Talk Elections

such a shame that He isn't.  such a beautiful idea!  I had this inkling, driving home on the barren public-sector Long Island highways, to drive to my father's house, and it would have been on the way, and I haven't spoken to him bar 3 texts in 3 weeks, and tell him: "I forgive you, Dad.  and I pray that you can forgive me."  but I double-took, and realized, I didn't mean it!  I don't forgive him!  he is a spiteful, narcissistic, limited, angry man, and I don't forgive him!  how I wish I did. how I wish there were Christ, but there's no Christ without deliverance from sin, there's no deliverance from sin without literal Genesis, and literal Genesis absolutely never happened.  so there's no Christ.  so I do not forgive my father.  and I sit, in a barren, empty room.

No, because he is real.

He was probably a real figure; but he wasn't what he claimed he was. So nothing to miss really.

Much of what we apparently 'know' about him isn't even what he claimed himself, but rather on his behalf by hagiographers over the centuries.

Jesus was just some random guy who died almost 2000 years ago.

True. There were no doubt dozens of semi-literate prophets and messiahs roaming Judea. We just happen to know either about one, or an amalgamation of others into one.

As mentioned, the biblical Jesus probably was based on a real person. However, it would be absolutely horrible if the biblical description were accurate - the notion of condemning people to eternal torment for not worshiping him is revolting, and would be worse than anything us humans have ever done.

I can only imagine what logged-out-jmfcst is writing to himself after reading this thread.

I don't feel any particular need to 'wish' for pancakes or Suspiria de Profundis to be real, so no. I'm certainly glad about it though.

No, although I see where you"re coming from, I second Dibble - I'm very glad that Jesus as described in the Bible wasn't real (disclaimer: IMO), since the ramifications of not worshipping him are so awful.

He WAS real!!!  There are numerous independent historical sources that confirm this.  Of course He was real!

He was real, and there is evidence that he existed. He was what he said he was-he was the Son of God. But, the Christian religion is based on faith-thats the keyword-faith. We have faith that he existed and was the Son of God. And that faith will be rewarded by him.

I really don't "worship him". I love him, and thats how it should be. I don't bow down to him and praise him for sh**ts and giggles. I do it out of love. I love him because he committed the ultimate sacriface for our sins. No matter how hard I try, I will never pay back the debt I owe to him-my afterlife. And to pay this debt off, I try to love my brothers on Earth, and preach the Gospel.

Jesus is made out to be "LETZ KILL TEH GAYZ". But, all in all, Jesus was a God of love, not hate.

Who said anything about gay people? I was talking about Hell - you know, that place that God sends the nonbelievers to suffer in torment and agony for all eternity. That's not exactly an act of love.

Might I suggest that you're reading the Little Apocalypse of Matthew and similar passages in a way that's culturally conditioned to comport with certain specifics of theology that lack universality, antiquity, and consensus?

Rereading the OP I'm not sure why Tweed thinks that literal Genesis is necessary for the remission of sin, since Original Sin doesn't require a specific originary event in order to make sense.

I didn't reference an attack on gays by anyone, and the post was not in a negative context. I did not mean to sound negative or attacking, because that was the opposite of my point. Megachurches often have the radical, hatefull, un Christian ministers who give Jesus a bad name.

My point was, its easy to avoid hell. Everyone has Jesus in them-you just have to find him. I hope someday you will, because once I found him, my life became a lot better :)

You're missing the point entirely - a loving being wouldn't create Hell in the first place.

I don't really agree here -- it certainly can 'make sense', but the Biblical doctrine can't hold together as one, and descends into the realm of mere suggestion.

Yes it is-- he's honoring the choice of unbelievers not to believe in Him.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'mere suggestion', except in the sense that all religion is suggestion because it can't and when it's being honest doesn't try to give empirical proof to many of its claims. There's also not honestly that much in the way of 'Biblical doctrine'. Doctrine is commentary on the significance of the Biblical narrative, which has always been applied through the social lens.

So when the North Korean leadership throws dissenters into a labor camp to work them to death, is that also a loving act? Clearly the leadership is honoring their choice to dissent, right?

