What is the logic behind Jesus' crucifixion?

[Justin108]

This is arguably the core of the Christian faith that Jesus died for our sins and made it possible for us to live for eternity in heaven... but why did Jesus have to die in order for us to have our sins forgiven?

God makes the rules. There is no "God HAD to sacrifice Jesus" because God can do anything.

Christians often say that God cannot let sin go unpunished as it would be unjust; but is it any more just to sacrifice an innocent man on behalf of a guilty man? If a man rapes a little girl and the man's brother offers to go to prison on his behalf, would this be justice?

If god is satisfied by punishment without guilt (Jesus), why is he not satisfied with guilt without punishment?

[JoeyKnothead]

From Post 261:

If mankind never sins, then mankind would be equal to God.

But man is not equal to God.

Considering "sin" is the breaking of God's laws, we're left to wonder if he has or has not sinned - considering we can't show he even has a "law".

I've never sinned, 'cause it is, my law is the only law I respect.

[The Tanager]

If mankind never sins, then mankind would be equal to God.

But man is not equal to God.

Why would our not sinning make us equal to God?

[The Tanager]

Sorry but I’m not seeing the logic behind this statement. Why are we no longer capable of surrendering all the way? This seems like a presumption on your part.

In Christian doctrine it's that we have a sinful nature which seems to me to be a part of what is assumed when assessing the coherency of the Christian picture. But I also think observation of our behavior as humans backs this up. We all show the symptoms by continuing to sin. The only ones that claim to be perfect are seen by everyone else as nutjobs.

So are you saying here that we learn to perfectly surrender due to the example that Jesus gave? So then we can perfectly surrender too?

Not in the sense of learning to write by watching a video, but like having a parent hold our hand as we form the letters, if that distinction makes sense.

What is it we do to “perfectly surrender (surrender all the way)�? Can you define this? Please explain what is the difference between imperfect surrendering and perfectly surrendering.

Imperfect surrendering would be how we only surrender here and there, but are really still set up on our own. Perfect surrendering would be surrendering in every single thing. And surrendering means things like trusting God in everything even when circumstances seem confusing, seeking His guidance, seeking a relationship with Him to live a full life. According to my understanding of Christianity, we weren't made with the ability to live a full life without that relationship.

I’m simply not seeing why God couldn’t have achieved exactly the same thing without Jesus. Insert that nature into us so that we can perfectly surrender then explain to us how to perfectly surrender. I don’t see how Jesus dying on the cross is teaching us how to perfectly surrender. Maybe once you explain what perfect surrender is I might be able to figure that out.

Insert what nature into us? It's Jesus' human nature that is being inserted. Without an Incarnation there is no perfected human nature to insert. If you are asking God to just create a different nature for us then is He giving us a nature with free will or not? God could have accomplished a perfect surrendering by never giving us free will to begin with or by taking it away now, but that is not what God is after. God is after free beings who choose relationship with Him freely.

But if you are asking God to give us a new nature with free will...He already did to begin with. We messed it up. Hitting reset involves destroying us and putting a new batch in our place. It is replacement, not redemption.

It could be. It depends what the situation is. But there’s not supposed to be any suffering in Heaven either. So to prevent sin/suffering there’s gonna have to be some serious limitations imposed on our freewill.

To prevent suffering, I agree there seemingly will need to be limitations on us that we don't currently have, but I'm not sure they impose upon the more important core of our free will. What examples are you thinking of?

And, if we also ask, why didn't God put these limitations on us to begin with, I think good comes from living in a world that has these kinds of features. With or without sin they can teach us strength, compassion, etc. We wouldn't need them in Heaven because they have already built our good character during our time on Earth.

We are having a desire to sin being altered to having no desire. We are having limiters put on us. The more actions we have stifled as a result of editing our program the more robotic we’re going to become. Imagine if you have a computer program with lots of features and you start cutting those features. The computer program becomes less and less flexible. More and more robotic in it's actions.

