katsaris | Thoughts on 'The Passion of the Christ' (and Christianity)

It's been almost two weeks since I thought I'd write this... but hey, better late than never. (First part to the commentary, can be found here.)

Warning: This is extra extra long commentary, and I think it more concerns Christianity as a whole, than just Gibson's film.

Thoughts on 'The Passion of the Christ' (and Christianity) - Part II.

In my previous commentary, I talked quite a bit about several issues that irked me about the film, so I guess it's about time to mention a couple of the nice moments. Before going into full "commenting on Christianity" mode.

Best visual: No question about it, the scene with the "teardrop from heaven" is possibly one of the best visuals I've ever seen in a religious film. Especially the way it plays with perspectives, that I didn't understand what I was seeing until I was already experiencing it.

That one was just cool.

Best line: "I am making the world anew."

Or something like that anyway. I'm translating into English the Greek subtitles which were translated from English subtitles of the Aramaic words of the film. Which were themselves probably taken from Greek originally.

And nah, I didn't like it because of the role it played in in the film. I liked it in advance, above and regardless how the film would incorporate it. :-)

It's the central conceit of Christianity, that the single most important event in human history is the death and resurrection of Christ. Through his death we are all saved. It becomes the story that supposedly echoes from the beginnings of time and reaches all the way to the end of the universe. So, in a sense, (and always according to Christianity, which once again I *don't* believe in) Christ's death and resurrection is the one truly universal story, the one that influences us all, regardless of time and place.

Because his Death is supposedly the sacrifice that allows everyone's sins to be forgiven, and his resurrection the action that defeats death and brings in the promise of new life. It was because of the burden of human Sin, that God gave his only-begotten son for the benefit of mankind.

Etc, etc, etc.

Or to be a bit less polite: "blah blah blah".

The fault isn't only Gibson's. It's Christianity's as a whole, or atleast all the Christian sects I know of (since I couldn't possibly claim to know the teachings of *every* Christian group, or even most of them).

And this is the flaw: They don't really explain WHY.

There are two basic plot points here that must, I think, be considered constant. One is that supposedly Christ sacrificed himself for the benefit of mankind. Second that this sacrifice was meaningful, (indeed the most meaningful thing ever done, etc, etc)

But in trying to explain this point and present it as not only reasonable but actually *inevitable*, pretty much every Christian I've ever heard, seems to be making leaps of assumptions and axioms that they may perhaps themselves accept as a matter of faith, but seem far from even approaching credible to your random non-believer.

For example: As often mentioned by Christians, someone had to supposedly pay for human sin. But they don't actually explain *why* someone had to pay, or how an innocent man's (or innocent God's for that matter) suffering, somehow makes forgiving the *guilty* possible. In most of the civilised world punishing the innocent doesn't wash away the sin of the guilty, it's instead considered a sin by itself.

Sometimes, I've heard it described as some supposed "blood debt" that had to be repaid by someone, *anyone*, once again because of the burden of sin. But who made that supposed rule, if not God? If God is creating the very rules that make it inevitable that he will end up getting torturuously killed, that's one again rather too bizarre to meaningfully call it "necessary sacrifice" -- IMO once again.

This review has started getting rambling, but the main issue and problem is this -- you have a story, but the main plot point (the fact that Jesus' sacrifice somehow leads to our salvation) ends up fully relegated to the realm of "sacred mystery" that can't be understood. Gibson allegedly drove himself the nails in, to indicate his own partaking of guilt in the crucifixion of Jesus -- and that's standard Christian belief that every human is responsible for Jesus' crucifixion since he died for all our sins.

So we know that *Gibson* considers the story universal in scope. But unless one's already a Christian, there's nothing in there, no new point of view, nothing to help explain this "central mystery", and to let the rest of us (especially non-Christians) know how the story is indeed truly universal. How Sin as a whole condemned Jesus to the cross, how Sin as a whole was defeated through it.

What I would have done

This pretty much becomes a sort of betareading Christianity on my part, similar to how I have betaread for friends' fanfiction. (A little more arrogant on my part, this time, perhaps. :-)

How does one convey meaning to the crucifixion. Start with the givens. It was done to forgive our sins. And indeed there's a line by the Jesus character on the cross that says "Forgive them, they don't know what they are doing."

