Maybe Jesus wasnt supposed to die?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@the raindog

Diogenes the Cynic said:

I understand. That is your choice. But to the extent a person decides that they themselves can be the arbiter of what right and wrong is, Christianity will remain elusive, if not impossible. In virtually every thread that comes close to this topic someone will say some variation of “all you need is love” (the beatles song going through my head…) and misquote some scrpiture.

No need to misquote it. That’s exactly what Jesus and Paul both said.

The fact is, there are many more cites that show that Jesus Christ subordinated himself to do the will of his Father. Love is paramount. But along with love one must have a sense of their spiritual need, a hunger for it, and humility.

How can he subordinate himself to himself?

And even when you make a choice to subordinate yourself to something like Christianity, you are still deciding that it is “right” to do so. There is no way out of this box. All moral decisions are autocratic.

For my part, I recognize that if Jesus himself said that he was incapable [by choice] of being self willed,

This is a logical contradiction. You’re saying that Jesus was doing God’s will (as depraved as that might be) rather than his own, but if Jesus WAS God, then his will and God’s will are one and the same. He can’t subordinate himself o himself.

who am I to assert that my moral compass is any better? I would submit your compass doesn’t know true north, even though it appears to.

You’re showing faith in you’re own moral compass simply by choosing to be a Christian.

There is the issue as to whether God is good. (I submit He is) And there is the issue as to whether you can insist on having Him adhere to your moral code. (I submit you can’t)

I can insist on anything I want.

Well…The OP wasn’t general, not specific. Secondly, I would submit that the concept of the “ransom” is not one everyone is familiar with. In any event, it is the central anser to the OP—which is, “Why did Jesus have to die?”

You cannot answer this question (at all!) without going to the source—to find what the bible has to say about the purpose of his death. Yet here it is rarely done. I know of no other field of study where the source document—the authority on the subject—is so blithely ignored.

The main reason that I don’t post much anymore is that we’re not fighting ignorance. We’re breeding it. This is a cesspool of ignorance. Please note: This is not from a perspective of dogma. It’s simply from the perspective of what the bible has to say on a given topic. If a poster asks a question that must, by defintion, require the bible for the answer there will routinely be dozens of answers–sometimes more than a hundred—without ever referencing the bible.

My point is this: If you wish to know the answer to this question, read the bible yourself. Go to the source. And that goes for the believer or the academic; to the theist or the atheist.

You seem to think the New Testament has one consistent answer about the meaning of the crucifixion. It does not.

Anyway, my intention in the thread was not to provide a Biblical answer to the OP’s question but to critique some of the answers offered by Christians. I’m just addressing the answers as they are articulated in the thread. The Biblical veracity of the proffered answers is of no consequence to the validity of my critiques. If someone said that Jesus died so that he could get super powers and free human beings from the Matrix, I would critique that theory too. So what if the answer isn’t Biblical? How is that my fault? It wasn’t my answer.

We inherited sin. That sucks. Whether that is in our “genes” or not, we do not know. But the fact remains that we inherited the sin of Adam.

What does “inheriting sin” mean if doesn’t mean it’s genetic? And there was no Adam.

We are not “blamed” for it in any way. It is a fact of heridity. Rather that “blaming” us, God sent His son (His son, not Himself) to balance the scales of justice and cancel out our curse of death, from inherited sin.

This statement makes no sense to me at all. If we aren’t being blamed for it then why do we need to be “saved” from it? And why does God need a sacrifice to get rid of it?

Romans 5:12 says this:

*12 That is why, just as through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because they had all sinned—. *

It does in fact say that sin was inherited; death spread to all men. How? “through one man”; Adam.

No, it says that “sin entered the world” and that “all men sin.” It does not say that sin is genetic.

By reading the bible and endeavoring to understand God’s righteous expectations, His requirements and purposes. By taking in knowledge.
(as the first step in developing a relationship with God)

How do you know the Bible is accurate?

The Bible is also massively contradictory when it comes to moral teaching so how do you know which passages are the sound ones and which ones are false?

What I’m getting at is that the choice to follow a Christian moral system is ultimately arbitrary. It’s a guess and nothing more. There is no empirical reason to choose Christianity over Shinto or Panentheism other than personal whim. If it’s so important to choose Christianity, then why hasn’t God bothered to offer a shred of proof that Christianity is true?

How can you trust a Bible which has so many demonstrable errors, contradictions and historical untruths?

It’s not. Unrepentent sin results in death. Permanent death. A just God would not burn or torture someone for eternity for 70 or 80 years of sin, no matter how heinous the sins. I believe you and I agree on this. “Hell” is the common grave. It’s where you go when you die. It’s non-sentient death.

Ok, well that’s fine with me then. I have no fear of permanent death. I would actually prefer that to eternal life. What should I do if I want to be a good person but I don’t want to go to Heaven?

