DERAIL: So the Crucifixion - What's up with that?

[Tom Sawyer]

And this is the road I was trying (apparently unsuccessfully) to avoid. When I started this thread I just wanted to answer the question in the thread title and make my personal stance as a Christian clear.

Each of us thinks that we have a "more accurate view" due to our beliefs. That is a fair characterization. I did try to make it very clear that I was speaking from faith only and knew that there would be those who would pounce on that and demand "proof" of the validity of my faith. That was never my intent and I thought it was clearly stated in my opening post. You might think that this is a cop out and maybe it is on my part, but I honestly don't think that I can ever provide sufficient evidence for you of the existence of God, or you provide the same for me that there is no God.

Your last sentence is exactly right. That is why I did not attempt to make the standard arguments part of this conversation and in fact was trying very hard to be perfectly clear that I would not.

Ruth

I don't think it's a cop out. You can have whatever positions you want for whatever reasons you want and the standards necessary for the rationales is that they're satisfying to you, not that they're satisfying to others. If you try to impose your positions onto others, then that would switch around but you're not doing that and you've made it clear that you have no interest in justifying your beliefs from any other standpoint, so it's fine.

It's actually more satisfying to me to see someone who doesn't try and twist logic into nonsensical intellectual knots in order to jam the square peg of their faith into the round hole of science. Those arguments tend to get stupid fast.

One thing I am curious about, however, is when you talked in your OP about "Christ died on the cross to pay for those sins". I've never really gotten the point of that. Jesus was God, so why go through the dog-and-pony show of putting on a human meatsuit and pretending to die in order to forgive us for our sins instead of just forgiving us for our sins without all the drama? It seems like an inefficient waste of his time and I don't get why we should be impressed by it.

 

[Lion IRC]

Atheists anthropomorphising God and His motives again?

 

[Sarpedon]

How can you accuse us of anthropomorphizing God, when your religion is ALL ABOUT how God became a man?

 

[Lion IRC]

I think God is reaching out to us - offering us hope.
Showing by example that death is not the end.
Sin is not a terminal disease.
God and His Son can easily 'talk the talk' but on the road to Calvary we see Him walk the walk.

I look at statues of Buddha and they are all smiling - contented.
I look at The Cross and I think, here's Someone who really understands suffering.

 

[Lion IRC]

How can you accuse us of anthropomorphizing God, when your religion is ALL ABOUT how God became a man?

It's a two-way street.
If the atheist (counter-apologist) contends against my explanation of God's empathy and love for humans, labelling it 'anthropomorphism', then they are applying their own human ideas to what they think God would or wouldn't do.

 

[Shadowy Man]

I look at statues of Buddha and they are all smiling - contented.
I look at The Cross and I think, here's Someone who really understands suffering.

Then you're not fully understanding what the Buddha meant by "suffering". You'll need to study Buddhism more if you're interested. But that's a whole other conversation for a whole other thread.

 

[Lion IRC]

I know what Buddha 'meant'.
I said "understands sufferering"

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Atheists anthropomorphising God and His motives again?

Yes. I am curious about his motives. Christians discuss the crucifixion as something that one should be impressed by and I don't know why. If the answer to his motives is "Because gods are weird" or "Because eternity is a really, really long time and sometimes immortals need to do random shit just to fill the day", then fine, it's understandable why he went this route.

One of the tenets of Christianity (as I understand it) seems to be that God is a rational actor who has good reasons behind the things he says and does. For instance, when he said "Thou shalt not kill", it was because he thought that there were good reasons to not go around killing people and we could get why that's a decent commandment to have. He didn't just say "Thou shalt not ..." and then flipped open a dictionary and banned us from doing whatever the seventh word on the page was for no particular reason beyond that he'd thought up nine commandments and wanted to make it a round number.

So yes, I'm anthropomorphizing God - in the sense that the reasons that God does things are understandable by humans. If that's not the case and his motivations were simply a mystery which our tiny and limited minds cannot comprehend, then what would be a reason for any of us to ascribe more WOW factor to "Jesus got crucified" than we do to "Bob made a sandwich"?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I think God is reaching out to us - offering us hope.
Showing by example that death is not the end.
Sin is not a terminal disease.
God and His Son can easily 'talk the talk' but on the road to Calvary we see Him walk the walk.

