I never understood the most basic, fundamental point of Christianity - how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?
“Oh, you think it’s so easy? You get crucified, and if you really do it, I’ll forgive everybody’s sins.”
“That’s bullshit. You won’t do that.”
"I’ll go you one better - I’ll forgive their sins forever.
All right, you got a bet!"
If I committed a murder, that murder doesn’t just go away just because some random, third party person died somewhere, 2000 years ago. My victim is still dead, the family is still sad, and I’m still a murderer.
The next time I’m in front of a judge, can I claim my crimes are already absolved because a guy died long ago? Of course not, I’m going to jail. The government doesn’t buy that story because it makes no sense, and I’m not buying it either.
This has been a source of debate since the very earliest days of Christianity, but essentially the main idea isn’t that suffering in and of itself is what did it, it is that Jesus was a literal ritual sacrifice for the sins of humanity. In ancient Judaism, there was a lot of focus on animal sacrifices, and the Book of Leviticus lays out a very complex and rigid set of sacrifices that must be performed as atonements for each type of ritual impurity or sin, with the degree of sacrifice required roughly corresponding to the seriousness of the offense. It ranged from spiced cakes donated to the Temple for minor offenses to burning an entire bull without eating any of the meat for especially serious ones. Christians believe that by living a perfect human life and by being God incarnate, Jesus proved to be a good enough sacrifice to permanently atone for all the sins of humanity.
Of course, this begs the question of why God can’t decide he just doesn’t want to do all these sacrifices to begin with, and that goes back to Greek philosophers like Plato who tried to work out what properties a monotheistic God would have. One of the properties that got worked out was that if God is the greatest possible being, then He cannot change- after all, if He could, then he would have either not been the greatest possible being before, or he would be becoming something other than the greatest possible being. Therefore, if you believe that God created a set laws that demand sacrifice, then they must be in effect forever.
I would then wonder the validity of the assumption that the ancient Jewish laws were actually God’s divine laws in the first place under this set of assumptions, but that is assumed to be true by both Christians and Jews as a matter of faith.
Of course, this begs the question of why God can’t decide he just doesn’t want to do all these sacrifices to begin with, […]
Did you even consider the optics? He’d have to apologize to everyone who was condemned to hell. That’s some real egg on his face if he just goes “whoopsie, my bad”!
how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?
Speaking as someone literally brought up in a cult like environment, it’s just one of the many nonsense word-salad doctrines that people live by when those people were never able to separate their feelings from their world. IE: there is a segment of the population who do not have a distinction between an outside world, separate from their feelings about it.
This is a reflection of how the brain works at a most basic level. It’s not a logic tool for reasoning out problems, not by default at least. It’s default instruction state is to assemble experiences and associations to write a story to explain how you feel, and it doesn’t actually have objective understanding about the world, so those stories do not need to make sense.
When you really, truly internalize and digest this fact, you will understand so much about yourself and others. You can overcome some depressive episodes and know how to make people like you, how to manage addiction and unhealthy behavior and how to avoid being manipulated by others, and so much more. It’s vastly important we understand this about our brains.
You have to actually train your brain to actually analyze and understand the world around you in a way that shows you how you and the world relate to each other. Most people don’t do this work, but brains are good enough at taking advantage of your environment that they can still get through life… but it leaves a lot of room for huge errors in reasoning. In fact, it’s not conscious reasoning at all, it’s story-building followed by total acceptance of this story without question because you think it’s you reasoning, but it’s just how your brain weaves narratives in your mind.
So for the people who never learned this distinction, they just feel a thing, and then either let their brains assemble a story to explain it, or they latch onto someone else’s supplied story. This is how people are manipulated on mass scales.
“Jesus died for your sins” makes no logical sense, but it’s not meant to, it’s meant to make you feel like something is being done about the thing you worry most about, if you’re going to see your loved ones again in heaven. That’s a paralyzing fear for almost every human who’s ever lived. Our awareness of death has opened a huge vulnerability in our reasoning skills and caused us more death and harm than if we didn’t worry about it so much.
