctrine unmistakably points to this idea of substitution (c.f. Galatian 1:4, 1 Peter 2:24, 1 John 2:2 and 4:10, and Revelation 1:5). But since the wide majority of believers in the Christian crucifixion doctrine do believe that the crucifixion was such a substitution, and since I have never seen any other explanation of the supposed need for the supposed crucifixion of Jesus (on whom be peace) that’s at all coherent, and most of all since the Bible's viewpoint of the crucifixion doctrine it teaches is that of this substitution, I am addressing only the Christians who believe in this substitution doctrine.

The Concept of Torture and Crucifixion Being Necessary in the First Place

We Muslims believe that God or Allah or Jehovah (translations of the same word in English, Arabic and Hebrew) is always willing to forgive sinners who repent. Christianity professes to teach the same thing. So why should anyone have to pay for ours sins on the side? There is no room between the statements, "I have learned my lesson and will reform; please forgive me," and, "I forgive you" for anything except a decision to forgive, let alone a sentence of death by torture. Either God is willing, due to His goodness and mercy, to forgive the repentant of their sins or someone must face the retribution for all sinners by taking a necessary and inevitable punishment in their place; pick one. The two things are mutually exclusive. If God decides to forgive someone who reforms and asks for forgiveness, then POOF! They are forgiven, and that's both all there is to it and all that there needs to be. That someone would still have to suffer and die for the person's sins is impractical overkill (no pun intended) at best and enormous injustice at worst.

If God is always willing to forgive the repentant, then why the crucifixion? Why not just forgive them and leave it at that? Would a perfectly righteous or even partially righteous Being claim to forgive someone and still have to punish someone? No, that's not how it works; it is a confusion of words, because that is what it means to forgive someone. Forgiveness consists entirely of deciding to forgive someone, telling them so, and letting go; punishment is the opposite of forgiveness and as such cannot coincide with it. Here is the definition of the infinitive "to forgive" according to The Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus, Second Edition:

forgive: cease to feel angry or resentful toward; pardon. See synonym study at ABSOLVE.

So forgiving is pardoning, and you don’t pardon by killing. Subjecting someone to hours of torture followed by a crucifixion is not, cannot and never could be an act of forgiveness, regardless of whether that person is paying for their sins or someone else's. Do you think that God is so vicious and cruel that He forgives you personally, but still requires that someone else still be punished? Which leads me to…

The Concept of Someone Paying for Someone Else's Sins

Even if you believe in retributive justice, which is supposed to go against everything that Christianity teaches, it is still a basic fact of life, at least for your average theist, which includes Christians, that, to put it in the form of a syllogism for the sake of clarity:

1. God never does anything evil.
2. It is evil to punish (or reward, for that matter) one person for what another person did.
3. Therefore, God does not, never has and never will punish one person for what another person did, without changing so that He no longer has the characteristic mentioned in #1.

So either God is good or the crucifixion doctrine is true; as you can see, the two things cannot possibly go together. The only way out of this would be to deny that step #2 of the syllogism is wrong, but no reasonable person would do this.

You remember when, in school, some teacher or teachers would give the whole class detention or some other punishment because one or two people were breaking the rules? You remember how rightfully offended you got? (These teachers tend to practice this injustice so as to turn you against your misbehaving peers, telling you that you now have them to thank, but I was never fooled and always blamed the teacher instead.) It's the same principle at work in the crucifixion doctrine, even if it is sort of in reverse. And the very same principle is at work when the Bible repeatedly speaks of God punishing people for the sins of their parents (even, according to the Ten Commandments, carrying it on for numerous generations!).

What your parents do, your parents must pay for, and only your parents, if they must pay for it in the first place. And why? Because no one should ever be rewarded or punished for what someone else did; it is a travesty not only of justice but also of logic and practicality. As such, a perfectly good God would not punish one person for the sins of everyone else, especially when that one person himself (as both Christians and Muslims tend to believe) never committed any sins of his own in his entire life.

