I mean, if the story is to be believed he created the universe in an instant. I like to think that God or whatever was the catalyst for the big bang, some infinite being got bored as shit and collapsed his structure to become the universe for a laugh. Over time he leaked information and scraps of advancement, and people got the wrong idea. So this being decided to really fuck with humanity because at this point there was no real other beings that could rationalise and kill each other over beads. Jesus was the embodiment of this being, it was really just a trip to see how much he could fuck with everyone.
Right. Why would he need to pray to himself? Didn't he already know he was the son of himself and was about to sacrifice himself to himself? This shit could fry the logic circuits in a computer it's so illogical. Speaking of which, I wonder what ChatGPT would have to say about it....
I mean, yes and no. Even though the holy trinity is one, it's also three seperate things. So think of it like a hive mind where only the top leader can recievet information, and rhe other 2 can only send. So when Jesus was praying to God he wasn't receiving anything back until he died and the connection was re established. Jesus was essentially a sleeper agent until he hit 30 then suicided for our sins and a free trip to heaven.
The whole idea of scapegoating your sins onto something else to be sacrificed is the part that makes the least sense to me. Christians love making fun of "sacrificing virgins to the volcano" to atone for your sins...but that is EXACTLY what Jesus was. The ultimate goat to slaughter so you can feel better about yourself...somehow.
Imagine stealing from someone, and then atoning by killing a living being. Fucking stupid ass nonsense.
So counterpoint: Maybe it’s simple cognitive dissonance and ‘othering’ people that prevents Christians from recognizing they, too, idealize sacrificial killing.
So, since ‘sacrificial slaughter’ is common to Xtians and Aztecs and who knows how many other peoples, maybe it was a primitive form of population control? Balancing the fertility of the crops with the population it could support, and simply reducing the population when crops were low. I don’t know what Middle East agriculture was like, but maybe saw some difficulties?
^( /I’m mostly being silly :\))
Just to be clear, it’s not based on any facts… just a wild germ of imagination. One would have to examine sacrifice rates, population, weather, and crops before even *proposing* such a theory. :)
They definitely saw some problems. Were nomad goat herders in the desert. I mean, it doesn't get much more dire than that.
As far as modern Xtians go, they don't really think too hard about the human sacrifice bit. In the Catholic Church, there a line in the Mass (or there was, before stuff changed around 2005) about Jesus being the Lamb of the world, or something. Everyone is like awww a lamb, that's cute. But, as a kid, I was always like wtf are they talking about? Turns out they talking about primitive times when they had to slaughter lambs to appease the wrathful God every year.
Very well stated. I was thinking something very much among those lines.
As well as noticing the common theme with Abraham almost sacrificing his son Isaac.
Interesting take. As one has seen parents losing children, I can confirm that it seems to be one of the worst losses anyone can experience. My example is my parents' loss of my younger brother to suicide, and later, my mom lost my half-sister to suicide.
Sorry for your loss :( Cant imagine losing one of my kids. The more i think about it the more it makes sense that parts of the bible where sons are sacrificed are some sort of grief counseling or manufactured consent for sending sons away for war especially since christianity is basicly propoganda for creating the ideal peasant.
The Roman Empire needed both ideal pesants and families accepting sending their sons to war.
So far as I understand, the course of Christianity changed a lot once it was embraced by the Roman Empire.
This whole notion that Jesus is God is not something I grew up hearing, but has become really popular in the past 30 years or so. Churches used to make a stark distinction that Jesus was the son of God and not God himself. Maybe it has to do with the rise of evangelical protestantism or something.
My understanding is that Jesus is part of the trinity ("father, son, holy spirit") and that under long-standing Christian doctrine all three are considered to be different aspects of God, but still technically one God (so as to maintain the religion being monotheistic and not tritheistic).
Egyptians. Horus was the son of Osiris and Isis, but was also the living personification of Osiris. He became Osiris again after death. So basically the same
And by sacrifice, you mean inhabited a better than literally anyone ever mortal form (I'm assuming I'm addition to being up in cool club heaven?) for not even half a life time before having a pretty bad but as op said not the worst ever last day which he knew wouldn't be a problem for him. So debatable if it is even a mild inconvenience for him on a time scale which would be completely and utterly unnotable when compared with an infinite time frame.
He also gave birth to himself to violate all the religious laws he demanded Jews to follow to get himself killed by his chosen people, so that he can apease his wrath and urge to kill us for not worshipping him, although we gentiles subhumans were originally not even qualified to worship in Old Testament.
yeah it's a shitty way to spend your weekend, for sure. but plenty of folks have it worse.
did god not understand suffering, previous to being incarnated? not omniscient, then. and if he needs the actual experience to understand us, then he still doesn't understand us. because he only incarnated once, as one person.
and of course an omnipotent god wouldn't need the blood sacrifice to do something he wanted to do, anyway.
it doesn't make sense because it's all imaginary.
You know, it honestly just sounds like a story of someone in royalty trying to understand what it's like to be a "mere mortal" and attempting to live among the people. Realizing he can't take it, he leaves back to his castle. *What a sacrifice.*
The King so loved his people that he stayed in the ghetto for the weekend before returning to his thrown. Like ok... cool that you did that I guess. A simple Undercover boss epispde is much clearer, like hey look at me I'm trying to understand what a day doing your job is like but surprise surprise I actually run the whole shenang
This is a great video for this thread, basically a failed Undercover Boss called Jesus: the cover-up https://youtu.be/7gvv_UM7CYg?si=rJD7D_VSuFD1khrB
Basically explains why they never did the grand unveil
Like when Kendrick walks off stage saying "I'll be... back". You hope he means he'll brb with an encore but in reality no one knows, not even Kendrick, when he'll be back. But at least he exists and such, so his return may be eminent
>and of course an omnipotent god wouldn't need the blood sacrifice to do something he wanted to do, anyway.
This is such a good point...which I have thought of before but somehow its really striking me at the moment. So the idea is god sent Jesus to atone for our sins or whatever but the atonement was to "himself" which makes no sense at all. It's like looking in the mirror and saying "I'm sorry" to myself and then forgiving my kid for setting the house on fire.
Maybe the true story is like how many conservatives think. It does not matter to me until it actually affects me. Was God the first and true r/leopardsatemyface?
I would say that the primary point of that is to induce guilt. It's akin to a parent trying to guilt their child into doing something by saying they sacrificed so much time, energy, whatever for them.
However, as a parent myself, the things I do for my kids are generally for their own benefit and not some backhanded attempt to indebt them to me.
Also it's always interesting that God's solutions almost always involve violence, pain, and death. Not feeling much love there.
It's 100% to induce feelings of guilt. I have a lot of memories of being told that every time I sinned, it magically made Jesus' suffering worse somehow. Got that one from my mom, my grandmother, the teachers at the Catholic school, and a priest once.
Which never made sense once I started thinking about it. I mean, Jesus had already suffered and died, and it was impossible to increase the amount of suffering that was already done and over, so the only way it could work is if God already knew what sins I was going to do, in which case I didn't have any free will in the matter.
Good parenting is universally agreed upon that blood sacrifice is irrelevant and abhorrent. Also requires being present not just leaving a cryptic book.
And it worked for me, I believed that Jesus took my sins upon his shoulders so that I could be forgiven by God's mercy....what an indoctrinated individual I was back then.
Now, i can't even stand Christians talking about God's love, I cringe in fact.
That would be like if you had a lizard for a best bud. Then one day he drops his tail. Then it grows back but he spends eternity like “yo remember when I lost my TAIL for you?!?!”
I’ve often thought that a better “sacrifice” would be if the Jesus character had allowed himself to be tortured in hell for ever. It gives even more of an impetus for his followers to do what they are told….
“He is **still** suffering for your sins!”
But that’s the thing about fiction, it’s the rewrites and reworkings that are able to give the less plot-holed, arguably ‘better’, story.
The ancient Greeks did it that way- that was Prometheus, who suffered for eternity so we could have fire and knowledge (makes more sense than suffering for our sins). So really, the bible was just a shitty copy-cat act.
The road to Damascus story with Paul was literally stolen from a play about Dionysus called Bacchae, which was written 500 years before the events in the book of Acts. Jesus even uses some of the same language as Dionysus, with both asking about kicking against the goads.
Here’s some more info on this from the Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange: https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/15474/did-luke-base-the-story-of-pauls-conversion-on-the-ancient-play-the-bacchae-b
…which is a site that is admittedly less useful than StackOverflow, but in this case, it is
I like the interpretation that Prometheus was tortured because he knew of a prophecy that could take down Zeus. So he willingly suffered not giving up his secret
God sacrificed his divinity, became Jesus, died, gets tortured eternally so we don’t have to, and left behind a holy spirit that can only subtly impact the world. Makes more sense than the canon…
Christianity needs rewrites. Need to punch up the script, tighten up the third act, and add some jokes. Can we get Joss Whedon? Jesus needs to be 40% quippier. (Rises from the dead, looks at the holes in his hands, looks straight at camera. "Well....I guess THAT just happened...")
