That part never made any sense to me either. Why do sins need to be forgiven and how does torturing someone allow forgiveness? Seems like torturing and killing the son of god would be a serious sin by itself.
Couldn’t god just realize he created flawed beings and forgive them himself, or not hold a grudge about it? Humans are how he made them according to the religion.
You ask good questions, but if you’re really interested you can look into Christian apologetics re: free will. There are some interesting answers awaiting you. But the gist of it is that God didn’t create flawed beings, he created beings with free will that chose to be flawed.
And Christianity has never said free will is a flawed design, because humans having free will is one of the most important aspects of the religion and is very fundamental to what it means to be a human (a concept that is true both in and outside of Christianity, unless you believe in destiny or something). It is not a flaw to have free will, otherwise God himself would be flawed. In a regular context, it’s kind of like you’re not flawed for existing, but you’re flawed if you do negative things with your existence. I would personally have to be convinced that having free will is a flaw/a negative thing
To quickly answer your first couple questions: death is the punishment for sinning and Jesus is supposed to be perfect and sinless and thus should not die. but instead he died in place of other sinners, kind of like taking the blame for them. And yes, torturing and killing the son of God was indeed a sin, the people who did it were sinful. I don’t think anyone has said otherwise. The ones who killed Jesus were not his followers or supporters
So… these are excellent questions and I’m afraid I personally can’t answer all of them since I’m not that knowledgeable here. But I do believe people smarter than I have come up with better answers than I will give too. I’m afraid I don’t understand your question regarding original sin being forgiven. I’ll try to answer the rest from my experiences, though
So think of it this way: if God created humans to have free will, this means they can choose to be bad. You may be asking, why would God create a world where bad can exist? Doesn’t that seem flawed? But if God were to create a world where bad can’t exist, then humans wouldn’t have true free will. God didn’t create the world with bad things in it, he created the world as good (in Genesis, the first chapter of the bible, he continually says “it is good” after everything he creates.)
So God creates the world as good and put humans with free will into the world. And because they have true free will, they also have the choice of making the world bad, which is what ended up happening. The pint is, “Bad” as a concept must exist in order for there to be true free will
So if bad can exist, then logically there has to be consequences for bad things. Otherwise it’s not bad. If there are no consequences it can’t be bad, it just doesn’t make any sense. So sinning, which is the bad we’ve been talking about, has the consequence of death. I hope that kind of answers the question of “why do people have to be punished for sins”
Humans were not intended to be ignorant, and they were already intelligent. They just didn’t have specific knowledge. And this is true even to this day. We as humans don’t know everything and we never will. But humans had free will even before they had the knowledge from eating the fruit. They willingly disobeyed God’s instructions before they even ate the fruit. They were already intelligent. I guess in a sense they were designed to be ignorant if by ignorant you mean “does not have unending knowledge about everything in existence”. Then indeed, humans were never designed to have 100% of all the answers. If they did, they would be no different from God. And this is clear even to this day. Not even science can explain everything and we’re always discovering/learning new things. An aside: from here you can kind of see that the bible is pretty accurate about the way it describes humans objectively, from having free will to having gaps in complete knowledge of the universe
God didn’t take anything out on Jesus, but Jesus sacrificed himself for other humans. I’m not sure of the imagery of hell, note that I could be wrong here , but Hell is separation from God, not necessarily a physical torturing session. And this makes sense, when you sin, you go further away from God since you’re disobeying him. And when you disobey someone, that means you don’t trust them. And if you don’t trust them, you’re not getting any closer to them. And hell is just eternal separation from God, which, to a Christian, is the worst thing you can experience if you truly believe God is the greatest gift and biggest form of love you can experience. That’s kind of the gist of it
I couldn’t answer your questions on humans in hell before crucification since I need to sleep now, but I do have some ideas/potential answers. I do think it is a question worth looking into, for both you and I!
