Truth in Christianity

SteveCrack

Registered Member
I came across this thought last night, and wanted to toss it out to the enlightened folks that visit these forums, in hopes that I could receive some feedback.

-Jesus died for our sins.

Isn't that a very Christian way of saying that the human race violently molested, then murdered the one son, the one definitive proving of the Lord? I used to believe that the body of Christian theology was rooted in bullshit. However, the above statement, the cornerstone of the entire religion, may be the most truthful, collective Fruedian Slip the Western world has ever known.

Consider the weight of shame laid upon the pious creators of such a fallacy. By manipulating those seeking a greater meaning, it was the legitimate pursuit of understanding that was martyered, NOT a man on a cross.

It's a story of the human race destroying the the proof of god's existence. The death of Jesus being merely a collective guilty conscience venting itself for misleading civilization away from the individual, personal, exclusive journey of proof we would otherwise feel free to endeavor upon.
 
I came across this thought last night, and wanted to toss it out to the enlightened folks that visit these forums, in hopes that I could receive some feedback.

-Jesus died for our sins.

Isn't that a very Christian way of saying that the human race violently molested, then murdered the one son, the one definitive proving of the Lord? I used to believe that the body of Christian theology was rooted in bullshit. However, the above statement, the cornerstone of the entire religion, may be the most truthful, collective Fruedian Slip the Western world has ever known.

Consider the weight of shame laid upon the pious creators of such a fallacy. By manipulating those seeking a greater meaning, it was the legitimate pursuit of understanding that was martyered, NOT a man on a cross.

It's a story of the human race destroying the the proof of god's existence. The death of Jesus being merely a collective guilty conscience venting itself for misleading civilization away from the individual, personal, exclusive journey of proof we would otherwise feel free to endeavor upon.
*************
M*W: Until you can prove Jesus existed, you cannot claim he died.
 
The collective guilty unconscious venting would be those that created the mythos, and those people must have exsisted, otherwise a billion or so people wouldn't be Christian.

What I'm saying, in a literary sense, is that the allegory of Jesus' death (wether it happened or it didn't) was merely the truth coming out from underneath the lie.
 
There is no truth in Christianity, it is all based on myth and fabrication.
Religion is a collection of metaphors. Metaphors are neither true nor false, but something in between. Many people who follow the various religions understand that, if only on an unconscious level. But many do not. The Abrahamic religions in particular seem to dull the senses and render many of their members incapable of understanding metaphor.
 
More Than A Metaphor

First of all there is proof Jesus existed in the Talmud, the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, other historians make mention of him and his followers and the of course the New Testament scriptures which carry the record of his teachings. The fact that Christians still exist even though at one time were persecuted for their faith and that Judaism still rejects Jesus as their Messiah should be adequate proof of his historicity.

Christianity is not a metaphor it is meant to be a solution to a very complex dilema. That dilema is mankind's continual disobedience to natural law, moral law and even personal conscience. More simply stated, we all disobey what we know to be wrong even if our consciences vary as to what we personally believe is wrong. We also all disobey the laws of our country. And finally the more one attempts to live a life of complete obedience to a standard the more they fail at it. This disobedience is what is called sin. The word sin comes from a Greek word meaning "to miss the mark" (as in target practice). The true nature of mankind is we ALL at some point fall short and miss the mark of whatever standard we would use to measure ourselves.

When we disobey the laws of our land and are caught and proven to be guilty we must be punished - all law contains punishment designed to deter and restrain lawbreakers. Time does not forgive lawbreakers. Consider a murderer, or a rapist, etc. The result or punishment of sin is death.

What Christianity teaches is a reality that God who created all things (our manufacturer - so to speak) assumed liability for His creation and took on human flesh and paid the full penalty for our sin - died the death we deserved and was raised from the dead as proof the payment for our disobedience/crimes was accepted and for all who are willing to accept it and place their names so to speak on the class action suit are able to benefit from what Jesus has done. God gives us His Spirit to lead and guide us.