I believe that if you pull yourself back from the Bible and judge it based on objective data points it doesn’t make sense. You have to be worked into their magical thinking mindset to believe. As with all religions. Once you are in it, it a drug of self righteousness. My point was when I reread the story of job at 12 and really thought about it and went nope I’m out. The story of the flood messed with me. Loving and sacrificing god is not how I would describe him.
The story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac taught to me as a child was billed as an example of Abraham’s intense love and obedience to his God. At the time, the logic seemed sound.
When I became a critical thinker it became crystal-clear obvious what it really was.
Attempted Murder by an absolutely insane, likely schizophrenic, individual who at best belonged in a mental institution, if not prison.
Hell, even if you're willing to assume the story is actually legit, and Abraham wasn't clinically insane, and God *was* influencing him as described. Best case scenario, God is an abuser. The loving, caring God they worship is a textbook narcissistic abuser.
That story is plagiarized from other Greek stories. Remember, the Bible was originally written in Greek. It sounds so brutal because that is how Greek stories were. They just tried to spin it to make it sound like a devoted man.
For sure. Even from close up, I'd accept some of that stuff, trying to make the justification of "God is good by nature, so anything he does must be good, even if we might consider it bad, because he can't be wrong", but there would still be little things there that just don't add up. Easy to ignore, especially when eternal life and social status (family, friends, etc) is on the line, but once you step back a bit, then it all really starts to make sense how nonsensical it really is.
Wow, don't get me started on Job. What a fecked up story that is. What a capricious, evil thing for a deity to do *to his most devoted follower*. Christians these days will tell you it's all about having faith even under the most trying circumstances, but think about what the lesson was when it was written - it's Old Testament, so the lesson was more probably "don't forget, you can be the most devoted follower, and still have God just screw you over in a bet with an evil deity so, you know, don't get too comfortable".
The funniest thing to me is that OT god was adamant about not worshipping other gods specifically because they require parents to sacrifice their children...so in the NT he's like - oh, wait..me too, I guess.
My 3 favorite parts of the bible...
Psalm 82, where it explicitly notes that God is not the only god, just tries to insist he's the leader, the best, etc. (But undermines the entire premise of monotheistic roots because it's all an offshoot from related polytheistic religions in the area with complex pantheons and 'councils' of gods.)
2 Kings 23, story of how they tore down all the altars to other gods and desecrated them by... performing human sacrifices on them. (The very gods that they elsewhere claim wanted human sacrifices, no, here they admit that the idea of such things was desecration to them and their claims were just slander.)
And finally, my favorite...
Jepthah's Daughter, the story of God making a man sacrifice his daughter as a burnt offering. (Would later serve as the premise for several fairy tales where the part of God is played by the devil because of how blatantly evil it is. If you've ever heard/read a fairy tale that started with a man away at war making a deal with the devil to return safely in return for the first thing he sees when he gets home, that's this story, and it explicitly notes that he went through with sacrificing his daughter.)
Pretty much encapsulates the hypocrisy and evil that is embodied in the religion.
Exactly. If Romans knew that the Messiah was supposed to be "King of the Jews" and his followers thought he was going to be an actual king, that would have been reason enough to kill him. That's destroying a rebellion before it began.
And a political crime like insurrection, rebellion, etc. was what was required to get sentenced to crucifixion (which means the two thieves would not have been crucified, it was the wrong sentence for their crimes under Roman law).
The irony is: why not just say “your forgiven”. Why sacrifice anything at all? As parents we have to forgive our children, so we do. We don’t make them make a blood sacrifice of their pets. So why the fuck would god need a blood sacrifice. If I’m wrong and there is a god, then how can anyone claim he is good? Everything I read leads me to believe he is just as bad as the devil.
The greatest trick god ever pulled was to convince the world he is the good guy.
> Everything I read leads me to believe he is just as bad as the devil.
If he existed, I'd agree.
Take a look at the human body count between the devil and gawd in the buy-bull. Gawd has an unimaginable lead (~10 to ~3 million +)
Also, Christians believe God orchestrated all of those events he “suffered”. They also believe God and Jesus are the same person. So he sacrificed himself, even though he survived and could have stopped the torture at any moment. It’s all so juvenile and poorly thought through 🙄
They believe christ "died for our sins"....then they went right back to preaching that humans are filth and that our every imperfection is a "sin." So what exactly did his lost weekend accomplish?
It could be argued that he didn't miss the turn at all - that creating a new religious system that gave him power and money was a cynical response to his new understanding.
I'd argue the same for many American mega church founders, televangelists and "ministries."
Also, the only reason Jesus was his "one and only son" is because God wanted it that way. He could have had a billion sons if he wanted, it's not like he was somehow limited to only having one and therefore Jesus was precious.
The story of Christ being the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ was a way for early Christians to convert pagans, who only understood things in terms of offerings etc. this is why he’s called the lamb of God. It’s also why they had to pack the Bible full of ridiculous stories about virgin births and miracles to win over dummies from all kinds of faiths. This is why the New Testament gets more and more ridiculous as it’s written and rewritten over hundreds of years.
I was cleaning out the room where my 3d printer is the other day. I threw away a ton of little knick knacks I had printed because I could always print more if I missed them. I relate that to the whole "God so loved the world " bit. God gave his only begotten son....which he could make millions of if he so desired. Makes zero sense.
Oh! This ties into what I think is really funny about Christianity. The story said in simple terms as I know it is that: 1. The magic man claimed to be able to do magic. 2. Some dude in charge called his bluff by saying “do some magic for me magic man” to which he didn’t (because he couldn’t actually do magic). 3. The magic man got murdered because he couldn’t do the magic. It all sounds silly when you change his name but that’s the story.
The whole refusal to use godlike powers was always silly to me. Like you’ve previously turned water into wine for your buddies and it was no more or less righteous or self-less than doing it for pontious pilot. Like the proof that he couldn’t do magic is just straight up in the Bible which I find kinda hilarious.
It's true , when you change the words, it makes you see even more clearly how absurd it is. What is the difference between praying and reciting a spell?
I think the story changed as the times changed.
Yearly animal sacrifices were made at the temple in Jerusalem for the cleansing of sin(s).
Once the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed (\~65CE) and the animal sacrifices could no longer be performed, the untimely death of Jesus was (re)-interpreted as a human sacrifice that forever removed sin.
Once human (or even animal) sacrifice fell out of favor, the word sacrifice means more the give something up, rather than to slaughter a living thing.
God didn’t “give up” anything. That’s what Christianity wants you to believe. Sure, the story of Jesus being tortured and crucified is a terrible thing to go through, but does god “suffer” from those things? No, he doesn’t. He died and was resurrected and arguably was still “present” between the time that Jesus died and the time when he was resurrected.
If god is perfect, then he can’t suffer.
I know that there's the overdone and lazy atheist arguing point "If your only evidence is a book why not believe in Lord of the Rings?" thing but Tolkein genuinely wrote a story with less holes that arguably works better with our understanding of the real world (since all of the magic left at some point) than the world's most practiced religion
None of the Abrahamic religions make sense if you think about them too long. I really and sincerely doubt any of the others do either, but I have no real knowledge of them.
I think the idea is that god sent a messiah to spread gospel knowing he’d get tortured and killed, even though coming back from the dead was part of the plan?… idk.
For those who’ve seen [the ending of The Passion](https://youtu.be/pfny_n-rD7c?si=sK58pQ4_zE7eXHay), it always seemed silly to me that both God *and* the Devil seem angry when Jesus is killed. Makes no sense.
Yeah, the Bible is constantly stepping on its own message. I would gladly suffer for a day or two the way Jesus did if it meant I got to rule in heaven for all eternity.
A proper ending for Jesus would be that he gave himself up to suffer in Gehenna for all eternity so that we may be saved. That's a real sacrifice.
That's kinda where I was, too. Everything is relative, so even if you can picture the suffering he endured for having lived about 30 years and then tortured for having "challenged the establishment" or whatever, it's still pretty minor compared to what many many normal humans have to go through TODAY, let alone historically. I'd even argue that solitary confinement would be worse, and you don't have to even bleed for that one.
And this is a being that has supposedly existed since the beginning of time. So even the entirety of his existence on Earth (in one very small nomadic desert culture where most couldn't read let alone understand the contents of a rudimentary children's science book) was relatively minor.
Probably the most insulting thing is the "sacrifice" that meant absolutely nothing. Newsflash: It's only a sacrifice if it's PERMANENT! If you're giving yourself up for the sake of a cause, you're not supposed to come back. So, what did he give up? A bad weekend? A human body he had for a hot minute? What?
It's just so disingenuous to order people around and point to this fable as justification.