But the question is whether we are altering our desires or whether limiters are being placed upon us against our will that are altering the desires, stifling our actions. I'm saying it is the former, not the latter.

If this is not turning us into robots and its not violating our freewill then why didn’t God just do this in the first place? Change our natures so that we wouldn’t be so sinful and rebellious? Why couldn’t he have just made us “different than we are� back then?

He did make us this way to begin with. We had the ability to always choose the good. We didn't always choose the good. We've had thousands of years of rebellion. In response God is redeeming us. To make us different back then and to guarantee no rebellion and sin would be to create a nature that determines a certain outcome that we couldn't go against, i.e., take away our free will.

It just seems you are trying to bring in double standards here. If our natures are changed on earth you want to say it’s violating our freewill, but when it comes to heaven then suddenly it’s “oh we are just becoming different.�

I'm not saying that at all. Our natures are being changed on earth, step by step, and will extend into heaven. The distinction is whether God just...poofs...gives us a new nature, replacing who we are (effectively) with someone else or whether God guides us step by step into transforming our nature freely.

ll you need to do is look at the behaviour of certain humans and see the lack of remorse and care they exhibit. Some do things without fear of consequences. Some do things without any consideration for the wellbeing of others. You can see this sort of stuff from a very early age.

If you study personalities, you will learn that we are born with different temperaments. These determine how we interact with people and live our lives. Some people have more compassion than others. Some have little compassion. I have even done Christian studies about this.

I would recommend this book:



Study stuff like this and you will see that not all humans are naturally endowed with the same wonderful personality characteristics.

It is possible to push through fear and guilt and some things like that but how many people who want to do evil things ever have to? For many cruel people, hurting others is easy as it’s part of their nature. For me I could do evil things but I wouldn't want to have to face the guilt. I've often wished I could have sex with beautiful women I know. I could probably rape them if I really wanted too. But I wouldn't want to have push through the remorse and the guilt... the fear of ramifications... the not being able to live with myself. What's the point? Why would I? It really makes no sense... unless I was mentally ill.

Then we look at the behavior of people differently. Being born with different temperaments is one thing, to which I agree. But the question is whether something like this DETERMINES how we live. I have not seen evidence which shows that these factors certainly does determine our behaviors. Some of the evidence I've talked with people about have seemed to me to be built upon philosophical assumptions. But I will put this book on my list to read.

I don’t see how doing “loving� actions to someone you hate is loving. That’s a paradox. You can’t have love and hate someone at the same time.

In doing this we are treating the person we hate as though we loved them. You may not feel the affection of love towards them that we do towards our best friend, but you are blessing them, like you willingly do to those you feel a strong bond towards. And I think it fosters the feeling of love towards those we didn't previously.

My comment was in response to you saying that if we lose our freewill we lose the ability to love. With my definition of love, I don’t see how we would lose it. Nothing can stop how we feel about someone.

I agree we don't necessarily lose your idea of love if we lose free will.

I’m not even seeing how it would stop anyone using your definition. If we choose to do good and bless a person, I’m not seeing how God preventing us from doing evil (putting limiters on us) is going to stop us from doing good deeds. It’s only going to stop us from doing evil deeds.

If our free will is to hurt someone and God prevents us from acting out that will, then there is no free will. Technically God, in this scenario, doesn't prevent the exercise of our free will in certain situations (when we choose good), but it makes those actions seemingly meaningless because whatever we want to do, only good things will result.

It's kind of like God won't override our team's freedom in playing basketball unless we miss a shot. If we make the shot...God lets our freedom through. If we are going to miss the shot...God overrides it and we end up making the shot. Is that really freedom?

[The Tanager]

This is trivial or nonsensical. What is a "decision" to an entity under the absolute control of an external force?

A decision to such an entity would be one that physically is able to do 1 of 2 or more actions (say, go for a walk or sit and eat a bowl of cereal) and the external force controlling it decides that this entity will go for a walk. There are logical paths the entity can take and it is being forced down one specific path.

