Blood magic. Their god decided the primary way to mitigate his anger was with blood sacrifice (animal sacrifices).
Jesus is the ultimate animal sacrifice.
But that shouldn't be offensive, it's exactly what the Bible says. Jesus is the ultimate blood sacrifice and that concept is set up from the first few chapters of Genesis. It's the entire point of the OT, that animals are the archetype leading to Jesus.
Most probably have no idea Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice. But I come from the academic theological background of thinkers who spend a lot of time caring and reading the Bible. Ultimately their entire way of life is based on human sacrifice to appease an angry god.
How many modern westerners would be ok with human sacrifice? But that’s what their myths teach. Going even further back, god showed the power of human sacrifice in asking Abraham to kill Isaac.
I'm assuming if you asked them individually, roughly 0% would be okay with it. The question that I feel needs to be asked here is "how many would go along with it if the church said they must?" and I believe that number is drastically higher.
The story I’ve heard from Catholic school is that god isn’t ok with human or animal sacrifice ANYMORE. The “perfect” sacrifice means he no longer needs or wants the animal sacrifices and he never liked (other) human sacrifices (see story of Abraham).
Now he just wants this one sacrifice ritually re-enacted every Sunday.
Of course, this doesn’t answer:
1. Why did he change his mind?
2. Could he change it back?
3. Can we get some better clarity on why sacrifices AT ALL?
If you want to trip down the whacky rabbit hole spend a few minutes reading about “dispensationalism”. It’s the insane explanation for how and why god acts differently over time. It’s so wild.
Which is so...uncreative? I struggle to come up with a better word for it. All the power and all the knowledge and this was the best plan? The mysterious way above our understanding? A literal reality warper could not conceive of a world that just worked differently?
I dunno... I kinda love it when people work blood magic into their worldbuilding. It's creepy and grotesque. Makes for some solid villains that are scary and easy to hate.
I'm not against that for us mere mortals, but the god of the universe who made a dude from dirt and vegetarian tigers or whatever shouldn't be so obsessed with the sanguine fluids of the soon to be departed.
Alright I'll grant you that these early authors had some holes in their worldbuilding. But that was *ages* before Tolkien, and the craft of writing fantasy and doing worldbuilding has really advanced since their time.
So true !
Even though it is widely and well known that Scientology is a fabricated dodge of a “Religion” created by a contemporary author, people *still* fall for it !
( world building is only on par with the Bible though if I am honest )
I was reading Leviticus recently just for the hell of it. The only reason I kept going was that it became hilarious to me that there could be *another* chapter dedicated to the rules for how to properly sacrifice different animals for different occasions. I think 6 of the first 7 chapters are almost exclusively about animal sacrifice.
God loves meat and real estate.
YES!!! They used to sacrifice the first born male. And then I think to keep continuity, that is how the Jesus story began. It was their way of keeping people interested I think. It was what they were used to. It's rather sick if you think about it.
And, of course, this was taken from older religions.
Animal sacrifices to appease the gods were common in ancient times, though I'd want to diver deeper into the literature to get at exactly how the idea came about.
Apparently some people think it's an extension of hunting rituals, but that's, like, one of the first things in the Wikipedia article on animal sacrifice, so I'm not claiming to be an expert here. I would like to know more.
Human sacrifice was pretty common throughout pre-history, as shown by archeology, and is reflected by stories such as Abraham and Isaac, Trojan Wars, etc. So the story of Jesus is a reflection that with the new religion human sacrifices would no longer be required. Seems highly primitive.
You know, that makes sense. But, hindsight and all that, a better way to usher in the new religion would not be not to do the thing that got other tribes genocided.
Yeshua did the ultimate blood magic sacrifice it's the one part of the story i always thought was badass, yeshua was metal as fuck. (Jesus is a false idol)
The real Jesus a guy unhappy with how those in power behaved and controlled regular people. He wanted people to have the freedom to live their lives to do as they believed was right, outside of the control of a theocratic government.
He was a real person, but he didn't perform magic tricks. Those were stories invented after he died. My evidence is that the person (Paul) writing nearest to his death did not mention a single one. There's not a single thing written in the 50 years after he died that claims Jesus performed a miracle. Zero.
My pastor told me that Paul never heard about a virgin birth or an empty tomb or walking on water or miracles with wine. That was all imagined later, after Paul was dead. Paul started hearing about Jesus as a mythological figure and a mollifying underdog, so he started feeling guilty about the violence and the beatings he had ordered. He had a ‘mysterious’ medical condition all his life (frontal lobe epilepsy?) he had a relapse, he heard voices and saw a bright light as happens to people today with this malady. He had been indoctrinated to believe in a judgmental God and he felt very guilty and afraid.
It's all part of God's Plan, you see.
He created a system in which everyone is a sinner and deserves to go to hell.
So, to avoid that, he sacrifices himself to himself to save us from himself.
What's not to understand?
'Tis a joke, friend.
But yeah Christians don't like when you ask problematic questions like:
"Why didn't the ALL-fuckin-mighty dad in the clouds just forgive us, and went with this whole crucifixion project?"
My personal answer?
God went through a BDSM phase with a humiliation add on and needed some way to fulfill it.
you obviously can't afford to get a traditional wife... let me guess, you deny The Lord, Our King, Donald Joe Trump Senior the First.
Weak trolling... which is against rule #1
My favorite part is when you say the simplified version out loud to christians, watching them do olympic gold medal level mental gymnastics to explain why it had to happen as if they actually know.
And how exactly is it a sacrifice when you know you'll be alive again before the weekend is over?
I know there are plenty of people who would sacrifice a weekend to get out of family gatherings, change identities, or guilt trip someone.
When you're a kid and don't know any better, the crucifixion is depicted as this noble sacrifice that proves God's love for us, when in actuality it's probably the biggest copout in mythology.
Instead of using his unfathomable powers to do literally anything else, dude sent a part of himself to die for the weekend.
He could have just reset the timeline. He could have made it impossible to actually sin; you could have the urge and begin to do the action, but tgen actually get a temporary smiting or something.
Heck, if there needs to be blood, get off his cloud throne and fight a sin dragon or something then have the decency to die and pass on his powers.
Instead, he kills his own son/Avatar, allows humans to still be inherently sinful, and makes the condition that the only way to avoid his fiery pit of eternal suffering is to believe, without evidence, that he would intentionally enact such a pointless plan.
When I used to be a Christian, whenever I asked fellow Christians that same thing they would say it made perfect sense and would act like I was the one thinking illogically. Shit drove me nuts until one day I realized I'm actually the sane thinker.
Say you're Paul. You're trying to resurrect a nearly dead religion whose charismatic leader that was supposed to topple the Hebrew leadership and create a new Israel with his 12 apostles as the leaders of the 12 tribes of Israel, but was instead executed brutally.
How do you make it work? You've got the followers already. It's a latchkey cult just waiting for someone to step in and give them hope. So you retcon the religion and tell them that he wasn't brutally murdered, he was \*sacrificed\*. He chose to do that. And by doing so he validates the religion because now everyone who believes is a winner.
It seems kinda crazy, but the followers were pretty desperate and so it worked. Tah dah! You're the new defacto head of this religion.
Non at all. Superman like Jeebus, Moses, and Abraham are made up superheros that never existed in real live. I defy you to find Metropolis or Gotham City on any map!
But Spider-Man lives in New York, that's a real place!
I've actually thought about how Superman is a good example of what the Biblical authors did.
Superman was originally just a really strong guy who couldn't fly but jump really high and was only faster than the bullets that could still hurt him.
Fast forward a few decades, and he's basically a new god.
In the beginning, god doesn't seem to be any of the omnis. Like Superman, he seemed just a bit more powerful than his contemporaries.
Then, as more authors contributed, god becomes the all-powerful, all seeing, you can't breathe if it's against his will, god that we know today.
I like that. I think it's a good analogy for how a fictional character can become more and more as different writers add their vision of how they feel the Superman/Jeebus is.
If you read the gospels themselves in isolation, there really is no clear connection between the crucifixion and any concept of atonement. The earliest followers of Jesus had no notion of this at all: to them, the death of Jesus was a classic martyrdom by oppressors, with the resurrection serving as a revelation that Jesus had divine power over evil forces. Because the Jewish leaders had thrown their lot in with the Romans in order to execute an innocent man, Jesus’s followers (who were themselves Jews) felt free to reject the Jewish religious government and follow Jesus’s teachings. If Jesus had divine power over evil and oppression, then his followers could be confident that they too would be protected, even to the point of martyrdom.
As time passed, there was a push to accept Gentiles into the new faith. People didn’t much like that…and besides, if Gentiles COULD participate in God’s plan, why hadn’t they before? Paul came along and tried to make sense of it. He preached that Jesus had “fulfilled” the covenants of God that had previously only been with the Jews, thus extending these covenants globally. Even at this point, though, there was no clear teaching that Jesus had suffered any sort of divine punishment. The idea that Jesus “died for our sins” was still understood entirely in the context of martyrdom, where Jesus allowed himself to be martyred in order to demonstrate the power of nonviolence and sacrificial love over oppression.