I don’t have exact answers for this, but if you look at it as if Adam was indicative of all of mankind (which he was), you can see it less like people are condemned when theyre born but more like all people are inherently broken/flawed/sinners. Original sin was just the first example of it. If there were people out in the world who were objectively flawless and sinless I’d take a totally different stance, but mankind being broken and evil is just pretty consistent with history and with the bible
Christianity doesn’t exactly say it’s a grievous error to be born and that you’re condemned for it, it more says that you’re inherently broken but you can still be redeemed
And I take issue with you saying humans are broken/flawed/sinners by default. We are not. We simply are. Death gives life meaning. Atrocities give accomplishments meaning. “Evil” gives “Good” depth. Shadow defines light.
Yeah, we can commit terrible atrocities. To ourselves, to the planet, to other species. There is no limit to our cruelty. I’m not trying to downplay or trivialize that. Bad acts should be punished, and they should not be emulated or perpetuated.
But we can only be as evil as we are good.
“The sweetest dreams of freedom are dreamt in the cruelest of prisons”.
We can agree to disagree then. But my extra thoughts are, if you take an evolutionary argument, we only do things that are beneficial for ourselves/species.
We’re an inherently selfish species from a biological perspective, people aren’t just fundamentally altruistic. If evolution shaped our morals to encourage us to be nice to each other to benefit the whole species, why is it still such a struggle for people to be selfless?
Being altruistic/good natured/selfless is something that has to be fostered and you have to be intentional about. If you have to be intentional about being good, then that means your default state is being bad. It’s easy to be selfish and only do things that you want and only care about yourself, because that’s our nature as a species. I don’t agree that we just “are” and that we just “exist”, it just sounds like someone that doesn’t want to face the truth that mankind is really not that great a species. It’s just copium to me
“you’re inherently broken going to hell because you were born but you can still be redeemed.”
Fixed that for you. Christianity says the default for every soul is hell unless they are Christians. You don’t need to do anything to “earn” hell, that’s just the default setting.
The contrast though is that you don’t “earn” heaven either. Nothing makes a Christian and a non Christian so inherently different from each other that one fundamentally deserves heaven and the other hell. It’s saved by faith, not by works
The notion of being guilty by proxy is mind boggling but it would be/is a good tool to control people through fear, which is essentially most creeds business.
The notion is mind boggling because being guilty by proxy is not how it works anyway. If you could find a 100% objectively guiltless man I’d totally concede that guilt by proxy is how it works, but let’s face it, literally everyone on this earth is not perfect or blameless. You don’t need a proxy to be guilty, everyone already is, its not hard to see when you look at the people in the world
If every man after Adam is guilty by proxy, Jesus would’ve been guilty as well as soon as he was born. But Christianity clearly posits the opposite of that
The guilty by proxy argument predicates that every human being, at the moment of conception, is already guilty of an act onto which said human had no participation on. That is being guilty by simply existing.
We’re are not getting into the argument of nobody being exempt of fault, either by action or lack of it.
The “loop hole” used to exempt JC Sandals of the original son was having him being conceived with no human intervention, therefore, sinless. After all, it is argued he was born of a virgin woman, willed into existence into flesh yet not conceived as any other.
What constitutes a fault? Are we to consider fault only actions or lack thereof taken counciously or any outcome that negatively influences another or anything, even if such outcome arises from an unpredicted(able) steming from an action taken with a good purpose?
The doylist explanation is that a lot of religions back in the day practiced animal sacrifice to their deities (including judaism, e.g. Noah sacrificing animals after the flood and Abraham sacrificing a ram in place of his son once god was bored of telling Abraham to kill his kid to prove his faith). Jesus getting sacrificed is supposed to be a mirror of this for Christians and an “ultimate” sacrifice. They don’t sacrifice animals to god anymore because jesus just keeps doing the heavy lifting for them.
That part never made any sense to me either. Why do sins need to be forgiven and how does torturing someone allow forgiveness? Seems like torturing and killing the son of god would be a serious sin by itself.