In every film made so far on Jesus (that I know of), this line seems to be referring to only the act of the crucifixion itself. But why could not "forgive them" not be made to refer to all sinners everywhere and all sin?

In which case, what is there in the crucifixion that makes it relevant to forgiveness? The only answer that springs to mind is forgiveness may only be meaningful when it comes from the person that suffered himself.

Another given: The Christian God is supposedly all-powerful. So the crucifixion didn't confer him *power*. And God is supposedly all-knowing, so the crucifixion din't confer Him knowledge. And being all-knowing and all-wise may be enough to make one the perfect Judge.

But a judge that would say "I forgive you" to a murderer, or rapist, or torturer, would still be crossing a line -- if he's not the person that suffered because of the crime, he's not in the position to forgive it. And one thing that Christianity doesn't usually claim is that God is actually... all-experienced.

So, what if Jesus' suffering was required, not to satisfy some kind of bizarre karmic law that claimed that an innocent had to suffer just because, but rather so that Jesus could gain the *authority* to forgive mankind. Through the experience of the consequences of sin -- aka "suffering".

In short, what if: If he had never been murdered, he wouldn't have had the right to forgive murderers. If he had never been tortured, he wouldn't have had the right to forgive torturers. If he had never been mocked, lied against, betrayed, etc, etc, he wouldn't have had the right to forgive the sinners belonging to those criteria.

And yet he suffers through all of it, and among the things he says in the end is "Forgive them." And the sins are therefore forgiven.

Rather interesting theory is it? :-)

Consequences

Anyway if there's any Christian groups that claims the above, I'd love to hear about it. Because this theory has certain quite... unorthodox logical consequences. For starters it would indicate a God that treats mankind not from position of defacto authority (just because he created us, as if that gives him any right :-) but rather from a position of equality. And empathy. And mutual suffering.

More logical consequences: Most Christians seem to talk as if the repayment-through-torturous Jesus' death was something inevitable and required from the very first sin (disobedience or perhaps hubris or something) in the Garden of Eden. This theory however (where Jesus pays not simply by his death, but by his suffering, wound for wound, sin for sin) would mean that Jesus wouldn't have had to be murdered if there hadn't existed murderers already, tortured if there hadn't existed torturers, etc, etc...

To make the theory fully consistent, we could perhaps easily enlarge the theory to indicate, that (in the usual way of actions having meanings on different planes of symbolism/what says you) Jesus was at the same time of his crucifixion actually suffering the pain that all members of mankind ever felt (or would ever feel, till world's end) because of other people's sins.

This brings IMO also a well-needed perspective on the role of sin, and what is sometimes called "Catholic guilt", I think. Because given Jesus suffered partly because of *you*, but really, he only suffered *partly* because of you. Non-murderers and non-torturers don't really have to feel responsible for Jesus's death and suffering as a whole. And Gibson, old boy, unless you really did do the equivalent of driving nails through a persons hands or wrists, there really wasn't much need to show your guilt in such a manner. You could have been a cameo in the crowd, simply calling Jesus names. :-)

Not only that but the whole thing also ties in neatly to Jesus's description about "What you did to my brothers, you also did to me" which gains a nice literalist meaning, through use of this theory.

Further logical consequences: There wouldn't exist victimless sins. Sin becomes not a random affront against God, just because God says so, but rather because it directly causes the suffering of other people. Rejoyce, you people that don't fast on Wednesdays and Fridays (or whenever the hell it is that people are supposed to fast on). And gay people. And you people that don't hold the Sabbath.

One could play with this theory further, if one feels like it. For example what's the place of Hell or Purgatory in this scenario? Even as a Christian I couldn't really buy the idea of an eternal Hell (infinite punishment for finite sins) but Purgatory made a bit more sense from a Justice point of view if we had to repay an exact amount of suffering, for the suffering we caused. But with the added element of *Jesus* suffering that mentioned exact amount... things change.

And on film?

How could it be portrayed on film? Especially in such a way as to not make such an interpretration forced or required, but just use the possibility as a means to further the universality of the story?

