For some reason as I was falling asleep last night I started thinking about the Jesus story and the idea that Jesus, though divine, got to experience being human up to and including death.
But when I think about my own life, I realize that the biggest obstacle I face is uncertainty. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll overcome whatever life throws at me. I don’t know if I’m making the right choices. I don’t know how I’ll die. I don’t know that I’m a god. I don’t know that there’s a magnificent afterlife.
If these questions aren’t at issue, how much of the human experience are you getting? How much can you know about your future before you aren’t living the same sort of life as your neighbor is living?
Not only that, but the guy didn’t sin. He didn’t have sex, drink himself into a stupor, play cards or get into fights. According to some people, he never even took a crap.
Also, why wouldn’t an omniscient and omnipotent God who created everything not already know all there is about being human?
Attempting a more constructive answer, I would point towards the essay by philosopher Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”. Nagel argues that the defining characteristic of conscious experience is subjectivity – that we could never know what it is “like” to be another organism, probably not even our own identical twin, let alone a creature as alien to our experiences as a bat.
How, even, could God observe them from another point of view?
I guess what I’m arguing here – and Nagel seems to back me up – is that there is no way for God to know what it is like to be a human, anymore than I can know what it is like to be Mario or Zelda.
According to some Christians he had perfect parents, never felt what it was like to have abusive parents, never knew what a real married couple experienced. never had to support a wife or children so didn’t experience the worries of that. Never experienced being a woman or know her experiences in life, never fathered (or bore) a child, some believe he had no siblings, so didn’t compete for his parents attention. Was never a human parent who didn’t know the future; when he needed money for taxes he sent Peter to go to a certain fish and get the money for his and Peter’s taxes. Was able to know he would come back to life (said after 3 days he would come back after death) so it wasn’t really a death as humans know it. He really didn’t live a true human life or experience what a normal human does. Once hid when he was almost caught because it wasn’t his time, so chose when he would be arrested.
One can read into what the authors wrote, but really can’t know about him for certain. Couldn’t have any human male chromosones, because his father wasn’t supposed to be a human.
Is that standard Christian dogma? Because the argument with the moneylenders in the temple seems very much like a “fight” to me, and as for the rest I don’t remember hearing anything about Jesus having done it or not.
I’m not sure; I’m not a Christian. I do know that it is standard Christian dogma that he was without sin; I guess it is just a matter of what you believe constitutes sin. Is fighting a sin? Sex?
And maybe it is situational. I would guess there are some Christians out there who believe Jesus’s actions are defined to be without sin. Even if he snorted a gram of cocaine and raped 100 hookers, it would have been the purest and most sin-free coke-fueled hooker rape in all of history.
It isn’t like there is a set of beliefs you actually have to adhere to to be a Christian. All you have to do is call yourself one and probably at least have heard of Jesus. My mom calls herself a Christian, but she believes in everything from palm-reading to reincarnation.
Anyway, my overall response to the OP is that this is a modified “rock so heavy he can’t lift it” scenario. Being omniscient, or “all-knowing”, you would think God already knew what it is like to be a human. But according to Nagel – whom I agree with – that isn’t even logically possible, due to the nature of subjective experience.
PS Does anybody know the source of the idea that the reason God came to earth as Jesus was to experience the pain and suffering of being a human? Is it in the bible? Or is it relatively new? Is it an implicit part of the whole Jesus story?
Personally I never understood why he couldn’t just snap his fingers and make everything better, or why things were (and are) so shitty in the first place, considering he is the Master of the Universe and all. A veritable He-Man.
Right… that’s what I don’t understand. What does coming to earth and pretending to die have to do with any of that?
Besides… Before Jesus, did everybody die, or did they suffer eternally? That seems like two completely different things there. Anyway, it seems like there’s still a lot of suffering and dying going on.
But then the big question becomes why was it necessary for Jesus to come to Earth to end eternal suffering? Jesus is God. Couldn’t God have just ended eternal suffering any time he wished? Why did he need to come to Earth and die as a human first?
Well, even many theists admit to a version of “omnipotent” that means “can do anything logically possible”; which means that logically impossible things can’t be accomplished by an omnipotent. Applying the same standard to omniscience would mean that things logically impossible to perceive can’t be perceived by an omniscient.
