Modern explanations of Christs Sacrifice?

[Kanastrous]

It's rooted in the Israelite concept of the scapegoat.

In Exodus and Leviticus the priests would mumbo-jumbo over an actual goat, which 'absorbed' the sins of the congregation, and was then driven away from the camp to symbolically remove those sins. There's also the symbolism of the Paschal Lamb, whose blood marked the doors of the Israelite slaves against intrusion by the Angel of Death that wiped out the Egyptians' fist-born children.

The Crucifixion is the same basic gag with the same basic symbolism, except with a dead human in place of a banished goat.

[Rye]

There's a line somewhere that Jesus says, something like "he who lays down his life for his best friend is blessed blah blah" you get the idea. That's how liberal christians deal with it, his sacrifice was to take the evil out of the world, and this evil was understood as original sin/demons and soforth by the early christians.

The conservative answers tend to be stock fundie ones and anyone can recite those.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Well, an ex-Catholic friend of mine said he thought the most reasonable explanation was that the sacrifice wasn't really necessary for salvation, but rather it was just to focus humans on their guilt and make them feel indebted to him. In any case it makes God out to be an arbitrary asshole again, which is unavoidable within the context of orthodox theology.

The truth, simply, is that Christianity admits of no moral or logical rules except that whatever they say is unquestionably true when they say it, whether or not it implicitly or explicitly contradicts what was said a minute before. Reason is a tool they use to build themselves up in respectability when they can, and discard when it goes against them. Monotheism is nothing more than the projection of the domination fantasies of an insecure and hierarchically minded male onto the universe. Shut up and obey, bitch! Everything else is an ad hoc rationalization to prevent them from having to face an alternative worldview. It is not meant for you, but for them. Of course everyone here knows this.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Modern "explanations"? Gloss over the inconvenient anti-logical details, and then distract with appeals to love, tradition, and faith and hope.