I believe this is a great chance to learn from children, that child is relaying their experience. I believe this is what we are suppose to be seeing, yet we don’t, though children do. My take is the children are experiencing the intentions of the guy wearing the bunny suit combined with their intentions, the child is picking up on the intention and living that experience. That is a small example of the magical world that will be our reality one day. But this is also currently used by people with bad intentions and that can cause great harm, so we learn to leave this place and chose the physical world to dwell in as it reduces pain.
History begs to differ, though if you want to believe this contrary to all the historical evidence of what people call a fact is actually found to be untrue, then that is your choice.
The way I see it, Jesus’ mission in life was to teach morals (not to create a religion). For instance: to forgive your enemies, to be humble and charitable, to value other people rather than material goods and to treat others as you would like to be treated. He tried to teach, in a way the primitive minds could accept, that our actions during life would reflect our soul in the afterlife. He saves us by showing the morals by which we can elevate our souls, without which our souls will suffer.
For me it does not make any sense when they say Jesus directly saved us of our sins by suffering for us. If we were automatically saved, then we could be as reckless as we wanted because our soul would be guaranteed a spot in heaven. Another way many people look at it is that so long you love God, you can do all kinds of immoral actions because if you just ask forgiveness and pray to God it’ll all be okay. I think that is interpretation is in itself immoral. Furthermore it also does not make sense to me that God would require Jesus so suffer horribly. Jesus suffered horribly because men were horrible and saw Jesus as a threat to their power.
Primitive minds? Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had been dead for a long time at this point. There was sophisticated Roman philosophy and ethics. I’d say that if Jesus gave a crap he should have showed up in some place that wasn’t a backwater, but I’d start singing “Jesus Christ, Superstar” if I did.
So for the moment we’re ignoring the ‘detachment’ stuff from earlier, fair enough.
Okay, at this part you’ve lost clarity. You seem to be proposing the following:
Pretty much everybody suffers. (cite: watch the news.)
This collective suffering can be assessed from a global perspective; the individuals are suffering, so the collective is suffering.
This was Jesus’s suffering.
Problem is, you’ve completely lost sight of the question I asked. The Bible speaks of Jesus being personally tortured by God in Gethsemane, and then being tortured and executed via crucifiction by the romans. These were not the absorbed sufferings of all humanity flowing naturally amongst the collective via osmosis; this was God personally plugging the pain hose into Jesus’s wherewithal and letting 'er rip. This was suffering that God had stored up somewhere, which he then deliberately inflicted on the poor guy. Who afterward proceeded to get tacked to a cross, which also seems pretty much unrelated to the price of rice in china, not to mention all the stubbed toes there.
Now, I suppose there’s a possibility that you’re equivocating between the “body of everybody” - the collective entity that you decribed, and Jesus’s physical body, that didn’t quite sweat blood in the garden but bled plenty shortly thereafter. But even if we presume that the Jesus that was walking around had a physical body that was composed of all the people who he was physically interacting with, that still doesn’t explain or jusify the painful events that are the subject of this thread, because those were inflicted externally of the pain already present in the body. Actually it would be even less than helpful, because if torturing Jesus means torturing everybody then God personally tortured all of humanity for no reason yet explained.
So yeah - I’d say this needs a bit more work.
I am able to understand the concept of a metaentity composed of smaller individual entities. Actions that hurt the individual entities probably hurt the metaentity (but might not); actions that hurt the metaentity are bad news for the individual entities at the point of impact but could easily not hurt the others, though there’s a chance they might be indirectly effected. An analogy of my own - it’s like your computer. Your computer’s functionality as a whole depends on (most) all of its pards, and would be impacted if your monitor got smashed, but your keyboard wouldn’t care. The whole suffers from the damage to the parts, but not necessarily vice versa.
You actually didn’t say anything that established or implied that all human suffering is caused extrnally by Satan, and regardless lots of human suffering is caused by other humans anyway. Just sayin’.
Regardless. I’m willing to entertain the idea that in your mythology there is a metaentity composed of humans/human spirits, the same way an anthill shows emergent behaviors from the simpler actions of its individual ants. I’ll even allow that this metaentity might be sentient independently of all of us sphincters that make it up. (You didn’t say it was, but I’ll assume you meant to.)
It’s still unclear if this entity has Jesus as one of its components, or if it is Jesus (it can’t be both). If the metaentity isn’t Jesus, I suppose it could be God, but really I shouldn’t be speculating on that; you should be telling me.
