gadfly wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 11:32 pm
It seems to me that you are a victim of American fundamentalism. Fundamentalists read more books about Christianity by other fundamentalists than they do the actual Bible. Because they are so loud and obnoxious everyone thinks they represent Christianity. They don't. The New Testament is far more diverse in opinions than they would care to recognize.
Hi Gadfly, and thanks for the thoughtful reply
Not sure I've seen you around before; it's been a while since I've posted here regularly.
It's possible that Evangelicals are the only group in which a majority believe all five of those points, but I'd wager that #3 (Jesus' sacrifice) is held by an overwhelming majority both of Christians overall and in each of the three major branches - held as a doctrine at least if not really
believed by many 'cultural Christians' - and that majorities in each major branch also hold at least one or two of the others. Moreover even many Christians who don't
believe some of the more grotesque points still hold sacred the writings which overtly promote them. How can a person with at least average intelligence and a
functioning conscience read something like Numbers 31 and say "Well maybe those actions weren't actually commanded by God, but the story itself is still 'inspired' by God"?
- Numbers 31:17 Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. 18 But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves.
Even in your post you seem to stop short of actually acknowledging that the contents of the Christian anthology include some passages or even whole books which are barbaric, blasphemous, false prophecy or downright evil... though perhaps there's hints that you might quietly hold that view? I haven't been around recently but there've been a few Christians on this forum who have held views along those lines -
Slopeshoulder, johnmarc, Elijah John and at least one or two others I'm forgetting right now - but it's not exactly common.
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gadfly wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 11:32 pm
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One who planned to keep humans ignorant of good and evil, the sole and greatest 'sin' (had they known what sin was) being to acquire that knowledge
--Is this your interpretation of Genesis 2? Do we know that that is how ancient Israelites would have understood the story?
I'd say it's plausible that the
original source material or author/s behind Genesis 2-4 viewed the story/s as
an allegory for human intelligence and the development and spread of sedentary agriculture, which is certainly a more satisfying interpretation! This point #1 - a literal interpretation of the Garden and the Fall - might rival #5 as the least widely-held belief among Christians of those five. It's also the least objectionable of the five, an abstract theological point which would be more or less inconsequential since the fall even if it were literally true, so take it or leave it I guess. But it does suggest the less-than-stellar character of that version of the Christian deity and it is believed by a significant fraction of Christians even today, presumably a much larger fraction in prior centuries.
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gadfly wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 11:32 pm
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One who established rules such that thenceforth every human would be born with an innate propensity for evil
--that is certainly taught by Augustine; but it is an interpretation, and therefore not a belief required by all Christians.
Different folk would use different terms and emphasis, but I'd say not just Christians but the overwhelming majority of humans generally would agree that our species is universally and deeply imperfect (besides Catholics' asterisk over Mary and of course Jesus himself). It's a major theme both in the Tanakh which highlights the sins of Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David and so on, and in gospels with the failings of the apostles and hypocrisy of the religious leaders, and in Paul's epistles with his denunciation and struggles with the flesh; "For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." Whether or not it's a 'required' belief, it's a factual observation which is a primary driving force behind Christianity and many other religions; how do we make sense of our tendency towards evil, and how can it be overcome?
Of course evangelical apologists would try to squirm around the uncomfortable and inescapable conclusion that
this deeply flawed state is how 'God' made us by pretending that it was due to human free will (which pretty much requires a literalization of the Garden and Fall stories), but that obviously doesn't work at all since
the rules of birth and inheritance were set by their God. I suppose there are some sects which invoke a spiritual pre-existence in order to claim that all the innocent little babies born into sin are actually incarnations of evil demons that freely chose to rebel against God (which seems to be what
A Freeman is opining in his posts above)... but even if we were to take that seriously, I imagine that a deity who erases one rebellious identity in order to inflict punitive conditions on a new identity would raise more moral objections than it solves!
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gadfly wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 11:32 pm
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One who is unwilling or unable to simply forgive or show mercy for those sins he thrust upon us, but instead requires a blood sacrifice in order to 'forgive'; and not just any blood sacrifice but a human sacrifice... and not just any human sacrifice, but a totally innocent sacrifice of his own son! Without that horrific act this being they worship was apparently incapable of forgiving the sinfulness which he himself created
--once again, that is an interpretation drawn by some medieval theologians and it certainly continues to this day in some of the branches of the Christian faith; but it is by no means fundamental to Christianity. The apostle Paul tends more to mystical union than substitution, i.e., Christians by faith participate in both Christ's self-sacrifice and resurrection.
I think a kind of mystical union view is advanced by C. S. Lewis in
Mere Christianity also. But what moral difference does it make whether the brutal human sacrifice was for atonement of sin or for mystical union? Either way this is a deity that required a brutal human sacrifice in order to enact its "merciful" plan; about the best that can salvaged from it is supposing that it was required due to weakness, an inability to enact the plan by other means, rather than that it was required due to caprice.