It does seem rather difficult to make it subtly. But, well, among other things, I'd use a flashback with the temptations in the desert between Satan and Jesus, especially the scene where Jesus sees all the kingdoms of the world, I'd make it clear that he sees *all* the kingdoms of the world, present, past and future.

That gives the idea of universality through time and could be a useful parallel for other scenes. I'd use references that showed Sin as the timeless *self-caused* enemy of mankind, starting with the very first examples of it -- not the rather bizarre thing about Eve and the apple, but rather about Cain shedding the blood of Abel.

And while on the cross, and in the apex of Jesus' suffering, we could perhaps pass from scenes showing random brutality, lesser and greater all over Jerusalem (easy to think of many examples on the fly -- a man carelessly shoving a little kid, where it falls painfully on the harsh road -- soldiers whipping or even just mocking other prisoners -- muggings -- more crosses being built for even more convicted prisoners...)

And with every such scene, we turn back to the face of Jesus, reacting in pain as if with these other people's pain. It's not just about the cross -- it's about the whole suffering of human sin.

And having already established the timeless theme we know it's also not just about this city or this time. Such suffering occurs to a greater or lesser extent in *all* cities, throughout *all* times.

And the movie about the suffering of Jesus would have become truly universal -- the tale of the suffering of all mankind.

And then he says "Forgive them".

I think it would have worked. And it might have been a better film than it actually was. :-) Hell, it might have even been a better *Christianity* than it actually is. :-)

--

Anyway -- cheers. I'm all done now, and I don't think I'll have the time or energy to review anything else for several days... :-)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

owl

I think maybe you have a misconception of the Christian view of sin.
Any sin is a sin against God. In the parable of the prodigal son Jesus has him say, 'I have sinned against heaven and against you [his father]'. Now the son hadn't done anything to God-incarnate-as-Jesus, he'd just been an thankless brat to his father.
Right from the start of his earthly ministry Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins--all sins. And the Jewish religious leaders knew what he was claiming--'Who does he think he is? No-one can forgive sins but God alone.' That's in Mark 2, well before the crucifixion.

You see, any sin is in effect saying to God, 'I know better than you, I care about my own self more than I do about you, I don't want to do it your way.' That's the point about Eve and the fruit (never states it was an apple, it only was thought to be so because the Latin for bad, malum and apple, malus.)
Eve was effectively saying that she knew better than God, that she wanted to eat the fruit more than she wanted to continue her perfect relationship with God.

And think of just a human relationship that has been ruptured by the fault of one of the members. Forgiveness hurts, doesn't it? It's costly. Maybe it hurts for God too, maybe that's why he had to suffer.

I think that's a good point about 'forgive them' applying to all sinners and not just the people crucifying him. Though how anyone can make the story a basis for anti-Semitism, with that line, I don't knwo.

I sort of get the impression that you're a bit miffed that there is a 'sacred mystery'. But if a religion was perfectly transparent to the intellect, wouldn't you be suspicious and say, 'no, it's too simple to be true'? Look at the world, it's not simple. It's full of quarks and wave-particle duality and quantum physics, and nobody fully understands it. Are you angry with the physicist for discovering a counter-intuitive world?

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

Any sin is a sin against God.

True, but using my theory that would NOT be because God's feelings are hurt because of our disobedience (to tell the truth that always felt like a rather lame reason to me). It would rather be because the suffering we cause by hurting other people would *automatically* be felt (or have been felt) by God himself.

So every sin would be a sin against God, *because* it's at the same time a sin against other people.

But as I mentioned this of course has the side-effect that you can't have sins that are sins against God *alone*. Human suffering would always have to be involved in order to call it a true sin. That's where the real trouble of being able to forgive starts, if God would have to suffer the pain we caused to others before he could say "you are forgiven."

"That's in Mark 2, well before the crucifixion."

Well, yeah, one could choose to see that as a plot hole in my pet theory :-). But always talking hypothetically I would really not expect time linearity to matter much to a God. That whole "universality" theme of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, so to speak, where it echoes (and is echoed) both forward and backwards through time.

