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

And they were wrong, which is my point. When they did so, they were claiming a status that put them on a plane above mortal men, but claiming it and being it were different things. It was a sign of their hubris and their subjects credulity that somehow this made them sacred.

There's another sense in which we use the word "god"--that often comes up in discussions of idolatry or shirk (for Muslims): god as that which we worship as a source of ultimate meaning and sacred worth. If we treat wealth, status, power, or some material object as our gods, that becomes idolatrous in putting the finite ahead of infinite worth. If we say we are gods, it seems to me that's what we're doing. It may exhilerating, but it cheapens the concept, and there is danger of Nietschean hubris in doing so.

 

Yet as quoted in the O.P., even Jesus promoted this thinking.

You are accusing Jesus of hubris.

To believe in the infinite is to go into foolish supernatural thinking as we have no clue as to if anything is infinite or not.

Regards
DL

 

I don't see a quote from Jesus in the OP. What are you talking about? The OP gives us a passage from Hebrews (written by Lord knows who) quoting Leviticus, and calls it "the cornerstone of Christianity".
10 reasons Hebrews 9:22 does not teach the shedding of blood for the forgiveness of sins
If Jesus is divine, he wouldn't be guilty of hubris in acknowledging that aspect of his nature. We who are not divine would be. As for the infinite ("eternal" might be a better turn) there's nothing necessarily "supernatural " about it. Beauty, truth, justice, etc., are all eternal values. God is, among other things, the summation of human idealism.

 

I was referring to the many quotes in the link attributed to Yahweh/Jesus.

You show your double standard by saying that hubris in a human is not hubris if Jesus does it.

You seem to think that what is subjective, like beauty and justice are objective. I do not agree. I will grant that truth might be objective, but not all truths.

Regards
DL

 

I see no "many quotes" by Jesus saying what you say he's saying. There is no double standard in judging the conduct of mere humans differently than that of humans who are really also divine and knew what he was talking about. Traditional Christians believe that was the case with Jesus--and only with Jesus. Justice is objective, although human efforts to achieve it are approximate. Truth is objective, although human efforts to perceive it are clouded by subjectivity. As for beauty, "Beauty is truth. Truth beauty– that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Keats

 

Perhaps I should clarify a bit then---by rational, I am referring to several things---1.) the Greek influence on Judeo-Christian thought, including the use of the concept of logos, 2.) an emphasis on the physical over the non-physical (physical reality being more rational than nonphysical reality), 3.) a masculine dominance that taps into a rational dynamic as opposed to female dynamic (not that the irrational or female dynamic is bad, or inferior--I am not making a judgement or calling the irrational negative---it comes from a subjective/subconscious rather than an objective/conscious source, and is simply a different dynamic).

An of number 2 is what I was saying about the communion and the crucifxion----by replacing the blood sacrifice, it eliminated a magico-religious ceremony, and replaced it with a simplified ritual.

 

It is still a filthy and stupid tradition to maintain.

Logos is a miss-used term unless the user defines what branch of thought he is talking about.

To try to use it on it's own, to me, is ridiculous given it's many branches of thought and speech.
Better to stick to English.

Regards
DL

 

Yeah, but, who won't they murder?

 

You would have to ask them.

If Jesus popped up again, the churches would lock him out, more than likely.

Regards
DL

 

Meh.

 

Ditto.

Regards
DL

 

Christianity didn't invent human sacrifice, it ended it. There is anthropological evidence that human sacrifice was practiced by many cultures around the entire world, for God knows how long.
The central tenet of Christianity is that Jesus willingly offered himself as the ultimate sacrifice and thereafter put an end to this forever.
What you really should be asking here is why humanity felt the need for human sacrifice in the first place. That's a much more interesting and deeper question.
Regardless of what the answer is, Christianity came far too late for the blame to be put on it. This practice precedes Christianity and is probably as old or older than humanity itself.

 

Ended human sacrifice. Seriously?

Have you not read how many cultures continues doing so long after you say Jesus ended it?

