Christiantiy Has a Trickster God, Too

Conclusion from a trend: Every Old Testament story is awful. Let's just move on to the New where at least there's an attempt at something resembling humanity. The long and short of the story of Abraham and Issac is that God decided he wanted to test his best bro Abraham's faith in him, so he.... orders Abraham to sacrifice his son to him. Yeah. Abraham, as any sane human being would, is highly distressed to say the least, but takes his young son up to a mountain as God wished. Right at the last second, God jumps out like Ashton Kutcher in an episode of Punk'd and said it was all a test, you don't actually have to kill your son. That Abraham didn't decide to take that knife and apply it to his jerkass God is one of the great religious mystery.

Pictured: The eternal wisdom and infinite love of God

To be absolutely clear, true sacrifice does not involve sacrificing the lives of others, even if they're people you care about. Sorry, but it's no real sacrifice to give up something that belongs to others - particularly their life, and I would probably suspect anyone who says otherwise as being a borderline psychopath. True sacrifice involves giving up something that benefits only us, for the sake of others or for the sake of something greater. I don't have any particular religious belief, so I'm not really experienced with religious sacrifice. But I have people and things I care about, and I think that I've likely sacrificed at least a little for those. Probably the greatest thing I've ever had to sacrifice - and believe me, I haven't done it nearly enough - is catharsis. When you have as strong feelings as I tend to do about certain things, particularly oppression, it's tempting to give into a need for catharsis, for revenge on those who have done wrong. It takes sacrifice - sacrifice of the gratification that catharsis so often provides - to set aside those desires in favor of doing what will get the best results in the long run. Again, this is hardly something I have perfected doing, but it's a sacrifice I recognize needs to be taken.