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 Question for Christians |
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Or I’m just trying to understand how that whole crucifixion thing is supposed to portray god in a good light. Or why one would choose to subscribe to a belief system predicated on a torture/murder. The primary Christian icon is a torture device! And somehow it’s based on love. |
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First we have to understand that God gave mankind a free will, the other way you propose would have required force that went beyond humanities ability to choose for themselves. Jesus himself asked God.... Mark 14: 35-36 35Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. 36“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” We were offered many opportunities to choose one of the most notable was when we asked Piot that Barabbas be released. God did not choose that method. Humans and humanity did! Because human methods are often malicious and sadistic. In essence god was working with what he had to work with UNLESS he violated our free will to choose and decide for ourselves. I personally do not like when religion depicts Christ on the cross and chooses that for its symbol. In the early days the symbology was a fish. But yet again that is how WE are! Not how God is. You may want to ask what type of beings would torture and kill an innocent person? And know we are still doing it to this very day. Another thing to keep in mind... Jesus said he had to fulfill everything written about him when being questioned as to why... Jesus replied... Luke 24:44 He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.” keep in mind the Psalms were Witten 1035 - 970 BCE By David, who had become king David father of Solomon. I will share Psalm 22 with you below. It describes Christ's crucifiction Psalm 22[a] For the director of music. To the tune of “The Doe of the Morning.” A psalm of David. 1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? 2 My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.[b] 3 Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises.[c] 4 In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. 5 To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. 6 But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. 7 All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. 8 “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, “let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him.” 9 Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast. 10 From birth I was cast on you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God. 11 Do not be far from me, for trouble is near and there is no one to help. 12 Many bulls surround me; strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. 13 Roaring lions that tear their prey open their mouths wide against me. 14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. 15 My mouth[d] is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death. 16 Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce[e] my hands and my feet. 17 All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. 18 They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. 19 But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me. 20 Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs. 21 Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen. 22 I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you. 23 You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you descendants of Jacob, honor him! Revere him, all you descendants of Israel! 24 For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help. 25 From you comes the theme of my praise in the great assembly; before those who fear you[f] I will fulfill my vows. 26 The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the Lord will praise him— may your hearts live forever! 27 All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, 28 for dominion belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations. 29 All the rich of the earth will feast and worship; all who go down to the dust will kneel before him— those who cannot keep themselves alive. 30 Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. 31 They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it! So we have several things... Mankind's free will to choose. Christ having to fulfill everything written about him in the law, Prophets and psalms No my friend the question is... what does that say about us? That we would have had to been reached in that way! Another thing to keep in mind is death is not a bad thing and pain is very temporary. Think of a woman giving birth she can spend 10's of hours in excruciating pain, but when the child is born her pain is forgotten and all that remains is her unconditional love for her child. A woman's first born child is the single most beautiful thing she has witnessed in life. Ask a good mother if this is true or not. I am more than happy to continue this conversation and be of any service that I can. |
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Patz |
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Three My favorite is man's free will coupled with God's hands off approach. |
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Zorro Straight away your question begs the question. Why do you assume that God wants to be 'portrayed in a good light'? God is not some narcissist. What matters to God is truth and love, not the approval of us mere mortals. The truth is that humans are a brutal race. Humans do things like torture. Jesus was not the only person ever crucified for no good reason. This is God Himself (not just some Arian or Jehovah's Witness 'son of God') who is jamming into our faces just how brutal we are. Just like Socrates before him, Jesus was murdered because he challenged us, our comfortable self-deceits about who and what we are, our excuses for inhuman behaviour, our self-centred priorities. The headlines to take out of it are these: - 1. THE SCAPEGOAT IS INNOCENT!! It is we accusers, blame-shifters and murderers who condemn ourselves by our actions. 2. GOD IDENTIFIES WITH THE POWERLESS, NOT THE POWERFULL. So be wary of those who abuse power. Most of all. be wary about how you use whatever power you might have over another, to use it for their benefit, not their harm; or you could be playing the part of Pilate. Many more points could be made, but let's settle for those, which I consider the big ones. And you are right to say "The primary Christian icon is a torture device!" Deliberately so! To remind us of those two key considerations. Protestants tend to prefer a bare cross, to emphasise the Resurrection, but there is much to be said for the Catholic crucifix. Look at it, and ponder how we are called to love the innocent person who is suffering unjustly. Then act! |