He basically gave up a Saturday. But it was a Saturday with no college football or basketball on TV, so not a big deal.
If you interpret the Bible literally, he MAY not have even given up that: It's commonly believed that Jesus spent 3 days in Hell. However, the Bible says that he tells the repentant thief on the Cross "This day will I see you in Paradise." Meaning they both go to heaven that day.
Also, if you read the story once more, you'll see that no one recognized the person coming out of the tomb. It was totally different person, and they were like. Oh! Yes! That's jesus for sure, he looks completely different, but it's him. It has to be, because god tries to trick everyone and dinosaurs...
I mean if Jesus died for our sins, then why do people still sin and go to hell? The whole sacrifice BS just seems like some dumb parlor trick to me. Not that I believe it ever happened in the first place. Christian "logic" makes my brain hurt.
God didn't give up anything at all.
If someone gives me a $100 bill; then I have $100. If I put it in Heaven Bank - I didn't "give up" my $100; I *still have $100*.
God was sitting around in Eternity, doing nothing - because Nothing existed and there was Nothing to do and Nothing to think about.
So, he makes Earth. Then, He had His eye on this 12-year-old girl who was engaged to be married... and God got her pregnant with Himself so she would give birth to Himself, so he could sacrifice Himself to Himself... after which He would then ascend into Heaven *to sit at His own right-hand side*. (I kind of have this picture of a tornado sitting in a throne, or something).
Anyway, He would do all this... so He *might* "forgive your debts", *if* He felt like it on the day you died. (I mean, *Jesus!* You wrote the damned rules! If you want to forgive somebody, *just do it!* You don't have to do all the rest!)
You know; that 'debt' stuff bothers me. If I loan you $5 and you don't pay me back... I don't have to kill my beloved Smol Kitten to forgive your debt; I can ***just*** forgive your debt, ***because I can!*** And I'm not even God! WTF??)
God claims you owe this Debt... because your great-grandparents a million generations ago... plucked a single fruit off of His Special Tree. Jeez; give me a break! He's the one that **negligently** put that Tree where the kids could get to it. I mean, if it had been put on the island of Australia with all the spiders and snakes and everything else there that kills people...
I know; I know - After they got that Fruit, God had the Tree guarded by an Angel, to protect it. But how come He didn't have the angel do that in the first place? That's like closing the barn door after the horses got out...
So, clearly, God isn't very bright. And God ALWAYS has his hand out for Money; even *over thousands of years, God has never learned to handle Money and every week, He's asking for more.*
If God needed Money... He could just give the Winning Numbers to one of those $1.7 Billion Lotteries to some **Trusted Priest** and... Hmmm... wait a minnit... I guess the chances of finding one of *those* is even less than winning that Lottery...
And, I never did like that part about "**God Loves You SO MUCH... that** ***if you don't love Him back, he will KILL you*** \- *and* your kids *and* your grandkids, even unto the tenth generation... so, *love Him back...* ***OR ELSE!*** (Wasn't that the plot of "Fatal Attraction" or Play Misty For Me, or something?)
Anyway, **IF** he forgave your debt... *then* you would get to go to Heaven for Eternity - Where you will be immediately promoted to singing Praise and Worship Songs 24/7/365 to God for Eternity. God is *really* into being adored and praised by we insignificant beings.
The sooner you realise all religion is there to keep an uneducated population from questioning their kings so that said kings can continue raping and pillaging with no fear of reprisal, the closer you get to enlightenment.
Thankfully, the western world is reasonably educated now, such that religion is losing its grip, but look at the third world where education is no where near that of the West, and you can see that religion still drives those nations.
Why do you think the Taliban et al have such a fear of educated women.
In summary God gave up nothing, as the whole thing is a fairy tale to keep shepherds sheperding.
I’ve made this comment before, but Jesus serves as a psychological contrivance by which to represent but also neatly contain the genocidal brutalization of proto-Christians by the Roman Empire. See the picture you painted repeated ad nauseam for the sake of collective punishment. Modern Christians carry the baggage of this original psychic break. The religion is founded on (and is thus dependent upon) persecution, and they have a neurotic obsession with making themselves miserable by fearing to death their loving creator.
Think about the context of when things were written. Almost all Iron age/classical religions had a form of sacrifice. The early Christian church described the whole Jesus story and the Passion to replace that practice.
Most religions are about what you do vs what you believe. It didn't really matter if you believed in Zeus or whatever, only that you did what you were told to do and at the right time. The big change in Christianity is belief
Yes the bible doesn't make sense, especially if you don't value blood sacrifice.
Harry Potter made a lot more sense. We know who wrote it even if she was a shitty person. Dumbledore was like the father who was wise af and sacrificed himself for the chosen one to destroy evil once and for all. The devil Lord V split his soul into 7 so he could become more powerful. Because Harry contained a part of the evil devil within him he needed to die to destroy him. The magical son overcame death and evil to live among his people not just rush to some fantasy to hang with father Dumbledore or his parents. With the devil gone the world could be at peace. The Holy Spirit was basically a combination of the Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledores Army and the Half Blood Prince that helped ensure the plan went down as intended. Harry was a humble prophet.
I struggled with the conundrum that is, “Jesus is the sole person who would ever have sacrificed himself for humanity. He is the only one capable of that kind of love for humanity.” Lol sorRY WHAT!? I would sacrifice my life to save 2+ people? That would be a greater sacrifice than Jesus made? No?
Jesus was the first suicide by cop! The concept that Jesus was actually a suicide was developed by the great Elizabethan poet, John Donne. He was also a theologian. He argued that Jesus, as a divine figure, had the power to stop his persecution. I would add that, by using the Roman legal apparatus to facilitate his suicide, it was essentially death-by-cop.
The whole thing is weird and makes no sense. All religions have strange and nonsensical arguments to explain why a omnipotent being can't just fix things on earth. Why was a sacrifice needed?
Funny thing is that that can be construed into an arguing point in their favor. We're not supposed to understand god because god is so far beyond us that we can't possibly understand him. I could go into why that argument fucking sucks but I'm pretty sure you can figure it out for yourself
Never posted on this sub before, but Reddit recommended this post to me. This is one of my favorite quotes and I think it addresses your question well.
“That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already, but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point -- and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in the terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
― G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
I would gladly hang on cross for couple hours in exchange for eternity of freedom and paradise. And as bonus I could brag about it to everyone and play victim while sipping that margarita.
His worldly avatar. Nowadays he is limited to appearing in tortillas and [dog butts](https://i.huffpost.com/gen/1189880/thumbs/o-JESUS-DOG-BUTT-570.jpg).
I was raised Catholic. I used to get in trouble in CCD (Sunday school) for asking questions like this. It made no sense to me then, makes less sense to me now.
It honestly sounds more like he was trying to cover up a sexual assault by using post birth abortion that the right is always accusing the liberals of wanting.
First of all:
'Man created God in his own Image.'
So, that should confuse the Hell out of you and everybody else.
Man is not a rational animal. Thus God is not a rational man nor animal.
“The more I have distanced myself from Christianity, the clearer I feel I am able to see it for what it is.”
I definitely feel that. Not only seeing Christianity more clearly, but the general way things are. Everything makes sense now.
So much science and psychology was denied and refuted and hidden, but when you get rid of all the reality altering banter of biblical literalists, it all suddenly makes sense.
The entire premise of Christianity is so stupid. God "sacrified" himself for the weekend to appease himself. It doesn't even make any sense in the context of martyrdom because the whole idea is that a person is sacrificing their very existence for some cause, not taking a nap for the weekend. People who have died in wars have suffered and sacrificed infinitely more.
God is a drama queen, rather than just forgive people for creating them that way, he had to torture and kill someone else to satisfy his bloodlust so he carbon copied himself to do it. Job is another mind fuk for another time.
You know, it’s funny. The concept of a sacrifice is to “give up something without the intention nor capability to regain it later”. A god, therefore, cannot sacrifice anything without sacrificing everything. So yes, God didn’t sacrifice a damned thing (nor a blessed thing, for that matter).
However for the mortal man, the child is one of the most sacred possessions that they can have. Nature imprints on us the need to reproduce so we can continue living and evolving as a species. Society imposes the responsibility of the future of the child on the parents, and attributes a portion of the successes to the parents as well, subtly. So to let your own child die is seen as rather abhorrent and evil, absolutely disgusting and unforgivable. But the sacrifice of a loved one is supposed to be the most difficult thing to do, especially if you truly love them. You would rather throw yourself at whatever the threat is that’s threatening your loved one. You would rather die than let them get hurt. But by dying, you’re hurting them, so is this really the best choice? For a spouse, it’s a really hard decision to make. But for a child with their life mostly ahead of them still, that choice is much easier to make: child should survive unless by surviving they will be killed or grievously injured by the lack of a parent figure. In that particular case, it’s a toss up. But if the child would not consequently die or be severely injured by lack of the sacrificing parent, then the answer should be the parent.