I look at statues of Buddha and they are all smiling - contented.
I look at The Cross and I think, here's Someone who really understands suffering.

I don't know. I think that a decent chunk of humanity goes through a shitload more pain in their lives than someone who dealt with a bit of inconvenience over a long weekend. It just seems so trivial - an immortal guy who pretended to die to make a point which didn't need making. Also, he's omniscient - he understands all forms of suffering perfectly without the need to experience them directly, so it's not like it gave him some kind of perspective he didn't previously have. I get how a human or a limited and minor deity would perhaps gain something from this, but not an Omni-dude.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I look at The Cross and I think, here's Someone who really understands suffering.

Wait wait. An omnipotent agent only suffers if it chooses to suffer. The whole point of suffering is that we don't chose it. It's something we endure. The Christian God didn't endure shit. Which the resurrection proves. Jesus had nothing to be afraid of. That's not suffering.

An omnipotent agent can't relate to something that isn't omnipotent. An omnipotent God cannot understand humans. Do you feel you can relate to an ant?

Another thing that the resurrection proves is that God didn't sacrifice anything. An agent with infinite power can't sacrifice anything. That's like making a rock so heavy that God can't lift it.

If you think your God understand suffering, you haven't thought it through. There's no way your God could.

 

[Lion IRC]

Yes!
God can choose NOT to suffer.
But He did.
What does that tell you?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I look at The Cross and I think, here's Someone who really understands suffering.

Wait wait. An omnipotent agent only suffers if it chooses to suffer. The whole point of suffering is that we don't chose it. It's something we endure. The Christian God didn't endure shit. Which the resurrection proves. Jesus had nothing to be afraid of. That's not suffering.

An omnipotent agent can't relate to something that isn't omnipotent. An omnipotent God cannot understand humans. Do you feel you can relate to an ant?

Another thing that the resurrection proves is that God didn't sacrifice anything. An agent with infinite power can't sacrifice anything. That's like making a rock so heavy that God can't lift it.

If you think your God understand suffering, you haven't thought it through. There's no way your God could.

But he's also omniscient, so he can understand it fine, the same as he can understand everything else. The personal experience of it wouldn't add anything to his understanding of it, however, since that understanding was already perfect.

- - - Updated - - -

Yes!
God can choose NOT to suffer.
But He did.
What does that tell you?

That it was a slow week and he was bored and looking for something to do to pass the time?

Perhaps asking the question from a different perspective would help. What is it that God gained through this suffering which could not have been accomplished equally well without the suffering? If we're supposed to be impressed with the suffering, then it would be necessary for that suffering to have a purpose.

 

[Lion IRC]

God is answering DrZoidberg's objection head on.
Oh God, you don't understand us, you're all powerful and don't know suffering, you don't know hunger, you don't know poverty.

But God becomes incarnate and talks directly to the poor in spirit, to those who mourn, to the meek, to the powerless.

And He suffers voluntarily in order to 'prove a point' as it were.

He didn't HAVE to do that.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

God is answering DrZoidberg's objection head on.
Oh God, you don't understand us, you're all powerful and don't know suffering, you don't know hunger, you don't know poverty.

But God becomes incarnate and talks directly to the poor in spirit, to those who mourn, to the meek, to the powerless.

And He suffers voluntarily in order to 'prove a point' as it were.

He didn't HAVE to do that.

Well, why not just say "I'm fucking omniscient, you moron. I understand everything with no further effort on my part". Anything else just seems like unnecessary dithering on his part.

Regardless of the rationales, it gets away from the original question of why it was somehow necessary to tie this suffering to his forgiving people's sins. That's just an irrelevancy piled ontop of an irrelevancy.

 

[Lion IRC]

At least you admit you don't know why.
Perhaps you should reserve judgement until you do.

 

[Lion IRC]

It must come as a surprise to certain people that a gracious, loving God is willing to forgive.

He gives and we get.
He forgives and we forget.

