tecoyah

It is my opinion that although Jesus was in fact , a real person, he was likely not the "Son of God", but rather a living Avatar( Avatar is a name for one who has reached ultimate enlightenment). The Buddah, and others would also fit this definition.
The bulk of the information contained within the Biblical story of this man is likely inaccurate, as would be any 2000 yr old story, interpreted hundreds of times by inumerable individuals. That said, all three questions become irrelevant unless we wish to discuss the "meaning" interpreted from the mythology contained in these writtings.

#1 Son of God: A Label given unto one who shows capabilities and understanding very far beyond the accepted norm. Human nature is to lift up that which we admire, or do not understand onto a pedistal. We also require payment of one kind or another, in exchange for relief of burden. Thus the destruction of that which we admire/love in exchange for the creators good graces.

#2 Human nature will also attempt to aleviate pain, if at all possible.

#3 When all else fails, and no happy ending is handy......write in an open ended closing.


*The above is of course, opinion. It bears no resemblance to Fact, as there can be no actual fact involved in a debate concerning something that is impossible to prove, at this time. Should such facts become availible, the author reserves the right to change the opinions expressed therein*

__________________
Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

Willravel

Let me ask you a question. How do you talk to a sceptic? My answer to that question was to simply think of things in the same way that they might, so that they may better understand your point from a point of view that is closer to their own.

I personally do not believe that Jesus was a con artist. Actually interpreting what I said as meaning a 'con artist' is really a narrrow view.

It would be a mistake to argue logic with you...so moving right along.

And again, we return to how to discuss something with a sceptic. I don't claim to have any idea of how long a day was in the book of genesis is pertaining to the creation. I was simply illustrating a point by showing that there is a possibility that some of Christianity can coincide with scientific theory.

I do not consider myself to be gullible. I consider myself to have a higher goal. Let's say God doesn't exist, for the sake of argument. If one were to believe in a great entity that taught a lot of good morals and lessons and led that person to lead a good and decent life, where is the harm? Gullibility is moot in this case. As for there being a God or not, there are ten thousand reasons there is a God and ten thousand reasons there is not one. Calling someone gullible for believing in God is like calling somone gullible for being a pacifist. It is a life choice.

adysav

Some of, yes. I admitted that a lot of it is historically accurate, although some stories can be found in alternate sources and often with differences you could obviously attribute to personal bias. The recording of history is well renowned for being 'interpreted' at the hands of the recorder.
Most of what you originally posted though is wildly inconsistent.
I agree that living a decent, moral life is a noble cause that every man should endeavour to follow. However I wouldn't say that belief in a god is essential to being a moral person.
You're actually misquoting me. What I said was "If you take the Bible as truth you are just gullible" and I stand by that. Believing in a god and believing what the Bible says are two different things.

asaris

Okay, calling someone gullible for believing in the Bible is like calling someone gullible for being a pacifist. Belief in the accuracy of scripture is part of a whole network of beliefs; examining any one of them out of context may cause it to seem irrational, but the whole network is pretty darn consistent. In any case, it's just arrogance to think that those of us who believe that scripture is accurate are 'gullible'. I don't think that people who don't believe in God are stupid; why do you have to call us gullible?

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

SecretMethod70

It seems, perhaps, adysav, that you are misinformed. You're letting your thoughts regarding religion be shaped by the proclaimed followers of the religion as opposed to what the religion actually says about itself. For example, there's the debate over how Christians could claim to know how long a day was when the earth came into being. This is a fair question, but the problem with it lies in the fact that many Christians DON'T claim to know that, and even less leaders of faith do. That's right - if you compare clergy and their church leaders side by side, many times church leaders are MORE likely to accept evolution and big bang (guided by God of course) than the clergy themselves. Of course, even more accept it than it seems because many people are misguided by the wording of the question. To many people, saying simply "yes" to " do you believe in evolution" is tantamount to saying they believe God had no part in creation, so they say no when, in fact, they DO believe in evolution but do not believe that God had no part in it.