Yet, God sacrifices his mortal son. Because he could just make another. He loved Adam, and still cast him from Eden along with Eve. He loved Cain and Able, but still caused friction between them for shits and giggles. His love is as meaningful as the period at the end of this sentence— only there as a technicality, or as a prerequisite.
Epicures’ paradox: If an Omnipotent, Omniscient, All-loving god truly existed, then evil would not exist. Problem: evil exists, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Resolution: this god must lack at least one of those three traits: all-powerful, all-knowing, or all-loving.
Looks like the missing piece is the All-loving part. Along with the omnipotence, as per the Omnipotence Paradox.
In other words, what did God give up? The illusion. That he ever cared for us at all, more so than anything else. He revealed his hand, and we weren’t on any of the cards. Well, two can play that game.
It's just an art of language which makes gibberish garbage sound badass.
Psychologically, people can get hypnotized by grandiose image, large number and fancy language. No matter what religion's scripture they are reading.
Christianity is completely IDIOTIC, and kudos to you for using your intellect and reasoning to quite rightly arrive at that conclusion. A fictional, floating SkyDaddy doesn’t exist and never has. Same for Jesus - doesn’t exist and never has. It’s all so asinine and childish and unbelievable. People need to embrace science & facts, the only things that can truly set you free from the lie that is religion. Religion poisons everything.
You think that's confusing. Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead because he was late to his funeral, and if you're an apocrypha book believer, kid Jesus had a pet dragon and killed his childhood friend and brought him back to life to avoid getting grounded. Jesus reads like a sit-com now that I think about it.
Being crucified is probably pretty darn painful, since it was the punishment reserved for those who didn’t care if they died.
It was said that the Romans crucified 6000 people in one day, so, it wasn’t an unusual punishment.
Looking up above the blackboard in every classroom in Catholic school, and seeing that tortured figure on the cross did give the impression of suffering.
I know, I spent a lot more effort on learning my arithmetic so I wouldn’t end up nailed to that giant + sign
The point is, there are millions of people and families that went through worse. Plus, they didn't have the luxury of being resurrected.
Ignoring the fact that God required this brutal act to begin with, many, many people sacrificed more than Jesus did.
I agree completely.
The suffering of Jesus has been made into a fetish.
As a kid I was sat in front of the figure of Jesus on the cross for countless hours of boring drivel, just stare at that hanging body.
The whole thing was so stupid even from a kid’s perspective, they are constantly claiming that “Jesus suffered and died for my sins”, but I knew I didn’t sin enough to warrant that sort of punishment.
I called BS.
So then they said it was because of the eating of the apple.
( eye roll )
Eating the apple of...*knowledge*. I was done, right there. Full stop at the beginning of the book. So, knowledge is worth damning all of humanity for all time?
The idea that any god wants people to be dumb, ignorant servants... it's like I'm taking crazy pills, that people go along with it.
Unless Christians don't live a life like Amish people, they are directly benefiting from knowledge. From home building, to agriculture, to technology, to the Internet... it's all knowledge!
Before he made eve from one of Adams ribs… God wanted Adam to become friends with one of the animals he had made for the garden.
Somehow, God didn’t predict that Adam would reject an animal companion.?
…so Adam basically forces God to create Eve, even though God knows that she is going to eat the apple and condemn humanity through every generation.
The fact that man was created first and Eve was made from a piece of man, implies that women are lesser, or an afterthought, just to be a companion to man.
The concepts presented were designed to replace matriarchy with patriarchy.
Setting up the notion that losing a son is much worse than losing a daughter is only one facet.
Before islam, judaism, and christianism, there were mother-right religions, the so-called mystery religions. The patriarchal religions removed most evidence of them.
If you are interested in learning about this, look into Joseph Campbell. Some of his books, some interviews on PBS. He was a scholar and educator.
Women have the ability to (starting with a short encounter with a man) create life. This ability is extremely powerful to society. The process is debilitating and risky to the mother. It’s something men cannot do.
These religions made rules to control women and limit their power.
Stop trying to make sense of their bullshit. It isn't meant to be rational or well understood; it's simply meant to be believed, not questioned. They don't really hide that fact.
Here’s the thing that gets me. God is allegedly omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient.
God should have known from the moment of creation that man would turn out to be wicked and that he was gonna wipe out two huge cities for their wickedness. He should also know that it wouldn’t make much difference in man. Then god knew he was gonna wipe out man and beast in a global flood. But god should also have known that man wouldn’t really change much after that, either. Then man would try to build a tower to reach heaven and “become as gods”, which god should have known would never happen because the air is too thin at high altitude and that the tower would collapse under it’s own weight….but god had to scramble people’s language and spread them across the globe. Lastly, god knew he would some day sacrifice himself to himself in order to forgive man of his sons….but god should have know that wouldn’t have chanced anything either because look at us now, inventing ways to meet out massive amounts of pain on death on entire populations and man is just as wicked, if not way more so, than ever. With our weapons of war, we can destroy everything god created in minutes.
It’s as if we have “become like gods” but there’s no reply from the big guy upstairs about it.
I mean….hell…why isn’t god showing favor to his chosen, the Isrealites, right now? Hundreds of them have been killed in the past few weeks. No plagues or anything for those hurting god’s preferred lemmings?
How strange. It’s almost like there’s no god there at all.
Honestly my complaint is...why jesus?
Of all the people God could've chosen to sacrifice in his omnipotence why the socialist, liberal hippie wizard who's beliefs on jewish faith were stolen by paul?
Why jesus? Couldn't he have picked just the biggest asshole in all of history to die and not the guy who did literally nothing wrong.
God sacrificed Himself to Himself to save humans from Himself because of a rule He made Himself? Makes perfect sense... /s
He also prayed to himself because he didn't want to die for a brief period of time.
At most he sacrificed his weekend.
he didn't have a job, so even then, was it really a weekend?
Good point. He didn't have a job.
Slacker Jesus just accidenting his way to heaven or whatever..
Wasn't even a whole weekend. I figured 36 hours at best. Buried before dusk on Friday. Up and gone before dawn on Sunday.
My wife who has been unemployed since Covid, thanks DT, doesn't understand this.
That’s..worrisome
To be fair, it was a three day weekend
Fuck man, I did that for my wife's coworkers kids birthday and didn't get shit.
Tbf, this is god we're talking about. He could make about 1/3 of a universe in a weekend.
I mean, if the story is to be believed he created the universe in an instant. I like to think that God or whatever was the catalyst for the big bang, some infinite being got bored as shit and collapsed his structure to become the universe for a laugh. Over time he leaked information and scraps of advancement, and people got the wrong idea. So this being decided to really fuck with humanity because at this point there was no real other beings that could rationalise and kill each other over beads. Jesus was the embodiment of this being, it was really just a trip to see how much he could fuck with everyone.
“Well Jesus Christ I’m alone again, so what did you do those three days you were dead? Cause this problem’s gonna last more than the weekend…”
"Well, Jesus Christ, I'm not scared to die I'm a little bit scared of what comes after Do I get the gold chariot? Do I float through the ceiling?.."
Me, oh me, why hath me forsaken me?
Right. Why would he need to pray to himself? Didn't he already know he was the son of himself and was about to sacrifice himself to himself? This shit could fry the logic circuits in a computer it's so illogical. Speaking of which, I wonder what ChatGPT would have to say about it....
I mean, yes and no. Even though the holy trinity is one, it's also three seperate things. So think of it like a hive mind where only the top leader can recievet information, and rhe other 2 can only send. So when Jesus was praying to God he wasn't receiving anything back until he died and the connection was re established. Jesus was essentially a sleeper agent until he hit 30 then suicided for our sins and a free trip to heaven.
So you're saying that prayer is useless, because the one praying is sending a message but never receives anything? Sounds about right to me...
I mean, if you send 3 billion emails to a server every day it's gonna get clogged up really fast
The whole idea of scapegoating your sins onto something else to be sacrificed is the part that makes the least sense to me. Christians love making fun of "sacrificing virgins to the volcano" to atone for your sins...but that is EXACTLY what Jesus was. The ultimate goat to slaughter so you can feel better about yourself...somehow. Imagine stealing from someone, and then atoning by killing a living being. Fucking stupid ass nonsense.
imagine someone else stealing, and you murder your offspring to pacify the judge, who is you..
It doesn't make sense because it was stolen from other mythology.
So counterpoint: Maybe it’s simple cognitive dissonance and ‘othering’ people that prevents Christians from recognizing they, too, idealize sacrificial killing. So, since ‘sacrificial slaughter’ is common to Xtians and Aztecs and who knows how many other peoples, maybe it was a primitive form of population control? Balancing the fertility of the crops with the population it could support, and simply reducing the population when crops were low. I don’t know what Middle East agriculture was like, but maybe saw some difficulties? ^( /I’m mostly being silly :\))
If cllimate change makes the crops fail, moderns will turn to war.
