- cross-posted to:
- dankchristianmemes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- cross-posted to:
- dankchristianmemes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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So wait… God saved us by killing himself to save us from himself ???
Well… he saved us by making us kill him so he can forgive us for not listening to his orders.
Remember that religion is true to the poor, false to the rich, and useful to the powerful.
False to the rich when inconvenient, yes, even as they wrap themselves in the mantle of it for public appearance.
That’s when it’s useful to them.
(OT: nice nostalgic username btw. Reminds me I have to take my back pain medication.)
Thanks and same.
“I saved you from being sent to hell.”
“Wait, who was going to send me to hell?”
“I was”
“…”
“Praise and worship pls, I suffered a lot for this.”
Depending on the interpretation the “I was” should be “yourself”.
As God is the source of all life and good, choosing to turn away from Him means hell is self-inflicted.
Ah, so we can kill people for not doing what we want, as long as we warn them first?
Then if they don’t do what we say, their death was self-inflicted.Seems reasonable.
No? That’s not what it means.
Let me try an analogy: suppose you got out in a snowstorm, God is someone who loves you and got after you to light a fire so you can be warm, what happens if you still insist on going away?
The whole thing about Jesus saving us by suffering and dying… If god was all powerful, he could have saved us without all the suffering part. Since he had to suffer, there are rules that god must adhere to. If god has to obey rules, then he is not all powerful.
…wat? It’s not because there’s rules (he very well could have simply snapped his fingers), it’s because he wanted to demonstrate to us how much he loved us. It has to do with the whole “he is the embodiment of both perfect love and perfect justice” thing.
“I’m going to torture and murder this man who helped the poor and sick, just to show you how much I love you”.
Yeah, seems pretty on point for the “you are my chosen people, murder everyone else” god.
Remember, the concept of hell doesn’t exist anywhere in Jewish or Christian scripture. It’s a much later Hellenist addition.
I’m atheist but Jesus definitely references hell in the Bible
A quick Google search returned this (a few are from the new testament and the evangelists):
This is incorrect. The word “hell” is not Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic and does not occur anywhere in scripture. Every time you see the word “hell” that word has been intentionally mistranslated from other words that already have clear, unambiguous meanings. Aside from word choices, the concept itself originates in Hellenism, the literal Greek Hades. The Roman cults injected their own tradition into the growing Christian cult, and gradually it evolved in the cartoonishly silly “fiery underworld of eternal torture” concept, a very convenient tool for controlling a populace through dogmatic terror.
That’s about the word “hell”. The concept is there. In fact many of the verses do not mention the name of the place, just the description or punishment
The concept is also not there. In the Hebrew the word sheol is used. This literally means “the grave” and is used for death and the dead, exactly as we understand it in a modern secular sense.
Gehenna is one of the words used by Jesus. This is dripping with meaning from the Old Testament, where children were burned alive in sacrifice to other gods and buried in a potters field nearby. It is symbolic of meaningless, pointless, anti-covenantal death, then being anonymously buried and forgotten like garbage, rather than beloved family.
Jesus also uses Hades — literally the Greek underworld — for a parable to a Hellenist audience. The parable is about culpability and the permanence of the consequences of wickedness. Wicked people would not be swayed even by a dead relative appearing and warning them. This is a parable, a literary device, not a sudden declaration that the Hellenist underworld, foreign to Judaism, is physically objectively real.
Jewish scripture is surprisingly consistent about this. Dead means dead. None of the New Testament authors contradict this. The controversy of the time was whether the dead would be resurrected and judged at the end of all things. That mythology began during the Maccabean revolt — which is also when the book of Daniel was written and assembled — and which is a major influence on Jesus and his teaching. In that mythology, dead is still dead, but they will be resurrected and judged. The righteous will be given a retirement plan and eternal life in a new creation, those who are not found righteous will be burned like trash and remain dead and forgotten forever.
I’m pretty sure that the Abrahamic concept of Hell isn’t from Hades, since Hades is not a place of suffering, just a place where dead people go without punishments or rewards, a concept that occurs in many, many religions. Tartarus, on the other hand, is more similar to the Abrahamic (or especially Christian) Hell, but the main distinction here is that Tartarus is reserved for the people that the gods are REALLY pissed with.
Basically, ancient Hellenic afterlife can be split into three places: Elysium, for very, very good people, Tartarus, for very, very bad people, and Hades for everyone else.