Be that as it may, I don't see why it matters.

First off, it's not an issue of "can never choose evil" but "will never choose evil".

Now, let's replace the word "evil" with the words "to eat rocks", and see if what you're saying makes sense:

For God to make humans who, by nature, will never choose to eat rocks is for an outside force to determine one's will (by determining their nature).

Utter nonsense now, right? God made my body (supposedly) such that eating a rock would be grossly unpleasant, dangerous, and otherwise utterly meaningless for me. I would never eat a rock. I am not even tempted to. Is this some indication that I don't have free will? Of course not.

It is an issue of can vs. will. An entity that can never make a choice has no free will. An entity that never makes certain choices but could have is exercising free will. If God made it so humans can never eat rocks, then that is a limit on our free will, just like we can't fly without outside help. Not all limits are necessarily bad, even if it would be fun to take wing and fly. If God made it so humans can eat rocks (which is the actual case, right?) and we choose never to eat rocks, God isn't limiting our free will; we are exercising it. It may be unpleasant, dangerous and meaningless which factors into our exercise of our will to not eat them, but we could push through those deterrents.

But we are also talking about a much wider limitation when we are talking about taking away our freedom to choose to do good/evil. I think this limit is necessarily bad because it makes our will meaningless in the moral sense. No matter what we will, certain things will result. It doesn't matter if I want to hurt someone or not. And it doesn't really matter that I want to love that person, because whatever I want the same result will follow. It makes feelings and acts of love, in my opinion empty. I don't want my wife to be forced into a relationship with me and forced into doing something nice to me. I may really enjoy the robot that serves me, but I don't love it like I love my wife or my kids. That is like what Christianity claims God wants with us.

I'm not saying there couldn't be any freedom of our will if our choice of good/evil is taken away, but I wonder how trivial such freedom would be. Okay, I can choose to learn German over French. I can choose to walk on one side of the street rather than the other, unless a car gets out of control and then maybe I'm forced to walk on the other side of the street. But maybe the driver of the car itself is the one limited there, not me.

There is greater importance on how we choose to act towards other people, however. Without freedom there, I think love itself would be empty. Maybe it still makes us feel good, but we have to do certain actions no matter how we feel.

To me it seems that God is being "forced" into making (having made) particular decisions every time a theist opens their mouth.

God isn't forced into anything because of my thoughts trying to make sense of reality any more than reality isn't forced into particular paths just because an atheist or agnostic opens their mouth. It's simply people trying to make sense of reality.

How about God? Is he free to choose evil? Has he been? Will he always be?

There is no one forcing God to choose to do good in the Christian worldview, so yes, He is free to do what He wants. Always has been and always will be.

[The Tanager]

The first part, love is a feeling. The act is an act not feeling, hence not love.

Then perhaps we are talking about different things here. We can use whatever terms you want. I think the higher virtue is to choose to bless other people even when you don't feel love towards them and that such acts will actually help you to begin to have more of a feeling of love towards them. I think such acts show other people respect based on who they are and not on our own disposition. It makes love other-centered rather than self-involved, it seems to me.

If it is one's nature then by definition it's not an outside force, no? Google says nature is defined as the basic or inherent features, character, or qualities of something. Freewill-ed beings created good by nature is not incoherent at all.

But if we define it in this way wouldn't we be saying a computer program has free will? Or that water exercises free will by boiling when heat is added? I don't see how we can be satisfied with that understanding.

Hence the problem of evil. A good and omnipotent deity, by necessity, could only create beings equal to himself. We are not equal to God, therefore Christians have a logical contradiction.

Why would it be evil or a lack of power for a god to create beings unequal to Himself?

[Bust Nak]

Then perhaps we are talking about different things here. We can use whatever terms you want. I think the higher virtue is to choose to bless other people even when you don't feel love towards them and that such acts will actually help you to begin to have more of a feeling of love towards them. I think such acts show other people respect based on who they are and not on our own disposition. It makes love other-centered rather than self-involved, it seems to me.

