Did Jesus really have to die for our sins?

[sojourner]

God can make it more interesting. He's perfect like that.

Nothing's more interesting than life, itself.

 

[PolyHedral]

But that's God's responsibility also.

 

[sojourner]

But that's God's responsibility also.

Nope. God gave us that responsibility in creation.

 

[PolyHedral]

Nope. God gave us that responsibility in creation.

But we're influenced only by creation.

 

[sojourner]

But we're influenced only by creation.

Meaning?

 

[PolyHedral]

Meaning?

There is no possible way to make an "independent" decision. The only way a decision can be made are either 1) based on memories, which are a consequence of how the universe is, or 2) randomly. Neither of these can sensibly be called our responsibility.

 

[Heathen Hammer]

I have always found comments suggesting what God should do or not to be based on anything sufficient to justify the assertion. Why do you think a finite mind could have the capacity to demand anything from an infinate one or be able to judge it? It might be that a generic God is an unjust God and doesn't care whether you get the message or not.

Dog Whisperer Fallacy.

I imagine you have found comments like this to be insufficient because you are a slave to the dogma that suggests an immoral act by God cannot be judged by 'lesser' moral agents, to be so. If you were to place numerous of your God's actions into the hands of a human instead, you'd consider that human a villain. You give God a pass because the dogma allows you to stop thinking about it.

'You don't understand, just do what i say' is not a moral system's basis by any intelligent stretch of the imagination. If the agents who act within it are disallowed from understanding it, it's void.

 

[Heathen Hammer]

Because man has an inherent desire to be free of authority and accountability. These days noone can claim they don't have access to God's truth if they want it. Even in former times God said,
New International Version (©1984)
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. Romans 1:20

People don't like the implication so we grab hold of any theory that argues against it.

I chuckled that you quoted a version published in 1984 for things said 'in former times'.

Btw, God's power and infallible Will should overcome Man's 'desire to be free of authority and accountability'.

 

[Heathen Hammer]

Or, like any other great teacher, instead of just spoon-feeding students the information they "need," he gives us space and encouragement to discover for ourselves, thereby growing in the process.

Providing vague, and occasionally immoral dictums via a questionable tome written in prehistory, is not 'spoon feeding'.

 

[Thief]

Teachers guide, and God is infallible.

...Yet so many people seem to be hopelessly lost. I wonder why.

They are lost.

Like seed cast to the wind...here we are.

Some of us will fail for having fallen to infertile ground.
Some of us will fail for all the weeds around us.
Some of us will fail caught up immediately by the life of others.

Most of us fail for not realizing the scheme of things....
and then 'standing up' when this life is over.

God is responsible?....okay.
But was it really His fault that you might fail?

Some things are random.

 

[Heathen Hammer]

They are lost.

Like seed cast to the wind...here we are.

Some of us will fail for having fallen to infertile ground.
Some of us will fail for all the weeds around us.
Some of us will fail caught up immediately by the life of others.

Most of us fail for not realizing the scheme of things....
and then 'standing up' when this life is over.

God is responsible?....okay.
But was it really His fault that you might fail?

Some things are random.

If God is the gardener, none of that is. Yes, it's his fault.

 

[Thief]

If God is the gardener, none of that is. Yes, it's his fault.

Nay.

The random effect sought is your individual perspective...your unique soul.
That won't happen if God is pushing your next gesture or word.

So...you may well be...on your own.
And when it's over....you stand with your thought and feelings....naked.
For all of heaven to see.

Will they then ask you to follow?....in spite of your faults.
Or will they let the ground take you?

The scheme of things will lay the fault in your hands.
You say and do, as you think you should, or care to.
Whose fault is that?

 

[Heathen Hammer]

Nay.

The random effect sought is your individual perspective...your unique soul.
That won't happen if God is pushing your next gesture or word.

So...you may well be...on your own.
And when it's over....you stand with your thought and feelings....naked.
For all of heaven to see.

Will they then ask you to follow?....in spite of your faults.
Or will they let the ground take you?

The scheme of things will lay the fault in your hands.
You say and do, as you think you should, or care to.
Whose fault is that?

Nay.
Why do you keep repeating this lost concept, again and again? is it just a tantrum you use when you have no arguments? Your 'what will you do when you stand up at the end' garbage? it doesn't apply. This has been repeated to you so many times now I just don't understand your absolute failure to get it. At this point, it's like... creepy and pathological.

Your God is in control in this scenario; he's infallible. So all the mistakes belong to him. It's his fault.
EVERYone has personal responsibility and the ONLY one who refuses it is your God. So criticize him about it, because refusal of personal responsibility is your fetish. Unless you're too cowardly to stand up to the ONE person whose fault it actually is!