I am not sure why this is such an offensive message to some. To me it is a great hope. God understands my weakness, is willing to forgive my sin, promises a changed life, and promises eternal life all because of what Jesus did.
 
First of all there is proof Jesus existed in the Talmud, the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus, other historians make mention of him and his followers and the of course the New Testament scriptures which carry the record of his teachings.
Being mentioned in books, well after the supposed date of his death, does not prove his existence. There are NO contemporary records of Jesus' existence.

The fact that Christians still exist even though at one time were persecuted for their faith and that Judaism still rejects Jesus as their Messiah should be adequate proof of his historicity.
This "argument" is utterly ridiculous. Belief does prove historicity.

That dilema is mankind's continual disobedience to natural law, moral law and even personal conscience.
How can mankind "disobey" natural law? Can we break the laws of physics?
What is "moral law"?
We can go against our personal conscience, certainly, but "disobey"...?

More simply stated, we all disobey what we know to be wrong even if our consciences vary as to what we personally believe is wrong. We also all disobey the laws of our country. And finally the more one attempts to live a life of complete obedience to a standard the more they fail at it. This disobedience is what is called sin.
Wrong. Sin is defined as a transgression of a religious or moral law( there's that supposition again!), NOT disobeying national laws.

The word sin comes from a Greek word meaning "to miss the mark" (as in target practice).
Really?
Please provide a source for this, because the on-line etymological dictionary says different:
O.E. synn "moral wrongdoing, offense against God, misdeed," from P.Gmc. *sundjo (cf. O.S. sundia, O.Fris. sende, M.Du. sonde, Ger. Sünde "sin, transgression, trespass, offense"), probably ult. "true" (cf. Goth. sonjis, O.N. sannr "true"), from PIE *es-ont-, prp. of base *es- "to be" (see is). The semantic development is via notion of "to be truly the one (who is guilty)," as in O.N. phrase verð sannr at "be found guilty of," and the use of the phrase "it is being" in Hittite confessional formula. The same process probably yielded the L. word sons (gen. sontis) "guilty, criminal" from prp. of sum, esse "to be, that which is." Some etymologists believe the Germanic word was an early borrowing directly from the L. genitive. Sin-eater is attested from 1680s. To live in sin "cohabit without marriage" is from 1838. Ice hockey slang sin bin "penalty box" is attested from 1950.
I.e. a transgression against god, from the Proto-Germanic. And the Greek word for "sin" (missing the mark) is hamarto-, hamart-.
Hard luck.

What Christianity teaches is a reality that God who created all things
Except that it's a only an unsubstantiated claim (an assumption) that god did so. To state that it's "reality" is going well beyond any provable fact.

God gives us His Spirit to lead and guide us.
This, too, is an assumption.

I am not sure why this is such an offensive message to some.
Have you ever considered that it could be taken as offensive because there is not one iota of evidence for these claims yet these beliefs are forced upon people and they are expected (required!) to accept and live up to them.

Plus, of course, as seen in your post, this belief also leads to lack of critical, rational thought. Some of us don't want to give that up.
 
