I remember during my deconstruction asking a simple question.
Why did god have to sacrifice his son?
The answer apologists give is that he just had to, that was the only way to cleanse the sins of man.
God is supposedly all powerful though, surely an all powerful being could have just waved his hand and cleansed all the sins. Our he could have just been ok with peoples sins, ever since people have kept sinning and he is somehow ok with that.
The answer apologists give to this is normally some form of
It is the Nature of God that he not be able to dwell with sin.
This of course would logically mean that this all powerful god suddenly is powerless against his own nature, and therefore not all powerful because he doesn’t have the power to change his nature.
Or he chooses not to, he just made a choice that sin is icky and then made another choice that the only way to be ok with sin was to sacrifice his son.
It’s like me coming into your house and saying “the rules are I’m going to torture you forever unless I can make you clean in my eyes, the only way I can make you clean is to cut off my foot because of a set of rules I’m fully in control of. Now thank me for cutting off my foot, I had to, it was the only way, because of the rules that I fully control”
Close, but his son is also him, so he actually had to kill himself to save us from… Himself. But it’s OK because he didn’t die, he faked his death and now bunnies lay eggs on Easter, and we’ll all still go to hell for being sinners unless we give human-made, tax-exempt institutions human money that was likely earned through some form of sin. Oh and we also have to tell on ourselves to a likely pedophile. That ensures heaven, I’m told.
It’s fun because you could have a very powerful god or a very wise god. The problem with an all powerful or all knowing god is that it just makes everything else arbitrary abusive rules.
God can’t love you if you sin. Why not, he’s ALL powerful, he can do anything he wants. God chooses not to love you if you sin, and then he chooses to torture you for all eternity
I don’t find anything worth worshipping in such an entity if it did exist
Honestly it’s even worse than that when you consider he didn’t just make the rules, he made us. And he did it with perfect foreknowledge of everything that would happen.
So it’s not just “he sacrificed himself to save us from himself”, it’s “he sacrificed himself to save us from what he’s going to do to us because of the way he made us”.
Also as far as the cutting off his foot thing, it’s more like an axolotl cutting off his foot. He’ll have in back and be in perfect condition in just a few days.
Yeah, what bothers me is the giving of free will, paired with damnation for making the wrong choice and heaven for the right ones.
If anyone set up a scenario for their pet with the intention of eternally punishing them if they make the “wrong” choice, they’d be considered an asshole.
Granted, some interpretations of hell is really just being without the love of God, but knowing how great it should feel, which makes it slightly better? Still icky though.
You touched on it, but for completeness, the official Catholic stance is actually a pretty interesting interpretation that is the result of a kind of wild assumption, and the absolute upholding of free will. Basically God is meant to be the source of all positive things, including feeling and sensation. Every person has a 2 way connection to God. Any positive feeling you’ve ever had was from him through this connection. When someone commits a Mortal Sin, they are showing they reject God, and sever their side of the connection. Truly repenting will pick the line back up, and God never drops his side so long as you live. If you die with a severed line, he accepts that you really don’t want to associate with him, and he drops his side too. And so Hell is not a place, nor a punishment, it’s a state of being. All the gnashing of teeth and lakes of fire were originally metaphors for how badly a total lack of Grace, that connection, is. Later Dante’s Inferno and other works painted it in a striking way that caught the imagination, but it is not the Church’s official stance.
The really fun part is smashing together the idea that Mortal Sin is a rejection of God, and the core concept of the Silent Christian. IE, the Bible very literally, and repeatedly, states that God is love. Like, not that he embodies it, or that he is the source of it (though it also does claim that) but that the two concepts are literally interchangeable. You basically can rewrite it using a replace tool and swap out any instance of God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost with Love. It does make some kind of philosophical strange abstractness when it talks about loving Love, not that weird, with Love loving things, pretty weird. And it kind of takes “tough love,” to a whole new level with some of the wrath he brings in the 1st Testament, but that is fairly low on the list of weirdness between the two Testaments, and the God = love stuff is mostly from the 2nd.
