Ah, Jebus loves you...
posted by Dreamy at 6:03 pm
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
About Me
- Name: Dreamy
- Location: London, Hampstead, United Kingdom
I enjoy walks in beautiful green surroundings breathing lovely fresh air. I love making things and being creative generally. I sing, write songs, poetry, and short stories. I tend to prefer doing things that involve learning something new, especially going to public lectures.
- Strange random overheard conversation: 2
- Itchy cold hairs
- Live Again
- Yellow Light
- Mice dream
- Strange random overheard conversation: 1
- Camden tube, London
- Dream is mean
- Humans?
9 Comments:
Though a Christian, I also disbelieve in the Way of Christ as pictured :)
I'm not quite sure what you mean by disbeliving in Mr. Christ's way. How do you feel about his suffering so that we don't have to, not working so very well?
Christ suffered that we might live (in an ultimate, sub specie aeternitatis sense), not that he suffered so that we don't have to suffer. Christianity's about God pouring himself out for the world... not about Ibuprofen.
Ah ok. 'Scuse my 'god said "blah"/ jesus said "blah" ignorance. What about all the billions of unborn and dead? Did he not quite suffer enough for them?
In comparison to, say, child abuse, he hardly suffered at all. I bet about one in fifty people alive today could match the supposed suffering on his. He should just stop moany on about it. Or is that just christians?
I can't for my life understand why any educated adult could possibly believe hat Jesus is anything other than a legend.
'Scuse my 'god said "blah"/ jesus said "blah" ignorance.
I wasn't intending to be pedantic, and I'm sorry if this is the way it came across. Christian views about what Christ's sacrfice achieved aren't a minor theological or textual point... they're one of the main events.
In comparison to, say, child abuse, he hardly suffered at all. I bet about one in fifty people alive today could match the supposed suffering on his. He should just stop moany on about it. Or is that just christians?
Once one accepts certain Christian presuppositions (that there is one good and all-powerful God, that the prophet Jesus of Nazareth was God come to live among us, and that by his death he bought our life), there are two ways to go with our view of his suffering.
One is to hold the view that he could have suffered more... he could have been incarcerated for years and tortured (rather than moving about at liberty until a day or two before his execution), or he could have been abused as a child (rather than, as far as we can infer from the Gospel accounts, growing up in a loving and stable home). In some sense, this would be true point: he could have suffered more, if there's some objective yardstick of pain. On the other hand, to require this - given our suppositions - would seem ungrateful and wrong. In fact, we're more amazed and grateful - sometimes we remind ourselves to be amazed and grateful - that God should send himself to take on the human form and its sufferings, that he should become like us to the extent of suffering and dying for us.
I can't for my life understand why any educated adult could possibly believe hat Jesus is anything other than a legend.
How do you deal, then, with the awkward empirical fact that many educated adults etc etc?
I deal with it by sighing and shrugging my shoulders. Also by realizing that life is so sketchy and insecure that people require beliefs, regardless how impossible, to keep from going insane. Also by realizing that the human mind was designed by natural selection to favor bullshit over the obviously true when the bullshit provides more security than the true.
Interesting... you have beliefs, though, I suppose. I guess you are sane. (Perhaps some atheists are able not to believe, and yet stay sane. A royal priesthood).
"The human mind was designed by natural selection to..." sounds deterministic to me. That there is no designer is surely the point. One of the paradoxes of language, no doubt.
You might be interested to read more about these issues here (from me) and here (from science fiction writer, and atheist/ materialist Ken MacLeod).
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