Though I already know the answer. Yes, you're too cowardly.

IN your anecdote, God is the gardener. Who is casting the seeds? Who chooses the ground? How do the seeds determine where they are thrown? Can they see the ground? Can they choose to fall or not? So yes, by your own inept example, it's God's fault; well done.

The one telling phrase from you is "God is responsible?....okay." Because that's where you realize, yes, it's God's fault, but you don't dare point it out because he's a petty vengeful little prick who will destroy you for pointing out his incompetence. So it's not truth you are interested in, no honor, virtue or justice or moral righteousness, it's not upsetting your tyrant.

At least man up for once in your life and admit that's all it is. You are not a noble rogue poet; you're a sniveling coward.

 

[URAVIP2ME]

If God is the gardener, none of that is. Yes, it's his fault.

Let's say you [gardener] are in your garden and there is an interruption.
Would you go back to your garden after the interruption was over ?
Or, would you say because of the interruption I will never go back to my garden?
Most people just go back to their garden once the interruption is over.

God planted with quality seeds, Satan threw in the weeds/tares.
Satan is at fault because Satan is the one who caused an interruption in God's paradisaic garden.
We are still living at that 'time of interruption' but that does not mean God has abandoned his purpose to return, so to speak, to the paradisaic garden.
Return or come back to 'weed out' the garden with 'weed-b-gone' forever.
['wicked-b-gone' forever.-Proverbs 2 vs 21,22; Psalm 92 v 7]

We are nearing the weeding 'time of separation' [Matthew 25 vs 31,32]
when Jesus will weed out, or separate, the good sheep or 'wheat'-like people from the wicked goat 'weed/tares'-like people at this global 'time of separation' or 'harvest time'.

Satan's deliberate efforts to corrupt everyone fails because the thriving wheat do not become weeds.
Just as the humble sheep do not become haughty goats.

So, God's purpose for a paradisaic earth has never changed, [Rev. 11 v 18 B]
just like when you want to do something and something else gets in the way.
It does not stop you from doing what you want it just delays you for a while.
Jesus will soon put an end to Satan's getting in our way.
[Rev. 19 vs 11,15; Isaiah 11 vs 3,4]
Then, God, as the Greatest Gardener, will have Jesus usher in global Peace on Earth toward men of goodwill.
-Back to the garden we go. Back forever and ever.

 

[beerisit]

Let's say you [gardener] are in your garden and there is an interruption.
Would you go back to your garden after the interruption was over ?
Or, would you say because of the interruption I will never go back to my garden?
Most people just go back to their garden once the interruption is over.

God planted with quality seeds, Satan threw in the weeds/tares.
Satan is at fault because Satan is the one who caused an interruption in God's paradisaic garden.
We are still living at that 'time of interruption' but that does not mean God has abandoned his purpose to return, so to speak, to the paradisaic garden.
Return or come back to 'weed out' the garden with 'weed-b-gone' forever.
['wicked-b-gone' forever.-Proverbs 2 vs 21,22; Psalm 92 v 7]

We are nearing the weeding 'time of separation' [Matthew 25 vs 31,32]
when Jesus will weed out, or separate, the good sheep or 'wheat'-like people from the wicked goat 'weed/tares'-like people at this global 'time of separation' or 'harvest time'.

Satan's deliberate efforts to corrupt everyone fails because the thriving wheat do not become weeds.
Just as the humble sheep do not become haughty goats.

So, God's purpose for a paradisaic earth has never changed, [Rev. 11 v 18 B]
just like when you want to do something and something else gets in the way.
It does not stop you from doing what you want it just delays you for a while.
Jesus will soon put an end to Satan's getting in our way.
[Rev. 19 vs 11,15; Isaiah 11 vs 3,4]
Then, God, as the Greatest Gardener, will have Jesus usher in global Peace on Earth toward men of goodwill.
-Back to the garden we go. Back forever and ever.

I must say that that is funny.

 

[PolyHedral]

Let's say you [gardener] are in your garden and there is an interruption.
Would you go back to your garden after the interruption was over ?
Or, would you say because of the interruption I will never go back to my garden?
Most people just go back to their garden once the interruption is over.

God planted with quality seeds, Satan threw in the weeds/tares.
Satan is at fault because Satan is the one who caused an interruption in God's paradisaic garden.
We are still living at that 'time of interruption' but that does not mean God has abandoned his purpose to return, so to speak, to the paradisaic garden.
Return or come back to 'weed out' the garden with 'weed-b-gone' forever.
['wicked-b-gone' forever.-Proverbs 2 vs 21,22; Psalm 92 v 7]

You're forgetting two very important things in this metaphor.
1. Satan is a plant. God put him there.
2. God can be in multiple places at once, and can do multiple things at once without issue.