 

[Sarpedon]

I'm not pushing back against anything you say, except for your accusation of 'anthropomorphising god.' If you are a christian, you must believe that God WAS a man. Therefore the concept of 'anthropomorphising' him doesn't apply. If Jesus was, as Christian dogma DICTATES, both 'fully god and fully man' then you can't criticize us for taking you at your word.

We discussed incarnation before, and I pointed out that other religions have different ideas about how it works. In Hinduism, for example, a deity can become incarnate in a human body, without becoming "fully" human.

Since this is a fictitious event, either of us can assign any given value to it, and there's nothing to make one person's interpretation better than the other's. If you disagree with that, you'll need to actually establish some facts.

 

[Angry Floof]

God is answering DrZoidberg's objection head on.
Oh God, you don't understand us, you're all powerful and don't know suffering, you don't know hunger, you don't know poverty.

But God becomes incarnate and talks directly to the poor in spirit, to those who mourn, to the meek, to the powerless.

And He suffers voluntarily in order to 'prove a point' as it were.

He didn't HAVE to do that.

Lovely fantasy. Doesn't answer the question, though.

If you want to convince humans that your god and his rules are fit for humans, you're going to have to somehow relate your argument to being human (i.e., reality). There is nothing in human experience that helps us to relate to magical beings "suffering" magical "death." For most believers, the relationship is in what they themselves might suffer if they question any of it, but there is no effect of magical beings dying magical deaths on human experience. You have to have other humans impinge on your senses and spectrum of human emotions in order to relate to magical suffering.

That doesn't help the story to make sense, I know, But the fact that there are so many believers in inhumane, incoherent ideological identity does make more sense when you're allowed to observe how humans work vs. having reality fed to you by religious authorities and assorted trusted mouthpieces.

You start from the established fantasy and try to force it to appear to be true and good for humans. I start from actual human experience and actual living, breathing, suffering human beings first, and from there it's pretty easy to check religious bullshit against reality.

 

[DrZoidberg]

God is answering DrZoidberg's objection head on.
Oh God, you don't understand us, you're all powerful and don't know suffering, you don't know hunger, you don't know poverty.

But God becomes incarnate and talks directly to the poor in spirit, to those who mourn, to the meek, to the powerless.

And He suffers voluntarily in order to 'prove a point' as it were.

Why do you think God suffered? You've just postulated that God is omnipotent. Where's the suffering? Did God stop being omnipotent when becoming incarnate? Why? The rules of any fiction have to be consistent or it'll annoy the readers. I'm already annoyed with this story.

He didn't HAVE to do that.

Yes, quite litteraly. Being omnipotent he can dial the knob of pain and up and down as much as he'd like. He knew that he'd be fine. The fear and the uncertainty is an important factor of suffering. Something which God can and will never have to deal with. And didn't, no matter how much he was nailed to the cross. Also, worth noting, is that God is omnipotent. He put himself on that cross. Knowing what would happen if he did such and such, he did and orchestrated himself being nailed to that cross.

There's a problem with omnipotence and omniscience... nobody is impressed by anything you do. It'll always be a like a super rich guy taking his date to McDonalds. He's omnipotent. Why not just fix all problems? It's as little effort as fixing the big problems.

God didn't sacrifice shit. Put his own son on the cross on purpose. Why should anybody give a shit? It's like that scene in Blazing Saddles when the new sheriff puts and gun to his head and threatens to kill himself. Pathetic. Also pathetic for anybody to fall for this passive aggressive bullshit.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

At least you admit you don't know why.
Perhaps you should reserve judgement until you do.

Why? I don't know the particulars of Jupiter's orbital path off the top of my head either, but I don't feel the need to hold off deciding whether or not to buy a new car until I can figure out if it's ascendant with Mercury. This is because, despite what some astrologists might tell me, I have no reason to assume that there's a relationship between the two things and it would be kind of dumb to accept this relationship as a viable premise until given a reason to do so.

Similarly, without being given a viable reason for a relation between suffering and forgiving sins, it would be kind of dumb to just accept that this relationship exists. You only reserve judgment about a relationship between two things if you have sufficient reason to believe that there is a potential for this relationship to be valid. If you just have someone pick two random things and say they're related, there's no need to reserve judgment about taking the position that they're not.