Anonymous wrote:Let this thread die and NOT be resurrected.
+100. OP’s original premise, that Jesus existed and there was some cabal who made him up, has been soundly debunked. OP may even have been posting ironically to show how ludicrous that proposition is. LOL at all the atheist bigots demanding people justify their faith by proving divinity or denigrating other faiths, but no sane poster would engage with that and it’s a total derailment anyway. Die, thread, die.
Read again. No one asked anyone to “denigrate” other religions.
The request was to expand upon this statement:
“after a baseline of evidence, people go with the religion that makes the most theological/philosophical sense to them.”
What is the process you used to select your own religion over others?
DP, but I went through a process and chose a religion, so I'm happy to speak to that experience, though it may differ from what PP had in mind.
I was raised in a conservative Protestant denomination that never made any sense to me. I gave it up for a while in middle school and high school and then in college started trying more liberal Protestant denominations. What I found in my church-hopping was that my problem wasn't just with the conservatism, but with Christian theology as a whole. The Trinity doesn't make sense to me. The focus on sin (original sin, daily sin, heaven and hell, etc) is off-putting. I remember I went to a Presbyterian Church on Mother's Day and the sermon was about how our earthly families are just a shadow of our relationship with Jesus, and that was my last straw, because it was just one too many times that Christianity had downplayed the importance of family and people in our lives, and it turns out that is a core value of mine.
Sorry, my point is not to take issue with Christianity here, but just to say that my experience with Christianity across the Protestant spectrum (and some Catholicism through my dad's side of the family and Evangelicalism through some friends and cousins) proved that it was not the right fit for my own beliefs. Visiting all of those churches that weren't right for me really helped me figure out what I did (and did not) believe. When I started to look outside of Christianity, I found a spiritual home in Judaism, and have been here happily for a long time now.
All that said, I think PP's point is over-exaggerated. I don't think it's common for people to go through a process of evaluating the beliefs in which they were raised, especially if their religion doesn't really play a major role in their lives (secular-style Christmas and maybe church on Easter). People generally don't spend time evaluating something with a minor regular impact on them. My brother spends more time thinking about being left-handed than he does about being Christian.
Well yay, someone took the bait and trashed other peoples’ religion. Happy, atheist pp?
PP here. I'm not trashing Christianity, just citing examples of why the theology didn't work for me to answer the question about the process of choosing a theology. I'm sure that the Trinity and original sin and the elevation of the relationship with the divine over earthly relationships is meaningful for Christians. It just isn't my beliefs, and so I'm not Christian anymore.
You’ve got that wrong. Jesus took adherence to god-dictated Levitical rules and made them more personal and interior. Don’t just like your neighbors and co-religionists, love your enemies too. Don’t just give to charity, give the beggar your coat. And many more examples.
The above is another example of a person who cannot tolerate different points of view when it comes to religion. Christianity is right; anything else is wrong, in pp's opinion.
Many religions, not just Christianity, promote that thinking. You must believe what dogma tells you to believe or suffer eternal consequences.
NP: PP didn't say Christianity is right. PP said the specifics point PPP made about elevation of the divine in Christianity is not what Christianity actually professes. Pointing out that PP's statement of a fact was incorrect is very different from saying Christianity is right and everything else is wrong.
Look, on so many of these threads lots of people say "X religion says Y," and often that is incorrect information. Often is is even a stereotype or a bigoted remark (like your last sentence). It is important to correct these misstatements because a lot of people use those misstatements to develop misinformed opinions. The point was not to offer an opinion about PP's beliefs, or to change PP's mind about how she feels about faith or the faith she chooses, but to correct a mistake of fact that she asserted.
PPP here (I think? I'm the Jewish one). I've expressly stated that I based my decision to leave Christianity on my experiences with it across different Protestant denominations. I'm not arguing "facts" about Christian theology. I don't ascribe to it and don't claim to be all that knowledgeable about the theological underpinnings of it. It never made sense to me when I tried to learn it. There is an element of faith to any religion and I just didn't have faith in Christian doctrine. What I'm saying is that in my life, I sat through many sermons and Sunday School lessons about Jesus being our Father superseding our own earthly family. I understand that may not be what Christianity is actually supposed to say and there are plenty of things people say and do in the name of religion that could be argued as counter to the religion's actual teachings; often it's a matter of interpretation and emphasis.
While we're talking about misrepresenting the facts of a religion, 09/22/2022 10:16 said "Truly a far cry from the rape, incest, murder and genocide of the Old Testament." The Tanakh (the books that more or less make up the Old Testament) is replete with laws and commandments against those things. Love your neighbor as yourself, take care of the widow and orphan, do not murder, do not steal, don't marry your sister - all of those are in the "Old Testament." I'm so tired of the "vengeful God of the Old Testament" trope in Christianity, as if the only messages of love and caring are in the New Testament.
DP. But the Tanakh God IS vengeful. Just ask the Canaanites, Amorites, and others whose land he wanted for his people. Just ask his chosen people, whom he punished again and again (Noah’s flood, temple destructions) and sent into exile in Babylon for not adhering strictly to his laws or even worshipping Baal.
Pp’s are also saying that Jesus took the “be nice to your neighbor” commandment further into “love your enemy.”
You may have sat through sermons and Sunday School as a kid, but as you say those are your individual experiences based on your particular church as a kid. Sunday School is pretty different from the adult education that goes on in churches, too.
What I’m trying to say is that I agree with other pp’s that your understanding of Christianity is flawed. I wish you peace in your chosen faith. You would help yourself, though, if you stopped basing your choice on a flawed understanding and then kept trying to promote your flawed understanding.
Also a DP and a Christian, but this is honestly an anti-Semitic trope that Christians need to excise from how we talk about God. It fails on both counts, because
1) The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is loving and merciful; it's a big focus of a lot of the Prophets, paired with his judgment. Nehemiah calls him "ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love," Isaiah says his "steadfast love will never depart from you." God's love and mercy is there throughout.
2) Jesus teaches to love your enemy, but he also teaches judgment and God's anger. He's very clear about the punishment of the unrighteous and it's weeping and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, eternal fire.
There's genuine tension here and it takes some theological thinking to make it work, but Marcionism isn't it.
Jesus offered grace to individuals who repent. He stayed out of the business of conquering foreign lands or sending entire generations into exile.
If you're Christian, Jesus literally is the same God as the Old Testament God so actually very much was in the business of sending entire generations into exile. Meanwhile Israel was offered plenty of opportunities to repent and avoid exile. That the Babylonian Captivity is punishment for Israel's sins is very clear from the text of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Really? So it was Jesus who toyed with Job and made the deal with Satan and caused him unbearable hardship and have boils and all that? The stuff you learn here. I really wasn't aware of that.
^ It just seems so out of character for Jesus to do that. God/Jesus must have really changed between the Old and New Tesaments
That Jesus is the God from the Old Testament is pretty clear standard Christian belief. A couple of sources:
1) the Catholic Catechism: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1H.HTM identifying the "Lordship" of Christ with him being the YHWH of the Old Testament
2) https://www.gotquestions.org/is-Jesus-Yahweh.html (Got Questions is a very Protestant source Teaching that "One of the foundational Christian doctrines is that Jesus is God. He is the Jehovah/YHWH/Yahweh described in Exodus 3"
Just two easier to glance at references to show a spectrum across which this is believed.
