I am at a complete loss to understand - How about explaining exactly what you mean by that?
Are you familiar with the joke of which the punchline is, “Well, I sent you two boats and a helicopter!”?
Ah, Polycarp. Do you take “make old points in a new and insightful way” pills? I’ve never heard the joke of which you speak, but I bet I could tell it from context. Thanks.
Yes, I certainly am. I found it quite amusing when I was a devout Christian during my younger years. Not sure how it applies here, though.
I personally have never seen any boats or helicopters. Just people passing by in the water yelling at me from a distance giving me their personal assurance that a boat was out there somewhere and that it was sure to come soon (glug, glug).
The only reason I feel even remotely safe speculating as to what God (assuming for the moment) could have done (as I was requested to do by Beeblebrox) is that Christianity has made bold assertions that God has certain characteristics. These characteristics (omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnipotence) allow us to so speculate.
Too bad God isn’t omnicommunicative as well. That would solve a lot of problems, and I can’t think of a reason an omnibenevolent God would choose not to communicate.
Perhaps the Christian answer is simply, “We don’t know the answers, you aren’t God, deal with it, Job!” But this isn’t very convincing to a potential convert.
If I seem militantly atheistic at times, that is only because I want theists (and especially Christians) to defeat my best arguments against them.
Well, He’s sent prophets in O.T. times, Jesus, apostles in N.T. times, Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis of Assisi, Luther, Wesley, the Cure of Ars, people right down the line to those preaching today.
Part of the problem is that everybody seems to want Him to “rise up in wrath and smite the ungodly.” The problem with that is that we’re all ungodly – even those of us who try our best to follow Him. And His style in historical times seems to be minimalist – whatever He may have done in pluvial Mesopotamia or 2000 BC Sodom, He didn’t smite Nebuchadrezzar for having the temerity to conquer His Chosen People. Instead, He used him to teach them a lesson they needed to learn.
He’s quite explicit in the final chapters of all four Gospels. It’s our job, not His, to lead people to Him.
I’ve been trying to take that responsibility seriously, with extremely mixed results.
Well, if I called you and you had the phone disconnected, I couldn’t get through. If I sent somebody to knock on your door, it’s your business whether you choose to believe that I sent a message through him or it’s his own delusion that I did.
Can’t give a better answer than that. I have no idea why David B. has been conspicuous by his absence here, either. (Typical of those who claim godhood – they immediately disappear!;)) But that’s what I see Him doing – working through those who have chosen to hear His call.
Not a very convincing answer. Just, IMHO, the true one.
By the way, in regards to the Job thing, I thought I’d make another point.
Assuming God is talking to me, or that I have a reason to believe he exists, I am willing to admit that there are things I won’t understand, and I will trust in his power and grace regarding all final outcomes. In other words, I willing to suspend the philosophical problem of pain/evil.
But the problem is, how do I get over the problem of evil hump without knowing of his existence? If faith is truly a blind leap, is it truly faith?
Looking for something to point me in the direction to jump.
Every religion points; how to make the choice is the key.
The fallacy of the argument from authority fails to carry the day alone. Just because Aquinas said it is true does not necessarily make it so. Let’s face it, if he said something different, he might have been burned at the stake. And I’m sure that even you will admit that the number of people who hold a belief does not make that belief true.
I must find a personal reason for me to believe it for it to be valid for me. There must be an independent reason to believe in God other than that my parents and a lot of dead people told me I should. And one would think that reason would be discoverable. How does God succeed in hiding from me after all these years of searching?
Let’s face it, a lot of people knock on our doors, and a lot of telemarketers call me at home trying to sell all kinds of things. But, the messenger and the message have to have some objective credibility, or you could not hold me responsible for not believing him/it.
My problem is quite focused. I want to believe Christianity because my roots are there. But the whole Jesus thing just doesn’t seem, well, logical, and his death and resurrection seem so unnecessary. I’ve rationalized the existence of a supreme being who somehow hopes the best for me. (I’m not sure I’m totally on board yet, but I’m trying.) But I seem to be incapable of getting further.
I’m certainly willing to believe. I even attend services every now and then, even though I do not truly believe. I engage in conversations such as this one. In the meantime, I try to live a somewhat moral life (Golden Rule; last seven Commandments). What more can I do? I feel like I’m sitting by the phone, waiting to pick it up, but no one ever calls.
I have to think that God would at least give me the ability to determine if the phone is unconnected under my desk or to at least know the correct knock when I hear it (we did eat from the tree of knowledge after all…). And yet, after all of my searching, I’m “twice as cloudy as I’d been the night before, and I went in seeking clarity.” (Hey, you started the song quotations.)
I’m starting to think that “the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.” Unfortunately, that’s not encouraging me to continue my search.
