I’ve always been puzzled by the Christian morality tale of the crucifixion and resurrection. How, exactly, did God turning himself into his son, coming down to earth, getting crucified, and then coming back to life manage to save humanity from its original sin? What is the theology behind that? Weren’t there easier ways to redeem original sin, even if you believe in that silly concept?
Since the Bible doesn’t lay out exactly how the crucifixion saved us—for the theological notion of original sin didn’t arise until several centuries after Jesus supposedly lived—people have to guess. This gives great opportunity for theologians to exercise their only prowess: making stuff up.
In the past three days I’ve either read or had imparted to me four different explanations, none of which really make a lot of sense. If you have others, or if you think there’s one that most theologians agree on, by all means add it below.
1. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. It was a sacrifice that somehow redeemed humanity from sin, a debt that had to be paid in blood. This doesn’t make sense to me for several reasons, including that God could have redeemed humanity simply by waving his hand (or would that have been too easy?). Second, if God loved humanity that much, why did he kill everyone but eight people in Noah’s great flood? Why did he kill off almost everyone the first time, but then send Jesus down the second time?
2. God wants to forgive us for being sinners. But when we humans forgive someone for, say, hurting us or stealing from us, it costs us in psychic pain. That is, forgiveness involves suffering on the part of the one who forgives, for you must repress your natural tendency toward retribution. And, like us, God had to suffer to forgive us our sins. Ergo, he converted himself into a human and had himself tortured on the cross. Again, it puzzles me why God had to undergo the same pain as do humans. And why such extreme pain?
3. The demonstration of extreme suffering by the crucified Christ helps us suffering humans identify more readily with Jesus.
4. The crucifixion was in some sense a magnificent failure. As Beginning with Moses explains:
[Jesus] could not even vindicate himself. He was in the right and he knew that he was in the right. But he allowed himself to be put in the wrong and to be seen only as condemned, outcast, despised and defeated. Not all suffering involves such rejection. Very often the sufferer is upheld by the knowledge that his suffering is acclaimed and appreciated and that although he is hated by his persecutors he is lauded by his peers. For Christ, it was far different. He suffered without admiration and without compassion.
But this failure to garner compassion and admiration was ultimately a victory, for it brought the chance of salvation to everyone:
His cross was an instrument of victory. It destroyed Satan and put the Lord’s enemies to an open shame. His weakness became the power of God. His foolish decision to be crucified became God’s wisdom. His servitude – even his servility – became the ground of his lordship. His dying released the spiritual forces of the last days and the word of his cross became the saving power of God.
None of this makes sense to me. My alternative theory, which is mine, is that the crucifixion, if it happened, was a big failure because Jesus’s followers (if he existed) all thought that he would bring them salvation in their lifetime, and didn’t expect the Messiah to be executed. But, as the story goes, he was, and the corpse rotted or disappeared. Therefore the story of the resurrection was invented to try to convince the disappointed masses that, like Jesus, they too would have eternal life, since obviously the messiah wasn’t going to come during their lifetimes, as he promised he would.
What say you? What explanations have you heard for how the crucifixion and resurrection gives us the possibility of salvation? It seems to me this is simply one more demonstration of the great (and misplaced) ingenuity of theologians.
“My alternative theory, which is mine, is that the crucifixion, if it happened, was a big failure because Jesus’s followers (if he existed) all thought that he would bring them salvation in their lifetime, and didn’t expect the Messiah to be executed. But, as the story goes, he was, and the corpse rotted or disappeared. Therefore the story of the resurrection was invented to try to convince the disappointed masses that, like Jesus, they too would have eternal life, since obviously the messiah wasn’t going to come during their lifetimes, as he promised he would.”
Typical case of cognitive dissonance: if your predictions did not came true, than reframe your original predictions so they fit again.
Chritopher Hitchens has a few nice paragraphs in “God is not Great” about all this Messiah business. I wonder if I can find an except online.
Check out the history of the new testament. Dr Bart Ehrmans books will be of great help yo you. He is the worlds leading authority of the new testament. You wont be sorry; the truth will set you free.
If by “the truth will set you free” you mean to say “this will make a bible-believing Christian out of you”…two things about Ehrman.
1. He’s not the “world’s leading authority on the new testament”. Far from it.
2. He doesn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus. He’s written several books on how the mythology of a savior god could have arisen from the life of one of the many Messianic preachers around Israel in that era. But in no case does he agree that this person was a god, from god, or anything other than a normal human being.
If I misconstrued your post, forgive me. And please refrain from using Christian buzz phrases in the future unless you want them to be read as such.
hes an athiest just as I am
He calls himself an agnostic. “Atheist” is a term he associates with unreasonable certainty and extremism, IIRC.
I think he associates it with it being a pejorative to the religious people he has to deal with all the time so he takes the easy way out and dodges by calling himself an agnostic.
Bart Ehrman is an agnostic in exactly the same way that Richard Dawkins is.
There is only one? I’m sure there are professional historians of theology and religion queueing up to dispute that with you. And they’re going to be hugely outnumbered by the Fundie self-proclaimed preachers baying for your blood for disputing their pre-eminence.
If you had taken the trouble to search this website for Dr. Ehrman’s name before you posted, you’d have found that our host is very familiar with his books and devoted entire posts to them on several occasions. Also, from the readers’ comments you’d have learned that not all of them hold Dr. Ehrman’s scholarship in such great esteem as you do.
The Crucifixion is one of the classic calling cards of a death / rebirth sun god. The Cross is the four cardinal points of the compass. Jesus is crucified at noon on the Vernal Equinox; draw the compass lines in the sky at that moment and a circle for the Sun’s position at the center, and you get the Celtic Cross.
Christians got some of their symbology mixed up. The birth is supposed to happen in springtime, when everything is exploding into new life. And the death-and-resurrection is supposed to happen at the winter Solstice, when the Sun dies (reaches its nadir in the sky), lays low in the ground for three days (no movement is visible against horizon markers using naked-eye measurements) and rises again from the grave (begins its northward procession.)
The story told as an allegory to “hide” the “inner” secrets is no more noteworthy than the one told of Orpheus and his journey to the Underworld, or of Dionysus and his journey to the Underworld, and so on.
It is pure Christian propaganda that Christianity is an entirely novel invention radically unlike the pagan religions popular at its founding and instead the telling of actual historical events. It is, indeed, truly indistinguishable from those pagan religions from which it was born and with which it is brothers, except for the names of the characters.
Viewed from that perspective, there are no mysteries; it all makes perfect sense. Christianity is no more and no less than yet another primitive religious superstition, cast in the exact same mold as all the others of the Mediterranean of the Classical era.
Cheers,
b&
Oh man. You are so going to hell.
I’ll save you a seat.
Going to Hell? You mean we’re not there already?
b&
Nothing wrong with Hell…
http://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/pizza-hell.jpg
Make mine pepperoni and sausage, please!
b&
There are seats! Can you save me a La-Z-Boy?
There is some more to it. The idea of taking the burden of mankind was new (though there are some similarities with the Atlas myth); the idea of defending the rights of the weak was new for the Mediterrenian, though Buddhism was first. Jesus died for the sins of everyone, which contradicted the privileges of the elites, which took them for granted.
Theologians largely seem to agree these days that the whole story is an antidote to the scapegoat mechanism as described by Rene Girard.
Yup.
I was something of a revelation to me when I first had it explained to me that xianity was just another sun-god cult. It had never occurred to me.
I wonder if they do have it backward. Perhaps the birth happens in what would be winter for the northern hemisphere (medieval Europe) as a psychological crutch, something that says “hey, it’s not so bad, spring will come; keep your eye on the prize”. It seems to me the evergreen symbolism is all about that.
Also, blood sacrifice was ubiquitous in those days. The dying/rising sun-god imagery dovetails nicely with this, only writ large. Many denominations refer to christ as the “lamb” or the “paschal lamb” for this reason.
Please excuse the misspellings and redundant grammar.
On a Robert Price podcast I heard the hypothesis that the early Christ movement adopted tenets of Mithraism to better compete for a foothold in Roman culture. I don’t recall if Price said he developed this idea himself, or was recounting it for his listeners. A quick google yielded the following:
Among the recorded possible similarities between Christianity and Mithraism are the following:
Virgin birth
Twelve followers
Killing and resurrection
Miracles
Birthdate on December 25
Morality
Mankind’s savior
Known as the Light of the world
Based on (www.digiserve.com/gaia/articles/mithras.html) Legend of Mithras.
… recounting it [from another source] …
P.S.S.
If I could write things right the first time, I’d have included: note the corresponding dates of birth
The reason for the “John 3:16” signs at football games is the difference between xtianity and Mithraism: Believe in Jesus, and eternal, blissful afterlife is yours.
The concept of simply acknowledging belief in an unseen, unfelt, unresponsive supernatural “lord”, as opposed to that nasty awful person who was a real, oppressing “lord” was (IMO) the reason the religion caught on like fire in a grasslands. It was simple: believe, and you are PROMISED an eternal life of bliss. And, if you’re poor, so MUCH the better (eye of the needle for rich folk who cannot enter).
In the Roman/Greek religion, only meritorious people got eternal life. Here was a belief that slaves could embrace. Heads of households with slaves banned or discouraged xtian practices or adherence, as it affected the slaves day-to-day attitudes.
After Constantine, it became more of a “top-down” religion.
The Cult of Isis promised an afterlife and was contemporaneous with Christianity.
Mithraism was popular among Roman soldiers so it was mostly a manly cult. It got banned from Rome because it had a rather unRoman practice of making its members into eunuchs. Romans didn’t like this because they were all about the family. So, it was a different sort of cult.
Perhaps your example differentiates Christianity from Mithraism but it doesn’t from the very popular Cult of Isis.
Why focus on the inconsequential circumstantialities and ignore the smoking gun?
Justin Martyr accused the Mithraists of stealing the Eucharist from the Christians, but we know that Mithraism and its rituals are much older than Christianity. We also know that Tarsus (as in “Saul of”) was the hometown of Mithraism (see Plutarch’s mentions of Siliciaan pirates). And the oldest substantive and detailed biographical story of Jesus is Paul’s telling of the Last Supper…except that he’s not telling the story of the Last Supper but rather instructing his audience in the proper performance of the Eucharist — instructions that Catholic priests today still follow to the letter.
…and that’s just one of the reasons why I suspect (but no more than suspect) that the Peregrinus of Lucian’s delightful satire was, in fact, none other than Paul.
Cheers,
b&
I suggest you check you facts about Mithraism. First the Roman cult of Mithras seems to have been quite distinct from the Persian cult of Mithra (e.g., the surviving iconography and the apparent myths are quite different). Second we don’t get any evidence of the Roman cult until the second half of the 1st century CE (about the same time as Christianity). The only solid connections of Tarsus to Mithras is one coin from around 240CE which depicts the king and one side and a bull slaying on the other. The other mention is by Plutarch (late 1st century CE) that pirates in Cilicia in the middle of the 1st century BCE worshipped Mithra by sacrificing on top of a mountain (Roman Mithras was worshipped in caves or structures like a cave, Persians preferred high places). Weak evidence to support a contention that Tarsus was the center of Mithraism. The Romans may have considered their Mithras eastern but that does not make it so (think modern neo-paganism and its actual connection to its supposed roots).
BTW Roger Pearse who may show up on this thread can be irritating on the subject, but, I’ve checked out his facts about Mithras/Mithra in academic works and he is generally accurate about that subject.