Regardless, I await your explanation for how God additionally torturing either this metaentity or one of its parts is supposed to help anything.
Sounds like the Moral Influence model. Which still has the unanswered question of what God thought he was doing in Gethsemane. Any thoguhts?
This assumes that punishment is a goal, rather than a result. Instead of thinking of it as meting out punishment to fit a crime, think of it as a bank account. There is a debt. Mr Poor Guy owes a debt. It doesn’t matter if Mr Poor Guy gathers up the money himself, or Richie Rich hands over the money, as long as the debt is paid. The person receiving the payment doesn’t care.
So, too, atonement is a means of balancing the books (whatever the books are). It doesn’t matter who pays the debt as long as the debt is paid. But most of us are unwilling to pay the debt for someone else, given that our own debt is typically sufficiently large.
Of course, that analogy sets up other questions, about who set up the debt system, who arbitrates it, and why God is subjected to that authority. It also leaves unexplained how the debt is earned, or even what the medium of exchange is that earned said debt.
This is the “I need to make an Example” system. You see, you have to punish someone really hard up front, to set the example and show everyone else what they are in for. Then you can forgive anyone anything, because they won’t take the forgiveness for granted, they realize they could be punished pretty hard. Vs forgiving everyone out of the gate, and people beginning to think, “Hey, I can do anything and there are no consequences.”
So why the Innocent Jesus as opposed to someone else who actually deserved punishment? Because he was taking the punishment himself, so that he didn’t actually have to punish any of his children/slaves/followers? They could see the dramatic example without any of them actually having to suffer it?
Snerk!
Only if the person isn’t immortal/resurrected. That kinda defeats the point of the death penalty. It’s not really a death penalty, it’s more of a “long nap” penalty. He gets a Time Out.
But if praying for forgiveness can expiate all other sins, including sins you don’t remember, why can’t it expiate Original Sin? If praying for forgiveness doesn’t wash away Original Sin, then the person is still in sin when they go to Heaven with God. How does that work?
Recidivists get recaught and repunished.
That’s mighty convenient. You can justify anything you want that way.
Actually it is a perfect word - for the moral view of those who wrote the NT. All the subtleties of ethical philosophy were wiped out in favor of a primitive sacrifice a god-man for our sins. Aristotle advocated the mean, but Paul advocated extremism. Aristotle advocated a mean between unrealistic abstinence and harmful lust, Paul came down on the abstinence side. And they were both male chauvinist pigs.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it. It is kind of like Richie Rich, who has all the money in the world, setting up a system where you have to pay to breath. After you run up debuts from breathing, he makes a big show of getting the money to repay your debts by selling his only son into slavery. Of course his son comes back in 3 days. Why he doesn’t write it off out of his infinite bank account - or just not charge you for living - is unclear.
Yes; like I said, the person meting out punishment simply doesn’t care who gets punished, as long as the punisher gets to punish somebody. This is what you get when you try to cast the scapegoat sacrifice as a debtor model - you get a judge who doesn’t give a flip about justice and is only interested in his own satisfaction. In your analogy, that satisfaction is money, and the judge doesn’t care who pays it; in the Jesus sacrifice model, the satisfaction is that God gets to torture somebody, anybody; he doesn’t care who.
One other little ‘issue’ with trying to frame this as a debt situationis that it turns pain and torture and death into a transferrable currency. You literally get a diety that traffics in pain and death! This is a good thing if you’re trying to place the diety on the same level as those mesoamerican dieties that demanded human sacrifices, but otherwise it’s probably not so great.
And, of course, just like when some smug punk has his rich daddy buy his way out of prison, this transfer of punishment thing removes the ‘justice’ element from the equation, just like I said. It’s not about punishing the wicked; it’s about God satisfying himself alone.
As best I can tell, the Governmental theory is not a ‘making an example of’ theory - God is explicitly punishing Jesus sufficiently to give God satisfaction for all sins everwhere by anybody (making it multiple orders of magnitude overkill for any individual’s potential crimes), and he’s explicitly doing it to vent his displeasure and get satisfaction for everybody’s crimes past and future. Thus when he finished with Jesus he has no reason to complain about any crime you might consider doing; he’s already taken his pound of flesh for it and is satisfied.
