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?

[myth-one.com]

"Many" is more than half.

Correction: Many is defined as "a large but indefinite number"

An indefinite number can NOT be restricted to "more than half"

Correction noted.

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. (Matthew 7:13-14)

In the above verses, two groups are compared -- the many and the few.

If the entire set has two subsets characterized as few and many, it would seem that the subset described as many would be greater than that defined as few.

And if so, it would be more than half in this particular case.

[Zzyzx]

.

And if so, it would be more than half in this particular case.

Agreed -- in that case. My response was as though it was a general statement.

[otseng]

You don't have to be polite to me as it is an utterly transparent charade.

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[The Tanager]

Another long hiatus, but if you are still watching this thread, here go my responses.

So now we only supposing that "IF freewill" is a true position as well?

All Tanager is doing is applying the perspectives as it suits him and declaring their tenants "true" for each case. Which they are, in the context of the perspective he's using. The problem is that he has provided no logical reason for why we should apply one perspective (free will) in one case and another (determinism) in the other case.

It's not such a strange thing to do. Debate aside, we all switch between these perspectives all the time in our daily lives, usually without even realizing it.

I'll start here since this could have caused some of your confusion on my responses. I think the intent of the thread, as it is worded, is to analyze the coherency of the Christian system of beliefs rather than to analyze the truth of the Christian worldview. I have stated that this is my approach on numerous occassions from the very beginning. The topic of the thread makes an ad reductio absurdum type of argument where we assume certain foundational beliefs in Christianity are true for the very sake of showing that these beliefs end up contradicting each other, thereby showing Christianity can't be true.

In analyzing this type of argument we are not required to provide a logical reason for why we should believe that free will is true or why determinism is true. It's not me applying a perspective that suits me. It's simply analyzing the ad reductio absurdum as it should be done. If the topic had said "What is the truth behind Jesus' crucifixion" I would have had completely different responses to begin with.

And, FarWanderer, if you are saying that at times I've said free will is true and at other times I've said determinism is true to suit what I'm trying to say, I have no idea where you would get that from. If you didn't mean that and you didn't mean what I responded to above, then I'm at a loss in understanding exactly what you did mean.

[The Tanager]

Saying IF freewill is true is also saying IF freewill is not true.

Which is why I asked about your view and what you felt that meant for the crucifixion. IF freewill does not exist, what would this mean for the crucifixion. Would, when analyzed logically, lead to any incoherence? If it wouldn't, then your view is logically coherent. After that analysis one would still have no answer to the question, "Yeah, but is it true?"

That is one understanding, yes?

I'm not sure why you wrote that as a question.

I directed to the freewill position of crucifixion logic, as said 'logic' of cross/crucifixion ->being essentially non-existing and ineffective other than to condemn to eternal separation.

And I've been responding to your thoughts. I don't think the logic is non-existent and ineffective.

[Which may not be all that logical to some, and may even seem INVERSE in intentions of taking away SIN.

I'm a bit confused on this point. What is "INVERSE in intentions of taking away SIN?" That the freewill position teaches about hell in order to keep people from sinning? Do you mean something else? I'm sorry for my confusion here.

Requesting positions is nothing personal, even though it's hard to get answers, apparently.

Uh, no, I'm asking you to put your REAL position on the table. Got one?

So, the unbelieving freewillers already know in advance and therefore you don't actually have to say it, because "it goes without saying."

Is THIS what you're saying? "My position isn't stated, but it goes without saying?"

IF freewill is true then eternal separation as an extension of an existing condition of separation can happen, seems to be YOUR stance.

Of course requesting a position is nothing personal. That's not what you were doing. You didn't come and ask something like "what is your position on the final state of those who, with their free will, choose to reject God?" You came in and said things like "You don't have to be polite to me as it is an utterly transparent charade." That indictment of me is absolutely personal.

As to it being hard to get an answer and what seems to be my stance...it has explicitly been my stance that, in your phrasing, 'eternal separation as an extension of an existing condition of seperation can happen due to free will'. I have clearly shared my view that hell is the result of human free will on this thread. And I talked with non-Christians on this thread about what this says about God's love or lack thereof.

All I saw from you prior was a one liner consequence, that non freewill affirmation of crucifixion CAN result in an eternal extension of an existing situation of separation from God.