Well…says God…
The question bafles me. If God exists, and if He made all this stuff, there is no one else. God said as much, right? (Isa 45:5,6)

Nebuchadnezzar said:"… 35 And all the inhabitants of the earth are being considered as merely nothing, and he is doing according to his own will among the army of the heavens and the inhabitants of the earth. And there exists no one that can check his hand or that can say to him, ‘What have you been doing?’"****(Daniel 4:35) (bolding mine)

So the answe is yes. God can just say it and that makes it right. You are free to choose to reject this as out of hand. (and suffer the consequences)

God saying something is right doesn’t make it right. I do reject that and I welcome the consequences.

He could have! But He didn’t. It simply appears that you disagree with how He does [did] things.

I think this is a variation on the “mysterious ways” defense.

The “ransom” theory of the crucifixion is illogical. Why would God do something so illogical?

We can speculate all day long, or offer Monday monring quarterbacking. But it is not our right to determine what is right, and what course justice should take. We have neither the right or ability.

Once again. Making a decision to submit to what you perceive as “God’s” moral system is, in itself, an autocratic assumption of the right and ability to decide what is right and wrong.

Satan does exist by the will of God. But the bible clearly says that in due time he will be executed for his crimes; he will be put to death.

Which doesn’t alter the fact that he was created and continues to exist solely by the will of God, which makes God responsible for all that Satan does.

In the meantime we are every day, passively or actively, choosing whether we are willing to submit to God and His righteous requirements (that are, after all, based on love and for our benefit) or whether we are self willed. It’s up to you.

Choosing to be a Christian is an act of pure self-will completely uninformed by empirical evidence. it’s a guess based on personal intuition. When you decide to be a Christian, you are deciding, all by yourself, what is moral.

You’re asking me “WHY?” in the same breadth that you say that you won’t consider the texts that were offered?

The offered texts didn’t answer the question.

First, there is NO eternal torture. No burning hell for misdemeanors. God’s sense of justice, as articulated in the bible, offers us the hope of eternal life if we submit to Him and follow His righteous requirements. For those who choose not to, death awaits.

Cool. I choose death.

It’s His universe. It’s His rules.

And it’s my own moral prerogative to decide if those rules are worth following. Since you are saying there isn’t any punishment (and I don’t consider death to be a punishment…as I said before, I would prefer it to eternal life. I don’t know how anyone could stand to live forever) then I am even more empowered to live purely within my own intuitive ethos without fear of being tortured by a monstrous deity. I would choose my own ethos anyway but it’s a load off my mind to know there isn’t any punishment.

Without humility, without a desire to grow spiritually, your “knowledge” will be an empty vessel.

That hasn’t been my experience, but thanks for the concern.

As long as you insist that God conforms to you, you will not find Him or know Him.

Fine by me.

He could have. Be He didn’t. I would submit that a cursory reading of the bible will not give one an accurate reading on God, His purposes, or His personality. Trading barbs on an internet message board won’t get it.

I’ve given the Bible far more than a cursory reading. I’ve even read the Gospels in Greek. Didn’t help.

It makes no sense to you.

It sure doesn’t. And if God is not willing to make sense to ME, then I bid him good day.

There is nothing arbitrary about the definition of God. His “definition” is provided in rich detail in the bible. He articulates His requirements, His personaility, His intentions, and His purposes. That is the basis of one’s faith----an accurate knowledge of Him. (John 17:3 and many others)

What is arbitrary is to say that good is good because God says so. It’s the most hollow appeal to authority imaginable.

If you are striving to be “good”, it is entirely possible, if not likely, that you will do many things that God approves of. We are, after all, made in His image. Hence the talk of the “natural laws.” Your motivation may simply be a regard for others, your self or your family. To be a productive part of society. But if you take a secular humanist approach, in which you become your own arbiter of what is good and what is not, you are not endeavoring to search out God’s will.

If you take a non-secular approach, you are still making yourself an arbiter of what is good and what is not. You can’t “choose good” without first making a purely autocratic decision about what is good and what isn’t. Since God has given you no evidence, all you can do is make a guess that accords with your best intuition.

I don’t believe that the primary reason for doing good is the desire to go to heaven. One does it because of the love one develops for God, the richness and beauty in that relationship and the appreciation for Him and His qualities. He reciprocates by offering Life as a reward.

I prefer relationships and love for people. That’s good enough for me. And if I get to be annihilated for that instead of being shuffled off to some hellish paradise for the rest of time, so much the better.
If God exists, it would be impossible to do this.
[/quote]

I disagree.

I think you understand me just fine. It is the bible that I don’t think you understand. I say this with no shortage of trepidation. Several times in our relationship you have said, “I know more than you do.” (or variations of that)

From what I remember, I only said that about a knowledge of Greek, not the Bible. It seems that I may have corrected you on matters pertaining to Messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Bible but maybe that wasn’t you. Are you one of those who thinks the “suffering servant” was Jesus? If so, the I may have made a factual correction in some thread somewhere but I’m reasonably sure I didn’t say “I know more than you” about it.