Try reading of the Aztec and many other non-Middle East countries as well as the Northern European tribes.

As to Jesus voluntarily sacrificing himself. That is not so as Yahweh chose him and Jesus often said he was doing his fathers will and not his own and that he could do nothing without the father.

1Peter 1:20 0 He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.

Mine is a moral question. Please answer the last question in the O.P. if you wish to engage.

Regards
DL

 

When you make this observation I'm a little puzzled at how you could avoid simultaneously acknowledging that all of these groups ceased human sacrifice as a cultural institution after adopting Christianity.

I don't believe you're engaging with the idea of human sacrifice seriously. You seem to be regarding it as just some random error that was fated to be inevitably corrected. Something that is practiced nearly ubiquitously for the majority of human existence isn't merely happenstance. That's a mysterious, deep instinct, the reversal of which can't be counted on as inevitable at all.

It isn't that Jesus ended human sacrifice by fiat but rather that his life and story gradually replaced the need for it as it spread across the world.

Quoting the Bible is technically banned here (a very strange rule for a Christian discussion board) but there is plenty of support that Jesus was certainly aware of his mission. He knew he would be betrayed and sacrificed.
He did struggle with his mission and even experienced agony and fear, showing his human side, as during his prayers in the garden of Gethsemane, but he ultimately chose to accept his mission rather than turn away from it.

 

Nails folks to crosses, declares, we've ended sacrifices. okay yea that adds up.

 

You mean after Christianity was forced down their throats with threats of death. Right?

More like people may have seen the idiocy of it after Christianity's Yahweh would have been seen as an idiot for saying, --- hey guys let us end human sacrifice by having one last good one for the gipper.

That would suit more intelligent thinkers like these who talked of Christianity.

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. -- Thomas Jefferson

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire

That is because it was very rare and generally only with child sacrifice where the city state had finite resources and it was either keep the children population in check or starve the workers. That is also why the first temples also had well respected temple prostitutes. You did not think they were just for the priests did you?

Our deepest instincts default to cooperation. Not to the extreme competition for life you seem to think it is. This has been proven by science and baby experiments.

That was his suicide mission, yes, to where he even had to bribe Judas to turn him in. Look up the word sop, which he gave to his most trusted apostle Judas and note how the other apostles knew of the mission and just sat there and did nothing. You might have wondered why before this if you have read that fable.

Now give me a reply to my last question in the O.P. or we are done in this deflection and derailment.

Regards
DL

 

I should have read you before putting my little comic relief up.

Regards
DL

 

You can't read me, I'm an Enigma.

 

I thought you were a goof but respect is growing. Goof.

Regards
DL

 

The charge that Christians instituted human sacrifice is of course absurd--comparable to the Roman charge that they were cannibals because they consumed the body and blood of Christ in their communion services. . As you point out, there was plenty of that going on in ancient times, by the Druid Celts, the Canaanite and Carthaginian devotees of Baal and Molech, the Vikings, the Germanic tribes, etc. Christians didn't sacrifice Jesus. Romans did, although Christian scriptures portray it as self-sacrifice. Paul introduced the idea of sacrificial atonement, but I've argued that this is not essential to Christian belief. I, and many modern progressive Christians, think that the "sacrifice" idea was something Jesus followers came to believe after the face as a way of interpreting the death of the man they thought to be the Messiah. Many Christians today interpret the even metaphorically. If Gnostics can have metaphors, why can't other Christians? And the early (non-Gnostic) Christians, the Ebionites, thought that Jesus' self-sacrifice did away with all (including animal) sacrifice by making it unnecessary. They were therefore vegetarians. These sacrificial practices were condemned in the Old Testament, notwithstanding the Abraham and Isaac story, which was fiction.

It's ironic that some of the staunchest fundamentalists are atheists, like the Four Horsemen or other anti-Christians, like our Gnostic here. They interpret Christian scripture literally and attribute that literal interpretation to all Christians, as a means of attacking them. No consideration at all to what modern Christians actually believe or how their religion functions in their lives.