Diogenes the Cynic, do you want to question him about the nonsensical notion of god splitting off part of himself to create a son, then telling this son to sacrifice himself to appease a rule that he himself, or herself, an omnipotent being made, or should I?
I have to run out for a bit, so go ahead and start without me. I’ll be back to hit clean up a little bit later.
Ok.
yBeayf, you said he had to do this. I believe the concept was added so that when people said “Hey! The Jews were a conquered people. They couldn’t have killed Jesus.”, they Roman Empire, one of Christianity chef sponsors could not have the blame laid on them. That is just my pet theory however, and it does not lay to rest the fact that a god sacrificing himself to himself, is both illogical, and appears in earlier religions, some of which had saviors namied Jesus, as well.
One explanation that I have read (it’s been a LOT of years, so I don’t have any idea who wrote it) is that the idea of a sacrifice was not because God demanded it, but because it was an event that the people of that time and place understood.
Article seems to have a good explanation, but unfortunately I don’t know enough to know if the author got everything right.
Sacrifices (usually plant or animal) were a part of the Jewish religious practice of the time. Included in the reasons for making a sacrifice was to ask forgiveness for sins. So there was already a link in people’s minds between the ideas of sacrifice and forgiveness. God was using a form that his audience already knew. He was providing a lesson in a way that his students would (hopefully) understand.
Well, one would hope that a message of god would be one of enlightenment, not of the same old stuff, but it is a better answer than I have heard so far.
I still have problems with it though, but let’s not go into them right now.
Maybe I’ll sound stupid/crazy but:
God told Adam that to eat of the fruit of the tree of evil would cause him to die. Adam ate the fruit and (eventually) died. For God to simply wipe away the punishment would not serve justice. God has a history of serving justice over forgiveness (see Sodom and Gomorrah). So, to fufill justice, Jesus takes our punishment upon himself to save us.
I’m not sure I believe it, but it’s what I’ve heard, I’m still figuring out what I believe.
This is what I said in my point earlier, that a god could be trying to prove a point in a way that had “shock value” that they could understand and made sense for the times. Sacrafice had significance in the context of the times.
I disagree however that god did not demand this from Jesus based on the bible, as the passages of Jesus in The Garden of Gethsemane (example matt 26 36-42)
clearly shows that Jesus did not really want to die the way he did, and he did so only because he thought god demanded that he do it.
This certainly loosely follows lines of christian thought. Much christian docrine teaches that Jesus died to atone for orginal sin.
If you would like to be enlightened regarding some quite varied views on this see:
independant review(of view as stated by Augustine)
This will give you an opportunity to experience several different views
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But there was no Adam and Eve, no Garden, no tree and no fall. So where does that leave Christianity inre: “Original Sin?” Why do we need to be redeemed for an event that never occurred?
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Genesis says that Adam and Eve didn’t know right from wrong until after they ate the fruit so they can’t be held morally responsible for disobeying God if they didn’t know it was wrong.
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What does Adam have to do with ME? Why should I be held responisble for what someone else did?
4.How could eternal torture (or if you’d prefer, eternal separation from God) ever be rationalized as “justice?” There’s nothing just about it.
- It still makes no sense to demand a human sacrifice. All God has to do is DECIDE not fry people. No sacrifice is required. No “justice” is required. Nothing is required because all of these rules were just arbitrarily invented by God in the first place. A theology which states that humans must be saved from God has something logically wrong with it.
This contradicts the words of Jesus himself who said that all that’s necessary for eternal life is to love God and love thy neighbor.
(Luke 10:25-28)
*25On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26“What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27He answered: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[c]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[d]”
28“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”*
So the man himself says nothing about human sacrifices or specific belief, just love God and love your neigbore. I would also argue that Jesus defined those two commandments as synonymous in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (“whatever you have done to the least among you, you have done to me.”) So all you actually have to do is love your neigbor, according to Jesus.
What “sinfulnes and blindness?” What does “sin” mean and why does it deserve horrible punishment?
Why not just remove the “stain” (whatever that means) just by willing it away? Why does God need to be appeased by a sacrifice?
Also, how does God expect people to know what the truth is without proof? How is it fair to expect people just to guess which religion is the true one?
God created Adam and Eve with free will. When they sinned against God, they were afflicted with corruption and death, not as a vengeful punishment but as a natural result of their turning away from God. “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” This is not a threat, but a warning, and a simple statement of cause and effect.