With regard to Job, it's a very challenging book, but it's not more out of character for Jesus than it is for God as depicted in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God permits people to suffer, but it's primarily in response to sin. Israel doesn't go into exile because God is toying with them, they go into exile because of idolatry, to give one example. The story of Job is hard for Christians and Jews, because it's out of character no matter what.
Nobody is saying it’s a different God. It’s the same God.
Again, what’s changed is God’s relationship with mankind. Jesus established a “new covenant” between God and man. So God’s treatment of sinners did change thanks to Jesus atoning for us. That’s standard theology too.
How do you account for this verse?
Matthew 5:17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Easy. Jesus was never aware he was God. That was made up by Christian theologians about 300 years later. I can't be arsed right now to look up who exactly came up with this idea, but it became heresy to think otherwise.
The idea that Jesus is God existed at least at the time of John’s gospel.
Oh really. You mean the part in John 14:6 where Jesus says "I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me"? John 14
No. The part where it says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And the many times Jesus uses the language about “the word” and “I am.” The idea of logos was clear to listeners then.
Anonymous wrote:Let this thread die and NOT be resurrected.
+100. OP’s original premise, that Jesus existed and there was some cabal who made him up, has been soundly debunked. OP may even have been posting ironically to show how ludicrous that proposition is. LOL at all the atheist bigots demanding people justify their faith by proving divinity or denigrating other faiths, but no sane poster would engage with that and it’s a total derailment anyway. Die, thread, die.
Read again. No one asked anyone to “denigrate” other religions.
The request was to expand upon this statement:
“after a baseline of evidence, people go with the religion that makes the most theological/philosophical sense to them.”
What is the process you used to select your own religion over others?
DP, but I went through a process and chose a religion, so I'm happy to speak to that experience, though it may differ from what PP had in mind.
I was raised in a conservative Protestant denomination that never made any sense to me. I gave it up for a while in middle school and high school and then in college started trying more liberal Protestant denominations. What I found in my church-hopping was that my problem wasn't just with the conservatism, but with Christian theology as a whole. The Trinity doesn't make sense to me. The focus on sin (original sin, daily sin, heaven and hell, etc) is off-putting. I remember I went to a Presbyterian Church on Mother's Day and the sermon was about how our earthly families are just a shadow of our relationship with Jesus, and that was my last straw, because it was just one too many times that Christianity had downplayed the importance of family and people in our lives, and it turns out that is a core value of mine.
Sorry, my point is not to take issue with Christianity here, but just to say that my experience with Christianity across the Protestant spectrum (and some Catholicism through my dad's side of the family and Evangelicalism through some friends and cousins) proved that it was not the right fit for my own beliefs. Visiting all of those churches that weren't right for me really helped me figure out what I did (and did not) believe. When I started to look outside of Christianity, I found a spiritual home in Judaism, and have been here happily for a long time now.
All that said, I think PP's point is over-exaggerated. I don't think it's common for people to go through a process of evaluating the beliefs in which they were raised, especially if their religion doesn't really play a major role in their lives (secular-style Christmas and maybe church on Easter). People generally don't spend time evaluating something with a minor regular impact on them. My brother spends more time thinking about being left-handed than he does about being Christian.
Well yay, someone took the bait and trashed other peoples’ religion. Happy, atheist pp?
PP here. I'm not trashing Christianity, just citing examples of why the theology didn't work for me to answer the question about the process of choosing a theology. I'm sure that the Trinity and original sin and the elevation of the relationship with the divine over earthly relationships is meaningful for Christians. It just isn't my beliefs, and so I'm not Christian anymore.
You’ve got that wrong. Jesus took adherence to god-dictated Levitical rules and made them more personal and interior. Don’t just like your neighbors and co-religionists, love your enemies too. Don’t just give to charity, give the beggar your coat. And many more examples.
The above is another example of a person who cannot tolerate different points of view when it comes to religion. Christianity is right; anything else is wrong, in pp's opinion.
Many religions, not just Christianity, promote that thinking. You must believe what dogma tells you to believe or suffer eternal consequences.
NP: PP didn't say Christianity is right. PP said the specifics point PPP made about elevation of the divine in Christianity is not what Christianity actually professes. Pointing out that PP's statement of a fact was incorrect is very different from saying Christianity is right and everything else is wrong.
Look, on so many of these threads lots of people say "X religion says Y," and often that is incorrect information. Often is is even a stereotype or a bigoted remark (like your last sentence). It is important to correct these misstatements because a lot of people use those misstatements to develop misinformed opinions. The point was not to offer an opinion about PP's beliefs, or to change PP's mind about how she feels about faith or the faith she chooses, but to correct a mistake of fact that she asserted.
PPP here (I think? I'm the Jewish one). I've expressly stated that I based my decision to leave Christianity on my experiences with it across different Protestant denominations. I'm not arguing "facts" about Christian theology. I don't ascribe to it and don't claim to be all that knowledgeable about the theological underpinnings of it. It never made sense to me when I tried to learn it. There is an element of faith to any religion and I just didn't have faith in Christian doctrine. What I'm saying is that in my life, I sat through many sermons and Sunday School lessons about Jesus being our Father superseding our own earthly family. I understand that may not be what Christianity is actually supposed to say and there are plenty of things people say and do in the name of religion that could be argued as counter to the religion's actual teachings; often it's a matter of interpretation and emphasis.
While we're talking about misrepresenting the facts of a religion, 09/22/2022 10:16 said "Truly a far cry from the rape, incest, murder and genocide of the Old Testament." The Tanakh (the books that more or less make up the Old Testament) is replete with laws and commandments against those things. Love your neighbor as yourself, take care of the widow and orphan, do not murder, do not steal, don't marry your sister - all of those are in the "Old Testament." I'm so tired of the "vengeful God of the Old Testament" trope in Christianity, as if the only messages of love and caring are in the New Testament.
DP. But the Tanakh God IS vengeful. Just ask the Canaanites, Amorites, and others whose land he wanted for his people. Just ask his chosen people, whom he punished again and again (Noah’s flood, temple destructions) and sent into exile in Babylon for not adhering strictly to his laws or even worshipping Baal.
Pp’s are also saying that Jesus took the “be nice to your neighbor” commandment further into “love your enemy.”
You may have sat through sermons and Sunday School as a kid, but as you say those are your individual experiences based on your particular church as a kid. Sunday School is pretty different from the adult education that goes on in churches, too.
What I’m trying to say is that I agree with other pp’s that your understanding of Christianity is flawed. I wish you peace in your chosen faith. You would help yourself, though, if you stopped basing your choice on a flawed understanding and then kept trying to promote your flawed understanding.
Also a DP and a Christian, but this is honestly an anti-Semitic trope that Christians need to excise from how we talk about God. It fails on both counts, because
1) The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is loving and merciful; it's a big focus of a lot of the Prophets, paired with his judgment. Nehemiah calls him "ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love," Isaiah says his "steadfast love will never depart from you." God's love and mercy is there throughout.
2) Jesus teaches to love your enemy, but he also teaches judgment and God's anger. He's very clear about the punishment of the unrighteous and it's weeping and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, eternal fire.
There's genuine tension here and it takes some theological thinking to make it work, but Marcionism isn't it.
Jesus offered grace to individuals who repent. He stayed out of the business of conquering foreign lands or sending entire generations into exile.
