The cornerstone of Christianity is human sacrifice. Is Christianity a moral creed?

That's a great personal opinion you have there. Well done.

 

I don't find anything particularly appealing about it. That's why I'm not a Christian. I'm just saying it would have been more appealing to me as a religion if they had left out the atonement for sins part and just had a story about a man who preached peace and love and was willing to die for it. No bells or whistles.

 

That's why paganism offers a different ideal, see we don't live by rules and regulations in our lives, only guidelines we can choose to follow. We make our own future and nobody to answer to.

And we can sacrifice too, without being a lame sin. To bathe in and the drink the blood of our enemies, makes the war Gods smile and the Valkyries soul search. I take their skulls back to my shrine where silent Gods stand guard, soak them in blood and with wine my sacrificial ritual. A thousand heads are on display collected through years of thirst, macabre trophies from my prey picked clean of flesh by Odin's birds. I am a wolf in human shape, a predator with flaming rage!

 

Ah. Thanks. I thought you saw some other value in Yahweh. My bad, your good.

Regards
DL

 

I'm pleased you approve.

Regards
DL

 

I feel like you're not understanding who Jesus was. Christianity doesn't revolve around a human sacrificing himself for others (although that's an important moral principle of how far love for one another should go). It's about God sacrificing His Only Begotten Son (part of Himself) to save the fallen humankind. If you do realize who Jesus was, then your opinion might stem from pride. It's likely that you think that your views on morality are superior to God's, which is something I have also struggled with in the past, so I'm not passing judgement. I recommend praying to God for discernment every single day.

 

I'd have better thoughts if God had sacrificed himself.. no way would I give my child up for people to torture and kill! There is evil in what he did.. but that only satisfies my beliefs that God did not exist.. if he did, he would never have done that... full stop!

 

So God could only forgive by having his son murdered.

Do you even know what you are writing and how many of the laws Jesus taught he would have to break to be what you say he is?

Watch the link in the O.P. for the first time..

As to what you think motivated a sacrifice, our fall. Can you tell us what is a fall about becoming as God's in the knowing of good and evil, that the originators of the myth, the Jews, saw as man's elevation and not our fall?

Do you think that when you developed a moral sense that you became a fallen person or did gaining a moral sense elevate you?

Regards
DL

 

The fact that natural law and our moral and natural inclination is to have sons bury their parents and not parents bury their offspring is one of my big arguments against this whole sacrifice myth.

Christians do not seem to care. One of the worst replies I get is when discussing Job and how God allowed Satan to kill his children.

You should see how many vile Christians say that that is ok because God replaced them later. Those Christians head for the hills when I ask if they think a new child eliminates the pain of the lose of the murdered ones.

Morality has never been a Christian forte. That is why they always run from discussing them and why they had to use inquisitions to grow as their moral tenets could not convert those who had better ones.

Regards
DL

 

Evil according to what type of morality? Your own subjective one? What makes your subjective criteria about what is good and what is evil superior to that of any other human on Earth? You said that you don't believe in God, so I'm assuming that you believe in evolution. If evolution is true, then we're just molecules in motion and we are just as responsible for the particles that create impulses in our brains as a leaf is responsible for the fact that the wind carries it. Evolution states that whatever allows survival is all that matters. Right, wrong, good and evil are concepts that society creates as it goes. Good and evil do not exist in matter, they're not in molecules, you can't study them in a laboratory. They're transcendent.

 

Natural law and our natural inclinations are feeble guides in evaluating the appropriateness of divine actions. More persuasive is the argument that penal substitutionary atonement--punishment of the innocent instead of the guilty-- makes no sense. Does Penal Substitutionary Theory Make Sense?
God does not defeat evil with violence, but with non-violence. Love overcomes hate.The analogy to the Paschal lamb gave Paul a vivid heuristic metaphor for his sacrifice theory, taken over by three of the four gospel writers. But vicarious penal substitutionary atonement is not the only way of looking at Jesus' mission. Abelard claimed that Christ saved us by inspiring us to live in accord with God's will by His example. Love, not atonement, is the central message.https://cac.org/love-not-atonement-2017-05-04/ This "moral influence" interpretation is one of the earliest theory of Jesus' mission--tht Jesus came and died in order to bring about a positive transformation of humanity.He is crucified as a martyr due to the radical nature of His moral example.Why I don't buy "vicarious substitutionary atonement".
Ehrman argues that the author of Luke-Acts did not have a doctrine of atonement. For Luke, it was the resurrection, not the crucifixion, that mattered.Did Luke Have a Doctrine of the Atonement? Mailbag September 24, 2017
This Lukan view is further elaborated by Carey. While this is not the version put forward by evangelical Christians, to me it's the most persuasive.