But the core concept in the “invisible Christian,” is that those with no faith in a sky daddy can still be good Christians by letting God love into their hearts. Therefore, anyone that has empathy can really be taken to be a good Chrostian, and obtain all the benefits whenever the Bible says you need to beleive in and accept God. And the corollary here is that committing Mortal Sin, IE willingly committing a heinous act such as murder, is a rejection of God love in your life. Of course, the definition of what qualifies as Mortal Sin remains a contentious affair. Though the Catholics are generally more tolerant than the more hard-line sects, they are still pretty backwards here. But if you restrict it to things that cause serious harm to another person, then it becomes a comparatively reasonable model. Much more so than it is popularly presented, at any rate.
A big part that disrupted my religious beliefs was, while leading a homeless outreach ministry in college, one of the most regular attendees was in fact sikh. Did some learning about their religion, and I really dug it.
Massive respect and admiration for her to come out regularly - we weren’t that Christian when we went out, meaning we never proselytized, but we still prayed together before and after each night, and did some stuff like offer to wash the feet of folks. And she stayed with us through this stuff because she loved helping. I just couldn’t accept that someone who is driven to the same loving actions would be judged as going to hell, just because their family was born with a different culture.
Given that context, I really enjoyed the perspective you shared. Thank you!
To be fair, the I don’t think the Church has ever officially taken a stance on the idea of the Invisible Christian. But Pope Francis was a proponent of the idea.
My sticking point was similar. How jesus’ sacrifice was so noble and he died to save everyone who came before, and will come after. Like yea sure thats a big deal, but how many people would take that trade? “Literally all of humanity… or me?” If you presented mortals with that option, mortals who dont know their father is all powerful god, and who dont know theyre going to be taken to heaven for eternity, how many would still take it?
Hell, most mortals have 1 person in their life they’d sacrifice themselves for. As the number saved goes up, the individual sacrifice seems to lose value imo. It wasnt even like he sacrificed himself for an eternity of suffering. He suffered for a few days… on the scale of eternity, thats pretty insignificant
I remember during my deconstruction asking a simple question.
The answer apologists give is that he just had to, that was the only way to cleanse the sins of man.
God is supposedly all powerful though, surely an all powerful being could have just waved his hand and cleansed all the sins. Our he could have just been ok with peoples sins, ever since people have kept sinning and he is somehow ok with that.
The answer apologists give to this is normally some form of
This of course would logically mean that this all powerful god suddenly is powerless against his own nature, and therefore not all powerful because he doesn’t have the power to change his nature.
Or he chooses not to, he just made a choice that sin is icky and then made another choice that the only way to be ok with sin was to sacrifice his son.
It’s like me coming into your house and saying “the rules are I’m going to torture you forever unless I can make you clean in my eyes, the only way I can make you clean is to cut off my foot because of a set of rules I’m fully in control of. Now thank me for cutting off my foot, I had to, it was the only way, because of the rules that I fully control”
Close, but his son is also him, so he actually had to kill himself to save us from… Himself. But it’s OK because he didn’t die, he faked his death and now bunnies lay eggs on Easter, and we’ll all still go to hell for being sinners unless we give human-made, tax-exempt institutions human money that was likely earned through some form of sin. Oh and we also have to tell on ourselves to a likely pedophile. That ensures heaven, I’m told.
It’s fun because you could have a very powerful god or a very wise god. The problem with an all powerful or all knowing god is that it just makes everything else arbitrary abusive rules.
God can’t love you if you sin. Why not, he’s ALL powerful, he can do anything he wants. God chooses not to love you if you sin, and then he chooses to torture you for all eternity
I don’t find anything worth worshipping in such an entity if it did exist
If you haven’t already discovered DZDebates on YouTube you’ll love him. Though it sounds like you may have.
New to me, thanks for the recommendation :D
Honestly it’s even worse than that when you consider he didn’t just make the rules, he made us. And he did it with perfect foreknowledge of everything that would happen.
So it’s not just “he sacrificed himself to save us from himself”, it’s “he sacrificed himself to save us from what he’s going to do to us because of the way he made us”.
