Demystifying Jesus

[Aussiescribbler]

The bible describes our sinfulness more adequately and completely than we can do so without God. The bible says that our flesh and our undegenerated hearts desire things that God considers wicked, it states that only once our hearts and minds are spiritually renewed is the case where on average out spirits can overcome our flesh. A famous verse about this states that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Again let me point out we can not even begin to resolve this many issues. Only once you pick one or two and we concentrate on them can I sufficiently resolve anything. Right now the best I can do is briefly comment on some of the issues you mention. I prefer to debate less subjects, but much more in depth.

This one is easy, the alternative is Christ. The following points briefly summarize Christianity.

We've been skirting about a bunch of issues, but here I think is the crux. Your explanation of Christianity, as you see it, makes it clear that we have a major sticking point to finding agreement, and that is that your God is my Satan.

1. If God is to be God then he must demand perfection. Also, the only criteria that make sense are that a perfect God cannot settle for anything less than perfection and that for imperfect creatures to be redeemed depends entirely on grace.

Perfection has no existence outside the human mind. We can conceive of a perfect circle, for instance, but we cannot find one or make one in the real world. This prefect God is a figment of the human imagination with which we have historically tortured ourselves.

The creative principle of the universe (my God) operates by imperfection. The process of evolution which produced us was one of mutations (mistakes) which proved beneficial. We progress through making mistakes and so does nature.

Idealism (the love of perfection) is the root of all evil. To blame ourselves for falling below the imaginary standard of perfection robs us of self-acceptance. It robs us of the ability to love ourselves and if we can't love ourselves we can't truly love others.

To demand perfection of anyone is oppressive psychological bullying. Naturally such bullying makes us angry. Having our self-acceptance stolen by the unreasonable demand that we be perfect makes us egotistical, i.e. selfish.

This God of yours is not a source of love, because love requires acceptance and forgiveness. To demand perfection is an act of hatred.

The demand for perfection produces everything which is antagonistic to it. Evil behaviour is an act of rebellion against the oppressive demand for perfection. Belief in a perfect God breeds evil. The guilty conscience produced comes to resent the clean conscience of innocence. Thus this demand for perfection is what generates the desire to harm the innocent.

William Blake made it clear :

To the Accuser Who Is
The God of This World

Truly, My Satan, thou art but a Dunce,
And dost not know the Garment from the Man.
Every Harlot was a Virgin once,
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.

Tho' thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline,
The lost Traveller's Dream under the Hill.

I don't believe that Jesus represented this false God of yours. I believe his God was love. Love does not demand perfection. Love gives everything and demands nothing.

2. So no one other than Christ is perfect yet God requires perfection.
3. So creatures as imperfect as we are completely dependent of God to supply the remedy.
4. God paid the entire price to provide that redemption.
5. God allowed himself to die in our place by our killing his perfect and divine son.

It is Satan who slakes his blood lust with the death of the innocent. Those who killed Jesus did so because of what your God did to them, making them hate the life and love that he personified.

6. This is another issue that makes Christianity different from other faiths.
7. His allowing his perfect son to take the just punishment our imperfect records deserve is called substitutionary atonement.
8. Substitutionary atonement means Christ's perfect record is accredited to our own lives when we accept his sacrifice and we inherent the reward he received by being morally perfect before God, where as the punishment for our imperfection was placed on Christ which he willingly paid for on the cross.

This makes no rational sense. How can one person's death pay the price for anther's misdeeds?

9. That means that since Christ willingly suffered the full penalty for my sins I am declared perfect before God so that I may enjoy what Christ himself earned.
10. Also since the Holy Spirit comes to live inside every Christian believer the moment he accepts Christ's sacrifice and he is born again, that means that after that point we have divine help in overcoming out sinful flesh but the fact we all fall short of perfection will not matter since it is Christ's righteous that he provided when he died to all those that believe that I will be judged on. Those who do not accept Christ's sacrifice will be judged on their imperfect record but not Christians.

The flesh is not sinful. It is perfectionism's intolerance toward the natural processes of the flesh which turns us away from love towards violence and cruelty. And sexual lust is driven by the desire to find escape from the unjust torture inflicted upon us by this concept that we should be perfect.

Of course, I don't mean anything supernatural when I talk of Satan. I am talking about an idea. To me your God is just that, an idea that you feel has an actual supernatural existence.

I'm happy to be judged on my own deeds. I don't want a free pass if it is bought with the blood of another.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

To me, any healthy individual would want life to go on. ( even most un-healthy try to get better )
Eternity is in our hearts. For each day we can think of, or imagine, we can think of a next or following day.
We can count forwards and backwards forever and ever.
Do you enjoy travel and meeting new people ? I never tire of travel and meeting new people and re-visiting others.
If you enjoy that, if so, just think eternity in perfect physical health would make that enjoyable and possible.
Eternity would make possible to absolutely meet each and everyone one on Earth.
A friend last year visited Australia and brought me back gifts including vegemite which I never had before.
Could you meet everyone on Earth in only a thousand years, and even if you could you might want to re-visit them.
We don't use all of our brain capacity at this point, so with a better brain we can learn and study in depth as never before in history. We'd be able to communicate much better and understand each other better than now.

Yes, evolution would require death, so we are Not talking about evolution but creation, as Adam was created from the dust of the ground. Lifeless Adam came to life ' after ' God breathed the breath of life into lifeless Adam.
Only Adam and Eve (people) were offered everlasting life on Earth as long as they did Not break God's Law.
The breaking of the Law carried with it the evil or the bad which is the death penalty. No post-mortem penalty.
Since we are innocent, and death pays the price tag of sin, then there will be a resurrection of the dead.
Is there any dead person you would really like to see again? Resurrection, to me, will make that possible.

Well, it's not something I have any desire for. Eternity is too long for me.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

If my God or one very similar did not specially create humankind then the primary creative foundation for human beings is natural selection. If God does not exist then evolution is an unguided process which only creates a series of equally worthless life forms. There is no reason to think that the randomness of nature alone could endow anything with value or worth. So that we (in that case) have no inherent value or worth.

If you feel that humans, or any other animals, would be "worthless" if they were not specially created by a supernatural being, I pity you the poverty of your soul.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

Christianity is a faith position as well as most of human knowledge. Can you tell me anything that you can know to a certainty in any field? Regardless, why are you demanding certainty for faith claims? Inappropriate standards are evidence of a failed argument.

I'm not demanding certainty for anything. To ask if someone is sure they are not deluded is to ask if someone is sure they are not deluded, it is not to demand that they know the answer.

 

[1robin]

We've been skirting about a bunch of issues, but here I think is the crux. Your explanation of Christianity, as you see it, makes it clear that we have a major sticking point to finding agreement, and that is that your God is my Satan.

Where in the world did you come up with that conclusions? You described what we have been doing incorrectly.

1. You have been waxing eloquent about vast numbers of speculative metaphysical presumptions.
2. I have been trying to get you to concentrate on one or two issues where resolution can be had.
3. I have been posting conclusions which follow deductively or implicitly from mainstream academic procedures and standards which have been accepted for hundreds or thousands of years.
4. My other conclusions are consistent with a simple and direct reading of biblical texts and the over all consistency of the narrative unless a secondary reading seems more appropriate.
5. My conclusions also line up with virtually all of the greatest and most accepted bible commentaries.
6. Your conclusions pretty much contradict all of the great academic standards which my conclusions are almost always consistent with.
7. Now of course it is not impossible that you are right but when you consistently contradict the majority of scholarly consensus', standards, the vast majority of the evidence, and the most appropriate specialties to investigate each type of claim but the likelihood that your are right and most of the rest of us are wrong is vanishingly small.

