Look, I’m not trying to convert you or even persuade you. I’m just offering some information about a particular point of view.
I’ve tried to have a friendly conversation, but you’ve been consistently dismissive, hostile, and rude. I don’t need to spend any more time trying to communicate with someone who won’t engage and who won’t offer me the minimal courtesy of a civil tone.
You win; I’m out.
We’re not going to do Pascal’s Wager again are we?
The perfect begbert2 is a refined skeptic who feels perfectly justified in not giving any god an inch of unearned slack. He’s also lazy, sloppy, egotistical, immoral, and quite rude (especially to children and babies).
What? You disagree? In that case you’re saying that there’s an ideal of perfection that I should be attaining - an ideal that’s clearly shared with Little Nemo and Obama and Brad Pitt and Donald Trump and the Saints and the Cardinals. (We know the ideal is a shared ideal because absent that we’d all have separate bibles, and absent separate bibles we can’t even aspire for this supposed varying perfection because whe don’t even know what different things we’re each supposed to be doing.)
So yeah - this paragraph makes no sense whatsoever. Either we’re all supposed to be God and not be us, or we’re fine as we are, warts and dirt and all.
On the upside - I don’t want to be in the company of any God who would make things worse for me if I chose not to be in the God’s company, so no matter how it turns out I’m going to come out fine.
So is God a marrionette or a slave?
What? There’s no dispute at all. Things were great in the garden of eden, then God was disobeyed (with a rather trivial offense) and then God started laying down punishments and curses left and right, resulting in the trouble-filled world we have now. In other words, God did it - that’s the creation myth here, not us “polluting our universe” or somesuch nonsense.
A REAL god could forgive without jumping through the hoops. Heck, even I can forgive a person without getting a transfusion from them and poking myself with a pin.
For certain values of “we all”. Others of us aren’t as impressed by a god that gets mired in and tied up in his own self-made beaurocracy. A better God wouldn’t have made stupid rules in the first place if he was going to have to go and poke loopholes in them - as if a rule that’s been ventilated by loopholes is somehow more meaningful than a rule that never existed.
Of course, that’s not as large a problem as one who uses his forgiveness as a cudgel to manipulate people. So, am I forgiven? God’s already “bought” my debt (from himself, apparently) - is really he going to forgive it, or hang onto it and try to use it to manipulate my behavior with conditional “forgiveness”? 'Cause if that’s what’s happening, I’m exactly as much in debt and enslaved and imprisoned and punished as I was before he made himself bleed to satisfy his own bloodlust.
“Your math and logic are stupid (because they disagree with my childish theology)” is all I get out of this. Was there another point?
Speaking of math, C.S.'s infinite debt thing is a math error - quite literally on a par with dividing by zero. It does sound pretty logical during the narrow window between being intruduced to mathematical infinities and understanding them, though.
The question rests upon the unstated assumption that the life of Jesus was intended as a learning experience for God.
Perhaps He had some other purpose in mind.
Tris
Slumming, perhaps?
Well, giving a substantive reply to a hemi-demi-semi-snark, slumming would fall into the broad category of learning experiences.
Tris
Actually, it wasn’t a snark. Another reason people slum is to show firsthand that the “lower classes” aren’t worthy of Enlightenment.
My point is simply that even method acting is still acting. It’s not genuinely becoming.
But still, this rests on the presumption that His experience, whether acting, slumming, or exploring is the reason for becoming a human, and living a human life, or approximating a human life, or shamming a human life, or creating an illusion of human life, or whatever you are assuming He is doing.
My point is that it might not be about what is in it for Him at all. There could be some other underlying purpose in the birth, life, and death of the savior of man.
When I play peekaboo with my infant child, I am never in doubt at all that he still exists when I hide my eyes. He might well not be aware of that odd fact of reality, that unperceived objects continue to exist. I might not have been aware that he did not have that concept. He certainly doesn’t know that I do have it. But you know what? That isn’t why I play peekaboo with my infant child.
Tris
God is just playing with us? He knows that his time on Earth is just a little excursion and that he is in no real trouble, but he’d like us to believe that he is experiencing agony, pain and doubt?
Because every Christian theology I’ve ever seen says that he became human. And I’m saying that no, Jesus wasn’t human because a human doesn’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. It has nothing to do with whether he learned anything. It has to do with whether he was human. Just as George Clooney dressing like a janitor and mopping a floor doesn’t make George Clooney a janitor, Jesus dressing like a human doesn’t make Jesus human, let alone “fully human.”