 

I can study your morals here.

You are to emulate your God in all of his ways. So says scriptures.

If you decided a blood sacrifice was required for you to forgive others, or for any reason really, would you step up to your own demand or would you send your child to die?

Regards
DL

 

Divine action must first be shown to have actually happened. Good luck with that.

Regardless of that glitch, that is not what scriptures say.

Gen3;22 Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil;

1 Thessalonians 5:21 Test all things; hold fast what is good.

We are to choose what is good and not some imaginary God.

Just more supernaturalstupid thinking on his part.

I am working on a Gnostic Christian O.P. It is not ready but this bit is what it will be based on.


Have you leaned what your bible teaches?

The Bible teaches one to start ones spiritual journey from the bottom i.e. from a stage where he must consider himself as a born Sinner and starts his journey upwards from there. One reaches second stage when he realises that he is the son and God is his father. The final realisation is when he realises that he and the Father are One. This is similar to the spiritual journey of a Hindu who starts his journey from Dwait stage , (where he thinks himself and God to be two distinct entities), graduates to Vishishta Adwait (a stage where he thinks himself a fragment/ fraction of Him) and finally reached to the Adwait stage ( a stage when he merges himself with that infinite consciousness.)

Gnostic Christian saying. Stevan Davies. The savior is not a celestial being brought to earth; the savior is a capacity of the mind, and the saviors journey from above is actually one’s own journey from within.

Regards
DL

 

Quite a lot of Jesus' moral tenets are immoral. That is why Christians run for the hills whenever I ask them to debate those morals.

If they ever had decent tenets, they would have converted people with them instead of growing their vile religion by inquisition, murder and the burning of other creeds holy books.

Regards
DL

 

You actually believe I can learn from you?
Have you ever had a son, or a child? Come back to me and tell me if you would sacrifice that child to teach people good and evil!
Then you preach science as a back drop? LOL

Religion is a load of crap.. it was laws of long ago, now we have our own police, and we have good and bad.. get real, and get a life.. or be a politician..

More wars are caused through politics and religion... fact!

 

...

 

You pick and choose out of context sentences to construct whatever fantasy you want. None of your rantings make sense.

A non-supernaturalist Gnostic? How oxymoronic of you. I can hardly wait.

You're mistaken. You were made in the image and likeness of God, and have made yourself into a confused old man thinking he is God.

 

Quite a lot of teachings attributed to Jesus aren't Jesus'. The Jesus Seminar estimated He said and did less than 20% of the things attributed to Him, but they developed a plausible methodology for identifying probable authenticity. But the important thing is not whether He said them but whether or not they're true. For that, we must rely on our judgment. If I encountered you, I might run for the hills, too--to get away from a tiresome crank. Christianity is still the largest world religion. Attributing that to inquisition, murder and the burning of other creeds' holy books is unconvincing. You have yet to come up with persuasive arguments of your own in defense of alternative beliefs. You say very little about the specific tenets of Gnosticism. Is it because from the vantage point of the twenty-first century they seem ridiculous?

 

I think the fact that I'm unable to turn water into wine is the true evil. Who does that? Come on Jesus, mate. Give me the goods!

 

Technically speaking, penal substitution can be interpreted to make perfect sense. To put it in plain terms: God is perfect and cannot tolerate imperfection in His presence. Humans were imperfect after the fall, so God had to either destroy them, remove them from His presence for eternity or change something. He loved humans enough as to choose the third option. Through means that are not comprehensible from our current perspective, He made it so that imperfection was fixed through the sacrifice of perfection. Impossible, you say? With God nothing is impossible. Couldn't He have done it in any other way? He probably could have, but He created the universe, so He is entitled to make the rules. Imperfection can be reduced with a sacrifice even in our fallen world (villains having a redemptive arc is a thing both is real life and in fiction), so imagine how much more it could be reduced through a sacrifice of a perfect being. Jesus is part of God (in what way, it's debatable), therefore He was a perfect being. Therefore, the fact that His sacrifice removed imperfection makes rational sense.

The part that you find unacceptable is the result of your socially-constructed worldview. You'd have very little against someone paying a fine to release a loved one from prison after they committed an insignificant crime, but you find it unacceptable for someone to offer themselves to take the place of a mass murderer who was sentenced to death. The only difference between the two cases is the severity of the crime. Have you ever pondered on how severe sin is for God?