Perfection has no existence outside the human mind. We can conceive of a perfect circle, for instance, but we cannot find one or make one in the real world. This prefect God is a figment of the human imagination with which we have historically tortured ourselves.

Certainly it could. What your referring to is an ideal not a perfection but even ideals can actually exist. Perfection depends completely upon intentions. For example depending upon God's intentions this universe may be perfectly suited to achieve them. If God values freewill then only a universe that contains moral evil would be perfect.

The creative principle of the universe (my God) operates by imperfection. The process of evolution which produced us was one of mutations (mistakes) which proved beneficial. We progress through making mistakes and so does nature.

Nature (your God) has no will. Nothing in the universe contains anything that indicates the way things should be, it only contains what simply is. So nature (your God) is amoral and neither fails or succeeds at anything except contradicting 100,000 years of human reasoning. I know what evolution could have done and what it could not. It could not endow anything with value, worth, equality, sovereignty, dignity, sanctity, or a moral conscience. Therefor your God created us without any of our most cherished qualities.

Idealism (the love of perfection) is the root of all evil. To blame ourselves for falling below the imaginary standard of perfection robs us of self-acceptance. It robs us of the ability to love ourselves and if we can't love ourselves we can't truly love others.

If perfection does not exist then how can we love it. My God specifically loves us despite our imperfections, your God is made up of mere atoms and does not do, think, or love anything.

To demand perfection of anyone is oppressive psychological bullying. Naturally such bullying makes us angry. Having our self-acceptance stolen by the unreasonable demand that we be perfect makes us egotistical, i.e. selfish.

This God of yours is not a source of love, because love requires acceptance and forgiveness. To demand perfection is an act of hatred.

Ok I see now that you are not even reading what I say. The 9 or 10 points I made specifically contradict every single claim you made about God here. I will await you to go back and review what I said and for you to respond appropriately to what I have spent hours trying to communicate to you. If you don't or can't then I cannot justify blowing more time posting the same things that you failed to grasp the last time.

If you can go back and review my ten points concerning the Christian model of salvation and then either admit that every single thing you posted that I bolded above is just plain wrong and does not follow from those ten points then maybe we can continue.

Also, your bizarre conclusion that my God is your Satan is not only inconsistent with your entire world view it also demonstrates just how accurately God predicted several thousand years ago that people would say exactly what you have. These are merely a few of the hundreds of examples.

Isaiah 5:20

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (or in this case God for Satan and Satan for God) my words.

2 Timothy 3:1-5
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

2 Timothy 4:3
For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,

2 Timothy 3:1-4
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

After thinking about this a bit I have decided that I am no longer going to respond to you until we resolve just how flawed and illogical your conclusions I bolded above, in fact are. So if your not prepared to actually get to the bottom of at least one of the thirty or forty issues you have brought up then you probably will not want to continue our discussion, because I am not moving on until we do. It is up to you, you can get out here or prepare to actually get to the bottom of at least something. I have no hard feelings about you disagreeing with me, I do not care if you trash the God I believe in (he can take it and / or defend him self without my help), but I do care that your conclusions contradict what I stated and that they do not follow from what I said at all. So I need you to back up and demonstrate you will actually read what I post and that you can draw logical conclusions from the statements I make whether or not you agree with me. I do not expect you to agree, I do expect you to read and comprehend what I post, or else why should I bother?

 

[Aussiescribbler]

After thinking about this a bit I have decided that I am no longer going to respond to you until we resolve just how flawed and illogical your conclusions I bolded above, in fact are. So if your not prepared to actually get to the bottom of at least one of the thirty or forty issues you have brought up then you probably will not want to continue our discussion, because I am not moving on until we do. It is up to you, you can get out here or prepare to actually get to the bottom of at least something. I have no hard feelings about you disagreeing with me, I do not care if you trash the God I believe in (he can take it and / or defend him self without my help), but I do care that your conclusions contradict what I stated and that they do not follow from what I said at all. So I need you to back up and demonstrate you will actually read what I post and that you can draw logical conclusions from the statements I make whether or not you agree with me. I do not expect you to agree, I do expect you to read and comprehend what I post, or else why should I bother?

Fair enough. I'll look at one thing you said and then try to explain my position expressed in the sentence of mine which you highlighted, which arises from that.

1. If God is to be God then he must demand perfection. Also, the only criteria that make sense are that a perfect God cannot settle for anything less than perfection and that for imperfect creatures to be redeemed depends entirely on grace.

What do you mean by "if God is to be God"? My assumption is that what you mean by this, given that you talk of God being perfect, is "if God is perfect". How do we know that God is perfect? What would it mean for God to be perfect? What would it mean for God to be imperfect? If there is only one God does the concept "perfect" mean anything? If there is only one, you can't make a comparison to see which is the most perfect. On the other hand, if we are insecure about aspects of our own nature or behaviour we may say "God is without our imperfections."

You say "the only criteria that make sense are that a perfect God cannot settle for anything less than perfection..." Why? This seems to be an assertion with no inherent logic, presented with no supporting evidence. I've questioned the use of limited human experience as a frame of reference from which to seek conceptual understanding of that which is far outside our experience, but it seems to me that, if an assertion is made without evidence and I can find a human analogy which contradicts the conclusion, I might as well use it. God is referred to as "the Father" so it doesn't seem unfair to make an analogy to a human father and his children. A human father is not perfect, so we will pick some other admirable trait. A father may be exceptionally intelligent. Will he be able to settle for anything less than the same level of intelligence in his children? He will naturally want that for them (he may even want them to be more intelligent than himself), but he will love them no matter how low their intelligence may turn out to be. He won't demand that they be what he wants them to be if he is a loving father.

It is this question of demanding perfection which I have a problem with. It is why I identify the conception of God as you describe him with the source of all evil, mythologically represented by the figure of Satan.

I said : This God of yours is not a source of love, because love requires acceptance and forgiveness. To demand perfection is an act of hatred.

I base my reasoning on my own personal experience with idealism, i.e. the demand for perfection, as opposed to acceptance.

Let's imagine two Gods fighting over my heart. One demands perfection. The other accepts all imperfections.

When I had the thought about killing my baby niece, the first God took ahold of me. He told me I was evil. He put fear into my heart that I might actually kill her. Under his influence, I became inoperable and self-obsessed. I became incapable, for that period, of feeling love for others.

The other God is the one who blesses me with his presence at the moment. If he had come to me at that time, he would have said : "Don't worry. It's only a thought. What do you think, you have to be perfect?" The curse would have been lifted. I would have not become inoperable. Without that suffering draining me and turning me inward, I would have been more generous and loving towards others.

All of our potential for creativity, love and generosity is in our natural self, our body and mind. It is when our mind becomes possessed by ideas which run counter to our natural tendencies, stifling them or turning them in counterproductive directions, that we become selfish, hostile, lazy, etc.

I say "to demand perfection is an act of hatred" because idealism has always been a source of self-hatred for me. And, I've only been able to feel love for others, when I got off of my own back.

I can't see any evidence for the existence of your God except as a product of the human imagination. I see evidence for my God every day. I am evidence for my God. My God is a never-ending process of unguided improvisation which has produced an intelligent and imaginative animal like myself, and when I let go of attempts to impose my will on others and accept them as they are I am an expression of the same creative process.

I think that the God of Jesus was not the same God who is portrayed drowning most of humanity and destroying whole cities in the Old Testament. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5:44-45 This suggests to me that he is saying that the way to align ourselves to God's will is to make no demands of others, but to accept them as they are. He doesn't say "Don't be like God. He demands perfection but you have no right to."