If you're Christian, Jesus literally is the same God as the Old Testament God so actually very much was in the business of sending entire generations into exile. Meanwhile Israel was offered plenty of opportunities to repent and avoid exile. That the Babylonian Captivity is punishment for Israel's sins is very clear from the text of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Really? So it was Jesus who toyed with Job and made the deal with Satan and caused him unbearable hardship and have boils and all that? The stuff you learn here. I really wasn't aware of that.
^ It just seems so out of character for Jesus to do that. God/Jesus must have really changed between the Old and New Tesaments
That Jesus is the God from the Old Testament is pretty clear standard Christian belief. A couple of sources:
1) the Catholic Catechism: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1H.HTM identifying the "Lordship" of Christ with him being the YHWH of the Old Testament
2) https://www.gotquestions.org/is-Jesus-Yahweh.html (Got Questions is a very Protestant source Teaching that "One of the foundational Christian doctrines is that Jesus is God. He is the Jehovah/YHWH/Yahweh described in Exodus 3"
Just two easier to glance at references to show a spectrum across which this is believed.
With regard to Job, it's a very challenging book, but it's not more out of character for Jesus than it is for God as depicted in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God permits people to suffer, but it's primarily in response to sin. Israel doesn't go into exile because God is toying with them, they go into exile because of idolatry, to give one example. The story of Job is hard for Christians and Jews, because it's out of character no matter what.
Nobody is saying it’s a different God. It’s the same God.
Again, what’s changed is God’s relationship with mankind. Jesus established a “new covenant” between God and man. So God’s treatment of sinners did change thanks to Jesus atoning for us. That’s standard theology too.
This comment from a ways back
DP. But the Tanakh God IS vengeful. Just ask the Canaanites, Amorites, and others whose land he wanted for his people. Just ask his chosen people, whom he punished again and again (Noah’s flood, temple destructions) and sent into exile in Babylon for not adhering strictly to his laws or even worshipping Baal.
Pp’s are also saying that Jesus took the “be nice to your neighbor” commandment further into “love your enemy.”
Strongly reads as if the poster believes they are different Gods. "The Tanakh God is vengeful" but Jesus says "love your enemy" set them up in contrast to each other. As does
Jesus offered grace to individuals who repent. He stayed out of the business of conquering foreign lands or sending entire generations into exile.
As I said then, if you treat them as one God, which they are for the purposes of orthodox Christian theology, then you can't say Jesus had nothing to do with the exile or conquest of Canaan.
Those were the people I was responding to, and I think it's fair to say they're treating them effectively as different Gods. If none of those people were you, great, but I was responding to beliefs that were voiced in this thread.
If we’re going to start taking random DCUM posters’ feelings about religion as the final word on Christian theology, we might as well stab ourselves in the eyeballs.
That said, I’m not sure how to make this any clearer. You keep coming back to whether we’ve somehow swapped out gods. Christian theology never, ever, said God had changed. You need to drop the idea of changing gods. What Jesus did by atoning for our sins was change the covenant (relationship) between (the same) God and man.
One "god" believes that he had a "son" 2000 years ago.
Another "god" doesn't.
The trolls have joined the thread. Too bad, this was an interesting discussion.
Anonymous wrote:Let this thread die and NOT be resurrected.
+100. OP’s original premise, that Jesus existed and there was some cabal who made him up, has been soundly debunked. OP may even have been posting ironically to show how ludicrous that proposition is. LOL at all the atheist bigots demanding people justify their faith by proving divinity or denigrating other faiths, but no sane poster would engage with that and it’s a total derailment anyway. Die, thread, die.
Read again. No one asked anyone to “denigrate” other religions.
The request was to expand upon this statement:
“after a baseline of evidence, people go with the religion that makes the most theological/philosophical sense to them.”
What is the process you used to select your own religion over others?
DP, but I went through a process and chose a religion, so I'm happy to speak to that experience, though it may differ from what PP had in mind.
I was raised in a conservative Protestant denomination that never made any sense to me. I gave it up for a while in middle school and high school and then in college started trying more liberal Protestant denominations. What I found in my church-hopping was that my problem wasn't just with the conservatism, but with Christian theology as a whole. The Trinity doesn't make sense to me. The focus on sin (original sin, daily sin, heaven and hell, etc) is off-putting. I remember I went to a Presbyterian Church on Mother's Day and the sermon was about how our earthly families are just a shadow of our relationship with Jesus, and that was my last straw, because it was just one too many times that Christianity had downplayed the importance of family and people in our lives, and it turns out that is a core value of mine.
Sorry, my point is not to take issue with Christianity here, but just to say that my experience with Christianity across the Protestant spectrum (and some Catholicism through my dad's side of the family and Evangelicalism through some friends and cousins) proved that it was not the right fit for my own beliefs. Visiting all of those churches that weren't right for me really helped me figure out what I did (and did not) believe. When I started to look outside of Christianity, I found a spiritual home in Judaism, and have been here happily for a long time now.
All that said, I think PP's point is over-exaggerated. I don't think it's common for people to go through a process of evaluating the beliefs in which they were raised, especially if their religion doesn't really play a major role in their lives (secular-style Christmas and maybe church on Easter). People generally don't spend time evaluating something with a minor regular impact on them. My brother spends more time thinking about being left-handed than he does about being Christian.
Well yay, someone took the bait and trashed other peoples’ religion. Happy, atheist pp?
PP here. I'm not trashing Christianity, just citing examples of why the theology didn't work for me to answer the question about the process of choosing a theology. I'm sure that the Trinity and original sin and the elevation of the relationship with the divine over earthly relationships is meaningful for Christians. It just isn't my beliefs, and so I'm not Christian anymore.
You’ve got that wrong. Jesus took adherence to god-dictated Levitical rules and made them more personal and interior. Don’t just like your neighbors and co-religionists, love your enemies too. Don’t just give to charity, give the beggar your coat. And many more examples.
The above is another example of a person who cannot tolerate different points of view when it comes to religion. Christianity is right; anything else is wrong, in pp's opinion.
Many religions, not just Christianity, promote that thinking. You must believe what dogma tells you to believe or suffer eternal consequences.
NP: PP didn't say Christianity is right. PP said the specifics point PPP made about elevation of the divine in Christianity is not what Christianity actually professes. Pointing out that PP's statement of a fact was incorrect is very different from saying Christianity is right and everything else is wrong.
Look, on so many of these threads lots of people say "X religion says Y," and often that is incorrect information. Often is is even a stereotype or a bigoted remark (like your last sentence). It is important to correct these misstatements because a lot of people use those misstatements to develop misinformed opinions. The point was not to offer an opinion about PP's beliefs, or to change PP's mind about how she feels about faith or the faith she chooses, but to correct a mistake of fact that she asserted.
PPP here (I think? I'm the Jewish one). I've expressly stated that I based my decision to leave Christianity on my experiences with it across different Protestant denominations. I'm not arguing "facts" about Christian theology. I don't ascribe to it and don't claim to be all that knowledgeable about the theological underpinnings of it. It never made sense to me when I tried to learn it. There is an element of faith to any religion and I just didn't have faith in Christian doctrine. What I'm saying is that in my life, I sat through many sermons and Sunday School lessons about Jesus being our Father superseding our own earthly family. I understand that may not be what Christianity is actually supposed to say and there are plenty of things people say and do in the name of religion that could be argued as counter to the religion's actual teachings; often it's a matter of interpretation and emphasis.