So basically Tweed wants to be a Christian but thinks the entire doctrine falls apart if the story of The Fall in Genesis is not literal, and can't accept it so he can't be a Christian. That's how I'm reading this thread.

No, and I'll have to go with a point my old friend Christopher Hitchens made many times. 

If Jesus the son of God were real, then that would mean that for the entirety of human existence before he appeared about 2,000 years ago, God watched upon endless suffering of early humanity in life and the afterlife (if I'm correct, Jesus preached no salvation without him) with complete indifference.  Then, he decides that the best way to reveal the path to salvation is to brutally sacrifice his son in the desert in front of illiterate, uneducated peasants, far away from the more advanced human societies of the time in the far East. 

It's ridiculous and awful in my opinion. 

If I knew Tweed in real life, I wonder if I'd be on the verge of converting him.

What's ridiculous and awful is Christopher Hitchens's understanding of doctrine, and, for that matter, narratology. (Also history. The Jews weren't illiterate or uneducated, not that it would have been an insurmountable problem if they were.)

oakvale pointed out in IRC just tonight how much I should dislike Christopher Hitchens, and he's quite accurate. Though I'll give him credit for the Henry Kissinger thing.

Hitchens does deserve credit in a few areas, but any understanding of the Middle East past or present was never one of them.

He's not only real but He's coming back and quite possibly in all of our lifetimes if not our kids. I know folks don't like me all that much for my opposition to gay marriage but I and my church (not a mega church but a good sized one) oppose it out of love for the individuals involved. I share the gospel with others because I love them.

God doesn't want anyone to perish but all come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). What Is Tweed trying to say with this thread?

So you oppose gay marriage because you love gay people? You want to deny the right of between 22 and 33 million Americans to marry the person that they love and support because you 'love' them?

I like Hitchens a lot, but I'll grant that the above quote could have been better.


 Jesus the son of God were real, then that would mean that for the entirety of human existence before he appeared about 2,000 years ago, God watched upon endless suffering of early humanity in life and the afterlife (if I'm correct, Jesus preached no salvation without him) with complete indifference.  Then, he decides that the best way to reveal the path to salvation is to brutally sacrifice his son in the desert in front of illiterate, uneducated Gilded Age peasants, far away from the more advanced human societies of the time in the far East.

Interestingly enough, LDS theology fixes this problem; anyone who didn't (and even now, still doesn't) have the chance to hear the gospel from Jesus or his followers gets a free "pass to get out of eternal suffering" card, essentially. Except for the most wicked, of course, who wouldn't accept the gospel even if they heard it.

Ok... they aren't peasants.  It changes my argument very little. 

HockeyDude really hates poor people.  Stunningly so.

There's also the possibility, which if I was a Christian, then I would believe, that you are judged on how you acted rather than what you believed. For example, very bad Christians would go to Hell, and good atheists would go to Heaven.

Doesn't the bible say Jesus' death was decided before God even created the universe?  If so, God didn't "then decide", rather it was decided from the beginning of time. 

That makes no sense in terms of Christianity, though.  All people are inherently xinful regardless of "good" or "bad" behavior, God cannot abide sin in his prescence, and the only way to clense one's sins is through Christ.  That salvation is a free gift through faith that all may accept, but only a certain few will: seek and you shall find and all that.  Giving the gift of everlasting existence in God's prescence to good non-Christians is an absurdity in terms from this viewpoint because there is no such thing as a person who is good by his own merits due to Original Sin.

This is mostly pretty generally accepted but the idea that the free gift is through explicit faith in Christ alone and specifically is for the most part a Protestant notion. Faith has been interpreted as a broader virtue in other strands of Christian thought (how broad exactly, of course, depends upon the church and the time period; compare for instance Karl Rahner to Dante Alighieri on this).

I'm making typoes all over the place.  Not having access to a keyboard sucks.

Fair enough: for the Catholic  (and  Orthodox?) case  just substitute "the sacraments of  the Church"  into my original post instead of faith. 

