I still love Kierkegaard

I'll break it down first and explain why it's incorrect -- (sorry this came out longer than I expected) the atonement is a big topic let me know if you have questions or if something needs clarification. I can provide sources for everything that I'm saying as well if you wish.

"God is sacrificing"

This makes it sound like Christ was a passive agent in the events of the passion and resurrection, which he is not -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have the same will.

"God is sacrificing his own son, which is also him"

Note how this statement must be false because it's contradictory. How can X "sacrifice" Y, when X == Y? This comes from a misunderstanding of the phrase "Jesus is God" -- that phrase means that Jesus is 'homoousious' in Greek or 'has the same nature/essence' with God the Father. However some people understand it incorrectly as "Jesus is the same person as the Father".

The idiom for Jesus is not God (which is never mentioned in the NT or the nicene creed -- never it is said that "Jesus is God") but the idiom is 'Son of God'. This idiom is the one language that is used by the council of Nicaea to formulate the creed. And to explain what 'Son of God' means the creed goes on to say that Jesus is homoousious with the Father.

"to himself"

The popular and incorrect understanding of this is that God just wanted someone to be punished instead of humanity (note how that doesn't even make sense how humanity is reconciled to God if someone else took the punishment! And how is Jesus supposed to die instead of humanity when he later rose from the dead? the whole thing is absurd!) but this understanding of the atonement (called 'penal substitution') is part of 16th century reformation theology. In the firsth 10 centuries of Christianity we have ZERO authors who thought about the atonement that way (have a quick look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonement_in_Christianity for a general view of this). The reason all Christian apologists believe this and try to defend it is because they are protestant.

"in order to satisfy rules that he himself also put in place"

This just portrays God as one who needs to find a 'loophole' in the system which he himself has put in place. How can this be even intelligble? God can do whatever he wants and he could have forgiven humanity easily. It's just that what humanity needed was more than forgiveness: human beings needed to be made alive again after being subject to death because of sin. Again just to be clear: the death because of sin is not a punishment -- it's the natural course of events when a human being turns their back to the source of life -- God.

"so that he doesn't have to send people he created and loves infinitely to be tortured forever in a place he created"

The popular image of God throwing people in a pit of fire and torturing them for eternity is not a Christian image. It first made its way to Christianity long long ago (which is probably why it's still prevalent) with the apocalypse of Peter -- a document that was influenced by pagan ideas (I'll put a reference here because this is important: this is from Bruce Metzger's The canon of the NT)

I am the OP, and you just about summed it up.

If I wish to ascertain the current status of the universe and the human ways of interacting with it, then any day, give me physics, math, brainscans, and controlled experimentation rather than longwinded twaddle from some dude believing his random personal ramplings to be somehow normative.

For a lot of what I do (large-scale, scientific computing), C++ is exactly what I need: it's expressive/compact when I need it to be, and its compile-time metaprogramming lets me do things faster in ways no other language can.

For testing and interactive analysis, I can easily use pybind11 to generate bindings. And because python integration is so easy, I can know many other people will be able to use it.

That's the balance I like best.

I prefer reinforcement learning to mind-body philosophy. I think RL has more clear and concise concepts that can be tested and has the potential to create intelligence, something philosophy can't do. I replace the word "consciousness" with "agent" and the word "emotion" with "value function", "sensing" with "neural network based representation" then suddenly so many mind-body debates become easier to grasp. "Reasoning" is just simulation of consequences in the mind, something called model-based RL, the babble of a baby looks like a LSTM learning to generate text, and the chaotic movements of a newborn look like pretraining RL agents for motion control.

Then I visit philosophy forums and people still insist on "qualia this" and "free will that". Qualia is just sensation + action value associated with it, it feels like something because it occupies our perception and value judgement, and determines actions. So many fake mysteries in philosophy, created by fluffy suitcase words like consciousness.

Yeah, but why would sensation and value function feel like anything? Why aren't we p-zombies one might ask? Because we are agents in the world and not being good agents means death, so we have to feel to exist. RL and sister domains like evolutionary algorithms explain consciousness by the opposite of it - death. For example, what is consciousness if not that thing necessary for you to eat, protect yourself and reproduce - in other words, to beat death?

P-zombies don't fear death. Even if one existed, it would not have the drive to protect itself and it would be damaged or destroyed soon enough. So it's like something that can only exist for a short time and not benefit from evolution or RL, similar to a traditional computer program. I wholeheartedly agree with a recent article that put the blame of stagnating philosophy of consciousness on the shoulders of Chalmers and the (philosophically) useless concepts he produced. The "hard problem" is just dualism in disguise. Call something "a hard problem" and it becomes a category of its own, apart from science, in the realm of metaphysics, an euphemism for dualism.

> approval or disapproval of God is not recorded

That's the whole point, certainly this was viewed as tragic but normal. In other words, child sacrifice was not recommended but certainly was within realm of possibility for ancient jewish religion (and of course for all other religions around that area).