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isn't that the question? why create a race like this? as I've asked in the past, why create an animal kingdom involving so much death (rather than one with a larger percentage of herbivores)? maybe, since so many in the animal world have to kill to live, why NOT make a brutal race, ...so they will be similar to the animals? not that ANY of that makes sense. because you could just as easily create a better nicer race. seems like any interpretation is an attempt to explain the rough and beautiful complex world, AFTER it came into being, and after it evolved quite a good ways. maybe there are two gods, one that created the free-for-all world and who is unknown. and the 'known' god who is the one who takes all the heat / gets all the 'credit.' that said, I do enjoy Bob's, apatazer's, my minister friend Joe B, and others who care about people and interpret religion in creative, broadly knowledgeable, and mostly positive ways. my mid-western minister cousin, who has a narrow dark view, not so much... I am right, that God could have decided to create the earth and its beings any way he wanted, no? that in reaction to your "This is God Himself...who is jamming into our faces just how brutal we are." I may be missing something. that just doesn't seem like something an entity that created the system would need to do. why make us brutal? I think you answered this in the past, ...that it is something you don't understand and are seeking to understand. "groping" or "grasping" may have been one of the words you used. how much possibility do you give to the idea that there actually is no god? zero? a tiny possibility? if there isn't a God, that solves the problem of trying to understand some of these questions. I suppose there is also value in the existence of things we can't understand. but you get that with or without God. |
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hogfysshe That was a good post. To answer your question my certainty is 100%. I know it for a fact for it has been proven to me personally in a very personal way beyond all doubt. I can absolutely relate to your post/questions. In fact for some reason I remembered asking those very questions while I was posting my first post. My question was worded differently to include all life even plant life. I asked why does something else have to die in order for us to live? I got a very frustrating reply (at the time) which was.. "If you have a better idea, I am all ears" Humans make choices, we are not born as violet, or loving. Our choice's make it so. If someone was to create a perfect VR simulator, where you went into a sensory deprivation device, then woke up in a world with a clean slate, you could do anything you wanted to, but you had completely repressed/forgotten who you are before you went in. And that world operated exactly like ours. After you lived a full life and woke back up. You would be in complete awe of how perfect it all was. And it's creator a super genius. Forever is a very long time and perfection is extremely boring after just a short period of time. If you get what I mean. We don't know what is going on or the purpose. If we knew those things, I believe we would see the flaw's as perfection. Just like the simulation I mentioned. But as I mentioned before about our free will. How could God make such changes without interfering with our free will? If it were proven to you beyond all doubt, where would your personal discovery be? Where would your free will be? In this duality natured Universe many things have to at least have knowledge of, hate, love, right, wrong. In order for us to experience. If everyone was perfect in a perfect world how could you ever experience forgiveness or forgiving? |
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Hoggy 17:08 Hoggy, you have put your index digit on it! This is where we start talking theodicy, which is something I've always been wary of. Figuring out my own motives is often hard enough, if I am honest. How much less likely that I will be able to figure out 'God's Eternal Purpose'? The best I can do is ponder the insights a few real geniuses. One good place to start was a short point made by C.S. Lewis. He observed that for any two entities to interact, there were broadly three options:- 1. Neutrality, in which neither sought or offered any 'personal' relationship or benefit either way. 2. Advantage for self. Whether this harmed the other or not, the priority is to gain for oneself. 3. Advantage for the other. Whether this involved actual personal loss or not, the priority is to provide gain for the other. So if the purpose of Creation is to show God's character, as one who is prepared to place the priority on benefitting the other, then at least some interaction at this level is necessary. We are told that "God is Love". This is more than benevolence towards the other; it involves prioritising the benefit of the other EVEN IF it has a personal cost. A Cosmos in which such 'love' can be offered freely is inevitably a Cosmos in which the strong can demand it of the weak. Where sacrificial love is possible, so is selfish exploitation. Everything beyond that is merely a matter of degree. In the life, work and death of Jesus, we see God's emphasis. God thinks it's worth it, and has walked the walk. <How much possibility do you give to the idea that there actually is no god? zero? a tiny possibility?