 

[1robin]

Fair enough. I'll look at one thing you said and then try to explain my position expressed in the sentence of mine which you highlighted, which arises from that.

Well, I am pleased. Maybe there is hope for this discussion yet. However you got things a little out of order here but maybe I could have been clearer. So lets back up and take a fresh run at this. Since it was my request I will do the work to make it can be accomplished. I am not dismissing your last 4 posts but we need to first get this one thing straightened out. If we can then I will go back and respond to your recent posts. I will clearly post below what it is we need to resolve.

I gave a few brief aspects of Christian salvation which demonstrate the character of God.

1. If God is to be God then he must demand perfection. Also, the only criteria that make sense are that a perfect God cannot settle for anything less than perfection and that for imperfect creatures to be redeemed depends entirely on grace.
2. So no one other than Christ is perfect yet God requires perfection.
3. So creatures as imperfect as we are completely dependent of God to supply the remedy.
4. God paid the entire price to provide that redemption.
5. God allowed himself to die in our place by our killing his perfect and divine son.
6. This is another issue that makes Christianity different from other faiths.
7. His allowing his perfect son to take the just punishment our imperfect records deserve is called substitutionary atonement.
8. Substitutionary atonement means Christ's perfect record is accredited to our own lives when we accept his sacrifice and we inherent the reward he received by being morally perfect before God, where as the punishment for our imperfection was placed on Christ which he willingly paid for on the cross.
9. That means that since Christ willingly suffered the full penalty for my sins I am declared perfect before God so that I may enjoy what Christ himself earned.
10. Also since the Holy Spirit comes to live inside every Christian believer the moment he accepts Christ's sacrifice and he is born again, that means that after that point we have divine help in overcoming our sinful flesh but the fact we all fall short of perfection will not matter since it is Christ's righteousness that he provided when he died to all those that believe that I will be judged on. Those who do not accept Christ's sacrifice will be judged on their imperfect record but not Christians.

From which you drew the bizarre conclusions that follow

To demand perfection of anyone is oppressive psychological bullying. Naturally such bullying makes us angry. Having our self-acceptance stolen by the unreasonable demand that we be perfect makes us egotistical, i.e. selfish.

This God of yours is not a source of love, because love requires acceptance and forgiveness. To demand perfection is an act of hatred.

So you need to explain how you got from what I said to what you said despite the fact that my points completely contradict your conclusions. So emphatically show how you got what you said above from what I said above.

Also in addition to my points above I want to add a few details.

1. The greatest possible evidence of true love is if one person (God or a human being) loves another so much that they will sacrifice themselves for another person (God or Human being). In his dying to redeem us from our imperfections God has paid the highest price possible to do exactly what you claim he didn't, provide perfect forgiveness and acceptance.
2. We build museums and hand out medals to those who sacrifice themselves for others. We consider those who do to be the greatest among us, yet when God does this to an even greater degree you conclude he is the worst of all persons.
3. As my points emphatically demonstrate that for any perfect God to remain perfect he must demand perfection from those he holds sovereignty over. If he does not do so then he has a less than perfect standard and is unjust. He would also have allowed sin and rebellion to enter heaven which would make it the same Hell that we live in now if he did so.
4. However, unlike what you suggest God is not only perfectly just, he is also unconditionally loving. He did not wipe us all out and start over even though he would have been perfectly just to do so, no he provided the entire price to redeem and make righteous those who would merely accept the price that he alone has paid. There exists no greater example of unconditional love in the history of the universe.
5. By the way in this context righteous means to stand in the proper moral relationship before God. It does not mean to meet some subjective human standard. God does not and should not have the same standards that the morally insane human race has.

So review my original points above and the points I added here and draw a rational conclusion from my points to replace the conclusions you originally made above. If you can then I can justify discussing these issue further, but if you cannot why would I spend more time making points which you draw completely irrational conclusions from.

 

[pearl]

How would a symbolic representation of something which presumably took place more than a million years previously end up in the writings of these people living only a few thousand years ago?

The Pentateuch, as we now have it, was compiled by the final redactor during the Babylonian exile. But it is a compilation of older traditions. There are at least four identified traditions throughout.

One could consider Jung's concept of a collective unconscious. Although I've read a little of Jung, I'm not sure, in practical terms, how these memories would be passed on. But I think that there is a special power in the imagination. When we open our mind to roam outside the bounds of linear reason it has a tendency to grasp larger patterns of meaning.

Especially that of the poets. There is an interesting book by Heinz Westman, 'The Structure of Biblical Myths, the Ontogenesis of the Psyche' in which the author states, 'It is assumed by most scholars that the time of Abraham was roughly coincident with that of Hammurabi, King of Babylon; about 1800 BC. Hammurabi dethroned the moon goddess Sin and replaced her with the sun god Marduk. An example of the manipulation of an existing religious institution which is coincident with a rising consciousness in the spiritual realm, Monotheism was born."

If you are interested to know more about Griffith's ideas you can check out his website. I've studied him for about 25 years, but I don't necessarily recommend it has a hobby for others :

Thanks, but I think I'll pass. I have had Westman's book for a few years and have not finished it.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

Well, I am pleased. Maybe there is hope for this discussion yet. However you got things a little out of order here but maybe I could have been clearer. So lets back up and take a fresh run at this. Since it was my request I will do the work to make it can be accomplished. I am not dismissing your last 4 posts but we need to first get this one thing straightened out. If we can then I will go back and respond to your recent posts. I will clearly post below what it is we need to resolve.

I gave a few brief aspects of Christian salvation which demonstrate the character of God.

1. If God is to be God then he must demand perfection. Also, the only criteria that make sense are that a perfect God cannot settle for anything less than perfection and that for imperfect creatures to be redeemed depends entirely on grace.
2. So no one other than Christ is perfect yet God requires perfection.
3. So creatures as imperfect as we are completely dependent of God to supply the remedy.
4. God paid the entire price to provide that redemption.
5. God allowed himself to die in our place by our killing his perfect and divine son.
6. This is another issue that makes Christianity different from other faiths.
7. His allowing his perfect son to take the just punishment our imperfect records deserve is called substitutionary atonement.
8. Substitutionary atonement means Christ's perfect record is accredited to our own lives when we accept his sacrifice and we inherent the reward he received by being morally perfect before God, where as the punishment for our imperfection was placed on Christ which he willingly paid for on the cross.
9. That means that since Christ willingly suffered the full penalty for my sins I am declared perfect before God so that I may enjoy what Christ himself earned.
10. Also since the Holy Spirit comes to live inside every Christian believer the moment he accepts Christ's sacrifice and he is born again, that means that after that point we have divine help in overcoming our sinful flesh but the fact we all fall short of perfection will not matter since it is Christ's righteousness that he provided when he died to all those that believe that I will be judged on. Those who do not accept Christ's sacrifice will be judged on their imperfect record but not Christians.

I can see that the problem from your perspective is that I'm concentrating on the beginning of the first point and seemingly ignoring the provision of redemption, which is the essence of the rest.

First, let me provide some context. I have no reason to believe that the God you are talking about has an existence outside the human mind. The God you are talking about is not my god, i.e. the pantheistic god. Therefore my first question is : "What might be the effect on the human psyche of believing in such a God?" Belief in such a God stretches back well before the time of Christ, so for a long time people believed in such a God without access to the kind of redemption you are talking about, though I understand that it was promised that it would arrive some day. My belief, which I've outlined previously, is that idealism is the root of all evil, because it undermines our natural loving nature and sows the seeds of rebellion against that nature by association. We are naturally loving, but if we feel that love is demanded of us, the demand oppresses us and we are liable to strike back against love because of this association with oppression. I arrived at this conclusion from personal experience. This is why I said that I identify your God with my Satan, because I see Satan as a mythological figure representing the origin of evil and I believe that evil began with idealism. The idea that there is a perfect God who "cannot settle for less than perfection" is a very powerful manifestation of idealism and thus, to my mind, a likely generator of suffering in those who have such a belief and understandable hostility in those to whom they try and introduce it. Of course, I can understand that this is only part of the picture, as this God is also believed to have made a sacrifice to redeem our non-ideal nature. However, the belief in such a deity is liable to have done immense harm to humans in the period before Jesus.