While we're talking about misrepresenting the facts of a religion, 09/22/2022 10:16 said "Truly a far cry from the rape, incest, murder and genocide of the Old Testament." The Tanakh (the books that more or less make up the Old Testament) is replete with laws and commandments against those things. Love your neighbor as yourself, take care of the widow and orphan, do not murder, do not steal, don't marry your sister - all of those are in the "Old Testament." I'm so tired of the "vengeful God of the Old Testament" trope in Christianity, as if the only messages of love and caring are in the New Testament.
DP. But the Tanakh God IS vengeful. Just ask the Canaanites, Amorites, and others whose land he wanted for his people. Just ask his chosen people, whom he punished again and again (Noah’s flood, temple destructions) and sent into exile in Babylon for not adhering strictly to his laws or even worshipping Baal.
Pp’s are also saying that Jesus took the “be nice to your neighbor” commandment further into “love your enemy.”
You may have sat through sermons and Sunday School as a kid, but as you say those are your individual experiences based on your particular church as a kid. Sunday School is pretty different from the adult education that goes on in churches, too.
What I’m trying to say is that I agree with other pp’s that your understanding of Christianity is flawed. I wish you peace in your chosen faith. You would help yourself, though, if you stopped basing your choice on a flawed understanding and then kept trying to promote your flawed understanding.
Also a DP and a Christian, but this is honestly an anti-Semitic trope that Christians need to excise from how we talk about God. It fails on both counts, because
1) The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is loving and merciful; it's a big focus of a lot of the Prophets, paired with his judgment. Nehemiah calls him "ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love," Isaiah says his "steadfast love will never depart from you." God's love and mercy is there throughout.
2) Jesus teaches to love your enemy, but he also teaches judgment and God's anger. He's very clear about the punishment of the unrighteous and it's weeping and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, eternal fire.
There's genuine tension here and it takes some theological thinking to make it work, but Marcionism isn't it.
Jesus offered grace to individuals who repent. He stayed out of the business of conquering foreign lands or sending entire generations into exile.
If you're Christian, Jesus literally is the same God as the Old Testament God so actually very much was in the business of sending entire generations into exile. Meanwhile Israel was offered plenty of opportunities to repent and avoid exile. That the Babylonian Captivity is punishment for Israel's sins is very clear from the text of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Really? So it was Jesus who toyed with Job and made the deal with Satan and caused him unbearable hardship and have boils and all that? The stuff you learn here. I really wasn't aware of that.
^ It just seems so out of character for Jesus to do that. God/Jesus must have really changed between the Old and New Tesaments
That Jesus is the God from the Old Testament is pretty clear standard Christian belief. A couple of sources:
1) the Catholic Catechism: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1H.HTM identifying the "Lordship" of Christ with him being the YHWH of the Old Testament
2) https://www.gotquestions.org/is-Jesus-Yahweh.html (Got Questions is a very Protestant source Teaching that "One of the foundational Christian doctrines is that Jesus is God. He is the Jehovah/YHWH/Yahweh described in Exodus 3"
Just two easier to glance at references to show a spectrum across which this is believed.
With regard to Job, it's a very challenging book, but it's not more out of character for Jesus than it is for God as depicted in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God permits people to suffer, but it's primarily in response to sin. Israel doesn't go into exile because God is toying with them, they go into exile because of idolatry, to give one example. The story of Job is hard for Christians and Jews, because it's out of character no matter what.
Nobody is saying it’s a different God. It’s the same God.
Again, what’s changed is God’s relationship with mankind. Jesus established a “new covenant” between God and man. So God’s treatment of sinners did change thanks to Jesus atoning for us. That’s standard theology too.
This comment from a ways back
DP. But the Tanakh God IS vengeful. Just ask the Canaanites, Amorites, and others whose land he wanted for his people. Just ask his chosen people, whom he punished again and again (Noah’s flood, temple destructions) and sent into exile in Babylon for not adhering strictly to his laws or even worshipping Baal.
Pp’s are also saying that Jesus took the “be nice to your neighbor” commandment further into “love your enemy.”
Strongly reads as if the poster believes they are different Gods. "The Tanakh God is vengeful" but Jesus says "love your enemy" set them up in contrast to each other. As does
Jesus offered grace to individuals who repent. He stayed out of the business of conquering foreign lands or sending entire generations into exile.
As I said then, if you treat them as one God, which they are for the purposes of orthodox Christian theology, then you can't say Jesus had nothing to do with the exile or conquest of Canaan.
Those were the people I was responding to, and I think it's fair to say they're treating them effectively as different Gods. If none of those people were you, great, but I was responding to beliefs that were voiced in this thread.
If we’re going to start taking random DCUM posters’ feelings about religion as the final word on Christian theology, we might as well stab ourselves in the eyeballs.
That said, I’m not sure how to make this any clearer. You keep coming back to whether we’ve somehow swapped out gods. Christian theology never, ever, said God had changed. You need to drop the idea of changing gods. What Jesus did by atoning for our sins was change the covenant (relationship) between (the same) God and man.
One "god" believes that he had a "son" 2000 years ago.
Another "god" doesn't.
The trolls have joined the thread. Too bad, this was an interesting discussion.
Ad hominems went you can't dispute the facts. Got it.
This thread has gone so far off the rails. Seems like the like the people who want to debate Jesus’ divinity or what “fulfill the law” means need to start their own threads.
Anonymous wrote:Let this thread die and NOT be resurrected.
+100. OP’s original premise, that Jesus existed and there was some cabal who made him up, has been soundly debunked. OP may even have been posting ironically to show how ludicrous that proposition is. LOL at all the atheist bigots demanding people justify their faith by proving divinity or denigrating other faiths, but no sane poster would engage with that and it’s a total derailment anyway. Die, thread, die.
Read again. No one asked anyone to “denigrate” other religions.
The request was to expand upon this statement:
“after a baseline of evidence, people go with the religion that makes the most theological/philosophical sense to them.”
What is the process you used to select your own religion over others?
DP, but I went through a process and chose a religion, so I'm happy to speak to that experience, though it may differ from what PP had in mind.
I was raised in a conservative Protestant denomination that never made any sense to me. I gave it up for a while in middle school and high school and then in college started trying more liberal Protestant denominations. What I found in my church-hopping was that my problem wasn't just with the conservatism, but with Christian theology as a whole. The Trinity doesn't make sense to me. The focus on sin (original sin, daily sin, heaven and hell, etc) is off-putting. I remember I went to a Presbyterian Church on Mother's Day and the sermon was about how our earthly families are just a shadow of our relationship with Jesus, and that was my last straw, because it was just one too many times that Christianity had downplayed the importance of family and people in our lives, and it turns out that is a core value of mine.
Sorry, my point is not to take issue with Christianity here, but just to say that my experience with Christianity across the Protestant spectrum (and some Catholicism through my dad's side of the family and Evangelicalism through some friends and cousins) proved that it was not the right fit for my own beliefs. Visiting all of those churches that weren't right for me really helped me figure out what I did (and did not) believe. When I started to look outside of Christianity, I found a spiritual home in Judaism, and have been here happily for a long time now.
All that said, I think PP's point is over-exaggerated. I don't think it's common for people to go through a process of evaluating the beliefs in which they were raised, especially if their religion doesn't really play a major role in their lives (secular-style Christmas and maybe church on Easter). People generally don't spend time evaluating something with a minor regular impact on them. My brother spends more time thinking about being left-handed than he does about being Christian.