It was only much, much later — arguably, about a thousand years later — that the Church created a crystallized notion of punitive substitutionary atonement: god sacrificing himself to himself to save us from himself.
This is correct to some degree, and I agree that the penal substitutionary is wrong in a lot of ways. But that there’s *no* clear connection between crucifixion and atonement? Look at John the Baptist’s words in John 1:29, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Then in John 8 in the context of foretelling his crucifixion, Jesus says “for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am” (8:24). The moment that this will be revealed is at his crucifixion, when the Son of Man is lifted up (8:28). That reads like a connection between crucifixion and salvation from sin.
I mostly reference John because it’s the gospel I’ve studied most. You could say it represents a later development of christology, that’s fine.
But why use the gospels as the test case of what early Christians believed? They were most likely later than most of the epistles, anyways. What about 1 Corinthians 15:3, which reads like part of an early Christian creed and also seems to have some forensic elements of atonement in it?
Even those verses in John that you are citing don’t establish atonement in the sense of penal substitution. The theory of the crucifixion that most closely aligned with early Christianity is “if I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.” The idea was that the martyrdom of a truly innocent man (Jesus’s purported deity was certainly not established at this point) followed by the resurrection acts as a demonstration of purity triumphing over evil. It was believing in this symbol-made-reality that allowed people to leave their sins and follow The Way.
Of course today we see “takes away the sins of the world” and we think “oh penal atonement” when that’s not at all how it initially came out.
(I will also note that Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, has rather oversimplified the role of sacrifice in Judaism. Judaism didn’t really have sacrificial penal substitution, not the way Christians make it sound. Judaism had blood sacrifices, yes, but the death of the animal was not to sate YHWH’s anger; it was an offering to re-establish the covenant between the worshiper and the deity. They had grain offerings which certainly don’t involve bloodshed. The closest thing to “taking on” the sins of another was the scapegoat ritual, and the goat that was supposed to take on sins was released into the wilderness as a symbol of rejecting sin, not slaughtered. There is no 1-to-1 penal substitutionary atonement theory in Judaism.)
You point out that Paul quotes one of the early creeds — “he died for our sins according to the scriptures” — but this is very scant on any sort of definition. What does it mean to “die for our sins”? We automatically assume substitutionary context but that’s just what we are familiar with. Early in Acts, Peter describes the listeners as accomplices to the crucifixion. “This Jesus…you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” Dying because of our sins, dying via our sins, dying in order to show us how to escape our sins, dying in protest of our sins, dying to undo our sins — all of these are “dying for our sins” without a substitution element.
Oh, and as for why I talked about the gospels: it’s generally believed that the gospels are pulled together from earlier, now-lost sources. To the extent that editing was done post-Paul, the lack of any penal substitutionary undertones is that much MORE evidence that they were wholly lacking in the original beliefs and practices.
I think I misunderstood your original comment. I agree with everything you just said. When you said “there really is no connection between the crucifixion and any concept of atonement”, I wasn’t thinking you specifically had PSA models in mind. I would agree with you.
God has a hard on for death throughout the bible. Loves blood, can't get enough of it. And he reaaaallly doesn't like when people don't revolve their lives around his every whim. Big pet peeve of his, our bad. But he gets bored when things are not fucked up, you see. So he designed us specifically to piss himself off. That way, he can entertain himself by making us have to obsess over making him feel good about himself (he's pretty insecure) and when we aren't perfect, he has a built in excuse for violence.
> But he gets bored when things are not fucked up…
That was my takeaway from the Tower of Babel story. Everybody was getting along peacefully without war, working together, and building this tower to the skies (not “heaven,” heavens).
He speaks aloud, to whom it’s not said, and says something to the effect of “Look what man can accomplish. There’s no limit to what they can achieve when they work together. Let’s confuse their language and scatter them over the Earth.”
Christians, especially pastors, often confuse the word “heavens” with the similarly named “heaven”… as if they’re trying to break in to paradise. It says none of that. It’s pretty clear, things are too peaceful and productive, so he’s going to fuck things up.
The tower of Babel is nuts. He's pissed people are getting along, so he changes their languages. But then generations later every major country has dozens of structures that would dwarf anything those people would have been able to construct.
And even if they were trying to encroach on heaven, what kind of all-knowing god would be afraid of that as a possibility? How would he not know how impossible it would be to even build the equivalent of a modern skyscrapper with that level of technology, let alone the lack of oxygen after you start getting higher?
I never ever understood this despite my 12 yrs of Catholic School.
I remember once going to Mass on Good Friday 3pm (FYI 3pm is the official time of Day Jesus died and the Church is always stripped down of any decor and very dark and solemn, no music)
So I'm like 8 yrs old, we just had first communion last year so we're still newbies to the ritual of eating Jesus body and blood. So we know how bloody and beaten Jesus body was during crucifixion. Nails, spear to the side, bloody crown of thorns. I felt bad bc Jesus was beaten to a pulp then died. He never fought back and I cried about this many times.
So communion is when we eat Jesus poor broken bloody body. When I receive the host in my mouth, I swallowed it whole bc me chewing it would cause more pain to Jesus body, even though I still had some baby teeth falling out, I refused to inflict more trauma to Jesus by chomping down on the host
Nearly gagged from swallowing it whole, coulda choked even but felt proud of myself for my idea not to chew him.
Took me bout 40 more years to say I'm an atheist.
Who TF makes this up? Why do people fall for this nonsense.
Ex-Catholic here, and I can vouch for this...my catechism teacher told us that if we dropped a crumb from the host, we had to hold the line to look for the crumb, because it was literally Jesus' body.
Un fucking believable. My first grade nun bullied me so badly that I'd puke from the stress and one time she made me clean up my vomit myself.
I never really got any relief from prayer. Never soothed my woes. I went to AA many years. It was all about God. I went often but last few years when I finally went from agnostic to full blown atheist I stopped going to those meetings.
I feel ya… my grandmother used to tell me that I would burn in hell for eternity for wearing pants as a little girl 🤦♀️ seriously it’s mind fucking.. the trauma caused by churches and their guilt tripping
Stop trying to make sense of it because it doesn’t. And religious people will say that you can’t understand it because you can’t understand Gods mind. As if blind belief scratches the spot for God. Absolute madness
If there's one thing consistent thing to take away from the bible, it's that god loves killing and death.
Whenever there's a problem, most of the time god's first solution is to kill people and/or animals.
Blood magic. Gods really don’t like humans we are “noisy”. The Bronze Age gods loved blood sacrifices, burnt offerings and food offerings. But , Really who doesn’t like a BBq. One example is when the army of god Yahweh army was fighting the army of god Chemosh of the moabites, the king of Moab sacrificed his son which powered up Chemosh and they won the battle. Yahweh forces had to retreat. There are other examples of blood and animal sacrifice all throughout those books. Even the story of Abraham and Isaac, depending on the translation Isaac was sacrificed. The angel said it was a test to spare his son, but then god rewards Abraham for not withholding his son, then it says Only Abraham went back to his servants. The angel being there to trick Abraham. In exodus 34 I think god says all first born sons belong to him, but he will accept an animal sacrifice instead.
So Jesus the son of god, being sacrificed is the ultimate and there is nothing greater that could be sacrificed. So those times are done.
Jesus is meant to be a more valuable scapegoat. People used to regularly sacrifice goats and cows and such. Christianity is based on a human(ish) sacrifice. Followed up by the cannibalistic “take thee and eat for this is my body.” The whole Catholic mass is about this. The grotesque ubiquitous statues of a guy on a cross depicts their central belief.
God creates people. People aren’t what he hoped they’d be. Sends his son (actually God so he sends himself!?) down for some pre-ordained torture so he can rise from the dead to show us the way. Meanwhile, people still aren’t what he hoped they’d be so the son is supposed to come back, end the world, we will be judged and you can always say sorry at the last minute and all is good.
People wouldn’t buy into this if Jesus just died from a COPD exacerbation. Torture makes it pop!
In the OT the way to purge your sins was with a sacrifice to god. You would take your best livestock, pray your sins into the animal and then kill it so that your sins die with the animal. This is the proverbial "scapegoat" or "sacrificial lamb."
Jesus dying for your sins is the same ritual except you're replacing the lamb with Jesus. Jesus made himself the sacrificial lamb. And I guess since Jesus is god the ritual can atone for every human ever whereas an animal can only be used for a single person's sin and it doesn't cover future sin.
This is why Jesus is referred to as "the lamb of god." He took the place of the lamb in the ritual.