But God is a God of Love; it is His nature to love. So rather than let us continue to live in death and decay, He healed our nature by joining it to Himself in the person of Christ, and demolished death and corruption by submitting to it, and then resurrecting Himself in a restored, incorruptible body – the body that we were meant to have originally, but lost as a result of our fall.
Maybe God could have remedied the situation another way; I don’t know. But the above is what He did, in fact, do.
The fathers have taught that the Garden did not exist on this earth, but near it, in a manner we are currently incapable of comprehending. The details are unknown to us, but suffice it to say at one point there were two humans who were the first, they were in an unearthly garden, they disobeyed God, and therefore lost their primordial state and turned away from the presence of God.
They were like moral infants. They knew it was wrong to eat the fruit theoretically, but they had no concrete knowledge of right and wrong. The fathers do teach, though, that they eventually would have been allowed to eat from the tree. It was not the fruit itself that caused the fall, but their disobedience and turning away from God.
You are descended from Adam and Eve, and so share in the effects (NOT the guilt) of their sin, just as the child of a women who drinks heavily during her pregnancy will be born with various defects and malformations.
Because at every point that a person is in hell, it is their choice to remain there. God wills that all be saved, but not all are willing to be saved, and God will not interfere with one’s free moral choice (which, incidentally, is the proper understanding of “free will.” Obviously I am not free to decide to turn into a frog and go flying off into the sunset, but I am free at every point of my conscious existence to choose whether to do right or wrong).
God does not choose to fry people; they choose their fate freely, and continue to choose it for as long as they suffer it. It is God’s love that they have rejected, and so being face-to-face with it is intolerable for them, while being the ultimate bliss for those who have chosen it.
I agree wholeheartedly. This is why I do not believe that we needed to be saved from God, but rather from death.
That is all that is necessary to inherit eternal life. For there to be eternal life to inherit in the first place, though, is why Christ died and was resurrected.
The sinfulness and blindness that led some Jews AND some Romans to put Him to death, which is the same sinfulness that we are all guilty of, to greater or lesser degrees. It is the same spirit of disobedience of and hatred for God and His love.
Sin is the turning away from our true nature as it was originally created. When I sin – when I do not love God with all my mind, heart, soul, and strength, and when I do not love my neighbor as myself – I am acting as one less than human, for humanity was and is meant to do both of these things.
The sacrifice wasn’t to appease God, it was to destroy death. See my post immediately above.
The Church is the true religion, and the only guaranteed way to salvation, but that does not mean that everybody else will be damned. After all, did Christ not say that if one loves the Lord with all one’s heart, mind, soul, and strength, and one loves one’s neighbor as oneself, one will live?
Some good points yBeayf. It still seems to me that a god of love and kindness wouldnt want a sacrafice of any kind, willing or not. What would an eternal god know of death anyway? It still makes more sense to me that Jesus was sent so that we could redeem ourselves, by not killing him. And showing our maker that we are not the brutal, amoral creatures we seem to be. We failed, and in the end Jesus asked God to forgive those who “know not what they do”.
In the Bible we are led to believe he is talking about those who are killing him, but I believe he was asking forgivness for all of us.
Again, Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t to satisfy some sort of lust for vengeance on the part of the Father – it was Christ willingly offering Himself as a victim so as to destroy death. The sacrifices under the old law were a prefigurement – it was as if the victim suffered the death that properly belonged to us. With Christ, He actually did suffer that death, on our behalf, and since He took on our death, we may partake of His resurrection.
More than any of us, since He’s already experienced it and we haven’t.
What “fathers?” Cite?
There is not a shred of evidence to support this and plenty to refute it.
No, sorry, you can’t have it both ways. Either they knew right from wrong or they didn’t. You can’t be a little bit pregnant.
Their disobedience was no sin because they didn’t know it was wrong.
A. I’m descended from replicating RNA molecules
B. What “effects” are you talking about? How are these “effects” mechanically passed genetically? If I don’t have any guilt then what do I have to repent for?
Nonsense. It’s God’s choice and God’s choice alone. He can make Hell disappear any time he feels like it.
Blaming the victim.
[qupte]and God will not interfere with one’s free moral choice (which, incidentally, is the proper understanding of “free will.” Obviously I am not free to decide to turn into a frog and go flying off into the sunset, but I am free at every point of my conscious existence to choose whether to do right or wrong).
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- How is one supposed to know what’s “right and wrong?”
- What’s immoral not being able to correctly guess which religious mythology out of thousands is the true one?
I’m sorry but these kinds of declarations just don’e even make semantic sense to me much less logical sense.