Once you have a McGuffin that makes you feel protected from this thing you fear most, you are more likely to reinforce and build further narratives around this idea to protect it. To not protect it, to dismantle it and try to figure it out is literally painful to many people, because it invites in the question… What if you’re wrong?" and even approaching that question makes people who have never processed these emotions absolutely fall apart.
edit: I want to add one thing, that the more you think about the really hard thing, your inevitable end, it becomes easier to accept and make peace with. Especially as you get older and more aware of your own limitations and realize you’re kinda stuck on rails in this life. There is no bigger story or experience you will miss out on.
Truly excellent post, and a special thumbs up to the use of McGuffin in this context.
You are describing Critical Thinking Skills, something that gives people the ability to recognize and dismiss propaganda, among other things. Critical Thinking is how we are meant to process information, and without it, people substitute the kind of chaotic thinking you describe.
Conservatives recognize Critical Thinking Skills as dangerous to their important propaganda machine, so controlling education, and suppressing the overt teaching of Critical Thinking Skills is an important on going mission.
I was lucky to have three years in high school with a subversive English teacher that used his subject to teach us Critical Thinking Skills, and hone them. I didn’t recognize what he had been up to until years later, and I was so pleased that he was so much more subversive than I ever knew.
This is absolutely about critical thinking and I wish we could all be so lucky to have a teacher like you did.
But I realized in typing this out that I have stopped saying the term “critical thinking” years and years ago, because like other terms it has basically lost all meaning, like “gaslighting.” People just say it without any idea what it means, so I stopped saying it. Instead I try to explain it to people without naming it, because people on both sides of every issue think they know what it means.
We need some kind of new order with a nationalized Mr Rogers type system for teaching people the most basic shit all over again. Literally, I am astonished how people missed even the most basic lessons from Saturday morning cartoons, I feel like a huge segment of the population were watching G.I. Joe as kids and routing for Cobra or booing the public service messages at the end.
I tried to get in touch with Mr Clark at one point, but he had passed away about 5 years earlier, so I honor him by talking about him now and then. Easily the most influential teacher of my life, the kind of teacher ALL teachers should aspire to be.
In 10th grade English, we had to write a few papers where we had to defend a position, using strictly documented sources. That taught us how to organize our thoughts, and rely on sources, not our own opinions.
In 11th grade, we had Shakespeare 1, in which we read several plays, and discussed them in class from the directors perspective so we had to decide how to best tell the story, and defend our choices. The desks were arranged in a giant circle, so that when you were debating a point, you had to face the person you were debating with. The ultimate lesson was that the objective was to decide on the best idea, not just win the debate with your inferior concept, and that sometimes means leaving your own idea behind, in favor of the better one. We learned that there is no shame in acknowledging an objectively better idea.
12th grade was Shakespeare 2, and more polishing of our skills.
I thought we were just learning Shakespeare, whom he taught me to love to this day, decades later. It wasn’t until years after high school, when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh when he first came on the scene, and wondered why his obvious propaganda wasn’t seducing me like it was seducing other listeners. That was when I realized that my Critical Thinking Skills were better than most peoples,’ and that all tracked back to Mr. Clark’s English classes. He’s the one that taught me how to think properly, as I thought I was just enjoying Shakespeare.
Its not formally correct, but it’s understandable through other possessive rules. Like “MrscottyTay’s” or “HugeNerd’s”
The English language is more complex than just what the posh prescribed formal rules indicate. They’re guidelines rather than doctrines to live by. Even though this isn’t quite a great example of it but our language becomes a lot more playful and colourful through the breaking of such rules.
It’s an understandable mistake, but it’s also one of those things that gets drilled into you while learning English. I’m all for breaking rules in English when it’s beneficial to the tone, meaning, or something else. But it’s just a confusing error that does nothing to justify its use.
It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.
The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.
I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.