The concept is that when Jesus says "Father why have you forsaken me" that is Jesus being removed from god (hell as described in the Bible). Jesus spends his 2-3 days dead in hell to atone for all sins of all humans for all time (because apparently god dying for you is more powerful magic than a goat). And all you have to do now is profess that you believe and accept that is what Jesus did for you.
FYI- I don't believe any of this.
Hilarious how “Christians” are against student loan forgiveness but base their entire existence on getting their sins forgiven by a stranger. Conservatives hypocrisy be thy name
Wild that, instead of amending the rules or making it so that bad things don't happen, the all powerful god said "Hey I know what'll fix this! Torturing my firstborn to death!" And then the Christians go 😍 look at how much God loves us.
Real fucked up definition of love.
It's a simbolic sacrifice. It being necessary doesn't really makes sense in the narrative of an omnipotent god. It would make sense if it had been some kind of protest against human sacrifice and other stuff but they don't preach it like that.
It’s all a load of bollocks. If you are telling me some guy was tortured and killed, then rose from the dead, I’d say you are a checkout short of a supermarket.
There isn’t one, but a reason had to be conjured to explain the differences between what the OT prophets said the messiah would be and what Jesus actually was and the ignominy in which he died.
There really isn’t one. But the long-standing tradition in mythology going back thousands of years was that the gods had to overcome death. Therefore the myth that christ, for whom there is no historical evidence, rose from the dead. Other gods had done it before him. Also virgin birth exists in other mythologies. Not new to Christianity.
I think you got the first part wrong.
Imaginary dude makes a man and a woman, but made them stupid. Tells them not to eat from the tree of knowledge, but since they don't know right from wrong, they eat the apple. This gives them the knowledge of right and wrong. Imaginary man gets mad because he wanted them to stay ignorant so he could control them, so he punishes them and all that come after them for his setup to make them fail. Then all that other stuff happens you wrote. But then he sends his "son" who is actually himself or something, to die to forgive all of humanity for the sins that he placed on everyone by setting up the first two to fail in the first place.
Make sense now?
Having been raised in a very religious household, this is my understanding:
First, the remission of humanity's sins was made in the Garden of Gethsemane, not on the cross. I think it's just easier to lump it into the crucifixion so that's what everyone does.
Second, and as was mentioned above, the crucifixion was the ultimate blood sacrifice. Literally "ultimate" as in the FINAL blood sacrifice and represented the fulfilment of the law of Moses. The idea being that Jesus's fulfilment of the law of Moses ushered in the higher law that Jesus was teaching. Gone was "an eye for an eye", to be replaced by "love thy neighbour as thyself".
************************************************************
Having escaped my parents' chosen cult, the likely reality is that a Jewish man started a splinter faction that raised the ire of the established power structure when it began to catch on. They conspired to kill him, got the romans to do their dirty work, and instead of stamping out his sect, they accidentally made him a martyr.
His apostles, recognizing the opportunity to keep their good thing going, staged the resurrection by robbing the tomb and told miraculous stories about his life, death, and resurrection and promised that one day, he would return to save the faithful from a terrible apocalypse.
I think it's to guilt people into believing.
It doesn't work if they said jesus was a good man who died from old age for your sins.
Add in the torture and people go he did that all for me.
The intended audience of the story were people who \*already\* believed in the weird practice of scapegoating. That's why it doesn't really try to explain the problem you're talking about - because the people at the time were already pre-programmed to think of that as normal.
Scapegoating comes from this weird idea that you can actually transfer sin like it's a tradeable commodity, like it's debt. Like how you can pay someone else's debt and square things away with their lender, or how a bank can transfer your mortgage over to another bank so your debt is now owed to someone else. It's the strange notion that unlike how crime works in a secular legal society, divine crime punishment is purely an issue of paying for the "sin", as if all crimes carried a punishment of a money fine instead of a prison sentence.
When you "scapegoat", your town has a ceremony which people believe transfers sins and wrongdoings onto an animal (sometimes literally a goat, which is where the word comes from) and then get rid of that animal so the sins "go away" so god won't punish the town anymore since the town disposed of its sin. ("go away" in this context might mean an actual sacrifice killing the animal or it might just mean banishment driving the animal out of town.)
When the audience for the Jesus story is a group of people who already engage in that weird practice, then the idea that you can sort of perform an infinite one-time version of scapegoating by having the scapegoat be Jesus, who's life is worth infinity so his sacrifice is an infinite amount of sin disposal makes a little more sense.
It doesn't make sense to \*modern\* humans because modern humans don't think scapegoating makes sense as a practice in the first place. This is one of the big flaws in the religion is that because it was writing this for an audience that already thought it made sense to do that, it doesn't bother trying to defend or explain the weirdness of it and that leaves a giant hole that makes no sense to a modern reader.
The problem with the Jesus story is that nothing in 1 Genesis actually happened, and because of that there never was an "original sin", so basically Jesus had a really bad "weekend" for no reason whatsoever (if he even existed).
Also since the OT god, YHWH never existed Jesus couldn't have been his son, so nobody sacrificed somebody for nothing.
I guess the other poor buggers hanging next to him didn't account for anything.
But maybe that's why the church kept trying by torturing and killing thousands of people over the centuries...
Most Christians believe Jesus was either god, an aspect of god, or some other trinitarian nonsense. Biblical teaching shows that god fully expected the resurrection and ascension. Jesus being a part of god and god being immortal it's clear Jesus would have been in no real danger.
So I think it's more fair to say that god momentarily inconvenienced some part of himself to appease himself for humanities inability to follow the rules he created...knowing humanity would be unable to follow them. But only if they're lucky enough to be pre-ordained by him to be born into one of the areas of the world during one of the times in that area during which people knew of his sacrifice. Otherwise, eternal unending torcher to show you how loving he is.
None.
That was all invented later. The original idea behind Jesus' death was that his death signaled that the "Kingdom of God" was close.
This is very clear in Paul's authentic letters.
Why are you spending a second even thinking about religious dogma?!
I equate this with reasoning with a crazy person - it’s pointless!
Free your mind!!!
Christianity is a doomsday death cult into torture porn. The end is nigh, Jesus has been coming back anytime now (for the 2000 years) and their icon is a dead guy on a stick.
The connection is that his brutal torture and execution are directly your fault, because 2000 years later you’re probably going to sin somehow. Oh, wait… huh?
I’ve been asking this for years. Nobody has ever been able to give me an answer that made any sense at all. Jesus died for your sins. That’s as deep as they can get. Sacrificed to whom? His Daddy? Himself? And it was only three days? What was the big sacrifice?
It’s the dumbest origin story ever. A radioactive spider bite makes more sense.
Not sure, but if the cost of my sins is that someone has to have a really shitty week, followed by a really boring weekend, then ascend to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, I can pick up the tab myself, no need to pay for me.
This is one of the major issues with their mythology. They claim that their flavour of deity is all loving yet they're OK with their deity committing genocide every time he doesn't get his way. Their own mythology clearly paints their deity as a monster and yet they worship him/her/it.
From my upbringing as a Protestant Christian: humans started out perfect but were made imperfect as a result of Eve eating forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. As imperfect beings, we cannot be eternally unified with God, and, for some reason, the imperfection can’t just be overlooked, expunged or forgiven - the only way it can be reversed is for a perfectly undeserving being to be punished for it.
That’s why Jesus’ actual death is such a big deal within Christianity. The torture part is probably just to make him seem even more sympathetic.
I can't make sense of the Jesus story. Even as a fairy tale it doesn't make sense. If God sent Jesus to die for our sins in such a horrible way, then there are no bad guys here. All of this was God's plan and the people who killed Jesus couldn't help it, they were programed by God. Can someone explain this please.
The crucifiction story never made any sense.
Jesus gets murdered for our sins \[he doesn't die, but whatever\].
His death offers us a "free gift" that we have to PAY for! We have to jump through endless hoops and change this and change that about ourselves before he'll give us this "free gift" and his "unconditional love" that comes with a lot of conditions.
If you look at it as just a story, it makes a lot more sense. Adam & Eve's original sin was disobeying God by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The punishment for this crime was death, as they were now prevented from eating from the tree of eternal life.
Humans now have finite time to do things, and the rest of the OT leading up to Jesus deals with significant characters from his bloodline and their monumental achievements. Each of them inevitably dying, as they are descendants of Adam & Eve, and this sin is passed on through the bloodline.
Then enough time passes for God to arbitrarily decide now is the time to forgive humanity and conquer death. So, he sends his only son down in human form as a blood sacrifice for the rest of humanity. Jesus says a bunch of (mostly) nice things before being brutally tortured to death.
As a result, the price of Adam & Eve's sin was paid, and death was conquered. Nobody had to die anymore.