Well yay, someone took the bait and trashed other peoples’ religion. Happy, atheist pp?
PP here. I'm not trashing Christianity, just citing examples of why the theology didn't work for me to answer the question about the process of choosing a theology. I'm sure that the Trinity and original sin and the elevation of the relationship with the divine over earthly relationships is meaningful for Christians. It just isn't my beliefs, and so I'm not Christian anymore.
You’ve got that wrong. Jesus took adherence to god-dictated Levitical rules and made them more personal and interior. Don’t just like your neighbors and co-religionists, love your enemies too. Don’t just give to charity, give the beggar your coat. And many more examples.
The above is another example of a person who cannot tolerate different points of view when it comes to religion. Christianity is right; anything else is wrong, in pp's opinion.
Many religions, not just Christianity, promote that thinking. You must believe what dogma tells you to believe or suffer eternal consequences.
NP: PP didn't say Christianity is right. PP said the specifics point PPP made about elevation of the divine in Christianity is not what Christianity actually professes. Pointing out that PP's statement of a fact was incorrect is very different from saying Christianity is right and everything else is wrong.
Look, on so many of these threads lots of people say "X religion says Y," and often that is incorrect information. Often is is even a stereotype or a bigoted remark (like your last sentence). It is important to correct these misstatements because a lot of people use those misstatements to develop misinformed opinions. The point was not to offer an opinion about PP's beliefs, or to change PP's mind about how she feels about faith or the faith she chooses, but to correct a mistake of fact that she asserted.
PPP here (I think? I'm the Jewish one). I've expressly stated that I based my decision to leave Christianity on my experiences with it across different Protestant denominations. I'm not arguing "facts" about Christian theology. I don't ascribe to it and don't claim to be all that knowledgeable about the theological underpinnings of it. It never made sense to me when I tried to learn it. There is an element of faith to any religion and I just didn't have faith in Christian doctrine. What I'm saying is that in my life, I sat through many sermons and Sunday School lessons about Jesus being our Father superseding our own earthly family. I understand that may not be what Christianity is actually supposed to say and there are plenty of things people say and do in the name of religion that could be argued as counter to the religion's actual teachings; often it's a matter of interpretation and emphasis.
While we're talking about misrepresenting the facts of a religion, 09/22/2022 10:16 said "Truly a far cry from the rape, incest, murder and genocide of the Old Testament." The Tanakh (the books that more or less make up the Old Testament) is replete with laws and commandments against those things. Love your neighbor as yourself, take care of the widow and orphan, do not murder, do not steal, don't marry your sister - all of those are in the "Old Testament." I'm so tired of the "vengeful God of the Old Testament" trope in Christianity, as if the only messages of love and caring are in the New Testament.
DP. But the Tanakh God IS vengeful. Just ask the Canaanites, Amorites, and others whose land he wanted for his people. Just ask his chosen people, whom he punished again and again (Noah’s flood, temple destructions) and sent into exile in Babylon for not adhering strictly to his laws or even worshipping Baal.
Pp’s are also saying that Jesus took the “be nice to your neighbor” commandment further into “love your enemy.”
You may have sat through sermons and Sunday School as a kid, but as you say those are your individual experiences based on your particular church as a kid. Sunday School is pretty different from the adult education that goes on in churches, too.
What I’m trying to say is that I agree with other pp’s that your understanding of Christianity is flawed. I wish you peace in your chosen faith. You would help yourself, though, if you stopped basing your choice on a flawed understanding and then kept trying to promote your flawed understanding.
Also a DP and a Christian, but this is honestly an anti-Semitic trope that Christians need to excise from how we talk about God. It fails on both counts, because
1) The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is loving and merciful; it's a big focus of a lot of the Prophets, paired with his judgment. Nehemiah calls him "ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love," Isaiah says his "steadfast love will never depart from you." God's love and mercy is there throughout.
2) Jesus teaches to love your enemy, but he also teaches judgment and God's anger. He's very clear about the punishment of the unrighteous and it's weeping and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, eternal fire.
There's genuine tension here and it takes some theological thinking to make it work, but Marcionism isn't it.
Jesus offered grace to individuals who repent. He stayed out of the business of conquering foreign lands or sending entire generations into exile.
If you're Christian, Jesus literally is the same God as the Old Testament God so actually very much was in the business of sending entire generations into exile. Meanwhile Israel was offered plenty of opportunities to repent and avoid exile. That the Babylonian Captivity is punishment for Israel's sins is very clear from the text of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Really? So it was Jesus who toyed with Job and made the deal with Satan and caused him unbearable hardship and have boils and all that? The stuff you learn here. I really wasn't aware of that.
^ It just seems so out of character for Jesus to do that. God/Jesus must have really changed between the Old and New Tesaments
That Jesus is the God from the Old Testament is pretty clear standard Christian belief. A couple of sources:
1) the Catholic Catechism: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1H.HTM identifying the "Lordship" of Christ with him being the YHWH of the Old Testament
2) https://www.gotquestions.org/is-Jesus-Yahweh.html (Got Questions is a very Protestant source Teaching that "One of the foundational Christian doctrines is that Jesus is God. He is the Jehovah/YHWH/Yahweh described in Exodus 3"
Just two easier to glance at references to show a spectrum across which this is believed.
With regard to Job, it's a very challenging book, but it's not more out of character for Jesus than it is for God as depicted in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God permits people to suffer, but it's primarily in response to sin. Israel doesn't go into exile because God is toying with them, they go into exile because of idolatry, to give one example. The story of Job is hard for Christians and Jews, because it's out of character no matter what.
Nobody is saying it’s a different God. It’s the same God.
Again, what’s changed is God’s relationship with mankind. Jesus established a “new covenant” between God and man. So God’s treatment of sinners did change thanks to Jesus atoning for us. That’s standard theology too.
How do you account for this verse?
Matthew 5:17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Easy. Jesus was never aware he was God. That was made up by Christian theologians about 300 years later. I can't be arsed right now to look up who exactly came up with this idea, but it became heresy to think otherwise.
The idea that Jesus is God existed at least at the time of John’s gospel.
Oh really. You mean the part in John 14:6 where Jesus says "I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me"? John 14
No. The part where it says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And the many times Jesus uses the language about “the word” and “I am.” The idea of logos was clear to listeners then.
ok, the bolded is John talking (whoever he was). But John 14:6 is Jesus talking. Apparently Jesus doesn't know he is God. Why would he say no one come to the Father but by me, if he is the Father? Makes no sense. He's clearly distinguishing between himself and the Father.
Anonymous wrote:Let this thread die and NOT be resurrected.
+100. OP’s original premise, that Jesus existed and there was some cabal who made him up, has been soundly debunked. OP may even have been posting ironically to show how ludicrous that proposition is. LOL at all the atheist bigots demanding people justify their faith by proving divinity or denigrating other faiths, but no sane poster would engage with that and it’s a total derailment anyway. Die, thread, die.
Read again. No one asked anyone to “denigrate” other religions.
The request was to expand upon this statement:
“after a baseline of evidence, people go with the religion that makes the most theological/philosophical sense to them.”
What is the process you used to select your own religion over others?
DP, but I went through a process and chose a religion, so I'm happy to speak to that experience, though it may differ from what PP had in mind.
