Interesting theory, and addressing it as a theory, I’m going to probe it for holes.
Jesus seemed really well-informed as to the details of his upcoming demise - who would betray him and when, etc. He knew all this in plenty of time to flee, possibly even before he arrived in town and did the things that lead to his execution, but instead all textual signs indicate that he deliberately was setting himself up to die and carefully doing nothing to prevent it. That would seem to contradict your theory - or do you assume that the bits of the text in question are erroneous?
Other than the presumption that Jesus’s death had to have some meaning as a show of human fortitude, is there any specific reason to think that Jesus’s death wasn’t God’s idea specifically? Jesus on at least one point stated that he’d sure like to get out of it if he could, but would continue to endure if God wanted him to. That doesn’t seem to mesh with the theory either.
Speaking of that, what was with Gethsemane? I’m concerned with the torture as well as the death, and while the death arguably was the natural outcome of him ransacking the temple and scaring people with his apocalyptic talk, the garden was just God personally torturing him, based on nothing Jesus had done whatsoever. So what’s with that?
Basically Satan proposed the rules for his ‘lordship’ over humanity, God acted as mediator, and often presenter of the terms.
That would be Satan, the entity is known
Sort of, there are entities that will not detach because they don’t desire to. God will change heaven and earth if needed so that all is good, including what Satan has done while his is detached.
Ultimately yes, God takes responsibility for everything Satan has done and also makes it right. Jesus had to die to bear this responsibility, as I stated above I believe, not just at the cross, but for each soul that has been ever under Satan and also eventually must die for Satan Himself to be saved.
Without this suffering for a time we would never have the reformed Satan in the end which would be a eternal missing member of the family. Maybe you don’t think that a loss, and really I don’t blame you for feeling that way as Satan is responsible for every form of suffering known to man and he looks upon us as farm animals (before the animal rights movement), but I believe God sees it differently to what Satan will be. God desires none to be lost and God’s plan is perfect, so none will be lost.
So let me restate this; the following events occured:
Everybody was a part of God or detached from God humming along happy in his near viscinity. The people still stuck to God are perfect; the people who popped loose are evil…ish?
Satan detaches from God.
Satan turns mustache-twirlingly, blatantly evil.
Satan says to God, “Let’s play a little game - all the people who separated from you have to die horribly! Mwahahahah! Oh, and if somebody who isn’t separated from you ever dies then I lose, and I have to get tortured or something.”
God replies, “That’s cool; let’s do it!” He does this because playing this game will make Satan reattach eventually somehow.
Everybody else around goes “WTF??” (Okay, I’m just assuming this part.)
People start dying left and right, and Satan hires a posse of demons and non-christian gods and the like, gives them pitchforks, and sets them to work poking the ones who died while detached. While laughing maniacally.
People continue going “WTF???”
God schedules for a person to die while still attached to God. Satan sees this coming but can’t do anything about it, because he totally never anticicpated the possibility. This means that God has won.
People keep dying, going to hell, and getting tortured anyway for some 2000 years longer, or more.
People go “W! T! F!”
Eventually God will get around to claiming his victory. All the tortured and smarting souls will be released and allowed to reattach, unless they’re sufficiently pissed off at having been railroaded into this horrific farce that they stomp off in a huff.
Satan gets spanked harder than anybody’s ever been spanked before.
???
Profit! Er, I mean, Satan mysteriously becomes good again and reattaches.
Oh, and everybody else comes back and reattaches eventually too.
The end. Well, assuming God’s managed to fix his ‘bits of him keep detaching’ problem. (Possibly by demonstrating that if you detach, he will hurt you. Or he’ll let a Satan hurt you; regardless it will be on. Negative reinforcement!)
Decent summary?
Also, it seems that your theory as to the ‘why’ behind Jesus’s torture and death has now become “To save Satan.” Correct?
Yeah, I don’t think that rewriting the definition of “good” in all the dictionaries counts. If bad things happened, bad things happened, even if everyone goes on valium and forgets.
It’s so nice that God volunteered me to suffer and die for the cause of saving Satan. And no, I don’t remember signing anything.
Interestingly, this theory sort of makes me as important as Jesus - presumably if my mild mortal suffering (and long horrible suffering in Hell) wasn’t as necessary as Jesus’s brief horrible suffering in life, then God wouldn’t be having me do it.