In short, one could imagine Jesus to have had this authority to forgive in Mark 2, because he would in the *future* be so crucified. :-)

I sort of get the impression that you're a bit miffed that there is a 'sacred mystery'. But if a religion was perfectly transparent to the intellect, wouldn't you be suspicious and say, 'no, it's too simple to be true'? Look at the world, it's not simple. It's full of quarks and wave-particle duality and quantum physics, and nobody fully understands it. Are you angry with the physicist for discovering a counter-intuitive world?

Mysteries should exist only to be solved IMO. :-) The idea of the mystery that can't be approached by all means in one's disposal, only by blind faith, is ... a rather distasteful one to me.

Among other things, the more one piles mystery upon mystery, leaps of faith upon leaps of faith, the more it ends up seeming like a house of cards, all too easy to collapse. Not to mention that IMO faith is easier to manipulate and abuse, than pure reasoning is. It's the problem I would have really with all religions "ex revelation", not just Christianity.

And ofcourse the other thing about the wave-particle duality or similar stuff is that to most people it *doesn't really matter*. It matters for the physicists, and for physics-enthusiasts, but you don't need to know anything about it to know that it works. Nobody's gonna put a gun in your head and ask you to know all about it or be damned.

On the other hand, the crucifixion of Jesus and his ressurection, and the role they had to alleviate the burden of human sin, are supposed to matter a great deal. And this salvation is afterall also supposed to be the "good word".

Which we should supposedly hear and be gladdened and repent of our sins, rather than just go "What the--? This doesn't make any sense!" as I'd be likely to do... :-)

And on the third hand, physicists didn't actually *create* the complicated world we live in. But if God's the Author or even just the co-Author (alongside humanity) of the story of this universe, I'd expect fewer plot-holes in his Divine Plot.

And I'd also expect the result to be a story that can be appreciated by Intellect, as well as Emotion, Senses and Faith. :-)

From:

owl

Continuing...

And of course the other thing about the wave-particle duality or similar stuff is that to most people it *doesn't really matter*. It matters for the physicists, and for physics-enthusiasts, but you don't need to know anything about it to know that it works. Nobody's gonna put a gun in your head and ask you to know all about it or be damned.

Of course it matters! *miffed physicist* :-P
But no one expects you to have a degree in systematic theology to be a Christian. You can trust in God without having all the theoretical knowledge, in the same way you can use your kettle, or trust yourself to an aircraft, without understanding the electromagnetic interactions and so on. And it's knowing a Person, not a conglomeration of fundamental forces and particles. It wouldn't be fair that only intellectuals could know God--after all, he did say 'Let the little children come to me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' (Matthew 19.14)

But plenty of intellectuals believe in God, satisfying their minds as well as their hearts. There are several theories of 'the mechanics' of the Atonement; personally I think they all are part of the truth (I study physics, I have no problem with thinking apparently contradictory things to be true!)

I think that your 'all-experienced' idea has something in it. God being omniscient, would know what it was like to be human on one level, but for some reason He became human, became one of us. So it was necessary for him to do that, and your reason isn't terribly different from some of the things theologians have thought of, that God ha to suffer the consequences of sin.
Where you disagree with Christianity is the 'what has God to forgive' point. Your theory is working off the modern view of 'sin' (when it's thought of at all) as 'something that hurts other people' rather than a rottenness in the soul, a broken relationship with the One who created us. In his crucifixion Jesus was separated from God, suffering that broken relationship. How about if, for God to forgive, he had to suffer not just the sins of men but the wrath of God for those sins?

Which we should supposedly hear and be gladdened and repent of our sins, rather than just go "What the--? This doesn't make any sense!" as I'd be likely to do...

Well, you need to want rid of your sins before you'll be glad to find a way to do that. If you haven't got to that point yet, then you'll not think the gospel good news. As Jesus said, 'Those who are well don't need a doctor, only the sick ' (Matthew 9.12)--
but of course he was being sarcastic, because no one of us is good. All of us sin.

And on the third hand, physicists didn't actually *create* the complicated world we live in. But if God's the Author or even just the co-Author (alongside humanity) of the story of this universe, I'd expect fewer plot-holes in his Divine Plot.

