I believe this was my first post, and it it wasn’t quite, it should’ve been. This one dates back to 06 Sep 1997 on the AOL SDMB–
The thread was titled **God Does Not Exist, a PROOF **
(I no longer remember who it was that I was quoting at the top):
>Anyway, the answer to your question is that Christians (or at least Catholic Christians) don’t get it either. To explain it, they call it unexplainable.<
Unexplainable? Hey, it’s simple! God, who is the Almighty and is the Creator of All that Is, made inferior merchandise when creating peoplekind, and said merchandise was corrupted by a certain serpentine thingie that by prior definition is also the creation of beforementioned God, and said corruption forced abovementioned Almighty God to cast this most important centerpiece of Creation out of Eden whereupon they were cursed with original sin, presumably by God, lest we ascribe the power to curse God’s centerpiece to any lesser being, which was a situation that royally pisseth the Almighty God until, after a relatively unsuccessful experiment involving the drowning of the most corrupt of the centerpiece-manifestations (see “Noah”, in a book called “Genesis”), he decided to fix the problem for once and for all.
He sent his Son, who was Himself, God, down to earth to reside amongst these downfallen centerpieces of creation (aka “sinners”) so that the people could see God in some terms that they could understand, cuz God in God’s awesome majesty was a bit much to comprehend, dig? Now things are simpler: we have Jesus, who was the son of Mary and Joseph and God who impregnated Mary who was married to Joseph; Jesus was God manifest, made mortal amongst mortals, and Jesus said we should not believe things that he said just because he said them, but instead look to his works to see God manifest in what he did. And as any Christian will tell you, the most important thing he did was die for our sins, a sacrifice made necessary because of our original sin (see above), presumably by God, since no one else is around who could dictate such terms to God, so God demanded of Jesus, who is God, that Jesus die in order to redeem our sins. With me so far?
So Jesus died, except that he didn’t. Jesus rose from the dead on the third day and ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of God who is himself, and the two of God who are identically God are happily pleased that God got hisself killed on our behalf, and as a result, if we acknowledge all of the above, we too may enter the kingdom of heaven as soon as we die. Jesus offers everyone the chance to live after they are dead, not to be confused with Vladimir Dracula or Stephen King, and to prove this he raised a dead dude by the name of Lazarus who was dead at the time. (Lazarus by my calculations is approximately 1950 years old by now, counting from his second coming, although there have been no recent reports of what he might be up to).
However, lest you think that things have more or less reached a standstill, be assured that Jesus / God, who art one and the same, do not consider the struggle to be over. God is going to send Jesus, who is God’s self as you recall, once again, an event foreseen and described as the “second coming”. The holy, who believe all of the above, will be taken upstairs to heaven, possibly bypassing purgatory, which is sort of like fraternity hazing for the heaven-bound, and heading directly to the harps; the unholy, who for reasons having mainly to do with their compromised moral structures and heavily mortgaged souls have refused to acknowledge Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior, will go to hell (with or without the conveyance of proverbial handbasket) and the heavens will ring with a thunderous amen.
I apologize for oversimplifying some things, but hey, you have to reach the masses on a level they can grasp, yes?
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and my original sig:
“Use Signature (set in Preferences)”