Traditionalist Catholic understanding, certainly. I think that you might have some intellectual interest in Rahner's soteriology; it's...actually a little condescending at points but it does make some allowances for more charitable answers to the concept of 'good' or 'bad' non-Christians. The fact that it's a little condescending is why I prefer apocatastatic ideas, many of which are associated largely with Eastern Orthodoxy (although as I understand it, and I could be wrong about this too, they're considered intellectually and doctrinally strong minority reports in Eastern theology rather than conventional interpretations).

From personal experience it's clear to me that Jesus was and still is real.

Now to the question whether faith alone is the way for Christians to go to heaven, my answer is a clear yes. In my opinion, the idea that Christians need to do certain good deeds or respect sacraments that were defined by human beings in order to go to heaven sort of downplays Jesus' huge sacrifice. Jesus' death and resurrection lose significance if the question whether a human being does a certain number of good deeds and conducts specific sacraments also has an impact on a person's salvation. The good deeds a Christian does are the result of his faith and a sign that someone's faith is alive, but nothing more.

Oh, you met him?

Yes.
I hope you are aware that the words "meet" and "experience" can be used in a metaphorical sense and don't necessarily have to be understood in a way such as "to meet face to face".

What does my opinion whether I'd like the Jesus story to be real or not have ANYTHING to do with poor people?  I'm just making a point that revealing a truth needed for salvation would be better served in a more advanced society at the time. 

Ok, it was all planned out... Every human born before jesus died for humanity's sin is condemned.  Still, what an awful, horrible reality.

Have you seriously never even heard the phrase 'Harrowing of Hell' before? A lot of schools of thought suggest that could have been pretty thorough.

The problem is your notion that, apparently, urban people are superior the rural, or that the literate to the illiterate.  There are points to be made against Christianity, but a constant slamming of its founders for being impoverished and uneducated (and considering Jesus had knowledge backwards and forwards of the OT scriptures, even that is a questionable premise) comes off as very, very arrogant.  Besides, you'd be hard-pressed to find a theologian in a higher social position in the 50s or 60s of the Common Era than Paul, who was very literate and well-educated and wrote about a third of the NT.  (I'll give you Seneca, but that's about it for that generation).  

Jesus appeared to the Jews because he had to.  The Messiah was to be a descendant of David, to be born in David's hometown of Bethlehem, to be heralded by Elijah, to begin his ministry at the Mount of Olives to come to Jerusalem via donkey, to "suddenly come to his Temple" and purify the priesthood, etc.  Not much time to sail up and down the Yangtze preaching when one has a checklist of Messianic obligations to fulfill.

EDIT: Nathan, you're a sophisticated Christian.  Do you subscribe to the idea of "Heaven" as a place where good people go, or are you an old-school by the book "the dead are sleeping and will awaken and experience resurrection in flesh at the End of Days, New Jerusalem will be on Earth, etc." type?  The former notion is so out of touch with the Scripture it's almost unbelievable.

Constant slamming?  I quoted one thing from Christopher Hitchens.  Whatever.  I never said one people was superior to the other.  That wasn't the point.  The point was it should've been revealed where the information would spread faster to a greater number of people.  You're interpreting my words in the most negative way possible. 

No, I haven't.  Does it make Hell better?  If so.... great... I don't care.  There are millions of other reasons I'd rather the supernatural claims of Christianity and it's founder be untrue.  I used the example that popped into my mind first.  I was under the impression Christ taught that salvation was only attainable through him.  It seems that no matter what widely held view about Christianity I ever bring up around here, I'm somehow wrong.  So please go nuts and tell me how I'm wrong about that one, too.  

EDIT: So Jesus goes to Hell and saves everyone who died before he showed up.  (Christianity's revisions are so stupidly blatant it's almost funny) I'm not a Christian and I have no interest in reading scripture so how would I have known that?  Not mention that those souls still suffered for quite a long time waiting for Jesus to show up, right?  Benefit of the doubt granted... still prefer that Jesus did not exist for a lot of other reasons.