There’s one thing that still bugs me about this narrative. Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice. He wasn’t killed as an offering to God for the sins of humanity. He was killed because he was giving the peasants ideas that the ruling class didn’t like. Unless God sending him to Earth in the first place was the sacrifice, by the logic that God knew how it would turn out. But then God is the one offering the sacrifice… to God.
To Christians, the reasons why the Romans did it are irrelevant, since they were fulfilling a prophecy and doing the thing they needed to do as part of “god’s plan”
That is actually the Christian understanding. To make it even weirder, in a sense, Jesus is God in this scenario. So God sacrifices Himself for the sins of humanity.
Yep, this is how I understood the story. For whatever reason, God considered himself bound by the rules he laid down, and so worked the system to break everyone out of it.
Well I am an atheist myself, but the key is that in the old testament god gave every human the blame for the original sin.
And the special thing with Jesus dying and taking all sins with him is, that now god won’t hate every human just because Adam and Eve stole some fruits.
This some weird story but yeah. Basically after Jesus, god wasn’t that angry anymore.
Original sin is not a concept found in the Bible. That concept developed later. If you read Genesis, Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden just for knowing good and Evil, with an implication that this was too close to godhood for God’s liking
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Later scholars interpreted this as an “original sin” that gets passed on to all humans but that isn’t in the original text and even today Jews don’t believe in original sin despite having the same scripture to work from.
Yeah it would have been way easier for the apparently all good, all knowing, all powerful god to just, you know, forgive us, but that wouldn’t have made for a good book
I want to use an analogy. If you have a landlord who seeks rent every month and you don’t give it one month, then you get kicked out and if you can’t transport your stuff on time then it gets trashed.
If that landlord made an exception, then the full force of the law would require the exception to be applied equally. Soon enough the landlord would have his stuff turn to shit.
However if a buddy spotted your rent, then asked you to simply remember him and try to do better, then the landlord could retain the perfect administration and the perfect justice, and your buddy could be able to chill with you in cool places.
Most of the time I hear about God the father being perfect justice like the landlord and Jesus being able to extend mercy from the suffering so he can provide mercy if you promise to do better.
Simply saying “why not have no rules if you make the rules” is a good response, but there are probably some side effects if there are not rules maintained.
Yeah that’s a neat analogy, but it breaks down when you realize that the landlord is supposedly all good, all knowing, and all powerful. If a being with those properties makes a system that can go to shit, or needs to be “fixed”, then he either made it that way on purpose and is a monster, or he isn’t all knowing and all powerful. Either way, not worth worshipping in my opinion.
If there are side effects, then the god is not all powerful like the bible claims.
The thing is, the bible was written by corrupt and greedy humans, the bible has been selected (many books left out or included) by corrupt and greedy humans, modified by corrupt and greedy humans, and translated by corrupt and greedy humans.
If I wrote a book and claimed “it is the direct word of god and this god is the only god that is all powerful and all knowing and better than your god” that doesn’t make it true. That is literally what happened thousands of years ago, and nobody could refute it or argue against it because the only people who were literate or educated at all were the elite who had a vested interest in control and order
If there is a god and any of his word actually made it into the cherry picked bible, it is so mangled and corrupted beyond recognition as to be useless and unrecognizable, and people STILL have corrupted it so much further daily that they do not follow a single point of the bible. What makes anyone think that people back then were magically less hateful and had absolute 100% integrity even though there was significantly more war and corruption than now.
The entire concept of “salvation” in Christianity is is dynamic, and has changed again and again over the centuries. Jesus was very likely a Jewish Apocalypticist - his message was that the end was near, and God’s justice was close at hand for the unrighteous. And after this was accomplished, God’s kingdom on earth would reign. The “salvation” Jesus refers to here is almost certainly salvation from the upcoming apocalypse - follow him, and you’ll make it through to see the Kingdom.
