The Way into the Kingdom of Heaven is not through punishment, through suffering imposed by a wrathful God whose justice outweighs His mercy. It is through love: the boundless, self-giving love God has for us, to which we respond with love for Him and for one another (1 John 4:16-21).
Sounds a little like Lord of the Flies.
I think another aspect of the Christian guilt trip is “Christ sacrificed himself to save YOU… so now you owe him something.”
This tends to be implied, rather than stated in so many words, but I think it’s a strong thread in Christianity.
The OP is consistent with the dogma I was raised with and latter rejected (I’m agnostic now).
If you believe mankind is inherently bad (and thus, deserving of eternal punishment), then obviously you can’t expect to go to Heaven unless you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. JC was an necessary intervention.
If you believe mankind isn’t inherently bad while still subscribing to belief in Heaven, Hell and Jesus, then that means accepting one of two things. Either we’re saying good people can go to Hell. Or we’re saying that acceptance of Jesus isn’t essential to getting into Heaven. Neither one of these is consistent with traditional Christian theology.
Not so much the fear of God stopping you, but God the Father can and will discipline his child, and it would be His responsibility to do so for the ultimate good. So God can allow it to happen, even moving the police out of the way to permit it.
Ultimately it’s brought off the worldly plane, so no such fear of worldly authorities exist - so in cops are useless and fear of them also (quoting Jesus in front of Pilate “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above. Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.” - this shows how useless Pilate’s authority is viewed by Jesus.
It is brought to a very spiritual plane and awareness and one can understand why things happen have nothing to do with the worldly issues. They, the non-spiritual ‘Joe Atheist’ (as you mention) and someone doing the work of Christ (Bob), are in two entirely different planes of existence.
That appears to be a very cruel misuse of that verse to use against a child. It simply means man’s work, even trying to be good is just a disorganized mess to God. It would require God to fix it. Like small kids (man) trying to help out their parents (God), usually it required more work of the parents to fix what the children have helped with.
The worthlessness comes from out detachment from God, acting as a independent from God. As Solomon said - everything is worthless, as Jesus said - The pagans run back and forth for these (useless) things, when your Father knows you need them (and will provide them).
However the Work of the Kingdom done by God’s children is of one spirit, the Holy Spirit, the same spirit of God the Father and thus part of the same body. It is coordinated by the mind of God, and though might appear a mess will beautifully work out.
On the subject of what the word sin means in the bible, I have certainly heard it said, among fellow believers and from the pulpit, that sin means “missing the mark”. That appears to be the meaning of the Greek word hamartan, which is used 43 times, primarily by Paul. Many other words in Hebrew and Greek are translated as sin in the bible, and they usually mean something much closer to bad or evil.
You can find more than you ever wanted to know about all of the words for sin here.
This is something that as a Catholic I’ve never understood. Because they threw the virgin into the volcano (crucifixion) 2000 or so years ago, MY sins are forgiven. There’s no connection. I mean, crucifixion is an awful way to torture someone to death, as the tens of thousands sacrificed by the romans could verify, I’m sure. But still; that was a voluntary action; one might even suggest, suicidal, if he knew it was coming but did nothing to stop it.
How I was turned off from Christianity is related to the idea of intrinsic “badness”, in a way:
I was not raised religiously but I did attend a religious (Episcopal) school for most of my childhood (80s and 90s). This included religious instruction and weekly services. I went through the motions, enjoying some of the lessons and songs (and even taking communion, usually due to my ever-present hunger, before realizing that this was a big faux-pas for a non-believer), but thought little about religion except for one particular creed we recited in service – the one line went something like this:
“I have sinned against him in thought, word, and deed”
It was the “thought” that got me – how could a thought be a sin? Words and deeds, sure – they could hurt people. My parents always taught me that the ultimate guide for morality was how one treated other people. Thought didn’t, and couldn’t, have anything to do with how others were treated. I couldn’t hurt anyone, or help anyone, with a thought. Only with words or actions.
This bothered the hell out of me. If a God really cares about what I think, and insists that certain thoughts were either required (say, a belief and worship for him) or disallowed (pervy thoughts or whatever), then that God was being an asshole.
I couldn’t (and still can’t) see a way around this. If God exists, and doesn’t put infinite more value on how people treat others over what thoughts exist in people’s minds, then that God isn’t worth respecting, much less worshiping.
I understood then and understand now that, if Christianity is true, I’m doomed to hell for these beliefs, but I also didn’t and don’t see any way around them – I could pretend to believe, and join a church, and go through the motions, and tell people I was saved, but I’d still believe that this supposed God is a pathetic piece of shit, and still doubt that such an asshole God could really exist.
As others have indicated, this is not what I heard through years of Sunday School and church services (I was raised Episcopalian). The consistency of the teachings I got through those years was, as a couple others mentioned, that sinning isn’t “bad”, per se, but “missing the mark” or “falling short”. We often think about sins as things like murder, lying, stealing, adultery, etc. and these are all bad things by virtually anyone’s moral standards. However, while I’m loathe to use a trite expression like WWJD, it very much was distilled in me that sinning is whenever we failed to live up to that, which is far more often than that. It derives from the idea that God is perfect, his morality is perfect, and Jesus’s life is an example of how to live in that way.
