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And if you don’t sin, then Jesus died for nothing.
It’s interesting how art reframes familiar stories to highlight empathy and responsibility in a simple way.
MBA in theology
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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”
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
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.
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.
I generally try to leave room for everyone at the table, and I think that God can still be worth worshipping. Here is my thought process:
In mathematics there are set theory theorems that prove that some infinities are bigger than others. Therefore a all powerful god (considered infinity over all this observable spacetime) is still progressing (increasing if choosing good) and regressing ( slowing the rate of increase or decreaseing) if choosing evil.
We humans were given the knowledge of good and evil at some point while growing up. We are to be joint heirs with christ (and what power and authority does christ inherit from various ways?). Therefore we humans know and can choose evil or good with infinite side effects some day.
I think/speculate that an infinite god would place hard limits on evil, but I don’t know how that would look like. Therefore if there are hard limits then the definition of this system is one that cannot go to shit.
If the process of creating “good” human-children/heirs with infinite side effects requires real choice (not strawman choice) between good and evil, then how could God create this spacetime to allow this?
I think a tendency toward judging choices and choosing good over evil are the preffered properties that are being selected for. I also think these are Emergent properties of neural nets (i think human intelligence are at least partially from neural nets from physical neurons).
I have greater capacity for evil because I know better. I can see where you come from and I respect it. Please poke holes in my theories where there are issues.
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.
I agree with you on all counts.
To add a little more to your arguments: In the times of Isaiah, the current corrupt greedy humans wanted to only refer to dead prophets that they could misinterpret to their hearts’ content.
There is a guy who was the founder of Less Wrong that summarized religion vs science like this: if God spoke once and every generation after is less enlightened, then following religion sucks. If science allows you to stand on the shoulders of those who came before where you are continuously becoming less wrong then you can actually do good and become better. Note that I am paraphrasing hard.
Religion that I accept is when there is both individual communication from God and collective leadership from someone who has communication from God. This handles edge cases like when you can’t feel God because of “loud hormones/feelings/pain” when you can go to leadership. It also handles you growing at your own pace and creating a personal collection of writings that are like a “you specific scripture”.
Religion lacking these traits leads to you being further from God than your parents.
Seeking religion has risks: there is a real risk of “blind leading the blind”. Good luck if you choose to pursue religion because the standard used for a godly leader was last defined as a prophet/apostle by Jesus with specific rituals to give authority. The catholic church which curated the bible says they never lost authority. All other Christian religions have to make peace with how authority to get answers on behalf of others is obtained.
Have peace on your journey.
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.
This is the parable of the sheep and the goats in action lol
“I saved you from being sent to hell.”
“Wait, who was going to send me to hell?”
“I was”
“…”
“Praise and worship pls, I suffered a lot for this.”
The OG conservative undiagnosed-something parent.
God is also called father, for he is the Godfather of Godfathers, and your protection money is eternally due.
You know, when you phrase it like that Jesus sounds a lot like Donald Trump…
Depending on the interpretation the “I was” should be “yourself”.
As God is the source of all life and good, choosing to turn away from Him means hell is self-inflicted.
Isaiah 45:7 : I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things,"
God made the evil.
Ah, so we can kill people for not doing what we want, as long as we warn them first?
Then if they don’t do what we say, their death was self-inflicted.Seems reasonable.
No? That’s not what it means.
Let me try an analogy: suppose you got out in a snowstorm, God is someone who loves you and got after you to light a fire so you can be warm, what happens if you still insist on going away?
If you love someone and they go out in a snowstorm, then decide they were wrong and its too cold. Would you let them back into your house, or would you keep the door locked and let them freeze to death.
This is like the parable of the bridessmaids. God presents itself as vindictive and petty. We are told, endlessly that god has perfect love, but that is not what the bible shows us in the deeds of god or jesus, or the parables constructed to represent them.
It is though.
“Choosing to turn away from him” means not doing what he tells you to do. And as a result of this, he punishes you with eternal damnation.It’s not like him saying “Don’t jump off that cliff or you’ll die!”.
It’s “Do exactly as I say, or I will personally ensure that you suffer for eternity.”
I mean, that doesn’t really fix it if you have am actually omnipotent diety though, because that diety would be responsible for, well, everything, to include what the results of rejecting that diety would be.
Yes, that’s why hell isn’t already the current reality, despite humanity rejecting God, He still lends us life and good things out of love and doesn’t instantly smite those who use His gifts to act outside of His will.
If I told you I built a torture chamber where I’d punish you forever, I’d get the cops called on me. When you tell others the same its actually called love? You sound so insane right now.
I’m not going to defend the person above from having to confront the Problem of Evil (of which confrontation they seem to be in desperate need), but to play YHWH’s advocate for a moment:
They are suggesting that they subscribe to a more traditional view of “hell” than is depicted in, say, Dante’s Inferno. They claim that Hell is merely the absence of god’s love, and that that existence without god is torment enough. They are not suggesting that God has set up a lake of fire for Samael and the other fallen angels to prod at you with pitchforks. Their idea of hell is like an endless void of nothing, alone with your thoughts, cold and alone. Simply “without”.