On your resume, you can’t put that you were a doctor just because you played one on TV. It doesn’t matter whether you had to learn something to play a doctor on TV, or if you already knew everything there was to know about playing a doctor on TV–you still were never a doctor.
If you voluntarily put yourself into a situation that makes you uncomfortable and/or causes pain, and you have a guaranteed escape(a “safe word”, if you will), then you are not participating in Real Life-you are having an S&M session.
From the point of view of an infinite god, of trillions upon trillions of worlds, with unknowable numbers of souls, over billions of years, every thing about you is fairly small, in every aspect of its existence, and significance, yes.
If that is the experience you gain from it, then from your perspective God is a petty, mean, and dishonest monster. Other outlooks are possible.
Tris
I do understand the dichotomy. I simply don’t think it is . . . significant.
I don’t find it unreasonable that God could in fact experience true human life. You could not have his perceptions, and do so, nor could I. I find projecting human limits onto God to be an interesting paradox when considering God projecting human limits onto himself. Very confusing to consider, if you are human. It might be easier to understand if you were God.
But, in either case it doesn’t seem to me to be a very important part of the story. I am not part of a particular sect, or theological tradition, so I cannot speak to the doctrinal consequences of it all, but the human side of the events seem more important. The birth and life, death, resurrection, and true humanity of the Lord are not philosophical events, they are miracles of faith, and love. Of course, that requires that God is God, and Christ is God made man. If it didn’t happen, then none of it matters at all. If it did, then the fact that it would be impossible for humans to accomplish seems unsurprising.
Tris
Yes they are. And without evidence, all outlooks are nothing but guesses and/or wishful thinking.
I don’t understand. If these events are miracles, then it seems to me that we should say that they are not inevitable or expected even given the unique situation Jesus was in. That is to say, we should not expect that a son of God should live the way he did, die and be reborn, and so on, and that these things are, for such a being, just as much a miracle as if they occurred to any average human. On that basis, that it would be impossible for humans doesn’t seem to be affected by the matter (or affect in turn) in terms of likelihood or reasonablity. It’s no more or less surprising that humans could not accomplish those things, with that as a given.
I’m talking about the human side of the events. It didn’t exist. There was God as God and there was God as Actor. Just as George Clooney knows he gets to stop being a janitor once the cameras stop, Jesus knew that he got to go back to (really just continue) being a god. That changes everything.
No matter how method the actor, no matter how deeply they feel the role, no matter how much suffering they emulate, they aren’t the role. You have to take away all of it, all extra information, all extra virtue, all extra confidence, in order to be a schlub like the rest of us. If you can’t do that, you didn’t live as a human.
When we hunger, we don’t get to create food from nothing. We don’t get to raise people from the dead or heal the sick. We don’t get to know when we will die and why and what happens next and what our purpose is.
That’s supposed to be what makes faith so special.
Whew. I turned my head almost all the way around following that. 
Uh, I think miracles are different from God’s perspective than from mine. I have fairly strong suspicions that God has a different view of even the most simple, and mundane thing than I do. I don’t know exactly how they are different, but somehow, I feel that they are still miracles even for him.
I find the entire realm of matters related to God to be unlikely, and unreasonable. I happen to have faith that they are true, not understanding of the details of how they came about. I have the exact same appreciation of my own life. It is really not that atypical of humans as a group but I don’t understand it, either.
Tris
Apologies. Looking back on it, even I find it hard to read. The basic idea I was trying to get at was essentially that if we consider some of the things that Jesus did to be miracles, then we are essentially saying that he required divine intercession to the same extent that you or I would require in order to do those things. That being a son of God, or whatever term would most accurately sum up Jesus’ unique situation, is not in and of itself enough to allow him to do what he did without divine aid. Which in turn would mean that we can’t attribute those miracles to that difference between Jesus and ourselves; that those things which are considered miracles performed by him can’t be used to exalt him.
Then I suppose the question is; what makes those things more unworthy of respect or reverence than the resurrection, for example? Assuming that they are, of course, which isn’t necessarily a given.
It does give me a lot to think about. I suppose defining what it is to be human is the crux of it, not what it is to be God. How much faith would Jesus need to accept his human life without divine foreknowledge, and how much miraculous foreknowledge would make him not human? Is Jesus actively making the fish eat a shekel and jump into Peter’s net, or simply having faith that telling Peter to be as a fisherman to solve the problems of a fisherman will allow Peter to experience his miracle? Is the feeding of the multitudes a specific creation on the spot, or faith that God will provide, born out by subsequent events? How much vision must a man have, to stop being a man? I have no answer to that.
Tris