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First of all there is proof Jesus existed in the Talmud, the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus . . . .
You need to update your research, as other scholars have. Using modern analytical methods, the latest verdict is that those passages in Josephus's writings are apocryphal forgeries inserted at a later date.
The fact that Christians still exist even though at one time were persecuted for their faith and that Judaism still rejects Jesus as their Messiah should be adequate proof of his historicity.
Many people believe many untruths. That seems to be one of the traits of our species. This is a place of science and you have misused the word "proof" where "evidence" is the appropriate term. There is nowhere near enough evidence to "prove" beyond a reasonable doubt (the standard of science) that Jesus was a real historical person. Considering that the Romans were consummate recordkeepers, it's very suspicious that there are no contemporary accounts of the so-called "miracles" attributed to him. That would have been big, entertaining news to the Roman citizens.
Christianity is not a metaphor it is meant to be a solution to a very complex dilemma.
Apparently you need to also review your notes from your courses in literature and psychology. Every religion on earth is a textbook example of a set of metaphors. This does not conflict at all with your own statement. Metaphors are very powerful tools for resolving dilemmas, although in many cases they may guide us to the wrong solutions.
That dilemma is mankind's continual disobedience to natural law, moral law and even personal conscience. More simply stated, we all disobey what we know to be wrong even if our consciences vary as to what we personally believe is wrong.
You also need to review your notes from your anthropology classes. Humans are a pack-social species that evolved to live in harmony and cooperation with a couple of dozen members of an extended-family tribe whom we had cared for and depended on since birth. In the Paleolithic Era when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers with no surplus food, during a lean year every other tribe was a pack of enemies who needed to steal our food for survival. Since then we have invented agriculture and all the subsequent paradigm-shifting technologies such as civilization, metallurgy, industry and electronics, and there is now an abundance of food, but the few hundred generations of breeding since the Agricultural Revolution has not been enough time for natural selection to turn us from a pack-social species into a species of creatures who love and trust everyone else. There's still a caveman inside each of us, ready to spring into action on a bad day.

This is the dilemma that morality, laws, religions, and all of our other artificial constructions try to resolve: we are pack-social creatures, attempting to live in an overlay of a herd-social society that we created for ourselves, in conflict with our own nature.
What Christianity teaches is a reality that God who created all things . . . .
Once again, you display your ignorance of the concept of metaphor. There is no respectable evidence of any shred of truth in the God myth. It's all hearsay that has been handed down for thousands of years, since long before science and scholarship were practiced and argument from authority--now one of the most laughable fallacies--was accepted as evidence for truth.
I am not sure why this is such an offensive message to some.
This third-generation atheist can only speak for himself and his family, but it is not the message itself that we find offensive. After all (again speaking only for myself), I find great comfort and inspiration in the messages from other fictional sources, from the legends of the Indian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Norse and Native American gods, to the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh and Kermit the Frog.

My utter contempt for the monotheistic religions, that have been metastasizing across this helpless planet like a cancer epidemic, is that their pathetic one-dimensional model of the human spirit (everything we say, think, do or desire lies somewhere on an oversimplified linear scale with Good at one end and Evil at the other, instead of the 23-dimensional richness of the traditional religions) squeezes our complex psychology and culture into a paradigm that is simply incapable of handling the workload effectively.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam present some fine, inspiring stories, yet in practice in the real world they inspire their followers into orgies of unspeakable violence every few generations, which undo all the good they have ever done. Just the obliteration of the "heathen" civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas--two of the only six independently created civilizations in all history--with their wealth of motifs, ideas and dreams, with the blessing of the Christian leaders, is a "sin" of such overwhelming cosmic proportions that the Children of Abraham will NEVER be able to satisfactorily atone for this loss, even if their execrable philosophies endure for another million years.

Monotheism is a plague on this planet and humanity will always be in peril of self-destruction so long as it exists--no matter how sweet and lovely the cute little fables in its holy books may appear to be.
 
The collective guilty unconscious venting would be those that created the mythos, and those people must have exsisted, otherwise a billion or so people wouldn't be Christian.

What I'm saying, in a literary sense, is that the allegory of Jesus' death (wether it happened or it didn't) was merely the truth coming out from underneath the lie.