But then Jesus died. Even though he died, what we know from studying all sorts of religions and cults in history, is that death is often not the end. But the followers of Jesus had to evolve their thinking. So they came up with idea that, even though Jesus had just been killed, he would return again - and soon! To them, of course, soon meant soon. It’s why Paul talks about how marriage is pointless because there isn’t much time left. When this second coming never happened, and the decades rolled on, who Jesus was and what his followers were to be “saved” from changed. At this point the religion is gaining followers all across the Roman Empire. However, as different cultures find Jesus, Christianity itself incorporated ideas from these cultures. One such idea was the concept of an eternal hell of torment - something that was largely unknown in Judaism (outside of sects that had previously been influenced by Hellenism).
Eventually, the Church emerges and certain concepts of salvation become more formalized and standardized. These largely serve the interested of the feudal church - making the masses stay in line. Then you have Protestantism emerge not coincidentally with the emergence of capitalism, and Protestant notions of salvation that serve the interests of capital. Fast forward to today’s White Evangelical Christianity, where salvation only entails a sort of mental assent to a historical event (Jesus’ death). What you actually do - good or bad (like helping the poor) - is largely irrelevant to your eternal status. What matters is being in the “in group” that demands conformity when it comes to various socio-political concepts (abortion, homosexuality, et al).
Christian salvation is “confusing” because after the first couple centuries or so, it’s definition was forged in ways to serve the interests of the powerful.
It’s easier to understand in the context of the past when they had things like sacrificing a goat for stuff. It’s just another form of ritual sacrifice.
I never understood the most basic, fundamental point of Christianity - how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?
“Oh, you think it’s so easy? You get crucified, and if you really do it, I’ll forgive everybody’s sins.”
“That’s bullshit. You won’t do that.”
"I’ll go you one better - I’ll forgive their sins forever.
All right, you got a bet!"
If I committed a murder, that murder doesn’t just go away just because some random, third party person died somewhere, 2000 years ago. My victim is still dead, the family is still sad, and I’m still a murderer.
The next time I’m in front of a judge, can I claim my crimes are already absolved because a guy died long ago? Of course not, I’m going to jail. The government doesn’t buy that story because it makes no sense, and I’m not buying it either.
Edit: Numerous insightful replies, I’m impressed. Thanks, gang!
This has been a source of debate since the very earliest days of Christianity, but essentially the main idea isn’t that suffering in and of itself is what did it, it is that Jesus was a literal ritual sacrifice for the sins of humanity. In ancient Judaism, there was a lot of focus on animal sacrifices, and the Book of Leviticus lays out a very complex and rigid set of sacrifices that must be performed as atonements for each type of ritual impurity or sin, with the degree of sacrifice required roughly corresponding to the seriousness of the offense. It ranged from spiced cakes donated to the Temple for minor offenses to burning an entire bull without eating any of the meat for especially serious ones. Christians believe that by living a perfect human life and by being God incarnate, Jesus proved to be a good enough sacrifice to permanently atone for all the sins of humanity.
Of course, this begs the question of why God can’t decide he just doesn’t want to do all these sacrifices to begin with, and that goes back to Greek philosophers like Plato who tried to work out what properties a monotheistic God would have. One of the properties that got worked out was that if God is the greatest possible being, then He cannot change- after all, if He could, then he would have either not been the greatest possible being before, or he would be becoming something other than the greatest possible being. Therefore, if you believe that God created a set laws that demand sacrifice, then they must be in effect forever.
I would then wonder the validity of the assumption that the ancient Jewish laws were actually God’s divine laws in the first place under this set of assumptions, but that is assumed to be true by both Christians and Jews as a matter of faith.
Did you even consider the optics? He’d have to apologize to everyone who was condemned to hell. That’s some real egg on his face if he just goes “whoopsie, my bad”!
Speaking as someone literally brought up in a cult like environment, it’s just one of the many nonsense word-salad doctrines that people live by when those people were never able to separate their feelings from their world. IE: there is a segment of the population who do not have a distinction between an outside world, separate from their feelings about it.
This is a reflection of how the brain works at a most basic level. It’s not a logic tool for reasoning out problems, not by default at least. It’s default instruction state is to assemble experiences and associations to write a story to explain how you feel, and it doesn’t actually have objective understanding about the world, so those stories do not need to make sense.