The Bible is not and was not intended to be a history book. Very few Christians read it as such. So, debating over whether or not it's proper to "believe" in the bible using arguments based on its literal interpretation and use as a source of historical information as opposed to strictly spiritual information is simply misguided at best.

As a side note, the poetry that we attribute to "Homer" was passed on - accurately, with the exception of a few meaningless word changes - through nearly 1000 years of Greek history in which the Greeks were simply incapable of writing it down. They had no written language; no alphabet whatsoever. Yet, Homer survived, intact, over nearly 1000 years because of its poetic nature. Likewise, the same person who theorized and then later proved how this happened made the very same conjecture after analysis of the Bible. The point being that, even if I were not pointing out that the Bible was never intended to be a literal history, it is entirely feasable that it was passed down over such great lengths of time with little variation to its contents.

__________________
Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling

adysav

If evolution as we know it is consistent it precludes the existence of the God you believe in, or at least makes the stories regarding the Garden of Eden and the birth of man a little bit nonsensical.

There is evidence it was memorised but I'm not sure how - given there is no original copy - you could determine how accurately it was passed on.

SecretMethod70

There is no written copy of the original Homer either. I couldn't tell you precisely how, but the ways in which we know there have not been significant changes to the Old Testament Bible are the same as the ways we know that there have not been significant changes to Homer.

Homer's poetry was created at a time when there was no written language being used for literature - the language used by the Mycenaean's was almost exclusively used for accounting purposes, i.e. 10 goats exchanged for 5 vases and so forth. Milman Parry speculated, and proved the likelihood, that Homer, although never written down originally, was fairly consistant in how it was passed down over the nearly 1000 years of the Greek dark ages. He did a great deal of work with a group of peoples in Yugoslavia who had a very similar oral tradition in the early 1900s. This "theory" of his is now, to historians, about as much a theory as the theory of evolution is to scientists. To be perfectly frank, I don't feel the need to redo Milman Parry's work on Homer and the Bible and I trust the fact that it's a nearly unanimously accepted theory by the community of people far more educated than I in matters such as this - again, much like evolution.

Again, this presupposes that most religious folk believe in interpreting the Bible literally. Most do not, especially regarding this. Again, the "truthfulness" of the Bible has absolutely nothing to do with its literal accuracy, and most religious scholars agree on this as far as I am aware. The old testament is written essentially as a large book of poetry, and to expect poetic texts to be literally accurate is, at the very least, absurd.

__________________
Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling

martinguerre

To echo SM70, this isn't an appropriate test. There's nowhere in the Bible where it tells you to take everything literally...and the tradition has been to argue and contest the text. Why assume that the validity of the document rests on a single, extreme interpretation?

adysav

Then it essentially becomes just a story with a message, like thousands of books over time. Why choose christianity?
If the whole thing has just gone a bit over the top with the poetic licence and Jesus was just someone with a strong love of his fellow man and a desire to do good, then where is the need for a god?

(on a side note, can you imagine creating the 25000+ lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey without being able to write them down?)

cooperricko

A story with a message - sounds like a reasonably accurate interpretation to me.

Now if we can just get hold of the zealots and shake the shit out of them to accept this theory then ... Oh! does this make me a zealot from the other side?

wnker85

As it seems to be on this topic, many will dismiss this line of thinking.

But as written in the original text of the bible a day was counted as sun up to sun down. Not just the vague “day”. The actual word had a time tied to it. And as far as Evolution goes there is one simple fact sin cause death. Without sin there can not be death. So, until man sinned nothing could have died. And evolution works mostly off the dying of the weak, unsuited beings that can’t survive as well in a certain environment.

Now I am not a priest, but we just went over this topic in a bible study and I thought it would be interesting to see.