You're not 'wrong', you just haven't demonstrated familiarity with the interpretive praxis.


Neither. I subscribe to particular and universal judgments of the soul's manner of experiencing the presence of God. My understanding of the Biblical descriptions of the Four Last Things is as by and large symbolic representations of the genuine progression of the soul after death, in which it is invited into Divine communion by Christ and treated in accordance with its past and present disposition towards the invitation. In general I interpret the Bible as the root and first developing portion of the traditional source of doctrine, which continues to generate belief.

I think you are being unfair here. What is argued is that Judea at the time of Jesus was relatively 'uneducated' in comparison to the Greeks and Romans to the West, Roman-Egyptians to the south, the Parthians to the east and the Chinese states further east than that. While it was certainly the crossroads of the era, it wasn't an intellectual powerhouse. Secondly, you always have to remember that anything 'Jesus says' is (as it cannot be proven otherwise) is merely attributed to him. It is therefore said he had knowledge of Jewish prophecy, which any potential cadidate for messiah had to know. Jesus' backstory was retroactively padded out to meet the requirements (which of course didn't meet the requirements for the Jews at that time) and the revisions were somewhat overeager; the 'virgin birth' was a bit overzealous for example. All this only matters if you accept the starting point of the Jewish prophecy as the 'truth.'

As for theologians you mention Paul was on par with Seneca and that you'd be hard pressed to find anyone with such prowess at that time. Putting aside non-Greek philosophers that is unfair; Gaius Rufus, Epictetus and others of the Silver Age spring to mind. Furthermore, Paul's background comes entirely from the Acts the historical reliability of which is under question so on what basis is his 'prowess' determined? Gaius Rufus for example argued that women's capacity was as developed as those of men and therefore should be encourgaged to study and participate in theological and philosophical discourse. Paul of course is not as welcoming. Which is the more enlightened view?

Besides, he pilfers from Plato...(ducks) :P

How does it being planned out condemn every human prior to Jesus to Hell?

No need to duck, I'll play along:  How does Jesus pilfer from Plato?  It would seem, at least to me, that Jesus pilfered (understandably so) from the Hebrew scriptures, which Jesus claimed testified about him.

If you only examine Jesus' statements against Plato's, some similarities would appear.  But if you take Jesus' statements and compare them to the Old Testament (in other words, taking a "holistic view" of the Bible), you'll find that Jesus' teachings were pilfered from the scriptures of his day.

If the Bible claims to have been ultimately written by a single author (God), you have to use a holistic approach and examine and compare it to itself in order to understand what it is saying.  It’s the Bible’s holistic cohesion that testifies that it is from God.

I don't know, Tweed, I never saw anything appealing about the fictional character, so I don't think he'd be any more likeable were he 'real'.

I think Mikado was saying that Paul pilfered from Plato, not Jesus.

People will believe what they want. But I know Jesus was real and if you choose to not believe it, then that's up to you.

I'm legitimately interested, how do you KNOW this?  I have absolutely no way of unequivocally proving the existence of Jesus, and you do not possess mental abilities that I do not.  (and I'm perfectly aware this exact point was raised by Bill Maher and others many times, so there, I'm not taking credit for it)

Is this not an important question in the matter?

EDIT: and are you saying that you know Jesus was real AND the son of god, or are you saying that you just know that a man named Jesus existed?

Jesus was just some random guy who died long ago. Some scientists believe he died on Friday, April 3, 33. Anyways, he's long gone.

I am saying I know Jesus is real and is the son of God. How do I know this, because of how He has changed my life and others around me. I feel Him everyday and see Him working everyday.

The salvation provided by Jesus doesn't depend on the doctrine of Original Sin. At least, not in the traditional sense. What it depends on is the existence of sin, and the need for salvation from it.  We need Jesus because we are not capable of saving ourselves. That incapability of saving ourselves from sin need not come from some ancestral inheritance - except in the sense of our nature as finite creatures.
There have been many Christians who do not subscribe to the doctrine of Original Sin, even including some evangelicals.

The Restoration Movement is a notable example.

He's real:

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