May I ask you to clarify? What exactly seems illogical about it?
How have you gone about that? What were your reasons?
Iam interested, but I’d like some clarification before answering your posts. Is it the idea of blood sacrifice that seems illogical? Or God sacrificing all His power?
Yes, I’m sure He could have. But it does seem to me that that would have to be a universe without choice. The only way to be sure that nothing undesirable will happen is to refuse the freedom of choice.
(hijack)
Addison Leitch said, “When the will of God crosses the will of man, somebody has to die.”
I rambled this into my rather dusty livejournal some months back, and I think it dovetails into this thread, if not perfectly, at least no painfully badly. 
My non-Christian perspective on “why Jesus?”–and also on the “whither communication?” turn:
I was talking with my dear friend K. a few nights ago, and the conversation veered and lurched ramblingly all over the map, as we tend to do. The final detour was into religious territory, and my realization of a fairly recent internal shift in my outlook–namely, the moment I realized that the middling-sized chip on my shoulder about Christianity was pretty much dismantled. (As the subject line [“Expedient means, Lotus Sutra, chip dandruff”] says, there’s still some dandruff, but not quite so much dander.)
And that moment happened roundabouts Thanksgiving time, when I was visiting family. Curled up in an armchair, reading The Lotus Sutra–translated, of course. It’s one of the major texts of the Mahayana branch of Buddhism, and aside from a few noticeable warts (a couple sadly misogynistic bits being the warts I’m thinking of), the most relentlessly optimistic and flat-out good-natured religious work I think I’ve ever read. The essential thrust of Mahayana being, everybody gets out, everybody will be enlightened, everybody will know and achieve the cessation of suffering, everybody awakens, everybody becomes a buddha in their own right, everybody. No exceptions. Everybody. It’ll take a long, long time, but it will happen. To stress that, memory pulls a bit of Luc Besson’s “Leon” totally out of context:
“Bring me everybody.”
“Uh…what do you mean, ‘everybody’?”
"EVERYBODY!!!"
Anyway, one of the major themes of the text is that of “expedient means”; essentially, that buddhas and bodhisattvas will often not teach fully, but that which is necessary to inspire students to not lose hope, and not regress into lower realms from which it’s very difficult (but again, not impossible; in Buddhism, even the lowest hells are marked by impermanence) to rise back out of. Several chapters of the sutra are devoted to parables around that theme. The one that struck me was this:
A group of travellers are making their way to a distant land. The road there is long and hard, it passes through some frankly unpleasant territory without much water or food. To make matters worse, none of the travellers really know the way. Luckily, there’s a guide, a fellow who’s been there, knows the twists and turns of the route, and has the power to protect and shepherd them until they can do so themselves.
But the journey is hard. The travellers are very weary, and more and more are ready to give up, turn back and return to where they started from. It’s a more comfortable place than where they are now, and the destination is impossibly far away. The guide can tell them fully why getting to that destination makes it all worthwhile, teach them fully its mysteries, and so on–but right now, right here, that won’t do a bit of good, because the people who placed themselves in his charge are tired, they are weary, they’re running out of hope, they just need to rest.
“Keep pressing on. Just over the next ridge is a fabulous city,” he tells them. It’s paved with gold, fountains of sweet wine, heavenly music, etc. There, they can rest, indeed, that city can be their destination. It’s just over that next ridge. And using his powers, he ensures that there is that city, and the travellers take heart as they come up a rise and see it through his aid. He knows that when they rest, they’ll be able to continue down to the ultimate goal, but for right here and now, for these travellers, this shining city on the hill is the expedient means necessary to keep them going forward.
And something in my head went click. That was it. I’d always rejected Christianity not from a rational standpoint (the standard rational standpoints did act as very strong shorings-up, make no mistake) but from the gut. The dogma of it, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the shallow unfairness of the one-life one-shot-with-simple-binary-outcome, shining city or darkest hell forever, I didn’t reject on fully rational grounds, but because it turned my stomach.
My stomach. I wasn’t one of those travellers. Thoughts clicked into each other rapidly. Jesus the man was teaching in a specific historical context, just as Siddhartha the man was. Where “the” Buddha was born into a relatively stable society where entering into religious isolation followed by teaching and expounding varyingly-new doctrines was expected and respected, “the” Christ was born into a society in turmoil, conquered yet again, where new doctrines were very much not expected or respected. Different travellers, needing different expedient means. What do you tell travellers who are steeped in a culture of making offerings for their sins, of the narrative that misfortunes are frequently from the One God punishing transgressions against The Law? You don’t tell them forget the Law, this is new; you say that not one jot passes from the Law; I’m not abrogating anything, but think of it as completing it. That the Law doesn’t lie in words and codes, it lies in the simplest and hardest thing–love. Love each other, love God. When you know that you’re going to be killed–the guides to that distant ultimate shore have powers, after all–you don’t say, well hell, that’s the breaks, you make use of it. Forget those sin offerings–my death is all the sin offering you’ll ever need. I’m finding a lot of it makes far more sense when viewed this way.
