Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TSTwizby]

Please keep responses to the point and non-flame inducing. As the title says, this is a serious question. Everything said will be assumed to have been meant seriously unless explicitly noted otherwise.

First, background and motivation for the question. I consider myself agnostic in the sense that while I don't see any reason that any god has to exist, I also don't see any reason why one can't or shouldn't. I went to a Jewish preschool, but attended church regularly for a few years in elementary school. I have no background in religious studies and know no one else who has. I have seen many arguments between Atheists and Christians, and have come to the conclusion that in all of the cases I have observed, both groups misunderstood the others' arguments at a fundamental level. I personally believe that this bridge can be gaped, at the very least by a third party and most likely by anyone given sufficient time and motivation. I would guess I have a better understanding of the Atheist than the Christian viewpoint at present, and have thus been attempting to garner a better understanding of the Christian viewpoint.

One argument which I've seen cropping up a lot lately in my internet-travels is Atheists vs Christians arguing about the moral character of the Christian God, specifically regarding the whole 'if God is all powerful and benevolent, why is there evil?' thing. The most common argument I've seen in response to this is that God also wants people to have free will for some reason, and since humans are imperfect they sometimes chose to do evil. Some go into more depth and reference Adam/Eve and the whole tree thing, with the choice to eat the fruit being the original choice to do evil and the reason why all humans are flawed. Another point I've seen brought up, though far less often, specifically with regards to hell is that damning to hell is not something that God does to people who sin but rather something that people who sin do to themselves by sinning.

Now, another thing I've seen talked about somewhat less often is the 'Christ died for your sins' thing. Specifically, what does Jesus dying have to do with people sinning? Combining these two ideas has led me to the following interpretation:

The reason that believing in Jesus specifically is the only route to salvation is due to not accepting his sacrifice and therefore being stuck with original sin, while believing in him and accepting that sacrifice gives you another chance.

My question is, would anyone here (Christean or otherwise, though obviously the former would be able to provide more useful input) be able to say whether my interpretation is in any way similar to the typical Christian view of things? Alternately, is there an alternate interpretation which would be more accurate? Or are there too many different viewpoints to speak of a 'typical' one?


Apologies if this was not the right forum in which to post. I debated between here and Life Advice, but as I am looking for information rather than advice I thought it might be inappropriate.

[miauw62]

In Belgium, most Christians treat the Bible as a book that says how you should treat other people by metaphors, and not an absolute truth.

[Ultimuh]

Well I myself am christian, and I think your conclusion seems fair enough.
Now i have an aunt on my mothers side who believes everyone goes to heaven because of Jesus's death,
no matter what that person did in his/her life.
So all I can say is, if you think your interpretation of faith is good enough, it should be.
Whatever flots your boat, as long as it dosn't harm other people.

[kaijyuu]

I'll just drop this here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil


IMO there are reasonable ways around it, but it requires specific definitions of good and evil, specific forms of morality, etc. If your view of the world doesn't fall on those specific lines then you'll never be able to reconcile the problem of evil, which is why many people use it as evidence against a omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity existing.

[10ebbor10]

Or maybe God just isn't all powerfull. Not in the lightning throwing, evil smiting meaning of the word.

[kaijyuu]

IMO the most reasonable trait to throw out would be "omnibenevolant." Why does a deity have to be good, or to care, or whatever? Maybe he's a dick.

[10ebbor10]

IMO the most reasonable trait to throw out would be "omnibenevolant." Why does a deity have to be good, or to care, or whatever? Maybe he's a dick.

Because there's not much point in believing in a God that serves only to make your life worse. The most reasonable thing to throw out would be the fact that he physically exists, and is bound by scientific laws. I mean, with no proof of his existance, it relies solely on belief. (And I doubt that most Christians really believe God to exist in an empirical, factual way. As a methaphor or a guideline for your life and actions, sure. )

Edit:

I'm pretty sure the crucifying of Jezus was part of a larger methapor for forgiviness. It's a breakdown of the common religious myths (Someone does X wrong, and gets punished for that as an example to others. It's based on the scapegoat mechanism, which is the reason for the first religions). The Bible's story goes like this (Jezus and all others(scapegoats) are always described as being innocent. And sometimes they are punished, sometimes they are not). It's supposed to encourage you to live like him, to forgive people, even though it means that you can be hurt like that. Forgiving people will not only free them, but yourself as well. (No longer being bound by an old wound)

[Ultimuh]

IMO the most reasonable trait to throw out would be "omnibenevolant." Why does a deity have to be good, or to care, or whatever? Maybe he's a dick.

Hmm, I see where this is going.. Better back out of this thread while I still can.

[Euld]

Well... I used to be a hard-core Christian, now I'm a gay non-believer, so maybe I can offer some insight.  At least some insight into the groups I hung around in (United States, Washington).  One of the most difficult things I've seen in the debates between Christians and atheists is the fact that neither can really give any ground.  Christian theology (keep in mind, this is for the group I hung out with) is an interconnected web of ideas, conclusions, and beliefs that hold a vast system together.  Jesus is at the center of it.  It's believed that he accepted the blame for the sins of the world, past, present, and future, and upon his crucifixion this negated the need for a yearly sacrifice and for worship at the temple in Jerusalem.  Thus, a person from any race or nation could worship and believe without following the lengthy list of Jewish customs.  Things get more complicated from there.  But all in all, there's no room for compromise within this vast system of beliefs.  If one belief can be changed, or ignored, then others go with it.  So (some) Christians can rarely compromise in a religious discussion.