> I'll take this question literally. Unlike Apatzer, I am not absolutely, totally, completely convinced that my concept of God is 'correct'. That's because I know that my concept of God is no more than the best I can manage with the imagination available to me. I have no doubt that the Truth is something infinitely, exponentially greater. But I'm not taking Pascal's wager here. It's not a guessing game that requires intellectual assent and then behavioural conformity. My faith is about following the truth as honestly as I can, and then trying to live it. If I'm deluding myself, at least it's my honest delusion and I'll leave it to God to decide my case on the answers I've written. Or for Maat to put that feather to good use, or whatever. Alternatively, if there is no God then I've managed a sense of self-worth and purpose in these few short years, helped a few people I've met, and lost nothing at the end. But I expect something so far beyond that as to be unimaginable, and that the 'something' will involve no less scope for pain as this current Cosmos. Otherwise, what would "Love" mean if it costs nothing? |
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I get the point about an OVERLY perfect world. one of my references for that is the movie (I think it was a movie), "if every day was Christmas." after a month, poor kid had a backyard full of puppies. I accept your point. but I suggest that there may be some middle ground that could be explored, ...a world (well, worlds) where the range of experience is manipulated. for example, you could probably have a little less killing than our current world, without having a major negative impact on our ability to experience joy. AND, even if the joy experience is 97.5 of the current 100, I'd say trading away the well known bad acts of hitler and chauvin would be worth the cost. plus, maybe we could go bowling with them, and pick up another 1/10th of a percent more (or they might be a drag to be around and we'd lose a tenth). well, I'll concede that, in an odd way, those guys did help us define what is unacceptable. OTOH, I think we already knew. don't kill off a large group of people. and don't kill a guy while trying to detain him for a fairly minor offense. now, WHERE and HOW we came to know that is something we wouldn't want to lose. I suggest that you could have societies that experienced and therefore recognized wrongs both WITH and WITHOUT religion being involved. re humans having a choice, confine (for a moment) to our being omnivores. that does give us a lot of choices in terms of what we eat. but a carnivore has no such choice. I don't think you are saying an herbivore necessarily has a "bad" life. less exciting, perhaps. but the price of the carnivore's excitement is high. more importantly, a planet designer with unlimited creative ability could probably make herbivorousness not be a negative thing for animals and humans, ...meaning we wouldn't have to be weak, either by virtue of some alternate biological design, or through some other means. point is, I'm not convinced the design really is all that perfect, ...and also that (for the purpose of discussion) accepting there is no God provides a way to not blame "him" for the imperfect design. at the same time, idea I don't dislike the idea of things being hard or impossible to understand and explain. |
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I see here that you could still have God either way, in one case a God who set in motion a society without religion, ...but which developed an agreed upon moral and ethical framework. |
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hogfysshe That is a world that we humans are able to achieve. Take an infant or very small toddler. Eventually they get poddy training and stop going in their bed and clothes. Currently mankind is still in the crawling phase as a sentient species. We still dedicate where we eat and on our clothes, we steal each other's toys and throw one hissy fit after another. If we last long enough as a species. We will eventually create a world that is remarkably like the one you describe if not better. I know that you do not think the design is perfect and that is completely fine. But keep in mind that we base that off of who we are and in not knowing what the propose is and how the design actually works. Neither you or I could possibly be correct in our assumptions. The question is what is the perfect design? And how can we achieve that? |
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Religion |
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as in chess and other areas of life, one way to develop a plan is to put a lot of weight on "natural" boundaries, a boundary being something that for one reason or another can't be allowed, the negatives being too great. if you decide that a huge amount of killing is bad, that can be one factor (designer's note: no genocide, if possible; also no lions killing bunnies, if possible). I like your story of humanity working to improve. but I also like looking at it from the standpoint of the designer, partly because it is one way to come at the question of is there or isn't there a God. man could still be placed in a situation where there is room to improve, in other designs. |
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Zorroloco |
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Patz Let me work on a response |
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Transubstantiation Ten individual packs of 100 wafers each weighs 0.6 lbs. Broadman (tm) Church Communion Wafers. So each Jeezit is 0.00061 lbs. If the Dead Sea Pedestrian weighed in at 140 lbs, not that unreasonable assumption for an ascetic holy man, he massed 230,000 wafers. But let us not overlook the wine. A pint is a pound the world around, my uncle taught me. But wine is not as dense as blood. We'll assume for the sake of making the math easier that it is--Close enough and maybe exactly through the magic of Transubstantiation. So the average adult male is about ten pints of blood. That's ten pounds. We deduct that and are left with 213,000 wafers. At one communion a week it would take 213000/52 = 4000 years to consume an entire Jesus. Maybe that's how long it will take for his return? |
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Transubstantiation II |
