The Mechanics of it All

I believe that the story goes that humans sin too much to be allowed into god's presence. The only way for god to save us was to send down his only son to take the burden of our sins onto himself, descend into hell, and then to rise again. It is my understanding that Jesus took every one's sin with him when he went to hell thus making the only requirement to gain entrance into heaven repentance and belief in Jesus.

The main problem I see with this is that god is supposed to make the rules. If humans sin too much whose fault is it, the human or the supposed creator of humans? Plus, the standard of too much sin is created by god and I would assume then he could just change the standard to fit his creation better.  

And if Jesus is God, that means God sacrificed himself to himself because the rules he wrote demanded it.

You'll notice that these days, virtually all human societies have by now developed a distinction between the concepts of debt and guilt. You can redeem somebody else's debt, by paying it for them, but you can't redeem somebody else's guilt. This is as it should be, surely. Punishing an innocent person in place of a guilty person is not justice but a double injustice.

Yet Christian theology doesn't seem to recognise this distinction. Guilt is redeemed as if it were a debt. 

I agree that it's one crazy story and none of it makes much sense, or any sense.

The bit about taking on our sin is interesting as it at least gives the whole process some type of logic/mechanism. 

I've never heard that he descended into hell.

The whole thing this story did for me growing up was to intill a massive amount of guilt - we were so bad that God had to send his only son so that we could torture and kill him - which allowed us to be saved! What a mind f!@#.

 The interesting part of this (and I don't proclaim to know the Bible particularly well) is that I don't know of any OT verses which prophecy that the only way to forgive "sin" is by killing an innocent and then heaping the sin of all humanity, including billions who have yet to be born, on this individual.  Perhaps more importantly, there is no explanation to justify why this is necessary.

Maybe heaven is just not for free-thinkers...

What kills me is that according to Christians, everyone (meaning half of this planet) who doesn't believe in Christ is still burdened with sin and will fry.  It is so bad that different sects of Christianity are certain that their particular interpretation is the correct one and believe other Christians are destined to hell.