This is not to say that a ‘making an example’ model would necessarily be a bad explanation for the Jesus thing; just that it doesn’t appear to be one that has ever had historical traction, or which has even been mentioned in this thread until now, as best I can tell. Possibly because it puts God in the position of trying to rule by fear, tinpot dictator style; also possibly because it makes Jesus’s sacrifice unimportant. I mean, sure it may have been done as an example, but it didn’t actually do anything - the level of badness of any sins people do wouldn’t be effected by it, and nothing about Jesus’s actions would actually save or forgive anybody. And, of course, there’s the little detail that it didn’t work - there are still unrepentant bastards like myself who don’t give a flip about the scary torture God did that one time and who still sin like crazy - which would make God’s Jesus plan a failure.
All that aside, though, it is a reasonable explanation: Jesus suffered and died because God is trying to rule by fear, employing the principle that you only have to drop the nuke once to make your point.
Yeah, that’s my feeling too. Objectively speaking if there’s any part of Jesus’s swan song that deserves attention it’s the Gethsemane torture; that was supposedly an unprecedented and unequaled example of God getting his smite on, at least when it comes to him targeting a single individual. By comparison getting whipped and crucified is pretty ho-hum (and was commonplace by the standards of the day), and him coming back fine a day and a half later takes all the sting out of the execution.
This is of course presuming that the mythos in question doesn’t claim that the death of Jesus specifically served some sort of ritualistic purpose, independent of its dubous status as a punishment. I have seen models that make this claim, but they too fall short when you ask for the mechanism of how Jesus’s ressurection ‘defeated death’ for everybody else, or whatever.
If you don’t like that, you’ll want to avoid the parts where (s)he states that the names ‘God’ and ‘Satan’ may be swapped freely in order to allow you to break the scriptures and reshape them to your liking.
Um, the Bible? Admittedly it’s been more than a decade since I stained my fingers by touching it’s cover, by it was my undersanding that Jesus toddled over to Gethsemane, told his homeys to stay awake (they didn’t), then went in to pray. God then proceeded to rake him over the coals; Jesus floated the idea that God take that bitter cup from him, but God didn’t bite. This was apparently not fun; the pain was supposedly of a magnitude to make him soak himself sweating from every pore. (Doubtlessly not sweating actual blood, though, or Judas would have found some other way to identify him rather than putting his lips on that. Like maybe, “He’s the one soaked in blood”.)
This pain party apparently continued for a while; it was long enough that Jesus got (iirc) two smoke breaks, which he spent going down to wake up his homeys and ask them, seriously, stay awake. (They didn’t.) Each time he went back for a bit more roasting. Eventually it ended, he went back, Judas came by and engaged in a bit of homoerotic betrayal, and then some guard got his ear cut off and reattached and nobody was impressed or spoke of it again. And so on.
I dunno about anybody else, but the religion I was unfortunate enough to be raised in liked to stress Gethsemane, possibly because the whole ‘crucifiction-weekend-I’m back!’ thing is really pretty unimpressive when you think about it, in about three different ways. The garden business isn’t directly comparable to things that were happening left and right back then, and so could be construed as special and worse. Even if that is overstating the situation, though, I don’t really recall God making a habit of torturing individuals in the bible; he usually either killed them off quickly, or killed off a whole lot of people quick. The main exception I can think of is Job, and supposedly God wasn’t the one carrying that out anyway, for a change. Plus while he was doubtlessly uncomfortable, he still had the energy left to whine.
Regardless, that’s where I’m coming from. I suppose I can easily see a person minimizing the Gethsemane incident; it obviously didn’t go on that long, after all. Still though, something supposedly happened in there, and it apparently wasn’t a tea party.
It was specifically the idea that God was doing something to Jesus (torturing him, or whatever) that I didn’t recognize (and still don’t).
Here’s the account of Gethsemane as it appears in Mark (Matthew’s is essentially identical); and here’s Luke’s version. Nowhere do I see God doing anything mean to Jesus, beyond refusing his request to “take this cup from me.” As for why it was such a rough, anguished night for Jesus, it seems to me the most obvious interpretation, though not the only possible one, is that Jesus is dreading the torturous events of the day to come.
Nowhere do I see any indication that God is directly causing Jesus’s suffering, only allowing it.
Aside from this objection (which may or may not make any difference to the main point of the thread), I think you’ve asked a very good question or set of questions here (in the OP and some of your followup posts), and I don’t have a really good answer to them. There are some thoughts here (“What is the significance of the cross and the crucifixion of Jesus?”) that I find somewhat helpful, though not completely satisfying.