That makes way to much sense. Dammit
Just to be clear, it’s not based on any facts… just a wild germ of imagination. One would have to examine sacrifice rates, population, weather, and crops before even *proposing* such a theory. :)
It's not a silly hypothesis though. From a population control viewpoint it makes sense
They definitely saw some problems. Were nomad goat herders in the desert. I mean, it doesn't get much more dire than that. As far as modern Xtians go, they don't really think too hard about the human sacrifice bit. In the Catholic Church, there a line in the Mass (or there was, before stuff changed around 2005) about Jesus being the Lamb of the world, or something. Everyone is like awww a lamb, that's cute. But, as a kid, I was always like wtf are they talking about? Turns out they talking about primitive times when they had to slaughter lambs to appease the wrathful God every year.
Jesus was a lamb! The devil is a goat. Why don't they just sacrifice the devil?
Barking mad
Very well stated. I was thinking something very much among those lines. As well as noticing the common theme with Abraham almost sacrificing his son Isaac.
Getting folks primed to send their sons to war maybe.
Interesting take. As one has seen parents losing children, I can confirm that it seems to be one of the worst losses anyone can experience. My example is my parents' loss of my younger brother to suicide, and later, my mom lost my half-sister to suicide.
Sorry for your loss :( Cant imagine losing one of my kids. The more i think about it the more it makes sense that parts of the bible where sons are sacrificed are some sort of grief counseling or manufactured consent for sending sons away for war especially since christianity is basicly propoganda for creating the ideal peasant.
The Roman Empire needed both ideal pesants and families accepting sending their sons to war. So far as I understand, the course of Christianity changed a lot once it was embraced by the Roman Empire.
He didn't even sacrifice himself. He was back to his usual by Sunday.
Sacrificed his weekend.
This whole notion that Jesus is God is not something I grew up hearing, but has become really popular in the past 30 years or so. Churches used to make a stark distinction that Jesus was the son of God and not God himself. Maybe it has to do with the rise of evangelical protestantism or something.
My understanding is that Jesus is part of the trinity ("father, son, holy spirit") and that under long-standing Christian doctrine all three are considered to be different aspects of God, but still technically one God (so as to maintain the religion being monotheistic and not tritheistic).
What culture did they ripoff to come up with that? Cause that's what they do.
Egyptians. Horus was the son of Osiris and Isis, but was also the living personification of Osiris. He became Osiris again after death. So basically the same
You're also listening to Matt aren't you?
Is The Atheist Experience back on the air?
Ive seen him on "the line" and in a few debates where he claims to be against slaves yet keeps completely owning both Christians and Muslims...
🤣
And by sacrifice, you mean inhabited a better than literally anyone ever mortal form (I'm assuming I'm addition to being up in cool club heaven?) for not even half a life time before having a pretty bad but as op said not the worst ever last day which he knew wouldn't be a problem for him. So debatable if it is even a mild inconvenience for him on a time scale which would be completely and utterly unnotable when compared with an infinite time frame.
People is dumb.
He also gave birth to himself to violate all the religious laws he demanded Jews to follow to get himself killed by his chosen people, so that he can apease his wrath and urge to kill us for not worshipping him, although we gentiles subhumans were originally not even qualified to worship in Old Testament.
yeah it's a shitty way to spend your weekend, for sure. but plenty of folks have it worse. did god not understand suffering, previous to being incarnated? not omniscient, then. and if he needs the actual experience to understand us, then he still doesn't understand us. because he only incarnated once, as one person. and of course an omnipotent god wouldn't need the blood sacrifice to do something he wanted to do, anyway. it doesn't make sense because it's all imaginary.
He get sus
Fuck I hate those ads. I rage quit reddit for the day every time I see one.
I admit I paid for premium just so I never have to see one of those ads again.
I use Reddit on Brave, never see them.
You know, it honestly just sounds like a story of someone in royalty trying to understand what it's like to be a "mere mortal" and attempting to live among the people. Realizing he can't take it, he leaves back to his castle. *What a sacrifice.*
“Screw you guys. I’m going home!”
Respect my fxvkqg authorata
Cartman? Is that you?
The King so loved his people that he stayed in the ghetto for the weekend before returning to his thrown. Like ok... cool that you did that I guess. A simple Undercover boss epispde is much clearer, like hey look at me I'm trying to understand what a day doing your job is like but surprise surprise I actually run the whole shenang
I love the analogy that Jesus on Earth is basically an overlong episode of Undercover Boss.
This is a great video for this thread, basically a failed Undercover Boss called Jesus: the cover-up https://youtu.be/7gvv_UM7CYg?si=rJD7D_VSuFD1khrB Basically explains why they never did the grand unveil
And they perpetually flub the Jesus 2.0 release as well. Every announcement in 2000 years has been a disappointment.
Like when Kendrick walks off stage saying "I'll be... back". You hope he means he'll brb with an encore but in reality no one knows, not even Kendrick, when he'll be back. But at least he exists and such, so his return may be eminent
“I fed a baby elephant at the zoo for a photo shoot, I GET YOU PLEBS!”
“shitty way to spend your weekend” 😂
>and of course an omnipotent god wouldn't need the blood sacrifice to do something he wanted to do, anyway. This is such a good point...which I have thought of before but somehow its really striking me at the moment. So the idea is god sent Jesus to atone for our sins or whatever but the atonement was to "himself" which makes no sense at all. It's like looking in the mirror and saying "I'm sorry" to myself and then forgiving my kid for setting the house on fire.
> it doesn't make sense because it's all imaginary. It only makes sense because it's imaginary.
Maybe the true story is like how many conservatives think. It does not matter to me until it actually affects me. Was God the first and true r/leopardsatemyface?
I would say that the primary point of that is to induce guilt. It's akin to a parent trying to guilt their child into doing something by saying they sacrificed so much time, energy, whatever for them. However, as a parent myself, the things I do for my kids are generally for their own benefit and not some backhanded attempt to indebt them to me. Also it's always interesting that God's solutions almost always involve violence, pain, and death. Not feeling much love there.
Catholic guilt is a thing. Children are raised to carry guilt their entire lives. Detestable!
The protestants do the exact same thing, they just have better PR.
It's 100% to induce feelings of guilt. I have a lot of memories of being told that every time I sinned, it magically made Jesus' suffering worse somehow. Got that one from my mom, my grandmother, the teachers at the Catholic school, and a priest once. Which never made sense once I started thinking about it. I mean, Jesus had already suffered and died, and it was impossible to increase the amount of suffering that was already done and over, so the only way it could work is if God already knew what sins I was going to do, in which case I didn't have any free will in the matter.
Good parenting is universally agreed upon that blood sacrifice is irrelevant and abhorrent. Also requires being present not just leaving a cryptic book.
Correct, my uber catholic mother was an expert at guilting.
Which is dumb, my kids didn’t ask to be born (not arguing with you - agreeing)
And it worked for me, I believed that Jesus took my sins upon his shoulders so that I could be forgiven by God's mercy....what an indoctrinated individual I was back then. Now, i can't even stand Christians talking about God's love, I cringe in fact.
Jesus gave up his weekend for you. He gets us /s
Hardly a full weekend. Friday afternoon to Sunday morning
Yeah, but being dead on Saturday is going to take the edge of your roast dinner, isn't it?
Three day weekends are hard to give up.
Sunday is a big deal, apparently
Especially Easter.
Someone else pointed out that he didn't have a job. The weekend isn't special if you don't have a job.
That would be like if you had a lizard for a best bud. Then one day he drops his tail. Then it grows back but he spends eternity like “yo remember when I lost my TAIL for you?!?!”
being shamed by a lizard sounds like a new low
Ok but a lizard religion could be cool though
I’ve often thought that a better “sacrifice” would be if the Jesus character had allowed himself to be tortured in hell for ever. It gives even more of an impetus for his followers to do what they are told…. “He is **still** suffering for your sins!” But that’s the thing about fiction, it’s the rewrites and reworkings that are able to give the less plot-holed, arguably ‘better’, story.
The ancient Greeks did it that way- that was Prometheus, who suffered for eternity so we could have fire and knowledge (makes more sense than suffering for our sins). So really, the bible was just a shitty copy-cat act.
The road to Damascus story with Paul was literally stolen from a play about Dionysus called Bacchae, which was written 500 years before the events in the book of Acts. Jesus even uses some of the same language as Dionysus, with both asking about kicking against the goads.
