Atheists & Agnostics

When I was a kid, I sometimes went to church; a few months after my mom died from a terminal disease my older sister was talking to Dad and I about the heart transplant that Dr. Christian Barnard over in South Africa had just successfully performed, and what happened to the soul in such a case.. isn't the soul in the heart? My dad sat us two (12 and up and old enough to comprehend a lot of this), and explained in logical and historical based terms the origins of Christianity and a lot of other religions also. He was not a church goer the way mom was, and he was kind of an agnostic, he believed that God was possible and maybe probable but God was not necessarily tied in with Christianity! He also explained that the soul is not in the heart.

My father and I would have some interesting discussions in the years that followed. He explained that Christ was a religious reformer who wanted the animal sacrifices to stop, and for his trouble he had a conflict with the Hebrew establishment that led ultimately to them not taking his side to save him from being killed by the Romans. Of course, ultimately the Christians and the Jews stopped sacrificing animals by killing and then burning them. It dawned on me many years later that the expression "lamb of God" meant Jesus was the new sacrificial lamb. I don't personally understand why sacrifice is such a vital part of Christianity in our modern times because modern Christians do not burn animals on altars and neither do Jews. It just is not something that we grow up with. But the archaic notion that someone must sacrifice something in that religion persists.