Roger Pearse is a shameless Christian apologist who refuses to even pretend to commit to the most elementary biographical details of Jesus. I know, for he followed me around for quite some time on USENET. But every time I asked him to simply state who or what he thought Jesus actually was and what evidence supported his position, he would suddenly shut up and not appear again for a few weeks. It got silly, to the point that I could summon him on command with the name, “Mithra,” and just as quickly dismiss him with the name, “Jesus.”
But regardless, here’re the facts you requested.
Justin Martyr, First Apology, from the end of Chapter 66:
Plutarch, Life of Pompey, Chapter 24:
(For those not familiar with the geography and politics and timing of the Classical era, Tarsus was the capital of Cilicia; Pompey’s campaign against the pirates was in the middle of the first century BCE; and Plutarch was about 25 years younger than Martyr and, I believe, wrote his history before Martyr wrote his Apology, though I don’t feel like confirming that right now.)
Last, here’s the first recorded description of the Christian Eucharist:
Just to tie all the pieces together: Martyr established that the Christian and Mithraic eucharists were the same ceremony, and Plutarch established that the modern Mithraic ceremonies were the same as those practiced a century before the claimed date of the Crucifixion.
It really doesn’t ever get any more emphatic than that. Not even in a modern courtroom.
Cheers,
b&
Evidence for these claims?
Look it up.
I’ve tried. Mostly new age jargon with no real evidence to support the myth claims.
Richard Carrier is the least concerning of the bunch but he seems to be taking the same new age arguments and just casts them in a new light.
Theosophy and nothing more really. It amazes me to see “reasonable” people regurgitating such nonsense.
Confirmation bias methinks.
“Heaven for the climate;
Hell for the company.”
–Mark Twain or maybe
H.L. Mencken
(Now that everyone has an I-phone
or some similar gadget, I am free to garble
& mis-attribute to my heart’s content.)
The crucifixion and resurrection story is cleverly designed to instill guilt, pity, and hope for an afterlife. It has enormous emotional resonance for believers, and may be the greatest meme ever invented. It doesn’t have to make sense.
The basis of every traditional religion I know of is the fear of death and oblivion.
But because of the moral values that were the norm when it was conceived, and which are assumed by it, it not only doesn’t make sense, it seems more and more ridiculous to give it any credence. I think a lot of believers these days are conflicted by that.
Well, what do you expect after 2 000 years?
That’s why theologians state that we should read the texts with the eyes and the mindframe of the people back then.
As I think our moral values superior to those of 2 000 years ago (and sincerely hope mankind in the 41st Century will have developed moral values that contribute more to happiness than ours) the story still sucks.
Your tone indicates you disagree with me, yet your words reiterate my point. As you imply, I expect nothing less after 2000 years. That is after all what I said to support my opinion that many believers today are conflicted by the differences in typical moral values between then and now.
My buddy Ali, when he’s not hanging out at home in his goat mask and posing pouch, anticipating the Mormon’s next visit, posits that all religions start from the sharing of food.
If you’re ever in Aberdeen, I’ll introduce you and let duke it out. Goat masks are optional, though you’ll need to stand your hand every half hour or so, so you’ll need somewhere to hang your sporran.
Before I graduated from Faith altogether, I realizes that I was appalled by the whole blood sacrifice theology, I became briefly entangled in postmodern theology and I tried to discover a new way of finding meaning and divine transcendance in the Jesus narrative. I tried to convince myself that the crucifixion (sans the resurrection) was really God’s way of apologizing to mankind for having fucked things up so badly. I wrote the resurrection off entirely. That apology theology wasn’t at all satisfying in the end. Speaking to other atheists who’ve come out of Christianity, I’ve found that some of them tried on very similar theologies in the death throes of their Faith.
I’m picturing Faith as something like the liquid metal terminator that morphs into a jillion different things in it’s death throes.
Nice – good imagery and it’s always a nice touch to bring in popular sci fi. As a Terminator fan I say, well done!
YES! That’s a great image…especially regarding postmodern theology. It can just becomes whatever you want…but there’s no guarantee it’ll be satisfying in the end. And even if I had found it personally satisfying I would have been the lone ‘apology theology’ believer in my congregation, which is kinda lonely. No one would’ve been interested to hear my heresy, much less partake in it.
correction: “…I realized…”
And like the liquid metal Terminator, when you look at it all you see is a twisted distorted version of yourself.
Ah Terminator. Is there anything it can’t explain?
5. None of the above. Stuff was made up to control the masses.
you got it!!!!
Aaahhhhh, that’s why the story was developed and accepted by the elites of power in the 1st Century. Not.
Agreed. The stories were fabricated nearly 200 years after the alleged happenings.
Jesus and the Apostles were Jewish, and Judaism (like countless faiths through history) makes a big deal about the sacrifice of animals and people as an atonement for sin and other supernatural favors. Jesus is, by that logic, a superior sacrifice. The question is not so much why Christians created this theology in the 2nd century as what it is in most human minds that believes supernatural favor comes from the giving up of things. Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained) proposed that it’s human nature to expect favor in exchange for donations of value, with no ability in our brains to distinguish a tangible trading partner from one who is made up. From that perspective, the Christian salvation story is just a variant on an ancient, universal theme.
And its not just the Jews, the whole polytheistic culture at the time revolved around people giving various sacrifices to Gods to get their favor. There are some Greek myths about sacrificing a person to appease a God… Jesus is just weirder version of Iphigenia.
Christianity was an Eastern mystery cult. You don’t have to be a doubter to know that is true. See my #27 below.
Oops, that comment was supposed to be further down. What I wanted to say here was at least the Greeks had the good sense to show Agamemnon as punished for his sacrifice in some versions. It’s why he got his with Clytemnestra.
The Jewish sacrifice wasn’t to get favor or appease a god..but justice, a payment/penalty for sin (thereby the connection to Christ.)
Best explanation yet, IMO.
I view the theology underlying Jesus’ sacrifice as a parallel to a typical screenplay from Gilligan’s Island, where Gilligan does something absolutely stupid and has to do something even stupider to get himself out of the mess he created.
While it’s entertaining as a child, as an adult it’s hard to sit through an entire episode, because people just don’t act that way.
Crucifixion symbolism- is yet another way to create fear, illogical fear. Or maybe the jewelers were behind it – all those golden cross pendants. Have never understood how any group of religious aspirants could turn a blood stained cross, thorns, into an icon that would draw people in. Admittedly, it worked but not on me. It’s morbid and ugly. Many wretches pitifully suffered on a cross in ages past, tragic, but to glorify that is creepy.
If Jesus had been killed by guillotine that would be the symbol people would wear around their necks & put up at Christian hospitals.
I think it was Bill Hicks — or was it Lenny Bruce? — who said that if Jesus had been sent to the electric chair that Christians today would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks.
It makes for a good punch line, but there’s very good reason to suspect that the cross came as an astrological symbol of the Sun’s yearly progression looooooooong before the Christ mythmakers literally set Jesus upon it.
If Jesus had been killed by guillotine — or by the sword — then he probably would have been a moon god.
b&
Is there any truth to the story that the roman crosses for punishment were actually shaped like a capital T rather than the cross adopted by Christians?
Seems there were all kinds of shapes. I think it’s only the NT that says it was a Tau shape.
As a five year old child unfamiliar with Christianity at a Catholic wedding with my parents, I saw Jesus on a cross for the first time & loudly asked, “who’s t-man?”, to my parents’ embarrassment. They still tell that story.
At about the same age my grandmother took me up to communion for a blessing. To keep me interested, she showed me the communion wafer that the priest had handed to her. It had an image of the crucified Jesus on it, so I exclaimed in a loud voice that everybody could hear “a weight lifter!”
It would certainly be an easier shape to build. And why go to the trouble to build the more difficult shape? To give the poor victim something to rest his head against?
There is another interesting one: “What if Jesus had been impaled…” 🙂
Desnes Diev
Or, force-fed pebbles until his belly burst (the Mongol Hordes did this to the ruler of Samarkand. He killed the people in a peaceful Mongol diplomatic mission.)
Apparently (and I believe I got this from The Myth of Christian Persecution), the Cross wasn’t a big Christian symbol, to the point of being something used to mock Christians. At least until Constantine took it up as his symbol.
I seem to recall that usually people were crucified on X’s anyway.
+ 1
I thought Constantine used the chi-rho symbol.
It was the chi rho he saw that told him to conquer with it. Imagine it meant something else? Maybe it was some other Greek word and Constantine screwed up! 😉
Gore Vidal told a story of being in Sicily, and asking an old grandmother there why Jesus was always shown in such horrible agony on crucifixes.
“Because”, the old woman replied firmly “He was unkind to His mother.” (Italian Mama culture)
In China the Jesuits quickly realised the negative reactions of the locals to such an inauspicious symbol, and replaced it with the Madonna; nothing being better to the Chinese than a mother and a plump healthy male baby.
To this day Catholicism is called “Heaven Teaching” while Protestantism is “Jesus Teaching”.
Q. What does Jesus save us from?
A. Going to hell.
Q. Who makes the decision as to whether or not we go to hell?
A. God.
Q. According to the Bible, to whom are sacrifices made?
A. God.
Q. Is Jesus God?
A. According to the vast majority of Christians, yes.
So, according to Christian theology, God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself.
And, of course, that makes a whole lot of sense! Wow, the thickets of make-believe thinking that these Christians get themselves into. It never ceases to amaze me.
You simply lack the sophisticated understanding necessary to appreciate the subtlety of the triune aspect of god.
(I think my spell might be atheist. It doesn’t recognize “triune”.)
I got into a great deal of trouble at age 9 for pointing that out in Sunday School. I was unimpressed with the outrage, it just provided more evidence that the whole thing was nonsense and a lot of adults were crazy.
The point of Sunday School always seemed to be to pound these things into kids before they had the sense to question it.
My girlfriend’s nephews were raised without much religion at all, and watching stuff like The Ten Commandments just results in them having so many, many questions. Way more than are produced by, say, Batman.
I thought the whole point was to get rid of the kids so the parents could “worship” in peace. At least my parents did. on the positve side the Sunday School teacher turned out, some years later, to have some interesting secular skills when I met her on a New Years eve. One of the few cases of religion producing a win-win scenario. The grandfather who lived with us and took us to Sunday school was religious so they also got him out of the way but parents never showed any such inclination. I was lucky that way.
I feel ya. I got in BIG trouble at CCD class for excitedly and earnestly insisting that all the priests should get together and bless all the water on the planet into Holy Water at one fell swoop.
Had to apologize to the instructor, and got my ear twisted painfully, for my enthusiastic problem solving.
(Full disclosure: I’m fairly certain I was partly motivated by anticipating using the 5 minutes shaved off each ceremony by happily returning to my junior science fiction books.)
That would be hell on vampires going for a late night dip!
Chin up, mate. It’s a token of a childs natural instinct for bullshit.
Religous authorities have always had a certain nasty disdain for natural ingenuity.
Clearly God went through all this trouble to impress someone. Who would that be? Why, that would be us, humans of course.
We wrote the story, we get the prerogative to make the story revolve around us!
Well said, August! When I dropped out of Christianity nearly 50 years ago, I couldn’t have expressed my principal reason anywhere nearly as succinctly as you have just put it, but that was the reason – Christianity’s central act and its explanatory doctrine make no sense at all, and no amount of huffing and puffing by apologists, theologians and learned Biblical scholars I have since read has ever dealt convincingly with this point.
It always seemed to me, as a kid in Catholic school, that my teachers and priests would always warp the One God/Three Beings hypostasis to whatever meaning suited them at the time. In this case, it wasn’t God transforming himself to be tortured to death to appease himself for a 4,000 year old sin, it was showing how a separate entity – Jesus – loved us so much that his father had to forgive all of humanity for Adam’s sin for the rest of time.
If there is a grain of truth in the Gospel of Mark, which I believe there is, then the last words of Jesus may be accurate. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Perhaps the historical Jesus was surprised at the failure of YHWH.
In the Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, he writes that, if Jesus lived, at the point of Crucifixion, he discovered he had suffered in vain. He had been misled.
I’m pretty sure that biblical scholars hold that the earliest version of Mark did not have a resurrection narrative. It was tacked on later, and the rest is theology.
I think I was about seven y-o when I asked about how that verse worked. About seven and a half when I decided the whole bible was a crock.
There is a much easier explanation. To endure the pain Jesus was reciting the Psalms. Just take a look at Psalm 22.
To endure the pyschological pain that YHWH failed to overthrow the Romans and set up an earthly kingdom, perhaps.
The story certainly gets embellished further in the text of subsequent gospels.
The Catholic Catechism argues that net-net, we are all better off as the crucifixion and resurrection more than canceled out original sin …
417
Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendants human nature wounded by their own first sin and hence deprived of original holiness and justice; this deprivation is called “original sin”.
420
The victory that Christ won over sin has given us greater blessings than those which sin had taken from us: “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom 5:20).
Of course, this is just asserted as some bloke made it up but the greater worry is that it still all depends on an individual person called Adam, who was the first human being. As recently as 1950, Pope Pius XII stated the following in the Humani Genris encyclical …
When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.
I’m not an evolutionary biologist by profession but that sounds anti-scientific to me. Maybe some evolutionary biologists could comment?
No, it’s perfectly scientific. There is a mutation in a gene in chromosome 17, around 17q12, that carries the dominant allele for sin and which has been passed down ever since the mutation arose in some bloke Adam. Whether this allele became fixed through chance or positive selection, an actual benefit conferred by sin, is not known, but fixed in the population it is. 😉
🙂
As best I can reconstruct the theory from dimly remembered teachings …
Since the human offence was against god — therefore so great an offence that it would be unforgivable by human efforts to say “I’m sorry” — there had to be a divine forgiver and/or sayer of “sorry!”, i.e. Jesus.
This is sort of a variation of #2.
And it all falls apart if there was no “orginal pair” to trace the sin back to.
Where can I find the geneticists demonsation that we couldn’t possibly be descended from one single human paring?
IN my very inexpert opinion, I think the answer must be something akin to number one. I read a summation of Christianity years ago which I quite liked, but I have forgotten the source. It simply said “God had to sacrifice himself, to himself, to change the rules of the system he set up in the first place.” My understanding of early Christian theology held that sacrifices of the kind practiced in the Temple in Jerusalem were in fact effective, or partially so. Sacrificing a goat (or, more properly, the goat’s blood somehow) had a limited effect of atonement. In order for full redemption of sins, you needed a “perfect” sacrifice, ergo, Jesus (although he really doesn’t seem all that perfect in the gospels). As I once described it to a friend, Jesus was the hydrogen bomb of sin redemption. Anyway, why an omnipotent God couldn’t hand-wave this one off is often filed under that ubiquitous category of “mystery” which seems to be the last refuge for theologians. As for what really happened, I tend to think you are correct–and that Saul of Tarsus found a half-remembered guy to shape his theology around. I have always found 1 Corinthians 2:2 stunning where Paul says “I chose to know nothing among you, but Christ Jesus, and him crucified.” Sounds like even if they had been around for him, Paul wouldn’t have cared much for the Gospels!
From what I know about the (admittedly very little) theology that I have studied, the whole crucifixion business is rooted in Old Testament Messianic theology, which the New Testament writers would have based themselves heavily on. In OT theology, vicarious redemption was based on the principle of the scapegoat, which is deployed over and over in the OT. Basically, the gods were only assuaged when a blood sacrifice was made (goat, pig, someone’s eldest son/daughter…).
NT writers, who would have seen the life of a purported Messiah in the light of the OT, would have written the story from that angle, and subsequent preachers would have interpreted it that way.
It does no good to try and reinterpret vicarious redemption in the light of modern morality – the idea that one’s wrongdoing could be transferred on to something/someone else who would then be punished is simply abhorrent, but it was not so in OT times of course. Modern Christian explanations (that our debt to God was too great to be paid by any other means, that God’s goodness was so great that he would suffer such a horrible thing for our sake…) are simply rationalisations of the ancient scapegoat morality in modern terms. When looked at naked, this ancient morality is abhorrent in modern terms, but what else are the Christians going to do?
+1
Just what I was about to post! (Only better.)
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Ha ha, thanks. I suppose I haven’t answered Jerry’s second question, i.e. “why the resurrection?”. Simply because that’s what the OT says the Messiah would have done (book of Daniel I think… but I could be wrong). If the story of Jesus is to be the story of the OT Messiah, then it has to end with the resurrection.
It is worth noting at this point that the very earliest account of Jesus’s life (the gospel of Mark), does NOT mention a resurrection, but ends with the empty tomb. This might be for a number of reasons, but it does make sense that Jesus as the Messiah was only invented by Paul, who created a religion for the Gentiles. (Matthew, Luke and John were all writing ages after Paul). Therefore it would make sense that post-Paul writers would have completed the story by having Jesus *actually* rise from the dead, whereas pre-Paul writers only have him speaking in OT Messianic terms and figures without necessarily actually *being* the Messiah himself. This is all speculation of course – but so are all other interpretations!
The last words said by the man in garden to the women strongly imply that the author of Mark thought Jesus had been resurrected.
“As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’ So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
– From Mark 16 (NRSV)
It is believed that everything after that was tacked on by later scribes, but that bit is original Mark.
Well put. The Atonement only makes sense in an honor culture which simply takes the right of an authority to revenge dishonor as a given. The pain and suffering of those who have wronged you is a value, a token of good — and it’s required for balancing justice in the universe. The atonement also only makes sense if you believe in essences.
Christians seem to think that the idea of a vicarious atonement somehow gets them out of the whole honor-culture mentality which gives it weight. No. It doesn’t.
I have seen people with enlightenment values helpfully re-working the meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection so that they become metaphors for something which makes sense. They make lame analogies …”it’s like when you blahblahblah” but no, it’s not really like that. The atonement only makes sense in an honor culture: you can’t humanize it without changing what makes it unique and significant.
According to the New Age tome A Course in Miracles the crucifixion didn’t establish the Atonement, the resurrection did … and it was a “perfect lesson” done to demonstrate “that nothing can destroy truth … because light abolishes all forms of evil.” From what I can tell, it turns out that the ultimate evil is atheism because reason and science destroyed Love (it’s complicated.)
Again, the answer to “why?” isn’t supposed to make sense to atheists.
Not complicated
I gave the “ration”ales for all of this below, where ever my post is.
Denial of death
Denial of death ➕transcendence
God/son conflated
No generation means no de generation
Primal/original sin = corporality
Corporality – the body dies
No corporal union = no sex = vigin birth
God/son conflation it’s very simple. Again no generation = no degeneration
Ghost = death
But not if its holy
It’s holy and partakes in trinity = death/no death – rebirth . . .
It’s all denial of death ala E. Becker. Denial is hard, so finesse it with Transcending it – see my post below
I think I was given explanation #1, and simply just didn’t think about it all that much until I became a teenager, and began the path towards atheism. When you actually start thinking about the story in the context of what it would be like with Jesus *not* being a divine being, it rings more true, and terribly sad.
And if you follow the arguments of the historical Jesus doubters, there is the possibility that the whole thing is just the historical fictionalization of a mystery cult’s philosophy.
Christianity was an Eastern mystery cult. You don’t have to be a doubter to know that is true. See my #27 below.
The problem that strikes me with #1 (i.e., John 3:16) is that God is sacrificing his son to someone, but to whom?
God’s nature. Or at least that’s how my little sect presented it. God, it was said, is by nature perfect and just, and the just part of God requires that no sin can go unpunished. By his very nature, God is unable to let sin go unpunished. Since all humans sin we are all doomed, so he set up the perfect sacrifice so that justice could be served once and for all.
Of course, this isn’t much better than just saying “to himself”, but strikingly it does try to carve out some kind of constraint on God’s abilities, his free will even. There are, in this theology, some things God just can’t do (though they’d NEVER say it that way), and one of those things is let sin go unpunished. God is like Odysseus lashing himself to the mast, trying to contrive a way to constrain his own nature. It’s almost poetic that way, but we never got that poetry as the thrust of most sermons was to impress upon us that we all *deserved* to die and should feel accordingly.
let sin go unpunished? He would do anything for love. But he won’t do that!
Huh. Meatloaf suddenly makes a lot of sense now. Mind blown.
Maybe Im crazy, But it’s crazy and it’s true,
I know you can save me, No one else can save me now but you.
Before his untimely death, atheist and former minister Ken Pulliam was examining the theology of the Penal Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement at his still functioning blog. I highly recommend it. See http://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2010/07/index-to-articles-on-atonement.html
If one expects these things to make sense, one will only be frustrated. They have to feel like they make sense. Here’s the sense they seemed to make, as best I understood my church’s theology.
1. God required sacrifice of animals, including sacrifices as a sort of apology and repayment for doing things wrong. (See pages and more boring pages of the old testament describing in detail how to make what sacrifices for what reason.)
1.5. Note that many societies have viewed the sacrifice of a human as the ultimate sacrifice, to be made when the transgression are really bad, or the current problem is really big.
2. Jesus was crucified — not what his followers expected.
3. His death must have meaning — therefore, it was a sacrifice. It was a sacrifice that, at some level, he chose.
4. What could his sacrifice be for? To make restitution for all the wrongs we humans have done, the wrongs that cause us to die when it seems so clearly right that we should be immortal.
I don’t think that things like “causing people to feel guilty so they’ll obey the church” could have been the motivation of the earliest people trying to work this out, though once there was a church these ideas were obviously ripe for exploitation.
There’s a lot of OT evidence that the common people in the area practiced human sacrifice as well…even those who declared allegiance to Yahweh.
Every time a “bad” king comes along and lets the people worship in high places and make idols to Baal and Asherah, there’s also references to sacrificing children.
Jephthah is just the only named example of this. But it seems pretty clear that human sacrifice was practiced, and one of the reasons that the “Yahweh-only” crowd eventually won out was because the leaders wanted to abolish this practice.
Guilt = being born with a body = a corporal reality = enjoyment (sex) of corporal reality.
Whom do I owe for this gift/body, and if I pay up maybe I won’t lose it.
god/Jesus conflated = no sex no generation = no degeneration = vigin both. See my post below
I don’t necessarily buy the historicity of Jesus (or Jesus precursors). But if any one thing were to convince me that there may be have been a historical core it’s the obvious and inelegant post hoc kludging of the crucifixion/resurrection story, a sure sign of exaptation to me. It does seem like there just might have been a character (or characters) who was/were executed and a flimsy rationalization was built up after the fact. Or it could be mythic whatsits manufactured from whole cloth. I am curious about the question but doubt we’ll ever have an answer. And ultimately whichever way the truth lies makes no difference to me.
god/son generations conflated = no sex (virgin birth). No degeneration.
Cyclical via mechanism of Holy Ghost.
A ghost that comes back to life.
See my post below.
“Why did he kill off almost everyone the first time, but then send Jesus down the second time.”
Because of the covenant of the Ark. (Think, “rainbow”.)
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As Ricky Gervais says about The Flood, “what did the squids do?”
Heck, what about the rainbow trout?
Ha – testable hypothesis! If all land animals are descended from a Noachean pair, they should be less genetically diverse than their aquatic counterparts. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the results of that study.
How is it a “sacrifice” when Jesus gets better in a couple of days? He certainly didn’t suffer more than most humans with chronic pain, or cancer, or various other serious illnesses, so why should we be impressed?
‘Jesus had a bad week-end for your sins!’
Nice!
I wondered this myself when I was a christian child. When I asked this of my elders I was pretty much told not to think such things.
Yes. God is infinite and can’t be killed, so a mock death isn’t a sacrifice. It’s like fining God 10 cents. It has no meaning relative to his infinite power and timelessness.
For god so loved the world that he loaned out his only begotten son.
As someone else once noted: Wouldn’t it have been much more beneficial and meaningful if Jesus had sentenced himself to a gazillion hours of community service rather than death on a stick?
And a Kenyan lawyer is trying to rectify the situation by asking the World Court to overturn Jesus’ death sentence! The link.
It’s funny that his case was dismissed here by the high court before he sought his 5 sec of fame and he cites as evidence the claims made in the bible.
Hearsay the whole lot of it!
It’s a coincidence that I had the following excerpt already typed out.
I don’t know how much this adds to the conversation, but when I was visiting my Catholic parents over the weekend, I saw that a recent issue of Commonweal had an essay by Alice McDermott (I only wanted to see what she had to say because she’s a novelist; the rest of the magazine had the usual religious dreck).
So here’s the excerpt from McDermott’s piece:
We say: We believe in God, the Father Almighty. The Creator. The First Cause. The force that lit the fuse that set off the Big Bang. Whatever. Got it. And in his son, Jesus Christ. who came down from heaven (down and heaven being metaphorical, yes? no?), entered time by being born of the Virgin Mary, walked the earth, told us how to live, implored us to love one another, and then was crucified, died, and was buried. Historical fact. Descended into hell (metaphor again?) and on the third day arose from the dead. Literally. Walked the earth once more and then ascended into heaven. We’ve got the rest down pat: The Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting…
The point is: God so loved the world, he gave his only son so we should not perish but live…
The point is: Love redeems us. Even from death.
Really?
That’s immortality we’re talking about. Heaven. Literally. We’re saying that we believe that the injustice of death, every single death in human history, is made just by a loving God. We believe that the observable fact that we all perish — literally — is made null, overturned, by Christ’s sacrifice two thousand years ago. We believe in the triumph of love over death. We believe that God’s love for us — God the First Cause, the Creator, the metaphorical guy with the match at the Big Bang — lets us, unlike everything else in creation, live in eternity. That Christ’s literal, historic sacrifice on the Cross changed everything. That God’s love for every living, breathing one of us, which is reflected in our love for one another, redeems us, brings us to literal everlasting life.
—
None of this makes any sense. Poor Alice, she needs to get a life.
‘Go ask Alice. . . I think she’ll know.’
“When logic, and proportion, have fallen sloppy dead….”
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”
None of them make any rational sense but #3 makes historical sense. If we put Christianity into its historical context as another Eastern mystery cult like the Cult of Mythras, the Cult of Cybele, the Cult of Isis, etc., the crucifixion follows a similar theme.
The best example is the Cult of Isis because it flourished at precisely the same time as Christianity and appealed to the same group of followers (the disenfranchised: women, slaves, the poor).
Relatable Suffering
Christianity = Crucified Jesus
Isis = Hacked up Osiris
Compassion
Christianity = Salvation of humankind
Isis = Act of Isis going around looking for the pieces of Osiris
Salvation
Christianity = resurrection
Isis = Osiris assembled
In this way the idea of a failed resurrection also makes sense. Christians would be looking at this theme and when it didn’t happen then they just made stuff up.
Diana, this may be right up your alley if you get a sec. The mythology surrounding Horace is interesting as a possible predicate to Christianity.
pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2013/05/market-research.html
Ha ha! Yes!
What’s amazing to me is how many times these ideas have been rehashed over time. We also have a couple of recent examples of how cults have weathered seemingly impossible failures to become large organizations. Of particular interest is how JW survived two failed end of world predictions by its founder to rise again from the ashes.
#1 is the reason I heard most often in church (Southern evangelical protestant). The fact that the debt had to be paid in blood is the response to your question of why God couldn’t just wave his hand and forgive everyone. Romans 6:23 is quoted most often: “For the wages of sin is death…” <<- "death" being deceptive in that it actually means eternal life in hell. In order for our sins to be forgiven, Jesus had to take them on and then die. Because he did that, if we believe that wholeheartedly, we have eternal life in heaven.
Or something like that. It's been a while, heh heh.
Whenever one says that their god “had to” do something or “couldn’t” have acted a certain way, they’re denying their god’s omnipotence. I would think most Christians would see that as heresy.
It is only heresy if you claim that God could not do something different because he is not omnipotent, etc. God only seems constrained in his actions because God is so beyond human comprehension, therefore describing God as limited is not a problem when it is used to explain why things are as they are because you are describing the status quo, but it is heresy of the worst kind if the description of God as limited is used to explain why things are not different from the way they are.
If one’s god is omnipotent, then by definition they can do something different. You could say that because one’s god is so outside of human comprehension their actions are inscrutable, but you can’t say that your god had to do something or couldn’t act in a certain way.
You’re missing a key xian doctrinal point: it doesn’t have to make sense or be consistent! It’s Calvinball! God is an omnipotent being whose actions are constrained! Checkmate!
Well, the whole line of reasoning just applies itself to our life today, doesn’t it?
Let’s say you borrow my favorite CD without asking and break it. You apologize and want to make it up to me — get another CD, promise not to do it again, give me something else to replace it, etc.
But of course we know that’s just ludicrous, don’t we? “The wages of sin is death.” You did wrong, plain and simple. And plain and simple I have no other recourse but to kill you and let your blood wash away my pain and suffering and sooth my wounded honor … unless. Unless I can figure out where we can get some primo pain and suffering which will be just as good as watching my friend die, which I don’t want to do even though I have to (no other system is logically possible.) I mean, I love you. Dilemma. Bummer.
Wait. My cat. I also love my cat. So here’s the solution: I will torture and kill my cat (or even better let you do it!) and her screams of agony will satiate my blood lust. Solved!
But there’s a catch: you have to admit that this is a great solution and be very, very grateful that I’m agreeing to go through with it. Which ought to be easy. I showed you how much I love you; now it’s your turn. And this idea works all around (because I don’t have an actual cat — I only pretend to be my cat.)
There, see? It all becomes so very simple and obvious when it’s put into the everyday terms of our lives in the 21st century.
I’ll have to try that analogy on the next Christian who knocks on my door.
Beautiful.
The blood of jesus, oh yeah!
From what I understand, the mythicist view is that Jesus disguised himself so that the “rulers of the Age” (demons) would kill him. Once dead, Jesus was able to descend into the land of the dead and liberate all of the souls so that they could rise into the heavens.
This is from the Ascension of Isaiah:
To me, that sounds the most plausible. It isn’t an all-powerful God forgiving our sins, but it’s a very powerful god fighting a group of very powerful demi-gods/angels. There’s some discussion at: http://vridar.org/2011/02/02/jesus-crucified-by-demons-not-on-earth-the-ascension-of-isaiah-in-brief/
The version that’s told today, of an historical Jesus being crucified by humans makes little sense.
Just to add – this sort of explanation is what makes me partial to the mythic explanations. It gives a reason for Jesus’s crucifixion that’s consistent and understandable, and doesn’t make the first Christians into the sort of fruitcakes or cynical manipulators which people have suggested. The standard view of Jesus as a real human who was sent to Earth by God really does make little sense, as others have said.
I do wonder what early Christians thought about this, as Jesus was placed into an historical context.
Ever listen to Jack Van Impe he is funny.We are in end times ya know.Jesus is coming back, good hope he does before I have to pay my entire doctor bill.
He’s been saying that for about 50 years. Poor guy — I think the waiting is killing him.
I don’t find Jack very funny, but his wife Rexella (love the name) is hilarious. However, Jan Crouch and her wigs have them both beat. Why do so many televangelists’ wives look like drag queens?
I believe Rexella is in her 80s…so the wig and the face job are, frankly, part of what makes her so hilarious.
Once again, I have to agree with Ben. There are no original stories in the bible.
The entire point of Christianity is the power to control politics by controlling the masses. Christianity today uses the same tactics as it did early on. Piece-o-cake and kind of clever, you take stories from other religions and rewrite them based around your central character. This way you can appease people by telling them they are generally correct in their beliefs, but they have their deity wrong and by making this one little tweak it’ll all be right. It doesn’t have to make sense; it only has to bring others into the fold. This is what sophisticated theologians attempt to do today with science.
The new version is of course; science doesn’t contradict the bible, science complements the bible.
It also helps to understand that this is exactly how new religions were well-documented and publicly understood to come into existence. The best example is probably Serapis, a politically-expedient syncretic amalgamation of Osiris / Dionysus (who were already understood to be two culturally-dependent interpretations of the same god) with Apis the Bull.
Or, just look at how every Roman god was matched up with the “same” Greek one: Jupiter / Zeus, Mars / Ares, Dionysus / Bacchus, Hermes / Mercury, Vulcan / Hephaestus, and so on. That same process continues far outside of the Mediterranean, with Thor and Wotan both being equated with Jupiter and Zeus.
But I don’t think there were anywhere near as many synonyms as the Osiris / Dionysus / Bacchus / Mithra / Jesus / Orpheus one of a death / resurrection / salvation Sun god.
Cheers,
b&
“The entire point of Christianity is the power to control politics by controlling the masses.”
This just nonsense. Christianity only became state religion in the 4th Century. Are you really going to claim that the NT was constructed to serve the interests of the political elites of some 250 years later?
Absolutely. Show any evidence of any of the events before 200ACE. There exists all kind of records of those years with nothing about these fake acts.
The NT was not ‘constructed’ until the 4th C, at various congresses sanctioned by Constantine’s church, the latter enabled by him to help bring some degree of order and freedom from constant wrangling and outright fighting over dogmas. The Nicene Creed was supposed to do away with Arianism, but failed totally within one decade. To Constantine’s chagrin, the church he sponsored began rivaling Imperial power very quickly. His own conversion when close to death is best regarded as a giving-in to Pascal’s Wager.
I made no claims concerning the NT or when it was compiled, nor did I mention the political elite.
What I said was the point of xtianity is control, and its formation was for the express purpose of wresting control from those currently in power. If you can control the masses you control politics. That is why xtianity incorporates stories from other popular myths of the time with the minor change of jebus as the central character for all.
Many religions become one religion and you get the adherents en masse, as it were.
Religion is the same no matter the era, find out what people need or already believe and incorporate that into what you’re selling.
I think Doug Stanhope said it great:
“Jesus died for our sins? What has one to do with the other? You can`t go to the bank and say: hey, I hit myself over the head with a shovel for my dad`s mortage. He is now mortage free, isn`t he!?”
As comedienne, Laurie Lynn, noted: “God tells Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. If this was the only way they could understand the difference between good and evil, how could they have known that it was wrong to disobey God and eat the fruit?”
Have you ever done something you regret? If so, how does that compare to eating a fruit from the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”? If sin is disobedience to God and all sins are the same to God, then eating the apple was, by God’s own terms, a pedestrian sin.
Yet God condemned all of us to death because of a single sin: the first sin ever sinned. Are you guilty of Eve’s sin? Of course not! No more so than for Lindsay Lohan’s sins or for mine. Right off the bat, common sense tells us that the Bible, in Genesis, is preaching a twisted morality. It puts us in opposition to ourselves by claiming our nature is sinful.
I’m no genius but I know a scam when I see one. Biblical sin is God’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose con game: it’s a sham used to manipulate and control us via fear and guilt. I reject the neurosis of biblical sin: I believe our nature is basically good but we sometimes make mistakes. Hell, if we believe we’re not good, we probably won’t be.
But that’s definitely not what the Bible preaches, is it? We’re ALL unworthy, wretched, sinners.
The Bible says God created the universe and everything in it, including Adam and Eve. He did this in 6 days; executing his allegedly perfect plan on schedule and without a hitch (except that Eve was an afterthought). Adam and Eve were pure and sinless: they had all eternity, in Eden, to bask in God’s glory.
Unless, of course, they pissed Him off.
And it doesn’t take much to piss off God. No sir! And second chances? Forget about it. One mistake and you’re history. By the way, all of your offspring, forever, will also be cursed with death. How do you like them apples?
Because of Adam and Eve, we’re all born guilty of “Original Sin”. So much for God’s perfect plan (let’s call it, “plan A”). In fact, Original Sin made the human condition so intractably degenerate that God had to wipe out all life (human or not) with a catastrophic flood so that Noah’s family could start humanity anew, from scratch. This was God’s idea of plan B.
Well guess what? God’s plan B was all for naught. A few thousand years later, humanity had repopulated itself from Noah’s incestuous Ark and – surprise, surprise – was no better than before. I guess that’s what inbreeding gets you. You’d think God would have learned that the first time around.
Time for plan C.
This time, instead of genocide, God chose suicide. He came to Earth personally, as Jesus, to act out a script he divinely inspired, in biblical prophesy, that ended with his own trial, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension back home to heaven.
Why did God do this? Original Sin. Because of Original Sin, we can never be innocent enough for eternal life. We must be forgiven before heaven’s gates will open for us. If you know your dogma, you know Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross so that we may be redeemed from sin (and have everlasting life). Because God eternally cursed mankind with death, he had to provide some means for our redemption. The alternative was to abandon us. Quite a conundrum God put himself in, no?
Basically, God had to “save” us from the curse he imputed upon us to begin with. I’m amazed that so many people don’t see through this preposterous charade. Perhaps the pretzel logic is too tangled for most to unravel. The Bible would have us believe – and doctrine upholds – that we are all miserable wretches who will be granted eternal life only if we love Jesus. Of course, this assumes we can trust God not to resort to a plan D or E or whatever. After all, God is perfect and all-powerful: who’s going to stop him from tossing out plan C if he decides, yet again, that he still hasn’t gotten creation right?
God must regret cursing mankind with death. God is perfect, so we can’t say he makes mistakes; I prefer to say he has regrets. Anyway, I suppose God was hot-headed in his youth; the Old Testament clearly depicts him with a short fuse. So once he imputed death upon us, he couldn’t “un-impute” it. I mean, he’s God! Right? His word is law and immutable. What kind of self-respecting, omniscient, God would change his mind? If God is love, then I guess it’s true that, “love means never having to say you’re sorry”.
Eventually, God found a loophole in his own immutable law: leave mankind cursed but offer individuals an exemption by redemption. Yeah, that’s the ticket! For Christ’s sake – why didn’t God think of plan C before plan B? After all, if redemption is a workable plan, God flooded the Earth and wiped-out humanity for nothing. I hate when that happens!
From Original Sin to redemption, Eden to Gethsemane, the story twists a pretzel-logic plot of servile spiritual entrapment, with a theme of self-loathing morality.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I think the Supreme Being should be an elected position. Surely we can put somebody with more compassion and foresight onto the throne of the Ruler of the Universe. At least, if we elect poorly, we can vote for a replacement next time.
I think the concept of Original Sin makes sense from the point of view of a 3 year old who says ‘no’ to mommy and daddy even though they know it’s bad. Now they’re bad. And they soiled themselves.
They need to be washed clean.
Watching adults and theologians over-think the simplistic internal conflicts of naughty toddlers and try to wring deep meaning out of them is, as you put it, a ‘preposterous charade.’
Ordinal sin = corporality
Not that it makes much difference, but many Protestant sects reject the idea of the transmission of original sin. Many Protestants hold that babies are born still innocent, but humans being fallible will inevitably sin sooner or later but that it is only when they themselves sin that they come under judgment.
Of course, this has it’s own problem. If babies are innocent, meaning that if they died they’d go to Heaven, and if we let them grow up they’ll probably sin and, odds are, won’t be a part of the right sect to get properly forgiven and won’t make it to Heaven, then we should be killing babies to save them from Hell, no?
I think that makes abortion a sacrament.
I think so.
This bothered me a lot when I was a young Christian. We were taught that most people will end up in Hell (broad is the way that leads to destruction). Not only the unbelievers and the Hindus and Muslims and so on, but also all those who believed “false doctrine”, such as the Catholics. By the time you listed all those where were doomed it was clear that the odds a particular child would escape Hell (which was taken to be a literal lake of fire in which you burned forever) seemed so low that it sounded like an unconscionable crime to conceive child and expose it to such horror, and almost as much of a crime to allow an infant to survive long enough to sin.
I never raised this issue, though, because I was not entirely unafraid that, hearing the idea someone might take it up and put it into action.
Andrea Yates, is that you?
Another atonement theory that was prevalent for the first millenium was the Christus Victor theory which says that Jesus died to conquer the powers of evil (i.e. Satan) which held man under its dominion. It’s the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe theory of atontement. It’s making a bit of a comeback because PSA is so bloody ludicrous and makes Yahweh into a bloodthirsty vengeful psychopath and that view of god makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Better a god who saves us from evil than a god who saves us from himself.
What say I?
Your line of reasoning presupposes that you’re questioning the assertions of perfectly sane humans.
Theology is nothing more than made up bullshit, as you have said many time. Why even attempt to dispute or question those who engage in the fine art of making shit up?
IMHO such questioning is equivalent to having a rational debate w/ a Bellevue resident.
The whole point of theology is to convince people of absurdities. When this is achieved reason and evidence are virtually defeated. Already believing in absurdities, the faithful has no qualm about invoking fresh ones in the defence of his faith. The process is called “reduction of cognitive dissonance”. The faithful finds it far less painful to utter nonsense than to apostatize in the face of reason and evidence.
Seems obvious that if this is the same superpower driving Intelligent Design Theory, then all of the flaws, errors and extinctions inherent in nature are byproducts of this illogical, capricious and befuddled creator. Some mortals may hope that god will snatch one of those killer asteroids that he once fashioned (either in error or by design ?)- attempting to save us from extinction.
My guess is that, somehow, he won’t be able to make the catch!
It is very likely (and I would argue likeliest) that all those early religious founders are myth figures. So I think it is a mistake to interpret the myth as if it in any way could be factual.
Moreover, I think that such an empathy with the myth believers is the same mistake as the accommodationist mistake. It may feel good to do it, it may even be helpful at times, but it will not help (say) fence sitters.
And so I have to agree with Ben. The schlep is humdrum myth telling, no mystery as such.
Sub
I would suggest that believing in the ‘hard to believe’ paradoxically convinces the believer that he has arcane knowledge and contributes to the ‘mysticism’ of it all: mysticism isn’t supposed to be explainable. The ability to believe something unbelievable is seen as proof of faith. I wouldn’t even try to apply any logic to religion: non overlapping magisterium.
The term you’re looking for is, “cognitive dissonance.”
b&
I believe the inconsistency stems from the story being a mishmash of various fables and legends from various corners of the region – Greek, Jewish, Roman, Iranian, Egyptian, and others too numerous to list. In order to have something for everyone they held a meeting to decide on the story. As Despair.com informs us: Meetings – None of Us is as Dumb as All of Us. The end result was predictable.
May I, as a European, risk some cheeky observations? You north Americans often sound, well, shell-shocked, when talking about religion, as if you are only just coming to terms with a national delusion, rather like 1990, when the Russians realised the horrors that Communism had inflicted upon them. For a start, you often play their game by talking about ‘God’ with a capital ‘g’. But you could do better by always referring to ‘the gods’; lower case. Christianity is riddled with gods, angels and saints, and do not forget the devil; surely an important god. It seems to make religious claims less acceptable when you put their gods in the plural.
And you still feel as if you have to engage in theological debate, as if to try to talk the religious out of their delusion, such as the stuff above. When Lane Craig talks of his ‘Maximal Being’, always be quick to retort that both ‘beings’ and certainly ‘maximal beings’ are theological terms and mean absolutely nothing to those outside the cult, just as B flat Major is a musical term and means little to fishermen or farmers.
I think it better to distance oneself from the language of Religious Brain Disorder, and to be a little more incredulous as to the whole attempt to turn religious delusion into knowledge.
Did you know that those with RBD often exhibit evidence of a temporal distortion, in their claims of a living Jesus, their clasp of a book of myths as if it were contemporary, or in their dismissal of anything really old such as evolution or the age of the earth. ? It was best expressed by the religious poet, T S Eliot when he opined that …
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”
+1. Or more. Much more….
b&
Point, laugh and ridicule, but by no means attempt to engage in meaningful dialogue with delusion.
Why did god make us to begin with? He was lonely? Needed the pets his parents wouldn’t let him have?
The christian version of an omnipotent entity is hands down the biggest narcissist known to litterature.
To truly appreciate this post, it should be read in the voice of Thurston Howell, III.
It’s a made up story stolen from Eygyt,and related to the low point Northern Crux in the sky in Dec.
http://youtu.be/oZgT1SRcrKE
http://www.amazon.com/Christ-Conspiracy-Greatest-Story-Ever/dp/0932813747/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375731582&sr=1-2&keywords=christ+in+egypt
Acharya gets the basic idea right, but a lot of the details in the scholarship are on very shaky ground. Acharya’s Horus, for example, isn’t much like the one in the Book of the Dead.
It’s a mistrake to see Jesus as exactly modeled on a single source. Rather, he’s a syncretic pagan demigod, a patchwork quilt of many other earlier myths with some local flavor thrown in for good measure — just like all the other gods. And the broad outline of his biography is that of a death / resurrection / salvation sun god, with the point driven home by many of his “calling cards” (walking on water, turning water into wine, calming the seas, bringing forth our daily bread, that sort of thing).
It’s rather like declaring that the Neapolitan Margherita pizza is the “true” original source for the sorts of dishes you might order at someplace like the California Pizza Kitchen, and utterly ignoring the millennia-old pan-cultural traditions of putting stuff on top or inside of bread. Pitas, tacos, piroghi, baos, matzohs, sandwiches, naan, quiches, cheese and crackers, and on and on and on and on and on.
Cheers,
b&
The crucifixion was no sacrifice at all. According to some of the gospels, Jesus knew he was God and that he would live forever in heaven. Who wouldn’t trade one incredibly bad day for an eternity of bliss (setting aside the philosophical problems of blissful eternity)?
No, even if the biblical narrative is accurate, Jesus sacrificed nothing. The very foundation of Christianity is incoherent.
I’m beginning to think that for many of the faithful that’s a feature, not a bug. It is precisely because it is incoherent that it seems like a “mystery” and profound beyond human understanding. Because of this, Christianity is harder to attack with reason than, say, belief in alien abduction or the Hollow Earth.
Indeed, and since it makes no sense, the average believer (sucked in by peer pressure) is, just like those afraid to raise their hands in class for fear of seeming stupid, afraid to question it.
//
I have a memory of watching Edward G. Robinson appearing on the Mickey Mouse Club back in the 1950s where he leads the Mouseketeers in singing their closing song. I recall the song going something like the following: Mouseketeers, “M-I-C. “ Robinson, “C? See!” (said with his trademark snarl). Mouseketeers, “K-E-Y.” Robinson, “Y? Because I said so. That’s why.”
My theory of the crucifiction (spelling intentional) and resurrection is what I will call the “Edward G. Robinson” theory of religious thinking. Because he said so, that’s why.
The MMC recollection is hilarious. My favorite EGR (born Emanuel Goldenberg) role is Johnny Rocco, in Key Largo.
Which (I always assumed) inspired Firesign Theatre’s Rocky Rococco.
sub
“I’ve always been puzzled by the Christian morality tale of the crucifixion and resurrection. How, exactly, did God turning himself into his son, coming down to earth, getting crucified, and then coming back to life manage to save humanity from its original sin? What is the theology behind that? Weren’t there easier ways to redeem original sin, even if you believe in that silly concept?”
Jerry: (1) the concept of “incarnation” here is crude Alexandrian mythology… no knowledgeable Christian thinks God turned himself into a man, his son. No space here for a better formulation, but Antiochene wd. be the keyword. (2) Karl Barth IMO gave the best account of the Crucifixion: it among other things, (pace Anselm) symbolizes God’s assuming responsibility for the world and reveals God’s “election” of the world and the quality of that universal election. There is no support for Original Sin in Paul or in any canonical text, and Eastern Orthodox Christians know this. Augustine corrupted Western Roman tradition almost psst repair.(3) The Resurrection is mainly transformative: the risen Christ (Messiah) is the future of all creatures and things. Immortality and happiness. (4) The step from “was crucified” to “is the conquering Christ” would have been impossible to sell in Jerusalem to Jews without very persuasive propositional evidence. If the body simply rotted into vanishment it’s unlikely that a Jesus movement could have gotten off the ground. No bookie would take short odds. BTW: (5) The Zeitgeist stuff is ridiculous (as a quick search shows). ,,, (6) a good post.
the concept of “incarnation” here is crude Alexandrian mythology… no knowledgeable Christian thinks God turned himself into a man, his son.
It doesn’t matter to Jerry’s questions whether God “turned himself” into Jesus, or copied himself into Jesus, or imbued Jesus with his divine nature, or however else you care to describe it.
Karl Barth IMO gave the best account of the Crucifixion: it among other things, (pace Anselm) symbolizes God’s assuming responsibility for the world and reveals God’s “election” of the world and the quality of that universal election.
What’s the point of “symbolizing God’s assuming responsibility for the world or of “revealing God’s ‘election’ of the world and the quality of that universal election” (whatever that impenetrable phrase is supposed to mean)? Why were these things necessary? And why couldn’t God have done them in a way that didn’t involve someone being crucified?
The Resurrection is mainly transformative: the risen Christ (Messiah) is the future of all creatures and things. Immortality and happiness.
Again, why couldn’t God have produced “the future of all creatures and things” in a way that didn’t involve someone being crucified? Why did anyone have to suffer and die horribly to accomplish these things?
The step from “was crucified” to “is the conquering Christ” would have been impossible to sell in Jerusalem to Jews without very persuasive propositional evidence. If the body simply rotted into vanishment it’s unlikely that a Jesus movement could have gotten off the ground.
Why? Why couldn’t God just have planted the urge for a “Jesus movement” in people’s minds? For that matter, what’s the point of the “Jesus movement” anyway?
Um…that’s not what the Nicean Creed says:
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
[…]
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
That seems pretty darned explicit to me.
If god was dead, then who brought him back to life?
For anyone unfamiliar with it, Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” has a dandy piece of rhetorical outcry against this demented theology. The trope “Non Credo” includes the following:
And you became a man
You, God, chose to become a man
To pay the earth a small social call
I tell you, sir, you never were
A man at all
Why?
You had the choice
when to live
When
To die
And then
Become a god again
And then a plaster god like you
Has the gall to tell me what to do
To become a man
To show my respect on my knees
Go genuflect, but don’t expect guarantees
Oh
Just play it dumb
Play it blind
But when
I go
Then
Will I become a god again?
Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception contradicts the idea that Jesus’ death was needed to cleanse us of original sin.
Under Catholic doctrine Mary was conceived as a vessel free of original sin so that no nasty sinner’s uterus touched god. That means god can just choose for us to be born without original sin. Thus no need for God to send himself to earth to have himself pretend killed so that he could forgive us for having the temerity to be born of people who ate a piece of fruit against god’s wishes…
Of course their god can, or it’s not omnipotent.
Of course. I think it is interesting that Catholic doctrine specifically shows that not only can he, he did. Ergo no reason for Jesus to be born.
Please genuflect when you speak of the immaculate deception.
This makes sense, especially given what we know about cognitive dissonance and failed religious apocalyptic claims where believers rather than give up their faith in the face of clear evidence that they were wrong all along instead double down and become even more fervent believers, creating excuses for why they were right anyway.
I love to ask christians what the justification is for the new testament doing away with the laws of the old testament. Until now I’ve only had one statement that can pass for an answer:
The old testament was the prophecy of the coming of the messiah. The old laws were put in place by god in order to prepare everyone for (and to ensure) the coming of said messiah.
Once the messiah came, the old laws were no longer needed because there was a new order and the new rules were put in place.
Now you know!
Of course, nobody can ever explain why the garden of eden, original sin and the ten commandments still stand (oh, yeah, and god still hates fags but not pigs or shellfish) whereas the rest is jettisoned.
Which is exactly the same as this post.
Dear Jerry Coyne,
You cannot understand bullshit. You can only wash it off your shoes.
Plot… was purloined from a Seneca play;
sequeled, prequiled, embellished along way,
morphed to what’s spoon-fed to naive today.
Loving the comments!
I’m learning a bunch about the absurdity that is christian theology. Way more than what was covered back in my school days.
Keep it up fellow heathens! 🙂
The notion of God’s sacrifice is emotionally compelling (clearly, to a lot of people) on the same level most dramatic entertainment is compelling – e.g. the Twilight Series, the superhero movies, what have you.
The broad-stroke, emotional story point is that God, the Creator Of All Things, who could snuff mankind out for any transgression, instead loved us so much that He made the Ultimate Sacrifice: became human, suffered and died.
ONLY taking those broad strokes, a God sacrificing Himself for humans, to redeem us, it can be seen as an emotionally compelling concept.
But of course, like most movies or pulp stories, if you examine it any more closely, attempting some realistic appraisal, the logical holes spring everywhere and it doesn’t make a damned bit of sense. Sure, if a God HAD no recourse but to sacrifice Himself for us, that could be compelling. But
since there is no such logical or practical necessity, the sacrifice actually becomes utterly gratuitous suffering and more suggestive of sadism than of heroism.
Atheists just become those pests like the friend at the movie pointing out all the plot holes and things that don’t really make sense.
Most Christians just want to hush those thoughts and enjoy how the broadest emotional strokes of the story inspire them.
I don’t think most Christians are as concerned with precisely WHY a Supreme God would logically HAVE to make such a sacrifice of Himself for us. That’s for the theologians. They are mostly impressed that a God purportedly DID make such a sacrifice. “A God. Sacrificing himself. For little, faulty, ME!” That’s good enough.
Vaal
Yes, this explains it most clearly….and we are the ones ruining the suspension of disbelief!
+1
Christianity has even more plot holes than Prometheus
LOL, Gary, in terms of movies suffering from plot holes, Prometheus was uppermost in my mind when I wrote my post – I was even going to reference it. (Hold on, you mean the map guy – the guy who just 3D mapped the entire alien ship! – is the guy who gets lost in the alien ship?)
Vaal.
I never made it through that flick. Am I the only one who thinks it was a complete bore. ( well the 1st at least )
*hour.
It was awful. Everyone just needs to step away from the Alien franchise.
Yeah, give it a rest and wait for a decent manuscript….please, for the sake of science fiction.
I saw it with my wife. We were expecting something decent but right away we fell into giving it the MST 3000 treatment. So I thoroughly enjoyed it, but not in the way it was intended. My one sentence review for friends: “They didn’t send their best and brightest on this mission.”
LOL. I hear ya. I spent a good portion of the time facepalming. In this case, not a sign of good quality.
It’s almost hard to believe the movie wasn’t shot as a parody.
Hehe, maybe it’s a meta-parody, and we just didn’t get it. 😉
Ha ha! That’s the perfect pithy review!
Perfect!
Odin sacrificed himself to himself, and lost an eye to boot.
Odin did it in style. The missing eye was sacrificed to gain knowledge. He knew a good deal when he saw it. 🙂
The theological theory behind this is generally called “substitutionary atonement”. There are a number of sub-theories on how it actually works. If you “google” the term, I’m sure you will find plenty of information about it. As I remember from extensively pondering and research during my Catholic days, it all has to do with Adam committing a sin, the effects of which were passed on to all of his children and their children, etc. God, being a merciful God,would like to just forgive the sin, but he can’t (because he is a just God). The reason Jesus was the only one who could make up for Adam’s sin is because he was without sin, just as Adam was prior to his sin. The rest of us are already sinful because Adam passed his sinful state on to us.
Of course, since no literal Adam existed, and there was never a perfect state to fall from, it is all somewhat silly.
My sister is a principle of a Catholic Elementary School. Being an evolutionist, I couldn’t resist raising the issue. She essentially said she doesn’t think about. I couldn’t let it go. She doesn’t talk to me anymore.
Jesus without sin? He threw the money changers out of the temple, and the haul was particularly nice that day. What kind of capitalist does stuff like that?
I don’t get it. All this mental gymnastics because of a bloody apple and a talking snake. Sounds like a clear cut case of Voldemort.
Shit, He’s back!
God, being a merciful God, would like to just forgive the sin, but he can’t (because he is a just God).
But why does justice prevent God from just forgiving the sin? This raises the problem posed by Euthyphro. If justice was created by God, then it can be whatever he wants it to be. If justice cannot be whatever he wants it to be, then God is not sovereign.
Having been to an evangelical church more recently than most of you, this is what they say at that one particular church.
1. The wages of sin is death (Romans something or another). God requires death for sinning, originally lambs and birds, etc. (See the Leviticus/Deuteronomy)
2. We all have a sin nature (not necessarily original sin)So we all owe a life-debt to god, which we are not capable of paying, because we are not “clean” due to our sin.
3. The only possible sacrifice is a perfect person (the “lamb” of god)
4. Jesus was sent to earth to live a sinless life in order to take on the life-debts of the entire world.
5. Jesus death redeems everybody’s sins an allows life after death in heaven, but only if you believe in him and that he was a sacrifice in our place.
Many “contemporary Christian” songs point to this as well. See the lyrics to the Jesus Paid It All song. “My sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow”.
This is one of the most destructive and fucked up tenets of the christian religion.
The absurd idea that the human nature is unclean.
Indeed, I second your sentiment. This idea of sin nature is right there with the “flat earth” and an earth-centric universe.
Astoundingly false.
Ooo. Ick.
All those “blood” songs seriously give me the creeps.
“Are you washed in the blood,
In the soul cleansing blood of the Lamb?
Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”
Boy, have I heard that a million times growing up and what could be more wholesome for a kid than singing about washing in blood?. It always made me think of some kind of demented Tide commercial, where the regular detergent is in a bucket on one side with plain ‘ol water, and there is a bucket of blood on the other side. A white shirt is pulled out of both and there’s still some stain on the detergent one, but a bright white shirt is, contra all expectation, pulled out of the bucket of blood.
Man, now I get why menstruation really bothers these guys.
If I remember well, it’s the same thing as in “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth”. A perfect man, Jesus, has the same valor as the (once) perfect man Adam had and can pay “life for life”. The humanity, Adam’s children, is a collateral beneficiary.
We were told that the reason why it did not work since the minute Jesus died was that allowing more people to live would end in more people who would be saved.
Borges calls this the “mysterious economy of redemption”.
I have always wondered in this why the exchange rate is one Jesus for the sins of billions. Wouldn’t one perfect person redeem one sinful person, so you’d need a billions of Jesus’ to redeem all mankind? I guess the exchange rate is better if you’re not only perfect but also sorta-secretely god.
Jesuses. Don’t know why my typing brain thought it’d be s’.
One thing that bothers me about this diversity of “atonement theories” is that the more morally bizarre ones seem to have the most enduring purchase power on Western Christianity.
Sure, Rene Girard’s notion of Jesus as a scapegoat to end scapegoats is much more !*morally*! palatable than the standard substitutionary theory, but the masses clearly are more enchanted by the latter.
(Oddly, few evangelical readers of Lewis’ Narnia series have caught on that there it is a sacrifice to palliate the forces of evil rather than good, a common trope in early Christianity, but quite different from evangelical thinking today.)
I think it’s about the emotional pull. If you’re about to suffer something bad and someone takes it on the chin for you, that has a bigger emotional pull than the more abstract idea the scapegoat.
What wins in these things is the idea that stirs up the most intense emotions, not the idea that is in any other sense the most coherent.
My theory, which is mine, is that the crucifixion was an attempt to appeal to followers of older religions that believed in human sacrifice, while providing an excuse to eschew it in the future by recasting it as a symbolic Ultimate Human Sacrifice to End Them All that would finally appease their angry, angry god(s).
Everyone’s talking about supreme sacrifice, a human, and yet, not a peep about the Aztec sacrifices. And, the Spanish tried to stop it, yet the people to be sacrificed disdained the attempts to aid their escape.
And, the Hawaiians and the volcano!! Moar sacrifice of people! No credit, even.
I would like to see Huffpost do more “Aztecs Versus Xtians”-type articles, where they compare and contrast the Aztec sacrifices, versus simply One guy (and, the saints, don’t forget the saints). It’d be a winning story!!
Seems to me the crucifixion and resurrection make perfect sense in light of the Jewish mythos of the scapegoat. Jesus is the scapegoat who takes away the sin of Israel at the very least, the world at best. That this mythos is operative in the NT is easy to see. Aside from the book of Hebrews, take even Jesus’ baptismal scene. Who was it that laid his hand’s upon Jesus just as the high priest laid his hands on the scapegoat (and thereby transferring the sins of Israel upon it)? It was John the Baptist, the son of a priest. What happened to the scapegoat immediately after the ceremony? It was sent out into the wilderness (to “Azazel” some say a desert demon of some kind). And Jesus after his baptism? He went out into the wilderness where he met Satan. Jesus for some writers of the NT was the scapegoat, a creature without blemish who took our “blemishes”, our sins, upon him, who merely did for all people what a whole parade of goats couldn’t do, once and for all (ok now see Hebrews). One shouldn’t take this early Christian myth out of its Jewish context. Just saying…
But why did he come back? The scapegoat didn’t. Not that fool.
The details of it bother me. First, Jesus the observant Jew tells his followers to drink his “blood.” Leviticus specifically prohibits eating anything with blood in it (which is what defines kosher meat). And Jesus supposedly ministered to the poor, who were allowed to sacrifice a chicken if they couldn’t afford a bigger animal. So he was saying “Eat my body — it tastes like chicken!” Second, the sacrifice at the Temple was of cooked meat, which the Priests would eat. So Jesus would be both the penitent Jew and the sacrificed meat, which is crazy. Third, looking at it as a Passover seder makes no sense whatsoever. Blood in the passover story was put on doorways!
The only good thing about it was putting an end to animal sacrifice (and human sacrifice, which wasn’t the usual thing)
It might make more sense when you understand that Christianity was founded by Greeks, not Jews, and that the Eucharist was lifted wholesale from Mithraism. That Paul* and Joseph Smith were cut from the same cloth would also be good to know.
Cheers,
b&
BTW we might want to look at the reaction to the death of the Lubavitch rebbe, M.M. Schneerson, in 1994. Many of his followers considered him the promised messiah and when he died, some retained that belief and believe he will return.
True or not true.. the story and the sentiment are of unconditional love and an example of a life lived with love and died with love without asking for anything in return other than do your best to follow that example even if you are the only one that turns the other cheek.. You would be a better human being than you would if you were just a selfish non loving person.. It was not a failure it was inspiration whether it is true or fiction.. learning to love even your enemies is a great lesson. Even in your academic world.. In my world it is a priceless lesson.. if it was only about the strong survive and they didn’t have the strength of love and examples like Jesus..There would most likely be a lot less academic types around.
That’s a pleasing word salad of a reinterpretation, but it has no bearing on the Jesus of the Bible. That Jesus preached a neverending stream of vicious hate wrapped in a sick and perverted parody of love. Even in the Sermon on the Mount! All men who’ve ever looked at a pretty woman and failed to immediately thereafter gouge out their own eyes are condemned by Jesus’s own judgement to infinite torture. All women who divorce their husbands, no matter how abusive, are likewise, are similarly condemned. As are not merely those who fail to accept Jesus as sovereign but those who have the temerity to love their own families more than Jesus.
And the horrific nature of Jesus’s terrible corruption is made most plain in the story, for his crowning glory is his triumphant return from the dead…as a walking, talking, rotting corpse. He even has one of his thralls thrust his hands in the gaping chest wound so as to make it absolutely clear that this truly is your worst possible nightmare come to life.
Really, how anybody could possibly see the Jesus story in the Bible as anything other than the archetype for every horror (especially zombie) story in all of history utterly escapes me.
Cheers,
b&
Thanks for sharing your perspective… we all see things from different perspectives the holy rollers see fire and brimstone, you see zombies and i see the golden rule… cheers to you as well. Thanks for the different view. I enjoy all the views from the ground to 26000 ft and yours is intriguing! At least to me.
First, the Golden Rule long predates Christianity. Indeed, it’s observed in pretty much all social species.
But, more importantly, the Christian version of it has it taking precedence over “do no harm,” with truly disastrous consequences over the millennia. Torquemada, for example, was most dutifully following the Christian Golden Rule: better a few weeks of earthly torment than an eternity in Hell, and it’s what he would have wanted done to himself. His crime was in taking away from his victims their autonomy, their right to choose their own fate whether wise or foolish.
That’s a crime that was, quite literally, the entire raison d’tre for Jesus’s existence: to “judge” the living and the dead, and to bring about said Judgement Day in the Battle of Armageddon.
Any way you slice it, and no matter how many inventive layers of abstraction and obfuscation people understandably build to distance themselves from it, Jesus and Christianity are pure evil, horrifically so. It is a credit to Christians that so many of them run so far so fast in the opposite direction…but it is truly a shame that so few of them have the courage to simply up and leave and denounce the insanity for the corruption it so unashamedly is and always has been.
Cheers,
b&
Thanks for the enlightening note!
Not true. If it were just about love, then it wouldn’t involve the crucifixion and resurrection.
The love shown between a father and son and unquestioning faith based on that love.. the crucifiction and resurection… faith and its reward.. the love to die for and the love to reward. Just my thoughts.. i am certainly no expert on the bible or the christian religions.. i know much however about love and can appreciate the sacrifice of a father and son in such a story.
I don’t get it. How can it be love between a father and son if father and son are the one and same?
That’s not love. That’s mental masturbation.
Perhaps… and perhaps the climax is the concept. Got love the intrigue and thoughts provoked by such mental masturbation. Love is what it is to the one viewing or feeling it.. or in some cases not feeling it..
Well if yahweh is love, I’d argue that christians are in an abusive relationship.
A Stockholm Syndrome kind of love.
Abusive.. is still love.. just the darker side of it. I was raised by an abusive dad.. he loved me and did the best he knew how… i loved him although it took 30 years to appreciate and accept that he did the best he knew.. i am not a christian per say yet respect the values and the story of Christ and his life as portrayed. All religious peoples are abusive when they dont accept other peoples right to be who they are and what they feel. Good bad and ugly.. the bible was written by men.. not by christ or the all mighty if you believe in such!
I’m so sorry to hear that. My father was very irascible and sometimes violent, so I can relate to your story. We made peace some years ago and he has apologized as best he could, but those bad experiences will be with me for the rest of my life.
Violence and children is a lose-lose situation and I’m glad to see the emerging consensus that it is, under all circumstances, not alright to physically punish your child.
In the end.. the abuse lead to learning a different perspective and a greater understanding and depth of love..
Yes it is coming to the front that violence and physical punishment of and to children is un acceptable.
I am happy to have shared some thoughts with you and you with me.. it is unfortunate that we or any human being had to experience such a negative side of love and life. Thank you for being a beautiful person and making a positive impact on our world.
Anytime and right back at you. Good luck and goodspeed. 🙂
And I respect the values and the story of Frodo. And Harry Potter. And Luke Skywalker.
Why should I value the story of Jesus any higher than those examples?
Unquestioning faith is of use — and, indeed, interest — only to conmen and tyrants. Real love always questions, always challenges, always strives for growth and discovery and invention (even while it also luxuriates in the pleasures of the familiar).
b&
5. ‘cos a cross is a great symbol. Highly distinctive, instantly recognisable, far easier to construct than a Star of David or a pentagram or a Cross of Lorraine or a swastika or a crescent…
Just think if Big J had been stoned instead… we’d be having to bow down to – rocks?
In Baptist Seminary, we learned about four perspectives on the atonement granted by the cross.
1) Christus Victor: In his death and resurrection, Jesus finished the battle begun when Satan was cast out. The Devil is defeated and the rest of history is denoument. As someone noted above, this theology was popularized recently in ‘The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe’ where Aslan returns to life, kills Jadis, & defeats her army.
2) Transactional Justice: God is a paragon of justice. Sin is an offence against god’s justice and must be punished. Because Jesus never sinned, when god punished him, it satisfied the punishment for all sin ever. (How a paragon of justice can justify killing an innocent is left unexplained.)
3) Substitutionary Atonement: This is similar to transactional justice. Jesus actually took on the sin of all people ever, which he could do because he never sinned. Now that Jesus bore all that guilt, he suffered the required punishment to appease god, like the goat sacrificed on Yom Kippur. Because he was god, he had a get out of jail free card, which he played on the third day.
