When I was 13 my Dad spit on me.

I think that really affected me way into adulthood. Your article has given me the courage and understanding to REALLY forgive my Dad.

I love what you said about Forgiveness includes a sense of Humility. I have two kids upstairs asleep and I dont want them to be writing about this subject in 25 years.

God Bless.

Your objection to the Christian doctrine of the substitutionary death of Jesus is one that others have shared. But your comments show that you have misunderstood that doctrine.

In any system of justice, a balancing of the scales is necessary. A wrong must be made right, or else there is no justice. Either a penalty must be paid, or the penalty must be forgiven.

If we are guilty of sin, and we are, is there any penalty that can justly wipe away our sin? The Scriptures say no, humanly speaking. Our sin is too great for any human effort at balancing the scales.

The merciful solution God devised is that He, Himself would pay the price for our sin. The doctrine of the trinity says that Christ was both fully human and fully God. This was not therefore an act of filicide by an angry God, but a merciful act of self-sacrifice by a loving God, who balanced the scales of justice by paying the price for your sin and mine Himself.

An analogy can be made to a young man who was recently killed in the war in Iraq. He was a soldier. A grenade was thrown into his vehicle. He threw his body on the grenade and the explosion killed him, but his self-sacrifice saved the lives of the other soldiers in his vehicle.

Thus, God, threw Himself onto the tearing explosion our sin has caused and took on Himself the destruction that was meant for us.

Only in Christianity do we see a God so loving, so generous, so merciful, that He would willingly suffer so that His people would not have to.

How merciful is a god which demanded the agonizing death of his own son in order to provide the forgiveness you laud? This was a moving essay, until you introduced the idea that humanity has received global forgiveness from an angry father via the death, through torture, of an innocent son — introduced the idea without addressing it, without asking why Jesus didn’t say, “Father, I forgive you… for the unforgivable act of filicide.”

There is always a dissonance that rises to hypocrisy when Christians talk about forgiveness and mercy, and this is the core of it. A death cult that glorifies an act of vicious human sacrifice and blood atonement — how do you call that merciful? How do you call that an examplar of forgiveness?

I didn’t realize I was on a Christian website before I got to those lines in the essay. My fault for not reading the URL & banner before jumping into the material; I got here through Google. And I hope you’ll forgive me for sharing the reason for my dismay over the failure of an essay that was otherwise intriguing and effective.