Fact is what really happened, and if you can’t accept the truth ,(just your own translations) to me it means you are not trying to find truth ,but just closing your mind to truth, or not wanting to believe differently for some reason, so there is no point in debating you, I think you can think what ever you wish, but it is not fact, and even if you go by the Bible, even Moses could not see God and live! God is said to be invisible so you can think you met him, but I contend it was just a halucination.
I am adding the dictonary’s translation of the word fact:a thing done,actuality,something that has actual existence,an actual experience in fact..truth.You can believe the dictionary or not, that is your right, but it isn’t factual.
Yes, but there is a reason for that, mainly trying to convey the concept and ensure clarity of what I believe is the underlying concept for suffering and detachment.
Ok I hope this will give the clarity that was lost:
I need to add:
4) there are 2 entities called Jesus, which is confusing by itself:
a- Jesus the man as we know about him
b- Jesus the ‘Christ Conscientious’ which is the combined human family which consist of 1 being - you mentioned the ant hill, which all ants taken together act as one. I also mentioned the fetal body, which I feel is more accurate, as individual non-specialized cells become specialized and we then can recognize the beginning of the larger being after cell specialization as opposed to a ‘lump of cells’. That larger being, and that being becoming conscious is the other Jesus I speak of. This Jesus consists of all of us including Jesus the man.
The combined body died (the body stated in 4b). This is the reason for all human suffering because we are all part of the dead body. This is the reason why just the stubbed toe doesn’t suffer. The injury was so great that it caused this combined entity which you, me Jesus, everyone you know to die. So every part suffers when the body died.
5a) Jesus the man suffered for the reason that the combined body died, he is part of that body.
I also wanted to add some scriptural reference to the larger combined entity Jesus I mentioned above. This below is obviously not about Mary’s birth of Jesus, but is on a much larger scale:
[QUOTE=Rev 12]
1 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”[a] And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.
[/QUOTE]
I believe that child is the combined entity Jesus from my above posting.
Focusing on the Luke version, Jesus was “in anguish” (KJV says “in an agony”) and sweating like a pig, even after an angel appears and infuses him with strength. At every other time before* and after he’s cool as a cucumber, right up until the end. Far from being the obvious explanation, assuming that he’s panicking at levels exceeding the limits of divine intervention seems to be completely out of character to me.
I do note that those two verses may be latecomers, and removing them largely eliminates the inconsistency. Of course, many people don’t remove them, and many use the somewhat more dramatic KJV. Couple that with a desire to make Jesus not seem like a pansy (an uber-pansy if you remember that angel), and to get around his death’s import being lessened by the ressurection, you can see why people have latched onto the idea that there must have been something else going on to make him sweat. And of course if something was going on, God was the only real candidate for doing it, since Satan had demonstrated his complete ineffectiveness against Jesus previously.
Regardless, I’m easy; “It didn’t happen” is a legitimate explanation for the torture in Gethsemane -and probably the most exonerating one possible! Of course that still leaves us with the problem that God was the one who set Jesus up on that arduous path that has him scared witless, which as you note still calls for explanation.
Discounting that bit in the temple, which most would say was purely anger at the desecration - though it is interesting to consider the possiblity that he blew up in part due to stress over upcoming trial. That still doesn’t mesh with his cool exterior elsewhere though.
Hmm, let’s have a look at that site. As you say it proposes several explanations in turn.
That it was a deliberate demonstration of how the “domination” system is bad. This is sort of the inverse of the statement that Jesus was teaching radical ideas and got killed for it; in this he apparently said those things to deliberately get himself killed, in order to make a point that empires are bad. This sounds ludicrous to me; that the page describes this as “the most persuasive historical explanation” doesn’t bode well.
It was done to create a symbol that we need to become like Christ, through a rather indirect metaphorical interpretation that death = change and we need to change (to be like Christ, specifically). Okay. This aspect has no literal saving power, though; it’s just symbolic of what we have to do ourselves.