And as a man of faith I can not turn my back on the bible and say it was the good intentions of those who wrote it. For faith to remain true it can not change to the whims of a people.

asaris

It should be clear to everyone that the Creation story in Genesis does not need to be taken literally for one to be a Christian. People have been treating it metaphorically at least since Aquinas, probably since much earlier (though, of course, for different reasons than evolution). But it also seems clear that, just because one wants to read parts of the Bible metaphorically, one does not need to take the whole thing metaphorically. My usual guide is 'what sort of literature does this seem to be?' With some parts of the Bible, it's easy. Proverbs is, well, proverbs. Psalms is poetry. Genesis, at least the first bit, reads like myth. The gospels, on the other hand, read like historical narrative.

wnker85 brings up a good point; this is half the reason why I, for a long time, did not believe in evolution on a grand scale (the other half is that it wasn't until college that I could find someone who knew enough about carbon dating to answer my objections to it). But, there are a few ways to spin it. One, the most plausible to me, is that it's *very* metaphorical. It's talking about the nature of mankind, that our nature is not to die, but to live eternally, and that things just went wrong here at a very early stage. Walker Percy has some interesting things to say on this; if people are interested, I can look it up and post the quote. But the point is that those philosophers (I'm thinking primarily of Heidegger here) who think that 'death' is somehow essential to our Being must be wrong. That is part of the thrust of my sig quote (and no, Badiou is not a Christian. He's a French materialist marxist.)

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

martinguerre

\

to the modern mind, rote memorization seems very alien. but a great deal of the cultures on this planet have spent pretty substantial amounts of time learning how to memorize and preserve texts. some brahmins in india still learn the vedas syllable by syllable, and then mix them up, learn it all again, just as a safeguard against error. i'm not claiming the recieved text is exactly how it was first said...but you do need to take in to account the ability of oral tradition to accurately preserve material.

and no...there is a HUGE gulf between a literal interpretation and "its a good story." if it was just a story...i don't think i'd give it more than second thought. it's a total non-sequiter to think that if it's not literal it is simply fiction.

Amarth

Perhaps sending Jesus is just God's way of enforcing His will while letting us keep our own.

SinMin

Tecoyah,the Jesus may save but religion kills comment is very interesting to me. In this whole discussion it is interesting to look at one the most loving sacrifices in the History of man, in the death of Jesus Christ, (assuming you are Christian and believe the death of Jesus as payment for our sins). But then look at all of the death and persecution that has taken place in the name of Jesus, and in the name of religion i.e Salem Witch Trials, the Crusades, Persecution in Africa, and around the world. It makes it really difficult to understand others and to love others like the New Testament states, when there is so much distrust within religion and in many of the things it has caused. But there is still good to be found in Religion if we can get past hate, and distrust.

tecoyah

I would agree with your assesment. Most truly religious people I have encountered are loving and understanding, if somewhat closed minded. The problems I see, are created by the texts themselves, as they are far too vague in what this entity we refer to as "God" actually requires of us. Human nature is apt to create division from misunderstanding, and it is impossible to understand which version of scripture is accurate, if any.
Long ago I decided to forgo the hypocracy so prevelant in the Christian faith. I then studied eastern philosophy, and this lead to physics.Only with a relative understanding of all these, and much more did I find myself coming to a startling revelation.

They are all correct.

__________________
Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

martinguerre

See...i don't think a little instruction book would be nearly so able at producing serious thought, reflection and meditation. Pedantic "thou shalts" are not going to engage people...and the relationship is what it's about, IMO.

JustDisGuy

Interesting thread. For those of you confused about the phrase "His only Son", I believe the associated phrase you should be looking for is "immaculate conception".

__________________
"Act as if the future of the universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking that your actions make any difference."

cooperricko

Immaculate conception? Nah, I think that Mary was just like any other woman and Joseph just like any other man - too afraid to tell their parents and kin that they forgot the condoms.

martinguerre

"immaculate conception"

Has nothing to do with Jesus. A later catholic teaching that Mary was concieved with out recieving original sin.

cooperricko

Quoted by martinguerre:-

"immaculate conception"

Has nothing to do with Jesus. A later catholic teaching that Mary was concieved with out recieving original sin.


Is this sort of like - "making the story up as they go along"? How many other facts have been made up to make the story a little bit more interesting. Isn't this what the tangent was heading towards some time ago. Logic, Scientific theory etc...