Couldn’t god just realize he created flawed beings and forgive them himself, or not hold a grudge about it? Humans are how he made them according to the religion.
You ask good questions, but if you’re really interested you can look into Christian apologetics re: free will. There are some interesting answers awaiting you. But the gist of it is that God didn’t create flawed beings, he created beings with free will that chose to be flawed.
And Christianity has never said free will is a flawed design, because humans having free will is one of the most important aspects of the religion and is very fundamental to what it means to be a human (a concept that is true both in and outside of Christianity, unless you believe in destiny or something). It is not a flaw to have free will, otherwise God himself would be flawed. In a regular context, it’s kind of like you’re not flawed for existing, but you’re flawed if you do negative things with your existence. I would personally have to be convinced that having free will is a flaw/a negative thing
To quickly answer your first couple questions: death is the punishment for sinning and Jesus is supposed to be perfect and sinless and thus should not die. but instead he died in place of other sinners, kind of like taking the blame for them. And yes, torturing and killing the son of God was indeed a sin, the people who did it were sinful. I don’t think anyone has said otherwise. The ones who killed Jesus were not his followers or supporters
Seems he could have anticipated the flaw.
Seems you could have read my comment better
death-cultsplainin’
Copium
That, too.
Yes sir whatever you say great discussion
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So… these are excellent questions and I’m afraid I personally can’t answer all of them since I’m not that knowledgeable here. But I do believe people smarter than I have come up with better answers than I will give too. I’m afraid I don’t understand your question regarding original sin being forgiven. I’ll try to answer the rest from my experiences, though
So think of it this way: if God created humans to have free will, this means they can choose to be bad. You may be asking, why would God create a world where bad can exist? Doesn’t that seem flawed? But if God were to create a world where bad can’t exist, then humans wouldn’t have true free will. God didn’t create the world with bad things in it, he created the world as good (in Genesis, the first chapter of the bible, he continually says “it is good” after everything he creates.)
So God creates the world as good and put humans with free will into the world. And because they have true free will, they also have the choice of making the world bad, which is what ended up happening. The pint is, “Bad” as a concept must exist in order for there to be true free will
So if bad can exist, then logically there has to be consequences for bad things. Otherwise it’s not bad. If there are no consequences it can’t be bad, it just doesn’t make any sense. So sinning, which is the bad we’ve been talking about, has the consequence of death. I hope that kind of answers the question of “why do people have to be punished for sins”
Humans were not intended to be ignorant, and they were already intelligent. They just didn’t have specific knowledge. And this is true even to this day. We as humans don’t know everything and we never will. But humans had free will even before they had the knowledge from eating the fruit. They willingly disobeyed God’s instructions before they even ate the fruit. They were already intelligent. I guess in a sense they were designed to be ignorant if by ignorant you mean “does not have unending knowledge about everything in existence”. Then indeed, humans were never designed to have 100% of all the answers. If they did, they would be no different from God. And this is clear even to this day. Not even science can explain everything and we’re always discovering/learning new things. An aside: from here you can kind of see that the bible is pretty accurate about the way it describes humans objectively, from having free will to having gaps in complete knowledge of the universe
God didn’t take anything out on Jesus, but Jesus sacrificed himself for other humans. I’m not sure of the imagery of hell, note that I could be wrong here , but Hell is separation from God, not necessarily a physical torturing session. And this makes sense, when you sin, you go further away from God since you’re disobeying him. And when you disobey someone, that means you don’t trust them. And if you don’t trust them, you’re not getting any closer to them. And hell is just eternal separation from God, which, to a Christian, is the worst thing you can experience if you truly believe God is the greatest gift and biggest form of love you can experience. That’s kind of the gist of it
I couldn’t answer your questions on humans in hell before crucification since I need to sleep now, but I do have some ideas/potential answers. I do think it is a question worth looking into, for both you and I!