When you really, truly internalize and digest this fact, you will understand so much about yourself and others. You can overcome some depressive episodes and know how to make people like you, how to manage addiction and unhealthy behavior and how to avoid being manipulated by others, and so much more. It’s vastly important we understand this about our brains.
You have to actually train your brain to actually analyze and understand the world around you in a way that shows you how you and the world relate to each other. Most people don’t do this work, but brains are good enough at taking advantage of your environment that they can still get through life… but it leaves a lot of room for huge errors in reasoning. In fact, it’s not conscious reasoning at all, it’s story-building followed by total acceptance of this story without question because you think it’s you reasoning, but it’s just how your brain weaves narratives in your mind.
So for the people who never learned this distinction, they just feel a thing, and then either let their brains assemble a story to explain it, or they latch onto someone else’s supplied story. This is how people are manipulated on mass scales.
“Jesus died for your sins” makes no logical sense, but it’s not meant to, it’s meant to make you feel like something is being done about the thing you worry most about, if you’re going to see your loved ones again in heaven. That’s a paralyzing fear for almost every human who’s ever lived. Our awareness of death has opened a huge vulnerability in our reasoning skills and caused us more death and harm than if we didn’t worry about it so much.
Once you have a McGuffin that makes you feel protected from this thing you fear most, you are more likely to reinforce and build further narratives around this idea to protect it. To not protect it, to dismantle it and try to figure it out is literally painful to many people, because it invites in the question… What if you’re wrong?" and even approaching that question makes people who have never processed these emotions absolutely fall apart.
edit: I want to add one thing, that the more you think about the really hard thing, your inevitable end, it becomes easier to accept and make peace with. Especially as you get older and more aware of your own limitations and realize you’re kinda stuck on rails in this life. There is no bigger story or experience you will miss out on.
Truly excellent post, and a special thumbs up to the use of McGuffin in this context.
You are describing Critical Thinking Skills, something that gives people the ability to recognize and dismiss propaganda, among other things. Critical Thinking is how we are meant to process information, and without it, people substitute the kind of chaotic thinking you describe.
Conservatives recognize Critical Thinking Skills as dangerous to their important propaganda machine, so controlling education, and suppressing the overt teaching of Critical Thinking Skills is an important on going mission.
I was lucky to have three years in high school with a subversive English teacher that used his subject to teach us Critical Thinking Skills, and hone them. I didn’t recognize what he had been up to until years later, and I was so pleased that he was so much more subversive than I ever knew.
This is absolutely about critical thinking and I wish we could all be so lucky to have a teacher like you did.
But I realized in typing this out that I have stopped saying the term “critical thinking” years and years ago, because like other terms it has basically lost all meaning, like “gaslighting.” People just say it without any idea what it means, so I stopped saying it. Instead I try to explain it to people without naming it, because people on both sides of every issue think they know what it means.
We need some kind of new order with a nationalized Mr Rogers type system for teaching people the most basic shit all over again. Literally, I am astonished how people missed even the most basic lessons from Saturday morning cartoons, I feel like a huge segment of the population were watching G.I. Joe as kids and routing for Cobra or booing the public service messages at the end.
I tried to get in touch with Mr Clark at one point, but he had passed away about 5 years earlier, so I honor him by talking about him now and then. Easily the most influential teacher of my life, the kind of teacher ALL teachers should aspire to be.
In what way did he teach you critical thinking skills?
In 10th grade English, we had to write a few papers where we had to defend a position, using strictly documented sources. That taught us how to organize our thoughts, and rely on sources, not our own opinions.
In 11th grade, we had Shakespeare 1, in which we read several plays, and discussed them in class from the directors perspective so we had to decide how to best tell the story, and defend our choices. The desks were arranged in a giant circle, so that when you were debating a point, you had to face the person you were debating with. The ultimate lesson was that the objective was to decide on the best idea, not just win the debate with your inferior concept, and that sometimes means leaving your own idea behind, in favor of the better one. We learned that there is no shame in acknowledging an objectively better idea.
