Well if you don’t believe in the trinity, then Jesus was either a man or was God. If he was God he performed an atonement by sacrificing himself to pay for sins of man. The idea that man’s sins must be atoned for is…HIS IDEA.
If you believe that Jesus was man, then how would one guy be able to ‘atone’ for someone else’s sins? He’s just a random guy.
That’s not the Christian formulation of the Trinity, though. It doesn’t state that God is three persons who are also one person. Rather, the Trinitarian statement is that there are three persons in one God. One might disbelieve this statement or fail to grasp it, but regardless of one’s belief or disbelief, it’s simply incorrect to say that Trinitarianism teaches “three persons and yet one person.”
What kind of profound truth manages to eliminate the need for interpretation? It’s foolish to reject a religious worldview on the grounds that people may disagree about how it is to be interpreted. All but the most basic and elementary of statements are bound to be misinterpreted by some, or even a great many.
Just that if the atonement did something, anything, it changed something. If it didn’t change something, there was no “atonement.” If it didn’t accomplish anything, what was it?
I do see where you are splitting out the act from the punishment, but the whole idea of Christianity is that something fundamental changed because of the death of Jesus. The whole idea of the snarky comment that I quoted in the OP is that something fundamental changed because of the death of Jesus. The death of Jesus brought about something new. Things are different now than they were before.
If anyone argues with that, then they are making the very premise of the sacrifice nonsense.
I think this honestly causes more trouble than it solves.
Why would humans possibly have the impression that God doesn’t love them, and
How in the world does someone dying and it being our fault make that impression go away?
You just end up with an abusive parent whose life revolves around guilt trips by accepting this argument. “You’re a worthless scum who will suffer forever for your shortcomings, oh and I’ll just stand here in the RAIN and DIE of pneumonia because you don’t LOVE ME enough not to SUCK SO MUCH.”
Because life is unpleasant-to-horrible for most people, and was far worse at the time? The world isn’t consistent with a God that even likes humans, much less loves them. It’s the Problem of Evil again.
I believe it’s probably more important to establish that god actually exists before arguing over what color his hat is.
Jesus’ crucifixion is repeatedly referred to as sacrifice. If the question is to who or what, then there aren’t many candidates. Who were the sins against? Who declared things sins in the first place? Who declared heaven closed? Who declared that sacrificing their son would open heaven again? Who was the atonement to? God. God is the only thing possible for the atonement to have any meaning.
Yeah, sorry, I was being sarcastic.
I think having someone say that you suck so much you deserve to die (which is what the atonement is supposed to be taking care of in some way) is kind of a hint that they aren’t all that fond.
Trying to parse some kind of semantic distinction betwen a “sacrifice” and an “atonement” is lost on me. What’s the difference? What do humans need to “atone” for, and how did the crucifixion accomplish that? Most importantly, who SAYS humans need to atone? Only God. So why couldn’t God just skip the crucifixion and go right to forgiveness (as much as it can make sense to forgive people for doing only what he wills them to do)? What was accomplished with he crucifixion that couldn’t have been accomplished without one?
Except for that God did quite explicitly throw Adam and Eve out of Eden, and he did do his big baby with a mallet routine on Sodom and Gomorrah, not to mention flooding the Earth and killing 99.999% of everyone on it. So he did punish us for eating the apple, and he clearly is perfectly fine to punish us for any other sort of misdeed.
It also seems handy that God should choose to kill himself just as the Roman-Jewish authorities decided to kill Jesus.
I didn’t say I believed it. But that reading the the meaning of the Crucifixion requires you to believe that the Old Testament God is a Demiurge–that is, an evil and deceitful being, powerful but nonetheless subordinate to the true creator. That reading is easy to support from the text, as there is hardly any other way to read the Garden of Evil story except that the character presenting himself as God was setting Adam & Eve up.
IIRC, it’s that any man who’s free from sin can be a worthy sacrifice, rather like how scapegoats and sacrificial animals need to be without blemish; the problem with picking a random guy is that you’d probably get someone who’d racked up a whole bunch of sins, which is no more acceptable to He Who Demands Sacrifices than if you’d plopped some diseased calf that’s missing a testicle on the altar.
If you believe that, and you also believe Jesus was special enough to be “without blemish” right when he was offering himself up as a sacrifice, then it presumably scans: he was like unto a sacrificial animal that’s altar-worthy, because he was as free from sin as an observant Jew who dies maybe three seconds after Yom Kippur. (Whether this means the Romans could have arranged a good enough sacrifice by killing such a Jew maybe three seconds after Yom Kippur is another matter entirely.)