We may well be talking about different things, but love is commonly defined as a strong feeling of affection. Having said that, I agree that being kind to someone you love is expected, being kind to someone you don't love can be considered a virtue.

But if we define it in this way wouldn't we be saying a computer program has free will? Or that water exercises free will by boiling when heat is added? I don't see how we can be satisfied with that understanding.

Computer programs and boiling water behave according to their nature sure, but I don't see how that applies without any "will." When we have strong AI then sure, there is no fundamental reason why computers can't have freewill.

Why would it be evil or a lack of power for a god to create beings unequal to Himself?

Because the creation of any being with less than moral perfection would lead, directly or indirectly, to unnecessary suffering.

[sf]

Hence the problem of evil. A good and omnipotent deity, by necessity, could only create beings equal to himself. We are not equal to God, therefore Christians have a logical contradiction.

I often ponder if God could create something as perfect as him (as described in the Bible) or not. Perhaps solving that question would solve whether his created creatures would have to have the ability to sin/commit evil.

[bluethread]

OK, if it is burnt up, it is a waste. If it is given to those who do the work, it is excessive. It looks to me like you are looking for a scapegoat. Oh, sorry, that would be a waste wouldn't it?

Looking for a scapegoat? I don't know what you mean. I'm simply questioning the morality and logic of brutally slaughtering innocent beings to atone for someone's sins.

"brutally slaughtering"? Are you aware of the rabbinic procedures for "slaughtering"? It was not only the most humane form of killing an animal then, it still is. As I said, it appears that you are going to demonize this, regardless of any information to the contrary. If you don't think animals should be killed, that is fine. However, I don't know why I or anybody else should have to be subject to your sensibilities. Haven't you repeatedly criticized Christians for requiring you to subject to their sensibilities?

So, it serves as a reminder. That is the point. You may not like it, but it works.

So you're comparing a financial fine to the brutal slaughter of an animal? Let's not even stop at animals. Let's talk about the HUMAN sacrifice of Jesus after all that's what this thread is about. No one got to eat him. His body was shoved in a tomb afterwards. So paying a speeding fine is the equivalent of killing a human being?

Having an animal or even a human killed is a good reminder in your books? That's all moral and fine from your point of view? Not primitive, cruel or barbaric?

Again, do you consider the procedures of the meat packing industry to be brutal slaughter, because the rabbinic procedures are more human than that. Regarding Yeshua's death, that was not a Temple sacrifice, but self sacrifice. Are you saying that the actions of Gondi and the Tibetan monks is primitive, cruel or barbaric? According to the Scriptures no one took Yeshua's life. He permitted it to happen as an example. By the way, I do not believe that Yeshua's self sacrifice was barbaric. If you are using that term to mean uncivilized, you are presuming your preferred culture to be the optimum civilization. That or literal Barbarism has nothing to do with Adonai's ways. It was the practice of the Barbarians.

[Danmark]

OK, if it is burnt up, it is a waste. If it is given to those who do the work, it is excessive. It looks to me like you are looking for a scapegoat. Oh, sorry, that would be a waste wouldn't it?

Looking for a scapegoat? I don't know what you mean. I'm simply questioning the morality and logic of brutally slaughtering innocent beings to atone for someone's sins.

"brutally slaughtering"? Are you aware of the rabbinic procedures for "slaughtering"? It was not only the most humane form of killing an animal then, it still is. As I said, it appears that you are going to demonize this, regardless of any information to the contrary. If you don't think animals should be killed, that is fine. However, I don't know why I or anybody else should have to be subject to your sensibilities. Haven't you repeatedly criticized Christians for requiring you to subject to their sensibilities?

So, it serves as a reminder. That is the point. You may not like it, but it works.

So you're comparing a financial fine to the brutal slaughter of an animal? Let's not even stop at animals. Let's talk about the HUMAN sacrifice of Jesus after all that's what this thread is about. No one got to eat him. His body was shoved in a tomb afterwards. So paying a speeding fine is the equivalent of killing a human being?