It’s clear that you place a great premium or knowledge and criticism. But it’s clear to me that the source of your knowledge is largely from commentraries about the bible, and not from the bible itself. In fact you recommend some book in this thread,right? Yet, here at SDMB you have been accorded props for your biblical knowledge.

You cannot really educate yourself about the Bible by only reading the Bible. You may become an expert about what the Bible says, but you will not acquire context. You will not acquire knowledge of history, culture, linguistics, etc which are necessary to understand what you’re reading. To understand the Bible requires reading material external to the Bible.

There is a huge distinction. The basis of your posts rarely use the bible in any detail

This is patently untrue. I would guess that the majority of my posts about Christianity are direct commentaries on Biblical criticism.

and many times I’ve called you out for [blatantly] mis-applying a scripture

I don’t think so. I think you’ve simply become upset that I didn’t interpret a passage the same way you do.

And so while I applaud knowledge even from someone has no intention of using that knowledge to develop a working faith in God, I am simply saying that I find your biblical knowledge to be dubious. (while acknowledging that you are well read among authors who criticize the bible)

Anytime you want to show me where my Biblical knowledge is factually wrong, feel free to point it out. I’m sure you will find that you were mistaken.

If God does exist (as an agnostic it would appear that you accept this possibility) than it would be at least possible that your knowlwedge is abject ignorance; that rather than going to the source of all knowledge you’ve chosen to take counsel from the creation (idiots like Spong et al) rather than the Creator. (God)

“The source of all knowledge?” Waht would that be? The Bible? The Bible was written by humans. It is not a reliable source of knowledge.

If you think the Bible is a source of divine knowledge, then I’m going to have to ask you for some proof.

There is a distinction too between theology, dogma and a simple rendering of what the bible has to say on a matter.

I agree with this and that’s why I always endeavor to find the most plain reading possible.

So, why did Jesus die?

Probably because he was stirring up shit at the Temple during Passover. I don’t believe his death had any significance at all. It was his life and words that mattered, not his detah.

[Scott_Plaid]

I was wondering how this issue was covered, by mainstream Christians , so I found
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ only to find that it pretty much just says,” It* looks *like there are problems with the narrative, keyword being “looks”. "Now, no one has a good explanation of why this could possibly be fair, but hey, the big sky daddy knows better than we do, right?’
The ethical problem of personal vs. collective responsibility

[mswas]

Definition of sin | Dictionary.com

sin

Definition of guilt | Dictionary.com

n 1: estrangement from god

Main Entry: guilt
Pronunciation: 'gilt
Function: noun
: feelings of culpability especially for imagined offenses or from a sense of inadequacy : morbid self-reproach often manifest in marked preoccupation with the moral correctness of one’s behavior <aggressive responses originating in inner guilt and uncertainty>

I would say that sin is somewhat synonymous with guilt. I’d recommend one read the entire definitions of both, I think all definitions of a particular word are applicable to it’s usage in an appropriate context, but it’s the understanding of the context that helps us to see the truth, and to know which particular definition is at the top of the hierarchy in that particular context and which ones barely apply.

That being said, I’d like to offer up this mathematical definition for sin

sine ( P ) Pronunciation Key (sn)
n. Abbr. sin
The ordinate of the endpoint of an arc of a unit circle centered at the origin of a Cartesian coordinate system, the arc being of length x and measured counterclockwise from the point (1, 0) if x is positive or clockwise if x is negative.

If one takes the circle to be the whole, but all one is seeing is the “sin” of that circle, then one is not taking in the whole. The whole in this case being the circle, and the partial being the sin. The circle/whole would be god, and the line creating the circle itself would be the line that measures “good and evil”. In this particular case you could equate clockwise and counterclockwise with the direction you are heading.

In the Sefer Yetzirah, The Tree of Life is a 5 dimensional hypercube. Each axis is made up of an infinite line with one common end point, and the direction on that line is it’s polarity. Good and Evil are one axis of the five dimensions. So if you are looking toward God’s positive side you are looking toward good and if you are looking toward the negative side you are looking toward evil. The determining of which side is good and which is evil is purely subjective to the viewer. You can be dragged into the dark abyss and lose all conciousness, or you can fly too high like Icarus to be annihilated by the heat of pure light.