And should an atheist give any ground, the Christian immediately views the situation as a conversion in progress, a success, and more proof their beliefs are real.  And--*yawn* *zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

[kaijyuu]

And--*yawn* *zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

Probably the best possible response to a religion debate xD

[Zangi]

Well it is heavily implied that the particular diety of Christians decides if you go to 'utopia' and 'eternal damnation' based on your belief in said diety...  A popular iteration.  Another popular one being based on the morale/social standards of the church...
Even so, even if the Christian diety can do jack all other then decide where you go after death... that alone will still get believers and worshippers.  Belief of said diety being capable of doing other stuff is just a bonus to the diety's +god rep.

[10ebbor10]

Well it is heavily implied that the particular diety of Christians decides if you go to 'utopia' and 'eternal damnation' based on your belief in said diety...  A popular iteration.  Another popular one being based on the morale/social standards of the church...
Even so, even if the Christian diety can do jack all other then decide where you go after death... that alone will still get believers and worshippers.  Belief of said diety being capable of doing other stuff is just a bonus to the diety's +god rep.

Not really, depends on the pieces you lift out.

It's often stated that doing good in order to go to Heaven won't help your for example.

[scriver]

Well, I'll say this. The animosity between Christians and agnostics/atheists does not exist in Europe the same way it does in the US. I have no problem with religious folks. I have never met any religious folks who have any problem with me. Most Swedes have some sort of personal, abstract, pseudo-deistic belief anyway (hence why we score so high on non-Christian lists but further down on non-religious). We're all cool with each other. Except the few cults and sects, of course, but they don't really count in perspective, do they.

I'm not 100% certain, of course, but I think said American animosity stems a lot from how a large group of religious people seem to be unable to understand that atheists can be "moral people", and hence, in return, how atheists sometimes paint believers as mindnumb slaves to tradition/the Word of the Book. It's pretty hard to have any kind of discussion, or even just co-existence, in that climate. I mean, how can anyone not get angry when accused of either of those?

[Euld]

And--*yawn* *zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*

Probably the best possible response to a religion debate xD

Sorry XD  I actually went to bed right at that part because my mind finally went "ok you need to sleep now.  I'm turning off the lights.  GET. TO. BED."

[Starver]

Firstly, my standpoint.  I'm an agnostic and an atheist.  (Atheist as in not a believer, not as in a denouncer/disbeliever.  The distinction needs to be made.  Tag me as an "implicit" (rather then "explicit") or "weak" (rather than "strong") atheist, if you want to use either of those terms to qualify me.  (And this is the biggest misunderstanding I think needs to be addressed, as not everyone who necessarily says "<given religious stance> can't be proven" is saying "<given religious stance> is wrong".)

The most common argument I've seen in response to [why is there evil] is that God also wants people to have free will for some reason, and since humans are imperfect they sometimes chose to do evil.

Taking this from my POV, in which my logical equivalent to "God created us all" is that we are simulations inside someone else's computer (to vastly simplify the analogy, which can easily accommodate the idea that there is a God, i.e. the operator), the creator involved is surely omniscient and omnipotent as he can peek and poke any bit of data within His simulation, but omnibenevolence isn't a factor because the deterministic universe he has set going (except where He deliberately disturbs it by making data changes) is just a Conway's Game Of Life to Him.

There's loads of complex patterns, interacting, but by His standards any entities that (to themselves) proclaim self-awareness are just as much a complex of interacting patterns as the rest of the interacting patterns that form the 'universe', whether sentient, non-sentient-but-living, mineral, astronomical or (because some patterns will encode for the non-physical) informatical.  Any strangenesses (miracles, divine interventions, deluge-equivalent overturnings of the entire world, etc) that the entities observe are unlikely to be conscious attempts at communication and direction from The Creator, but the same sort of experimentation as we are likely to perform upon any similarly abstracted simulation within our computers.  And you just know how you would either get bored and mess about a lot (probably wiping out any 'conscious' entity you inadvertently and unknowingly produced) or just let it run and see how it goes until you do get bored, or need to reboot the machine.  (As far as our world is concerned, it appears that we've been left to run, on the whole.  But that's just my own surmising based upon our possibly deceptive experiences (see below).  Thus we are pretty much deterministically following paths, and Good and Evil are of no concern to Him, whoever He is, or even conceived by the respective Almighty for being the events and deeds that they 'are'.)

