And the story could continue like this — your friend would look at the authorities and say, “Sorry guys, I believe in Jesus (whatever that means).” And the authorities would be obliged to let him go :D Anyway, atonement does not make sense to anyone, therefore people go to great lengths to rationalize it. Without much success, I must add, hence the adage, “Just have faith.” If I’m not mistaken, you were alluding to “original sin” with your story. That is, too, one hugely misunderstood concept. On one hand, it’s true that the idea of stratified civilization with god-king on top and “untouchables” on the bottom propagates itself when people submit to it (either by conviction, but also by complicity), but as Jesus (and other wise people) said, change in behavior (“repentance”) can break that cycle. In case of your friend, if his great-grandfather stopped being a thief and brought up his kids not be thieves, he already “repented”, and no “sin” was “passed on” (no matter what he believed). In the East it would be called breaking the cycle of karma. Then again, what Jesus talked about, runs much deeper and permeates the whole society on a very subtle levels. It’s a little bit “out there”, but I touched upon it in an article about some aspects of Book of Revelation:
