What a bastard, gets off on people suffering from birth. And don't give me that original sin shit, why did you choose to make sin hereditary? Or just snuff out Adam and Eve and start again with two new ones instead of letting them fill the world with their cursed offspring. Omnipotent, omnicognisant, omnibenevolent, pick any two. All three together are logically impossible due to the reality of human suffering. What do you have to say for yourself, you bastard? If you really are up there which I don't think you really are.
If you say "That Hannibal Lecter was a bit of a bastard wasn't he?" it doesn't mean you believe a cannibal serial killer called Hannibal Lecter exists, you're just commenting on a fictional character in a story. You can do that with Yahweh as well, only it's a story that a distressingly large number of people believe in because they don't see the logical flaws. An all knowing, all powerful, all loving God cannot exist because of the existence of human suffering.
The difference being everyone knows Hannibal is a fictional character, but billions of people believe God is real. You can see why someone would assume if you're talking about God as though he's real you would be one of the people who thinks he is.
Okay, so I too used to misunderstand original sin. And maybe this understanding is still wrong, but there is an interpretation of it that finally made sense to me.
Firstly, things are not sins because God chose for them to be. They're sins because they are contrary to the nature of how things should be. In other words, God doesn't choose what is a sin, rather being the ultimate good constrains what God can and can't accept.
Secondly, think of sin and judgment as working like pollution. It is not so much a debt or punishment owed from the individual as it is a sort of spiritual state of disease that taints the individual and everything they come into contact with.
Thirdly, while it is action more than anything that has to be addressed, sin does not require action. The desire to sin is itself sin.
EDIT: To clarify, this is because sin is about the internal spiritual/emotional state of the person, not the action itself.
Fourthly, the story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is metaphorical (even a lot of ancient theologians recognized that most/all of Genesis is). Creatures which do not have the ability to conceive of morality cannot fall into a state of sin because they cannot violate their own intended nature. Humans are different, being intelligent enough to ponder morality/other philosophical questions, comprehend their environment, have thoughts on it besides just reacting to stimuli or experiencing an emotion. However, the ability to consider a moral question also makes them a moral agent at the same time that our inherently limited perspective prevents us from being able to perfectly understand what is expected of us. The godlike nature in man also creates a drive towards ego, a mistaken belief that we can figure things out for ourselves, which results in tragedy and suffering.
The individual's nature as being godlike but apart from God means that they have a bottomless well of sin deep down inside. I feel like I'm explaining this very poorly, but I became aware of that one day, felt like I would explode or vomit from the sudden awareness of something ugly and evil that comes from within and cannot be expelled. Being bottomless it pollutes them completely and no human action can overcome it, only the intervention of a higher power. In Christianity this comes about from the crucifixion, which is based on Mesopotamian concepts of ritual sacrifice. A sacrifice must be done to dispel that pollution, but when the state is infinitely corrupt, only something of infinite value - God itself - will do. God takes the punishment for Man because your sin isn't a debt and God doesn't get to decide all the rules of how things work, like an author writing a story, even if he makes the physical universe. Sin is just part of the basic rules by which the world works, God included, and to spare people from the consequences of it God has to offer itself in sacrifice because his suffering washes it away. It's not like karma where the individual has to suffer for what they did.
I've come to feel that original sin is a truth of reality. I don't know for sure if Jesus as the savior is true too, but I think the basic concepts behind Christianity were divinely inspired.
"However, the ability to consider a moral question also makes them a moral agent at the same time that our inherently limited perspective prevents us from being able to perfectly understand what is expected of us."
Then why didn't God create us capable of understanding? People like you always say this is the price we have to pay for free will, having the ability to sin, or, counterituitively, the inability to not sin. But our free will is restrained in countless ways, we are not capable of understanding the supposed big plan, we can't travel faster than the speed of light, we can't travel backwards in time etc. Having no ability to sin would be small potatoes in comparison.
And god had to kill himself to set us free? Do me a favour. If he is truly omnipotent he could have done it another way that would have spared himself/his son (which is another thing that makes no logical sense) the suffering. If that was the only way then god is not omnipotent. Your beliefs make no logical sense, you might as well try to make two plus two equal five.
"However, the ability to consider a moral question also makes them a moral agent at the same time that our inherently limited perspective prevents us from being able to perfectly understand what is expected of us."
Then why didn't God create us capable of understanding? People like you always say this is the price we have to pay for free will, having the ability to sin, or, counterituitively, the inability to not sin. But our free will is restrained in countless ways, we are not capable of understanding the supposed big plan, we can't travel faster than the speed of light, we can't travel backwards in time etc. Having no ability to sin would be small potatoes in comparison.
Maybe because if you make something that is an exact copy of yourself in features and personality you haven't made anything new at all, just a clone, and so would contribute nothing useful to the world. That's also supposing that omniscience is the key there, that's my own speculation.
Also, and more importantly, because life without choice and risk is meaningless. Here is where I find Mormon thought more useful than Christian thought, but I think many religions are sympathetic to this notion. What is the point of life? Is it to amuse ourselves? Is it to just exist for its own sake? I think it is to cultivate virtue. To try to be more godlike. There's that eternal stain of sin on the character, but a person does have the ability to shape their character. They can't remove the potential of it, can't close the door on that bottomless well I described, but they can draw from that well and smear themselves up with grease and make their soul worse. They can likewise draw on their godlike nature, a bottomless well of good, and make themselves better.
The point of it is to give people a chance to earn their good nature. Become more godlike by taking on moral responsibility for one's actions, even if you sometimes stumble, even if some people fall and don't get up, because unless you make choices for yourself you will always be a spiritual child and life that you don't control has none of the savor of life that you do.
There is a secular parable I might go dig up about it.
From a Christian perspective, I recall there being an idea that God wanted equals (but again, not clones) that he could share his responsibility with. Doesn't WANT to be a celestial dictator but wants to raise up people like parents raise up children so that he can be satisfied in watching them take charge of their own lives.
I also have a belief, which I've been developing lately, that God values order more than anything, but the order is to be natural/spontaneous. Order that can come from human action but agrees with His/Nature's (same thing) vision of how the world should be. This is why the world, despite the dogma of entropy, actually has a tendency to inexorably arrange itself into more ordered forms. Inanimate matter is subject to entropy and decays, yet minerals will arrange themselves into crystals (repeating structures that grow). Minerals will at times spawn life forms (abiogenesis/primordial soup) that then begin to evolve and differentiate to create ecosystems that capture energy and matter and rearrange it, by homeostasis, by reproduction, into repeating patterns as well. Celestial bodies will get caught in orbits that create complex, clocklike systems that repeat in elaborate patterns endlessly. This process also creates more diversity. There is a highly limited number of compounds you can make just from minerals combining, but once organic life emerges the possibilities for structure explode.
And this comes up even in human society. God loves not just free will in people, but freedom in human society too. What Austrian School thinkers call spontaneous order, democratic and stateless forms of government, choice in religious life. This is a place where I deviate dramatically from most theists, I believe God loves a diversity of religious practice and decentralization in church structure (Catholicism is Satanic, an abomination; Orthodoxy, Mormonism, and Episcopalianism are sketchy). God likewise intends for us to have a place in the world as caretakers of his world. Play our part in society performing our functions for society, to cultivate our own virtue, but also to exercise power on his behalf as viceroys over nature, with both humility (understanding what is beyond our capabilities) and responsibility (understanding that we do have an impact and have duties).
I believe that God loves agriculture and artwork, because both impose order. Agriculture tames wild nature. You can get more biomass out of cropland and ranches than you can wild nature (though the diversity of nature also matters, a world of nothing but cornfields would anger him). Artwork is an exercise in godlike behavior, to impose order (it doesn't have to mean wanky Renaissance like stuff, more modern/abstract stuff has logic behind it) on matter. This is why music is so important in all religions. It is ordered sound. It is likewise why only humans and other highly developed animals seem to have any concept of art.
God likewise loves pet husbandry, because pet husbandry acts as the most intimate and caring form of that caretaker role and a way to exercise virtue. Creatures like cats likewise watch over us with an angelic presence. If properly treated they give a home some protection from demonic threats and help to steer a person's mind back towards oneness with God/Nature.
God's favor falls on American civilization and Protestant religion, and it reflects in the incredible success of both. The American Revolution and its values are, at the moment, the closest any people have come to figuring it out and making a society like what God would want. However, I am not foolish enough to imagine that there is an actual end state. The American experiment was itself tainted by sin and internal contradictions and its death (whether in years or millennia) crumble, but like all of the finest civilizations before it (British-Protestant, European, Greco-Roman) will prepare fertile ground for the next, even better civilization in a cycle of progressive improvement. It is my belief that this will come from the American South merging with Latin American culture. A sort of cultural (if not political) Golden Circle will form, but it will be built on the principle of liberty instead of slavery (for which the Old South was destroyed as punishment, but which also laid the work for a suitable people to emerge).
In its brief existence the American people (really, a family of closely related nations who formed on the shores of this country long before the "United States" was ever conceived) achieved fantastic living standards, incredible military power (lone global superpower), incredible breakthroughs in science (though this is more impressive if you broaden it to British civilization, not just American), and did so while fostering a social system that respected the dignity of the individual. They saved the world first from fascist totalitarianism on the battlefield (not exclusively their efforts, not even mainly in Germany's case, but there'd have been no NATO either without them) and then from Soviet Communism in the battle for influence and the competition of systems and principles in the Cold War.
Most significantly for me, symbolically, it was Americans and Americans alone who walked on the Moon. Ancient people had a better understanding than anyone today of how sacred that space is. That those celestial bodies, near perfect spheres (near the perfect shape), are sacred in and of themselves. The American people alone (yes, the program relied heavily on Germans, but it was not exclusively their work and they too were a fine product of the Protestant world) ascended into the Heavens and got to walk in the Clockmaker's machinery, transcend the Earth. It's not literal Heaven where the dead live, but it's Heaven of a different sort. It was the most important moment in all of history.
But the Americans also did mortal damage to their country. America saved the world from totalitarianism, but in the process debased itself (through CIA glow-ops) and adopted features of totalitarianism that would grow out of control. Sacrificed its own purity so the rest of the world could have a chance. And America also denied its proper place in the world. It was meant to be a city on a hill, a model for a new type of humanity and a rare, maybe unique, chance to break free of the vicious cycle that kept the world enslaved. But time and time again Americans would fall far short of that goal. Whether it was the abuse of the Indians, the Blacks, the Mexicans, even of its own founding Whites (as the colonization of the South and the enslavement of Appalachians to company towns), it dirtied itself considerably. Now it is reaping what it sowed.
In the long run, what comes out will be fine. Large empires have a heavy pressure to stagnate, become authoritarian. China is the model in my mind. An empire that got too big, grew lazy, grew stagnant, grew absolutely brutal to its own people, and developed into something truly evil. North America has many geographical similarities to China, and its status in the world today is much like that of China. I hope for the day when it crashes down. I don't think I want it to happen in my own lifetime, for selfishness. There'll be a ton of suffering when it does. But America crashing would be like Rome crashing. The Roman Empire was on that same damnable path as China, but when it died it created space for newer, finer peoples - Spaniards and French and British and Italians - to form out of it, and the finest of them to go on and build new empires, that would die, that would breed, and make new empires again. This, I think, is the point of America. It served its purpose, it will die, and its offspring will carry on the torch. People will reflect on American heritage in the way they do Rome and Greece. Not something to want to bring back in a political sense, but in the sense of a shared cultural origin.
I believe it is the American South and West that best preserved the spirit of the country and has the best prospects. I think the Mexicans are more like Southerners than anything else, and they seem to have a great receptiveness to Evangelicalism that bodes well, and seem to assimilate well when they're spread out in the countryside. Texas is the model, a fine merging of the South and Mexico. The transition will be rough, it always is, but what comes out will be stronger. The land is fine. The resources are rich. The culture flourished. Not so much at the moment, but much of what is authentically American is Southern. The 20th Century was like a Renaissance of music, and it came out of the Mississippi River Valley. The Sunbelt has drawn in population, drawn in industry, drawn in research laboratories. It went through the greatest suffering because it perverted the American experiment into its worst form, but that suffering also forced a culture to (so very slowly) come to grips with its own foundations and values. Understand what was good and what it is really meant to be.