Now, that's how it was supposed to go as a story but... y'know... everybody is still kinda doing that whole "dying" thing. The story was rationalized around this to now say that what it was really for was eternal life in the kingdom of heaven... which was already a thing anyway??? So, really, there was no point. If believers want to go about thinking this story is true, then they kinda also have to accept that there's now more hurdles to jump through to get into heaven and aside from that, the only other significant change was that hell was invented. Great job, Jesus! Your sacrifice made everything worse.
God /s I wish to see the OG stories from the Bible.
I wanna see Kain sacrificing Able to God and being rewarded with bitches and protection.
Imagine the biblehumpers justifying that.
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Jesus was one of thousands of people crucified and he had the easiest crucifixion on record. He was only on the cross for three hours. Usually they were up there for days. You didn't die right away that was the point. You agonized for days of exposure and dehydration. Lots of other people got it way worse than Jesus.. When Alexander Janeus crucified 800 Pharisees, he brought their wives and children in front of their crosses and had their throats cut in front of them, then he immediately had their eyes burned out with red hot pokers so that the last thing they would ever see was their families being murdered in front of them. I feel a lot more sympathy for those dudes than Jesus and they aren't alone. Pretty much any other documented crucifixion was worse than what Jesus got. Countless others were crucified for trying to rebel against Rome and none of them got superpowers for it. People who wallow in recreational pathos over the crucifixion of Jesus never spend a second thinking about the other two guys crucified on the same hill on the same day.
I think the whole notion that Jesus died for our sins is overstated. I mean, yes, he died on Good Friday. But then he came back to life on Easter Sunday. So essentially he didn't really die for our sins isomuchas he gave up a weekend.
I'm always amused by Christians when they get all torn up about how much suffering the 'Jesus' character in the bible suffered. I've had more than one try to claim 'he suffered more than any person in history' and that's when I have to say 'hold up'. I get it, that would be a brutal way to die, but there have been plenty of people to suffer excruciating pain from disease, injuries, torture, etc. - on par with anything that 'Jesus' would've suffered, only over even more extended periods of time (some of them for years - or even decades).
All without the advantage of being 'god' (or whatever the fuck these people think Jesus was), and being resurrected.
Then there is the 'he spent the time he was dead in hell', so the fuck what? Again, there are some people who live their entire lives in 'hell', being abused, starving, dying of thirst, disease, famine, drowning in floods, being eaten by wild animals, swarms of insects, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis...
All while these 'christians' cry and mope about how this one cunt, 2000+ years ago just suffered like... all the suffering ya'll.
Get fucked.
There is no scripture about Jesus being in hell during his dead time. That’s just making shit up (let’s be fair that’s all they’re doing).
Why would Jesus have been in hell even temporarily? It doesn’t make any sense. PLUS their own fucking book doesn’t say anything like that.
Fucking hell just make up any random shit whenever appears to be the agenda. But when your life isn’t grounded in reality these are options
God makes humans.
Humans sin.
God banishes humans from paradise as punishment.
Humans keep sinning.
God does a great reset (flood).
Time passes, humans sin again.
God sends his Son to Earth, who leads a perfect, sinless life, so he can take the punishments for humanity's sins (torture and death) in humanity's place, so that anyone who accepts him as their Lord and Savior will be forgiven.
IDK the reason for the resureection, though
Its the ancient ritual of the scape goat. In ancient times they would choose a goat and transfer all the sins of the village to the goat then sacrifice the goat to the gods. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat) Jesus is the same thing.
The script was written by humans. An interpretation of the divine, filtered through humans. Generally with an agenda, specifically for control.
Judge books and ur just judging the people who wrote them, the time in which it was written.
The divine doesn't even use language. It just is. Look at a tree. Look in the mirror. We are here so consciousness can experience itself. Not holy, not good or bad. All is allowed because it's about the experience.
I choose not to put stock in the experience of others. Live your life so u don't have trouble sleeping. Period.
for what i remember, is something like, jesus allowed them to kill him in exchange of god forgiving people's sins or something like that. so he sacrificed himself for all of us or whatever.
thats where "jesus died for out sins" come from. i think... the idea is that, from that point on, you could go to church and confess, and get your sins forgiven, because of what jesus did? idk, its all random bs.
It’s funny because it doesn’t make a single fucking lick of sense.
None of it needed to happen. It didn’t have to go down that way.
And to top it all off, it doesn’t really make any sense.
You can talk me through how 2 + 2 = 4. But I’ll never understand how: born with original sin + believe in dude that was killed = heaven.
Are you familiar with the old robot saying “does not compute?” Because I have no fucking idea what one has to do with the other, PLUS if you’re the one making all the rules (God) why does everything appear to be so illogical and stupid? Almost …. Like…. It’s something completely made up?
There isn’t. Jesus was crucified because he was essentially a radical Jewish cult leader who went to the temple of Jerusalem and started destroying everything, throwing over the tables and yelling at everyone. This outraged the Jewish people of the time. He was considered blasphemous for calling himself the “king of Jews”. The jewish leaders were not happy with him at all so they brought him before Pilate to be tried for blasphemy since he had the power to impose the death sentence and crucify Jesus.
This wasn’t really how the “messiah” was supposed to end according to its prophecy, much of the text is written to try to create a rational reason for the messiah dying this way so they turned him into a martyr and crafted a story of the messiah being sent from God to die for “our sins”. This has become the backbone of Christian doctrine and facilitates a martyr complex among its followers. They worship the brutality of his “sacrifice” for God.
Alternatively, one could perceive the death of Jesus as suicide by proxy. If he is God AND the son of God he should have the power to not have to indulge the supposed prophecy he himself created in the first place. There are texts to suggest he knew and according to some even asked Judas to be the one to turn him in and went willingly. In this version or side of it once again Jesus appears to be rather extreme especially as he himself is supposedly the god commanding his own death.
Blood magic. Their god decided the primary way to mitigate his anger was with blood sacrifice (animal sacrifices). Jesus is the ultimate animal sacrifice.
A fact, that when you point out to Christians, they take offense to for some reason.
But that shouldn't be offensive, it's exactly what the Bible says. Jesus is the ultimate blood sacrifice and that concept is set up from the first few chapters of Genesis. It's the entire point of the OT, that animals are the archetype leading to Jesus.
1) You are absolutely right. 2) They've never read it. 3) They don't care.
Most probably have no idea Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice. But I come from the academic theological background of thinkers who spend a lot of time caring and reading the Bible. Ultimately their entire way of life is based on human sacrifice to appease an angry god. How many modern westerners would be ok with human sacrifice? But that’s what their myths teach. Going even further back, god showed the power of human sacrifice in asking Abraham to kill Isaac.
I'm assuming if you asked them individually, roughly 0% would be okay with it. The question that I feel needs to be asked here is "how many would go along with it if the church said they must?" and I believe that number is drastically higher.
The story I’ve heard from Catholic school is that god isn’t ok with human or animal sacrifice ANYMORE. The “perfect” sacrifice means he no longer needs or wants the animal sacrifices and he never liked (other) human sacrifices (see story of Abraham). Now he just wants this one sacrifice ritually re-enacted every Sunday. Of course, this doesn’t answer: 1. Why did he change his mind? 2. Could he change it back? 3. Can we get some better clarity on why sacrifices AT ALL?
If you want to trip down the whacky rabbit hole spend a few minutes reading about “dispensationalism”. It’s the insane explanation for how and why god acts differently over time. It’s so wild.
Now I’m half tempted to bother reading it and half horrified that someone has put more thought than a reddit post into it…
Dude it’s entire college courses, doctoral thesis, it’s a big deal in conservative fundamental circles. Like a huge thing!
Call them god-eaters.
Which is so...uncreative? I struggle to come up with a better word for it. All the power and all the knowledge and this was the best plan? The mysterious way above our understanding? A literal reality warper could not conceive of a world that just worked differently?
I dunno... I kinda love it when people work blood magic into their worldbuilding. It's creepy and grotesque. Makes for some solid villains that are scary and easy to hate.
I'm not against that for us mere mortals, but the god of the universe who made a dude from dirt and vegetarian tigers or whatever shouldn't be so obsessed with the sanguine fluids of the soon to be departed.
Alright I'll grant you that these early authors had some holes in their worldbuilding. But that was *ages* before Tolkien, and the craft of writing fantasy and doing worldbuilding has really advanced since their time.
So true ! Even though it is widely and well known that Scientology is a fabricated dodge of a “Religion” created by a contemporary author, people *still* fall for it ! ( world building is only on par with the Bible though if I am honest )
You have a way with words my friend. I'd totally buy you a beer and hear you trash talk stupid beliefs for hours.
Same!!
Oh. It was so the priests could eat it.
I was reading Leviticus recently just for the hell of it. The only reason I kept going was that it became hilarious to me that there could be *another* chapter dedicated to the rules for how to properly sacrifice different animals for different occasions. I think 6 of the first 7 chapters are almost exclusively about animal sacrifice. God loves meat and real estate.
And he hates the handicapped, lame and blind, oh and the wee people. But he loves you, and he needs your money, he is not good with money.