All I know is that frying people is entirely God’s choice. Hell is his own invention and if he loved people he would simply forgive them as they are.
I agree wholeheartedly. This is why I do not believe that we needed to be saved from God, but rather from death.
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Death by God.
Diogenes the Cynic said:
Given that the OP refers to Jesus and God, it is God’s POV that matters, not yours or mine. I note later in your post (quote box 3 below) you do a fair amount of handicapping as to what is reasonable, ethical or logical. (as you are want to do) Also, you have not cited the bible, whcih given the context and thrust of the OP must be the only document from which the answer must come from. (or at the very least, the primary source. To the extent other sources are cited, they can be, at best, secondary sources; essentially commentary on the source material, the bible.)
As to Diogenes’s question and the definition of sin, the bible refers to two types of sin. The first is the sin that we are all born with; the sin we inherit. (Rom 5:12) The bible also speaks of sin that we commit ; the sin that comes from excercising our free will in a way that misses God’s standards of righteousness. The Greek word for sin carries the thought of “to miss” or “missing”; as in missing the mark, or to miss God’s mark. The Hebrew word carries a similar connotation.
From the bible’s POV, sin can be practiced through different ways. It may be in word (Job 2:10; Ps 39:1), in deed, doing wrong acts (Le 20:20; 2Co 12:21) or failing to do what should be done (Nu 9:13; Jas 4:17), or in mind or heart attitude** (Pr 21:4; compare also Ro 3:9-18; 2Pe 2:12-15). Lack of faith in God is a major sin, showing, as it does, distrust of him or lack of confidence in his ability to perform. (Heb 3:12, 13, 18, 19)** A consideration of the use of the original-language terms and examples associated with them illustrates this.
It is only God who has the right, wisdom, and power to establish what His standards are. Nonetheless, God is patient and understanding of our imperfection, and does not comdemn us accordingly. In fact, the point of Jesus’s death was to reconcile us to Him (via Christ’s death) and cleanse us of our imperfection. (our sin)
It is clear that human sin originated with Adam and Eve. It’s also clear that while A/E started human sin, Satan’s sin pre-dated A/E.** (1 John 3:8, John 8:44 and others)**
The biblical cites that show that sin has consequences number in the hundreds, and likely the thousands. God clearly laid out the requirements for Adam and Eve for example (Gen 2:16, 17) and also the consequences of disobedience.
As their God and creator, only He had that right. Throughout the OT & NT the cites show both a requirement of God, and the consequence of disobedience are too numerous to count. (See Rom 6:23, 6:16, 1 John 3:4-8, Pr 10:7, Gal 6:7,8 and hundreds of others)
(Diogenes asked about the comment " His resurrection showed that He conquered sin and we can too.")
It is only God who can establish what constitutes “justice.” It’s His universe. It’s His world man, we’re just spinning on it. As noted somewhere in the thread, God required animal sacrifices for many things, including sin atonement. Many of these sacrifices were quite specific, and dealt with different types of sin.
However, there is nothing in the bible that remotely suggests that Jesus’s death was done because it ‘would be something that the people would be familiar with.’
OTOH, it is clear from the bible that Jesus’s death was a “corresponding ransom”; it was a corresponding debt paid by Christ and God–willingly and out of love. The debt we incurred was the debt, and curse, of sin; of imperfection.
We inherited this curse from our perfect parents, Adam and Eve. Given that they were born perfect—without the blemish of sin—only a perfect man could offer himself as an equivalent sacrifice to balance the scales of Justice. Only Jesus had the necessary credentials to offer himself up as an equivalent sacrifice. (See Rom 6:23, Rom 3:23,24, Eph 1:7, Heb 10:1-3, 9:22-28, 1 Pet 1:18-19, Rom 5:15-19, Rom 5:14, Matt 20:28, Rom 5:8, 8:20, Heb 2:17 and others)
It is for this reason that Jesus died; to balance out the scales of justice, to cancel out the debt of sin that we inherited through our perfect parents Adam and Eve. And through his sacrifice we have the means to approach God with a hope that we formerly did not have due to this curse.
Jesus conquered sin by choosing to keep God’s righteous commandments. He excercised free will in doing so. Like Satan, and Adam/Eve he could have chosen to sin—to disobey. Yet he kept his integrity. In fact, he kept his integrity in a much different world than the paradise that Adam and Eve lived in. Like Eve he was tempted many times. (See Matt 4) In spite of this, he kept his integrity all the way through an excruciating execution. He set an example for all of us to follow, and through his death provided a means to approach God in prayer with a clean conscience. He could righfully say, "…but take courage! I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33)
Certainly there were other ways. But this was His way. His righteous decision. His sense of Justice.