Could you rephrase your second sentence , Don't speak both ways
 
You need to update your research, as other scholars have. Using modern analytical methods, the latest verdict is that those passages in Josephus's writings are apocryphal forgeries inserted at a later date.Many people believe many untruths. That seems to be one of the traits of our species. This is a place of science and you have misused the word "proof" where "evidence" is the appropriate term. There is nowhere near enough evidence to "prove" beyond a reasonable doubt (the standard of science) that Jesus was a real historical person. Considering that the Romans were consummate recordkeepers, it's very suspicious that there are no contemporary accounts of the so-called "miracles" attributed to him. That would have been big, entertaining news to the Roman citizens.Apparently you need to also review your notes from your courses in literature and psychology. Every religion on earth is a textbook example of a set of metaphors. This does not conflict at all with your own statement. Metaphors are very powerful tools for resolving dilemmas, although in many cases they may guide us to the wrong solutions.You also need to review your notes from your anthropology classes. Humans are a pack-social species that evolved to live in harmony and cooperation with a couple of dozen members of an extended-family tribe whom we had cared for and depended on since birth. In the Paleolithic Era when we were nomadic hunter-gatherers with no surplus food, during a lean year every other tribe was a pack of enemies who needed to steal our food for survival. Since then we have invented agriculture and all the subsequent paradigm-shifting technologies such as civilization, metallurgy, industry and electronics, and there is now an abundance of food, but the few hundred generations of breeding since the Agricultural Revolution has not been enough time for natural selection to turn us from a pack-social species into a species of creatures who love and trust everyone else. There's still a caveman inside each of us, ready to spring into action on a bad day.

This is the dilemma that morality, laws, religions, and all of our other artificial constructions try to resolve: we are pack-social creatures, attempting to live in an overlay of a herd-social society that we created for ourselves, in conflict with our own nature.Once again, you display your ignorance of the concept of metaphor. There is no respectable evidence of any shred of truth in the God myth. It's all hearsay that has been handed down for thousands of years, since long before science and scholarship were practiced and argument from authority--now one of the most laughable fallacies--was accepted as evidence for truth.This third-generation atheist can only speak for himself and his family, but it is not the message itself that we find offensive. After all (again speaking only for myself), I find great comfort and inspiration in the messages from other fictional sources, from the legends of the Indian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Norse and Native American gods, to the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh and Kermit the Frog.

My utter contempt for the monotheistic religions, that have been metastasizing across this helpless planet like a cancer epidemic, is that their pathetic one-dimensional model of the human spirit (everything we say, think, do or desire lies somewhere on an oversimplified linear scale with Good at one end and Evil at the other, instead of the 23-dimensional richness of the traditional religions) squeezes our complex psychology and culture into a paradigm that is simply incapable of handling the workload effectively.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam present some fine, inspiring stories, yet in practice in the real world they inspire their followers into orgies of unspeakable violence every few generations, which undo all the good they have ever done. Just the obliteration of the "heathen" civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas--two of the only six independently created civilizations in all history--with their wealth of motifs, ideas and dreams, with the blessing of the Christian leaders, is a "sin" of such overwhelming cosmic proportions that the Children of Abraham will NEVER be able to satisfactorily atone for this loss, even if their execrable philosophies endure for another million years.

Monotheism is a plague on this planet and humanity will always be in peril of self-destruction so long as it exists--no matter how sweet and lovely the cute little fables in its holy books may appear to be.



??????????????????????????????

Definitively you are a good writer, You present your atheist message .
You could be a good physicist they do a good amount of hand waving so do you.

In your rational way and knowledge of Roman record keeping . Can you find What were the the Jewish rebellious faction in the years between 58 and 68 ad, Please don't use Josephus writing , that period was a big event for the Romans. Can you also find Roman records with out going into the Talmud or NT. How Herod the great divided his kingdom ?


Since dislike so much monotheism .
Monotheism give humanity uniform way of thinking . I am surprised you bashing uniformity of thinking, yet you expressed yourself in various occasion as a dictator inclusive in your present post.
 
Prove Yashua did not exist.
You apparently do not understand the scientific method. The burden of prove never falls on the person who claims the negative. If it were, then the finite resources of science and scholarship would be quickly exhausted by the need to disprove every crackpot who comes forward with an outrageous hypothesis.

The burden of proof is on you, sir. If you have evidence to support the hypothesis that Jesus was a real, historical human being, then please show it to us.