Mention this inescapable fact to a practitioner of orthodox Christianity and their response will be inevitable—in fact, you could safely bet large sums of money on it—not that I condone gambling. They always say that the (alleged) torture and subsequent (alleged) crucifixion of Jesus was not a punishment inflicted on him but instead something that he himself quite willingly volunteered for. That's as may be if these Christians are right, but it does absolutely nothing to change the fact of the injustice involved. That anyone would have to be punished for someone else's crime or else there would be no restitution for the person who committed the crime is the injustice if this volunteering is the case. It goes entirely against the grain of everything that justice stands for, the way that justice works. God would either punish the person who committed the sins or choose not to punish anyone at all-this being, as I have pointed out, the meaning of forgiveness in the first place-or else God is not good. Pick one

The Concept of Crucifixion Paying for All the Sins that Anyone Ever Commited or Ever Will Commit

First let's assume that the crucifixion of Jesus (on whom be peace) actually occurred as a real event rather than an event that quite understandably happened from the viewpoint of secular history but nonetheless did not happen in actual fact. Then let's assume (with the faulty logic of Christian fundamentalism) that all four of the Bible's Gospels can and do go together, their accounts, which were written by four, different people who probably never even met each other, meant to be combined, and so their apparent contradictions about which tortures preceded the crucifixion (which I point out in my Evidence Against the Crucifixion article) are not contradictions at all but instead add up to an amalgam. Then let's also assume, for the sake of argument (with the usually baseless assumption of Christian inerrantists), that the four Gospels can automatically be trusted to report the events they depict with total accuracy, even though nobody (or in some cases, only certain, named people) witnessed many of the events which the Gospels report, let alone the authors of the Gospels.

Going by all of these false assumptions, and ignoring the fact that the very idea of retributive justice goes against the very foundations of Christian teachings, let us look at the idea of the various tortures and subsequent death by torture as something that paid for the sins of all humankind. The question I want you to consider, dear Christian reader, and consider with an open mind, is, "Can these few hours of torture and crucifixion undergone be enough to cover all the sins that were ever committed and that ever will be committed?" I know that there is no scientific measurement of the evil-to-retributive-justice ratio, but let's think with common sense here.

What you have is a flogging, a beating (involving spitting and mockery), a whack with a reed (or possibly, but not likely, more than one), a crown of thorns being twisted on the man's head, a march across town to Golgotha (assuming that this version of the story is right instead of the alternate account that Simon of Cyrene was forced to carry the cross instead), and a nine-hour crucifixion. That would be, to say the least, quite a terrible thing to endure. I certainly would not like to die that way. The suffering would be so terrible that it might lead some to madness. But by no means is that the most agonizing death that has ever taken place. A nine-hour crucifixion is, as the Gospels themselves mention, an unusually short one. Perhaps that is realistic considering the amount of blood that would have already been lost due to the flogging and the crown of thorns, but wouldn't you expect a crucifixion that pays for the sins of all of humankind to be the longest crucifixion anyone ever endured? In all likelihood, it would still be taking place now.

According to the Koran, it is true what modern, mainstream Christianity says that all people are sinners (c.f. Koran 16:61). Now consider this: there are six or seven billion people/sinners on the planet right now, and that of course does not include either all of the dead people/sinners from the blessed Adam all the way to the people who have most recently died or all of the people who will be born in the future from now until Judgment Day, whenever Judgment Day occurs. Could even the sins of we six or seven billion people be covered by such a relatively short and simple list of tortures, all endured in less than a day's time? Wouldn't the added up total of the punishments merited by Hitler and his generals alone be more than that? The single human being known as Albert Fish deserved at least that much punishment.

Nevertheless, according to the crucifixion doctrine, every act of tyrrany and injustice, every act of bullying on an elementary school playground, ever murder ever committed, every act of theft, every manipulation of someone's emotions to someone else's selfish ends, every act of self-deception, every burning at the stake, every gouging of the eyes, every act of direspect of any kind, even every obscene phone call, and much more, throughout the (as yet incomplete) history of the world, was paid for by less than a day of extreme torture. From a viewpoint of retributive justice, as unthinkably bad as the tortures listed by the four Gospels must be, they just aren't enough. Even the idea of all the acts of torture that were ever committed or ever will be committed all by themselves being paid for by a select few acts of torture just doesn't jibe. But of course, all of this is under all of the false assumptions I mentioned at the beginning of this section of this article anyway.

THE INESCAPABLE CONCLUSION

The crucifixion doctrine is flawed from start to finish, in at least the three ways I have shown it to be here in this article. Every aspect of it is impossible or at least inconsistent with the belief, held by all or virtually all Christians, and certainly all modern, mainstream Christians who believe in the crucifixion doctrine, that God is perfectly good or even mostly good. (Falsely) assuming that the crucifixion happened—that is, that the man being crucified really was Jesus (on whom be peace)—it did not and never could pay for all of our sins. Even the idea of it, seen from the un-Christ-like viewpoint of retributive justice, is a contradiction in terms, forgiveness taking place alongside punishment and punishment even being a part of forgiveness. The crucifixion doctrine, in short, simply is not and cannot be the truth.