That's assuming the Creator is not omniunderstanding, of course.  An omniunderstanding Creator would not just have the simulation in front of him, but also have a version of the simulation being thought through in His own brain (or equivalent) in order to be able to go "Ah, I see, this is a sub-entity who is starting to understand the nature of Me, and I were to arrange for something to happen to him, this understanding would grow (or change, or diminish)".  In constructing these thoughts, the relevant bits of simulation would exist within the head (or equivalent) of the Creator, and given the usual parameters ascribed to Him I would have no hesitation in describing that simulated reality as being as real as the simulated reality in His computer.  In fact, one could go further and make it a full 'thought experiment' within the Creator's mind, and that is where we exist and live.

Whether or not the "thinking Creator" is Himself perfect, we can imagine that the reality we see now is as a result of the thoughts that lead up until 'now'.  There may have been "how about if I do <this>", and then back-trackings to see what happens if <that> is done instead (this also applies to the machine-only simulation version, if we allow the concept of saves and restores of prior 'game points').  Indeed even the current time-stream may be of a "let's see what happens if I let the world follow this path", but may shortly be aborted and our entire existence redone (or re-redone) down an alternate path with different Divine Interference at its route.  Under this conceit, the answer of "Why does evil happen" is "to see what happens if these consequences play out".  And either the result is that these consequences are rejected and are retroactively changed or they are accepted as necessary acts towards the fulfilment of the world He wants to result.

(To analogue to the Real World (by some worldviews), maybe Adam and Eve could have been kept from exiling themselves from the Garden Of Eden, but that would have just produced an eternal Garden Of Eden with forever innocent inhabitants who did nothing actually worthy of His Glory, in the way He wanted.  Exile, with all the theatre surrounding that act, allowed the creation of large populations of His created beings who could (on the whole) progress through to the legacy wished for, for His own ineffable reasons.)

There's perhaps a further development of the idea, the "omnipredictive" Creator, but I would rationalise that this is virtually the same of the branch-simulating one, or (if He doesn't interfere) just one who has run through the way his Fire-And-Forget scenario will run and accepting that result.  It might seem rather pointless, though, to 'run it again'.  But, as I said, He probably has ineffable reasons behind it.  We could never know the motivations behind any Greater Being.


Personally, I see no reason to suggest that there's a guiding force at all, save for celestial (or, rather, pan-universal) mechanics, much akin to what we abstract down to "The Laws Of Physics", but whether the simulation was intelligently configured, intelligently (or otherwise) guided or just happened because "the 'universe machine' just happened" is irrelevant to my own philosophy.  Of course, this posits that Evil happens because it's a natural result of the universe's progress.  Not much comfort, there, but neither is there any soul-searching of why He has allowed it to happen, and the best can do is Deal With It.  Which, incidentally, is what I think He wants us to do, anyway, should there be any He existing.


I can also imagine a God Of Logic.  This god creates the universe, either as we see it or in a Young Earth Creationism manner but in the form of an older universe that arose in some given logical manner (with all the trimmings of "old photons that had 'already' set off from stars that have only now started to exist", or even "have existed, but are now their remnants of a star's dying, as to be later observed by 'younger photons' placed further back in the light-trail").  We could presume that His aim is that all His creations are expected to observe the (false, but realistic) scientific logic behind the universe and that those that He would favour are those that follow the logic and believe the universe to be 'atheistic', while those that ascribe to any religious perspective are given His equivalent of Damnation (including, of course, those that, for no actual reason, believe directly in Him, the God Of Logic!)  But that gets rather meta. )

((And while we're being meta, in various YEC beliefs, the world was created recently, and any "older things" were created old, as part of the Divine Illusion that we are meant to see through (except in the GoL's case, of course).  To create the older things, the deity concerned must have "run through" the world/universe in His mind in order to construct realistic strata and cosmic features and the like...  Taking us back to the different forms of Creator already mentioned, can we not imagine that we are still within His imagination, as he gets together the imagined events that will lead towards the future creation of a Young Earth world, with 'us' as background.  To parody the already paradoic "LastTuesdayism", this can be dubbed "NextTuesdayism".  The questions about Good and Evil are of course similarly irrelevant (or at least unanswerable) as with all the other "we're a simulation/thought experiment" versions so far discussed.))

Now, another thing I've seen talked about somewhat less often is the 'Christ died for your sins' thing. Specifically, what does Jesus dying have to do with people sinning?

I shall be briefer, here.  My understanding is that (allowing for various aspects of determinism and whether Christ Is God or Son Of God or both at the same time within the Trinity) it is taken as a juncture.  A point in time between which the (perhaps necessary) Old Testament mode of Godliness and the New Testament methodology.  This can be interpreted in many different ways, according to one's own particular faith (Mohammedan believers probably go for their own later "point of inflection", etc), and I doubt I could cover them all sufficiently accurately, so I'll leave it at that.  "Believing in Jesus" is (while not actually a central tenet of all Christian sub-sects, strangely), fairly tautological, as well.


Anyway, I see many other people have posted in response, and I posit this only as my interpretation, from both my own 'belief system', plus as many variants (which I hope include scenarios that those of actual faith can grasp the meaning of, albeit without full agreement as to their validity.  Although I was perhaps a little heavy on the whole "nature of Creation" at the top, sorry.  (And never even touch upon the "who/what created the Creator" question, but I know you're not asking about that.)