12th grade was Shakespeare 2, and more polishing of our skills.
I thought we were just learning Shakespeare, whom he taught me to love to this day, decades later. It wasn’t until years after high school, when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh when he first came on the scene, and wondered why his obvious propaganda wasn’t seducing me like it was seducing other listeners. That was when I realized that my Critical Thinking Skills were better than most peoples,’ and that all tracked back to Mr. Clark’s English classes. He’s the one that taught me how to think properly, as I thought I was just enjoying Shakespeare.
Mr. Clark was a flat out fucking genius.
it’s means it is
It can also be a possessive for it
Just remember this handy song from Strong Bad:
Oh, if you want it be possessive, it’s just I-T-S But if it’s supposed to be a contraction, then it’s I-T-apostrophe-S…Scalawag
https://youtu.be/yc2udEpyPpU
Um, no? Who told you that? **Its **is already possessive. Like hers, his, ours, theirs.
Its not formally correct, but it’s understandable through other possessive rules. Like “MrscottyTay’s” or “HugeNerd’s”
The English language is more complex than just what the posh prescribed formal rules indicate. They’re guidelines rather than doctrines to live by. Even though this isn’t quite a great example of it but our language becomes a lot more playful and colourful through the breaking of such rules.
It’s an understandable mistake, but it’s also one of those things that gets drilled into you while learning English. I’m all for breaking rules in English when it’s beneficial to the tone, meaning, or something else. But it’s just a confusing error that does nothing to justify its use.
N’o.
It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.
The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.
I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.
So he’s the original “you have to work inside the system if you wanna change it!”… Seems like the gnostics were onto something!
There’s one thing that still bugs me about this narrative. Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice. He wasn’t killed as an offering to God for the sins of humanity. He was killed because he was giving the peasants ideas that the ruling class didn’t like. Unless God sending him to Earth in the first place was the sacrifice, by the logic that God knew how it would turn out. But then God is the one offering the sacrifice… to God.
To Christians, the reasons why the Romans did it are irrelevant, since they were fulfilling a prophecy and doing the thing they needed to do as part of “god’s plan”
That is actually the Christian understanding. To make it even weirder, in a sense, Jesus is God in this scenario. So God sacrifices Himself for the sins of humanity.
Yep, this is how I understood the story. For whatever reason, God considered himself bound by the rules he laid down, and so worked the system to break everyone out of it.
Excellent perspective.
But what’s the sacrifice either? Jesus doesn’t even die for good. Is a few hours of suffering a grand sacrifice worth all humanity’s sins?
Off course the judge of that is God who is the definitive self-absorbed jackass so maybe he does value his own temporary inconvenience that high.
God basically ripped himself in two as Jesus/the Son was completely cut off from the Father.
Well I am an atheist myself, but the key is that in the old testament god gave every human the blame for the original sin.
And the special thing with Jesus dying and taking all sins with him is, that now god won’t hate every human just because Adam and Eve stole some fruits.
This some weird story but yeah. Basically after Jesus, god wasn’t that angry anymore.
Original sin is not a concept found in the Bible. That concept developed later. If you read Genesis, Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden just for knowing good and Evil, with an implication that this was too close to godhood for God’s liking
Later scholars interpreted this as an “original sin” that gets passed on to all humans but that isn’t in the original text and even today Jews don’t believe in original sin despite having the same scripture to work from.
Okay so he’s not angry with me over what my grandparents did, but he can still be angry with me in particular?
Yes.
Fuck.
Well written
Yeah it would have been way easier for the apparently all good, all knowing, all powerful god to just, you know, forgive us, but that wouldn’t have made for a good book
I want to use an analogy. If you have a landlord who seeks rent every month and you don’t give it one month, then you get kicked out and if you can’t transport your stuff on time then it gets trashed.
If that landlord made an exception, then the full force of the law would require the exception to be applied equally. Soon enough the landlord would have his stuff turn to shit.
