What I Don't Understand About the Birth of the Zombie Son of Sky Wizard

or

Letter to a Christian Shopper

(Apologies to Sam Harris.)

All of the canned Christmas music at the mall got me thinking, and I realized that there's a bit of your mythos that I don't understand (aside from all the other things like woman-hating, injustice, and ritual cannibalism). So, here's the scenario as I understand it:

An invisible wizard in the sky creates the world and aardvarks and people and jam. He is omnipotent and omniscient and supposedly benevolent, yet he decides to plant a forbidden apple tree on Man's front lawn. Man eats an apple, and Sky Wizard gets pissed and evicts him. Man goes on to live in other places, but every man who dies goes to H-E-double-hockey-sticks eternal torture. Sky Wizard, even though he's purportedly omniscient, somehow didn't see this coming. "Sorry," he says. "I'd really like to help, but my omnipotent hands are tied."

Fast forward to the dawn of the common era.

Sky Wizard finally decides he'd like to correct his monumental blunder. And while he's omnipotent, and could presumably snap his celestial fingers, he figures he'd rather add in some more torture and suffering. (Since he's omniscient, he's already a big Mel Gibson fan). So he has magical-not-sex with some poor young woman and gets her pregnant, and she doesn't even have the decency to name the baby Emanuel. Bummer for the prophets, but easier to fit on a bumper sticker. So the sole purpose of this kid is to suffer a whole lot, die, then beat up Satan (who, by the way, Sky Wizard also created and presumably never had free will, so can be assumed to be an extension of Sky Wizard) and then come back to life after being corpsified for a couple of days. So the boy grows up, and gets tortured, and tortured and killed all to do what Sky Wizard could have done by wiggling his magical nose, what with him being omnipotent and all.

Now I know one of your common arguments is somehow that "humanity needed to see it done like that." Yeah, that worked out really well: over a millennium of rampant anti-semitism, oppression and, well, those crusades were just super-nifty. And don't try playing the "free will" card. If Sky Wizard is omniscient, he'd have seen it seen it coming. (Except that then he's have missed out on Mel). So after needlessly torturing and killing his son, Sky Wizard resets the rules: now you can be as bad as you want as long as you like Jesus and feel sorry about whatever it was you did sometime before you die, and if you're good, but don't like Jesus, you get to be tortured eternally anyway. Sky Wizard sees this as an improvement.

And you celebrate the beginning of this torture cycle with obnoxious music and lying to children.

No, I won't wish you a merry Christmas.