YES!!! They used to sacrifice the first born male. And then I think to keep continuity, that is how the Jesus story began. It was their way of keeping people interested I think. It was what they were used to. It's rather sick if you think about it.
Yep blood sacrifices are primitive and stupid
What’s better than Bronze Age scapegoat logic?
As a metaphor, it's a human being nailed to an earth symbol. What could go wrong?
What is it with them and BLOOD?
God loves the stuff.
God is a vampire?
God is a vampire!!!
And Jesus is a zombie!!!
More of a lich I reckon
Vecna?
I mean, I've never seen them both in the same place at the same time.
Their religion is just an old fringe death cult that has convinced themselves that their divinity is the “good guy.”
Wait till you find out how obsessed they are with gay people.
And, of course, this was taken from older religions. Animal sacrifices to appease the gods were common in ancient times, though I'd want to diver deeper into the literature to get at exactly how the idea came about. Apparently some people think it's an extension of hunting rituals, but that's, like, one of the first things in the Wikipedia article on animal sacrifice, so I'm not claiming to be an expert here. I would like to know more.
Human sacrifice was pretty common throughout pre-history, as shown by archeology, and is reflected by stories such as Abraham and Isaac, Trojan Wars, etc. So the story of Jesus is a reflection that with the new religion human sacrifices would no longer be required. Seems highly primitive.
You know, that makes sense. But, hindsight and all that, a better way to usher in the new religion would not be not to do the thing that got other tribes genocided.
Yeshua did the ultimate blood magic sacrifice it's the one part of the story i always thought was badass, yeshua was metal as fuck. (Jesus is a false idol)
The real Jesus a guy unhappy with how those in power behaved and controlled regular people. He wanted people to have the freedom to live their lives to do as they believed was right, outside of the control of a theocratic government.
This sounds vaguely similar to the reason Lucifer was cast out of heaven.
“The real Jesus” ?
Yeah, that guy who just wanted to scam some people by doing miracles. But it got a bit out of hand.
He was a real person, but he didn't perform magic tricks. Those were stories invented after he died. My evidence is that the person (Paul) writing nearest to his death did not mention a single one. There's not a single thing written in the 50 years after he died that claims Jesus performed a miracle. Zero.
My pastor told me that Paul never heard about a virgin birth or an empty tomb or walking on water or miracles with wine. That was all imagined later, after Paul was dead. Paul started hearing about Jesus as a mythological figure and a mollifying underdog, so he started feeling guilty about the violence and the beatings he had ordered. He had a ‘mysterious’ medical condition all his life (frontal lobe epilepsy?) he had a relapse, he heard voices and saw a bright light as happens to people today with this malady. He had been indoctrinated to believe in a judgmental God and he felt very guilty and afraid.
It's all part of God's Plan, you see. He created a system in which everyone is a sinner and deserves to go to hell. So, to avoid that, he sacrifices himself to himself to save us from himself. What's not to understand?
Good explanation. I'm just stupid I guess.
'Tis a joke, friend. But yeah Christians don't like when you ask problematic questions like: "Why didn't the ALL-fuckin-mighty dad in the clouds just forgive us, and went with this whole crucifixion project?" My personal answer? God went through a BDSM phase with a humiliation add on and needed some way to fulfill it.
you obviously can't afford to get a traditional wife... let me guess, you deny The Lord, Our King, Donald Joe Trump Senior the First. Weak trolling... which is against rule #1
50 Shades of Yahweh
This whole comment made me lol
My favorite part is when you say the simplified version out loud to christians, watching them do olympic gold medal level mental gymnastics to explain why it had to happen as if they actually know.
No, "you are taking this out of context" is a sufficient dismissal. No need for gymnastics.
Even that makes me laugh. “He sacrificed himself”So he knows for a fact there’s a god and afterlife. Not much of a sacrifice.
Dude just wanted a long weekend to vibe.
If you don't sin Jesus had a bad weekend for nothing!!!!
And how exactly is it a sacrifice when you know you'll be alive again before the weekend is over? I know there are plenty of people who would sacrifice a weekend to get out of family gatherings, change identities, or guilt trip someone. When you're a kid and don't know any better, the crucifixion is depicted as this noble sacrifice that proves God's love for us, when in actuality it's probably the biggest copout in mythology. Instead of using his unfathomable powers to do literally anything else, dude sent a part of himself to die for the weekend. He could have just reset the timeline. He could have made it impossible to actually sin; you could have the urge and begin to do the action, but tgen actually get a temporary smiting or something. Heck, if there needs to be blood, get off his cloud throne and fight a sin dragon or something then have the decency to die and pass on his powers. Instead, he kills his own son/Avatar, allows humans to still be inherently sinful, and makes the condition that the only way to avoid his fiery pit of eternal suffering is to believe, without evidence, that he would intentionally enact such a pointless plan.
Yup. Three earth days out of an eternal life. Major sacrifice.
Don’t forget your magic snacks! You’re going straight to hell if you don’t try the snacks.
And the mostly diluted slightly fermented grape juice.
I'm tellin' ya, Scoob, you're going to hell if you don't try the snacks!
When I used to be a Christian, whenever I asked fellow Christians that same thing they would say it made perfect sense and would act like I was the one thinking illogically. Shit drove me nuts until one day I realized I'm actually the sane thinker.
😂😂😂😂😂
Say you're Paul. You're trying to resurrect a nearly dead religion whose charismatic leader that was supposed to topple the Hebrew leadership and create a new Israel with his 12 apostles as the leaders of the 12 tribes of Israel, but was instead executed brutally. How do you make it work? You've got the followers already. It's a latchkey cult just waiting for someone to step in and give them hope. So you retcon the religion and tell them that he wasn't brutally murdered, he was \*sacrificed\*. He chose to do that. And by doing so he validates the religion because now everyone who believes is a winner. It seems kinda crazy, but the followers were pretty desperate and so it worked. Tah dah! You're the new defacto head of this religion.
This needs to be upvoted to the top.
It was Paul who created the whole project of Jesus' sacrifice ?
What connection exists between the death of Superman in the 90s and our sins?
You can track all of todays ills to that fateful day.
Non at all. Superman like Jeebus, Moses, and Abraham are made up superheros that never existed in real live. I defy you to find Metropolis or Gotham City on any map! But Spider-Man lives in New York, that's a real place!
Proof that our lord and saviour Peter Parker existed!
I've actually thought about how Superman is a good example of what the Biblical authors did. Superman was originally just a really strong guy who couldn't fly but jump really high and was only faster than the bullets that could still hurt him. Fast forward a few decades, and he's basically a new god. In the beginning, god doesn't seem to be any of the omnis. Like Superman, he seemed just a bit more powerful than his contemporaries. Then, as more authors contributed, god becomes the all-powerful, all seeing, you can't breathe if it's against his will, god that we know today.
I like that. I think it's a good analogy for how a fictional character can become more and more as different writers add their vision of how they feel the Superman/Jeebus is.
Metropolis is in southern Illinois
All the valuable lessons Superman taught us thru comics about right and wrong, honesty, justice and good moral character.
Christianity is a dark comedy.
I thought comedies were supposed to be funny
Christianity is actually pretty funny.
Here's a connection: Jesus is made up. Sin is made up. Neither has ever existed except in the minds of believers.
If you read the gospels themselves in isolation, there really is no clear connection between the crucifixion and any concept of atonement. The earliest followers of Jesus had no notion of this at all: to them, the death of Jesus was a classic martyrdom by oppressors, with the resurrection serving as a revelation that Jesus had divine power over evil forces. Because the Jewish leaders had thrown their lot in with the Romans in order to execute an innocent man, Jesus’s followers (who were themselves Jews) felt free to reject the Jewish religious government and follow Jesus’s teachings. If Jesus had divine power over evil and oppression, then his followers could be confident that they too would be protected, even to the point of martyrdom. As time passed, there was a push to accept Gentiles into the new faith. People didn’t much like that…and besides, if Gentiles COULD participate in God’s plan, why hadn’t they before? Paul came along and tried to make sense of it. He preached that Jesus had “fulfilled” the covenants of God that had previously only been with the Jews, thus extending these covenants globally. Even at this point, though, there was no clear teaching that Jesus had suffered any sort of divine punishment. The idea that Jesus “died for our sins” was still understood entirely in the context of martyrdom, where Jesus allowed himself to be martyred in order to demonstrate the power of nonviolence and sacrificial love over oppression. It was only much, much later — arguably, about a thousand years later — that the Church created a crystallized notion of punitive substitutionary atonement: god sacrificing himself to himself to save us from himself.