Personally I don’t care one way or the other if Satan is lost, seeing as he’s fictional. Also, since I obviously was one of the people who elected to get detached too, I apparently don’t see being detached as a bad thing anyway. Neither did you, of course; we’re all detached here, since Jesus was the only perfect one to get run through the mortality gauntlet.
I don’t believe it is so much ‘forget’ but the pain of it will be forgotten.
The hypocratic oath states ‘first do no harm’, a oath every doctor is required to take AFAIK. If a dr cuts open flesh is that not doing harm? Did every dr violate his/her oath the moment they performed a operation or even perform a injection? This is actually something I have pondered many times.
So the question is can something that appears evil at the time turn out actually to been good. It is a question that I can answer only by what I believe God has shown me, which is yes, thought that question has been a subject of much debate.
Who said you signed anything. If you are born as to a slave you are a slave by birthright. Perhaps the first wild animal sort of when along to be captured and domesticated because it seemed good to have food provided and a safe place, so perhaps a free will decision for that first animal, but the next generation is not given a choice, born raised and slaughtered in captivity - no choice and all your days are basically controlled.
I answered this above and believe you are exactly correct, if God didn’t care about you as much as Jesus and if you were not as important as Jesus to Him God would not have you do it.
I’d say you were born into captivity by birthright, and as a captive you don’t know what it is like to be ‘attached’ as you never experienced it. Some people, such as John the Baptist are born attached however
Fairly decent, and humorous so a enjoyable easy read, I give it 4 stars.
I would add this is at the level of a wise parent (Father) and a stubborn prideful elder child (Satan) and a helpless infant (Jesus) who will rule over his older brother.
Except that until God made that screwy deal with Satan nobody was under Satan, so there was nobody else to save, according to your description of events.
Any omnipotent doctor that cuts into a person is a sadist.
The first problem with most analogies defending God is that the analogy itself requires you to forget that this is a god we’re talking about here. (Analogies criticizing God tend to use God’s godly properties against him, and so are slightly less prone to this problem.)
And yes, this raises the question, was this the best plan God could come up with to get Satan back? Seriously? Because it seems that the one thing that actually gets done by the plan is that lots and lots of people get tortured. Most of them by Satan, and Jesus and Satan get tortured by God personally. Which I suppose means that if he wants to, God can pretend at not having responsibility for any of the tortures, because (despite God deliberately letting it all happen, knowing what would happen) most of the tortures weren’t done by him personally, and the other two were people who had willingly agreed to be tortured. And when all the torturing is done God has all his scattered bits back home again, quivering with fear that if they ever separate again they’ll be tortured mindless again.
It’s seeming to me like (under your idiosyncratic theology) the best description for the reason behind Jesus’s torture and death is it was part of a plan to let God have everybody tortured who had ever done him the affront of separating from him in the first place, all while letting him claim none of it was his fault.
BZZZT! According to you, I was originally a bit of God. Then I (probably) separated from God, and as part of the scheme he’d brokered with Satan that meant God personally demoted me to a mortal birth as a ‘slave’. So I may have been mortal-born as a slave, but that’s only because God first sold me into slavery as part of the game he chose to start with Satan.
Don’t try and pretty it up; I see what’s going on here. Mortal existence is a negligible part of the game; the extranatural portion dominates, which consists of God handing us over to Satan to be tortured for the crime of separating ourselves from him.
And what he’s having me ‘do’, of course, is get forced to be born, die, and be tortured in hell, to teach me what happens to people that separate from God.
It does seem that the statement that all of us all are equally important to God is possibly true, though: he’ll torture anyone it takes to get all his misplaced bits of himself reattached again, with nobody so special as to be spared.
Of course, I don’t know that I can blame him; if my body parts started wandering off, I’d be pretty peeved too. I mean, I type badly enough with all ten fingers attached.
This would all be easier if you remembered your own theology - I was originally God’s divine appendix, before I decided to take a stroll and God sold me into slavery for my troubles. Prior to arriving on earth and losing all my memories presumably due to the horrific trauma of being shoved into a cell clump with no brain, I knew what it was to be a god. Please don’t be erasing that evil history just yet, thank you very much.