Also as far as the cutting off his foot thing, it’s more like an axolotl cutting off his foot. He’ll have in back and be in perfect condition in just a few days.
Yeah, what bothers me is the giving of free will, paired with damnation for making the wrong choice and heaven for the right ones.
If anyone set up a scenario for their pet with the intention of eternally punishing them if they make the “wrong” choice, they’d be considered an asshole.
Granted, some interpretations of hell is really just being without the love of God, but knowing how great it should feel, which makes it slightly better? Still icky though.
You touched on it, but for completeness, the official Catholic stance is actually a pretty interesting interpretation that is the result of a kind of wild assumption, and the absolute upholding of free will. Basically God is meant to be the source of all positive things, including feeling and sensation. Every person has a 2 way connection to God. Any positive feeling you’ve ever had was from him through this connection. When someone commits a Mortal Sin, they are showing they reject God, and sever their side of the connection. Truly repenting will pick the line back up, and God never drops his side so long as you live. If you die with a severed line, he accepts that you really don’t want to associate with him, and he drops his side too. And so Hell is not a place, nor a punishment, it’s a state of being. All the gnashing of teeth and lakes of fire were originally metaphors for how badly a total lack of Grace, that connection, is. Later Dante’s Inferno and other works painted it in a striking way that caught the imagination, but it is not the Church’s official stance.
The really fun part is smashing together the idea that Mortal Sin is a rejection of God, and the core concept of the Silent Christian. IE, the Bible very literally, and repeatedly, states that God is love. Like, not that he embodies it, or that he is the source of it (though it also does claim that) but that the two concepts are literally interchangeable. You basically can rewrite it using a replace tool and swap out any instance of God, Jesus, or the Holy Ghost with Love. It does make some kind of philosophical strange abstractness when it talks about loving Love, not that weird, with Love loving things, pretty weird. And it kind of takes “tough love,” to a whole new level with some of the wrath he brings in the 1st Testament, but that is fairly low on the list of weirdness between the two Testaments, and the God = love stuff is mostly from the 2nd.
But the core concept in the “invisible Christian,” is that those with no faith in a sky daddy can still be good Christians by letting
Godlove into their hearts. Therefore, anyone that has empathy can really be taken to be a good Chrostian, and obtain all the benefits whenever the Bible says you need to beleive in and accept God. And the corollary here is that committing Mortal Sin, IE willingly committing a heinous act such as murder, is a rejection ofGodlove in your life. Of course, the definition of what qualifies as Mortal Sin remains a contentious affair. Though the Catholics are generally more tolerant than the more hard-line sects, they are still pretty backwards here. But if you restrict it to things that cause serious harm to another person, then it becomes a comparatively reasonable model. Much more so than it is popularly presented, at any rate.That’s actually pretty wild.
A big part that disrupted my religious beliefs was, while leading a homeless outreach ministry in college, one of the most regular attendees was in fact sikh. Did some learning about their religion, and I really dug it.
Massive respect and admiration for her to come out regularly - we weren’t that Christian when we went out, meaning we never proselytized, but we still prayed together before and after each night, and did some stuff like offer to wash the feet of folks. And she stayed with us through this stuff because she loved helping. I just couldn’t accept that someone who is driven to the same loving actions would be judged as going to hell, just because their family was born with a different culture.
Given that context, I really enjoyed the perspective you shared. Thank you!
To be fair, the I don’t think the Church has ever officially taken a stance on the idea of the Invisible Christian. But Pope Francis was a proponent of the idea.
My sticking point was similar. How jesus’ sacrifice was so noble and he died to save everyone who came before, and will come after. Like yea sure thats a big deal, but how many people would take that trade? “Literally all of humanity… or me?” If you presented mortals with that option, mortals who dont know their father is all powerful god, and who dont know theyre going to be taken to heaven for eternity, how many would still take it?
Hell, most mortals have 1 person in their life they’d sacrifice themselves for. As the number saved goes up, the individual sacrifice seems to lose value imo. It wasnt even like he sacrificed himself for an eternity of suffering. He suffered for a few days… on the scale of eternity, thats pretty insignificant