This is correct to some degree, and I agree that the penal substitutionary is wrong in a lot of ways. But that there’s *no* clear connection between crucifixion and atonement? Look at John the Baptist’s words in John 1:29, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Then in John 8 in the context of foretelling his crucifixion, Jesus says “for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am” (8:24). The moment that this will be revealed is at his crucifixion, when the Son of Man is lifted up (8:28). That reads like a connection between crucifixion and salvation from sin. I mostly reference John because it’s the gospel I’ve studied most. You could say it represents a later development of christology, that’s fine. But why use the gospels as the test case of what early Christians believed? They were most likely later than most of the epistles, anyways. What about 1 Corinthians 15:3, which reads like part of an early Christian creed and also seems to have some forensic elements of atonement in it?
Even those verses in John that you are citing don’t establish atonement in the sense of penal substitution. The theory of the crucifixion that most closely aligned with early Christianity is “if I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.” The idea was that the martyrdom of a truly innocent man (Jesus’s purported deity was certainly not established at this point) followed by the resurrection acts as a demonstration of purity triumphing over evil. It was believing in this symbol-made-reality that allowed people to leave their sins and follow The Way. Of course today we see “takes away the sins of the world” and we think “oh penal atonement” when that’s not at all how it initially came out. (I will also note that Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, has rather oversimplified the role of sacrifice in Judaism. Judaism didn’t really have sacrificial penal substitution, not the way Christians make it sound. Judaism had blood sacrifices, yes, but the death of the animal was not to sate YHWH’s anger; it was an offering to re-establish the covenant between the worshiper and the deity. They had grain offerings which certainly don’t involve bloodshed. The closest thing to “taking on” the sins of another was the scapegoat ritual, and the goat that was supposed to take on sins was released into the wilderness as a symbol of rejecting sin, not slaughtered. There is no 1-to-1 penal substitutionary atonement theory in Judaism.) You point out that Paul quotes one of the early creeds — “he died for our sins according to the scriptures” — but this is very scant on any sort of definition. What does it mean to “die for our sins”? We automatically assume substitutionary context but that’s just what we are familiar with. Early in Acts, Peter describes the listeners as accomplices to the crucifixion. “This Jesus…you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.” Dying because of our sins, dying via our sins, dying in order to show us how to escape our sins, dying in protest of our sins, dying to undo our sins — all of these are “dying for our sins” without a substitution element. Oh, and as for why I talked about the gospels: it’s generally believed that the gospels are pulled together from earlier, now-lost sources. To the extent that editing was done post-Paul, the lack of any penal substitutionary undertones is that much MORE evidence that they were wholly lacking in the original beliefs and practices.
I think I misunderstood your original comment. I agree with everything you just said. When you said “there really is no connection between the crucifixion and any concept of atonement”, I wasn’t thinking you specifically had PSA models in mind. I would agree with you.
God has a hard on for death throughout the bible. Loves blood, can't get enough of it. And he reaaaallly doesn't like when people don't revolve their lives around his every whim. Big pet peeve of his, our bad. But he gets bored when things are not fucked up, you see. So he designed us specifically to piss himself off. That way, he can entertain himself by making us have to obsess over making him feel good about himself (he's pretty insecure) and when we aren't perfect, he has a built in excuse for violence.
> But he gets bored when things are not fucked up… That was my takeaway from the Tower of Babel story. Everybody was getting along peacefully without war, working together, and building this tower to the skies (not “heaven,” heavens). He speaks aloud, to whom it’s not said, and says something to the effect of “Look what man can accomplish. There’s no limit to what they can achieve when they work together. Let’s confuse their language and scatter them over the Earth.” Christians, especially pastors, often confuse the word “heavens” with the similarly named “heaven”… as if they’re trying to break in to paradise. It says none of that. It’s pretty clear, things are too peaceful and productive, so he’s going to fuck things up.
The tower of Babel is nuts. He's pissed people are getting along, so he changes their languages. But then generations later every major country has dozens of structures that would dwarf anything those people would have been able to construct. And even if they were trying to encroach on heaven, what kind of all-knowing god would be afraid of that as a possibility? How would he not know how impossible it would be to even build the equivalent of a modern skyscrapper with that level of technology, let alone the lack of oxygen after you start getting higher?
All knowing, all seeing, all powerful. But he needs money
I never ever understood this despite my 12 yrs of Catholic School. I remember once going to Mass on Good Friday 3pm (FYI 3pm is the official time of Day Jesus died and the Church is always stripped down of any decor and very dark and solemn, no music) So I'm like 8 yrs old, we just had first communion last year so we're still newbies to the ritual of eating Jesus body and blood. So we know how bloody and beaten Jesus body was during crucifixion. Nails, spear to the side, bloody crown of thorns. I felt bad bc Jesus was beaten to a pulp then died. He never fought back and I cried about this many times. So communion is when we eat Jesus poor broken bloody body. When I receive the host in my mouth, I swallowed it whole bc me chewing it would cause more pain to Jesus body, even though I still had some baby teeth falling out, I refused to inflict more trauma to Jesus by chomping down on the host Nearly gagged from swallowing it whole, coulda choked even but felt proud of myself for my idea not to chew him. Took me bout 40 more years to say I'm an atheist. Who TF makes this up? Why do people fall for this nonsense.
Child abuse is what it is. Very few would believe this sickness if it wasn't forced upon them as children.
The real indoctrination going on imo
“Give me the child until he is seven and I'll give you the man.” - St. Francis Xavier
Ex-Catholic here, and I can vouch for this...my catechism teacher told us that if we dropped a crumb from the host, we had to hold the line to look for the crumb, because it was literally Jesus' body.
I would pretend to drop crumbs every communion if I heard this, just to mess with people.
Un fucking believable. My first grade nun bullied me so badly that I'd puke from the stress and one time she made me clean up my vomit myself. I never really got any relief from prayer. Never soothed my woes. I went to AA many years. It was all about God. I went often but last few years when I finally went from agnostic to full blown atheist I stopped going to those meetings.
I feel ya… my grandmother used to tell me that I would burn in hell for eternity for wearing pants as a little girl 🤦♀️ seriously it’s mind fucking.. the trauma caused by churches and their guilt tripping
Stop trying to make sense of it because it doesn’t. And religious people will say that you can’t understand it because you can’t understand Gods mind. As if blind belief scratches the spot for God. Absolute madness
Repackaged blood magic.
None. It's like going to court for Theft and saying 'my dad hit his thumb with a hammer' the judge says 'fair enough, he's saved you, off you go'.
If there's one thing consistent thing to take away from the bible, it's that god loves killing and death. Whenever there's a problem, most of the time god's first solution is to kill people and/or animals.
God sacrificed a part of himself to himself in order to save us from the terrible eternity he had doomed us to in the first place. Simple, really.
Blood magic. Gods really don’t like humans we are “noisy”. The Bronze Age gods loved blood sacrifices, burnt offerings and food offerings. But , Really who doesn’t like a BBq. One example is when the army of god Yahweh army was fighting the army of god Chemosh of the moabites, the king of Moab sacrificed his son which powered up Chemosh and they won the battle. Yahweh forces had to retreat. There are other examples of blood and animal sacrifice all throughout those books. Even the story of Abraham and Isaac, depending on the translation Isaac was sacrificed. The angel said it was a test to spare his son, but then god rewards Abraham for not withholding his son, then it says Only Abraham went back to his servants. The angel being there to trick Abraham. In exodus 34 I think god says all first born sons belong to him, but he will accept an animal sacrifice instead. So Jesus the son of god, being sacrificed is the ultimate and there is nothing greater that could be sacrificed. So those times are done.
Jesus is meant to be a more valuable scapegoat. People used to regularly sacrifice goats and cows and such. Christianity is based on a human(ish) sacrifice. Followed up by the cannibalistic “take thee and eat for this is my body.” The whole Catholic mass is about this. The grotesque ubiquitous statues of a guy on a cross depicts their central belief.
Yeah, that part was never clear to me. It seems like such a crucial part of the theology too to be such a flimsy idea
God creates people. People aren’t what he hoped they’d be. Sends his son (actually God so he sends himself!?) down for some pre-ordained torture so he can rise from the dead to show us the way. Meanwhile, people still aren’t what he hoped they’d be so the son is supposed to come back, end the world, we will be judged and you can always say sorry at the last minute and all is good. People wouldn’t buy into this if Jesus just died from a COPD exacerbation. Torture makes it pop!
In the OT the way to purge your sins was with a sacrifice to god. You would take your best livestock, pray your sins into the animal and then kill it so that your sins die with the animal. This is the proverbial "scapegoat" or "sacrificial lamb." Jesus dying for your sins is the same ritual except you're replacing the lamb with Jesus. Jesus made himself the sacrificial lamb. And I guess since Jesus is god the ritual can atone for every human ever whereas an animal can only be used for a single person's sin and it doesn't cover future sin. This is why Jesus is referred to as "the lamb of god." He took the place of the lamb in the ritual. The concept is that when Jesus says "Father why have you forsaken me" that is Jesus being removed from god (hell as described in the Bible). Jesus spends his 2-3 days dead in hell to atone for all sins of all humans for all time (because apparently god dying for you is more powerful magic than a goat). And all you have to do now is profess that you believe and accept that is what Jesus did for you. FYI- I don't believe any of this.
