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I don't understand then. Original sin is a primary tenant of Christianity. Christianity cannot exist without it. Otherwise what is Jesus saving you from? You have to deserve hell so that you can be saved.
If you don't believe this and force it onto your children then are you even a Christian? Why wouldn't you want to completely brain wash your children to keep them out of hell? This is not some fringe thing. It's unavoidable and necessary to justify the Christian religion's existence. When I grew up in the church no one told me word for word, "you're a terrible person and you can never be good". They just taught me the Bible and the Bible is very clear on this.
And don't worry I'm not only attacking Christianity. Religion is easily the most harmful human invention. It has caused more suffering than anything else. Capitalism, communism, nationalism, etc are all bad but it's not even close. Let's eliminate religion first and then move on to the next most harmful thing.
Original sin does not require telling a 2 year old that they're a terrible person. Quite the opposite: Christians tell their kids that God loves them. But that we are sinners is hard to deny when you look at the state of the world. And even the best of us fall short of what Jesus expects from us, but we should try anyway. To love our neighbour, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, welcome the foreigner, and even love our enemy. Nobody does all of that to the level that we should, but we should try anyway.
But clearly there are people with a more negative approach to this. I think they're a bit too eager to prove their own point of being terrible people. We should strive to be good instead.
You just said it though. God loves you but you're a sinner. Implied that god's love will torture you for eternity because of your sin unless you follow the rules. Fear and love are not the same thing. Teaching anyone, especially children, that someone/something will hurt you because they love you is textbook abuse grooming. There is no way around it and you just proved it.
Yeah, that would be terrible. Fortunately that's not how it works. It's not about following the rules, it's about accepting God's grace, and about trying to do good. Salvation is not something we earn, it's something we receive. The way it was taught to me is that all we have to do is to accept it.
Of course we should also do good. Not to earn salvation, but simply because it's good. Although there's also Matthew 25 that suggests strongly that if you're there for people in need, you will be saved even if you're not aware of God, and if you're not, you won't, even if you are. That sounds contradictory, but the idea is that if you accept Jesus, you accept other people, and if you reject other people, you also reject Jesus.
But Christianity is not as rules-based as Islam or Judaism (although I suspect that also varies by interpretation).
The obsession with torture is more a medieval holdover as far as I can tell, and not something any Christian I know obsesses over.
I'm really glad you're picking and choosing the good parts of the Bible even if you're in the minority. However, if you want to talk about Matthew 25 he describes hell multiple times and describes it as Eternal torture, ETERNAL fire, weeping, gnashing of teeth etc. That's torture forever.
For eternity. Let's take an example of a very bad person, Adolf Hitler. He was really bad. Let's say he went to hell for being really bad. According to you, he may have accepted god's grace and gotten into heaven but let's say he didn't. Does he deserve eternal torture? According to the Bible, your vengeful God very much wants to torture bad people at let's say I agree with that. I could agree that Hitler should be tortured for 100 years, maybe you think 100,000 years is not appropriate, but even for Hitler eternity feels very excessive to me. After a certain amount of time he would not even remember what he's being tortured for. At least let him go into the nothingness of the void at some point.
So based on Matthew 25, your example, and the thought experiment above you have a few choices.
The Bible is not the word of God and therefore can be thrown out. This is a great one because you can still be a good person but you don't have to go through all of the mental gymnastics you're going through to try and justify all the terribly evil things in there.
You are a blasphemer who is actively lying to people about your holy text in order to convince them, or maybe yourself, that parts of it do not exist or can be interpreted as the exact opposite of what it says.
You truly believe that someone, no matter how bad, deserves eternal torment. To be tortured forever. In that case I can confidently say that your morals are bankrupt and we can stop this conversation immediately because your moral foundation is completely flawed. Also important to point out that that foundation is a direct result of your religion and you could be much better without it. The world would be better without it as well.
Last choice is God works in mysterious ways so even though none of this looks good at all you can just continue on with your fingers in your ears and say that it's not the religion's problem, it's just some people. There's that toxic version of faith where you get to do whatever you want no matter how incongruent and even with the best intentions it causes cognitive dissonance and psychosis. This is what happens with the vast majority of religious people no matter which one it is. It's the reason religion is innately harmful and should be abolished.
I don't think I'm in the minority at all. There are many Christians all over the world who try to live by the words of Jesus, by love and charity. It's just that US politics and media gets dominated by people weaponizing it to justify their hate, and that has lead a lot of people astray. It's not something that only happens in the US, but it's also something that always receives pushback when it happens. Sometimes slower than at other times. Dutch churches seem to be a lot more vigilant about this sort of thing than American churches, but again, consider that people like Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter and many people like then are also Christian.
You're trying to put me in God's place here. What I believe God expects of me, is to love my neighbour l, which means everybody I get into any kind of contact with, and to love them, help them when they're in need, even when they are my enemy.
This punishment you obsess about is not ours to execute. It is not ours to judge. It's ours to love. But sadly there's no shortage of people who want to claim God's authority for themselves and deal out punishment to the people they feel deserve it.