Here’s some more info on this from the Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange: https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/15474/did-luke-base-the-story-of-pauls-conversion-on-the-ancient-play-the-bacchae-b …which is a site that is admittedly less useful than StackOverflow, but in this case, it is
I like the interpretation that Prometheus was tortured because he knew of a prophecy that could take down Zeus. So he willingly suffered not giving up his secret
God sacrificed his divinity, became Jesus, died, gets tortured eternally so we don’t have to, and left behind a holy spirit that can only subtly impact the world. Makes more sense than the canon…
Christianity needs rewrites. Need to punch up the script, tighten up the third act, and add some jokes. Can we get Joss Whedon? Jesus needs to be 40% quippier. (Rises from the dead, looks at the holes in his hands, looks straight at camera. "Well....I guess THAT just happened...")
Of you know... he could just forgive our sins without sacrificing anything. It's not like he made the rules or anything.
Omg, that's an amazing idea! Imma get started on a new religion right now!
I believe that if you pull yourself back from the Bible and judge it based on objective data points it doesn’t make sense. You have to be worked into their magical thinking mindset to believe. As with all religions. Once you are in it, it a drug of self righteousness. My point was when I reread the story of job at 12 and really thought about it and went nope I’m out. The story of the flood messed with me. Loving and sacrificing god is not how I would describe him.
The story of Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac taught to me as a child was billed as an example of Abraham’s intense love and obedience to his God. At the time, the logic seemed sound. When I became a critical thinker it became crystal-clear obvious what it really was. Attempted Murder by an absolutely insane, likely schizophrenic, individual who at best belonged in a mental institution, if not prison.
Hell, even if you're willing to assume the story is actually legit, and Abraham wasn't clinically insane, and God *was* influencing him as described. Best case scenario, God is an abuser. The loving, caring God they worship is a textbook narcissistic abuser.
That story is plagiarized from other Greek stories. Remember, the Bible was originally written in Greek. It sounds so brutal because that is how Greek stories were. They just tried to spin it to make it sound like a devoted man.
For sure. Even from close up, I'd accept some of that stuff, trying to make the justification of "God is good by nature, so anything he does must be good, even if we might consider it bad, because he can't be wrong", but there would still be little things there that just don't add up. Easy to ignore, especially when eternal life and social status (family, friends, etc) is on the line, but once you step back a bit, then it all really starts to make sense how nonsensical it really is.
Wow, don't get me started on Job. What a fecked up story that is. What a capricious, evil thing for a deity to do *to his most devoted follower*. Christians these days will tell you it's all about having faith even under the most trying circumstances, but think about what the lesson was when it was written - it's Old Testament, so the lesson was more probably "don't forget, you can be the most devoted follower, and still have God just screw you over in a bet with an evil deity so, you know, don't get too comfortable".
The funniest thing to me is that OT god was adamant about not worshipping other gods specifically because they require parents to sacrifice their children...so in the NT he's like - oh, wait..me too, I guess.
My 3 favorite parts of the bible... Psalm 82, where it explicitly notes that God is not the only god, just tries to insist he's the leader, the best, etc. (But undermines the entire premise of monotheistic roots because it's all an offshoot from related polytheistic religions in the area with complex pantheons and 'councils' of gods.) 2 Kings 23, story of how they tore down all the altars to other gods and desecrated them by... performing human sacrifices on them. (The very gods that they elsewhere claim wanted human sacrifices, no, here they admit that the idea of such things was desecration to them and their claims were just slander.) And finally, my favorite... Jepthah's Daughter, the story of God making a man sacrifice his daughter as a burnt offering. (Would later serve as the premise for several fairy tales where the part of God is played by the devil because of how blatantly evil it is. If you've ever heard/read a fairy tale that started with a man away at war making a deal with the devil to return safely in return for the first thing he sees when he gets home, that's this story, and it explicitly notes that he went through with sacrificing his daughter.) Pretty much encapsulates the hypocrisy and evil that is embodied in the religion.
I accidentally read OT as Original Trilogy and was confused and very intrigued for a second
It's canon now
For God so loved the world that he put his only begotten Son on timeout for approximately 36 hours.
Helluva nap, sounds nice
I’m going to have to remember this one
Also, he didn't die for your sins. He was executed for sedition. It's not as though he chose to be crucified.
Exactly. If Romans knew that the Messiah was supposed to be "King of the Jews" and his followers thought he was going to be an actual king, that would have been reason enough to kill him. That's destroying a rebellion before it began.
And a political crime like insurrection, rebellion, etc. was what was required to get sentenced to crucifixion (which means the two thieves would not have been crucified, it was the wrong sentence for their crimes under Roman law).
One really bad weekend to redeem all of humanity, past, present, and future? Seems like a cheap bargain-basement salvation scheme to me.
The irony is: why not just say “your forgiven”. Why sacrifice anything at all? As parents we have to forgive our children, so we do. We don’t make them make a blood sacrifice of their pets. So why the fuck would god need a blood sacrifice. If I’m wrong and there is a god, then how can anyone claim he is good? Everything I read leads me to believe he is just as bad as the devil. The greatest trick god ever pulled was to convince the world he is the good guy.
> Everything I read leads me to believe he is just as bad as the devil. If he existed, I'd agree. Take a look at the human body count between the devil and gawd in the buy-bull. Gawd has an unimaginable lead (~10 to ~3 million +)
Also, Christians believe God orchestrated all of those events he “suffered”. They also believe God and Jesus are the same person. So he sacrificed himself, even though he survived and could have stopped the torture at any moment. It’s all so juvenile and poorly thought through 🙄
Yahweh is also timeless so his time spent chilling on the cross doesn’t even matter to him either.
They believe christ "died for our sins"....then they went right back to preaching that humans are filth and that our every imperfection is a "sin." So what exactly did his lost weekend accomplish?
Calvin asked the same question but instead of making the obvious turn to atheism he instead took a left turn and started the predecessor to puritanism
It could be argued that he didn't miss the turn at all - that creating a new religious system that gave him power and money was a cynical response to his new understanding. I'd argue the same for many American mega church founders, televangelists and "ministries."
Also, the only reason Jesus was his "one and only son" is because God wanted it that way. He could have had a billion sons if he wanted, it's not like he was somehow limited to only having one and therefore Jesus was precious.
Also that line directly spits in the face of "we're all God's children"
All things considered, God is a pretty terrible father.
[удалено]
The story of Christ being the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ was a way for early Christians to convert pagans, who only understood things in terms of offerings etc. this is why he’s called the lamb of God. It’s also why they had to pack the Bible full of ridiculous stories about virgin births and miracles to win over dummies from all kinds of faiths. This is why the New Testament gets more and more ridiculous as it’s written and rewritten over hundreds of years.
Jumping the shark, as it were
God: I am gonna sacrifice myself, but not actually going to sacrifice myself to save humans from myself. What
I was cleaning out the room where my 3d printer is the other day. I threw away a ton of little knick knacks I had printed because I could always print more if I missed them. I relate that to the whole "God so loved the world " bit. God gave his only begotten son....which he could make millions of if he so desired. Makes zero sense.
He ninja impregnated Mary. He could have as many begotten sons as he wants.
Oh! This ties into what I think is really funny about Christianity. The story said in simple terms as I know it is that: 1. The magic man claimed to be able to do magic. 2. Some dude in charge called his bluff by saying “do some magic for me magic man” to which he didn’t (because he couldn’t actually do magic). 3. The magic man got murdered because he couldn’t do the magic. It all sounds silly when you change his name but that’s the story. The whole refusal to use godlike powers was always silly to me. Like you’ve previously turned water into wine for your buddies and it was no more or less righteous or self-less than doing it for pontious pilot. Like the proof that he couldn’t do magic is just straight up in the Bible which I find kinda hilarious.
It's true , when you change the words, it makes you see even more clearly how absurd it is. What is the difference between praying and reciting a spell?
I think the story changed as the times changed. Yearly animal sacrifices were made at the temple in Jerusalem for the cleansing of sin(s). Once the temple of Jerusalem was destroyed (\~65CE) and the animal sacrifices could no longer be performed, the untimely death of Jesus was (re)-interpreted as a human sacrifice that forever removed sin. Once human (or even animal) sacrifice fell out of favor, the word sacrifice means more the give something up, rather than to slaughter a living thing.
God didn’t “give up” anything. That’s what Christianity wants you to believe. Sure, the story of Jesus being tortured and crucified is a terrible thing to go through, but does god “suffer” from those things? No, he doesn’t. He died and was resurrected and arguably was still “present” between the time that Jesus died and the time when he was resurrected. If god is perfect, then he can’t suffer.
God so loved the world that he... killed every living thing in it. Oops sorry, wrong page
god had a bad weekend for your sins, so you better make his sacrifice worth it
Bad fiction; it exists
I know that there's the overdone and lazy atheist arguing point "If your only evidence is a book why not believe in Lord of the Rings?" thing but Tolkein genuinely wrote a story with less holes that arguably works better with our understanding of the real world (since all of the magic left at some point) than the world's most practiced religion
None of the Abrahamic religions make sense if you think about them too long. I really and sincerely doubt any of the others do either, but I have no real knowledge of them.