So far, no one else has been able to do that.
I believe for me he existed.
Everyone is free to believe whatever they want. At least that is true in the United States; I have no idea how the laws work in your country. But your belief in something does not comprise evidence that the thing you believe in is true.
Of course he did not exist for you because you don't want to believe.
That's not true. I rather like the character of Jesus. If he had existed I would nominate him as one of the greatest men in history. Many of the things he is claimed to have said and done were magnificent, good examples for all of us. I suppose I might even say that I love Jesus as much as I love Winnie the Pooh and Kermit the Frog. I have learned important things from them; they have enriched my life and made me a better person.

Nonetheless, that does not make them real. The reason I do not believe in the factual existence of Jesus, despite my positive opinion of him, is that there is absolutely no credible evidence that he existed.

As long as I'm making up for the deficiencies in your scientific education and your poor understanding of the scientific method, I might as well also explain the Rule of Laplace, which is one of its cornerstones.
Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before anyone is obliged to treat them with respect.​
If you tell me you believe that you had a distant ancestor named Omar who lived in Judea in the early years of the Christian Era, a farmer who raised barley and goats, had a wife and three children, and was beloved by his neighbors, that is not an extraordinary assertion. Even though you many have no evidence to support this belief, I can treat it with respect because you are not demanding that I accept a premise that is preposterous, that requires me to believe that miracles occur and that dead people return to life. I will disagree with you, but I will disagree respectfully.

But when you tell me you believe that a man existed at that time who performed a number of miracles, such as walking on water, making food appear out of thin air, and (most outrageously of all) reappeared, alive and well, after everyone saw him die, then you are asking me to believe in things that violate the laws of nature--things which, if they were actually true, would require throwing out a significant portion of what we know about how the natural universe operates, start over, and rebuild our paradigm of natural laws.

If you ask me to do that, then you had better provide me with some truly extraordinary evidence to support your belief. Without that evidence, you become nothing more than one more crackpot, wasting everyone's time in your attempt to destroy science. This is why your belief must be answered with the strongest disrespect.
 
But isn't it a bigger extraordinary assertion, to say that Jesus did not exist?

There are four accounts of his life, written not long after he died.

Were the Jews commonly engaged in making up life stories of people at the time, or were these supposedly made up tales of a man called Jesus an anomaly?

Would the writers not have considered that their claims that this man existed, when they knew that he did not, were lies and deceptions, and therefore sinful?

If it is a creation of a man, then he must have been a great literary genius, because the story and events of this life have changed the world like no other.
 
But isn't it a bigger extraordinary assertion, to say that Jesus did not exist? There are four accounts of his life, written not long after he died.
Uh dude, one of those "accounts" was written by a man whom even Christians acknowledge would today be classified as clinically insane and not allowed out in public. (Paul, right?)

As I said to Arauca, if they had simply written biographical essays on a person whose life was believable, then we would have to say that there is at least a reasonable probability that they were true. We'd probably never be able to prove it one way or another, but at least we could respect the more-or-less rational faith of the believers. But because so many details of the essays are fantastic, then as I also pointed out to Arauca, the Rule of Laplace is automatically invoked. We need some extraordinary evidence to lend respectability to these assertions, or else the faith must be acknowledged as irrational. It's far too easy for people to pick up on a story and spread it around. Just look at the thousands of pages of contemporary urban legends on Snopes.com; each of you probably receives one of these in a recycled e-mail two or three times a week from friends whose judgment you trust, assuring you that they are 100% true!

There was no Snopes.com in those days. Very few people could read so stories were passed around by word of mouth, and what we now call the "telephone game" (although they had no telephones either:)) ensured that they became more interesting with each retelling. Even worse, because people back then had only a dim understanding of how the natural universe works, tall tales of supernatural phenomena did not conflict with what little they already knew, and so were easier to believe if presented by a good storyteller.

And again I ask, given that the Roman Empire was very competently administered at that time and that they placed great value on recordkeeping, why are there no official accounts of the miracles attributed to Jesus at a much later date? (The fraudulence of the supposed writings of Josephus on the subject has already been noted.) Christianity did not exist yet so there was no prejudice against it as there was in later generations. There would have been no persecution of a scribe who reported the accounts of several eyewitnesses to a man walking on water.

