“Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) is the world’s leading independent, international development charity that works through volunteers to fight poverty in developing countries. I have applied for their Youth for Development scheme for 2009/10 and am now looking forward to attending an assessment day in early 2009. This scheme would see me leaving London for a year to work in a developing country in a job that uses my current skills and experience, and interest in participation and governance hopefully. All major costs are covered, with a small monthly stipend, and in return we fundraise for VSO prior to leaving. It’s the experience of a lifetime for me and I’m excited to have made it through all the preliminary stages.”

I’m 25. The whole time, I’ve never honestly been able to figure out what the big deal about the whole Jesus Thing is; no, I mean specifically the dying_on_the_cross part. I mean; he died, so what? You can say your sensible arithmetic statements about how ‘he paid for our sins’, but I thought it was money and potatoes that pay for stuff. If the wages of sin is death, who pays them to you? And since when was sin work? It’s all abstract, and I don’t know how to connect it to something as real as a nail sticking out of a foot. 
There are a million ways to explain that we can’t go_to_heaven_when_we_die because we have dumped God, and I’m more than satisfied with them; I just don’t see how the God-clone’s suicide helps that at all. 

My BRAIN woke me UP at 4am to tell me about this stuff and I was, like, so not impressed; I went back to sleep at 7am and woke at 11.30, and Garbett told me I was lazy. 

Anyway: Jesus was payment_for_sins to people who were used to trying to pay for their sins. The people in the olden days [well until, like, 50 years ago] were more worried about sin and heaven than we seem to be today; they avoided sin, or at least didn’t complain about the consequences. Hell, they even thought everything bad that happened was punishment from God. What they took from Jesus was that they could never pay, and that they didn’t need to.

We don’t pay for our sins anymore. We live with them. We work through them, and we work round them. We’ve (almost) solved our sin with safe sex and responsible drinking. It’s about damage control, birth control and designated drivers. And the gap between all that and our dreams is what the TV shows and tabloids are all about.
So we lower our expectations. We accept our hangovers and divorces. We vaccinate our daughters against STDs. We put up with it till we’re rich and famous, and then we get depressed about it.
And we quarantine the proper sinners in prisons.

Indeed, we are familiar with our sin. We have these ideals of happiness and a sense of how good life can be, but we also have this frustration that our I-want-it-now’s undermine these ideals. 
For example, the pleasures of gambling, alcohol and fat/sugar don’t justify their destruction of lives. Till recently, school canteens were banned from selling pies. 
We say lust is fine as long as it’s controlled, but for some reason we think public nudity should be illegal. 
Everybody knows that drugs and pornography cheapen joy.
And do you know that forty years ago, they were laughing at the church for condemning smoking? Ha ha. 
Yet we do trust human will enough for it to be the difference between miscarriage and an abortion; one is a tragedy, and the other a right. 
Oh, and I still haven’t found prostitution at the Career’s Expo. 

What is Jesus to these people; to us? Is he payment for sins? Does He have a different face to us? 
He certainly doesn’t solve sin in a very practical sense. He told us that we’ve probably sinned even before we’ve gotten out of the shower each morning. He told us don’t even think about escaping bad stuff. The universe is disintegrating. He said ‘If I go to Jerusalem they’ll kill me’. And he went to Jerusalem and they killed him. 
He said don’t even think about trying to be good enough to get to heaven; that just makes everything worse and whitewashed. 

It’s disgustingly simple. The whole Jesus-thing was God going, “Ok, so I hear you; life sucks and I should be rescuing you RIGHT NOW. Well, if I did that I’ll completely ruin the meaning of life. So I’m not going to. Tell you what: I’ll join in. [Emphasis added]. The president is coming to ground zero to get shot at and yelled at and sleep-deprived and killed and hold babies dying of contagious diseases in his arms . He incites us to blasphemy and murder, and promptly bounces back, saying “So what? Pain and death; whoop-dee-dee. You’ll have forgotten all about it in three million years.” He inspires us to live righteously and take what comes to us. And you’ll see in the end that all the bad stuff dies out and the only stuff left is all the God-components of life, all the stuff you have loved with a pure heart, all the magical moments of your favourite songs strung together.