You know very little about theology! This is not an insult, just an observation, as most Christians know very little of theology as well (a tragedy, in my opinion). You are doing a good job regurgitating the same so-called Christian pillars that many fundamentalists would like you to believe are important to living in relationship with God. Luckily they are not! Let me pick this apart piece by piece to make things easy on my brain.

Are you claiming that a Hindu or a Buddhist can't show grace and mercy?

Hey I thought I was supposed to be the nasty one.

You misunderstand me. Christians don't show grace or mercy at any higher level than other people (that much is painfully obvious), and in my belief system, they are not shown grace or mercy any more than other people. God is the source of grace and mercy, and God shall happily give it to any who come to Him with a contrite and loving heart, whether they call Him Vishnu or Allah or Yahweh or nothing at all. That is perhaps where I might be considered a heretic by some Christian groups but I am proud to believe it and say it here.

The pillar of the Christian faith is a belief in a monotheist God, and the sacrifice of that monotheist God's son allowing mankind to cleanse itself of sin.

That is a certain interpretation of Christ, and certainly a fairly mainstream one. I do not share it... I ascribe to Gerhard Forde's theory of atonement, whereby Christ was not the sacrificial lamb born destined for exceptional suffering, but rather, Christ came as God in the act of forgiveness. Humanity, being a fickle bunch, rejected that notion of radical forgiveness, and we killed its bearer because we didn't know what else to do. I say "we" quite intentionally because I've little doubt that such skeptical and rational people as us would have no hesitations in killing (metaphorically or otherwise) any bringer of mercy who might come to us in this day and age. And God let us do it, God let us kill God, because God wanted us to see what we had done and realize our own hypocrisy. We all claim to want salvation, forgiveness, enlightenment, etc., but when it hits us in the face we'd rather smack it away. God has given us the opportunity to recognize this flaw in our human nature, and try to overcome it.

Without the promise of heaven or hell there is no point to Jesus' sacrifice, and Jesus was very clear on what was required in order to be "saved."

Yes, he was quite explicit. I believe it's something like this: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself." There is, in a way, a promise of heaven and hell. But heaven is to be with God, to be a part of God, to be cleansed of all the parts of you that have made you weak... hell is to be isolated from God and to be relegated to dwelling in all the parts of yourself that you hate... your own arrogance, wretchedness, hatefulness. But as I said before, God's mercy is eternal. Anyone who comes to God will receive it. Those are pillars of a faith which might be described as Christian, and that's a kind of faith I can hang my hat on, if you take my meaning.

Is it possible that men are more published in Op Ed sections because they seem to think their pointless, arrogant opinions are interesting and insightful more than women?

I don't know about man vs. woman but in my experience most Op Ed pieces are full of crap. I guess I wouldn't feel so bad if my sex could claim greater abstinence from such an ego-revelling drug.

But to each his/her own!

I am an expert in Angevin history, playing make-believe and wasting way too much time on Salon writing letters to the editor.

I have references but no degrees. Does that count?

If you would like to educate yourself about the facts of intelligent design and evolution, PBS's excellent documentary here might be a good place to start: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/

The answer is the same as to why historians don't necessarily take seriously contemporary accounts of events. Paul has an agenda and his own interpretation, and his epistles are written to certain groups of people in certain circumstances. As long as you go into his letters with that in mind it's not terribly difficult to recognize the good bits from the extraneous ones in his writings.