In other words, if someone just doesn’t do bad things, that doesn’t make them without sin. If someone isn’t as charitable as they could be, they’ve sinned. Or, to use an analogy, imagine archery or target shooting. If you miss the target altogether, it’s a bad shot, but if you fail to hit the bulls eye, it can even be a really close shot, but it’s not a bulls eye.
Further, at least in the brand of Christianity in which I was raised, it was never a fire and brimstone approach to sinning. The way I always understood it was that, yes, God is perfect, and we’re not, but that’s exactly why Jesus had to do what he did. We aren’t “worthy” without it, but that didn’t matter any more; mercy trumps justice. Thus, rather than feel bad about being imperfect, we should see that example and strive towards it, learn from our mistakes, realize we’re forgiven for them, and keep on trying to be better, with God’s help.
So, really, I guess I disagree with both ideas about what Christians believe, that bad and sin are synonymous for these purposes, and that we should feel bad. However, I will add that as I understand how I was raised is generally one of the more liberal interpretations of Christianity with which I’m familiar and I’ve not been a member of any Church for some time (nor do I consider myself Christian these days either, for that matter), so I cannot say how representative as a whole that is, but it certainly is at least common enough that the OP cannot be said to be a good generalization of Christianity as a whole.
Osho is better known in America as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose personality cult took over an Oregon town in the 1980s and, among other things, poisoned restaurant salad bars in order to prevent local residents from voting in an election.
Maybe racism is a good example/analogy. A person can have racist thoughts as well as racist words or deeds. And those racist thoughts are sinful, in the sense of being unhealthy, or unworthy of your best self, or something you’d be a better person without. And therefore God cares that you have them, not in the sense of saying “You’re sinning—I must punish you for that!” but more like a doctor who sees a bit of infection or cancer or tooth decay in a patient. And you should also care that you have them. Because they can affect the way you treat and relate to other people, especially if they are unchallenged and unchecked.
And a healthy Christian response to recognizing such thoughts in oneself might be to ask God’s forgiveness for having such thoughts, and perhaps also God’s help in avoiding or overcoming such thoughts in the future, with the joyful assurance that forgiveness would be granted.
Everybody seems to be making this more complicated than it really is …
The simple truth of the matter is, in fact, simple … “Love your brother as you love yourself” … there are no other core Christian beliefs, that’s the only one … everything else is just dross and flicky-wicky and , IMEIO, solely created by Man so that the strong can gain power over the weak … priests like ordering people about making them do what the priest wants them to do and using “you are a sinner” is great bait to get the people to do what the priest says … Christ’s message is we are all equal in God’s eyes, from Pope Frances all the way to Charles Manson … any parent knows what it’s like to love a child unconditionally … so it is with God’s love for us …
Oh … that guy … what a kook …
Rising from the dead is also a viable option, so it’s not the same as what we would call suicide.
As for there is no connection, there is. What they did back then was to kill a sinless man. They did it by casting their sins onto Him and condemning Him to death (instead of them who it was rightly for). Jesus forgave them, so they are now clean of the sin.
Jesus states if you harbor hatred towards a person you have committed murder in yoru heart. So we are still condemning others today and still need that sin of ours wiped clean.
This is where we are the body of Christ comes in, and God’s Holy Spirit is our spirit, and we are children of God - with the same authority as Jesus. As we forgive others who have done wrong against us, their sins are removed - it is God forgiving them and washing them clean, and yes some of these people will be put to death, Paul talks about their resurrection.
I was under the impression that said man was a mere blasphemer, who got executed in accordance with Deuteronomy 13.
That doesn’t sound nearly as bad, but it wasn’t what was taught to me, and I still get the impression from most Christians that bad thoughts alone (including a rejection/denial of God/Jesus) can send me to hell.
It certainly does, and it goes way back. You’re simply wrong here.
The English Biblical terms translated as “sin” or “syn” from the Biblical Greek and Jewish terms sometimes originate from words in the latter languages denoting the act or state of missing the mark; the original sense of New Testament Greek ἁμαρτία hamartia “sin”, is failure, being in error, missing the mark
I’d give you a citation on that, but there are like 700.000 hits for you to choose from.
I can’t really make sense of this response.
I am saying some people believe (I do not) the following proposition P: that humans are inherently bad and will do whatever they can get away with.
I mentioned that such people also believe that what keeps us in check differs between atheists and theists, though this is largely irrelevant really to my point.
And your response is…I’m not sure…saying that a true believer only fears god?
AFAICT you are saying that you belong to the set of people that believe P.
I was going to jump in to point out to Czarcasm that in my years spent in Methodist churches, I heard the “missing the mark” definition of sin over and over again, and it seemed to be the standard understanding of sin, but others have already covered that.
Instead, I’ll jump in to point out that kanicbird is not a mainstream Christian and has his own idiosyncratic beliefs that don’t reflect in any what most Christians think (and therefore aren’t relevant to the topic of this thread).
Sin may mean “miss the mark” in theory, but in practice, it means way more than that if Hell awaits those who are not redeemed from sin.
If it just meant being imperfect, few people would have the emotional impetus to seek slvation. Most people are not perfectionists; merely being imperfect is easy to live with. It takes a sense of shame, fear, and guilt to reliably convert people, and less not forget that’s what Christianity has historically been concerned with.