I have never understood the whole idea of sacrificing an animal as a necessary function of worship, at least not in the Judeo/Christian tradition. Pretty clearly the priests of many religions ate well on such offerings, but God as depicted in the Bible surely has no need to eat to sustain himself (and if he did eat, as we understand it, I hate to think of the consequences).

As a result, one problem I have long had is the whole question of why Jesus would need to die for the sins of humanity. Who is it who sets these rules that bind God’s options for action? If God sets them, should he not know better? (The requirement of a virgin birth is another one of these limitations that make little sense to me, especially with the added Catholic claim that Mary was also born from an immaculate conception. The God who creates by merely speaking could surely have brought forth his son from a cow or a stone, if he chose, and with more miraculous implications. I understand the idea that he might have wanted his son to experience first hand the full range of human existence, apparently other than old age, to assure us that he was fully sympathetic with the plight of our lives. That would have required only a more or less traditional birth process and infancy. People just end up tying themselves in knots in creating these complicated doctrinal digressions.)

The best explanation I have ever been able to work out on my own is that Jesus made the sacrifice not to satisfy some requirement by God but to show others that we should not be afraid of accepting the consequence of taking righteous stands. I am not sure that really works for me, as I would still be very much hesitant to follow his model without the confidence he would presumably have had from special knowledge. An alternative is that with people having adopted the tradition of sacrifices, God wanted to make a clear statement within that tradition. The problem there is that we did not get to see the life and sacrifice of Jesus, and relying on increasingly distant, unverifiable accounts is hardly more than marginally persuasive.