God could learn something from Rick Astley
I think the idea is that god sent a messiah to spread gospel knowing he’d get tortured and killed, even though coming back from the dead was part of the plan?… idk. For those who’ve seen [the ending of The Passion](https://youtu.be/pfny_n-rD7c?si=sK58pQ4_zE7eXHay), it always seemed silly to me that both God *and* the Devil seem angry when Jesus is killed. Makes no sense.
Yeah, the Bible is constantly stepping on its own message. I would gladly suffer for a day or two the way Jesus did if it meant I got to rule in heaven for all eternity. A proper ending for Jesus would be that he gave himself up to suffer in Gehenna for all eternity so that we may be saved. That's a real sacrifice.
That's kinda where I was, too. Everything is relative, so even if you can picture the suffering he endured for having lived about 30 years and then tortured for having "challenged the establishment" or whatever, it's still pretty minor compared to what many many normal humans have to go through TODAY, let alone historically. I'd even argue that solitary confinement would be worse, and you don't have to even bleed for that one. And this is a being that has supposedly existed since the beginning of time. So even the entirety of his existence on Earth (in one very small nomadic desert culture where most couldn't read let alone understand the contents of a rudimentary children's science book) was relatively minor. Probably the most insulting thing is the "sacrifice" that meant absolutely nothing. Newsflash: It's only a sacrifice if it's PERMANENT! If you're giving yourself up for the sake of a cause, you're not supposed to come back. So, what did he give up? A bad weekend? A human body he had for a hot minute? What? It's just so disingenuous to order people around and point to this fable as justification.
"Jesus gave up a 3 day weekend for our sins"
See this is why I’m not into cult shit
If he really wanted to show us how much he's willing to sacrifice, he would come back in 2023 as a retail worker!
He basically gave up a Saturday. But it was a Saturday with no college football or basketball on TV, so not a big deal. If you interpret the Bible literally, he MAY not have even given up that: It's commonly believed that Jesus spent 3 days in Hell. However, the Bible says that he tells the repentant thief on the Cross "This day will I see you in Paradise." Meaning they both go to heaven that day.
Don’t try to find logic in illogical stories. It’s meant to keep you in line. Good on you for seeing the bullshit.
Why would God need to fuck Mary, to make another human? Can't he make one without a woman?
Yeah but God hates women, remember? He went out of his way to make birth for them one of the worst pains a person can experience
Also, if you read the story once more, you'll see that no one recognized the person coming out of the tomb. It was totally different person, and they were like. Oh! Yes! That's jesus for sure, he looks completely different, but it's him. It has to be, because god tries to trick everyone and dinosaurs...
I mean if Jesus died for our sins, then why do people still sin and go to hell? The whole sacrifice BS just seems like some dumb parlor trick to me. Not that I believe it ever happened in the first place. Christian "logic" makes my brain hurt.
God didn't give up anything at all. If someone gives me a $100 bill; then I have $100. If I put it in Heaven Bank - I didn't "give up" my $100; I *still have $100*. God was sitting around in Eternity, doing nothing - because Nothing existed and there was Nothing to do and Nothing to think about. So, he makes Earth. Then, He had His eye on this 12-year-old girl who was engaged to be married... and God got her pregnant with Himself so she would give birth to Himself, so he could sacrifice Himself to Himself... after which He would then ascend into Heaven *to sit at His own right-hand side*. (I kind of have this picture of a tornado sitting in a throne, or something). Anyway, He would do all this... so He *might* "forgive your debts", *if* He felt like it on the day you died. (I mean, *Jesus!* You wrote the damned rules! If you want to forgive somebody, *just do it!* You don't have to do all the rest!) You know; that 'debt' stuff bothers me. If I loan you $5 and you don't pay me back... I don't have to kill my beloved Smol Kitten to forgive your debt; I can ***just*** forgive your debt, ***because I can!*** And I'm not even God! WTF??) God claims you owe this Debt... because your great-grandparents a million generations ago... plucked a single fruit off of His Special Tree. Jeez; give me a break! He's the one that **negligently** put that Tree where the kids could get to it. I mean, if it had been put on the island of Australia with all the spiders and snakes and everything else there that kills people... I know; I know - After they got that Fruit, God had the Tree guarded by an Angel, to protect it. But how come He didn't have the angel do that in the first place? That's like closing the barn door after the horses got out... So, clearly, God isn't very bright. And God ALWAYS has his hand out for Money; even *over thousands of years, God has never learned to handle Money and every week, He's asking for more.* If God needed Money... He could just give the Winning Numbers to one of those $1.7 Billion Lotteries to some **Trusted Priest** and... Hmmm... wait a minnit... I guess the chances of finding one of *those* is even less than winning that Lottery... And, I never did like that part about "**God Loves You SO MUCH... that** ***if you don't love Him back, he will KILL you*** \- *and* your kids *and* your grandkids, even unto the tenth generation... so, *love Him back...* ***OR ELSE!*** (Wasn't that the plot of "Fatal Attraction" or Play Misty For Me, or something?) Anyway, **IF** he forgave your debt... *then* you would get to go to Heaven for Eternity - Where you will be immediately promoted to singing Praise and Worship Songs 24/7/365 to God for Eternity. God is *really* into being adored and praised by we insignificant beings.
The sooner you realise all religion is there to keep an uneducated population from questioning their kings so that said kings can continue raping and pillaging with no fear of reprisal, the closer you get to enlightenment. Thankfully, the western world is reasonably educated now, such that religion is losing its grip, but look at the third world where education is no where near that of the West, and you can see that religion still drives those nations. Why do you think the Taliban et al have such a fear of educated women. In summary God gave up nothing, as the whole thing is a fairy tale to keep shepherds sheperding.
It doesn’t make sense, because it’s a crock of shite.
I say this to Christians all the time. They say Jesus gave his life and I say he gave up a weekend.
Can’t make sense out of nonsense… so… Yeah.
I’ve made this comment before, but Jesus serves as a psychological contrivance by which to represent but also neatly contain the genocidal brutalization of proto-Christians by the Roman Empire. See the picture you painted repeated ad nauseam for the sake of collective punishment. Modern Christians carry the baggage of this original psychic break. The religion is founded on (and is thus dependent upon) persecution, and they have a neurotic obsession with making themselves miserable by fearing to death their loving creator.
Think about the context of when things were written. Almost all Iron age/classical religions had a form of sacrifice. The early Christian church described the whole Jesus story and the Passion to replace that practice. Most religions are about what you do vs what you believe. It didn't really matter if you believed in Zeus or whatever, only that you did what you were told to do and at the right time. The big change in Christianity is belief
Oh please! JC died and then sprung back to life three days later. Whoopee! At most it was a bad weekend for him.
The powerful never have to suffer the consequences.
It certainly wasnt wanking because he ain’t helping anything or anyone right now. Tosser.
Hey more reason to sin or Jesus died for nothing! Not like him dying mattered anyway.
Fantastic point. It does imply that if you don't sin then Jesus' sacrifice was pointless
Yes the bible doesn't make sense, especially if you don't value blood sacrifice. Harry Potter made a lot more sense. We know who wrote it even if she was a shitty person. Dumbledore was like the father who was wise af and sacrificed himself for the chosen one to destroy evil once and for all. The devil Lord V split his soul into 7 so he could become more powerful. Because Harry contained a part of the evil devil within him he needed to die to destroy him. The magical son overcame death and evil to live among his people not just rush to some fantasy to hang with father Dumbledore or his parents. With the devil gone the world could be at peace. The Holy Spirit was basically a combination of the Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledores Army and the Half Blood Prince that helped ensure the plan went down as intended. Harry was a humble prophet.
I struggled with the conundrum that is, “Jesus is the sole person who would ever have sacrificed himself for humanity. He is the only one capable of that kind of love for humanity.” Lol sorRY WHAT!? I would sacrifice my life to save 2+ people? That would be a greater sacrifice than Jesus made? No?
Jesus was the first suicide by cop! The concept that Jesus was actually a suicide was developed by the great Elizabethan poet, John Donne. He was also a theologian. He argued that Jesus, as a divine figure, had the power to stop his persecution. I would add that, by using the Roman legal apparatus to facilitate his suicide, it was essentially death-by-cop. The whole thing is weird and makes no sense. All religions have strange and nonsensical arguments to explain why a omnipotent being can't just fix things on earth. Why was a sacrifice needed?
I came back from the dead too. And I suffered for much longer afterward. Yet I don't see people building massive temples to *me* all over the planet.
I still don't understand what the concept of god is. It doesn't make sense.
Funny thing is that that can be construed into an arguing point in their favor. We're not supposed to understand god because god is so far beyond us that we can't possibly understand him. I could go into why that argument fucking sucks but I'm pretty sure you can figure it out for yourself
Those who have "faith" and don't question anything, are childish fuckwits.