Where did I say that a non-freewill (which means being determined by another, right?) affirmation of crucifixion can result in hell? I'm confused on this one.

If a person is playing truth or consequences, they should maybe engage in a more solid manner?

I'm not sure what this means, either.

But you will pardon me for observing the "if's" and the "can's" and ask for a YES freewill is TRUE, for unbelief of freewill separation WILL be extended eternally,

I hope you can see these are legitimate questions.

I think they are legitimate questions, but some arise because of confusions of my position and I am confused on what you are asking with some of them. I'm not sure what you mean by saying "for unbelief of freewill separation WILL be extended eternally," That those who believe there is no freewill separation from God will have that belief eternally? That those who believe there is no freewill separation will be condemned to hell for that belief? Something else?

[The Tanager]

I can choose that, but I won't. I'd rather run off the excess fat on a treadmill and take bitter gourd extracts pills than choose bitter gourd over ice-cream. I picked this example because I really do hate bitter gourd that much. I suppose if the choice was one spoon of ice-cream vs a month's supply of bitter gourd and I am stranded with no food or water weeks away from civilization then I would CHOOSE THE gourds; but then again, it's a not an uncoerced choice anymore but one of bitter gourd or death.

If you really cannot envisage someone refusing bitter gourd when ice-cream is on offer every time without fail, we can use more extreme examples. Surely you can imagine someone who would rather die than kill another person - someone who refrain from killing another person every time without fail even under extreme coercion?

I don't understand why you think this is making your point. They are exercising their free will. Even under great influence they are still choosing to side with a certain influence over another. There will be plusses and minuses of whatever they choose. It may easier for one to make the decision than another. But you are not forced to eat ice cream because of your taste buds. You are influenced toward that decision and because of the other freedoms you have to get health in other ways it is an easier decision for you to make than someone trapped on an island full of bitter gourds and no milk-producing mammals. If you were limited to just gourd and ice cream I doubt you will choose to eat ice cream the rest of your life, even though you hate the taste of gourds because you will want to rid yourself of the negatives such a choice would bring in (lack of health or whatever). You may even grow to like the taste of it. I've acquired the likes of many things I didn't like before. This isn't a coerced choice, but it is a more narrow set of choices than you are used to. But even if gourd is the only thing left, you still aren't being forced to eat it. You are choosing survival over distaste. Some people choose other perceived goods (ending their pain) over survival at times. We all have various influencing factors. But they don't force us to eat ice-cream or to choose survival or to choose pacifism or whatever.

Ok, if picking ice-cream (or sparing someone's life) every time without fail doesn't count as fixed, then I can make this simple amendment to my suggestion: Is there anything incoherent with the concept of create beings with freewill, the ability to choose good or evil, one who would choose good without fail, without the result being fixed?

It seems coherent to me IF the 'choosing good without fail' is up to the freewill being and not the designer. When you introduce the idea of God choosing to create the freewill being who WILL always choose good without fail instead of the freewill being who WILL end up choosing good and bad or always bad then you are fixing the result and you aren't actually creating a being with freewill at all. You are creating a determined being because you have already determined that this being will always choose good without fail. You've determined that.

It seems you are answering yes to the question above: You are saying created beings who have freewill and make the right choice every time is incoherent? You are saying some wrong choices necessarily follow from true freewill?

Absolutely not (they way I understand your question above). I'm saying Adam and Eve absolutely could have always made the right choice, but they didn't. It was up to them, not up to God (although it definitely could have been up to God if He wanted).

Then the obvious follow up questions are: the freewill I experience when I choose ice-cream over bitter gourd every time is not true freewill? Does it imply Jesus have no freewill, he made the right choice every time after all?

I answered "no" to the question above, i.e., I said it is coherent to create beings with free will that end up choosing good without fail without fixing that result, but I can still respond to these questions. I think your choice, when handed a bitter gourd and an ice-cream to eat the ice-cream is exercising free will (but isn't a hard decision for you as other free will choices are). And Jesus does have free will, making the right choice every time like Adam and Eve could have but didn't.

So God didn't prescribe them to act one way or another, but if you agree with the descriptive definition, then you don't you have to accept that "God created morally imperfect beings" is an accurate description of Genesis?

God prescribes actions in the sense of what would be best for us, but not in the sense of making us do those actions. Perhaps I'm mis-using 'prescribe'." So the description of Genesis is that God made creatures who proved to be morally imperfect by their own making, but they could have also proved themselves to be morally perfect if they had made different choices. God didn't make them morally imperfect, but morally open to perfection and imperfection.