Having an animal or even a human killed is a good reminder in your books? That's all moral and fine from your point of view? Not primitive, cruel or barbaric?

Again, do you consider the procedures of the meat packing industry to be brutal slaughter, because the rabbinic procedures are more human than that. Regarding Yeshua's death, that was not a Temple sacrifice, but self sacrifice. Are you saying that the actions of Gondi and the Tibetan monks is primitive, cruel or barbaric? According to the Scriptures no one took Yeshua's life. He permitted it to happen as an example. By the way, I do not believe that Yeshua's self sacrifice was barbaric. If you are using that term to mean uncivilized, you are presuming your preferred culture to be the optimum civilization. That or literal Barbarism has nothing to do with Adonai's ways. It was the practice of the Barbarians.

Let's examine the facts:

According to secular law [the Humane_Slaughter_Act], animals should be stunned into unconsciousness prior to their slaughter to ensure a death with less suffering than in killing methods used earlier. The most common methods are electrocution and CO2 stunning for swine and captive bolt stunning for cattle, sheep, and goats. Of these methods of electrocution, electronarcosis has been widely acclaimed as the safest, most humane and most reliable as well as the surest way to stun the animal and render it insensitive to pain.
_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humane_Slaughter_Act

Rabbinic law claims also to be concerned that slaughtering an animal be done in a way to minimize suffering; however, it forbids administering a stunning blow or drugs or an electric shock. Instead the throat of the animal must be cut while the animal is fully conscious.

Administering electric shock to an animal prior to shehitah [kosher slaughtering] is prohibited, because it incapacitates the animal and renders it a trefah [animal unfit to eat]. It is forbidden to eat the meat of such an animal. The prohibition extends, as well, to administering an anesthetic....
_ http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article ... roduction/

The act is performed by severing the trachea, esophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and vagus nerve in a swift action using a knife with an extremely sharp blade (called a "chalef"by ashkenazim and a saquin by sephardim). This is performed with the intent of causing a rapid drop in blood pressure in the brain and loss of consciousness rendering the animal insensible to pain and to exsanguinate in a prompt and precise action.
_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shechita

It seems both fair and accurate to describe slaughter by cutting the trachea, esophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and vagus nerve so the animal bleeds to death as "brutal." It is arguably not torture, but it is certainly brutal.

Perhaps there are Rabbinic rules forbidding this kosher slaughter within the sight or hearing of other animals, but I am not aware of it. However the idea that cattle would be oblivious to the slaughter of others killed in its presence is unsupported. The contrary seems likely.



http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... less-meat/

[bluethread]

It seems both fair and accurate to describe slaughter by cutting the trachea, esophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and vagus nerve so the animal bleeds to death as "brutal." It is arguably not torture, but it is certainly brutal.

Perhaps there are Rabbinic rules forbidding this kosher slaughter within the sight or hearing of other animals, but I am not aware of it. However the idea that cattle would be oblivious to the slaughter of others killed in its presence is unsupported. The contrary seems likely.

Now we are straining at gnats and that is my point. Brutal was not OC's argument. He is implying, if not outright saying moral turpitude, by calling it primitive, cruel or barbaric. The wheel is primitive, but we still use it. You seem to be countering the cruel remark by saying it is arguably not torture and, as I have pointed out the term barbaric is culture bound both literally and figuratively. Should we outlaw hunting, because it is "brutal". The reason why stunning is not permitted is because heart memory, not brain memory, is necessary for draining the blood, much like nerve memory in the beheaded chicken. Hemophobes may have a problem with that, but it is not inherently cruel. Are we going to stop farmers from beheading chickens now? To your final point, I didn't see anywhere in your citation that the live cattle are oblivious to the stunned cattle. OC's argument rests on hyperbole on the one hand and straining at gnats on the other. As I said, I don't think any explanation is going to suffice. The bottom line is that the sacrifices violate his personal sensibilities and that is all.