Sin itself is guilt. Guilt seperates you from reality, because it can make one hyperfocused on their inadequacy. I’ve always had a problem with the schools of thought that imply that humans are in some way inadequate or imperfect in the name of sublimating one’s own desires to what we perceive as the will of God. First of all, sublimating one’s own desires is paradoxical, because our desires are part of God’s will, we are a manifestation of god, and therefore perfect. In order to be perfect we have to have some mirror duplicate that is what we were SUPPOSED to be, and never lived up to. As that duplicate does not exist outside of a reflection, perfection is not applicable to this excercise. A mirror never reflects the whole truth, it reflects the light based upon it’s own opacity it’s shape, and it’s angle to the thing being reflected. So any reflection is the identity of the object doing the reflecting, as well as the object being reflected. When we sublimate our own will for some external will of god, we are sublimating our will to the will of others. For balance to be achieved the will of all must be properly represented.

There is much confusion as to the difference between responsibility and guilt. Guilt is a reflection of responsibility. It is the reflection of cause being reflected by the fear or rage at the effect.

Original sin in my opinion is the original guilt we all share coming from a single source. In the eternal beginning we were all one. Then we split into two in order to perceive and reflect. The split was the masculine and feminine, or the intellect and emotion. Original sin would be the primal reaction to the original split by the emotion. Intellect being more detached, gets it’s readings of how things feel from the emotion, but the emotion feels them immediately. The confusion resulting from these two very different modes of observation caused a ripple of confusion throughout the rest of history. So the Intellect saw it happen and the Emotion Felt it happen. For the rest of eternity we have been working on developing a common language.

The word Divine has the root “Div” meaning to Divide. Con Fusion can be translated literally as a drive NOT to become one again. However, the split between thesis and antithesis naturally generated a third idea, the split itself. The split itself had it’s own identity, and that would be synthesis or the heart that joins the two disparate sides and reminds them that they are one.

Guilt is generated when we take another’s perceptions as superior to our own. But Good and Evil must remain subjective, for Evil is the tendency toward that which will kill you, but it may happen that what would kill you to do, would kill me NOT to do, therefore, if living is my choice, I should do it, whereas if living is your choice, you should not.

If the seperation between the two sides pulls apart too hard, then the middle must strain in order to pull the masses back into alignment, before they fall into a recursive world of pure light and a recursive world of pure darkness. If this strain becomes too much to bear, it manifests as a “Heart Attack”, the story of which must be played out on the stage in order to be expressed. Therefore there must be an actor playing that role in order to properly express that spiritual conflict. Enter Jesus, Stage left.

So original sin would be the original guilt. It can be quite muddled, but we all share it. The story of Adam and Eve is just another reflection of that original conflict, so what Adam does necessarily reflect upon you, not because you are responsible for his actions, but because the story represents a level of conciousness that is more purely primal that we all share. It’s important to take that story somewhat literally. It doesn’t mean that it’s the exact way it happened, but you need to ask questions like “What would the first person ever, who was the progenitor of us all feel in that situation?” Remember he was making choices with no real basis for comparison. He was the ultimate pioneer, his decisions would affect all of humanity forever in a very dramatic way for he is the Father of all men, so any attributes that Adam had are the archetypical attributes that would make one ‘masculine’. Whereas Eve is the archetype for women. And we can go back to the light/darkness metaphor because an atom is light, where as Eve is short for Evening.

So sin is not an ACTUAL seperation from God but more a PERCEIVED seperation from God due to the belief that one is guilty. So the Christ story, about him dying for our sins to me is more of a representation of Christ taking on all the power of that emotional pain and focusing it himself in order to express it, so that the macroconciousness of humanity would not be driven insane by that overwhelming primal guilt.

In the human body the Heart is the center between the upper faculties, and the lower primacy. That is why in Christianity following your Heart is so important, because it is the only part of the body that truly knows what both hands are up to, whereas the thought and reproduction centers oppose one another on the scales of balance where the heart is the fulcrum.

[mswas]

@Scott_plaid

I was wondering how this issue was covered, by mainstream Christians , so I found
http://www.religioustolerance.org/ only to find that it pretty much just says,” It* looks *like there are problems with the narrative, keyword being “looks”. "Now, no one has a good explanation of why this could possibly be fair, but hey, the big sky daddy knows better than we do, right?’
The ethical problem of personal vs. collective responsibility

I think an omnipotent, omniscient intellect has the capacity for putting in allowances for a change in language. The true seeker is not fooled by falsehoods, and just because a passage doesn’t apply to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to someone.

When I read the bible I find that I’ll just hook into a particular passage and it will be very dramatically speaking directly to me, about me. That doesn’t mean the whole bible is about me, or even that the passage I am reading is meant ONLY for me.

When there is emotional substance behind your words it conveys much greater meaning than the words themselves. When one doesn’t FEEL what they are expressing to someone, the other person is going to question it more, but if the person speaking truly believes what they are saying, then it is given more credibility by the reader. So necessarily, scripture written by one who believes in what they are writing is going to be more powerful than that written by one who is intentionally trying to fool you. Also, a human intellect has an amazing ability to see through bias if one develops critical thinking skills.