I was raised in a conservative Protestant denomination that never made any sense to me. I gave it up for a while in middle school and high school and then in college started trying more liberal Protestant denominations. What I found in my church-hopping was that my problem wasn't just with the conservatism, but with Christian theology as a whole. The Trinity doesn't make sense to me. The focus on sin (original sin, daily sin, heaven and hell, etc) is off-putting. I remember I went to a Presbyterian Church on Mother's Day and the sermon was about how our earthly families are just a shadow of our relationship with Jesus, and that was my last straw, because it was just one too many times that Christianity had downplayed the importance of family and people in our lives, and it turns out that is a core value of mine.
Sorry, my point is not to take issue with Christianity here, but just to say that my experience with Christianity across the Protestant spectrum (and some Catholicism through my dad's side of the family and Evangelicalism through some friends and cousins) proved that it was not the right fit for my own beliefs. Visiting all of those churches that weren't right for me really helped me figure out what I did (and did not) believe. When I started to look outside of Christianity, I found a spiritual home in Judaism, and have been here happily for a long time now.
All that said, I think PP's point is over-exaggerated. I don't think it's common for people to go through a process of evaluating the beliefs in which they were raised, especially if their religion doesn't really play a major role in their lives (secular-style Christmas and maybe church on Easter). People generally don't spend time evaluating something with a minor regular impact on them. My brother spends more time thinking about being left-handed than he does about being Christian.
Well yay, someone took the bait and trashed other peoples’ religion. Happy, atheist pp?
PP here. I'm not trashing Christianity, just citing examples of why the theology didn't work for me to answer the question about the process of choosing a theology. I'm sure that the Trinity and original sin and the elevation of the relationship with the divine over earthly relationships is meaningful for Christians. It just isn't my beliefs, and so I'm not Christian anymore.
You’ve got that wrong. Jesus took adherence to god-dictated Levitical rules and made them more personal and interior. Don’t just like your neighbors and co-religionists, love your enemies too. Don’t just give to charity, give the beggar your coat. And many more examples.
The above is another example of a person who cannot tolerate different points of view when it comes to religion. Christianity is right; anything else is wrong, in pp's opinion.
Many religions, not just Christianity, promote that thinking. You must believe what dogma tells you to believe or suffer eternal consequences.
NP: PP didn't say Christianity is right. PP said the specifics point PPP made about elevation of the divine in Christianity is not what Christianity actually professes. Pointing out that PP's statement of a fact was incorrect is very different from saying Christianity is right and everything else is wrong.
Look, on so many of these threads lots of people say "X religion says Y," and often that is incorrect information. Often is is even a stereotype or a bigoted remark (like your last sentence). It is important to correct these misstatements because a lot of people use those misstatements to develop misinformed opinions. The point was not to offer an opinion about PP's beliefs, or to change PP's mind about how she feels about faith or the faith she chooses, but to correct a mistake of fact that she asserted.
PPP here (I think? I'm the Jewish one). I've expressly stated that I based my decision to leave Christianity on my experiences with it across different Protestant denominations. I'm not arguing "facts" about Christian theology. I don't ascribe to it and don't claim to be all that knowledgeable about the theological underpinnings of it. It never made sense to me when I tried to learn it. There is an element of faith to any religion and I just didn't have faith in Christian doctrine. What I'm saying is that in my life, I sat through many sermons and Sunday School lessons about Jesus being our Father superseding our own earthly family. I understand that may not be what Christianity is actually supposed to say and there are plenty of things people say and do in the name of religion that could be argued as counter to the religion's actual teachings; often it's a matter of interpretation and emphasis.
While we're talking about misrepresenting the facts of a religion, 09/22/2022 10:16 said "Truly a far cry from the rape, incest, murder and genocide of the Old Testament." The Tanakh (the books that more or less make up the Old Testament) is replete with laws and commandments against those things. Love your neighbor as yourself, take care of the widow and orphan, do not murder, do not steal, don't marry your sister - all of those are in the "Old Testament." I'm so tired of the "vengeful God of the Old Testament" trope in Christianity, as if the only messages of love and caring are in the New Testament.
DP. But the Tanakh God IS vengeful. Just ask the Canaanites, Amorites, and others whose land he wanted for his people. Just ask his chosen people, whom he punished again and again (Noah’s flood, temple destructions) and sent into exile in Babylon for not adhering strictly to his laws or even worshipping Baal.
Pp’s are also saying that Jesus took the “be nice to your neighbor” commandment further into “love your enemy.”
You may have sat through sermons and Sunday School as a kid, but as you say those are your individual experiences based on your particular church as a kid. Sunday School is pretty different from the adult education that goes on in churches, too.
What I’m trying to say is that I agree with other pp’s that your understanding of Christianity is flawed. I wish you peace in your chosen faith. You would help yourself, though, if you stopped basing your choice on a flawed understanding and then kept trying to promote your flawed understanding.
Also a DP and a Christian, but this is honestly an anti-Semitic trope that Christians need to excise from how we talk about God. It fails on both counts, because
1) The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is loving and merciful; it's a big focus of a lot of the Prophets, paired with his judgment. Nehemiah calls him "ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love," Isaiah says his "steadfast love will never depart from you." God's love and mercy is there throughout.
2) Jesus teaches to love your enemy, but he also teaches judgment and God's anger. He's very clear about the punishment of the unrighteous and it's weeping and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, eternal fire.
There's genuine tension here and it takes some theological thinking to make it work, but Marcionism isn't it.
Jesus offered grace to individuals who repent. He stayed out of the business of conquering foreign lands or sending entire generations into exile.
If you're Christian, Jesus literally is the same God as the Old Testament God so actually very much was in the business of sending entire generations into exile. Meanwhile Israel was offered plenty of opportunities to repent and avoid exile. That the Babylonian Captivity is punishment for Israel's sins is very clear from the text of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Really? So it was Jesus who toyed with Job and made the deal with Satan and caused him unbearable hardship and have boils and all that? The stuff you learn here. I really wasn't aware of that.
^ It just seems so out of character for Jesus to do that. God/Jesus must have really changed between the Old and New Tesaments
That Jesus is the God from the Old Testament is pretty clear standard Christian belief. A couple of sources:
1) the Catholic Catechism: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1H.HTM identifying the "Lordship" of Christ with him being the YHWH of the Old Testament
2) https://www.gotquestions.org/is-Jesus-Yahweh.html (Got Questions is a very Protestant source Teaching that "One of the foundational Christian doctrines is that Jesus is God. He is the Jehovah/YHWH/Yahweh described in Exodus 3"
Just two easier to glance at references to show a spectrum across which this is believed.
With regard to Job, it's a very challenging book, but it's not more out of character for Jesus than it is for God as depicted in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God permits people to suffer, but it's primarily in response to sin. Israel doesn't go into exile because God is toying with them, they go into exile because of idolatry, to give one example. The story of Job is hard for Christians and Jews, because it's out of character no matter what.
Nobody is saying it’s a different God. It’s the same God.
Again, what’s changed is God’s relationship with mankind. Jesus established a “new covenant” between God and man. So God’s treatment of sinners did change thanks to Jesus atoning for us. That’s standard theology too.
How do you account for this verse?
Matthew 5:17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Easy. Jesus was never aware he was God. That was made up by Christian theologians about 300 years later. I can't be arsed right now to look up who exactly came up with this idea, but it became heresy to think otherwise.
The idea that Jesus is God existed at least at the time of John’s gospel.
