This. How weak is your faith that God feels the need to provide evidence to you?
There is too much in this thread to address it all, but I just want to make a few points.
First, to be up front and say I am a Christian and was raised in the faith, however I had years of doubting and was troubled by many of the same questions I see here. I now would call myself a true believer in traditional Christian doctrine (the Nicene creed, for example.)
Also that there are many excellent, logical, reasonable defenders of the faith and good books on apologetics if anyone is interested. I recommend C.S. Lewis or Timothy Keller for starters. I don’t accept woo-woo answers and I firmly believe Christians have to be able to defend their faith with logic and reason. Our minds and ability to reason comes from God, not just blind faith. It pains me when people think all Christians belive in crazy magical thinking (although I can see why that happens.)
I know I am not going to convince anyone with this post, I just wanted to assert that these questions are addressed coherently by well educated people, if anyone cares to read a whole response that would be much better than mine.
Now, one assertation I see here is that God needed a sacrifice to please him in a bloodthirsty sense. However, Christians believe that Jesus actually is God. God sacrifices Himself. He does this out of love for us, in that He knows we will never be able to be sinless. He has perfect love and willingly put himself in our place, and took our punishment which is death.
Now why can’t He just forgive us then? Why did Jesus (God) have to die? Because He also has perfect justice. There is a lot of talk about God’s love but not much about his justice. Perfect justice demands that the price is paid. To use an imperfect analogy, if you break a window in my house, I can either make you pay for it or forgive you and pay for it myself. But for the window (our relationship with God) to be fixed, someone has to pay. We broke it, God pays.
Christians believe in the resurrection of the body, not just the spirit. Because we are more than just our souls, our lives on this earth and our bodies have meaning. We don’t just live for heaven, we live to redeem God’s kingdom here on earth. Jesus was bodily resurrected because he has power over the body, and also to show us that we will also be bodily resurrected, and one day all of creation will be redeemed, it will not just be spirits in heaven. Physical things, like the earth and all of creation are also part of His kingdom. This is a distinction between Christianity and religions that claim we need to transcend our bodies to find God.
And yes, miracles and the resurrection are ‘proof’ but many people believe without seeing, and also many people have seen the miracles and yet don’t believe. For example, the Pharisees (Jesus often shows that ‘religious’ people have the hardest time understanding God.) You can see a miracle and still believe it was done by trickery
As for Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Keller explains this very well and I will attempt a probably poor paraphrase here from my own memory (if it’s bad, that is my fault):
Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac not because God was yanking him around, or because He was bloodthirsty. Abraham wanted a son more than anything, and God gave him Isaac. However, anything we love above God is an idol, and God was showing Abraham something when he told him to sacrifice his son. That God needs to come first, even above our families. If we love anything more than God it only leads to heartache because anything else can be taken away. Also that God is faithful. The firstborn son comes up often in the Bible because it was so important to the family. It was how the family wealth and name was passed down. But God promised Abraham that he would be the father of many nations. So Abraham must have wondered how God could fulfill that promise if he was now being told to sacrifice his firstborn son. But he knew God was faithful to his promises, so he was willing to give everything up to God to see how that was going to happen. God showed Abraham that he could be fully trusted, and also took away the possible idolatry of Isaac.
The ram was sacrificed in his place, but the ram is not what ultimately ‘saved’ Isaac or Abraham or anyone. Jesus’ death saved everyone who came before him and after.
I realize this is not a great answer - there are so many issues in this thread. My main point here is that Christianity does address them and I found answers to these issues and more.
I believe personal revelation is available to everyone, not just me and the apostles. The instruction is seek the Lord with all your heart,soul, strength. I also believe that everyone will reach that, everyone will get to the point where they seek the Lord, though it may be after several ‘lives’.
You are not inheriting the sin so much as the curse that your forefathers incurred via their sin. A evil father, noble son is not inconsistent, in this case the father may get away with great evil, while the son will bear any penalty for any little infraction, and learn to be good out of fear.