In any event, this is as intellectually vacant as it gets. I say that purely from a logical POV, and not as a believer or non-believer. It just is senseless.
I had a good friend who dismissed the account of Noah because the ark’s hull wouldn’t have been able to sustain the pressure exerted upon it. He conceded that God made the whole universe, the whole thing. He even conceded that God could control the weather–to make it rain for 40 days if he wished. But…apparently he couldn’t build a seaworthy vessel. :smack:
Diogenes, if you’re an atheist, cool. But…if you concede that there might be a God—the super-duper one that everyone talks about— it’s preposterous for any of us to define Him from our perspective, or ascribe limitations to Him.
See above for the definition of sin.
Certainly he could stop sin, or stop sin from causing death.
In the former, it would involve invalidating His righteous requirements and make our existence standardless. There would be no distinction made between good and evil, right or wrong.
In the latter it would either remove all consequence for our choicesand remove one incentive for striving to do good.
In any event, It’s His world. Who am I to say? Who are you?
Frankly, whether you choose to be a Christian or not is up to you. But with all due respect, I don’t think you can explain [cogently] Christian theology. Your questions in this post alone show this. It’s one thing to be able to articulate what the bible has to say on a given matter —thoroughly and contectually, and with a firm handle on the background and continuity— and reject it. But I do not believe you have this knowledge— the intellectual basis.
Knowledge must be the basis from which to gain faith. (along with humility, a spiritual awareness & sensibility etc) It appears to me that you are much better acquainted with books that entertain, or offer speculation/opinion/commentary on the bible than the bible itself.
I’m just going to cut to this because it sounds like you don’t think salvation is dependent on specific belief but just on being a good person. I still don’t see any point in a sacrifice, nor do I believe that humans are inherently sinful but as long as we can agree that being a good person is ultimately all that matters, I have no quarrel with you.
Diogenes the Cynic:
Put me in, coach. I’m ready to play today. Sign me up for the batting order.
Ultimately, it is Christ who matters, but if one is not going to be a member of the Church, then yes, striving to the utmost to love God and to love one’s neighbor is the best chance one has at salvation.
I do wish to respond to a few points, though…
See St. Ambrose, Paradise; St. Basil the Great, Hexaemeron; St. Gregory the Sinaite, Chapters on Commandments and Dogmas (in the Philokalia), St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis and On the Creation of the World; and especially St. John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith.
The garden didn’t obey physical laws as we know them. Obviously, this means its existence is unfalsifiable, but there it is. I believe it existed, you do not.
Being pregnant is a binary state; having knowledge of good and evil isn’t.
The effects are transmitted both spiritually and physically. If we are only looking at the physical aspect, you are susceptible to disease and death, no? And this is because your body grew according to the information contained in your genes, which you inherited from your parents. The spiritual aspect is, of course, again unfalsifiable.
For Him to do so, it would require Him to take away our status as free moral agents, in which case we would no longer be humans made in the image of God, but automata.
Diogenes the Cynic said:
That’s another thread, right?
How about a cite? There is no commentary that I’m aware of that shows that Adam/Eve knew right from wrong after their sin. Certainly there was a change in their awarenes; for example they were now aware of being naked. (Gen 3:7) The fact is, they were now sinners. They were imperfect.
Given that none of us are/were perfect, we have no reference points from which to define the change in their awareness—how imperfection changed them. The bible says little on this, and anything else is speculation.
This much we know: They were given: A) Clear instruction, B) The consequence of disobedience.
They rebelled, plain and simple.
See that receding hairline? You [likely] got that from your father. The imperfection? Adam.
Sucks, doesn’t it?
Agreed. There is no basis to believe that a just God tortures us forever. The wages of sin are death, not torture [in a burning hell] (Rom 6:23)
- It still makes no sense to demand a human sacrifice. All God has to do is DECIDE not fry people. No sacrifice is required. No “justice” is required. Nothing is required because all of these rules were just arbitrarily invented by God in the first place. A theology which states that humans must be saved from God has something logically wrong with it.
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It makes no sense to you. It’s really just that simple.
God chose what he chose. Apparently you are calling Him to task with a better set of rules. (or non-rules…)
You’re simply disagreeing with the way God does things, right?
(And we aren’t being saved from Him. We’re being saved from us.)