Now, why an omnipotent being would choose to create a universe where there is such a dichotomy in treatment is another matter. The existence of an Omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient being is mutually exclusive with our experienced reality, unless our definition of “benevolent” does not accurately describe the being’s morals.
I.e., Either God:
(A) does not exist; (B) is not all-powerful; © is not all-seeing/knowing (D) is not all-good.
Well, all but B and D are redundant, an omnipotent being could simply choose to be perfect in every other way. If they are not they specifically avoid being.
Omniscience is not implied by omnipotence. Choosing to be omniscient would first require a perfect knowledge of in what ways they are not omniscient. A sniper in a tower may have the power to destroy any living thing within 300 yards, but if they don’t know what their target is, the power to act doesn’t grant them the knowledge necessary to do so effectively. This, writ-large, is why most people list omniscience in addition to omnipotence among the powers of the abrahamic god (omnibenevolence has been added by much more recent Christians who don’t read the bible). Being all-knowing is required in order to effectively utilise omnipotence, but is not implied by it.
Also, A is listed as the base assumption, and is thus not redundant. It is what you fall back on if B-D are held true, by reductio ad absurdum. Since the other three cannot be true with our definitions of them, and they must be true in order to fit the definition of God according to these people, A would be true by reduction.
But wouldn’t making us in such a way that their absence amounts to eternal torment also be a deliberate choice by an all powerful being?
As God is the source of all life and good
If this is what god said, then it’s like Jeff Bezos running ads saying he’s a good guy.
Even if he wasn’t made up, the god character from the Christian Bible is the most evil, fucked up, bastards in all of fiction. As if murdering the entire planet (minus a hand full of people) wasn’t enough, he then demanded the rape of countless women due to the actions of their fathers and/or husbands. So don’t go around talking about your imaginary friend being this shining moral beacon. Your moral system and foundation of logic is built upon circular reasoning created by a bunch of nomadic biggots jealous of everyone around them.
I pray to Russell’s Teapot you actually read this response, think long and hard about it, and don’t just get caught up with “erm akshully they were Nephilim”
Does original sin exist?
Sure. It’s called Model I Theory-in-use.
It’s hard to say. I’ve been trying, but I keep finding proof online that somebody else has done so and so before me.
No
So wait… God saved us by killing himself to save us from himself ???
Inception killing.
Well… he saved us by making us kill him so he can forgive us for not listening to his orders.
“Okay, Judas Iscariot. I have a grand universal plan to eradicate original sin from the mortal plane. You have an extremely critical role in all of this: you must betray Jesus Christ, leading to his arrest, conviction and inevitable crucifixion.”
“Sure thing, God. What do I get in return?”
“As thanks for carrying out my plan exactly as I laid it out, you get several pieces of silver.”
"Oh and a sweet deal in the afterlife, right?
…
…
…
And a sweet deal in the afterlife… Right?"
“Well, your name will be remembered forever”
“For being a critical part of the plan right?”
Trinity is messed up in so many wonderful ways tbh
Won’t someone unmute jeezus
What difference would that make?
I’d like to hear what he’s saying, for one.
“You been whippin’ them bankers like how I said to do? I best not be finding out you let Caesar co-opt my message in order to continue on the imperial project that killed me”
Hell yeah
EAT THE RICH
I think or something along those lines
Hell yeah
Fuck me, I laughed way too hard at that.
(OT: nice nostalgic username btw. Reminds me I have to take my back pain medication.)
Thanks and same.
Isn’t it wierd that ultimately Christianity is all about finding that one perfect human sacrifice to stop god being pissed at us.
Very succinctly put
Really tho… It’s a story that repeats endlessly. Blameless young person is murdered by the state for speaking the truth.
The religious stuff is a distraction from the actual politics.
Dude was a cult leader who broke up families and disrupted people attending religious ceremonies. The bible is effectively cult propaganda and it still reveals that.
Remember that religion is true to the poor, false to the rich, and useful to the powerful.
False to the rich when inconvenient, yes, even as they wrap themselves in the mantle of it for public appearance.
That’s when it’s useful to them.
🎵 When I was a young man, the Romans
Took me up to Golgotha, to be a martyred man
I said, “Son, when you grow up, would you be
The savior of the poor, sick, the homeless, and the damned?” 🎵🎵🥁🥁🥁🎶🥁🥁🥁🎶🥁🥁🥁🎵
Remember, the concept of hell doesn’t exist anywhere in Jewish or Christian scripture. It’s a much later Hellenist addition.
I’m atheist but Jesus definitely references hell in the Bible
A quick Google search returned this (a few are from the new testament and the evangelists):
This is incorrect. The word “hell” is not Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic and does not occur anywhere in scripture. Every time you see the word “hell” that word has been intentionally mistranslated from other words that already have clear, unambiguous meanings. Aside from word choices, the concept itself originates in Hellenism, the literal Greek Hades. The Roman cults injected their own tradition into the growing Christian cult, and gradually it evolved in the cartoonishly silly “fiery underworld of eternal torture” concept, a very convenient tool for controlling a populace through dogmatic terror.
