Well, here we go. I'm so arrogant that I'm about to try to answer what is perhaps the most unanswerable question there is. Namely, isn't it illogical that God needs to kill himself, to have Jesus be sacrificed, for our sins to be forgiven? How can punishing one person cause the sins of another to be forgiven?

First, let's clear up a couple misconceptions. I think that saying it's illogical is going too far. What I might perhaps allow (but not necessarily) is that there is no logical connection between Jesus being killed and us being forgiven. In other words, logic is not necessarily involved here. Second, as someone informed me after my discussion with my Muslim friend, God didn't kill himself; he let himself be killed. That is perhaps significant.

Also, a preliminary explanation. The phrase "God's will" is ambiguous. In one sense, God's will is that everything work out perfectly and everyone does what's right and there's no suffering. In another sense, everything that happens is God's will, because he predestined everything. When I use the phrase in this document, I mean it in the former sense.

Now, something I think we can forget is that the point of God taking the form of a human was not solely for him to die. It was also for him to teach us how to live. Indeed, I have read in theological books that the original intention was that Jesus would rule the nation of Israel - the Kingdom of God on earth - and be a moral guide to us. The gospels seem to fit this nicely because Jesus keeps teaching them about the Kingdom of God. This was God's will (see above). But the Jews he spoke to rejected him and killed him, so that plan didn't work out.

Yet he was still able to teach us how to live. No human, or prophet, could do as good a job of this as God. Muslims say that God sent us prophets, i.e. regular humans, rather than angels, to teach us how to live because angels are not like us, so we could simply use the excuse that we're only humans and could not be as good as an angel. And indeed, Christians sometimes use this excuse when they're called to be good like Jesus. But this doesn't change the fact that an ideal that we can strive for would be nice to have - and I can't think of a better ideal than God in human form.

But this isn't to minimize Jesus's sacrifice, God's "backup plan", if you will, after Jesus was rejected by humans. So let's now turn to that.

First, let's keep in mind something that I consider important. I don't believe that God had to take human form and die to forgive our sins. I believe he chose to. He's God, after all.

Now, God is love. I think it is not a coincidence that the Bible passage my devotional ("The Upper Room") told me to read today, the day I'm trying to work this out, is 1 John 4:7-16. I find it hard to believe much in coincidences anymore. I recommend that you all go read that passage right now; and you might as well read to the end of chapter 4 too.

"God is love" means that God is perfectly moral, since morality is all about love (see "Why Christianity?" for details.) But what does it mean to love someone?

When someone loves someone it means they'll give things up for the well-being of the other. When someone loves someone perfectly, it means they'll give up anything for that person. But what can God give us? He could take away all our suffering, for example. But does that prove that he loves us? No, because it's so easy for him. It would be like a billionaire buying a car for a girl he loves. It's like nothing for him, so would not prove anything about how much he loves her.

Likewise, Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek, to love those who hate us. But if all God does is create the universe, command us to do what's right, and reward/punish us based on whether we do, then in what sense is he morally perfect or perfectly loving? Only in an abstract, meaningless sense. He would be naught but a great bully, using his omnipotence (might) to make himself right. The atheists taught us this.

So what can God give up for us? I challenge anyone to think of something. Can he become sad, shed a tear, and place it in the sky as the most beautiful star you can imagine? Yes, but he can create that star without needing to be sad. Can he chop off his arm and use its cells to create force fields around each of us to protect us from harm? Sure, but he can do the same and keep his arm. Can he sacrifice himself completely and cease to exist, creating an eternal paradise for us in the process? Yes, but then I'd be sad because I love God. I think that whatever he can give us by sacrificing something, he can give us by not sacrificing that thing as well. He's God, for crying out loud. No matter what kind of "universal law" exists that is "higher" than God that would force him to sacrifice something, he could always choose to remove that law; otherwise, he's not God.

So why not decree that our sins can be forgiven by God taking our form and dying in place of us? It's as good a means as any. God can decide to forgive our sins, or not, however he wants. It may not be logical, but neither is it illogical. Except that this particular means accomplishes a bunch of other things too. By it, God actually proves that he loves us. He even proves that he loves us perfectly - God becoming a human and suffering for a finite period of time is giving up infinite happiness. He proves that he's willing to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39) even when we hate him and kill him. To top it off, it's first an attempt to try to get us to follow him and establish his kingdom on earth. No matter what we chose, good would come out of it. It's the ultimate strategic decision.

This is not rationally convincing. But the Christian teaching fits my understanding of God like a glove. Therefore, I believe in Christianity instead of Islam by faith. You could call this upbringing, but choosing a belief system because I wasn't brought up with it and which doesn't fit my understanding of God (or, for that matter, choosing post-modernism) would be at least as arbitrary.

So in summary, I don't think my belief is illogical. But at the same time, I have no argument that would convince a rational Muslim that it is true. As usual, my logical brain is shown to be useless for anything that matters. I've failed. Sorry.