don't you wish Jesus were real?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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 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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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 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.

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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. 

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.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

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).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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.

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).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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. 

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. 

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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

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