In time the world will turn around cities like Miami, Dallas, Nashville and Atlanta.
And god had to kill himself to set us free? Do me a favour. If he is truly omnipotent he could have done it another way that would have spared himself/his son (which is another thing that makes no logical sense) the suffering.
That's the Christian part of it and I'm not sure I agree with it. i gave you one interpretation. Churches often leave it out because they usually actively avoid paying attention to the pagan context of Jewish/Christian ideas. Jews sacrificed animals to Yahweh, were still in that unga bunga caveman mentality where God gets off to huffing animal smoke. Christianity saw Jesus as being an infinity of birds and bulls and such.
If that was the only way then god is not omnipotent. Your beliefs make no logical sense, you might as well try to make two plus two equal five.
Omnipotent in what regard? In some abstract metaphysical sense?
Let me put it this way to you, does God have to be able to make 2 + 2 = 5 in order for him to qualify as omnipotent, or is it sufficient that he just be able to bend physical reality to his will?
I used to think that the decision of who is saved, what counts as sin, how sin is ameliorated, etc. came from God in the same sense that physical matter does or how a specific rule/commandment might. Now I understand it instead as being part of the "logic" of the world. God may be all-powerful over matter, but that doesn't mean he can violate logic (not X and X at the same time). The nature of sin and virtue is baked into the logic of the world. God can't change it and still be God because being God means being in full agreement with reality on all levels.
I don't particularly care if God is omnipotent is anyways. That may just come down to what we call God, but to me God is the Prime Mover and the source of consciousness. Whether it can steer the physical world beyond setting its rules up is a separate matter.
There is an argument, I think an effective one, that can be made that if we live in a materialist world where all our decisions our epiphenomena of physical brains (basically, if free will is an illusion, a common stance) than it's all predestined since the omniscient God would be able to predict the entire flow of history resulting from the world's initial state that it chooses.
As far as Jesus goes, I've got a belief that many people may, at times, tune in to or catch a glimpse of the divine's thought processes, and these people are often prophets. Much of what Jesus and Buddha taught is contradictory, but I think both of them were likely such people. I think the Shawnee prophet Tenkswatawah, who correctly prophesied that an earthquake would come and the Mississippi would run backwards, was such a person. I think Joseph Smith may have caught a glimpse at the nature of the afterlife and the nature of creation. The Founding Fathers were definitely divinely inspired, even if they didn't realize it or think in those terms. And I think Robespierre was imbued with a righteous mission. Even the author Richard Adams serves as another example; it was a story of his, meant as a sort of allegory for the Garden of Eden story, that first helped me actually understand it and served as a basis for my views on man's relationship to nature.
But it doesn't mean that these people are right in everything they say, because these little glimpses get jumbled with the noise of their own minds and interpreted through their own desires, and their own flawed natures often make a mess of it. And their own character can twist it towards something monstrous.
Jesus has a grasp on me, but I have a hard time believing that the idea of him being a savior could work without the rest of the religion working, and I have a very hard time accepting that Old Testament Yahweh was a real thing or a good thing. Seems like a bit of a faggot.
People who don't understand God's will have never played The Sims and left them without a bathroom, surrounded their fireplace with flammable material, or removed the ladder from the pool while they're swimming.
It's too late for me to take the time to hunt down Booker T Washington's quote, but he spoke about how a right-minded person cannot be degraded by the actions of another person, because the provocations against them rebound on to the one committing it.
One of the most notable features of the crucifixion is that it took what was intended as a degrading act of execution - extreme sadism, extreme violence against the body (even leaving aside the gauntlet of torture, crucifixion results in the muscles ripping apart under the strain of holding up the body's own weight), to my understanding), a public spectacle so as to humiliate the victim - and converted it into something heroic. This comes up elsewhere in the world, but generally the execution is an undesirable byproduct of the heroics, not the thing itself.
The cross was converted from a symbol of state terror into a symbol of the purest love.