And I'd also expect the result to be a story that can be appreciated by Intellect, as well as Emotion, Senses and Faith. :-)

No, we didn't create the world. But nor did the theologians and the Christians create God. A self-existent unchangeable God--wouldn't you expect to find His attributes as immutable as the laws of mathematics? He couldn't change His nature anymore than two and two could make five. Christianity isn't about a story God made up; it's about knowing a perfect, infinite, ultimate reality who loves us enough to suffer that for us.

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

From:

owl

You think that His relationships wouldn't be affected by what, or rather who, he is?

From: (Anonymous)

"A self-existent unchangeable God--wouldn't you expect to find His attributes as immutable as the laws of mathematics? He couldn't change His nature anymore than two and two could make five. "

Perhaps. But if He designed and created the world, I'd imagine that His relationship with the universe and his relationship with humanity *wouldn't* be equally immutable, but rather His choice...

If you take the Unmoved Mover to the logical conclusion, you end up with a Supreme Being who is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from a rock. As far as personality and interpersonal relationships go.

The partial solution to this is that some of what looks like cause and effect to us - ie, between persons, you yell at me, I cry - is dependent on a timespace continuum, whereas for a god outside Timespace, the before/after doesn't have the same meaning, so *all* possible relationship, "future" interactions, are always present, so God doesn't change, because change is only meaningful for beings like us. It gets pretty quantum thinking about this.

The other is that the idea that Ideal Personhood is being totally unaffected by anything outside is a distortion, an ultra-rationalist outtake on the genuine sense that true nobility of spirit is above petty retaliation and isn't helplessly shoved around by emotional reactions. But the opposite extreme isn't appropriate either. So a truly superior Supreme Being wouldn't be the Caricature Stoic of the Unmoved Mover, either.

Take your pick. Or, take both - they don't so far as I can tell rule eadch other out.

P@L

From: (Anonymous)

Now mind you, it's been about a dozen years since my last official theology class dealing with this, and this was *extremely* dense stuff that prolly shouldn't have been unleashed on undergrads in the first place (I think it's a wrong to both Anselm and to the unlucky neophytes to force freshmen to read the Proslogion) and it's stuff that top-flight theoretical metaphysics dudes have argued heftily about for centuries, so - take it all with the sodium chloride appropriate.

But again iirc, the "debt we owed for sin" as the old hymn goes, wasn't formulated out and didn't become a major part of Christian thinking until about the 2nd millenium. I will have to drag out my old class notes to be sure and do a lot more reading, but the emphasis earlier was a much more mythic one: poetic justice, really - the Death of Death. The idea - which is one that shows up an awful lot in the art of the Eastern Churches, and got lost sadly in the West and subsumed under the blood'n'schmalz, the crosses and tears and the cherubs and the fluffly clouds - was visually rendered by the Harrowing of Hell, which was a favorite theme for the Anglo-Saxons as well as the muralists and mosaicists out your way: Christ is God-become-Man because humans don't have the power to break out of the cycle, only the Eternal (as the epithet for the Ineffable Name is rendered in my Hebrew-English prayerbook) has the power to break the timespace barrier and change things. But it has to be someone human for it to work as well, because nothing different is accomplished by this, since of course a Creator can mess around with the universe, nothing new there.

So the Deity deliberately becomes mortal and dies, which is akin to stories from India, but all the ones I've read, the gods who are incarnated as mortals it's for some sort of penance, related to the celestial kinstrife that parallels the Olympians and the Titans or the Aesir and the Jotuns, in the Hindu pantheon. This self-sacrifice is akin to Luke going to Vader in ROTJ - it's a trap for Death, which is mythically identified with Hell/Satan, because while the Underworld can hold a mortal soul, it can't hold the Prime Mover, and so as in the mosaics, the "Gates of Hell" are symbolically broken and the souls in Hades set free.

It's one of *those* prophecy things - and I found out not so very long ago that there actually is a cool theme (finally!) of early Christian fanfic which has Satan doing an Evil Contract with Adam & Eve which of course has an escape clause because the impossible condition is fulfilled by Jesus...

(So, really, JRRT isn't doing anything radically new, though it feels like it, with the Athrabeth, because the "blood debt" attempt to turn it into a logical systematized thing, instead of just going with the poetry, was what won out for reasons that are only partly clear to me.)