If memory serves Lewis tries to salvage it by implying (I'm not sure if he says it outright) that Jesus' crucifixion wasn't a
necessary part of the plan but just something us nasty ol' humans did out of our own evil and malice... but that's wildly contradicting the bible and Jesus' own words. I noted to
bjs1 in
post #18 above that "As Hebrews suggests, it's all but impossible to make sense of the bloodthirsty Law of Moses without supposing either that it was a strictly man-made system, or that the sacrifices will resume under a new temple, or that they pointed to an Ultimate Sacrifice." Even if it's sometimes a little
ad hoc, the sacrificial death of Jesus ties so much together from the prophecy of Eve's seed, to Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, the Torah sacrificial system, Isaiah's suffering servant, Daniel's "cut off" messiah, the timing on Passover, and the subsequent destruction of the temple. Jesus himself is reported by 'Matthew' to have said "this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." However it was not a particularly
willing 'self-sacrifice'; the gospels record him as literally begging and pleading his father not to go through with it! So okay, in the end Jesus was 'willing' to die to save millions, but that doesn't make it any less cruel or evil for 'God' to have made that sacrifice necessary to begin with, if he'd had the power to arrange things otherwise.
Since Jesus' death is so central to the whole Christian canon and message, about the only way I can see around this is to treat massive chunks of the bible as little more than primitive myths, legends, opinions and retconned theologizing of a 1st century preacher's untimely demise. Interestingly some of those Christian folk I named above such as Elijah John belonged to a forum group called "Doesn't condone human sacrifice" (back when the groups were displayed/relevant on the old version of the forum), so this isn't just a non-Christian caricature.
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gadfly wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 11:32 pm
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One who endorsed, actively commanded and on several occasions personally engaged in the most heinous kind of deeds that humans have ever done such as institutional intergenerational chattel slavery and even wholesale genocide, and plans to ramp that slaughter up a hundred-fold at the end of the age
--a stronger criticism, for sure. However, I find it intriguing that Jesus himself seems to think that some of the Mosaic laws were in fact not ideal and therefore not in perfect alignment with God as Jesus conceived him. Note his debate over divorce: he says that "Moses" allowed for divorce bc of hard-heartedness. Thus the laws in the OT can (and should) be read as responses to the current environment, not as universal morals (a questionable entity). His example thus gives far more room than is supposed for Christians themselves to question and even criticize the Bible. Of course, American fundamentalists would object. And American fundamentalists are some of the loudest Christians ever to exist. And so, many non-Christians think American fundamentalism IS Christianity. But it ain't so.
I had an interesting discussion a few years back questioning whether the
stoning of a Sabbath-breaker was really as 'barbaric' as some folk suggested, and I reckon I made a reasonable case that it was not. But IMO there's only so far our credulity and imaginations can bend before something has to break; and if
active commandments to unnecessarily engage in intergenerational chattel slavery and serial genocide are not a place to draw a line and say "No, that s--- is purely evil and has nothing to do with a good god" then what the hell is? Besides hell itself, I suppose
Of course if a line is drawn there that pretty comprehensively undercuts the legitimacy of the Pentateuch, the Law of Moses and Deuteronomic history down to David (Samuel's slaughter of the Amalekites down to the last woman and child and donkey for the alleged crimes of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents is the most wanton and evil of the Israelites' many divinely-commanded genocides, if such a ranking even mattered), leaving only a few gems of rare human wisdom like "I am who I am" or Exodus 22:21-27 in an otherwise very dated bronze- and iron-age series of myths and legendary 'history.'
While eternal torture is conceptually even more evil, it's when I see Christians defending slavery and genocide that it hits home hardest just how evil Biblicism is: Supposing that their god's law is written in letters of ink rather than in their hearts and minds encourages believers to externalize their conscience and divest responsibility for moral decision-making into an ancient book or the people who profess to understand it. The phrase "seared conscience" comes to mind.
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gadfly wrote: ↑Fri Apr 25, 2025 11:32 pm
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Even more amazingly, one who plans to do the most vicious thing that humans can even imagine - torturing and savouring the smoke from the fiery torment of billions upon billions of people for day after day, year after year, century after century for all eternity, a literally incomprehensible level of cruelty
Drawn from which passage? I'm assuming Revelation. One book, which the early church was hesitant to even list among the authoritative books bc it was so weird. There are other passages among the NT canon that anticipate universal salvation (Romans. Colossians).
Revelation 14 yes, but not just there; in the OP I quoted Jesus' rather graphic teaching of the same doctrine in Mark 9, and some other passages in post #9:
- Daniel 12:2 Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Matthew 25:46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Luke 16:23 In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. 24 He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.” 25 But Abraham said, “Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. 26 Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.”
Universal salvation? That's a stretch, particularly for Paul who specifically emphasised the contrast between the "vessels of mercy" and the "vessels of wrath prepared for destruction." But there are enough relatively clear passages suggesting
annihilationism to make that a viable biblical alternative; just another of those internal inconsistencies and contradictions. Conceptually at least, the notion of eternal torture is by far the most evil of all these doctrines and the most blasphemous for those concerned with such things; in fact in abstract terms it's
the most evil of any conceivable doctrine, portraying a deity who is infinitely cruel and infinitely unjust. And it seems fairly clear from the synoptic gospels that Jesus at the very least openly flirted with or even explicitly taught that doctrine, which among other things makes it very clear that he too was a flawed man.
As with the slavery and genocide - and very much unlike interpretations of the Garden or observations of human nastiness - this isn't some point of theological minutiae; this seems like something which warrants a very clear line to be drawn and some very definite conclusions to follow from it. Those who accept or even feverishly preach their most sadistic imaginations of the inferno are particularly disturbing of course, but whether those folk are a third or a fifth of Christians they're just the tip of the iceberg compared to those who quietly sweep this darkest of all evil under the rug of their consciences and refuse to acknowledge what kind of a 'saviour' would have openly flirted with it. Jesus seems to have been a good man, for sure, but can we honestly pretend that he was anything more?