As this gets to another generation it would be aspects of both, how this would play out I don’t know and their are many variable.
All I can do is do the best I can, which is follow the path of Love, which I have personally found works the best, and even if I made a mistake, count on a God above everything that will know the intention of my heart and count on His righteousness to set me free.
If their is no such God above all then all is lost, and nothing matters.
Jesus Himself as man didn’t know everything, was following what He believed is the Holy Spirit to the best of His ability, what else can we really be expected to do?
Aren’t you a little old to be believing in curses?
Expect? I expect people to believe all sorts of crazy nonsense. I expect them to put their faith and confidence in gods for reasons other than that the god beliefs in question deserve faith and confidence. I mean, people are pretty silly overall, and I don’t expect them to act otherwise.
I think you would be better at following the path of love if you spent less time worrying about curses and sin and deals with the devil and evil spirits in people, or the various other statements you’ve made that have inspired revulsion in response. Just my opinion.
And, thankfully, things still matter without a god. In my opinion they matter more, in fact - they’re not a throwaway existence to be ignored by turning your eyes to an imagined bright future.
I’m glad you believe Christians should use logic and reason and I realize that there are a lot of highly educated and intelligent Christian apologists. Still, I have to say that Christian theology cannot truly be explained through logic and reason. Logic and reason only apply if Christians first accept certain things with blind faith. Note , I say this as a former Christian.
This is true of the most educated and intelligent apologists. Somewhere in thier chain of reason certain things are accepted on blind faith and without that blind faith the theology of the belief system just doesn’t work.
for example, from your own post,
God’s perfect justice needed payment.
Why, who says? Why couldn’t mankind redeem themselves simply by doing good works and repenting? {which fits with the Biblical passages about people being rewarded according to their works and judged for their deeds}.
If that’s the case and Jesus paid for all our sins and we will never be perfect, {or perhaps are made perfect by belief in Christ as Savior} then logic says Christians can do whatever hey want and it’s all paid up. They can sin as much as they like and all is forgiven because they believe in Christ right? No Christians believe that do they? They believe as Christians you’re supposed to be a living testimony for Christ right? They also believe we will still be sinners and less than perfect don’t they. Just do your best {whatever that means} and if you occasionally slip up then you’re forgiven
Is there something in Christian theology that tells us exactly where the line is drawn? How much sin from a believer will God accept before you’ve crossed the line and are heading for hell again?
Do we not bear the consequences of our actions? Isn’t it justice for us to redeem ourselves with good works?
I repeat, because it’s important, no answers hold to logic and reason without Christians accepting certain things with blind faith. Thus, logic and reason are not all that compatible with traditional Christianity.
Then I have a question. As, ultimately, creations of God, are we not affected with the blessing of his nobility? And considering that he is the ultimate good, while any evil we may commit is going to be finite in nature, doesn’t that blessing overwhelm any kind of sin we might commit? To say that we could commit a sin or some evil that would damn us would be to say that God’s goodness is finite (and incredibly limited, at that).
Sorry. I tend not to come to GD often. Let me address the question asked of me:
The “loophole” is my own terminology, and I probably shouldn’t have used it. But I’ll try to explain. The idea is that the whole “sin causes death” thing is a law. But it’s converse is also true: the ONLY thing that causes death is sin. The loophole is that others’ sins caused Jesus to die. That’s what I mean by taking on the sins of the world.
The reason why infants don’t work is because there’s a very common misconception, that children are born without sin. Nope. the curse on Adam was a curse on all mankind. Everybody still has the curse. There’s a scripture that implies this:
Children born to non-Christian parents are “unclean.” So being too young does not except one from the curse. And Christianity didn’t exist before Jesus came.
That’s the best I can do. Well, maybe one more shot at the thesis:
The idea is that God is both Just and Merciful. Unfortunately one often conflicts with the other. God had to figure out a way to satisfy both of these desires, and did so by letting someone else take the punishment that we all deserved. That’s the “loophole.”