"To demand perfection of anyone is oppressive psychological bullying. Naturally such bullying makes us angry. Having our self-acceptance stolen by the unreasonable demand that we be perfect makes us egotistical, i.e. selfish. This God of yours is not a source of love, because love requires acceptance and forgiveness. To demand perfection is an act of hatred." This was a response to "a perfect God cannot settle for anything less than perfection". Your God seems to have a kind of split personality. He is by nature inescapably hateful - i.e. unable to settle for anything less than perfection - but then turns out to be able to do what you said he could not do - find a way to accept us even though "we all fall short of perfection". So a hateful God becomes a loving God.

Maybe there is some way of resolving all the bizarre contradictions in the story as you tell it.

You say that a perfect God cannot settle for anything less than perfection. How can a perfect God create anything less than perfect in the first place? Is that not evidence that he is not perfect?

If our imperfection was God's doing, since he created us and everything which could influence us, then it is only right that, if he wanted us redeemed, that he should pay the price.

There is no reason for me to believe that Jesus was God in any other way than that that I have given - as an honest person he was the voice of the pantheistic God. I see no reason to believe he was your God in human form. If this were the case, why did he talk to God? Why did he ask God to take the cup from him? Why did he ask God to forgive those who crucified him? Why did he ask God why he had forsaken him? If he really was God and only God, there would have been no need to talk to God. I believe he was a human being, and the love he showed was his love, not that of a supernatural God. All human love comes from the pantheistic God, but the suffering of a man's flesh is his alone. It was in his humanity that Jesus suffered. He made the sacrifice. You can believe that he was your God, who decided to inflict pain on himself to redeem us for our imperfections, but that makes no sense to me.

And what evidence do we have that Jesus was "perfect"?

"Substitutionary atonement" makes no sense. God can't accept imperfection, but his creations are imperfect, so he takes on human form and is killed so that he can then accept them in their less than perfect form. If he is God and can do anything, why is his stuck with having to play this silly game in order to resolve the problem?

Now what would make more sense would be if God took on human form as Jesus as a demonstration of what perfect human behaviour would look like and to express his message of forgiveness that humans fall short. Then, I could see that it would be the right thing for humans to do to honour this example and accept the forgiveness. The problem that I have is with this self-sacrifice being presented as necessary for God, to right the balance of justice, rather than being needed only by humans, who are the ones in need of guidance and forgiveness.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

1. The greatest possible evidence of true love is if one person (God or a human being) loves another so much that they will sacrifice themselves for another person (God or Human being). In his dying to redeem us from our imperfections God has paid the highest price possible to do exactly what you claim he didn't, provide perfect forgiveness and acceptance.

If your God still exists then he didn't sacrifice himself. Jesus sacrificed himself. He died. He gave himself entirely. The concept of sacrifice is lessened by belief in a personal life after death. Just as a suicide bomber is giving up nothing, in their own mind, because they feel they are going straight to paradise, giving one's life for others in expectation of reward in paradise means less than giving one's life if one does not believe in an after-life. Jesus gave his life to others while alive and he accepted a terribly painful death. To know that is enough for me to recognise him as the human embodiment of love.

2. We build museums and hand out medals to those who sacrifice themselves for others. We consider those who do to be the greatest among us, yet when God does this to an even greater degree you conclude he is the worst of all persons.

I didn't say he was "the worst of all persons". I identified him with Satan. I see Satan as an idea with no existence outside the human mind. I see your God as an idea with no existence outside the human mind. I see idealism (the idea that perfection should be expected of us) as the root of all evil. Idealism is an idea that has no existence outside the human mind.

You say that God committed the ultimate sacrifice in order to show his love and redeem us. I believe this is a confidence trick. Satan is often portrayed as a trickster.

The highest form of love is unconditional love, i.e. love given without expectation of anything in return. But what you portray as God's love is not unconditional. If we don't respond in the way he wants us to respond, then he will punish us. My view is that the barriers of love, which originates in our animal self, are guilt and fear. Unconditional love, love which genuinely asks for nothing, is an act of faith. If it eases guilt and/or fear in another, their capacity for love will be unleashed, not as some kind of payment to the giver of love, but as a boon to others who may need it more than he.

3. As my points emphatically demonstrate that for any perfect God to remain perfect he must demand perfection from those he holds sovereignty over. If he does not do so then he has a less than perfect standard and is unjust. He would also have allowed sin and rebellion to enter heaven which would make it the same Hell that we live in now if he did so.

It is idealism (the demand for perfection) which has made our world Hell. It has led to sin and rebellion. These are a response to its oppressiveness. And remember that I have no reason to believe this God of yours exists outside of the human mind. I believe that, in time, unconditional acceptance, i.e. love, will heal sin and rebellion. "But I tell you, do not resist an evil person." Matthew 5:39 If someone feels oppressed by an idealistic exception, of course they will rebel. What heals the desire to rebel is to know that one is accepted as one is, to have the spur of idealism which drives the rebellion, removed.

4. However, unlike what you suggest God is not only perfectly just, he is also unconditionally loving. He did not wipe us all out and start over even though he would have been perfectly just to do so, no he provided the entire price to redeem and make righteous those who would merely accept the price that he alone has paid. There exists no greater example of unconditional love in the history of the universe.

According to Genesis, your God actually did commit a Stalin-like genocide against the human race in the time of Noah.

It was not unconditional, as I've pointed out above.

5. By the way in this context righteous means to stand in the proper moral relationship before God. It does not mean to meet some subjective human standard. God does not and should not have the same standards that the morally insane human race has.

What this means to me is that "righteousness" in this context means having the proper moral relationship to a figment of the human imagination. Here we see just how insidious this belief is. It is bad enough that we might feel ourselves to be held up to an unrealistic ideal, but because the ideals of this imaginary God are beyond the understanding of those of humans, we have no right to think of ourselves as anything but the most disgusting of parasitic worms if we follow our original loving animal nature.

This is why I call your "God" my "Satan", because we are naturally loving intelligent animals who have been cursed by the thought virus idealism (of which your God is an imaginary embodiment). Idealism (the demand for perfection) kills love and breeds hatred. Jesus tried to help us to abandon idealistic expectation of ourselves and others - "Judge not that thou be not judged", "Love thy enemy", etc. - and return to our natural animal self, i.e. our instinct for love. The idealism thought virus adapted to this situation by creating the lie that Jesus was an embodiment of a perfection-demanding God, and that his sacrifice was the self-sacrifice of that God. Metaphorically, Jesus' unconditional love for humanity threatened Satan so he responded by claiming Jesus' sacrifice as his own, thus fooling many Christian's into worshipping him. By this, I mean, that the God of Jesus is one to whom love is all and perfection meaningless, the pantheistic God. A God which makes people think less of themselves because they are not perfect is a blight on the human race, and any kind of confidence trick he plays to make us think he loves us does nothing to change that.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

There is an interesting book by Heinz Westman, 'The Structure of Biblical Myths, the Ontogenesis of the Psyche' in which the author states, 'It is assumed by most scholars that the time of Abraham was roughly coincident with that of Hammurabi, King of Babylon; about 1800 BC. Hammurabi dethroned the moon goddess Sin and replaced her with the sun god Marduk. An example of the manipulation of an existing religious institution which is coincident with a rising consciousness in the spiritual realm, Monotheism was born."