Of course, this view will almost certainly not satisfy either Christians or atheists. And it’s probably too overly-rationalized for many Buddhists as well. So this in itself is likely just an expedient means applied to myself.
I can live with that.
il Topo: It wasn’t my intent to argue from authority but to suggest that the chosen technique of the God I believe in is to “inspire” people to do His work in the world, rather than intervening in a spectacular way Himself. The people listed were intended as examples.
Jesus doesn’t make sense. Nobody possessed of all power would be willing to give it all up and become a baby with the probable outcome of an agonizing death out of agapetic love for man. But that’s what we’re told happened.
Jesus doesn’t make sense. Neither does George Washington.
Drastic: Your last post is truly beautiful. A wonderful perspective. I hope that longhair75, who came to Christianity from a Buddhist perspective much as you have done, sees it and comments on it.
Yes, you certainly may ask, and I’ll try to answer.
I think I mentioned in an earlier post that it may seem perfectly logical from the perspective of a sacrifice oriented people (and someone else mentioned that it may have been an expedient means of communicating developed specifically for such a people), but it doesn’t make much sense if you step back for a second and view it from the perspective of an all-powerful, all-knowing Being plotting out the universe he is going to build. I mean, why build into the model an inherent requirement for suffering. He knew He would have to send his Son and that his Son would have to suffer and die, did He not?
I have many problems (as you no doubt can tell) but blood sacrifice isn’t a bad place to start.
I’m exposing myself a little further here, but why stop now…I hate going to church and seeing a bloody body on the cross. It is so morbid. I, for one, would prefer to focus on the Resurrection if Jesus must be the focus. It seems silly to focus on how bloody and gory we can make the crucifix look.
If Jesus had come 50 years ago, and been executed by the US government, would we all have electric chairs on the alter, complete with a simulated, gory corpse? Would I have been raised with a gory, electrocuted, sitting figure hanging on the wall over my bed at night? Would women be wearing fashionable electric chair earings? Would some faiths merely have an empty electric chair as the centerpiece of their worship to emphasize the risen Christ?
I definitely have a problem with blood sacrifice generally, and especially it’s presence in the face of a total lack of necessity for it given an all-powerful Being designing the world with perfect foreknowledge.
But, you see, I don’t buy that. I don’t think free will is the reason for undesireable things. As I posted earlier:
“…free will ain’t the answer. After all, if God has free will, and yet, over an eternity of choices, He never chooses to do evil, not even once, then certainly free will is not enough to justify the existence of suffering. There must be something different about us that makes us susceptible to evil, something that He put in us or left out of us, presumably on purpose, something other than free will.”
I’m open to critique on that line of reasoning.
Fair enough, Polycarp.
I suppose inspiration must come at two levels. Those who are inspired to speak, and those who are inspired to listen. Hearing a message is not sufficient, as Drastic alludes. The listener must be prepared, or the message must be tailored. You can’t really blame someone who was raised from birth in a robust faith for ignoring the itinerant evangelizer who comes to town and sets up his tent.
You’re not helping matters, Polycarp!
I guess I’ll just have to keep waiting for my inspiration.
Why George Washington? Sure, he made sacrifices, but we all have to make sacrifices. God, on the otherhand, does not have to make sacrifices.
I’m very fond of the narrative that the holiness of existence (I really dislike the term “God”, partly–perhaps in largest part–from aforementioned dandruff, but also simply because I think it’s a term that has a great and hideous inertia-tendency of slamming blinders into place from the get-go because of the specific traditions and formulations it’s rooted in) “speaks” to everyone, all the time, and is simply not heard. I liked the “two boats and copter” parablejoke even in my strong-position atheist days. It troubles me when simplified, though–as (dandruff again) Christian formulations tend to do with it. Which is, reduce it to something uncomfortably close to–if not sometimes outright–a “blame the victim” framing. I think the truth of it is far more complex than that.
Never, never look up a picture or the Isenheim Altarpiece. 
It’s the most gruesome crucifixion painting I’ve ever seen… and, to me, one of the best. Just wanted to say that. I’ll get back to you when I’ve done some thinking. No smart remarks, thank you. 
Gah, I always swore I’d never do smilies…
Wow. That is a particularly disturbing alterpiece. Powerful art.
Not sure I’d want my kids to see it every Sunday, though.