However if a buddy spotted your rent, then asked you to simply remember him and try to do better, then the landlord could retain the perfect administration and the perfect justice, and your buddy could be able to chill with you in cool places.
Most of the time I hear about God the father being perfect justice like the landlord and Jesus being able to extend mercy from the suffering so he can provide mercy if you promise to do better.
Simply saying “why not have no rules if you make the rules” is a good response, but there are probably some side effects if there are not rules maintained.
Yeah that’s a neat analogy, but it breaks down when you realize that the landlord is supposedly all good, all knowing, and all powerful. If a being with those properties makes a system that can go to shit, or needs to be “fixed”, then he either made it that way on purpose and is a monster, or he isn’t all knowing and all powerful. Either way, not worth worshipping in my opinion.
If there are side effects, then the god is not all powerful like the bible claims.
The thing is, the bible was written by corrupt and greedy humans, the bible has been selected (many books left out or included) by corrupt and greedy humans, modified by corrupt and greedy humans, and translated by corrupt and greedy humans.
If I wrote a book and claimed “it is the direct word of god and this god is the only god that is all powerful and all knowing and better than your god” that doesn’t make it true. That is literally what happened thousands of years ago, and nobody could refute it or argue against it because the only people who were literate or educated at all were the elite who had a vested interest in control and order
If there is a god and any of his word actually made it into the cherry picked bible, it is so mangled and corrupted beyond recognition as to be useless and unrecognizable, and people STILL have corrupted it so much further daily that they do not follow a single point of the bible. What makes anyone think that people back then were magically less hateful and had absolute 100% integrity even though there was significantly more war and corruption than now.
It makes a lot more sense if you view it as a human sacrifice to appease the god(s).
Humans have created many religions where some poor sod has to get murdered to satisfy some god or Pantheon of gods. Christianity is no different.
Yeah, the entire religion is based on a human sacrifice. Wholesome.
The entire concept of “salvation” in Christianity is is dynamic, and has changed again and again over the centuries. Jesus was very likely a Jewish Apocalypticist - his message was that the end was near, and God’s justice was close at hand for the unrighteous. And after this was accomplished, God’s kingdom on earth would reign. The “salvation” Jesus refers to here is almost certainly salvation from the upcoming apocalypse - follow him, and you’ll make it through to see the Kingdom.
But then Jesus died. Even though he died, what we know from studying all sorts of religions and cults in history, is that death is often not the end. But the followers of Jesus had to evolve their thinking. So they came up with idea that, even though Jesus had just been killed, he would return again - and soon! To them, of course, soon meant soon. It’s why Paul talks about how marriage is pointless because there isn’t much time left. When this second coming never happened, and the decades rolled on, who Jesus was and what his followers were to be “saved” from changed. At this point the religion is gaining followers all across the Roman Empire. However, as different cultures find Jesus, Christianity itself incorporated ideas from these cultures. One such idea was the concept of an eternal hell of torment - something that was largely unknown in Judaism (outside of sects that had previously been influenced by Hellenism).
Eventually, the Church emerges and certain concepts of salvation become more formalized and standardized. These largely serve the interested of the feudal church - making the masses stay in line. Then you have Protestantism emerge not coincidentally with the emergence of capitalism, and Protestant notions of salvation that serve the interests of capital. Fast forward to today’s White Evangelical Christianity, where salvation only entails a sort of mental assent to a historical event (Jesus’ death). What you actually do - good or bad (like helping the poor) - is largely irrelevant to your eternal status. What matters is being in the “in group” that demands conformity when it comes to various socio-political concepts (abortion, homosexuality, et al).
Christian salvation is “confusing” because after the first couple centuries or so, it’s definition was forged in ways to serve the interests of the powerful.
Good one. A multi-millennial game of telephone, with the original message being fucked up in the first place. No wonder it has evolved to this.
It’s easier to understand in the context of the past when they had things like sacrificing a goat for stuff. It’s just another form of ritual sacrifice.