According to mainstream readings of the Bible, the story of Jesus goes like this:

Nothing impure can enter Heaven, meaning that, since all of us are sinners, we’re bound by default for Hell.

However, God sent his son Jesus to Earth. Jesus lived a sinless life, teaching others God’s wisdom and performing miracles. He made the ultimate sacrifice by being crucified, paying for all our sins in the process. Now we can enjoy a sweet eternity in Heaven if we accept Jesus as our personal Lord and Savior.

This is a load of bunkum for several reasons.

Those parts of the Bible describing the life of Jesus are replete with errors and contradictions. Jesus’ biographers disagree on everything from when he was crucified (John 19:14-16 vs. Mark 14:12-15:25) to whether he was a product of immaculate conception (Luke 1:31-35 vs. Acts 13:23.) But this isn’t what makes the Jesus story nonsense.

It’s also true that the rudiments of Jesus’ life story appear to have been borrowed from the narratives of other deities such as Dionysus, Osiris, Horus and Mithras. But this isn’t what makes the Jesus story nonsense.

In fact, there’s no extra-Biblical evidence that Jesus even existed.

But, then again, neither did Winston Smith, and that does not diminish the immense moral and intellectual value of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Similarly, Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” plays fast and loose with continuity, and remains a deservedly seminal work.

J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” septilogy borrows unapologetically from a variety of mythological traditions and is none the worse for it.

What makes the story of Jesus inferior to “Nineteen Eighty-Four” or “Harry Potter” is that it is an unfocused, unenlightened jumble.

Let’s begin with the premise of the story. No sinful person can enter Heaven (Rev. 21:27), which is unfortunate because we are all sinners (Rom. 3:23.)

The alternative section of the afterlife is Hell. Residents of Hell are tortured forever (Matt. 24:41-46.)

To be just, punishment for a crime must be proportional. As the Bible says, “eye for eye.”

In order for a punishment of infinite magnitude to be appropriate, the crime also would have to be of infinite severity.

To illustrate: if I went door-to-door with a carving knife and murdered each of the world’s 6.77 billion inhabitants individually, it would still be a crime infinitely too minor to deserve an eternity of torment as punishment.

And yet, somehow, the Biblical god feels it appropriate to mete out infinite punishment for all sins, including those as trivial as coveting your neighbor’s wife (or ass.)

Luckily for us poor sinners, however, God has given us an easy out in the form of Jesus. Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, expurgation of all sin and, thus, entry into Heaven is possible (1 John 1:7.)

However, this seemingly more reasonable segment also disintegrates into a heap of immoral gibberish upon examination.

Assuming for a moment that Hell is somehow a deserved consequence of sin, the provision of a loophole does not seem a particularly loving, wise or even honorable act.

The idea of Jesus’ helping us escape a punishment we’ve earned is, to me, not so much evocative of one person taking a bullet for another as it is of Gerald Ford granting Richard Nixon the all-purpose pardon that allowed him to escape prosecution for Watergate and other crimes.

What if I prefer to own my decisions rather than to offload them onto someone else? What if I prefer to take responsibility for my mistakes than to run away from them? Would I deserve infinite eons of agony if these were the choices I made?

And what about the people who choose to buy into Jesus’ deal? Billions of people scrambling through a loophole to avoid responsibility and punishment-- is that really a spectacle of ultimate beauty?

So far, as Jesus’ crucifixion as an act of sacrifice goes, it seems blindingly obvious that it was no sacrifice at all. Jesus was not harmed, nor did he give up any asset. And, at any rate, considering his omnipotence, his ordeal was entirely self-imposed and voluntary.

To frame it another way, would you regard it a sacrifice to undergo a few hours of Roman torture and three days of being dead if, afterward, you would be instated as the immortal lord of the universe?

It would be more meaningful a sacrifice if I were to kill one of my Sims.

The whole crucifixion business aside, the morals Jesus verbally extolled also were frequently bizarre and useless.

“Give to everyone who asks of you,” says Jesus in the book of Luke. “If anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.”

This is horrible, horrible advice.

Granted, it’s a step up from the fetus skewering (2 Kings 15:16) of the Old Testament, but it still has the potential to lead to terrible injury for anyone who takes it seriously.

Fortunately, it seems to have been roundly ignored, even and especially by Christians.

The same could be said of Jesus’ advice to offer no resistance to evildoers (Matt. 5:39). It has a sort of naïve charm, but it’s not an intelligent or useful suggestion, and would probably cause more harm than benefit if followed.

I’m also a little curious about the point of the bit in Mark where Jesus zaps a fig tree to death because he was hungry for figs and the tree didn’t have any figs on it.

In any case, it’s because of this pervasive nonsensicality that I choose to look to other narratives for insight that will help deepen my understanding of life and morality.

Kurt Vonnegut’s “Mother Night,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” Alan Moore’s “Watchmen”: these are works that peer deep into the human condition, not the Jesus tale.

-Zac Smith is an English junior.