The site then touches on the ‘scapegoat sacrifice’ explanation, but rejects it, in favor of…
It was done as a metaphor to show us that God is willing to accept us all without punishing us. Yes, God is reassuring us that he won’t punish us by punishing an innocent guy. As best I can tell the thinking is that God expects us to assume that it was a scapegoat sacrifice and thus that we’re saved by grace, and stop worrying about it. However Jesus’s crucifiction had no actual salvatory effect, because it isn’t needed; God was already planning to forgive everybody of everything anyway. (All the places in the rest of the bible flatly saying otherwise are presumably typos.) So in other words Jesus was crucified to trick into thinking we’re saved, because God couldn’t bring himself to just say we were already forgiven anyway.
Okay, yeah. Dr. Borg is clearly insane. It’s probably an effect of the implants.
Then the article shifts to a different speaker, a Mr. Grisham, who starts of by dismissing the scapegoat sacrifice explanation too, and then rolling into:
Um, can I get a translator? This is so buzzword-filled that it’s practically gibberish, assuming it isn’t gibberish. All I can see in here is that the point of having Jesus whipped and crucified is to show us that God knows and understands our pain. He’s one of us, man. He’s with us. He’s been there. And there was some stuff about the ressurection and love and, well, yeah. For the moment I’m assuming that this guy thinks that God is omniscient and thus already understood our pain, so this would again not have an actual salvatory effect, but is just an example or a metaphor or a…something.
I have to say, I’m not impressed by these guys; they seem like they’ve been huffing paint thinner. But, buried in this is the possibly interesting implication that once you start trying to argue for a benevolent, loving god, the concept of a sacrifice being literally necessary for anyone’s salvation starts to crumble for the simple reason that God starts acting like a benevolent god and thus nobody would be damned in the first place. Of course this makes Jesus’s crucifiction the elephant in the room, and so to try to get around that we get, well, this.
I, too, was going to ask about the “torture” in Gethsemane. Jesus’ torture wasn’t supposed to be the time he spent in the Garden, nor really just the scourging and time spent on the cross, but rather the time he spent in Hell being tortured there for “three days” before being ressurected. The version of Christianity that I am familiar with stressed the cross part and the hell part.
There was no actual torture occurring in the Garden. Jesus was just contemplating the path that was set before him and the terrible time to come, including the crucifiction and the time in hell. Any agony he was suffering was of the “praying really hard” and “contemplation” kind, not any physical attacks on his body.
I hereby declare the ‘walking around’ Jesus to be called “Jesus” and the ‘collective metaentity’ Jesus to be called “The Collective”. Calling two different things the same name is just begging for trouble - in fact I generally assume that somebody’s trying to pull a fast one whenever I see it happening.
So. I guess the theory is now:
The collective is dead. For some reason.
You argue that this makes all its component parts suffer. You have yet to propose a mechanism for why this happens. I will require one.
You argue that Jesus’s suffering before and on the cross was because he too is part of The Collective. This is silly; Jesus suffered because God went out of his way to have Jesus knowingly get himself arrested, tried, and executed. That’s right in the bible and pretty much beyond dispute without discarding the bible or its text.
This is not so good; your explanation is flying hard in the face of your scriptures. Plus it suffers from the very sort of problem that inspired this thread - how does the deadness of The Collective cause everybody to suffer? What’s the mechanism? And how does that mechanism mesh with observable reality - when I stub my toe, that suffering sure doesn’t seem to be coming from a decomposing The Collective - it seems to come from the fact I bashed my toe. That’s something that your explanation would need to resolve. Just like it would have to resolve the fact that Jesus didn’t just trip over a decomposing The Collective and fall onto the cross; he reportedly waited patiently for his betrayer to bring the romans to him, avoided defending himself, and passively accepted various physical indiginities that it was within his powers to end at any time. Very very explicitly, he did all this because God wanted it to play out that way. Which doesn’t sound like your model so far at all.
Yeah. This needs work. Plus I await hearing how this does or doesn’t mesh with that business about being connected/disconnected with God - Jesus is presumably connected, but he’s also part of the dead The Collective, which means that God partially overlaps with a dead entity? I am curious to see if you’ll be able to resolve this in any comprehensible way.
Ah, Revelations, the proof that hallucinagenic drugs were available to ancient man!
You needn’t bother trying to convince me that your model is supported elsewhere in scripture; it’s not necessary to understanding your theology. Heck, I’m happy with speculative explanations with no scriptural support, so long as they make sense and are self-consistent!
(You also aren’t going to convert me, incidentally, so don’t bother trying. From that persepective I don’t even consider the Bible a valid source of information, so it’s pointless to cite it at me anyway.)
May I ask where you’re getting this?