Thanks for the recommendation. It sounds amazing. I just ordered a second hand copy. It's always hard to find the time for all these great books.

 

[pearl]

Thanks for the recommendation. It sounds amazing. I just ordered a second hand copy. It's always hard to find the time for all these great books.

There is an interesting blurb on the back cover of the book from Pope John XXIII;
"If we could find a way of getting mankind to sit down and read the Bible as a newly published book, A NARRATIVE OF MAN SEARCHING FOR HIMSELF, it would become very popular in places where people have forgotten it."

 

[pearl]

Jesus was a human being who is now dead, but whose words we can still find some wisdom in? I suspect that we might agree that the religion that grew up around Jesus's name misrepresented him.

Bultmann would agree, that the historical man named 'Jesus' was an eschatological Jewish prophet whose original disciples(A.D. 30's) knew him only as such, and whom the post-apostolic (i.e. non-apostolic) Hellenistic church (late first century A.D.) deified as the Son of God: "Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God...,...the kerygma of the Hellenistic church proclaimed Jesus as the crucified and risen Christ" . Bultmann noted two predominating cultural influences which shaped each New Testament document: [a] the historical Jesus dressed in the mythical garb of the Gnostic "heavenly redeemer"

 

[1robin]

If your God still exists then he didn't sacrifice himself. Jesus sacrificed himself.

Ok, now we are on track, so far.

1. Jesus is God. The Christian God is a triune being (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), the same way we are either dual beings (body and soul) or triune (body, soul, and spirit). However you do not have to believe what I said about us to understand what I said about God. God is one being (the God Head) composed of 3 persons.
2. Each person (father, Son, and spirit) has an individual will but is of the same essence and all 3 suffered when Christ paid for our sins.
3. Those three persons have existed in perfect love, harmony, and have done so eternally. So when Christ offered him self to save mankind before any of us even existed then he and the father decided that a morally perfect Jesus would be physically tortured in an event so horrific it led to the creation of the word excruciating, despite his being the essence of love he would be wrongly condemned and killed by his own people and go to Hell himself so we would not have to, so at the crucifixion God's wrath was poured out on his perfect son for every sin everyone of us had or ever would commit this also resulted in the father being separated from the perfectly loving relationship they had shared for eternity for the first time.
4. This separation is what the God head endured so that we do not have to. That is what Hell is. It is permanent separation from God and all that depends on him. It is the utter absence of love, goodness, hope, peace, contentment, etc.......
5. So if the father, son, and Holy Spirit paid that price for you then is it any wonder the punishment for rejecting such an infinite gift is so horrific.
6. You must do but two things, admit your are utterly sinful (which you already have), and that you accept Christ's sacrifice to redeem you.
7. So in this context you should not distinguish between Christ and God, both are part of the same being. Also you must take or reject God within the context in which he comes. God if he exists is a necessary (philosophical term) and eternal being. So if he has ever existed then he has always existed and always will. So he could never stop existing. Christ already had eternal life and gained nothing more than glory (if even that) by his self sacrifice. He did not earn a reward by his actions, he had no obligation or motive other than his perfectly loving nature to do what he did.
8. Lastly you cannot decrease an actions worth by simply pointing to the Christian belief which inspired it. However a saying I heard applies here anyway. A Christian wants to go to heaven but only a few of us want to die to get there. Your Muslims did not sacrifice themselves for love the way Christians have, they do what millions have done over the course of history, to die or risk death to hurt those they hate. That is very common, but what many Christians have done is very uncommon.
9. You confused (trivial) physical death with (infinitely more important) spiritual death or second death.

Look at this stuff in this light. Even if you never agree with me if you stick it out you will at least have some idea what the Christian faith's main doctrines are.

I didn't say he was "the worst of all persons". I identified him with Satan.

No other word in human history has been more often associated with the greatest possible evil, as Satan. As for your argument look up Thomas Aquinas's five ways, specifically his way concerning degrees. I would provide his argumentation but I have never taken the time to slim it down enough for a post. It covers any optimality argument which is what you made.

You say that God committed the ultimate sacrifice in order to show his love and redeem us. I believe this is a confidence trick. Satan is often portrayed as a trickster.

Satan in no mainstream view has the power to resurrect nor does he desire anything less than spiritual death. He is not in the resurrection or sin forgiving business at all. Again you keep defining things in ways which completely contradict the principle text by which you come to know about them in the first place. You have an arbitrary and speculative metaphysical shell game going on.

The highest form of love is unconditional love, i.e. love given without expectation of anything in return.

The only being that can offer unconditional love is a being which lacks nothing in its nature, what is called the greatest possible being by philosphers. Only the Christian God is described in this way. If your God is merely nature your God couldn't exist and even if he did he couldn't love at all. Tell my which part of your God (composed entirely of atoms which have no capacity to love and which have no moral property) is the love molecule or the love law?

1. My God is just and perfect so he must demand perfection and justice. .
2. My God is perfectly loving and so redeems the imperfect.
3. He loves unconditionally because he paid the entire cost to redeem every imperfect being who would merely accept it. That includes rapists, murderers, and those who have hated him, etc......

Your God does not love, does not hate, does not command, does not reward, does not redeem, does not condemn, does not think, etc....... Your God is irrelevant, redundant, and either does not exist or it does not matter if he does.

It is idealism (the demand for perfection) which has made our world Hell. It has led to sin and rebellion. "But I tell you, do not resist an evil person." Matthew 5:39

You cannot even begin your argument until you first state what is perfect, show who is demanding perfection, and then show how whoever it is demanding perfection actually created the Hell we live in. No, demands for perfection do not cause imperfection, besides your drawing an ontological conclusion from your own epistemological argument, and it committed the genetic fallacy as well. I can give you argument after argument that show you have massive reasons to believe my God exist, in fact that is the only possible rational conclusion available for the arguments I can make and has been for thousands of years. The moral argument, the teleological argument, the cosmological, Aquinas' 5 ways, Augustinian argumentation, the 2500 biblical prophecies, etc........ all only have my God as a possible conclusion or explanation. I can see we are not going to get to where I wanted to at this point so I will give you one of these arguments below to see what you do with it.

The verse you quoted actually proves you are incorrect. The author and principle of that verse contradict your conclusion. That verse is a call to the unconditional love that you say it's author does not have. It is a direct command for Christians to practice the forgiveness and acceptance you say God does not have. Bizarre.

According to Genesis, your God actually did commit a Stalin-like genocide against the human race in the time of Noah.

First off a genocide is the act of killing a race because they simply are that race. If I did not like the Irish and set out to kill all people who were Irish because they were Irish that is a genocide. Second Genocide is wrong because it is carried out by a human race which does not have perfect knowledge of a racial group's guilt or innocence, and we do not have complete sovereignty over any racial group. God does have perfect knowledge and complete sovereignty over everything. Thirdly God did not kill any race or cultural group merely because they were that group. He has worked with different groups for a very long time and eventually had to wipe them out because they were completely depraved. The bible explicitly state who, how long, and why the antediluvians were destroyed. It was because the bible said their thoughts were incessantly evil, he even tried to save them anyway but just as deluded sinners will not accept Christ they would not get on the Ark. I have no trouble defending those times when God judged groups but for now the above is enough to short circuit every claim you made. A God who is good must stop groups that will not cease from killing, enslaving, oppressing, abusing, and even eating their fellow humans. An evil God would not do so, which is what you must be suggesting. Your God would worse than either, he is completely indifferent.

