well you can fucking sleep in on Sundays. All the premarital sex you can now get on Saturday nights too.
Well, maybe just recognize that some Christians don't take the sin/atonement stuff literally. The "washed in the blood" talk is very Evangelical. You're right though that the official line, established by Paul, prescribes vicarious atonement. It's an intuitive judgment. We could just accept that we've won the multiverse lottery and enjoy our exceptionally improbable existence as conscious accidents of an evolutionary process in which numerous contingencies could have resulted in no intelligent life forms. Or we could suspect that (to use Fred Hoyle's phrase) it's a "put up job". I think many believers think of God as the Dude in the Sky. The ones I hang with are less anthropomorphic. I think of God as a felt presence of a Higher Power "in whom we live and move and have our being." It leaves open the possibilities of theism, pantheism, panentheism, or hallucination. I see no reason to be more commital. I prefer optimistic agnostic to poetic atheist. I certainly feel closer to atheists intellectually than to Christian fundamentalists. And I think many Christians would be better off as atheists than as victims of the mind crippling disease of biblical literalism.
I always said, if God's so special then let God believe in itself. Having humans believe is meaningless as far as 'proof.' Propping meaning which has no foundation is a diminishing return. Takes more effort, as your eyes open. Less meaning can be established as true. Most religions are efforts at establishing the meaningless as something of substance. I love the saying: That which is without proof can be disregarded without reason.
Uhm, I think several if not most religions originated from sincere spirituality. What is meaningless often differs per person. So trying to give substance to what a religious person views as meaningful only seems meaningless to others... It can be very meaningful. I can not find myself following one religion so far (nor is it my aim) but to me that saying seems meaningless in regard to spirituality, faith and religion. I can see it can be righteously projected on certain dogma's though and surely other specific aspects as well but not on religion in general. But frankly I don't understand why you brought proof into it at all? Perhaps I'm misinterpretating what you are saying...
Choose religion, it's just so convenient! Jesus died so you could sin, that's so convenient! Transferal of punishment through Jesus, that's so convenient! That's not your ego, that's God talking to you, acknowledge him and dismiss all your wrong doings. That warm fuzzy feeling, that's not chemicals in your brain, dissolving your common sense. That's God. He's here to forgive you, isn't that so damn convenient? This thinking and reasoning stuff is over rated. Proof? Fuck proof! Religion is beyond proof, that's so convenient! Religion is so convenient!
there is no should or shouldn't about it. there is only the honesty to recognize the improbability of non-material existence resembling closely, what any person, organization, or book, claims to know about it.