SecretMethod70

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07674d.htm

New Advent is a pretty conservative Catholic site, but it can provide a decent answer nonetheless. Not sure what the last part of your comment was referring to, but most progressive Catholics and Catholics leaders embrace science and logic. There is a saying that the Word of God has "two books" - the Bible and Nature... i.e. neither can contradict the other, and when they do, the understanding and interpretation of one is likely wrong. Personally, I adhere to this belief. In line with this, I am "uncertain" regarding the doctrine of the imaculate conception. I believe it to be entirely possible, however I think that the definition of "what is immaculate" may change along with our understanding of God.

Incidentally, the doctrine of the immaculate conception is one of only two times the pope has spoken Ex Cathedra...a.k.a. infallibly.

__________________
Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling

ravenradiodj

Why would God sacrifice Himself to Himself to appease Himself?

OK, my two cents as a pagan minister and armchair religious historian, I could ramble on all night about this, but my spiritual brother Curtis has phrased it much more eloquently than I ever could, so I'll share with you his words:

"In my world view, a human being is an attempt by the Universe to become conscious of Itself. In a way, we are exploratory robots for Consciousness. Humans are both bright (in intelligence and in interior Light) and brutal (you have to have some animal conciousness to function and survive here). I love the Jesus story because (in my world view) it is about God putting on a planet suit. I do not differ from my Christian siblings in believing that God has come into flesh, we only differ in that they think it only happened once, and I think it happens on a daily basis. "But God is perfect and you aren't" is the inevitable response. I am still waiting to hear what makes God "perfect" other than His ability to snap his fingers and kill me, create worlds, burn me for eternity, etc. Possessing power in itself doesn't make any being morally right or "perfect", otherwise any schoolyard bully (or Saddam) would be "right" and "perfect". In the Bible, God shows jealousy and anger, which are always based on fear. There is nothing particuarly perfect about that. I also notice that as mankind grew up emotionally, God got more and more subtle and adult. Can I really be blamed for thinking that God never changed, just humans changed their beliefs about what God was/is? I also find it tiresome, this idea "Jesus never sinned." If he couldn't sin, what was the big deal with Him incarnating here at all? We are presented with this asexual teetoltaler (well, according to the Baptists) who never had girlfriend problems or any other real human problems, yet He supposedly came down to experience what being a human was all about. How could he have? He didn't have many actual human experiences, other than being mortally vulnerable. I have said it before and will say it again: plenty of humans have died much more horrible deaths than Jeheshua, and they didn't have the comfort of knowing for sure that they were immortal. I am really not much impressed that God actually allowed himself to experience what amounted to some some mild temporary discomfort. This whole "I died for your sins so fall down and worship me" stuff is just a pure and simple Mafia style protection racket created by the Establishment so they could better control us. The human-created (in my world view) Bible God INVENTED the idea of "sin", then he INVENTED the idea of "saving us" from it. Just like the Mafia comes around and says "you gots a nice place here, be a shame if something happened to it, but give us tribute and we'll 'protect' you."
Obviously, all you're being protected from is THEM. Just like with God, all you're being "saved" from is his vicious human-style rage because he can't "abide sin".
Well, obviously He can abide it, with his jeaousies and rages and genocides and telling his followers "take the little children and smash their brains out against the wall." There's no bigger sinner than the Bible God. He's a murderer, a torturer, given to jealousy and anger. These are NOT sins? Or is He exempt simply because he is bigger and meaner than us? And Jesus DID sin, because he despaired, and there is no bigger sin than despair. But who wouldn't under similar circumstances? I love Jesus more when he sins than when he walks around in a perfectly clean white robe like some self righteous eunuch with his nose in the air, as some fundamentalists seem to see Him. Personally, I like the down and dirty Jesus, sweating blood in Gethsemene, asking "Please God, no, I can't handle this..." We have all been there, and sometimes we drink the Cup and sometimes we knock it aside. When it comes down to spiritual values, we all have to go with our hearts, heads, and guts, i.e., spirits, intellects, and intuition. Maybe the Lord has hardened my heart as He did with Pharoah, but my heart, head, and gut tell me that there is no personal God, that we have to do the Work ourselves, and that no one is going to save me, and that actually there is nothing to be saved from but ignorance and amnesia. If your heart, head, and gut tell you something different, well, i can't argue with you (although I appear to, lol), because you and I have nothing else to go with but our hearts, heads, and guts. I really have no choice but to see the world as I do. I realize that you do the same."

cooperricko

Ravenradiodj ...