I think it is the most mind boggling question of Christianity. The Bible gives no answer as to why God needed to take his only son, morph him into human form and let him ‘die’ for the purpose of atoning the sins of his created humans. No answer, however imaginative, has even come close to satisfying me. Jesus, as a part of God itself, in the end, became what he was before being morphed into human form, i.e. the son of god in heaven. It’s mind bending to think one with infinite strength, power, love, knowledge and yada yada yada, can suffer at all (along the lines of,’what’s infinity minus one’). I suppose God didn’t suffer, only the human form of God – ‘Jesus’. Well, a better solution would be to torture the hell out of some bad dude and not mess with your only sone. If God lacked the attribute of ‘perfect’ then it really would’t be difficult to explain. The more reasonable explanation that theologians fail to consider is that God isn’t perfect. If it isn’t perfect than the many stumbling blocks with I.D., bible stories, etc go away. Then again, I’m sure the fear is what is left when layer after layer of perfectin is stripped away.
“Why did he kill off almost everyone the first time, but then send Jesus down the second time?”
It might help if you think of God as a software developer going through upgrades and new releases:
http://ronmurp.net/2008/01/25/god-releases-linux-unsubstantiated/
Like many a software developer, God thinks he’s near perfect. His followers though mistake him for a DBA that thinks he’s actually perfect.
I love sophisticated modern theology. One thing I instantly realised from it is that god must be an atheist. He cannot possibly believe in any creator entity greater than himself. I am also assured we are made in his image. So, we ought not believe in any such creator either. So, in creating us, god effectively kills himself. He is resurrected by our acknowledging all this (Indeed, his continuing existence depends on us). Once this is accepted, we know the truth. (Bring on an exciting illustrative story about crucifixion of himself in human form, resurrection etc. to convince the plebs) The truth will set us free. Salvation.
Disclaimer. I might decide on a different version of this hokum at any time as I see fit. You WILL respect it.
One interesting flip-flap theological explanation I’ve read about it is given in “Manual of dogmatic theology” by Tanquerey. It’s a catholic book. At page 87 one can read:
Article II Christ’s Sacrifice
816 Scripture discloses that, after the fall, men carried o sacrifices. Among them the sacrifice of bread and of wine which Melschisedech offered is renowned. (…)
B According to Leviticus, and the Epistle of Hebrews(VIII,IX,X), a sacrifice true and properly called is the offering of a sense-perceptible substance, together with a certain immolation, of it; this offering is made to God (…) to make known man’s feelings and dispositions through which God’s Supreme Sovereignty is recognized.
By reason of the end, sacrifice is distinguished in fourfold manner: I.Latreutic 2. Eucharistic 3. Impetratory 4. Propiciatory (…) and satisfactory, which is offered for sins of for punishment due to sins (…).
Said this, at page 90 one can read:
The Necessity of the Redemption
820 Errors. These taught the absolute necessity of the redemption: Wycliffe, because “all things happen from necessity”; the Optimists, like Malebranche an Leibnitz because, in the light of creation, God had to “turn his mind” to the Incarnation.
821 A Certain doctrine.
I.Once we have posited the existence of the original sin, then the Redemption was not necessary but altogether appropriate. This is certain.
a. It was not necessary since God was able either to annihilate the human race or reduce it to the natural order. This is certain and is opposed to the teaching of St. Anselm in particular, who taught that Incarnation is necessary.
In Scripture Redemption is attributed to God’s mercy: “According to his mercy he saved us” (Titus III,5;Ephesians,II,4).
Reason proves that the Redemption is not necessary: neither on the part of God Who is free in all His works ad extra, nor on the part of man who, can in no way demand reparation.
b. However, redemption was fitting: because the sin of the human race was less grave than the fault of the Angels and was caused by Adam’s will alone and according to the temptation of the devil; because after man’s will after the fall remained movable and hence capable of repentance.
2. Once we have posited in God the will to restore the human race, the Redemption through Christ was not necessary. This is certain contrary to Tournely and a few other theologians. In fact, God was able to restore the human race in many other ways; by pardoning gratis; by accepting imperfect satisfaction.
822 B The Common Doctrine.
If we posit the fact that God wished to exact equivalent satisfaction, the Incarnation of a divine person was strictly necessary.
(…)
Proof from the infinity of sin: the offense inflicted upon God through mortal sin is infinite in genere moris (“Since God exceeds the creature ad infinitum, the offense of one sinning mortally against God will be infinite in regard to His dignity; this has been injured in a certain manner by sin, while God Himself and His precept are disdained and despised. St. Thomas, Truth, q.28, a .2″). The offense increases according to the dignity of the person injured:”The injury is in proportion to the person injured“. But in this case the injured person is infinite. Therefore only through an infinite person can offense be made right. For a creature, a finite being, cannot offer infinite reparation:”Honor is according to the one giving honor“, or honor is measured according to he dignity or the person honoring.
Resuming… make a God that want perfect satisfaction, give an infinite value to something called mortal sin and one can get the reason why something of “infinite value” has to be immolated for these sins. In christianity’s case, the body of god Jesus.
There are also obsolete bits of theology that have been abandoned. One old explanation of the crucifixion was that it was a trick to make the devil break his covenant with god. The devil does not realise that Jesus is the son of god and only gets it after the harrowing of hell. It helps to picture Jesus turning up in the afterlife, peeling off a rubber mask to reveal the face of Martin Landau and then driving to heaven in an unmarked van while the “mission accomplished” music plays.
It’s all just trope.
Jesus… is each person’s own ego;
to be saved-from-sin… Jesus must go.
Hanging-on-cross… dramatic way to show.
Crucifixion… trope for self-immolate;
thus, let conscience… through life navigate
and with all dissonance… conciliate.
sin = selfishness.
Hi Jerry.
Abba’s children bless you.
http://llldiem.wordpress.com/2013/06/20/hosea-62/
http://llldiem.wordpress.com/2013/07/06/deuteronomy-306/
Jyrki
It has always mystified me that Christians can tell me what the crucifixion is but can never explain HOW it actually works, because clearly it hasn’t worked, just like all of Yaweh’s rash actions.
I love the “The demonstration of extreme suffering by the crucified Christ helps us suffering humans identify more readily with Jesus.” excuse. We could have gleaned that from Dismas who was “saved” and Gestas was not.
An important part of the Christian mindset is that some things have to just be taken on faith because we cannot understand them. I think this is one of them. To be fair, just because we cannot understand why God does something doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. My big problem with all of this is that basically God is magic. Once you allow magic powers to exist, logic flies out the window. Any attempt to explain or understand them is silly — they are as they are because of magic.
Makes sense to who?
god/son = conflation of generations = no degeneration.
Conflation of generation explains virgin birth, see my post.
I think the whole crucifixion/resurrection story was meant as an example. The father figure can do whatever he thinks is right, because he is, after all, the father. In the meantime, the son must obey because there is long term reward and the father is wiser and therefore must be trusted.
And since we are all, according to them, “children of god,” we need to trust the father completely and obey without question.
It’s just an attempt to help secure power by the “holy” caste over all other castes.
I would’ve liked it better if it turned out more like Star Wars.
Hmm…
Dour Father (who art in Heaven)
Old Moses ben Amram
Jesus Waterwalker
Cmon-3Pter
R2-Doubting2mas
Maybe not…
/@
As a fellow Jew (one who has studied Judaism a bit as well as the customs of the other peoples of the ancient near-east), I look at it from a sociopsychological viewpoint. To wit: as ordered in the Torah, there was a sacrificial offering – a lamb or a goat – on every holy day, but especially on days of atonement and other occasions where God was asked for forgiveness. That was what priests did for a living (and how they got fed, since only part of the offering was burned!) So, having to figure out a reason for why Jesus (most experts believe the historic Jesus was real) did not bring the salvation of the world, his disciples (or his disciples’ disciples) used the story that followed naturally from the almost universal custom of sacrificial offering. After all, human sacrifice was an almost universal custom among ancient civilizations of the old world AND the new (Inca, Mayan, Aztec). A fact that I find even more inexplicable than Jesus’ being the messiah.
Barbara Harley MD
… (most experts believe the historic Jesus was real) …
Most? Believe?
I’m glad we talk about Jesus.
http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Philippians-1-18/
Jesus!
To Diana: Power and a bit else.
http://evotuhat.wordpress.com/
I’ll provide an answer based on psychological dynamics.
A powerful and compelling answer to the Professors query. And I will “try” to make it brief.
The human brain has the power to conceive of the finite and infinite.
1) Our brains enable us to realize there was a time before and a time after us.
2) Awareness of the finite and the infinite: Awareness of this dichotomy creates a tension. This tension is realized in our brains as fear and anxiety – Part of an expected emotional sense or fear of impending death.
3) — Denial
This anxiety and fear, which again is the result of our three pound brains awareness of this dichotomy (self and death of self) HAS TO BE dealt with
The way it IS dealt with is by the psychological defense known as denial.
BUT
Denial by itself is not enough!
Denial by itself takes up a lot of psychological energy! It is not possible to accomplish this purely unconsciously. Think of coming upon a family tragedy having to say no no no, this is not happening and putting your hands over your eyes.
SO
4) Denial ➕ Transcendence
We resolve this tension not just by using denial but using a somewhat more complex psychological strategy that depends on denial BUT takes it one step further. (ONE STEP BEYOND)
Denial plus transcendence together better handles this tension/anxiety
An example will help.
The example will be Jesus Christ.
But first one more dichotomy has to be introduced! And this dichotomy is the awareness of the corporal (body) and the non corporal (non body). Our 3 pound brain also provides awareness of this!
We know that is is the body the corporal reality that will die. Either in the jaws of a sabertooth tiger or by some infection or whatever process. It is the corporal that withers and dies.
The corporal matches up with the finite in the two dichotomies – see below.
Corporal Finite
Non Corporal Infinite
4A) Religion is a psychological mechanism to resolve this dichotomy.
So
Anything for example anything that heightens this dichotomy has to be denied/transcended. Corporal things heighten the dichotomy. SEX is about as corporal as you can get! And the church cannot deal with sex.
Sex means procreation – generation and degeneration.
Jesus Christ COULD NOT be born by the mechanism of sex.
AND
He wasn’t — Ergo the virgin birth!
I promised I would make this short, So let me bring this to an end.
The concept of the Trinity vitiates the concerns regarding generation or generations and degeneration.
The father and the son conflate the generations; and if there is no real generation there cannot be any real degeneration. Both generations conflated. (And Remember the VIRGIN Mary – Virgin is the operative word)
The mechanism of the holy ghost enables the dynamics of the Trinity. A ghostly figure (dead people come back as ghosts, but NOT! Holy Ghosts) The holy ghost both serves to accept and deny death. Again the Holy Ghost is part of the Trinity that does away with sex, generation and degeneration.
Religion is a mechanism that tries to deal with the transient nature of our lives.
Prof. Dean Falk in her book the ‘Fossil Chronicles’ gestures to what point such awareness of self and therefore of death may have entered in the hominin (fossil) human family tree.
I think you’re answering the wrong question. Your ‘psychological dynamics’ more or less takes the atheist stance and points out that the Christian story is supposed to help people overcome their fear of death. Christ rose from the dead; thus, our mind/selves/souls will never die. Comfort.
Well, yes.
But Jerry’s question is a different question and a lot harder to answer if you are a believing Christian and you don’t just think Original Sin is a concept which stands in place of our corporal bodies : you think the details of the literal story are true and make sense. Given that, your helpful translation isn’t going to help much.