That’s about the word “hell”. The concept is there. In fact many of the verses do not mention the name of the place, just the description or punishment
The concept is also not there. In the Hebrew the word sheol is used. This literally means “the grave” and is used for death and the dead, exactly as we understand it in a modern secular sense.
Gehenna is one of the words used by Jesus. This is dripping with meaning from the Old Testament, where children were burned alive in sacrifice to other gods and buried in a potters field nearby. It is symbolic of meaningless, pointless, anti-covenantal death, then being anonymously buried and forgotten like garbage, rather than beloved family.
Jesus also uses Hades — literally the Greek underworld — for a parable to a Hellenist audience. The parable is about culpability and the permanence of the consequences of wickedness. Wicked people would not be swayed even by a dead relative appearing and warning them. This is a parable, a literary device, not a sudden declaration that the Hellenist underworld, foreign to Judaism, is physically objectively real.
Jewish scripture is surprisingly consistent about this. Dead means dead. None of the New Testament authors contradict this. The controversy of the time was whether the dead would be resurrected and judged at the end of all things. That mythology began during the Maccabean revolt — which is also when the book of Daniel was written and assembled — and which is a major influence on Jesus and his teaching. In that mythology, dead is still dead, but they will be resurrected and judged. The righteous will be given a retirement plan and eternal life in a new creation, those who are not found righteous will be burned like trash and remain dead and forgotten forever.
I’m pretty sure that the Abrahamic concept of Hell isn’t from Hades, since Hades is not a place of suffering, just a place where dead people go without punishments or rewards, a concept that occurs in many, many religions. Tartarus, on the other hand, is more similar to the Abrahamic (or especially Christian) Hell, but the main distinction here is that Tartarus is reserved for the people that the gods are REALLY pissed with.
Basically, ancient Hellenic afterlife can be split into three places: Elysium, for very, very good people, Tartarus, for very, very bad people, and Hades for everyone else.
Where can I read more on this?
Googled (ddgd actually), found this: https://earlychristianhistory.net/hell.html haven’t read it yet, so don’t judge my reading comprehension.
They talk about three words and it’s pretty meaningless:
This is the word most commonly
usedmistranslated in the New Testament as “hell.”Just because people use a word that doesn’t mean it’s used accurately. See previous comments about how hell is a later mistranslation.
This is the name of the Greek god of the underworld… it appears to mean a grave
Ok. Irrelevant.
This is a portion of the underworld… Here one finds Tantalus, Sisyphus, and others enduring such fates.
This word from greek mythology appears only once in book of Peter. Never mentioned by Jesus.
The weakness of all this “evidence” kinda says it all.
Hebrews had a concept “Shaol,” which later early Christians connected to Hades.
Also, Jesus references a “Lake of fire” and an “Outer darkness” where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” but those seem to be reserved for the hypocrite and oppressors who “laden men with burdens grievous to bear” and hoard resources while ignoring the needy.
Coincidentally, I just posted a more detailed breakdown to the other user. Even conceptually, words and phrases have been intentionally taken out of context and twisted to fit Hellenistic culture, tradition, and comfort.
Studying how religions, languages, and cultures change and evolve over time is fascinating. But Christianity is unique in that we have documentation for it all and can clearly see how history’s powerful twisted it into something that its namesake and founder would violently condemn.
They’re being pretty misleading IMO. The word “hell” doesnt appear anywhere in the original text, no. But neither does the word “heaven”.
And yet the concepts of heaven and hell, as Christians understand them, do exist in the text. There is the threat of eternal punishment after death. There is the promise of eternal reward after death.
That the english word we use doesnt exactly appear in the Hebrew, Greek or aramaic texts is quite frankly not worth mentioning.
“Father, I apologize. I was wrong.”
“fuck them kids”
The whole thing about Jesus saving us by suffering and dying… If god was all powerful, he could have saved us without all the suffering part. Since he had to suffer, there are rules that god must adhere to. If god has to obey rules, then he is not all powerful.
Everyone be like “god is merciful and love us all” and then the god smile, bend down, and give sweetheart little Timmy bone cancer.
Timmy would have grown up to be a trump cucking maga shitbrain.
fuck Timmy.
Yet Trump has to live on?..
…wat? It’s not because there’s rules (he very well could have simply snapped his fingers), it’s because he wanted to demonstrate to us how much he loved us. It has to do with the whole “he is the embodiment of both perfect love and perfect justice” thing.
“I’m going to torture and murder this man who helped the poor and sick, just to show you how much I love you”.
Yeah, seems pretty on point for the “you are my chosen people, murder everyone else” god.
If God is truly this powerful, He’s a psychopath.
He can create us perfect and kind and loyal, and specifically chooses not to. Instead, He bullies us into serving Him, going for a murder spree in the meanwhile, knowing full well it is entirely avoidable.
All to show how much He loves us.
So god is a masochist?
He could have demonstrated how much love there is by removing all suffering from the world by snapping his fingers too.