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Shiva When I see you burning in Hell, I'll sprinkle a bit of water on you. But I won't say 'Hic est sanguis meus' because by then you will have been excommunicated. |
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Patz I respect you and your views and understand how it makes sense to you. |
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Bob Straight away your question begs the question. Why do you assume that God wants to be 'portrayed in a good light'? God is not some narcissist. What matters to God is truth and love, not the approval of us mere mortals. “ I don’t assume god wants anything (a nonentity can’t want). I do assume that good people would worship a being whose actions portrayed it in a good light. ‘Truth and love’ I can get behind....it’s just that’s not what I think of when I think of allowing one’s child to be sacrificed to no good end. I know you’ll argue about the ‘no good end’ part, but certainly a supreme being would have the power to reach any ends desired in any manner desired. |
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Zorro 09:30 <allowing one’s child to be sacrificed to no good end.> You have missed a key detail in Christian theology here. Jesus is NOT 'God's child'. He is 'Immanu-el', 'God with us'. God didn't delegate the suffering. In fact, the physical suffering of the crucifixion is not the pointy part of the process; the real point is in the bit Apatzer has already quoted to you, from Psalm 22. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest..." The suffering of Jesus was not a few nails and scratches; it was the loss of everything that gave his life meaning. I tried to convey this in my 'alternative Jesus' in 'Rome in the East'. "To no good end"? God thought it was worth it. I'm humble enough to believe the expert on that one. <A supreme being would have the power to reach any ends desired in any manner desired.> I agree! While I can't be absolutely certain of every detail of the 'end desired', nor of the means and manner, I can discern at least an outline. Whether or not there was a better purpose that could have been served, or some other way of achieving it, is probably beyond my wit to imagine. Perhaps you know better than I, but I'll just run with what I've got. In the meantime, you can argue with God all you like. I encourage you to do so! Those who dared to do that as an honest search for understanding include Abraham outside Sodom, Jacob (aka Israel) at Peniel, Job in his suffering and Jesus himself on the Cross. There are also the many 'saints under the altar' in Revelation ch. 6. You would be in good company. Genuine faith means the courage to take that risk, growing towards maturity instead of falling back into a lullaby. |
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Bob It’s just that, imo, god doesn’t exist. if god exists, he doesn’t care about us. If he cares about us, he’d judge us on our actions relative to the rest of creation. If he judges us on dogma, denomination, choice of sacred text or other such minutia, then to hell with him - I don’t care what he thinks and I’ll take my medicine along with my chances, which I think are pretty good |
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Zorro 15:43 Meanwhile, and I've called you on this before... I suggest that you DO think 'god' exists. But you don't anthropomorphise the concept. Your 'god' (by which I mean 'supreme good that demands your highest priority') is a complex of qualities and ideals, such as 'Justice', 'Truth', Wisdom', 'Compassion', etc. That's why I think of you as a Latter-Day Stoic. Tell me if I'm wrong! |
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Bob And I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t describing you in my 15:43 post. I was describing my beliefs |
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Zorro 17:10 I was trying to drive home the point that most professed atheists think that Christians, Jews, Muslims think of 'God' in much the same way that Romans thought of Jupiter; as not much more than a super-sized, immortal and very powerful human. That is as far short of the genuine, adult, mature understanding of the Abrahamic God as is possible. In fact, the Christians of the first and second centuries were often referred to as 'atheists' precisely because the didn't understand God in that light. So when you say you don't believe in 'God', then that sounds to me like you are saying you don't believe in a scaled-up Jupiter, less the rest of the pantheon. Most mature Christians don't believe in a God like that, either. But your answer very encouraging. I'm both correct and wrong. Because no simple answer can be totally correct or totally wrong. That's what 'Transcendent' means. God is beyond categories in the purely human sense. That's why Buddhists, in their deepest contemplations, can only say 'Aum'. Here is an article you might find interesting, just put out by the ABC today. The links shown might also be of interest. www.abc.net.au |
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stalhandske 23-Oct-21, 22:39 |
This is, of course, the 'way out' for believers. Any deeper criticism is 'beyond categories' becase how can you possibly understand Deity as a simle human bean? |
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Stal We are all pushing at the envelope. |
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stalhandske 23-Oct-21, 23:05 |
Bob |
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Stal There are plenty of questions about biochemistry that no biochemist in the world can answer completely. Does that mean that biochemistry relies on 'faith' in some cases? The truth is that nothing in life is certain, and that ALL of us work from assumptions that can't be proved correct. Even Archimedes needed a place to stand before he could use his lever. Meanwhile, I have never argued that 'a religious faith is necessary'. I have only claimed that it provides a framework within which the questions of Life, the Universe and Everything can be considered systematically. Just like Science provides a framework for comprehending observations, but lots of people live full lives without it. |
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