We must take into account the fact that by the time these stories actually were written down, they had been circulating as oral anecdotes for decades!
Were the Jews commonly engaged in making up life stories of people at the time, or were these supposedly made up tales of a man called Jesus an anomaly?
People have been inventing life stories of fictional characters since they invented language!
Would the writers not have considered that their claims that this man existed, when they knew that he did not, were lies and deceptions, and therefore sinful?
As I already reminded everyone, one of those writers was a certified nutcase so his grasp of the concept of "sin" was probably a bit tenuous.

Nearly two thousand years later, we have very little knowledge of the personalities of these writers, beyond what the Bible (a document written by men just like them) says about them. They may have known very clearly that they were writing fiction, literature, a collection of metaphors. They may have known that a good many gullible people might accept them as truth, yet still felt (as all good writers do) that the messages they carried would ultimately inspire people to improve their lives and the world around them.

I doubt very much that they expected Christians, a persecuted people, to give birth to future generations of Christians who, once they had power, would turn around and persecute others, much less obliterate entire civilizations, enslave entire races, and try to completely exterminate Jesus's own people, the Jews.
If it is a creation of a man, then he must have been a great literary genius, because the story and events of this life have changed the world like no other.
Stories accrete and are rarely the work of a single writer. Jung teaches us about the collective unconscious, instinctive beliefs or "archetypes" that are programmed into our synapses by our DNA, either as survival traits in an era whose dangers we can't imagine and passed down by natural selection, or else random mutations passed down through a genetic bottleneck. He personally catalogued the archetypes in the Bible and correlated them with the parallel stories in the mythologies of other religions. What he found striking was that Abrahamism impoverished religion by discarding the rich pantheons of the traditional faiths, and attempted to use a single god as a model of the complex human spirit. He didn't go so far as to identify this constraint as the reason Abrahamist communities are so qualitatively more violent, but merely remarked casually that the wars among the Christian nations have been the bloodiest in human history. (I think he missed Genghis Khan but his point is still well taken.)
 
I came across this thought last night, and wanted to toss it out to the enlightened folks that visit these forums, in hopes that I could receive some feedback.

-Jesus died for our sins.

Isn't that a very Christian way of saying that the human race violently molested, then murdered the one son, the one definitive proving of the Lord? I used to believe that the body of Christian theology was rooted in bullshit. However, the above statement, the cornerstone of the entire religion, may be the most truthful, collective Fruedian Slip the Western world has ever known.

Consider the weight of shame laid upon the pious creators of such a fallacy. By manipulating those seeking a greater meaning, it was the legitimate pursuit of understanding that was martyered, NOT a man on a cross.

It's a story of the human race destroying the the proof of god's existence. The death of Jesus being merely a collective guilty conscience venting itself for misleading civilization away from the individual, personal, exclusive journey of proof we would otherwise feel free to endeavor upon.

I deny it that he died for my sins.
 
What Christianity teaches is a reality that God who created all things (our manufacturer - so to speak) assumed liability for His creation and took on human flesh and paid the full penalty for our sin - died the death we deserved and was raised from the dead as proof the payment for our disobedience/crimes was accepted and for all who are willing to accept it and place their names so to speak on the class action suit are able to benefit from what Jesus has done.

When you describe the message of Christianity in such a way, I want to run down the road screaming. What you just described is totally preposterous. No modern, rational, thinking person could ever believe such tripe.

Such a vengeful explanation of the purpose and work of Christ leaves me feeling cold (and a bit nauseous).
 
Were the Jews commonly writing in Greek at the time?

I wouldn't have thought so.
What's your point?

Is it likely that if either the Jews or the Greeks were making up a story about a man who was also God, that they would have had him die by crucifixion, a shameful death.
 
I wouldn't have thought so.
What's your point?
That these stories were written down by people who were not there.

Is it likely that if either the Jews or the Greeks were making up a story about a man who was also God, that they would have had him die by crucifixion, a shameful death.
If it was one of the primary forms of execution in those days, yes.
 
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