Jesus was born in September and christmas trees are giant dicks. Yes you read that right. They're penises. Festively festooned penises. Blame the catholics. They steamrolled every pagan tradition they could find into the catholic canon in order to convert the peasants to their particular cult.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Because according to the Christian faith, the death on the cross is the moment of victory. The divide-by-zero that absolves sin.

So, I’m no theologian, but I did grow up studying this stuff quite a bit. Here’s a probably-flawed explanation of my understanding of the teaching.

God created the world, and the creation fell short of his image for it. That’s what “sin” is, a falling-short-of-perfection. God’s perfect nature requires perfection for communion with his creation, so in an attempt to bring humanity back into communion with him, Jesus (who is both God and human) comes to live among the creation, lives a perfect life, and is killed. The teaching is that death is a result of imperfection, so the death of someone with human nature who was perfect wipes out the “cost” of sin.

So humans are again able to be connected with their Creator, despite the fact that none of them are perfect.

Christians are encouraged to follow the laws of scripture not because failure to do so will damn them, but because said laws can be good for them. The Bible outright says humans cannot get to heaven through their actions. So when Christians get all high and mighty about sin, they’re missing the point entirely. (Or, perhaps, they’re following what they’ve been taught by people who use religion to control people.)

It frustrates me to see Christians championing anti-LGBT causes and whatnot. Like, I don’t care if you think it’s sinful, the entire point of the religion is that everyone is sinful. The Bible is clear on this. Jesus came for sinners. After all, if people were perfect they wouldn’t need a savior in this system.

Someone can probably do a better, more theologically consistent job explaining this, but that’s my understanding.

As a bored kid in church, this is a question I pondered many times. Why would we choose to honor the method of torture that caused his death?

I like crucifixes, i study their design and craftsmanship while the Karen wearing it is berating me at work and threatening to call my manager.

Y'ever think about how if Jesus died by a guillotine there'd be guillotines everywhere

Many Christian, but non Catholic denominations definitely do not use, or phased out the usage, of crosses ( also fish symbols/religious stamps/rosaries and so on) as they understand this fact

Also they understand that Matthew 16:24 is referring to a Stavros/stauros, literally a wooden torture stake/pole, in allegory to taking a heavy responsibility, in general, as previous context shows that spreading the lord's message, with the difficulties it may bring, to extract a heavy toll on the average person's life, up to the point of having to sacrifice said life

They also understand that even thought the old law have been abolished, the spirit of it keeps on on many of their aspects, so no worshipping idols of any kind (imaginary or physical) is seen as the practical approach

Sam Kinison had a routine where he was pretending to be Jesus explaining why he hadn't returned yet: "yeah, I'll be back as soon as I can PLAY THE PIANO AGAIN! OH OHHHHHHHH!"