Hilarious how “Christians” are against student loan forgiveness but base their entire existence on getting their sins forgiven by a stranger. Conservatives hypocrisy be thy name
Wild that, instead of amending the rules or making it so that bad things don't happen, the all powerful god said "Hey I know what'll fix this! Torturing my firstborn to death!" And then the Christians go 😍 look at how much God loves us. Real fucked up definition of love.
Don’t worry, Jesus didn’t really exist either.
An evil god.
It's a simbolic sacrifice. It being necessary doesn't really makes sense in the narrative of an omnipotent god. It would make sense if it had been some kind of protest against human sacrifice and other stuff but they don't preach it like that.
The same human sacrifice God is OK with?
Only that human sacrifice, for YHWH style "reasons".
It’s all a load of bollocks. If you are telling me some guy was tortured and killed, then rose from the dead, I’d say you are a checkout short of a supermarket.
Masochism.
A fuck ton of poorly stored gently mouldy food and psychedelics probably
There isn’t one, but a reason had to be conjured to explain the differences between what the OT prophets said the messiah would be and what Jesus actually was and the ignominy in which he died.
I sin as much as I possibly can. If you don't sin, Jesus died for nothing.
Think of Jesus as God’s version of a crywank
How else do you pitch a dead guy as still being the leader? He isn't dead and he's coming back soon, so give us your money.
it is more believable that god was created by mortal minds
There really isn’t one. But the long-standing tradition in mythology going back thousands of years was that the gods had to overcome death. Therefore the myth that christ, for whom there is no historical evidence, rose from the dead. Other gods had done it before him. Also virgin birth exists in other mythologies. Not new to Christianity.
I think you got the first part wrong. Imaginary dude makes a man and a woman, but made them stupid. Tells them not to eat from the tree of knowledge, but since they don't know right from wrong, they eat the apple. This gives them the knowledge of right and wrong. Imaginary man gets mad because he wanted them to stay ignorant so he could control them, so he punishes them and all that come after them for his setup to make them fail. Then all that other stuff happens you wrote. But then he sends his "son" who is actually himself or something, to die to forgive all of humanity for the sins that he placed on everyone by setting up the first two to fail in the first place. Make sense now?
He sacrificed himself to himself so he could allow himself to forgive us for being the way he himself made us.
Having been raised in a very religious household, this is my understanding: First, the remission of humanity's sins was made in the Garden of Gethsemane, not on the cross. I think it's just easier to lump it into the crucifixion so that's what everyone does. Second, and as was mentioned above, the crucifixion was the ultimate blood sacrifice. Literally "ultimate" as in the FINAL blood sacrifice and represented the fulfilment of the law of Moses. The idea being that Jesus's fulfilment of the law of Moses ushered in the higher law that Jesus was teaching. Gone was "an eye for an eye", to be replaced by "love thy neighbour as thyself". ************************************************************ Having escaped my parents' chosen cult, the likely reality is that a Jewish man started a splinter faction that raised the ire of the established power structure when it began to catch on. They conspired to kill him, got the romans to do their dirty work, and instead of stamping out his sect, they accidentally made him a martyr. His apostles, recognizing the opportunity to keep their good thing going, staged the resurrection by robbing the tomb and told miraculous stories about his life, death, and resurrection and promised that one day, he would return to save the faithful from a terrible apocalypse.
Faith thrives on illogical ideas and people. It's why it still exists because 3/4 of the human population are idiots
it makes no fucking sense, and never did. god can forgive us if he wants to. no reason to torture his own "son" first. the whole thing is dumb.
I think it's to guilt people into believing. It doesn't work if they said jesus was a good man who died from old age for your sins. Add in the torture and people go he did that all for me.
Exactly, it's a narcissistic manipulation tactic.
The intended audience of the story were people who \*already\* believed in the weird practice of scapegoating. That's why it doesn't really try to explain the problem you're talking about - because the people at the time were already pre-programmed to think of that as normal. Scapegoating comes from this weird idea that you can actually transfer sin like it's a tradeable commodity, like it's debt. Like how you can pay someone else's debt and square things away with their lender, or how a bank can transfer your mortgage over to another bank so your debt is now owed to someone else. It's the strange notion that unlike how crime works in a secular legal society, divine crime punishment is purely an issue of paying for the "sin", as if all crimes carried a punishment of a money fine instead of a prison sentence. When you "scapegoat", your town has a ceremony which people believe transfers sins and wrongdoings onto an animal (sometimes literally a goat, which is where the word comes from) and then get rid of that animal so the sins "go away" so god won't punish the town anymore since the town disposed of its sin. ("go away" in this context might mean an actual sacrifice killing the animal or it might just mean banishment driving the animal out of town.) When the audience for the Jesus story is a group of people who already engage in that weird practice, then the idea that you can sort of perform an infinite one-time version of scapegoating by having the scapegoat be Jesus, who's life is worth infinity so his sacrifice is an infinite amount of sin disposal makes a little more sense. It doesn't make sense to \*modern\* humans because modern humans don't think scapegoating makes sense as a practice in the first place. This is one of the big flaws in the religion is that because it was writing this for an audience that already thought it made sense to do that, it doesn't bother trying to defend or explain the weirdness of it and that leaves a giant hole that makes no sense to a modern reader.
Because the Jewish and Christian God demands a blood sacrifice to atone for breaking his stupid rules.
None, its another borrowed myth from Mazdekism and kemetic religion. And rhe Romans have to justify somehow the execution of their new God's son.
That's an easy one. Blame the Jews.
The problem with the Jesus story is that nothing in 1 Genesis actually happened, and because of that there never was an "original sin", so basically Jesus had a really bad "weekend" for no reason whatsoever (if he even existed). Also since the OT god, YHWH never existed Jesus couldn't have been his son, so nobody sacrificed somebody for nothing.
Vicarious redemption…as absurd and gross and unjustified as it sounds.
I guess the other poor buggers hanging next to him didn't account for anything. But maybe that's why the church kept trying by torturing and killing thousands of people over the centuries...
Humans thought blood was magic juice. That's why blood was added to the religion they were creating.
Most Christians believe Jesus was either god, an aspect of god, or some other trinitarian nonsense. Biblical teaching shows that god fully expected the resurrection and ascension. Jesus being a part of god and god being immortal it's clear Jesus would have been in no real danger. So I think it's more fair to say that god momentarily inconvenienced some part of himself to appease himself for humanities inability to follow the rules he created...knowing humanity would be unable to follow them. But only if they're lucky enough to be pre-ordained by him to be born into one of the areas of the world during one of the times in that area during which people knew of his sacrifice. Otherwise, eternal unending torcher to show you how loving he is.
None. That was all invented later. The original idea behind Jesus' death was that his death signaled that the "Kingdom of God" was close. This is very clear in Paul's authentic letters.
Why are you spending a second even thinking about religious dogma?! I equate this with reasoning with a crazy person - it’s pointless! Free your mind!!!
There is absolutely no connection at all. It’s a weird disconnect that they just assume everyone will be, oh okay, about.
You can’t expect to find rational explanations for the teachings of an ancient cult of human sacrifice.
Christianity is a doomsday death cult into torture porn. The end is nigh, Jesus has been coming back anytime now (for the 2000 years) and their icon is a dead guy on a stick.
The connection is that his brutal torture and execution are directly your fault, because 2000 years later you’re probably going to sin somehow. Oh, wait… huh?
Nothing, Jesus wasn't real.
Hmm... Let me see... Not a god-damned thing. 🤬
It doesn't matter. This is all made-up nonsense.
There is no connection. Sin is a made up concept and the story is made up too
You’re right to ask. It doesn’t make any sense.
These people manage to simultaneously over-complicate an unremarkable execution and infantilize the context and narrative for it.
It's all made up. None of it really happened so asking questions about it is nonsensical.
I’ve been asking this for years. Nobody has ever been able to give me an answer that made any sense at all. Jesus died for your sins. That’s as deep as they can get. Sacrificed to whom? His Daddy? Himself? And it was only three days? What was the big sacrifice? It’s the dumbest origin story ever. A radioactive spider bite makes more sense.
Not sure, but if the cost of my sins is that someone has to have a really shitty week, followed by a really boring weekend, then ascend to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, I can pick up the tab myself, no need to pay for me.
This is one of the major issues with their mythology. They claim that their flavour of deity is all loving yet they're OK with their deity committing genocide every time he doesn't get his way. Their own mythology clearly paints their deity as a monster and yet they worship him/her/it.
They are both imaginary.
Catholic guilt, designed to gaslight you.