Oh really. You mean the part in John 14:6 where Jesus says "I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me"? John 14
No. The part where it says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And the many times Jesus uses the language about “the word” and “I am.” The idea of logos was clear to listeners then.
ok, the bolded is John talking (whoever he was). But John 14:6 is Jesus talking. Apparently Jesus doesn't know he is God. Why would he say no one come to the Father but by me, if he is the Father? Makes no sense. He's clearly distinguishing between himself and the Father.
DP, except in John 10:30 he says "the father and I are one."
(I also think it doesn't make any sense to distinguish between what is narration from John and what's Jesus's own words here, for two reasons: 1) the question is "when did Christians start believing that Jesus was God," if John believed it that demonstrates that it was earlier than 300 AD and 2) the author chooses the words of Jesus that are in the Gospel. There's no reason for him to include a statement if it actually contradicts his own theology.
Anonymous wrote:Let this thread die and NOT be resurrected.
+100. OP’s original premise, that Jesus existed and there was some cabal who made him up, has been soundly debunked. OP may even have been posting ironically to show how ludicrous that proposition is. LOL at all the atheist bigots demanding people justify their faith by proving divinity or denigrating other faiths, but no sane poster would engage with that and it’s a total derailment anyway. Die, thread, die.
Read again. No one asked anyone to “denigrate” other religions.
The request was to expand upon this statement:
“after a baseline of evidence, people go with the religion that makes the most theological/philosophical sense to them.”
What is the process you used to select your own religion over others?
DP, but I went through a process and chose a religion, so I'm happy to speak to that experience, though it may differ from what PP had in mind.
I was raised in a conservative Protestant denomination that never made any sense to me. I gave it up for a while in middle school and high school and then in college started trying more liberal Protestant denominations. What I found in my church-hopping was that my problem wasn't just with the conservatism, but with Christian theology as a whole. The Trinity doesn't make sense to me. The focus on sin (original sin, daily sin, heaven and hell, etc) is off-putting. I remember I went to a Presbyterian Church on Mother's Day and the sermon was about how our earthly families are just a shadow of our relationship with Jesus, and that was my last straw, because it was just one too many times that Christianity had downplayed the importance of family and people in our lives, and it turns out that is a core value of mine.
Sorry, my point is not to take issue with Christianity here, but just to say that my experience with Christianity across the Protestant spectrum (and some Catholicism through my dad's side of the family and Evangelicalism through some friends and cousins) proved that it was not the right fit for my own beliefs. Visiting all of those churches that weren't right for me really helped me figure out what I did (and did not) believe. When I started to look outside of Christianity, I found a spiritual home in Judaism, and have been here happily for a long time now.
All that said, I think PP's point is over-exaggerated. I don't think it's common for people to go through a process of evaluating the beliefs in which they were raised, especially if their religion doesn't really play a major role in their lives (secular-style Christmas and maybe church on Easter). People generally don't spend time evaluating something with a minor regular impact on them. My brother spends more time thinking about being left-handed than he does about being Christian.
Well yay, someone took the bait and trashed other peoples’ religion. Happy, atheist pp?
PP here. I'm not trashing Christianity, just citing examples of why the theology didn't work for me to answer the question about the process of choosing a theology. I'm sure that the Trinity and original sin and the elevation of the relationship with the divine over earthly relationships is meaningful for Christians. It just isn't my beliefs, and so I'm not Christian anymore.
You’ve got that wrong. Jesus took adherence to god-dictated Levitical rules and made them more personal and interior. Don’t just like your neighbors and co-religionists, love your enemies too. Don’t just give to charity, give the beggar your coat. And many more examples.
The above is another example of a person who cannot tolerate different points of view when it comes to religion. Christianity is right; anything else is wrong, in pp's opinion.
Many religions, not just Christianity, promote that thinking. You must believe what dogma tells you to believe or suffer eternal consequences.
NP: PP didn't say Christianity is right. PP said the specifics point PPP made about elevation of the divine in Christianity is not what Christianity actually professes. Pointing out that PP's statement of a fact was incorrect is very different from saying Christianity is right and everything else is wrong.
Look, on so many of these threads lots of people say "X religion says Y," and often that is incorrect information. Often is is even a stereotype or a bigoted remark (like your last sentence). It is important to correct these misstatements because a lot of people use those misstatements to develop misinformed opinions. The point was not to offer an opinion about PP's beliefs, or to change PP's mind about how she feels about faith or the faith she chooses, but to correct a mistake of fact that she asserted.
PPP here (I think? I'm the Jewish one). I've expressly stated that I based my decision to leave Christianity on my experiences with it across different Protestant denominations. I'm not arguing "facts" about Christian theology. I don't ascribe to it and don't claim to be all that knowledgeable about the theological underpinnings of it. It never made sense to me when I tried to learn it. There is an element of faith to any religion and I just didn't have faith in Christian doctrine. What I'm saying is that in my life, I sat through many sermons and Sunday School lessons about Jesus being our Father superseding our own earthly family. I understand that may not be what Christianity is actually supposed to say and there are plenty of things people say and do in the name of religion that could be argued as counter to the religion's actual teachings; often it's a matter of interpretation and emphasis.
While we're talking about misrepresenting the facts of a religion, 09/22/2022 10:16 said "Truly a far cry from the rape, incest, murder and genocide of the Old Testament." The Tanakh (the books that more or less make up the Old Testament) is replete with laws and commandments against those things. Love your neighbor as yourself, take care of the widow and orphan, do not murder, do not steal, don't marry your sister - all of those are in the "Old Testament." I'm so tired of the "vengeful God of the Old Testament" trope in Christianity, as if the only messages of love and caring are in the New Testament.
DP. But the Tanakh God IS vengeful. Just ask the Canaanites, Amorites, and others whose land he wanted for his people. Just ask his chosen people, whom he punished again and again (Noah’s flood, temple destructions) and sent into exile in Babylon for not adhering strictly to his laws or even worshipping Baal.
Pp’s are also saying that Jesus took the “be nice to your neighbor” commandment further into “love your enemy.”
You may have sat through sermons and Sunday School as a kid, but as you say those are your individual experiences based on your particular church as a kid. Sunday School is pretty different from the adult education that goes on in churches, too.
What I’m trying to say is that I agree with other pp’s that your understanding of Christianity is flawed. I wish you peace in your chosen faith. You would help yourself, though, if you stopped basing your choice on a flawed understanding and then kept trying to promote your flawed understanding.
Also a DP and a Christian, but this is honestly an anti-Semitic trope that Christians need to excise from how we talk about God. It fails on both counts, because
1) The God of the Hebrew Scriptures is loving and merciful; it's a big focus of a lot of the Prophets, paired with his judgment. Nehemiah calls him "ready to forgive, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love," Isaiah says his "steadfast love will never depart from you." God's love and mercy is there throughout.
2) Jesus teaches to love your enemy, but he also teaches judgment and God's anger. He's very clear about the punishment of the unrighteous and it's weeping and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness, eternal fire.
There's genuine tension here and it takes some theological thinking to make it work, but Marcionism isn't it.
Jesus offered grace to individuals who repent. He stayed out of the business of conquering foreign lands or sending entire generations into exile.
If you're Christian, Jesus literally is the same God as the Old Testament God so actually very much was in the business of sending entire generations into exile. Meanwhile Israel was offered plenty of opportunities to repent and avoid exile. That the Babylonian Captivity is punishment for Israel's sins is very clear from the text of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Really? So it was Jesus who toyed with Job and made the deal with Satan and caused him unbearable hardship and have boils and all that? The stuff you learn here. I really wasn't aware of that.