From: (Anonymous)

Soren Kierkegaard, (who again it's been too many years since I've read) did something really shocking and wonderful in his book Fear and Trembling, where he tears into the accepted Sunday-School notions and makes you *think* about them. People really don't like reading Kierkegaard, because of this, and I've read ministers warning against the dangers of K, who for a long time in his life planned to be a minister himself, because he says - So, what kind of a God asks for Abraham to sacrifice his only son, and why are you all sitting there in your pews smiling and nodding your heads, huh?

The question you ask is of course the obvious one, and you know my take on the question of creaturely guilt from the heated debates of this past summer; to follow the Augustinian path to its full-conclusion, arguing that all good is solely God's credit and none of our own, and all evil is our fault and none of the Creator's, is imo irrational except possibly for very, very narrow and technical definitions of all of the above terms, which render the statement useless. "We're all a bunch of worms," the Puritan view expounded by authors like Jonathan Edwards (Sinners in the hands of an Angry God) "and we should just be greatful that He doesn't step on us," doesn't cut it with me. Any more than the anti-matter "spiritual" crew, all so happy about the idea of the End of the World, all blasé about the glories of earth and sea and sky, not anywhere near as fond of beetles as the Prime Mover appears to be - I think they're blasphemers, personally, right up there with the Barrow-Wights.

--Hell, as pondered by the Oxford Movement crew, is very close to the Existentialist vision of Sartre - No Exit may declare that "Hell is other people" but if you watch the show, you realize that the people can't leave because they a) won't give up their insistence on having the last word; or b) sticking it to the other person; c) don't dare to walk out and be an individual alone in the universe, not defined as part of a social interaction. It's a combination of fear and laziness that keeps them in that room. CSL's vision in The Great Divorce is a little different, in that his denizens of the dismal underworld can't stand each other and ultimately end up moving vast distances to get away from each other - but again, it's because they can't stand to change and to give up any part of their flaws, to admit that they have any. Those who can - in the slightest degree - instantly begin a transformation into beings 'little less than the angels.' If you get up and move out of it, it was Purgatory; if you choose to stay, it's Hell. Giving Melkor a release for good behaviour doesn't work, because Melkor carries his own Darkness in him wherever he goes, and there isn't room in his soul for anyone but Melkor. One of the scariest lines in Silm is the bit in the beginning where it's noted that Morgoth was so good at deception, he even deceived himself about his own intentions. Roads paved with &c.

It was speculated on by Pelagius - and later defined as a heresy, but I am personally willing to consider Pelagianism in the abstract as a possibility regardless - that even Lucifer might be redeemed. Diane Duane has done some very interesting things with this in her Young Wizards series, taking the idea that an Immortal really does exist with a different relationship to the timespace continuum than we finite creatures, and so would have to be defeated again and again and again regardless by champion after champion, hunted up and down the nights and days--

Your ideas about *why* in the story it would be architectonically appropriate for Christ to suffer *in this manner* make a lot of sense and fit in with the Victorious Saviour theme I described earlier. They also sound familiar - but unfortunately, I've read so much stuff over the years that I have a hard time remembering where I run across things. If I remember I will look it up.

Christian pessimists who go around lamenting about how *nobody* these days believes in or talks about evil and good and so on, just don't read enough sf and fantasy or go to cons. (cough*don'tgetoutenough*cough) --Though that is rather a tautological thing to say, I suppose... 8-\

P@L.

From:

owl

Any more than the anti-matter "spiritual" crew, all so happy about the idea of the End of the World, all blasé about the glories of earth and sea and sky, not anywhere near as fond of beetles as the Prime Mover appears to be - I think they're blasphemers, personally, right up there with the Barrow-Wights.

That's Gnostics or Manichees, not Christians, who believe that. I like beetles. I assume God must like them too, to have created them. After all, isn't the material universe really rather fun? Though I'm not altogether sure what bearing the Barrow-wights have on the topic :-D

As for following Augustinian theology to the conclusion--you end up in hyper-Calvinism, in which you would never do anything at all. I think it isn't as sharply cut as all that: 'Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling, for it is God that works in you'--how do you sort out that sentence? Not the one extreme or the other, but somehow both.

