Milossarian
I like your beer analogy. 
It is evil — and not people — that is cut-off from God. God must remain purely Good, or else He will cease to be God, just as beer won’t be pure if we pour Kool-Aid into it. We — Hitler and all the rest of us — choose whether we will go with the evil or go with God. When we see Him face to face is when we make our decision:
Fast forward a bit…
Back to the OP…
Which is it? Did Jesus God take upon Himself the sins of the world or not? You have put forth that God must remain purely good. Yet he took sin upon himself, there by making Himself unpure. If the sin He beared was greater than the love He had he would have ceased to exist. But according to you becoming tainted with sin would cause God’s existance to cease as well. Seems to me that Jesus as God taking on sin is the proverbial Kool-Aid into the beer (unless he did one of his neat wedding tricks and turned Kool-Aid into beer).
As I mentioned before, the system for forgiveness was already in place before Jesus, and it was dependent on man’s own will to ask for forgiveness and make restitution himself, for himself. I liken this to a son who has stolen something from the store. Out of love, his mother can go into the store and pay for the stolen item. What does the son learn? That his mother loves him but she will be there to bail him out if he does it in the future (makes for a pretty spoiled child). Or, the mother who has taught her son that stealing is wrong, can require her son go to the store himself and pay for the stolen goods. This too is done out of love, and the son learns that while his mother loves him, he is responsible for his own actions and the consequences there of.
[hijack]
And why you keep advancing the idea that an eteranl being can be destroyed is beyond me. God, by his very definition, can not cease to exist. Even if all the world stopped believing in Him, he doesn’t just go away unless he is mearly a construct of the human mind.
I think He would just be a very lonely, disappointed diety.
[/hijack]
**Does this mean, then, that Hitler had his shot at redemption and salvation upon death? That the process he went through is little different than that of anyone who passes away?
(I know there was a recent thread on this subject with regard to Timothy McVeigh.)
That is a hard thing for our mortal minds to deal with, and our earthly sense of justice.
We are told the the wages of sin is death. This would tend to mean that an unrepentant sinner is, indeed, cut off from blissful eternity.
If this is the case, though, there goes my theory that you cannot not accept love, understanding, and God’s/Jesus’ way upon death.
I don’t understand this theory. Why would anyone, including Hitler, upon coming face to face with God decide to go anywhere but with God? It says it is for fear that your deeds will be exposed, but to who. God knows what your deeds are and this isn’t like in the second grade when the teacher asks if you wet your pants and you don’t want to say “yes”, because the other kids will tease you. One of my favorite authors* says that if one soul is lost then God has failed (which of course he can’t do). He uses the parable of the shepard going to search for the one lost sheep.
*Leslie Weatherhead The Christian Agnostic.
Milossarian
Agreed. Consider this story, which I know you’ve seen before, but consider it in the context of your observation:
Kniz
If this is hard for you to understand, then you are a good and innocent person indeed! It might surprise you to know that there are people who despise goodness. Despise it to the core. And there are many many people who will not worship Love. If you think that God is going to greet you with a hickory stick when you see Him, you are mistaken. He will greet you with Love. Some will run to Him; others will run away.
If God were to judge us, His judgment would be perfect in every respect. But our judgment is something that we will do, not something that God will do. We merely judge ourselves by Who He is. “There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day.” — Jesus
Again, your innocence is refreshing. When evil people encounter Love, they experience shame.
Oh, so God has a weakness. He is not strong enough to tolerate evil. Got it.
Would a sane, rational person do this?
Many have already made their choice. [shrug…] Is it sane or rational to call Absolute Goodness a “weakness”?
I don’t see how dealing with famous people the same as you deal with everybody else is an injustice. Those people probably weren’t that different from you:)
Because Jesus was probably not a Jew but a pagan, and Christianity was formed out of a meld of Jewish and Egyptian religions.
The amount of scholarly research done on Christianity draws far, far too many parallels to this idea (IMO) for it to be simply ignored no matter what you believe.
The dying-and-ressurecting-god is so incredibly common to most of the pagan religions of the time that I can’t help but see a connection there.