I never understood the most basic, fundamental point of Christianity - how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?
“Oh, you think it’s so easy? You get crucified, and if you really do it, I’ll forgive everybody’s sins.”
“That’s bullshit. You won’t do that.”
"I’ll go you one better - I’ll forgive their sins forever.
All right, you got a bet!"
If I committed a murder, that murder doesn’t just go away just because some random, third party person died somewhere, 2000 years ago. My victim is still dead, the family is still sad, and I’m still a murderer.
The next time I’m in front of a judge, can I claim my crimes are already absolved because a guy died long ago? Of course not, I’m going to jail. The government doesn’t buy that story because it makes no sense, and I’m not buying it either.
Edit: Numerous insightful replies, I’m impressed. Thanks, gang!
how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?
Speaking as someone literally brought up in a cult like environment, it’s just one of the many nonsense word-salad doctrines that people live by when those people were never able to separate their feelings from their world. IE: there is a segment of the population who do not have a distinction between an outside world, separate from their feelings about it.
This is a reflection of how the brain works at a most basic level. It’s not a logic tool for reasoning out problems, not by default at least. It’s default instruction state is to assemble experiences and associations to write a story to explain how you feel, and it doesn’t actually have objective understanding about the world, so those stories do not need to make sense.
When you really, truly internalize and digest this fact, you will understand so much about yourself and others. You can overcome some depressive episodes and know how to make people like you, how to manage addiction and unhealthy behavior and how to avoid being manipulated by others, and so much more. It’s vastly important we understand this about our brains.
You have to actually train your brain to actually analyze and understand the world around you in a way that shows you how you and the world relate to each other. Most people don’t do this work, but brains are good enough at taking advantage of your environment that they can still get through life… but it leaves a lot of room for huge errors in reasoning. In fact, it’s not conscious reasoning at all, it’s story-building followed by total acceptance of this story without question because you think it’s you reasoning, but it’s just how your brain weaves narratives in your mind.
So for the people who never learned this distinction, they just feel a thing, and then either let their brains assemble a story to explain it, or they latch onto someone else’s supplied story. This is how people are manipulated on mass scales.
“Jesus died for your sins” makes no logical sense, but it’s not meant to, it’s meant to make you feel like something is being done about the thing you worry most about, if you’re going to see your loved ones again in heaven. That’s a paralyzing fear for almost every human who’s ever lived. Our awareness of death has opened a huge vulnerability in our reasoning skills and caused us more death and harm than if we didn’t worry about it so much.
Once you have a McGuffin that makes you feel protected from this thing you fear most, you are more likely to reinforce and build further narratives around this idea to protect it. To not protect it, to dismantle it and try to figure it out is literally painful to many people, because it invites in the question… What if you’re wrong?" and even approaching that question makes people who have never processed these emotions absolutely fall apart.
edit: I want to add one thing, that the more you think about the really hard thing, your inevitable end, it becomes easier to accept and make peace with. Especially as you get older and more aware of your own limitations and realize you’re kinda stuck on rails in this life. There is no bigger story or experience you will miss out on.
it’s means it is
It can also be a possessive for it
Um, no? Who told you that? **Its **is already possessive. Like hers, his, ours, theirs.
It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.
The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.
I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.
Yeah it would have been way easier for the apparently all good, all knowing, all powerful god to just, you know, forgive us, but that wouldn’t have made for a good book
I want to use an analogy. If you have a landlord who seeks rent every month and you don’t give it one month, then you get kicked out and if you can’t transport your stuff on time then it gets trashed.
If that landlord made an exception, then the full force of the law would require the exception to be applied equally. Soon enough the landlord would have his stuff turn to shit.
However if a buddy spotted your rent, then asked you to simply remember him and try to do better, then the landlord could retain the perfect administration and the perfect justice, and your buddy could be able to chill with you in cool places.
Most of the time I hear about God the father being perfect justice like the landlord and Jesus being able to extend mercy from the suffering so he can provide mercy if you promise to do better.
Simply saying “why not have no rules if you make the rules” is a good response, but there are probably some side effects if there are not rules maintained.
Yeah that’s a neat analogy, but it breaks down when you realize that the landlord is supposedly all good, all knowing, and all powerful. If a being with those properties makes a system that can go to shit, or needs to be “fixed”, then he either made it that way on purpose and is a monster, or he isn’t all knowing and all powerful. Either way, not worth worshipping in my opinion.