That's a good point about Melkor carrying his own darkness--see the power of myth? (Tolkien quits rotating in grave at the multitude of Legolas-romance on ff.net long enough to note this with approval :-P)
I don' think hell is other people, I think hell is yourself, unchecked and unreformed. You'd rather have your pet sins than let go of them and becaome what you were meant to be.

Redeeming Lucifer? I think we can't really know much about the consciousness and mode of existence of angels, just because we don't experience it. There's certainly no reason given to suppose it possible, and several that suggest it isn't.

an Immortal really does exist with a different relationship to the timespace continuum than we finite creatures, and so would have to be defeated again and again and again regardless by champion after champion, hunted up and down the nights and days--

Wouldn't that imply a cyclic relation with time, in order have the very concept of 'again'?

From: (Anonymous)

That's Gnostics or Manichees, not Christians, who believe that. I like beetles. I assume God must like them too, to have created them. After all, isn't the material universe really rather fun? Though I'm not altogether sure what bearing the Barrow-wights have on the topic :-D

Well, they certainly would disagree with you about that! They sure as heck *think* they're Christians. I can't remember who it was, but I remember from sometime quite a while back Aris having an argument with someone who said that getting killed didn't matter because this world was a waste anyway and she believed that because she was a Christian. I can't remember whose LJ it was and what exactly the circumstances, maybe Aris does, but it struck me precisely b/c this person was a LOTR fan and explicitly tied her scorn for the world in with her evangelical faith. And if I do a bit of digging (my bookmarks are on the hard drive that I can't access right now) I will re-find any number of Christian websites expressing this sentiment of waryness and/or outright rejection of the physical world.

(FOTR, "Fog on the Barrow Downs")

Cold be heart and hand and bone
and cold be sleep under stone
never more to wake on stony bed,
never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.
In the black wind the stars shall die,
and still on gold here let them lie,
till the dark lord lifts his hand
over dead sea and withered land--

The Barrow-wight is celebrating the idea here of Morgoth's eventual triumph and third coming, the same "hope of Darkness" that was what blew the cover of Felagund & Co when asked to recite a similar "credo" - the ME equivalent of asking a Christian to trample on a cross and burn incense before the emperor, so to speak. They simply *can't do it*, can't curse the physical world and pray for Melkor's nihilistic triumph.

(The beetles are an in-joke in sf - it comes from the story of the question put to a 19th century scientist as to what, if anything, his studies of the natural world had taught him about the Creator? --Well, said the naturalist, one JBS Haldane, He has an inordinate fondness for beetles! Pratchett ObRefs this in The Last Continent. But when I read that story in the preface to the book "An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles," a beautiful compendium of coleoptera in Borders one night, it hit me like a revelation: humans think that such fondness for beetles is inordinate - and it is, according to the Thomist view of things, in which everything in nature is designed solely for human usage or benefit, and there won't be any of it in heaven because we won't need material stuff.

But in the version of iirc Bonaventure, nature is the inexhaustible fountain of the Divine imagination, that is endlessly creative of the wierd and wonderful. --Yup, I thought, that's why *we're* not God, not even Demiurges - we can't see the point of having a gazillion sorts of redundant beetles, not just pretty shiny beetles but beetles with points and beetles with stripes and beetles that look like something designed after way too many drinks, and beetles that can bite through pencils and beetles too small to even see, and that's just *beetles* not getting near protozoa or even flying insects...)

I don' think hell is other people, I think hell is yourself, unchecked and unreformed. You'd rather have your pet sins than let go of them and becaome what you were meant to be.

But the problem comes to how one defines that "meant to be," and who gets to do the defining, and why.

P@L

From: (Anonymous)

Redeeming Lucifer? I think we can't really know much about the consciousness and mode of existence of angels, just because we don't experience it.

That didn't stop Thomas Aquinas any - there's a *huge* amount of specific stuff on angelology in the Summae. Mind you, it's very helpful stuff for any would-be sf writer, considering what exactly the problems of a being of pure mental energy taking on physical appearance and/or form would involve and the possible ways of doing so. Would an angel, for example, speak in such a way as to disturb the air and reach the eardrum, or merely mess with your mind and create the illusion that you had heard something? Why would a being of pure mind take on the appearance of a body, and would such a being, since such a life-form obviously doesn't *need* eyes to see with in its usual state, be seeing with its "eyes" or would they just be there to make us earthlings feel at ease in communicating with it? And is there enough loose matter about at any one time, say floating in the atmosphere, that a sufficiently strong telepath could gather it up and make a visible body out of it? Anyone planning on writing Trek episodes, this should be required reading.