Don’t think I forgot you: I sorta answered this in my previous reply, but I can be a little more specific.
For death to happen, there must be sin. As long as one is with God, one cannot die. Man sinned, which separated him from God, so man must die.
This is the curse.
Jesus escapes this curse, because he, while being born of a woman, is not born of a man. This means he is not cursed, and thus is not forced to sin. But he still has to fight the natural tendency.
He does so. But then how is he to die? Well, sin must be involved. So, rather than sin himself, he lets the sins of others kill him. He asks for their forgiveness, and allows their sin to become part of him. His spirit, loaded with all that sin, sinks to Hell, where the sin is burned off.
But now we’re back to the OP. Why did he have to come back? Well, lots of people die. What proof is there that anything has happened? You need some sort of miracle. And you need to let other people know what happened. So you bring the guy back to life, to go tell his followers everything he did. (He’d already mentioned it before, but now he has proof.
Okay, but why do people have to know? This is the part that I admit is a bit confusing to me. Apparently, unlike Adam, one does not inherit Jesus’s lack of sin. One must voluntarily give up their sin. Jesus’s sacrifice just gives us the chance to do so, rather than being under the curse which makes us continue to sin. We ask Jesus to take away our sin, and he does so. Of course that sin doesn’t just disappear. It goes to Jesus, back on the cross, to be burnt in hell.
This also somewhat answers the question on why God didn’t just do this at any time. Apparently, the exact timing was not relevant theologically. Apparently Jesus’s sacrifice somehow trancended time. The only answer I have to that is that God who created time therefore exists outside of it. And, no I can’t explain that any further.
This hasn’t stopped theolgians from asking why Jesus didn’t come in more modern times where his message could have spread more quickly, and saved more people. Unfortunately, that’s the end of my knowledge on the subject. All I can leave you with is the apparently disliked axiom that God prefers faith to proven knowledge. To quote Jesus declaration to Thomas:
With this, I take my leave of this thread (most likely).
Strange, but I have peace without the beliefs you have and since you are no authority of what God does,wants or says I just could not possibly believe a supreme being could act or be so foolish and illogical. If God doesn’t deal in facts than your whole argument is moot. God could not possibly be that ignorant to dispel logic and have any intellegence at all.
If your God doesn’t deal in facts, then he doesn’t deal in truth, for facts are truth not fables.
Your beliefs help you and so go for it, but as for me, My God would have to be smarter, kinder, and more loving that that.
I guess that means he was half cursed. If Mary was destined to die because of original sin then Jesus inherited her half right? Maybe it was a recessive gene.
What about the sin people commit after they have accepted Christ? Is that automatically burned off or does it require repentance?
Does that mean if they sin and don’t repent before they die they are still going to hell even though they accepted Jesus?
What if they’re sinning unconsciously? They might be selfish or vain or racist, and not really see that in themselves. Is it just automatically forgiven and they can continue on being selfish vain or racist as a Christian and it’s okay?
Your situation is not the same, it is something you both have planned, so it could be both. If some accident happened that would prevent your Mother or you from having lunch, it would still be a plan you made together. no need for predicting it.
Jesus was quoted as stating He would rise in 3 days and would return in glory with His angels, while some of His listeners were still alive, if He was one with the Father who is said to have all knowledge, then if that was true He would have known,but since he didn’t return and people are still waiting after 2,000 years, It would seem He was just guessing or hoping He would come back.
My understanding is that he was supposed to come, die and ressurrect so people would believe, and wash their sin of being human away, as that was the punishment stated in Genesis for Adam and Eve’s sin. Their sin was trying to learn the difference between good and evil…a strange thing indeed!
Everyone has a world view. The existence of God cannot be proven or disproven, for example. What specific claims do you feel Christianity makes that are accepted on blind faith (that other people don’t make the same kinds of faith claims about?)