And if you do accept that, you are still stuck with the variation of the problem I mentioned before. God have the power to make perfection, but chooses to create imperfection instead, imperfection that lead directly or indirectly to suffering. Therefore God is less than perfectly good in creating unnecessarily suffering.

I agree God had the power to make beings who would always make the right choice (but these would, by definition, be non freewill beings). But this doesn't mean God chooses to create imperfect beings. God created beings with the freedom to be perfect or imperfect. God leaves the choice up to the humans. Yes, knowing it could lead to suffering. But that it could also lead to great relationships, a level of relationship that is impossible without it. For to guarantee the perfect beings would be to create robots (obviously, I'm not talking about them being metal or plastic necessarily). You can't have the same kind of relationship with a robot that you can with a human who has free will. The christian message is that the more loving choice is for God to create beings with free will, even if it leads to sufferings, than for God to create a computer program without sufferings.

[The Tanager]

That's good if that's what you are saying now, but it is not true that you were saying it originally:

I have not changed what I've been saying at all. I clarified terminology to fit how you understood those terms so that you could understand what I was saying all along. Many people would say robots make decisions, but that those decisions were determined by their programming. I understood you to be saying that, technically, those aren't decisions, so I reworded my phrasing without changing what I was actually saying. I changed from saying that having free will means making undetermined decisions to saying that having free will means making decisions.

And none of this is relevant, precisely because of the can/will distinction. You're just saying "can't do evil" = bad. Cool. Fine. Not the point. The point is that "won't do evil" is not necessarily "can't do evil" just like we agree that "won't eat rocks" doesn't necessarily mean "can't eat rocks".

I agree that the can/will distinction is an important distinction. If this is the point, then we agree on the point. But I don't think that is the point. I think the point of disagreement is resting on how we get to "won't do evil" and that we can't guarantee that we get there and have free will. Free will makes "won't do evil" a possibility.

I am reminded of a certain anime I WATCHED a few years ago called "From the New World". It took place in the distant future where humans had developed powerful reality-altering telepathic abilities. Children had these powers too, and many could be powerful enough to kill everyone around them. So in order to keep humans from being violent with each other, humans had been genetically engineered to produce a devastating physical feedback if they knowingly hurt or killed a member of their own species. Hurting someone usually made you debilitatingly sick, and killing them would probably kill you yourself.

Did the geneticists in this story violate the FREE WILL of these future people by making them this way?

I think they still have free will and that people would still hurt each other, so how does this do away with evil and suffering?

[The Tanager]

Exactly! Freewill still EXISTS. So it would be there when it came to doing evil. If we could not say rape someone due to fear or pain or guilt, we would then still have the freewill to do something else instead. It's just that we would be physically unable ... well not exactly unable... it would just be physically extremely difficult to perform that act. Most of us rational non-mentally ill people just wouldn't do it due to the difficulty. We would be someone who was physically unable to rape.

Likewise we could be physically unable to lie or lust or steal. Imagine what a great world we would live in if people were physically unable to steal! Physically unable to murder! Physically unable to rape! We can't fly. We can't leap tall buildings in a single bound. So lets impose those physical limitations to murder, rape, sadism, etc etc. Surely that's what a sensible loving and merciful god would do?

First off, there is a difference between only being able to leap 1 foot and not being able to leap at all. That is what I meant about wider limitations. To take away free will decisions is to take everything away (any leaping ability, by analogy), while limiting us to jump only 2 feet instead of 100 feet is a limitation, but not a determination.

But to the main points, if we are physically unable to do these things then freewill does not exist. And we are back to judging whether a world with free relationships is better than a world of robotic goodness, of which I think the former is better.

If it is just harder to do these things, people could still do them and then we are still left with a God who allowed these things to happen and you are still making the same critiques.

It may be that they have been there, just not particularly strongly. That book teaches that there are varying DEGREES of strength of personality. It's not about putting someone into a rigidly defined box. It's about certain percentages of boxes.

I agree there are degrees and that some decisions are easier for some than others, but there still appears to be freedom to me. Varying degrees of freedom between different people in the same scenarios and varying degrees of freedom within the same person in different scenarios.