It was not unconditional, as I've pointed out above.

Then pray tell, state the condition.

What this means to me is that "righteousness" in this context means having the proper moral relationship to a figment of the human imagination.

There you go again, simply presuming the truth without even hinting at any evidence or argumentation to believe your presumption is true. I cannot argue against a preference, I can only argue about evidence, facts, and the conclusions that follow from them. I cannot make you prefer something you wish was true.

This is why I call your "God" my "Satan", because we are naturally loving intelligent animals who have been cursed by the thought virus idealism (of which your God is an imaginary embodiment). Idealism (the demand for perfection) kills love and breeds hatred. Jesus tried to help us to abandon idealistic expectation of ourselves and others - "Judge not that thou be not judged", "Love thy enemy", etc. - and return to our natural animal self, i.e. our instinct for love. The idealism thought virus adapted to this situation by creating the lie that Jesus was an embodiment of a perfection-demanding God, and that his sacrifice was the self-sacrifice of that God. Metaphorically, Jesus' unconditional love for humanity threatened Satan so he responded by claiming Jesus' sacrifice as his own, thus fooling many Christian's into worshipping him. By this, I mean, that the God of Jesus is one to whom love is all and perfection meaningless, the pantheistic God. A God which makes people think less of themselves because they are not perfect is a blight on the human race, and any kind of confidence trick he plays to make us think he loves us does nothing to change that.

What we are causes what we do. In 5000 years of recorded history there have been around 300 years without major wars. We kill our children in the womb on an industrial scale. We are morally insane. So I reject your mere declaration and substitute reality for it. Again, your stating what you prefer even if contradictory to the world that actually exists and demanding reality adjust accordingly.

Anyway let me get to the argument I said I would post at the end.

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
2. The universe began to exist;
   Therefore:
3. The universe has a cause.
4. From the conclusion of the initial syllogism, he appends a further premise and conclusion based upon ontological analysis of the properties of the cause:[4]
5. The universe has a cause;
6. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful;
   Therefore:
7. An uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

Kalam cosmological argument - Wikipedia
Philosophy of Religion » The Kalam Cosmological Argument

 

[JustWondering]

Assuming that Jesus was a real man, is it possible to give a real world interpretation to his life and philosophy?

Central to that philosophy is saving us from sin.

What is meant by the term “sin”? Leaving aside any examples which require reference to God, let’s look at gluttony as an example. Gluttony is being selfish regarding food. If we look at other things which are considered “sinful”, they always come down to some form of selfishness. Even in the contentious matters which can’t be interpreted on a purely inter-human level but refer to thoughts or actions which are contrary to the wishes of “God”, we can still see that selfishness is the essence of the matter because putting one’s own desires before those of a deity in which you believe can reasonably be defined as a form of selfishness.

Selfishness is clearly a major problem for the human race. If we were not selfish, would there be war, poverty, rape…? If we were to solve the problem of human selfishness, it is unlikely that there is any other problem facing us which we could not solve.

So the problem of “sin” is the key problem.

How did it begin?

The Old Testament gives us the myth of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

I won’t go into paleo-anthropology because it isn’t something I understand well enough. Let’s just say that there is the possibility that our ape-like ancestors might have lived relatively peaceful cooperative erotically-uninhibited lives like the bonobos.

In the story of Adam and Eve, a dangerous predatory animal - a snake - causes a woman - Eve - to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A man - Adam - follows suit. This leads to a curse from “God”. Adam and Eve notice that they are naked and clothe themselves out of shame.

If our ancestors were loving and cooperative, they would have had no example within their society of what would later come to be known as “evil”. If a predatory animal such as a leopard ate one of their babies, however, this would stand in stark contrast to their own behaviour. And it would be a threat they needed to address. Since the women were the primary nurturers, the job of protecting against leopards, and trying to understand them, fell to men. Fighting leopards requires the cultivation of talents which run counter to those of the nurturers. The competitive and generally rowdy behaviour of the male hunters was bound to cause friction back in the village where it clashed with the nurturing priority. So morality began with the women’s insistence that men moderate their behaviour.

So we can see that predatory animals (the snake) caused women (Eve) to see the need for some system of morality (eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) and impress that need on men (Adam) also.

Why did this lead to a curse?

This system of morality gave birth to idealism - i.e. characterising some forms of behaviour as “good” and other kinds of behaviour as “evil” and then using forms of self-discipline or social discipline to encourage the former and discourage the latter.

On the surface this doesn’t seem unreasonable, but the problem is that, over time, idealism undermines self-acceptance. The more insecure we become in ourselves as a result of accumulated feelings of guilt, the harder it is for us to behave in a cooperative loving way. As a result we are open to more criticism and more guilt. It is a negative feedback loop. An unjust sense of condemnation from idealism makes us angry. The more insecure we feel the more egotistical, i.e. ego-embattled or selfish, we become. And the more insecure we become the harder it is for us to think truthfully.

The story of Adam and Eve recognising that they were naked and clothing themselves out of shame symbolises the origins of lying. Nakedness is a symbol for honesty. In the absence of idealism we were comfortable to be seen as we were - warts and all - but once we were exposed to the unforgiving gaze of idealism, we felt ashamed and adopted a false persona to try to hide our imperfections.

What came to be known as “God” was a false amalgam of nature with idealism. We are products of nature. Our ancestors no doubt experienced themselves as an integral part of that system, but the corrosive effects of idealism must have undermined this sense of identification, leading eventually to a paranoid relationship to nature. First would come fear of being punished by nature, and the need for some kind of appeasement rituals. But nature does not reflect idealism, so in time the embodiment of idealism would have to become otherworldly. Thus supernatural religion came into being - a collective paranoid psychosis complete with “magical thinking”.

It is into a world completely dominated by this psychosis that Jesus is born. Telling people that they are all nuts is not going to get him anywhere. If he is going to save them, he has to find a way to free them from their underlying selfishness problem while accommodating the fact that they are living within a collective psychosis. Because such delusions are fear-driven, the last thing you want to do is to attack them directly. This makes the psychotic person more frightened and thus more desperate to cling to the delusion.

So - while showing his knowledge of scripture, using terms like “your Father in Heaven”, etc. - he expressed a philosophy aimed at repairing the damage which had been done by idealism and returning people to the natural capacity for loving cooperation characteristic of life in “the Garden of Eden”.

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the insecure or suffering individual. The insecurity arises from guilt. Hence the emphasis on “judge not that thou be not judged” and that “God” forgives “sins” which are “confessed”, i.e admitted. Releasing people from feelings of guilt is necessary if they are to become less selfish.

Encouraging honesty is also important - “The truth will set you free” - because the maintenance of lies requires self-directedness and lies do not provide a commonly acknowledged framework of reality for us to come together.

The idea that those who believe him “won’t die” doesn’t refer to physical death, which comes to us all, but the spiritual death which selfishness entails. I use the term “spiritual” not in a supernatural sense but as a way of referring to the emotional experiencing of having meaning. Meaning arises through relationship. Think of a letter of the alphabet. It may have no specific meaning on its own, but meaning arises when we place it with other letters in a word. In the same way our own lives have no meaning except the meaning which arises out of our relationship with others. Selfishness excludes us from experiencing the rich emotions which can accompany that meaning.

In many ways, selfishness is self denial. We deny ourselves the true pleasure of life itself - we turn away from life to nurture our feelings of idealism-inflicted self-hatred. The irony is that what we need to heal that canker lies all around us.