Why do I have this urge to throw my hands in the air and shout " Hallelujah" ?

I don't have the energy left to reply to that last post (lol).

ravenradiodj

coopericko....

It'll be OK.

Walk your path, I'll walk mine, and when we happen to meet, it will be as brothers.

martinguerre

Whoa. I'm sure Baptist, and i'm quite aware that not only is Jesus God's Christ, an offer of salvation to all humankind, but that he had liver we could all be impressed with.

I don't know how people read those texts and get the idea that he was a world renoucer. Incarnation is the biggest scandal of the bible...that God would be here...in our messy world, and live in it. Go read it...don't just do it from memory. Go, actually get the book and read. I know...but it matters. The stories have been told too many times the way you say...but that's NOT what the book actually says. He goes to parties and gets drunk. He hangs out with lepers and whores. He argues with friends. He changes his mind about what his ministry means...becuase of what a gentile woman says.

if someone teaches that Jesus didn't have human experience, they are heretics. and i mean that in the nicest possible way...but they are in commission of an ancient heresy called docetism. the church has long held that Jesus didn't simply appear human, but was fully of our existance.

asaris

Interesting post, ravenradiodj. Unfortunately, I think it's riddled with errors of fact.
Have you ever read Hegel? This is quite similar to a bad reading of him. Not that that's an argument against your position, I'm just saying you might find him interesting.

Well, this is all true, as far as it goes. It's not God's power that makes him perfect; or rather, his power is only part of what makes him perfect. But you go on to say "In the Bible, God shows jealousy and anger, which are always based on fear." And this is simply false. Jealousy and anger can, and often are, based on fear. But they are also emotion which have their proper place. There are certain situations in which anger is appropriate, even morally required. There are even some situations in which jealousy is appropriate. And in none of these situations is the jealousy or anger motivated by fear; the phrase "Act always out of strength, never out of weakness" would not be a bad formulation of my moral code.

Well, of course God never changed. Most of this is something neither I nor any other traditional Christian would disagree with. I would take issue with the phrase 'mankind grew up emotionally'. Mankind does not grow up emotionally. We see an increasing development in the sophistication and subtlety of our concepts, but we all start out emotionally at step one. This is just confused. There is a difference between 'didn't sin' and 'couldn't sin'. Jesus could sin, but didn't. He was not at all an asexual teetotaler. We're told explicitly that he drank, and, while we're never told explicitly about his sex life, we know that he was "tempted in every way as we are", which must have included sexual temptations. You say later on "who never had any real human problems," but how can you say this? He was misunderstood by virtually everyone who knew him, even his closest friends. He was betrayed by one of his closest friends. All of his closest friends abandoned him in his hour of need. He had parents, who at times must have been frustrating to him, just as they are sometimes frustrating to us. Hardly. The notion that people sometimes do something wrong, and that when they do, they need to make up for it, has been around for 1000s of years, and with any luck will be around with us for 1000s more. The distinctly Christian notion is that life is not like a balance sheet, where the good things you do can balance out the bad things you do. You can't make up for the bad things you do; Kierkegaard uses the image of saying a spell backwards. That's why the sacrifice of Christ is necessary. Yeah, so do we. But doesn't this contradict your own point that Jesus didn't have any real human experiences?

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

cooperricko

Christians ....6

Lions ..........6

Tie break question please!

cooperricko

By the way .... what happened to his mum and ( earth bound ) dad ?

And the donkey ( really really )

cooperricko

OK guys.

I am really, really sorry that I posted the comment about 6 all. I kinda miss the discussion and the things that I have learnt from everyone. I even miss being labelled a fool by some ( for my views ).

But, I suppose that it's been done to death and we weren't getting anywhere with the thread - apart from heated and sustained arguement.

Do all threads die in such wimpery manner?

SecretMethod70

Most of the time.

__________________
Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling