Jesus was born in September and christmas trees are giant dicks. Yes you read that right. They’re penises. Festively festooned penises. Blame the catholics. They steamrolled every pagan tradition they could find into the catholic canon in order to convert the peasants to their particular cult.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Because according to the Christian faith, the death on the cross is the moment of victory. The divide-by-zero that absolves sin.
So, I’m no theologian, but I did grow up studying this stuff quite a bit. Here’s a probably-flawed explanation of my understanding of the teaching.
God created the world, and the creation fell short of his image for it. That’s what “sin” is, a falling-short-of-perfection. God’s perfect nature requires perfection for communion with his creation, so in an attempt to bring humanity back into communion with him, Jesus (who is both God and human) comes to live among the creation, lives a perfect life, and is killed. The teaching is that death is a result of imperfection, so the death of someone with human nature who was perfect wipes out the “cost” of sin.
So humans are again able to be connected with their Creator, despite the fact that none of them are perfect.
Christians are encouraged to follow the laws of scripture not because failure to do so will damn them, but because said laws can be good for them. The Bible outright says humans cannot get to heaven through their actions. So when Christians get all high and mighty about sin, they’re missing the point entirely. (Or, perhaps, they’re following what they’ve been taught by people who use religion to control people.)
It frustrates me to see Christians championing anti-LGBT causes and whatnot. Like, I don’t care if you think it’s sinful, the entire point of the religion is that everyone is sinful. The Bible is clear on this. Jesus came for sinners. After all, if people were perfect they wouldn’t need a savior in this system.
Someone can probably do a better, more theologically consistent job explaining this, but that’s my understanding.
The thing that really pisses me off is seeing Christians who hate Jews with the reasoning that the Jews were the ones who shouted for Jesus to be crucified when Pilot didn’t know what to do about it.
If they didn’t, your story would be broken as fuck and your sins would never be absolved. You wanted Jesus to be killed or the whole point of his existence is meaningless!
All cool but the dude’s name was Pontius Pilate (Poncio Pilato)
I like crucifixes, i study their design and craftsmanship while the Karen wearing it is berating me at work and threatening to call my manager.
As a bored kid in church, this is a question I pondered many times. Why would we choose to honor the method of torture that caused his death?
I always think of Jesus in the electric chair and followers wearing little “electric chairs” on a necklace
it’s to honor the sacrifice he made to abscond humanity of their sins.
Yeah, that doesn’t make sense either. How does dying by torture “absolve” (the word you were reaching for) humankind from their “sins,” and what sins are they talking about anyway? Sins are only religious rules, and if religion is a just a human construct, then they aren’t valid anyway.
I’ve never seen a religious message of any kind that made logical sense.
It’s a sacrifice of a perfect (never sinned) life for born and unborn innumerable sinner lives. The sin here is a categorical definition of not being perfect in god’s eyes.
Basically if you were perfect in god’s eyes, every decision, and action, conscious or not, would follow God’s will. Being a sinner just means that, again, in the eyes of God, your every action does not follow God’s will
Here is the logic behind it
An imperfect being life, untold quintillions of them, cannot ever weight the same vs a perfect one in god’s eyes.
The original templates for Human beings, made perfect, willingly sinned , and therefore, made sinners of anyone born of them
The crux of this issue is very deep, but basically, God’s whole sovereignty over his creation were being put to test by an opposing force (Satan) which basically tricked humans to create a situation that enabled the questioning of God legal framework for the then existing humanity and proposing that humans could, in actual fact, self govern and make perfect decisions with their lives without God’s intervention.
The very nature of the questioning line implies that had God cleaned the slate clean, deleting everything as a bad game of Sims, his very nature would have been made obsolete. So this was a non choice in god’s eyes
It also implied that, without sufficient time, imperfect beings would never be able to self organize to discover a way to self govern without God’s intervention.
The third implication was that it was unfair for God to punish innumerable unborn generations for the mistake made by their originating template.
A plan was made by God himself to solve this, the bible calls this a prophecy, in which a perfect life was to be the sacrifice for the born and unborn innumerable sinners which were thrown into that situation (understandable, how can an unborn person have done anything to be a sinner) without being directly responsible for it.
Jesus life, born under the protection of god’s shadow, being born. perfect (again never sinned) more than matches against the weight of any number of imperfect lives.
That’s why the bible calls his sacrifice a “once and for all” kind of deal. It basically applies against 99.99% of anything a human can do consciously or not to sin.
Unasked
Undeserved
Unlimited forgiveness.
I can explain more but that’s basically the gist of it
If God is all powerful, couldn’t he just do that without all the bloody, painful, torture part???
That’s what I wondered about.
The Cristian god prolly just enjoys a good drama
Y’ever think about how if Jesus died by a guillotine there’d be guillotines everywhere
You think if he was shot the gun manufacturer would use that in their advertising?
The cross is important because Christ’s death was a Sacrifice…in a similar way to offering a live animal on an altar, or offering incense to a god. Its this sacrifice (his crucifixion) that saves us.
Exactly. And the sacrifice refers not to Jesus’s suffering and persecution, but what humanity gave up in that sacrifice - God’s active, personal presence on Earth.
If you’re not religious, it all means nothing,of course.
I think that is actually a terrible deal. He could probably have just waved any sin away or something.
Oh well, don’t believe in it anyway.
Keeping God away from Earth is a good idea. The God that is described in the Bible is a monster.
Jesus though was basically a socialist with some caveats
As an atheist I appreciate that Jesus was willing to die for what he believed in. He saw injustice in the world and took action even at the cost of himself. That’s what I see in the cross.