Right. The human experience isn’t an omniscient one, so an omniscient being can’t know what it’s like to be as limited as we are. If people were omniscient, their experience of their lives would be hugely different.
Even the Gospel writers seem to disagree as to whether Jesus experienced doubt or uncertainty. John emphasizes His divine omniscience at every opportunity (whenever Jesus asks a question, John points out that He already knew, and was just asking to test the people around Him), but the other three Gospel writers include scenes like the garden of Gethsemane, where it’s pretty clear that He is indeed having second thoughts about the whole crucifixion deal. Personally, I think that He had to have had doubt, because without doubt, the Crucifixion was no sacrifice at all.
The part where he actually sees things from our point of view. Because he can’t, because he isn’t a human. He may know, in some sense, what we feel and what we think, but he can’t be a human anymore than I can be a bat. I can imagine I have wings and eat rotten fruit, but I’m still seeing it from my own perspective. In other words, I can attempt to visualize what it is like for me to be a bat, but I can’t comprehend what it is like for a bat to be a bat. I just can’t. And neither can God.
And there is no way you can simultaneously claim Jesus was a regular human, like you or I, and also claim that he was divine and the son of God and/or God incarnate. Basically, if he’s God, he’s seeing things from his perspective, not a human’s. No matter what shape he comes in.
Anyway, if you can read philosophese, I suggest reading the essay I linked to in post #3. It explains things a lot better than I can.
According to the Bible, Jesus did experience uncertainty. He knew what he was supposed to do, but he also knew that it was going to be lonely and very painful, and there were times when he wanted to escape. That’s why asked that the cup be taken from him, why he spent the night praying in the garden, and why he called out on the Cross that his father had forsaken him.
Mainstream Christian belief is that Christ was fully human as well as fully divine (at least prior to his death). I’m riffing a bit here, but I think what that means is that, as a human, he could have chosen to walk away from God’s plan (see, e.g., The Last Temptation of Christ). Certainly, one can disagree and argue that this doesn’t make sense, but that’s the belief. Think of it as analogous to the wave-particle duality. ( I see Chronos in this thread).
But there are any number of human beings for whom any of that is true. Christian belief is that he became a human being, not every human being. Note too that the Bible says that he lived in poverty, worked with his hands, and spent his preaching career among society’s outcasts. He didn’t personally experience everything in society, but he kept it real in many ways.
He believed he knew these things, but as noted above, there were times when he worried that he had been forsaken.
Christian belief is not that he pretended to die, but that he actually did die, just like all of us someday will. He was resurrected on earth, which is obviously unique to him. Ultimately, though, he went to Heaven, and that’s available to human beings as well.
Christ had to come to earth and choose to die as a human being to redeem humanity, because it was human beings who chose to stray into original sin. As I understand it, it’s about God respecting the degree of autonomy that he chose to give to his creations.
(Yes, there are Christians who do not believe in free will. Their views are presumably somewhat different, but I’m not the person to address them.)
The suffering and dying is here on earth. Christ’s promise was life everlasting in Heaven. Many, if not all, Christians believe that those who died between the Fall and the Resurrection did not go to Heaven, although I think there’s disagreement on what happened to them. Catholic theology posits a Limbo, which Dante portrayed as the first circle of Hell. Souls there were comfortable, content, and not tormented, but they were separate from God. I think he also wrote that when Christ passed through Hell, many virtuous ancients chose to leave with him.
BTW, I’m not trying to witness, and I’m not stating any of this as fact. I’m not saying that this is what I believe, and I’m certainly not suggesting that you should believe it. I’m just setting forth the point of view that I think many Christians would offer to address some of the points raised in this thread.
But monavis said Jesus died so that other humans wouldn’t have to. But humans still die, every last one of them. To me that means that plenty of humans “died” in the sense that they didn’t live forever. But Jesus lives forever. So he didn’t really die. Not in the sense monavis was referring to at least.
I know you think you’re explaining it, but you’re really not. This makes no sense whatsoever.
Christ had to come to Earth? Why did he have to? Why was God unable to simply redeem humanity without coming to Earth? What prevented him from doing so?