When justice is carried out, the wrong needs to be made right. If a criminal stole your wallet, it is one thing to forgive him, but for justice to be carried out he also has to pay the money back. Without restoration you are not made whole. Perfect justice means it is as if the wrong never happened.
Biblical passages about being judged for deeds are never about achieving salvation through deeds.
Yes - it is all paid up. But your thinking here is that Christians will ‘want’ to keep doing bad things after they have realized what Jesus has done for them. Jesus said he is doing away with ‘the law.’ This means we are free from rules. However, once you have truly seen perfect love and experienced forgiveness you act out of gratefulness.
actually, Christians do believe that through grace, there is nothing we can do that will make God ‘take it back.’ It is not as if our salvation is conditional on us not sinning. Christians all continue to sin.
yes.
yes
yes. But it is not like there is a scorecard. Our salvation does not hinge upon our morality. When someone does something wonderful for you, out of love, don’t you react with gratefulness? Aren’t you humbled when someone does something for you that you don’t deserve? To quote Keller on the dynamic of grace and gratitude:
“Think of what happens when you fall in love. Your love makes you eager for acceptance from the beloved. You ask, “will you marry me?” What happens when the answer is ‘yes?’ Do you say, ‘great! I’m in! Now I can act any way I want’? Of course not. Now you don’t even wait for the object of your affection to directly ask you to do something for them. You anticipate whatever pleases and delights them. There’s no coercion or sense of obligation, yet your behavior has been radically changed by the mind and heart of the person you love.”
(This is quoted from the book The Reason for God)
There is no line. God accepted ALL sin on the cross. There is no limit.
no, because our works will never be enough. We can never live up to the standard of perfection. It’s like telling a 5 year old he has to pay for the ming vase he just broke. He can’t.
I disagree, I think Christianity holds up to logic and reason as well or better than any other worldview. I say this as someone who has read Dawkins, Freud, Nietzsche, the findings of the Jesus Seminar, etc. I do think Christians often do a terrible job of it, though. It can be tough to find well reasoned minds who do a good job of explaining Christian doctrine, but they exist. (Alvin Plantinga, C.S. Lewis,Timothy Keller, Francis Collins are a few.)
If by ‘okay’ you mean, is their salvation still intact, then yes. If by ‘okay’ you mean God condones it, then no. There is a distinction that needs to be made between saying “this action makes God happy and glorifies Him” and “this action means my salvation is in jeopardy.” Jesus’ death paid for all your (and my) sin, past and future. Our salvation is not based on deeds. At all.
I wonder why an all knowing, kind, loving, supreme being would create a human race, starting with one man and woman, know before hand they would be flawed, let a monster He also created (and knew would tempt them because they were ignorant at the time), then punish them and all the rest of their off- spring, until He decided many centuries later to have a woman bear a child by Him, to take the rap for something he could have prevented to begin with…sounds like a cruel game and not the actions of a loving,compassionate,all knowing supreme being.
Seems very contradictory to what this supreme being is supposed to be.:dubious:
Does knowing something is going to happen make it your fault? Where does free will come in? ETA: The boundaries were established ahead of time. Man was not completely ignorant. I have a 5 year old and I tell him the rules, even though I know he will not be able to keep them, because he is 5 and will make mistakes. But he is still disciplined for disobeying. Should I not give him consequences because he cannot possibly obey every time?
Would you consider a God who made us unable to not choose Him more loving? Would it have been better to not have been created at all?
If you are going to have a relationship with another being, there has to be choice or there is no real love. You have a kind of Stepford relationship.
(And He did not make a person take the rap…He Himself took the rap.)
I do appreciate this, but I believe all evil is from a single entity, Satan - so all people, all or mostly all demons will also be saved IMHO. It allows me to believe every person has potential to be good. It also allows me to see how life is actually very very unfair to a certain group of people, it is not anything wrong with the person, that person is not inferior, it’s spiritual effect that make their life very cruel.
I can understand this, I don’t agree but that’s OK.