But that’s not why he died. He didn’t take a bullet for his friend, he freely offered himself as a sacrifice for our sin. This is what saves us from unending death. That’s why the cross is important. His death was more similar to an Animal that is sacrificed by the local shaman then a soldier who gets killed fighting against terrorists.
He died because he was put to death for criticizing the religious elites. There is no divinity that creates purpose in people’s lives and deaths.
Shouldn’t you rephrase that? If what you say is correct, isn’t Jesus an animal who willingly offered itself up as sacrifice to the local shaman, rather than simply bring sacrificed?
He offered himself To the Jewish Priests and Religious leaders who condemned him. Why do you think he’s called the Lamb of God? Lambs got sacrificed in his day!
Did he really, or did he get betrayed and then captured?
He KNEW he was going to be betrayed. That’s in Scripture. Yet he allowed himself to be handed over to fulfill what was written and to be a Sacrifice for our sins.
Many Christian, but non Catholic denominations definitely do not use, or phased out the usage, of crosses ( also fish symbols/religious stamps/rosaries and so on) as they understand this fact
Also they understand that Matthew 16:24 is referring to a Stavros/stauros, literally a wooden torture stake/pole, in allegory to taking a heavy responsibility, in general, as previous context shows that spreading the lord’s message, with the difficulties it may bring, to extract a heavy toll on the average person’s life, up to the point of having to sacrifice said life
They also understand that even thought the old law have been abolished, the spirit of it keeps on on many of their aspects, so no worshipping idols of any kind (imaginary or physical) is seen as the practical approach
Sam Kinison had a routine where he was pretending to be Jesus explaining why he hadn’t returned yet: “yeah, I’ll be back as soon as I can PLAY THE PIANO AGAIN! OH OHHHHHHHH!”
The government just declassified documents that describe the first time humans made contact with an alien race. We found out that not only do the aliens know about Jesus, he revisits them every year for a big celebration. "Every year?” the humans asked, “We’ve been waiting for him to come back for over 2000 years! How did you get him to return?”
“I don’t know, we’re just friends. The first time he visited, we gave him a big bag of our finest chocolates. What did you guys do?”
its because the roman empire hijacked the religion and after their collapse the leftovers (Catholic church) forced an entire continent into 1000 years of oppression.
Be more specific. Constantine did it, he blended Christianity with the Roman religion in the most convenient way possible
Jesus is lord.
Cross defeats Jesus.
Cross is lord.
Christianity is just another weird death cult. I never understood why the Romans had an issue with him until I learned that Jesus was literally proselytizing that people were going to raise from the dead. I am not talking about the afterlife, he was saying that people are going to unalive and his kingdom would be on this earth with everyone who died coming back to life.
Fucking whacko to say the least and then sure enough his cult had him come back to life like he said everyone else would. Sooo yeah they were fucking crazy and so is everyone who thinks a ancient book contains all the answers. Hint: it doesn’t.
Of course he liked crosses! There was even that one cross he used to hang at.
Nailed it.
the whole point of Christianity is that Jesus sacrificed himself to absolve humanity of the original sin. The cross represents the sacrifice.
If God is all powerful then why not just absolve us from the sin?
If this sacrifice was required, then he is not all powerful or he is into torture pron.
I’m not an expert in the Bible, but I don’t think it really ascribes omnipotency to God. I think it’s better to understand it as God being able to do all that can be done. So He may have limitations, but they are such that no other being can do something that He is unable to do.
From that sense, He is not able to save humanity freely, but he can set forth a process through which He can achieve this goal with some cost. I.e., He can create a divine being (that is either Himself in whole, Himself in part, or a direct descendant of Himself depending on your interpretation) that is able to spread His message and display an act of extreme self-sacrifice.
I don’t really understand exactly what the sacrifice did or what needed to be fixed, but I do think the stories make a lot more sense if you accept that God has some limitations. For instance, I assume it’s fair to believe that Noah’s flood was his first attempt to fix the problem (by killing everybody except for the most righteous of His creation), but it failed because He can’t do everything and doesn’t know everything. But the story of Jesus was His next attempt to sort things out.
But that’s just me thinking about them as fictional stories that really need to be edited rather than a divine and infallible truth.
Yeah, none of that makes sense. How much do you have to disengage your intelligence to somehow believe in that baloney enough to actually rule your life by it? Seriously weird.
Highly suspicious that we elected this representation of this sacrifice without written approval by Jesus himself, ey?
Yeah, but all that comes from Paul not Jesus himself.
And yet having sacrificed himself, he’s now back hanging out with his Dad in heaven and having a great time. That’s not a “sacrifice”, it’s more like a bad time at summer camp.
It was a bad three-day weekend.
LIES THEY USED DIE FISHE SYMBOL IN ITS EARLIER LIFESPAN!!!
Except earlier it said to have no idols. The cross is an idol. You can appreciate a sacrifice without using the tool that caused such sacrifice as a form of worship. If you rather jumped in front of you and died to a gun shot, he sacrificed his life to save you and you would be appreciative. Would you then wear a gun necklace around your neck to show you love your dad and the sacrifice he made for you? By sanctifying his murder weapon?
Christianity is a man made religion shaped to control people in which you are supposed to “worship” a really high authority that cannot be questioned.
sounds like the government
Are their non man made religions I should know about?
I feel like dogs would have a good religion. I wanna subscribe to that.
Most evenings, I sit on my front porch overlooking a quiet pond, and play my guitar for an hour or so, accompanied by birdsong. That’s my religion.
I like the part where they worship me.
if one uses the broad meaning of “religion” then i’d say unorganized ones aren’t really manmade, like hunter-gatherers just vaguely assuming the moon is “a spirit or something i guess” isn’t comparable to christianity or islam.
Nah, that’s actually exactly comparable to Islam and Christianity.
It was inherited from Zoroastrianrism.