^ It just seems so out of character for Jesus to do that. God/Jesus must have really changed between the Old and New Tesaments
That Jesus is the God from the Old Testament is pretty clear standard Christian belief. A couple of sources:
1) the Catholic Catechism: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1H.HTM identifying the "Lordship" of Christ with him being the YHWH of the Old Testament
2) https://www.gotquestions.org/is-Jesus-Yahweh.html (Got Questions is a very Protestant source Teaching that "One of the foundational Christian doctrines is that Jesus is God. He is the Jehovah/YHWH/Yahweh described in Exodus 3"
Just two easier to glance at references to show a spectrum across which this is believed.
With regard to Job, it's a very challenging book, but it's not more out of character for Jesus than it is for God as depicted in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, God permits people to suffer, but it's primarily in response to sin. Israel doesn't go into exile because God is toying with them, they go into exile because of idolatry, to give one example. The story of Job is hard for Christians and Jews, because it's out of character no matter what.
Nobody is saying it’s a different God. It’s the same God.
Again, what’s changed is God’s relationship with mankind. Jesus established a “new covenant” between God and man. So God’s treatment of sinners did change thanks to Jesus atoning for us. That’s standard theology too.
How do you account for this verse?
Matthew 5:17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
Easy. Jesus was never aware he was God. That was made up by Christian theologians about 300 years later. I can't be arsed right now to look up who exactly came up with this idea, but it became heresy to think otherwise.
The idea that Jesus is God existed at least at the time of John’s gospel.
Oh really. You mean the part in John 14:6 where Jesus says "I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me"? John 14
No. The part where it says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And the many times Jesus uses the language about “the word” and “I am.” The idea of logos was clear to listeners then.
ok, the bolded is John talking (whoever he was). But John 14:6 is Jesus talking. Apparently Jesus doesn't know he is God. Why would he say no one come to the Father but by me, if he is the Father? Makes no sense. He's clearly distinguishing between himself and the Father.
Here are Jesus’ own words in John, as Jesus talks to somebody called Philip. “Jesus said unto him, 'Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how do you say, "Show us the Father"?'" (John 14:9)
Anonymous wrote:Paul was talking about Jesus being God around 50 AD, 20 years after Jesus’ death. In response to the claim above that somebody this up around 300AD.
So if Jesus is God, then when he says in Mark "Father why hast thou forsaken me?" he's talking to himself?
Anonymous wrote:Paul was talking about Jesus being God around 50 AD, 20 years after Jesus’ death. In response to the claim above that somebody this up around 300AD.
So if Jesus is God, then when he says in Mark "Father why hast thou forsaken me?" he's talking to himself?
Jesus was quoting verbatim from Psalm 22 (look it up) which his listeners would have recognized as a lament about man’s condition. Jews at the time memorized long passages of the Bible.
And with that I’m done here. The thread topic has been answered. There was a thread about Jesus’ divinity just a week or two ago, and you undoubtedly participated heavily on it. What with bebopping from Jesus’ new covenant to a failed attempt to start a discussion on what it means for Jesus to “fulfill” the law and the prophets (also the subject of a very recent thread you undoubtedly participated on), it’s clear you want to waste our time.
Anonymous wrote:Paul was talking about Jesus being God around 50 AD, 20 years after Jesus’ death. In response to the claim above that somebody this up around 300AD.
So if Jesus is God, then when he says in Mark "Father why hast thou forsaken me?" he's talking to himself?
Jesus was quoting verbatim from Psalm 22 (look it up) which his listeners would have recognized as a lament about man’s condition. Jews at the time memorized long passages of the Bible.
And with that I’m done here. The thread topic has been answered. There was a thread about Jesus’ divinity just a week or two ago, and you undoubtedly participated heavily on it. What with bebopping from Jesus’ new covenant to a failed attempt to start a discussion on what it means for Jesus to “fulfill” the law and the prophets (also the subject of a very recent thread you undoubtedly participated on), it’s clear you want to waste our time.
Bye. You won’t be missed and your YAGE falls flat.
Anonymous wrote:Paul was talking about Jesus being God around 50 AD, 20 years after Jesus’ death. In response to the claim above that somebody this up around 300AD.
So if Jesus is God, then when he says in Mark "Father why hast thou forsaken me?" he's talking to himself?
Jesus was quoting verbatim from Psalm 22 (look it up) which his listeners would have recognized as a lament about man’s condition. Jews at the time memorized long passages of the Bible.
And with that I’m done here. The thread topic has been answered. There was a thread about Jesus’ divinity just a week or two ago, and you undoubtedly participated heavily on it. What with bebopping from Jesus’ new covenant to a failed attempt to start a discussion on what it means for Jesus to “fulfill” the law and the prophets (also the subject of a very recent thread you undoubtedly participated on), it’s clear you want to waste our time.
Bye. You won’t be missed and your YAGE falls flat.
+1. there are a few posters here who threaten not to come back, but invariably do.
Anonymous wrote:Paul was talking about Jesus being God around 50 AD, 20 years after Jesus’ death. In response to the claim above that somebody this up around 300AD.
So if Jesus is God, then when he says in Mark "Father why hast thou forsaken me?" he's talking to himself?
Jesus was quoting verbatim from Psalm 22 (look it up) which his listeners would have recognized as a lament about man’s condition. Jews at the time memorized long passages of the Bible.
And with that I’m done here. The thread topic has been answered. There was a thread about Jesus’ divinity just a week or two ago, and you undoubtedly participated heavily on it. What with bebopping from Jesus’ new covenant to a failed attempt to start a discussion on what it means for Jesus to “fulfill” the law and the prophets (also the subject of a very recent thread you undoubtedly participated on), it’s clear you want to waste our time.
Bye. You won’t be missed and your YAGE falls flat.
So your latest gotcha question was a fail and now you’re onto ad hominems. No wonder people don’t want to engage with you.
Anonymous wrote:This thread has gone so far off the rails. Seems like the like the people who want to debate Jesus’ divinity or what “fulfill the law” means need to start their own threads.
Yup.
There is zero evidence of his divinity.
There is some evidence that he “most likely” existed in history.
Anonymous wrote:Paul was talking about Jesus being God around 50 AD, 20 years after Jesus’ death. In response to the claim above that somebody this up around 300AD.
So if Jesus is God, then when he says in Mark "Father why hast thou forsaken me?" he's talking to himself?
Jesus was quoting verbatim from Psalm 22 (look it up) which his listeners would have recognized as a lament about man’s condition. Jews at the time memorized long passages of the Bible.
And with that I’m done here. The thread topic has been answered. There was a thread about Jesus’ divinity just a week or two ago, and you undoubtedly participated heavily on it. What with bebopping from Jesus’ new covenant to a failed attempt to start a discussion on what it means for Jesus to “fulfill” the law and the prophets (also the subject of a very recent thread you undoubtedly participated on), it’s clear you want to waste our time.
Bye. You won’t be missed and your YAGE falls flat.
So your latest gotcha question was a fail and now you’re onto ad hominems. No wonder people don’t want to engage with you.
I thought you were leaving!
I'm a DP, I just hate YAGEs, like anyone cares. Stay and have a discussion or go do something else, your ego is so big that you think it will matter if you announce your departure? "Oh noes, we better change our ways or 09/22/2022 18:58 will leave, how will this discussion survive without them!"
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