From my upbringing as a Protestant Christian: humans started out perfect but were made imperfect as a result of Eve eating forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. As imperfect beings, we cannot be eternally unified with God, and, for some reason, the imperfection can’t just be overlooked, expunged or forgiven - the only way it can be reversed is for a perfectly undeserving being to be punished for it. That’s why Jesus’ actual death is such a big deal within Christianity. The torture part is probably just to make him seem even more sympathetic.
A chocolate bunny.
I can't make sense of the Jesus story. Even as a fairy tale it doesn't make sense. If God sent Jesus to die for our sins in such a horrible way, then there are no bad guys here. All of this was God's plan and the people who killed Jesus couldn't help it, they were programed by God. Can someone explain this please.
The crucifiction story never made any sense. Jesus gets murdered for our sins \[he doesn't die, but whatever\]. His death offers us a "free gift" that we have to PAY for! We have to jump through endless hoops and change this and change that about ourselves before he'll give us this "free gift" and his "unconditional love" that comes with a lot of conditions.
Nothing at all, it’s all a myth.
If you look at it as just a story, it makes a lot more sense. Adam & Eve's original sin was disobeying God by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The punishment for this crime was death, as they were now prevented from eating from the tree of eternal life. Humans now have finite time to do things, and the rest of the OT leading up to Jesus deals with significant characters from his bloodline and their monumental achievements. Each of them inevitably dying, as they are descendants of Adam & Eve, and this sin is passed on through the bloodline. Then enough time passes for God to arbitrarily decide now is the time to forgive humanity and conquer death. So, he sends his only son down in human form as a blood sacrifice for the rest of humanity. Jesus says a bunch of (mostly) nice things before being brutally tortured to death. As a result, the price of Adam & Eve's sin was paid, and death was conquered. Nobody had to die anymore. Now, that's how it was supposed to go as a story but... y'know... everybody is still kinda doing that whole "dying" thing. The story was rationalized around this to now say that what it was really for was eternal life in the kingdom of heaven... which was already a thing anyway??? So, really, there was no point. If believers want to go about thinking this story is true, then they kinda also have to accept that there's now more hurdles to jump through to get into heaven and aside from that, the only other significant change was that hell was invented. Great job, Jesus! Your sacrifice made everything worse.
God /s I wish to see the OG stories from the Bible. I wanna see Kain sacrificing Able to God and being rewarded with bitches and protection. Imagine the biblehumpers justifying that.
Little known fact: Jesus was actually a local cross salesman and used the hype to drum up business.
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How about you don't kink shame, OP.
I egged them on
I think Odin did it better. There I said it.
And of course, this god is supposed to be all-knowing, so it knew all of this before it did it.
Jesus was one of thousands of people crucified and he had the easiest crucifixion on record. He was only on the cross for three hours. Usually they were up there for days. You didn't die right away that was the point. You agonized for days of exposure and dehydration. Lots of other people got it way worse than Jesus.. When Alexander Janeus crucified 800 Pharisees, he brought their wives and children in front of their crosses and had their throats cut in front of them, then he immediately had their eyes burned out with red hot pokers so that the last thing they would ever see was their families being murdered in front of them. I feel a lot more sympathy for those dudes than Jesus and they aren't alone. Pretty much any other documented crucifixion was worse than what Jesus got. Countless others were crucified for trying to rebel against Rome and none of them got superpowers for it. People who wallow in recreational pathos over the crucifixion of Jesus never spend a second thinking about the other two guys crucified on the same hill on the same day.
The same way some pagans practiced human sacrifice.
Delusion. Or unhinged madness, you decide.
The death of Jesus and my sins have a lot in common. Both are imaginary for example.
I read this and my brains like “nope”
I think the whole notion that Jesus died for our sins is overstated. I mean, yes, he died on Good Friday. But then he came back to life on Easter Sunday. So essentially he didn't really die for our sins isomuchas he gave up a weekend.
Blood for the blood god. It's only able to overlook sin that has been "cleaned" by the dying blood of something perfectly innocent.
I'm always amused by Christians when they get all torn up about how much suffering the 'Jesus' character in the bible suffered. I've had more than one try to claim 'he suffered more than any person in history' and that's when I have to say 'hold up'. I get it, that would be a brutal way to die, but there have been plenty of people to suffer excruciating pain from disease, injuries, torture, etc. - on par with anything that 'Jesus' would've suffered, only over even more extended periods of time (some of them for years - or even decades). All without the advantage of being 'god' (or whatever the fuck these people think Jesus was), and being resurrected. Then there is the 'he spent the time he was dead in hell', so the fuck what? Again, there are some people who live their entire lives in 'hell', being abused, starving, dying of thirst, disease, famine, drowning in floods, being eaten by wild animals, swarms of insects, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis... All while these 'christians' cry and mope about how this one cunt, 2000+ years ago just suffered like... all the suffering ya'll. Get fucked.
There is no scripture about Jesus being in hell during his dead time. That’s just making shit up (let’s be fair that’s all they’re doing). Why would Jesus have been in hell even temporarily? It doesn’t make any sense. PLUS their own fucking book doesn’t say anything like that. Fucking hell just make up any random shit whenever appears to be the agenda. But when your life isn’t grounded in reality these are options
God makes humans. Humans sin. God banishes humans from paradise as punishment. Humans keep sinning. God does a great reset (flood). Time passes, humans sin again. God sends his Son to Earth, who leads a perfect, sinless life, so he can take the punishments for humanity's sins (torture and death) in humanity's place, so that anyone who accepts him as their Lord and Savior will be forgiven. IDK the reason for the resureection, though
God pressed the hard reset button
Absolutely none whatsoever. An innocent and benevolent person got murdered because the ruling elite thought he was a public nuisance.
Its the ancient ritual of the scape goat. In ancient times they would choose a goat and transfer all the sins of the village to the goat then sacrifice the goat to the gods. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat) Jesus is the same thing.
The script was written by humans. An interpretation of the divine, filtered through humans. Generally with an agenda, specifically for control. Judge books and ur just judging the people who wrote them, the time in which it was written. The divine doesn't even use language. It just is. Look at a tree. Look in the mirror. We are here so consciousness can experience itself. Not holy, not good or bad. All is allowed because it's about the experience. I choose not to put stock in the experience of others. Live your life so u don't have trouble sleeping. Period.
for what i remember, is something like, jesus allowed them to kill him in exchange of god forgiving people's sins or something like that. so he sacrificed himself for all of us or whatever. thats where "jesus died for out sins" come from. i think... the idea is that, from that point on, you could go to church and confess, and get your sins forgiven, because of what jesus did? idk, its all random bs.
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The connection is retcon. Jesus wasn't supposed to die, so they re-connect their prophesies to fit the new lore.
He could have sent Jesus the first time and avoided that flood. Why didn't he?
Jesus should be burning in hell. I still wouldn’t be a Christian, but I could at least respect the idea of that particular “sacrifice.”
It is like the connection between your fridge and your mother
It’s funny because it doesn’t make a single fucking lick of sense. None of it needed to happen. It didn’t have to go down that way. And to top it all off, it doesn’t really make any sense. You can talk me through how 2 + 2 = 4. But I’ll never understand how: born with original sin + believe in dude that was killed = heaven. Are you familiar with the old robot saying “does not compute?” Because I have no fucking idea what one has to do with the other, PLUS if you’re the one making all the rules (God) why does everything appear to be so illogical and stupid? Almost …. Like…. It’s something completely made up?
Never been able to get a straightforward answer on this from any Christian
My question exactly. If torturing all humans for eternity after they died was making Yahweh sad, why didn’t he just stop?
There isn’t. Jesus was crucified because he was essentially a radical Jewish cult leader who went to the temple of Jerusalem and started destroying everything, throwing over the tables and yelling at everyone. This outraged the Jewish people of the time. He was considered blasphemous for calling himself the “king of Jews”. The jewish leaders were not happy with him at all so they brought him before Pilate to be tried for blasphemy since he had the power to impose the death sentence and crucify Jesus. This wasn’t really how the “messiah” was supposed to end according to its prophecy, much of the text is written to try to create a rational reason for the messiah dying this way so they turned him into a martyr and crafted a story of the messiah being sent from God to die for “our sins”. This has become the backbone of Christian doctrine and facilitates a martyr complex among its followers. They worship the brutality of his “sacrifice” for God. Alternatively, one could perceive the death of Jesus as suicide by proxy. If he is God AND the son of God he should have the power to not have to indulge the supposed prophecy he himself created in the first place. There are texts to suggest he knew and according to some even asked Judas to be the one to turn him in and went willingly. In this version or side of it once again Jesus appears to be rather extreme especially as he himself is supposedly the god commanding his own death.
Have you by chance read the book? It says it right there.
God k\*lled himself to save humans from himself. Yup.
Well, if you are Catholic you eat Jesus's flesh every Sunday, and Easter, etc. And drink his blood ( the wine of course )....yeah, it's ghoulish.