I could go into more detail, as I have on my blog : How to Be Free - the blog

Since Jesus's philosophy is based on the premise that EVERYONE is defective and needs his specific snake oil cure all, I believe it is psychologically harmful to those who indulge in it. Whether there is a real world interpretation for it or not, I'm sure there are other philosophies that are more healthy and constructive.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

1. Jesus is God. The Christian God is a triune being (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), the same way we are either dual beings (body and soul) or triune (body, soul, and spirit). However you do not have to believe what I said about us to understand what I said about God. God is one being (the God Head) composed of 3 persons.

I'm not a dualist. I'm a holist. I believe that the soul is simply a function of the body. All spiritual experiences are experiences of the flesh, because we experience them in our body, which is the medium for the experience. What we call a spiritual experience is an experience of the body in response to ideas of meaningful relationship to some larger context.

I don't accept your interpretation of the trinity. I gave my own non-supernatural interpretation in a previous post.

2. Each person (father, Son, and spirit) has an individual will but is of the same essence and all 3 suffered when Christ paid for our sins.
3. Those three persons have existed in perfect love, harmony, and have done so eternally. So when Christ offered him self to save mankind before any of us even existed then he and the father decided that a morally perfect Jesus would be physically tortured in an event so horrific it led to the creation of the word excruciating, despite his being the essence of love he would be wrongly condemned and killed by his own people and go to Hell himself so we would not have to, so at the crucifixion God's wrath was poured out on his perfect son for every sin everyone of us had or ever would commit this also resulted in the father being separated from the perfectly loving relationship they had shared for eternity for the first time.
4. This separation is what the God head endured so that we do not have to. That is what Hell is. It is permanent separation from God and all that depends on him. It is the utter absence of love, goodness, hope, peace, contentment, etc.......

I don't accept any of this as being a rational way of interpreting the crucifixion. We know that a preacher was crucified. We don't know that this was the bodily form of some supernatural God who wanted to let his creations off the hook for being imperfect by taking their form and being tortured. None of this makes much sense and seems to me to have been laid over the real event in order to make it conform to the prior beliefs of some superstitious people.

5. So if the father, son, and Holy Spirit paid that price for you then is it any wonder the punishment for rejecting such an infinite gift is so horrific.

If we are punished for not accepting a gift, that gift was not given unconditionally. It was given on the condition that we either accept it or face punishment.

6. You must do but two things, admit your are utterly sinful (which you already have), and that you accept Christ's sacrifice to redeem you.

When did I say I was "utterly sinful"? My interpretation of "sin" is selfishness. I admit that I am selfish, but I'm not utterly selfish. I do things for others without expecting anything from them in turn.

I don't accept that Jesus died for my sins. I accept the help that Jesus provides through his words of advice about how to live life. I accept the gift of inspiration that comes from contemplating his life. I do not accept him as my personal saviour in any kind of mystical sense. And I don't believe he would have wanted me to. I have no desire to be a Christian.

7. So in this context you should not distinguish between Christ and God, both are part of the same being. Also you must take or reject God within the context in which he comes. God if he exists is a necessary (philosophical term) and eternal being. So if he has ever existed then he has always existed and always will. So he could never stop existing. Christ already had eternal life and gained nothing more than glory (if even that) by his self sacrifice. He did not earn a reward by his actions, he had no obligation or motive other than his perfectly loving nature to do what he did.

The point I'm trying to make is that a person who doesn't believe they will have any life after death, but who never-the-less gives their life to save another, has arguably made a bigger sacrifice than Jesus, if Jesus knew he would be resurrected.

9. You confused (trivial) physical death with (infinitely more important) spiritual death or second death.

I believe spiritual death occurs before physical death. It is the state of alienation, of being cut off from the capacity for love and truth, i.e. being cut off from my God. Those who are not in a state of alienation don't worry about the physical death so much, even though there is no personal after-life, because they identify more with process, i.e. God, than they do with their body or ego.

Look at this stuff in this light. Even if you never agree with me if you stick it out you will at least have some idea what the Christian faith's main doctrines are.

It isn't that I haven't heard most of this stuff before. I just don't see any good reason to believe it. My aim has always been self-understanding. I've found my way out of severe personal problems. I've absorbed ideas from others which have been useful in this. My reason for taking an interest in the words of Jesus is that, the more I came to understand myself, the more meaning those words took on for me. I view the Bible as a highly unreliable source of information. I have no reason to believe that Jesus was some perfect human. And I certainly have no reason to believe that he was the human embodiment of a supernatural God. Some things in the gospels seem full of meaning to me. Some parts strike me as fairy story. If I can find a symbolic meaning in these parts, that's good. If I can't, I'm happy to push them to the side as not being helpful to me. I'm not looking for religion.

Satan in no mainstream view has the power to resurrect nor does he desire anything less than spiritual death. He is not in the resurrection or sin forgiving business at all. Again you keep defining things in ways which completely contradict the principle text by which you come to know about them in the first place. You have an arbitrary and speculative metaphysical shell game going on.

You misunderstand me. This is my reasoning :

1. You believe in a fictional perfect God.
2. Our original animal nature is to be unconditionally loving.
3. Unhelpful thinking alienates us from our unconditionally loving original nature.
4. The main kind of unhelpful thinking which sows the seeds of conflict both between ourselves and our loving nature and between ourselves and our fellows, is idealism (for instance the belief that there is a perfect God who judges us).
5. Since belief in a fictional perfect God is a key example of the idealism which is the root cause of all destructive and unloving behaviour in humans, it is not unfair to identify such a false belief as one of the manifestation of the mythological figure, Satan, especially as Satan is sometimes referred to as The Accuser, which suggests a judgemental figure.

The only being that can offer unconditional love is a being which lacks nothing in its nature, what is called the greatest possible being by philosphers. Only the Christian God is described in this way. If your God is merely nature your God couldn't exist and even if he did he couldn't love at all. Tell my which part of your God (composed entirely of atoms which have no capacity to love and which have no moral property) is the love molecule or the love law?

I don't understand your reasoning. Unconditional love is simply love which asks nothing in return. A sinner can easily perform an act of unconditional love. If a prostitute saw a lonely man on the street and gave him oral sex for free, that would be an act of unconditional love. It doesn't require someone who "lacks for nothing in [their] nature". I'm sure you've given unconditional love many times in your life. You may be doing it here by trying (from your perspective) to help me save my immortal soul. Are you expecting anything in return? This is the beauty of life to me. Love is everywhere you look, even if it may be diluted much of the time.

Love is a manifestation of my God. "He" invented it by trial and error. Look at a woman nurturing her young child. That was happening long before anyone started thinking about your God. Our bodies are a product of nature and our bodies instruct us in how to love each other. And the human mind, which you use to think about your imaginary God, is a product and manifestation of my God. It may have taken billions of years, but my God finally produced a mind capable of conceiving of "his" existence. (If the universe is the product of the perfect powerful being you surmise, why did it it take such an unthinkably long time for him to create beings capable of writing books about him?)

The verse you quoted actually proves you are incorrect. The author and principle of that verse contradict your conclusion. That verse is a call to the unconditional love that you say it's author does not have. It is a direct command for Christians to practice the forgiveness and acceptance you say God does not have. Bizarre.

I never denied that Jesus had unconditional love for humanity. What I don't believe is that he was the supernatural God you describe. I believe he spoke for my God, i.e. for nature and for our original loving nature, and that his message was hijacked by people who believe in the supernatural God you describe.