The claim that John was born attached (presumably, info available due to you being a prophet) is an interesting one; unlike the rest of us naughty little god-bits that had the temerity to want to leave the nest, these are organs that were still in the fold. Why would they have been sent to die? I can see several possibilities:
Other Jesus candidates. Who failed. Miserably. This possibility is included for completeness but is very unlikely because based on the text it was obvious to all who was the Jesus, the real slim Jesus, and all the other Jesus’s were just imitating - but maybe they didn’t know that when they volunteered or something. Or maybe one of the other possibilities is the right one.
They had once separated from God, but had come back and reattached before God brokered his torture plan with Satan. Thus, though they were at the moment obedient, they had still shown a tendency to wander, and still needed to be shown who was boss. So God brutally thrust them away from him into a life of slavery, suffering, and death, to make sure that they knew that even though they had had one excursion of fun and freedom, that further ones would be met with horror.
Like 2, except maybe they’d never left at all; despite having been perfectly innocent and loyal to date, God feared future betrayal, so all his myriad body parts were forced to wander alone in this vale of tears. (Not all at once, of course.) Only by sending everyone though this hell could God be assured that all his prodigal parts would return home and remain, quivering in terror and paralyzed by flashbacks, forevermore.
God just didn’t want to miss a chance to see someone squirm. Sadist god!
Okay, I’m betting that last one doesn’t seem likely to you. But what about the others? Why were John and the other innocents given over into slavery? Is there another reason I haven’t thought of? In its own this is as perplexing a question for your mythos as the original Jesus torture/death question is for more conventional Christianity.
It still belies the’ FACT’ that God must have wanted evil to exist, and then seemed to enjoy killing innocent or uneducated people, to allow a Monster he could well have not created in the first place. I am far from a all knowing being, but even I would not create something( or one) I knew would harm my children. Nor would I play favorites one over the other! The fact that God created a monster and knew it was evil speaks well of itself!
Of course you are believing in what some other human wrote, or decreed,not anything of God. Your belief is based on a Human not God! Humans like to make things up to control people, I question that. No one can truthfully say God said or did anything,that is Fact! Your choice to believe is yours, and as I have stated many times that is your right, but not necessarily right!
And I believe that ‘TRUTH’ that God wanted Satan to exist even if for that to happen there would be a time of suffering and evil released for a time, that will pass and in eternity a much better future will open up for every soul.
And since FACT =/= TRUTH you are not really saying much by using that word. You may as well be using the word MYTH because that’s exactly what Fact is, a modern day myth that science is actively trying to disprove and historically has a track record of doing exactly that very well.
I met God, we have talked about these things, so no I am not believing what some human wrote, I am believing what God told me about what some other people wrote. So contrary to your post my believe is based directly on God, not human, and is the reason why my interpretation is vastly different then those who did take the world of man as the Word of God.
You should, because you are exactly right. That doesn’t mean that God does not exist, nor does it mean that you can’t know Him. Your beliefs you were given by those over you on God is what is stopping you from knowing God because once you know God their control is gone. This is not only in religious institutions but all authority structures on earth.
And this is your belief, as I pointed out above it is in error and also logical error as you can’t know enough to make that declarative statement, but you are free to believe this.
Satan’s children would be under Satan by default. A big part of God’s plan is children, the first command that God gave man/women in the Bible is be fruitful and multiply, this in the end I believe will be the only command that remains (but in a vast form, as in the vine and branches parable).
I think you may have to be all knowing to make that statement.
God uses analogies, Jesus talks in parables. The reason Jesus gives is that the people can’t understand if told directly. After all in this we are not talking about a Dr trying to help but must first harm to do that. We are talking about a God who is trying to help but must first harm to do that.
Actually I think that analogy works pretty well. You ask why would God create a evil being, I generally state because God can have that being willingly desire and ultimately become good and that is a good thing. You can consider this the surgical procedure to remove the evil from Satan, and it is Satan himself who is doing the cutting by his actions. Once Satan is done harming his evil (which harm to evil may be defined as good), God can cure his wounds (which is also good), so Satan and God are both ultimately good, even though there is pain and suffering.
Totally I take this on faith alone and really hate what is going on with the suffering here and do cry out for more of God’s healing powers and the like to be used on earth.