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I don’t have exact answers for this, but if you look at it as if Adam was indicative of all of mankind (which he was), you can see it less like people are condemned when theyre born but more like all people are inherently broken/flawed/sinners. Original sin was just the first example of it. If there were people out in the world who were objectively flawless and sinless I’d take a totally different stance, but mankind being broken and evil is just pretty consistent with history and with the bible
Christianity doesn’t exactly say it’s a grievous error to be born and that you’re condemned for it, it more says that you’re inherently broken but you can still be redeemed
And I take issue with you saying humans are broken/flawed/sinners by default. We are not. We simply are. Death gives life meaning. Atrocities give accomplishments meaning. “Evil” gives “Good” depth. Shadow defines light.
Yeah, we can commit terrible atrocities. To ourselves, to the planet, to other species. There is no limit to our cruelty. I’m not trying to downplay or trivialize that. Bad acts should be punished, and they should not be emulated or perpetuated.
But we can only be as evil as we are good.
“The sweetest dreams of freedom are dreamt in the cruelest of prisons”.
We can agree to disagree then. But my extra thoughts are, if you take an evolutionary argument, we only do things that are beneficial for ourselves/species.
We’re an inherently selfish species from a biological perspective, people aren’t just fundamentally altruistic. If evolution shaped our morals to encourage us to be nice to each other to benefit the whole species, why is it still such a struggle for people to be selfless?
Being altruistic/good natured/selfless is something that has to be fostered and you have to be intentional about. If you have to be intentional about being good, then that means your default state is being bad. It’s easy to be selfish and only do things that you want and only care about yourself, because that’s our nature as a species. I don’t agree that we just “are” and that we just “exist”, it just sounds like someone that doesn’t want to face the truth that mankind is really not that great a species. It’s just copium to me
“you’re inherently
brokengoing to hell because you were born but you can still be redeemed.”Fixed that for you. Christianity says the default for every soul is hell unless they are Christians. You don’t need to do anything to “earn” hell, that’s just the default setting.
Which is what I said.
The contrast though is that you don’t “earn” heaven either. Nothing makes a Christian and a non Christian so inherently different from each other that one fundamentally deserves heaven and the other hell. It’s saved by faith, not by works
The notion of being guilty by proxy is mind boggling but it would be/is a good tool to control people through fear, which is essentially most creeds business.
The notion is mind boggling because being guilty by proxy is not how it works anyway. If you could find a 100% objectively guiltless man I’d totally concede that guilt by proxy is how it works, but let’s face it, literally everyone on this earth is not perfect or blameless. You don’t need a proxy to be guilty, everyone already is, its not hard to see when you look at the people in the world
If every man after Adam is guilty by proxy, Jesus would’ve been guilty as well as soon as he was born. But Christianity clearly posits the opposite of that
Let’s not take that route.
The guilty by proxy argument predicates that every human being, at the moment of conception, is already guilty of an act onto which said human had no participation on. That is being guilty by simply existing.
We’re are not getting into the argument of nobody being exempt of fault, either by action or lack of it.
The “loop hole” used to exempt JC Sandals of the original son was having him being conceived with no human intervention, therefore, sinless. After all, it is argued he was born of a virgin woman, willed into existence into flesh yet not conceived as any other.
You make a really excellent point, and I think I retract what I have posited. But I think nobody being exempt of fault is quite true, no?
The easiest reply would be “it dependends”.
But…
What constitutes a fault? Are we to consider fault only actions or lack thereof taken counciously or any outcome that negatively influences another or anything, even if such outcome arises from an unpredicted(able) steming from an action taken with a good purpose?
The doylist explanation is that a lot of religions back in the day practiced animal sacrifice to their deities (including judaism, e.g. Noah sacrificing animals after the flood and Abraham sacrificing a ram in place of his son once god was bored of telling Abraham to kill his kid to prove his faith). Jesus getting sacrificed is supposed to be a mirror of this for Christians and an “ultimate” sacrifice. They don’t sacrifice animals to god anymore because jesus just keeps doing the heavy lifting for them.