This is a bit of a problem.

 

[URAVIP2ME]

I must say that that is funny.

So, is God getting ready to fire up his Rototiller and take out the weed patches ?
Take out the weed patches in order to relieve mankind of distresses !

- Psalm 72

 

[1robin]

Dog Whisperer Fallacy.

I imagine you have found comments like this to be insufficient because you are a slave to the dogma that suggests an immoral act by God cannot be judged by 'lesser' moral agents, to be so. If you were to place numerous of your God's actions into the hands of a human instead, you'd consider that human a villain. You give God a pass because the dogma allows you to stop thinking about it.

'You don't understand, just do what i say' is not a moral system's basis by any intelligent stretch of the imagination. If the agents who act within it are disallowed from understanding it, it's void.

Thats the point, they are not in the hand of a ignorant, petty, sinful man. They are in God's omnipotent, onniscient, perfectly just hands. How can the former evaluate the latter. If you can't see the onvious problem here I give up.

The below states in better than I have.

"My ways are not your ways"
Can you imagine playing Kasparov at chess? I think he'd wipe the floor with me! Or can you imagine a six year old child debating Physics with Einstein?
Or could your own child, at the age of four, understand the skills and intricacies of what you do at school or college or work? Probably not, because what you do is so much more complex than ayoung child's, and they just don't have the vocabulary.
Could you begin to explain it? Perhaps a little; but there are limits to what they can understand at so young an age. You would certainly have to explain in very simple language, and that might give them a glimpse of what you do.

In the same way, God is far more complex than we are, and we cannot understand him fully. If we read the book of the Isaiah in the Bible, we find these words in chapter 55, verses 8 and 9, spoken through Isaiah, who was a prophet:
"My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the Lord. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts."
This means that we can only glimpse a portion of what God is doing in our lives and in the lives of others. There is an inevitable gap in understanding.

However, God provides a means to bridge that gap in two ways:

1. He has given us the Bible, which we sometimes refer to as "the word of God". We believe that the books of the bible have been given to mankind as a sort of Handbook or Manual. It contains answers to many questions, and the beginnings of many understandings. And the Bible stands on the assumption that God speaks and people can hear him. And some special people were chosen to write down what God has revealed. And some people can hear God today, and they reveal what God chooses to reveal through them.
2. Just as the Bible was written in the light of the understanding given by the Holy Spirit, so we need to read it in the same light. And that requires faith. If you will believe and trust in Jesus Christ, then pray and ask God to reveal the meaning of the "scriptures" (that is, the writings in the Bible) through the understanding of his Holy Spirit.

These revelations through the scriptures eventually become part of us, and help to change us into the sort of person that God wants us to become, deep down inside where it counts. And only God can do this. My ways are higher than your ways.

It's possibly reasonable to say you don't believe in God. It's rediculous to say you can judge him if he is who he said he is.It reveals an unimaginable level of arrogance.

 

[URAVIP2ME]

You're forgetting two very important things in this metaphor.
1. Satan is a plant. God put him there.
2. God can be in multiple places at once, and can do multiple things at once without issue.
This is a bit of a problem.

Please post the Scripture verses you have in mind for the ^above^.

Satan turned himself into a Satan and a Devil.
-James 1 vs 13-15; Ezekiel 28 vs 13-17

God created all as free moral agents to choose for one's self.
-Deut. 30 v 19; 32 v 5; Lev. 1 v 3

Where does it say God can be in multiple places at once?
1st Kings chapter 8 repeatedly places God in heaven. [heavenly home]
The resurrected 'ascended to heaven' Jesus appears before the person of God located in heaven.- Hebrews 9 v 24.

Psalm [104 v 30] mentions when God sends forth his spirit things are created, and the face of the earth is renewed.
That does not place God in multiple places but places his active spirit where he wants it.

 

[1robin]

I chuckled that you quoted a version published in 1984 for things said 'in former times'.

Btw, God's power and infallible Will should overcome Man's 'desire to be free of authority and accountability'.

You do not seem to understand Christian theology very well. God made it clear that to force someone to love and follow him is not what he desires. He gives a choice, and inevitably some will choose to reject it. To appeal to your argumentation procedures you love so much. You use many strawman arguments. You state a non-Christian view point refute it and think you have done so with Christianity.

What in the world is funny about the date for the version of the bible I listed. The verse itself has been around for thousands of years. Tell me what's funny so I can laugh.