I guess you never heard of "grace" or "mercy" which are actually pillars of Christian faith.

To sin is to separate yourself from God. Let me say that again... to separate yourself from God is to sin. Things you do that are bad (and I'm not talking about getting drunk occasionally or having premarital sex or watching naughty movies), like cutting yourself off from your family or intentionally hurting another person or willfully indulging in a practice that you know you shouldn't be doing, distances you from God. In a very pragmatic way... it's hard to converse earnestly with the being who created you to love creation if you are in the process of poisoning that creation, whether that's you, someone else, or the Earth itself.

When you ask for forgiveness or confess, you're not saying sorry in the hopes of getting into daddy's good graces again. You're not saying sorry because you hope you don't get punished for it. The act itself, and living with the knowledge of what you have done, is punishment enough. It's not "saying" sorry for anything. Repentance is a state of being actually sorry for hurting yourself or someone else, for the natural loss of connection with God that occurs. For a Christian, that sense of openness and honesty with God is as necessary as oxygen, and to lose that by deliberately failing to live up to what you should be doing is like cutting that off. And because of God's free grace and mercy, we do not have to sacrifice three goats or sit in the metaphysical time-out pen for a certain number of metaphysical minutes before you can regain that connection with God. God has already forgiven you for anything you might do, and all you have to do is recognize your flaws and failures and accept God's mercy.

Christians who say that they are 'saved' merely by being homeboys with Jesus are full of crap... Christians who say that their sins are forgiven but not other people's are full of crap. It is an absurd simplification of God's nature, one that does no justice to the vastness of God's mercy, nor to the incredible ability of humans to hurt each other. I realize that I am referencing Barth and Bonhoeffer and other neoorthodox theologians here so you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. But believe me, whatever you might think about the absurdity of God's nature, theologians have been there and done that.

I totally understand your criticism of the Job story. Like all literature, it's not perfect. I am especially incensed by the way, at the end of the story, some later rabbi editor decided to add in the nice Hollywood ending where Job gets twice as many animals and children as he had before. Way to blow the whole point of the book, dude! But I guess if such an act got the thing canonized, it may have been worth it.

As a direct metaphor to our relationship with God, the Job story leaves much to be desired, as you point out. That's where I would suggest that the text teaches us as much about its human authors as it does about God. You must hold the story of Job to its own standards: The prologue is an awkward attempt to explain to the listener why God would do such a thing to a person in the first place and thus get the story started, when actually God's speech from the whirlwind (which is the theological core of the work) makes clear that God's motives and reasons are unknowable to us, that God is a being so much bigger (and carrying so much larger a burden) than us that it is nearly impossible for us to fathom why the world functions the way it does, instead of in a way we might find more pleasing.

So, yes, the Job story is imperfect, as were its authors, as were its authors' understanding of God. But I think the fact that such a pessimistic book, one that rejects traditional Deuteronomistic teachings about God's punishments and rewards, made it into the canon, and is indeed one of the most memorable parts of the Hebrew Bible, speaks directly to the notion that God has a place for doubters, skeptics, sufferers, and dissidents in God's love. In fact, that place may be even more exalted than that of people who (like Job's friends) merely mindlessly believe what they've been taught.