Balking at Salvation

THE PRIMARY BARRIER to my gaining salvation for my immortal soul through Christ in the traditional Christian sense is my unmitigated aversion to the very notion of a person far superior to me being tortured to death to atone for my sins and achieve my eternal salvation. I simply cannot embrace this cosmic paradigm, and never could. This notwithstanding the obvious fact that since he was himself raised from the dead and ascended into heaven after only two days of death, Jesus in effect loses only a weekend in the bargain. It has alwasy amazed me, and continues to amaze me, that people rejoice at the opportunity to transfer their personal responsibilities to someone, anyone else, but especially to Jesus, a harmless man of great value who left the Earth while still, it can be easily surmised, had much more to give it. As if accepting salvation by embracing the sacrifice of another's life is a desirable choice, especially from a moral standpoint. Let us all discard our moral cowardice, accept full responsibility for ourselves and our actions, and love and emulate the living, uncrucified Jesus! According to the Islamic religion, Jesus, like Muhammed, was a prophet of God, but, like Muhammed, was entirely human. Jesus is mentioned no fewer than twenty seven times in the Quran, all of them praising him as a great prohpet, a forerumner to the Muslim prophet. In Islam, jesus was not crucified to atone for the sins of those who accept salvation by worshipping him, but rather, he ascended directly into heaven when the time was proper, as determined by God. Thus, in the Islamic faith we as individuals are responsibel entirely for all our actions while on Earth, we ecperience the consequences for them in this lifetime, and are judged by God upon our ascension. Its almost as if the Islamic religion is an updated, augmented version of Christianity, just as the Christian faith is an updated and enhanced version, in many ways, of Judaism. If nothing else, it seems ceratin that eithe God intends for thousands of religions to exist, for their to be thousands of ways to the mountain tp, so to speak, or, humans invent many different religions, all probably for the same reasons, but that none of them provides anything more than a partial view of truth and reality, and all contain many demonstrable errors.