Demigod Sacrifice Day

Today, high church Christians celebrate their religion's central act of human sacrifice.  Strictly speaking, however, while Christian doctrine affirms that the victim of the sacrifice is both fully human and fully divine, the sacrifice is more of a demigod with a human mother and God as a father, who has magical powers (including the power to give his followers lesser magical powers) as a result.  According to the Gospel of John, however, this demigod actually existed from the beginning of time and is merely reincarnated into his demigod being recounted in Christian doctrine.

The device used to kill the human sacrifice is the symbol of the religion.

The event is also celebrated at many weekly Christian worship services with ritual symbolic cannibalism (although Roman Catholic doctrine holds that bread and wine are magically transformed into meat and blood in the ritual, making their Mass an event of actual ritual cannibalism).

In the Christian Gospels, what actually happens is that the Jewish demigod founder of their religion is executed for sedition by Roman authorities supported by the local Jewish leaders.

But, this counts as a "sacrifice" for purposes of Christian doctrine, because the man executed was a prophet who knew it was going to happen and could have prevented it, but instead accepted his fate.  This counts for doctrinal purposes as a sacrifice by the victim's father, because he too knew what was going to happen and could have prevented it.

This human sacrifice in Christianity, like human sacrifices in other religions, provides benefits not to the victim of the human sacrifice, but to other people with only a thin connection to the sacrifice event.

In particular, Christian doctrine provides that the sacrifice of the victim by his father confers benefits on the religious followers of the father and the son by relieving them of metaphysical consequences for their own wrongful acts and the wrongful acts of their ancestors.  (A Christian doctrine called "original sin" holds that all humans must suffer metaphysical consequences for the wrongs of their earliest ancestor.)

Now, there are some plot holes in this account.

First, Christian doctrine does not explain to whom the father of the victim is sacrificing his son in order to relieve his worshipers of the metaphysical consequences of their wrongful act.  Christian doctrine provides that the father of the victim, together with the victim, and a third divine aspect called the Holy Spirit, are collectively the all powerful and all knowing God, so one would think that there is no one for the father of the victim to sacrifice the victim to, other than himself.  And, a sacrifice one makes to please oneself doesn't sound like much of a sacrifice.  There is no Christian doctrinal tradition in which God the Father, sacrifices God the Son, to God the Holy Spirit, so that theory doesn't fit the bill either.

Second, the demigod founder of the religion goes to Hell once he is sacrificed, even though he is supposedly without sin and blameless.  Apparently, this was very unpleasant.  This brings us to the third point.

Third, the sacrifice really isn't much of a sacrifice.  According to Christian doctrine, the demigod founder of the Christian religion returns to life on Earth from Hell in corporal form into the body he was killed in, less than 48 hours after he was sacrificed.  Maybe he was rejected for not being sinful enough and it just took a while for Hell to get around to processing him because it was short staffed on a weekend or something.  But, if the victim and his father both know that this resurrection was going to happen, it makes the sacrifice look rather petty.  Two days of suffering in Hell out of an eternity of life involving the adulation of billions of people and supreme supernatural power that extends to the power to meddle in the everyday lives of everyone in the world.

The resurrection is a bit underwhelming, however.  The founder of the religion makes a handful of appearances to small groups of his inner circle of followers for a couple of months, and then undead Jesus levitates to Heaven where he reigns in glory with his father and the third aspect of God, the Holy Spirit.  Undead Jesus doesn't really do anything of consequence on Earth after his resurrection, except to encourage his closest follows to keep the faith.

Jesus and undead Jesus tell his followers that he will return to the world to reward his worshipers and rule to rule the world justly, but almost two thousand years later, his worshipers are still waiting.

In the meantime, his worshipers, in addition to being required to believe this story, are also encouraged to have a personal relationship with undead Jesus that is shared with the other billion Christians alive today.

The only miracle in all of this is that a billion people do either believe this or claim to believe that this story is the deepest and most absolute and essential truth about our universe.