A basic tenet of mainstream Christian faith is that JC’s death and resurrection were necessary to redeem the original social contract that was broken in Teh Snake Incident, and patched repeatedly by agreements via Abraham and various and sundry prophets and Kings of Israel.
Fine, let’s stipulate all that.
So, what if the Messiah threw a Crucifixion Party, and no-one came?
What if Judas didn’t stray?
What if the Pharisees and Saducees said Meh?
What if Pilate and the Romans ruled JC a harmless crank?
What if Barbaras lost the Mob Vote?
What was Big Giant JudeoChristian Head’s back-up plan?
I suspect that if BGH can force the issue without mortal male material, that said BGH can also defeat contraceptive hormones by divinely preserving the state of the uterine wall as needed.
IMHO Jesus was needed when mankind broke the very first order that God gave us, which was right after He created us - ‘be fruitful and multiply’. IMHO This was the single commandment needed in paradise, and must be the meaning of the fruit (or outcome) of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as God would have no need to impose other commandments if that one was not violated. If you read what Eve saw in the fruit it is very like the reason why women today delay having children (getting a job, maintaining beauty, for educational reasons):
“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.”
Through Adam all men fell and all men must die. Additional rules, and restrictions (such as the curses on Adam and Eve, Tower of Babel confusion of language, 10 commandments) were imposed as man further broke rules. Because man broke the rules and separated himself from God, God has the right to impose others for man to be reconnected with God. These rules pile up and restrict us to the point that we cry out for a savior, that point when we know we don’t need a written code to follow, but a God who is willing to personally guide us, and forgive us, as a father forgives his children when they make mistakes.
The Father knows everything, so once something is set into motion He sees the end, He sees it even before the action. So all the above had to happen.
Maybe it’s better of thinking of Plan B to Plan C (Jesus Christianity) as not a change of a person but actually a change of ideology.
With Judaism, there was a big focus on the actual events on Earth… we are conquered by Assyrians, and then Babylonians, and Romans. Our plight means we have done something wrong with the relationship with god. We are waiting for a messiah to make things right with our situation on Earth and create a righteous kingdom on this planet.
Christianity changes the whole game by focusing on the afterlife. The righteous kingdom is beyond Earth. That’s actually quite an amazing leap in synchronized group-think if one actually stops and thinks about it. It still boggles my mind how this happened.
So Plan D is not so much a new person but a new ideology: Perhaps the next game-changing transition for religion is to create metaphysical thought on the pre-life (our souls existed before sperm & egg joined). Or to create new religious thinking on an alternate-universe-life in parallel dimensions: we must make our matter-anti-matter lives in the 11th dimension righteous so this life in this dimension is righteous. Therefore, I guess that means the Plan D messiah is Stephen Hawking?
It may be worth noting that, if I recall correctly, the mormons beleive that if a person is destined to do something, and doesn’t, then God will simply line up a second person with the same destiny later and try again, repeating as needed until one of the destined people gets it right. (This reads to me as a way to reconcile free will and predestined callings/tasks/duties.) Thus, if Joseph Smith had decided to smelt those plates into gold coins, God would have just smited him and given the plates to Guy 2, and nobody would ever have heard about the first guy.
Presuming that, if Mithras had failed to do a proper sacrifice and get the religion that God wanted to get started, started, God would just have made another guy, perhaps named “Jesus”, and given him a shot to pull all the peices together.
That explains the success of Christianity. It also explains how it failed to catch on east of Syria – the Persians already had a religion with a morally relevant afterlife.
Forgive me the hijack everyone; kanicbird: I’m not sure I understood this paragraph and I’d like to make sure I didn’t get an erroneous interpretation. Are you suggesting that women delaying childbirth for the sake of getting a job, education, etc. is undesirable?
No, this is not a tenet of any type of Christian faith that I’ve ever heard of, mainstream or otherwise. Jesus’s death and resurrection did not redeem any social contract; they redeemed humanity. The mainstream Christian position has always been that the purpose of the old covenant was to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus Christ, and the messianic prophecies were one among several purposes of the prophets.
As for the “What if?” questions, there probably wasn’t any doubt. When a guy shows up and claims that he is God and uses that authority to promote equality, freedom, healing, community, and universality, it’s a given that the authorities will have a negative reaction. Once his message becomes popular enough, it’s a given that the negative reaction will turn violent. Once he rises from the dead, it’s a given that some people will want to follow him.
Not every Christian faction believes in free will. Several of them are big on predestination actually.
They perhaps Jesus would have ruled as King on Earth (or whatever). I don’t think it was necessary for Jesus to get crucified, per se.
Same as above I suppose. These were all choices mankind made that shaped the events for the resurrection…if they hadn’t happened then presumably God would have simply had other plans with his only begotten son, etc etc.
Or, if we assume no free will and predestination then everything that happened was part of Gods plan, so there was never any chance for random events or changes in the plan…what happened was exactly as God intended. Sort of a celestial computer program…
God knows…
I don’t think there is any way to answer this. To many variables. If we assume that Jesus was in fact God’s son then I suppose he would have eventually died regardless…and thus he could have, in theory anyway, still sacrificed his life to wash away sin. Perhaps it was a choice that God was giving mankind…let Jesus live and some other set of events would happen, kill him and we get another set of events. But either way we get the whole washing away of sins thingy.
Or, perhaps it was all predestined. Or (my own theory) is that Jesus was just a man, and if he didn’t get whacked by the Romans at the behest of the Jewish theocracy he would have simply been another obscure preacher, completely forgotten by history and without spawning a world spanning religion.
I don’t see free will as something that is something that happens every second, but very rarely, other then that are actions are determined up to the next free will decision. The free will decision is to follow God or not, a simple choice usually between 2 ‘destinies’, we see this represented on TV/movies as a devil on one’s shoulder tempting us and a angel on the other trying to keep us on God’s path.
Once the free will decision was made paths are locked in and accomplished already - they have to happen.
An analogy is jumping out of a plane, to a person w/o knowledge of the ground, jumping out of a plane may seem like a sensible thing to do depending on the circumstance, While falling the person may think he is OK, different but OK, but the Father sees the end, the person hitting the ground and dieing. The free will decision was made in the plane, and during he fall no other free will decision in himself can help that person.