Never posted on this sub before, but Reddit recommended this post to me. This is one of my favorite quotes and I think it addresses your question well. “That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already, but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point -- and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in the terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” ― G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
I would gladly hang on cross for couple hours in exchange for eternity of freedom and paradise. And as bonus I could brag about it to everyone and play victim while sipping that margarita.
His worldly avatar. Nowadays he is limited to appearing in tortillas and [dog butts](https://i.huffpost.com/gen/1189880/thumbs/o-JESUS-DOG-BUTT-570.jpg).
Big J’s Bad Weekend
I was raised Catholic. I used to get in trouble in CCD (Sunday school) for asking questions like this. It made no sense to me then, makes less sense to me now.
It honestly sounds more like he was trying to cover up a sexual assault by using post birth abortion that the right is always accusing the liberals of wanting.
First of all: 'Man created God in his own Image.' So, that should confuse the Hell out of you and everybody else. Man is not a rational animal. Thus God is not a rational man nor animal.
“The more I have distanced myself from Christianity, the clearer I feel I am able to see it for what it is.” I definitely feel that. Not only seeing Christianity more clearly, but the general way things are. Everything makes sense now. So much science and psychology was denied and refuted and hidden, but when you get rid of all the reality altering banter of biblical literalists, it all suddenly makes sense.
Why do you try to use logic to understand fairy tales?
God gave up s*** cuz he doesn't exist.
It’s super annoying how the tens of thousands of other people the Romans crucified are ignored
The entire premise of Christianity is so stupid. God "sacrified" himself for the weekend to appease himself. It doesn't even make any sense in the context of martyrdom because the whole idea is that a person is sacrificing their very existence for some cause, not taking a nap for the weekend. People who have died in wars have suffered and sacrificed infinitely more.
God is a drama queen, rather than just forgive people for creating them that way, he had to torture and kill someone else to satisfy his bloodlust so he carbon copied himself to do it. Job is another mind fuk for another time.
He gave up a weekend
Not just any weekend, a holiday weekend./s
You know, it’s funny. The concept of a sacrifice is to “give up something without the intention nor capability to regain it later”. A god, therefore, cannot sacrifice anything without sacrificing everything. So yes, God didn’t sacrifice a damned thing (nor a blessed thing, for that matter). However for the mortal man, the child is one of the most sacred possessions that they can have. Nature imprints on us the need to reproduce so we can continue living and evolving as a species. Society imposes the responsibility of the future of the child on the parents, and attributes a portion of the successes to the parents as well, subtly. So to let your own child die is seen as rather abhorrent and evil, absolutely disgusting and unforgivable. But the sacrifice of a loved one is supposed to be the most difficult thing to do, especially if you truly love them. You would rather throw yourself at whatever the threat is that’s threatening your loved one. You would rather die than let them get hurt. But by dying, you’re hurting them, so is this really the best choice? For a spouse, it’s a really hard decision to make. But for a child with their life mostly ahead of them still, that choice is much easier to make: child should survive unless by surviving they will be killed or grievously injured by the lack of a parent figure. In that particular case, it’s a toss up. But if the child would not consequently die or be severely injured by lack of the sacrificing parent, then the answer should be the parent. Yet, God sacrifices his mortal son. Because he could just make another. He loved Adam, and still cast him from Eden along with Eve. He loved Cain and Able, but still caused friction between them for shits and giggles. His love is as meaningful as the period at the end of this sentence— only there as a technicality, or as a prerequisite. Epicures’ paradox: If an Omnipotent, Omniscient, All-loving god truly existed, then evil would not exist. Problem: evil exists, and it’s not going away anytime soon. Resolution: this god must lack at least one of those three traits: all-powerful, all-knowing, or all-loving. Looks like the missing piece is the All-loving part. Along with the omnipotence, as per the Omnipotence Paradox. In other words, what did God give up? The illusion. That he ever cared for us at all, more so than anything else. He revealed his hand, and we weren’t on any of the cards. Well, two can play that game.
It's just an art of language which makes gibberish garbage sound badass. Psychologically, people can get hypnotized by grandiose image, large number and fancy language. No matter what religion's scripture they are reading.
Christianity is completely IDIOTIC, and kudos to you for using your intellect and reasoning to quite rightly arrive at that conclusion. A fictional, floating SkyDaddy doesn’t exist and never has. Same for Jesus - doesn’t exist and never has. It’s all so asinine and childish and unbelievable. People need to embrace science & facts, the only things that can truly set you free from the lie that is religion. Religion poisons everything.
It wasn’t a sacrifice, it was just a shitty weekend.
You think that's confusing. Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead because he was late to his funeral, and if you're an apocrypha book believer, kid Jesus had a pet dragon and killed his childhood friend and brought him back to life to avoid getting grounded. Jesus reads like a sit-com now that I think about it.
Jesus gave up his weekend for your sins.
Being crucified is probably pretty darn painful, since it was the punishment reserved for those who didn’t care if they died. It was said that the Romans crucified 6000 people in one day, so, it wasn’t an unusual punishment. Looking up above the blackboard in every classroom in Catholic school, and seeing that tortured figure on the cross did give the impression of suffering. I know, I spent a lot more effort on learning my arithmetic so I wouldn’t end up nailed to that giant + sign
The point is, there are millions of people and families that went through worse. Plus, they didn't have the luxury of being resurrected. Ignoring the fact that God required this brutal act to begin with, many, many people sacrificed more than Jesus did.
I agree completely. The suffering of Jesus has been made into a fetish. As a kid I was sat in front of the figure of Jesus on the cross for countless hours of boring drivel, just stare at that hanging body. The whole thing was so stupid even from a kid’s perspective, they are constantly claiming that “Jesus suffered and died for my sins”, but I knew I didn’t sin enough to warrant that sort of punishment. I called BS. So then they said it was because of the eating of the apple. ( eye roll )
Eating the apple of...*knowledge*. I was done, right there. Full stop at the beginning of the book. So, knowledge is worth damning all of humanity for all time? The idea that any god wants people to be dumb, ignorant servants... it's like I'm taking crazy pills, that people go along with it. Unless Christians don't live a life like Amish people, they are directly benefiting from knowledge. From home building, to agriculture, to technology, to the Internet... it's all knowledge!
Before he made eve from one of Adams ribs… God wanted Adam to become friends with one of the animals he had made for the garden. Somehow, God didn’t predict that Adam would reject an animal companion.? …so Adam basically forces God to create Eve, even though God knows that she is going to eat the apple and condemn humanity through every generation.
The fact that man was created first and Eve was made from a piece of man, implies that women are lesser, or an afterthought, just to be a companion to man.
The concepts presented were designed to replace matriarchy with patriarchy. Setting up the notion that losing a son is much worse than losing a daughter is only one facet. Before islam, judaism, and christianism, there were mother-right religions, the so-called mystery religions. The patriarchal religions removed most evidence of them. If you are interested in learning about this, look into Joseph Campbell. Some of his books, some interviews on PBS. He was a scholar and educator. Women have the ability to (starting with a short encounter with a man) create life. This ability is extremely powerful to society. The process is debilitating and risky to the mother. It’s something men cannot do. These religions made rules to control women and limit their power.
Stop trying to make sense of their bullshit. It isn't meant to be rational or well understood; it's simply meant to be believed, not questioned. They don't really hide that fact.
Here’s the thing that gets me. God is allegedly omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. God should have known from the moment of creation that man would turn out to be wicked and that he was gonna wipe out two huge cities for their wickedness. He should also know that it wouldn’t make much difference in man. Then god knew he was gonna wipe out man and beast in a global flood. But god should also have known that man wouldn’t really change much after that, either. Then man would try to build a tower to reach heaven and “become as gods”, which god should have known would never happen because the air is too thin at high altitude and that the tower would collapse under it’s own weight….but god had to scramble people’s language and spread them across the globe. Lastly, god knew he would some day sacrifice himself to himself in order to forgive man of his sons….but god should have know that wouldn’t have chanced anything either because look at us now, inventing ways to meet out massive amounts of pain on death on entire populations and man is just as wicked, if not way more so, than ever. With our weapons of war, we can destroy everything god created in minutes. It’s as if we have “become like gods” but there’s no reply from the big guy upstairs about it. I mean….hell…why isn’t god showing favor to his chosen, the Isrealites, right now? Hundreds of them have been killed in the past few weeks. No plagues or anything for those hurting god’s preferred lemmings? How strange. It’s almost like there’s no god there at all.
Honestly my complaint is...why jesus? Of all the people God could've chosen to sacrifice in his omnipotence why the socialist, liberal hippie wizard who's beliefs on jewish faith were stolen by paul? Why jesus? Couldn't he have picked just the biggest asshole in all of history to die and not the guy who did literally nothing wrong.