First off a genocide is the act of killing a race because they simply are that race. If I did not like the Irish and set out to kill all people who were Irish because they were Irish that is a genocide. Second Genocide is wrong because it is carried out by a human race which does not have perfect knowledge of a racial group's guilt or innocence, and we do not have complete sovereignty over any racial group. God does have perfect knowledge and complete sovereignty over everything. Thirdly God did not kill any race or cultural group merely because they were that group. He has worked with different groups for a very long time and eventually had to wipe them out because they were completely depraved. The bible explicitly state who, how long, and why the antediluvians were destroyed. It was because the bible said their thoughts were incessantly evil, he even tried to save them anyway but just as deluded sinners will not accept Christ they would not get on the Ark. I have no trouble defending those times when God judged groups but for now the above is enough to short circuit every claim you made. A God who is good must stop groups that will not cease from killing, enslaving, oppressing, abusing, and even eating their fellow humans. An evil God would not do so, which is what you must be suggesting. Your God would worse than either, he is completely indifferent.

Were there any infants amongst the antediluvians at the time of the flood? I can understanding striking dead the killers, enslavers, oppressors, abusers, etc. But did children deserve to drown?

In the real world, people who have driven themselves to paranoia with their fantasies about a perfect judgemental God, are bound to see divine judgement in any natural disaster. It still goes on today with "Christian" preachers who say that a tsunami was brought on by the legalisation of gay marriage or whatever.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
2. The universe began to exist;
3. Therefore:
4. The universe has a cause.
5. From the conclusion of the initial syllogism, he appends a further premise and conclusion based upon ontological analysis of the properties of the cause:[4]
6. The universe has a cause;
7. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful;
8. Therefore:
9. An uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

As I've said, there is nothing wrong with saying about anything "I don't know..." I'm willing to believe that something could begin to exist without having a cause. I've seen no precedent for that, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. This doesn't mean that things would be coming into existence without cause willy nilly. The beginning of the universe was, presumably, a unique event. Maybe the universe didn't begin and only looks like it began because only part of the evidence is visible to us. So the universe may or may not have a cause. Even if it had a cause, how does that mean that it had a creator with intention? What we see in the universe is complexity coming from simplicity and things like personal power and intelligence arising from something less powerful and intelligent. So maybe the cause of the universe was to the universe as it is now as a microbe is to a human. The idea that the universe was created by a human-like intelligence who cares about the personal lives of humans does not arise from this argument. This argument is a con job intended to foist this irrational belief on the gullible.

My contention is that our ape-like ancestors at one stage were peaceful loving beings. Our instincts are largely the same as theirs. Our bodies tell us to love each other and live in peace. But our minds came up with ideas which proved unhelpful to us. We began to think in terms of "good" and "evil" and to strive to pursue the former and avoid the latter through personal discipline and imposed group discipline. This was unavoidable, but it brought with it internal conflict and conflict between individuals. And eventually it interfered with our ability to follow the guidance of our bodies toward love. Eventually we became so psychologically disturbed by this battle between "good" and "evil" within us, that we started to become paranoid. We imagined that there was some spirit of goodness standing in judgement of us. At first we would have just interpreted the vicissitude of nature as its punishment. Later the nature god would proliferate into other gods. And eventually, a popular belief took hold that there is a single powerful Father God. The degree to which people would believe in the supernatural would depend on how alienated they had become from their own body :

“Full sexual consciousness and a natural regulation of sexual life mean the end of mystical feelings of any kind. In other words, natural sexuality is the deadly enemy of mystical religion. The church, by making the fight over sexuality the center of its dogmas and of its influence over the masses, confirms this concept.” Wilhelm Reich

As I said above, spiritual experiences are experiences of the flesh, but part of idealism's curse was to make many people feel that their body was untrustworthy. Belief in the supernatural is founded in a projection of aspects of bodily reality into a "safe" ethereal realm. But the body has never been the problem. What we call "sins of the flesh" begin with the mind. The flesh knows what is good for it. Take gluttony. Why does someone eat more than their body tells them they need? Perhaps they are lonely and use food for comfort. So the problem lies in the mind thinking "I'm lonely," not in the body's desire. Similarly with promiscuity. The body craves regular orgasms, which aid in it's health and the health of the mind, but the body doesn't care how they are obtained. As far as the body is concerned, it might as well be faithful. It is the mind which gets bored, wants variety, etc. So if we want to solve our problems we need to look at the mind and at our unhelpful thinking, the kind of thinking which may lead us to behave recklessly or selfishly.

It seems to me that what heals those problems of the mind is unconditional self-acceptance. If we really feel that we are O.K. as we are, then this quietens down the mind, it helps us to be satisfied with less and it gives us a better basis from which to establish good relations with others.

I see the habit of viewing one's psyche and behaviour by reference to some theoretical perfect being who is watching us all the time as antithetical to this kind of mental health, and thus antithetical to the chances of us establishing a loving and peaceful world.

Does the idea of redemption through Christ undo this damage?

While I can't know what goes on in someone else's mind, I can speculate on what I imagine could be the effect of the kind of Christian belief you outline. It means living with the idealistic vision of how God would like us to be, while having Christ to redeem us for not being able to reach that ideal. It seems to me that the presence of the ideals might well generate its opposite in the heart of the Christian. He might become inwardly depraved, but repress that depravity, and cling tightly to Christ as his life-preserver in the rising tide of sewage. Feeling this deep inside himself he might tend to look around at the world and see sin everywhere and little evidence of the goodness of his fellows. He worships God/Christ, who has given him redemption, but you can't worship anyone on a conscious level without feeling first resentment and then hatred towards them on a subconscious level. They rescue you, but they make you feel pathetically powerless. And the more he hates God/Christ deep down, the more important it is to spend time on prayer and worship and praise. The mind scrambles to shore up faith by any means to counter the deeper dilemma. The more he needs Christ/God the more he hates them. The more he hates them the more he needs them. Meanwhile, to non-believers he seems fake and obsessed, not in touch with his natural self.

But this is all a fantasy which probably has more to do with me expecting to find my theories playing out, than it does with anyone's lived reality.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

Bultmann would agree, that the historical man named 'Jesus' was an eschatological Jewish prophet whose original disciples(A.D. 30's) knew him only as such, and whom the post-apostolic (i.e. non-apostolic) Hellenistic church (late first century A.D.) deified as the Son of God: "Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom of God...,...the kerygma of the Hellenistic church proclaimed Jesus as the crucified and risen Christ" . Bultmann noted two predominating cultural influences which shaped each New Testament document: [a] the historical Jesus dressed in the mythical garb of the Gnostic "heavenly redeemer"

Wow! It definitely sounds like something I need to read.

 

[Aussiescribbler]

Since Jesus's philosophy is based on the premise that EVERYONE is defective and needs his specific snake oil cure all, I believe it is psychologically harmful to those who indulge in it. Whether there is a real world interpretation for it or not, I'm sure there are other philosophies that are more healthy and constructive.

It is so hard to be sure what is Jesus' philosophy and what is the twisting of that philosophy by others. I think that everyone can learn to behave more lovingly. I don't like the term "defective". Jesus said we should become "like little children", which suggests that we are not essentially defective, but that we lose our way. Improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone expressed a similar idea : "Many teachers think of children as immature adults. It might lead to better and more 'respectful' teaching, if we thought of adults as atrophied children." Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre

I agree with you that Christianity, in many of its forms, can be harmful. I consider myself very lucky not to have been brought up by religious parents. Many atheists seem to still be carrying the scars of their indoctrination.

Having said that, I've always had a fondness for the figure of Jesus (I love movies about him) and find that many of his sayings, individually, speak to me.

I think the reason for wrestling with Jesus is precisely the hope of bringing some healing to the darker manifestations of Christianity. If there is a helpful message in there, of love, non-judgement and generosity, perhaps we can extricate it from the repressive, superstitious and sex-negative ideas which have encrusted it.

 

[pearl]

Wow! It definitely sounds like something I need to read.

I think Rudolph Butlmann could be known as the 'father of demythologizing.