But if you look to the canonical (did I spell that right?) books from the Apostles you’ll find they disagree on a few more points than just why Christ had to --or if he had to-- die. Not to say consistency can be found everywhere, of course, or that a few inconsistencies render the whole thing false, but rather it gives it a bit of a specious quality when compared to what else is known about the time.
It seems very likely that 1)Jesus was not a Jew. 2)His followers were sometimes not “hip” to what Jesus was doing. 3)Jesus wasn’t the only “Christ” of his day and surely wasn’t the only “miracle worker.”
I am not in any doubt that Jesus existed, or even that he preached a great deal. I don’t doubt that he felt he was part of something deeply religious. I do doubnt, however, that Christianity as it is today, or indeed, is historically, is much of how he intended it to be. I have recently started reading some of the “alternate Jesus theories” which, though they may be a bit of a stretch, surely offer much evidence in their favor in showing that the picture Christianity paints of Christ isn’t what Christ was all about. Taking Christianity in context of the times and what background Christ was likely to have come from makes his sacrifice much more apparent. He couldn’t become one with God until he died. Need I say that neither can we (if heaven exists) really? On earth we may come to know God, but only after we die and the time comes for us to ascend to heaven will we truly be one with Him in heaven.
Libertarian, when you say God cannot allow Evil to enter Him, you are saying He has a limitation, a weakness. An all-powerful entity should be able to do ANYTHING, anything we can imagine, including take Evil into Himself and transmute it into Goodness. He should also be able to do an infinite number of things we can never imagine.
If you want to believe in a limited, relatively weak God, go right ahead.
Once again the immediate is lost to the mediate. That God must remain Good to remain God does not imply that God must remain Good. There is nothing, other than His own choice as a Free Moral Agent, to prevent His abdication. As it happens, God chooses to be Good because He loves Goodness. I see nothing weak therein.
Eris
I agree with your premise that our amoral context serves to separate us from God in an ablative sense. In my opinion, that design is beautifully brilliant, and is the only perfect way to implement free-will.
I trust your intellectual integrity, and solely in the capacity of your admirer would I caution you that there is nothing novitatum about alternate Jesus theories. They go way back. Way way back. The so-called modern scholars bring to mind Poe’s observation that “no man has ever had an original thought.” There are an awful lot of gnats among the camels. In the end, there is only Love. All the rest is bullshit.
Lib, you’re talking about what God is willing to do. I am talking about what He is able to do, two completely different things.
An entity whose ability is not able to express its will is flawed, imperfect and relatively weak.
An entity whose ability is able to express its will in full is perfect. Is God such an entity or not?
[QUOTE]
coined by Lib
In the end, there is only Love. All the rest is bullshit.
[Deleted at poster’s request. --Gaudere]
[Edited by Gaudere on 06-30-2001 at 12:03 PM]
Jab,
Please forgive the arrogance, and sanctimony of the previous post. I offer no excuse, only a retraction, and abject apology.
Mods, if it is possible please delet the post, leaving this one in.
Tris.
I never got a chance to read it anyway. I left the boards at 6PM PDT yesterday.
God is perfect.
Incidentally, the moral imperative given to us by Jesus is “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” — Matthew 5:48
If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.
My question to this type of theory is “Where would the world be if everybody followed this advice?” I know that not everyone would, but it also doesn’t seem like a good plan for God to be making, if it is impossible for everyone to do it.
I do not like exclusionary religious ideas, where only so many people can qualify to go to heaven or whatever else is the goal.
Kniz
You understand, of course, that in the snippet you provided, Jesus is speaking directly to a man who values his wealth more than anything else. It was the man’s hope that he could “qualify for heaven” by obeying some simple rules. So Jesus gave him a new rule: love Me and all other people more than you love your money.
God’s kingdom is love among free moral agents. If there is any exclusion, it is merely we ourselves deciding that we are more interested in something else.
Under what rule, custom or convention are you allowed to call my quote a snippet when you did the same thing? Besides, I have always been told that the rich man was supposed to give up all his wealth and follow Jesus, just like Peter had laid down his nets and followed. You know like God provides for the lilies and birds, so will he provide for you.