I disagree that their freewill would be violated. Like you keep insisting, even with those powerful influences, you can still push through them. Adam and Eve could do the same. The thing would be why would any rational person do that when they know the negative outcome of doing it?

So, you are expecting God to make rational beings who won't do something because of that very rationality and then calling them free beings? Their rationality, programmed by God, is determining their will and, therefore, God is determining their will. There is not real freedom there.

At least there will be less spiritual damage. People will be less likely to lie, lust, steal, kill, etc etc if these limitations were stronger. If we all had them equally. Sin would not be the huge problem it is with mankind.

I don't see why that is the case. Less likely to do something doesn't mean we actually do it less.

We all have limitations that are overwhelming, yet we don't call that a violation of our freewill. We can still choose to push through them, or we can choose to do other things instead that ARE within those limitations (just like a DISABLEDperson) so our freewill is not violated. Just like I pushed through my overwhelming fear of heights to jump out of a plane. However if jumping out of a plane was going to result in someone else being hurt or me angering God I wouldn't have done it. The incentive just wouldn't have been there no matter how much I desired a thrill. I would have just not bothered to face the fear due to the ramifications of it.

Our disagreement here is over semantics because by 'overwhelm' I mean something you can't push through. If you push through it, then it didn't overwhelm your will. It tried to, but failed.

There needs to be some consistency APPLIED in these scenarios and I'm not seeing that consistency coming from you. You want to insert special pleading into the whole affair. Making out that limitations around sinning is a violation of freewill, but anything else isn't.

I don't see how I'm special pleading. They are different things. To sin directly means you are using your freewill. To not be able to sin means to not be able to use your freewill. To not be able to fly means you are physically limited, but you still have the ability to use your freewill. Limiting us from sinning at all means there are no moral choices open to us, while physically limiting us can still leave moral choices open to us. That is the difference.

Limiting how high we can jump or how long we can stay in the air is to limit us to a 2 on a scale of 10. Making us unable to jump at all would be to limit us to 0 on a scale of 10. Making us unable to sin is to limit us to a 0 on a scale of 10. There is less freedom in making us unable to sin and unable to fly (but still able to leave the ground).

[The Tanager]

Getting back to the question asked in the title of this topic, "What is the logic behind Jesus' crucifixion?," it appears to be that God requires a sacrifice to be perfect in order to expiate guilt. However, I do not see the logic behind the sacrifice of a single perfect 'lamb' forgiving the sins of everyone, including those yet to be born and sins yet to be committed. Perhaps that is why Paul had to write so much about it. When one's argument is deficient in both facts and logic, there's a tendency to pile up sheer numbers of words to compensate.

Assuming your understanding of the crucifixation is true, what is illogical about one sacrifice forgiving the sins of multiple people across different times? Why is it only logical if their is a one-to-one correspondence of sacrifice to person and that this needs to happen at the same time?

[FarWanderer]

And, FarWanderer, if you are saying that at times I've said free will is true and at other times I've said determinism is true to suit what I'm trying to say, I have no idea where you would get that from. If you didn't mean that and you didn't mean what I responded to above, then I'm at a loss in understanding exactly what you did mean.

You certainly haven't said those things verbatim (and I did not say you did), but rather you are using both sides for your arguments, and doing so inconsistently. It's extremely difficult to explain how you are doing it because the free-will // determinism problem stretches the limits of language itself. Both free will and determinism are purely presuppostional. Every idea expressed in words, so long as it involves causality, will necessarily have to presuppose free will or determinism. You ever wonder why the free-will // determinism debate is so unresolvable? I mean seriously it just goes on and on forever and ever in circles. Well this is why. It's just people starting from different presuppositions having an illusion of a debate; in actuality they are just talking past each other.

In any case, how this relates to our particular discussion: the others have made similar points, but in my case it was about "the freedom to eat rocks" compared to "the freedom to do evil". God made us such that we have no inclination to eat rocks. You apply free-will thinking to this scenario. Cool, that's fine. Yet when I suggest that God could just as easily make us with no inclination for evil, all the sudden you switch to words like "forced", "programmed", "robots" etc.

That's all you've done. You just change the language (injecting deterministic-sounding language that I never intended). That's it. You offer no consistent criteria for when this change should apply.

And I contend that you can't. Like I said earlier, free will is not an attribute. It's a perspective. You either view a situation through the lens of free-will, or you don't.