What I am getting on this however is Satan as a child who is telling his parents that he can handle the evil himself and doesn’t need the parents assistance in it’s removal. Which means that God was willing, but Satan is a stubborn child and insists on doing his way, which will be much more painful, but eventually Satan will turn to God to finish.
Then why does not God overpower his child and get it done? I believe He needs Satan to want it done from his heart. God is raising gods not men/women, the responsibilities of raising beings to rule universes may be a bit different the earthly children and the methods may differ a bit.
God does not want to micromanage his children, but wants His children free and free to come to Him willingly, not out of fear, but our of Love, to come to Him with their problems without trying to force his children. We can see Satan’s influence on Adam and Eve in the garden, they hid from the Lord. This shows Satan’s state, hiding from God, fearing God, though God is the only one that can heal them and free them and love them.
Again this is Satan’s teachings and the opposite of what God desires. It is not to fear, it is to be accepted as God’s child and your desire to be a part of the heavenly family to know you are always home there.
Ultimately there will be no fault for all will be forgiven by everyone because they desire to do so. The plan did involve everyone suffering, including God, though that was the method, not the desired effect.
Satan has children on earth, usually in positions of authority as Satan was giving command over the earth so that’s where he puts his children. You also have other beings born here, such as Jesus, and you have children of Adam and Eve who were free but sold into slavery, and some hybrids and mixed children. It is a big complicated mess. Assuming you are a child of Adam and Eve you were attached to God because A&E was attached, when they sold themselves they sold you. So Satan didn’t demote you, you were born into a class. You may have demoted yourself, but you had to have that freedom to do so, children of A&E do not. But since your lineage goes through A&E yes you were attached through them. Children of Satan are also attached through Satan as Satan was once ‘unfallen’ /attached (and could also be through their mother)
The cycle of life does not start at birth or conception, there is a never ending cycle, so what we may call a new born was actually part of the eternal.
Our mortal existence, I believe is actually death and a never ending cycle of death through reincarnation (thus eternal dying = eternal death), is Satan’s system. But God does desire to give us immortal bodies (as we see with Moses and Elijah and Jesus during the transfiguration), so to God our flesh is already dead and pretty darn useless but there is some physical reality to our eternal bodies just not our current bodies.
In the second part, God is allowing some of His children and Himself to suffer for the salvation and restoration of His other child. Much like how a parent may take bone marrow from one child to save another.
What He is doing is trying to have you learn that you are His child and therefore immune to death, if you believe you will die you will because you are a god and you create your own reality that you are mortal. So it is a learning process.
I believe the message goes further. Jesus tells us to use His name in prayer, and that we should pray to our heavenly Father. Also God is one, and if you have the Holy Spirit you have the exact same spirit as God and Jesus and the Father. And God has only one begotten Son. I would say we are Jesus, all of us as God sees us. His children, both male and female alike. And we are made to rule over Satan and command this world. But we need to realize that - Buddha made a very simular realization on his way to enlightenment. Now this is not to say that the man on the cross was not Jesus, nor was His role unimportant, but your role and suffering is equally important.
lol
The pain will be erased, the ‘evil’ will become myth I believe and that myth will be undying and be the basis of a new society of God’s family.
John’s work was done and he had to leave this ‘mortal’ existence. Just because we see death as a final state, it is a doorway to eternal life for some.
kanicbird is teaching us what suffering is by making us watch him crucify both logic and Scripture.
I love you, man, for this if nothing else.
Personally I think the whole thing was necessary for narrative reasons. Stories endure long after the people in them die. If God had not created so potent a story, would we still remember what Jesus said two thousand years later?
Regarding point 1, I’ve always considered the Bible subject to error, so yes, I do have an easy out here; I can simply claim that any parts that don’t fit my theory are erroneous. Or I could say he was expecting to be persecuted but ultimately rescued by his Father if he proved righteous, a la Abraham or Job.
Regarding point 2, it could be that Jesus was saying “don’t force this choice on me – don’t place me in a position in which I have to choose between death and abandonment of humanity”, which could be reconciled with my theory.
Regarding point 3… IDK, maybe Gethsemane was just another phase of the great test.
Mind you, I’m not feeling too attached to the particulars of the theory.
