Eh? What exactly is depraved about it, and by what standard are you judging it to be depraved?
I'm judging it by my own standard of what I deem good and right, just like everyone else does.
And where do I start with? I suppose my main argument is what Bobboau said, that humans are supposedly tainted so badly by our nature or our ancestors' actions (depending on interpretation) that it's impossible for us to get to heaven, and that the best solution God could come up with was to incarnate as a sinless human, go through the experience of dying, leave instructions to 11 guys to spread the word that NOW the only path to salvation / heaven is through believing that Jesus/God died for our sins so that we could get to Heaven, or have everlasting life, or however it's expressed.
This is a highly dubious plan from an all-knowing, all-powerful creator being. Basically, it turns out that his creation turned out so flawed that we didn't fulfill his standards for good company in heaven, so he applied this scheme to... I dunno, filter in the people who go along with this plan, and exclude those who don't believe in it? And this selection process is based on faith alone? Wouldn't it be simpler to just change the heaven - which he created - so that it's easier for the things he created to get in? Why did God need to experience the pain of physically tortured to death as a human, in order to create this backport?
Not only that, but I find the idea of human sacrifice distasteful in general - if I'm such a bad person that I don't deserve to wear that uniform, the idea that someone dying an agonizing death makes me able to skip the judgement process makes me highly uncomfortable. If the premise of humans being faulty beyond salvation were true, then why exactly does Jesus' death change things at all?
Then there's the afterlife itself. Described as "Heaven", an eternal life of blissful happiness, it is actually one of the most disturbing mental images that I can imagine - second only to the doctrine of Hell, which comes first.
The obvious fault in the concept of Heaven is that due to the faith-based (or arbitrary, who knows) selection process,
no one gets to heaven even in a best case scenario.
Let's consider a person of faith. He believes in just the right religion, and after his death, he is rewarded by being accepted into Heaven, to do whatever heaven beings do.
But this person has a family, people close to him, people whom he loves and misses while in heaven.
Some of these people are not accepted to go to heaven. In some variants, they just fade into nonexistence after death, forgotten and eternally dead. In the more seriously flawed variants, they are sent to Hell to
suffer for all eternity.
Needless to say, when the person who got to heaven realizes that some of his close ones didn't make it, this would cause some level of mental anguish and sadness.
But since Heaven is a place with no suffering, he
cannot feel sad about his family members who he will never again see. Either his thinking will be altered so that he does not miss them, does not feel bad for them not getting to heaven, or his memory is altered so that he doesn't even remember they ever existed.
In either case,
the person in Heaven is no longer the actual person who lived and loved the people who didn't get to go to Heaven.
And, of course, the doctrine of Hell (which thankfully is not central to most directions of Christianity despite popular belief) makes all this even worse, because now lack of faith is not only something that makes you miss on a reward (which is ethically problematic in itself), but instead it is a
crime that will be punished.
In fact, non-believers are sentenced to receive
infinite punishment for a finite crime, which is about as morally wrong as things can be.
Not only that, but faith is something that a person either has, or doesn't have. It's not a matter of choice either, so it's not a question of free will. The logical conclusion is that God has sentenced non-believers to death/hell/non-heaven and there is nothing non-believers can do about it, which again doesn't seem very ethically sustainable but whatever.
And yes - there is indeed the dilemma mentioned by Bobboay. Personally, I believe God's commands can't make an action ethical. It would be exactly the same as war criminals saying that they only obeyed orders. We don't accept that as a valid excuse from soldiers, and neither should we consider God's commands inherently moral - at least, I can't do that, but maybe I value human life and human mind more than God.
By the way, while thankfully most sects of Christianity do not try to apply some of the more insane commandments of God, they pretty much have to engage in tremendous amounts of intellectual dishonesty to justify ignoring the majority of the completely repugnant commandments written in their Holy Book, while still trying to maintain that the few socially, legally and ethically somewhat acceptable commandments are proof of how wise and loving this God is and how it is so much better to follow the moral guidance given by this religion than to try and decide on your own what's good and right.
And, perhaps the most personally offensive assertion that most religions do is that morality comes from God and that humans cannot behave in a moral way without (conscious or unconscious) guidance from God.
An evolution of this form is that when a person (believer OR non-believer) behaves in a moral way, it is always proof of God's influence, but when they behave in perceived immoral way, it's not seen as God's influence...