There's certainly no reason given to suppose it possible, and several that suggest it isn't.

Possible, or going to happen? Those are two different things, unless you get into rather rarified definitions of "possible" (which is, granted, a favorite hobby in my line of work, as is switching between the various definitions on the fly, hot-swapping them to confuse the issue like a con-artist working the shell game.) The traditional orthodox theory - which by your theory you'd have to reject, since it presumes to speak on an area of which we have no direct knowledge (but that logically followed leads as well to Negative Theology, you realize) - is that Immortals have such clear foresight, so to speak, that when they make a decision it is for all time, that's why they can't "change their minds later" because on their ordinary plane of existence, it's always "now." Thus, Lucifer can't grow up like the Prodigal Son and wise up, because as an Immortal the Lone Power always was full-grown and in full knowledge.

I'm not sure I buy this, but that's the argument that was always made to me as to why the Devil couldn't repent. Duane has fun playing with traditional concepts of "name magic" and modern concepts of identity in proposing a solution, but that's all I can say without serious spoilers. But it's very neat.

Wouldn't that imply a cyclic relation with time, in order have the very concept of 'again'?

I'm not sure what you mean by cyclical, but if you mean by that the idea that time is a repeating wheel, no, I don't think so. It works just fine by the Heraclitian mode, with it moving onward continuously, for those who are in the continuum. It's "again" for us, the poor sods going up against the Enemy, and "again" in so far as the Immortals (both bad and good) are working inside the Continuum, for them. In order to act upon the world, you have to enter into it...and therein lies the rub. (Garth Nix has done some interesting things with Chaotic Elementals being seduced to the Light Side by the beauty of mundane things, too.)

P@L.

From:

owl

There's a difference between thinking that your death doesn't matter greatly (after all, it's going to happen one day no matter what), and thinking that all matter is inherently bad. And the person holding it may be a Christain, but it's got no real basis in the Bible. We'll have a body at the resurrection--apparently one that can eat fish.

And I like beetles. I'm no Thomist. I mean, a beetle that can bite through a pencil? That's just cool.

But the problem comes to how one defines that "meant to be," and who gets to do the defining, and why.

Well, would you say that you're perfect at the minute? The best you can possibly be? Is there nothing in you that you would want to change, nothing that you would mind being stuck with for ever? If so, you're obviously an unfallen Elf or something--do you speak Quenya? Sindarin?

From: (Anonymous)

But the problem comes to how one defines that "meant to be," and who gets to do the defining, and why.

Well, would you say that you're perfect at the minute? The best you can possibly be? Is there nothing in you that you would want to change, nothing that you would mind being stuck with for ever? If so, you're obviously an unfallen Elf or something--do you speak Quenya? Sindarin?

So, if I am improving myself by mitzvah, by studying the TANAKH in accord with halakhic tradition, that's okay? How about by making offerings of prayer scarves on the mountain trees, and donations to the temple? Or by taking the first fruits of the land and casting them into the sea? Or by studying the Sutras? Is that all equally fine by you? I don't know very many evangelical Christians (or RCs for that matter) for whom it would be - so if it is, I commend you on your ecumenical spirit! (Be warned, I can out-sass pretty much anyone. Caveat lector.)

The problem is, there's a bit of a legerdemain going on in the public discourse over religion, where a lot of the problem isn't even strictly speaking a question of religion at all. *Ethics* doesn't come from religion, it isn't limited to religion, let alone any one religion. And very little of what is about theology and metaphysics is limited to Christianity, let alone any particular sect. The strictly revelatory aspects are quite small, once you pull out all the things that are merely local custom and nothing more, and it's hard to argue from an objective stance that those are either self-evident (hey, they're revelatory, they can't be self-evident, logically speaking) or necessary for living an upright, even heroically-virtuous life.

--Just as it's difficult to argue honestly from the historic and present evidence that any particular religion (including Christianity) succeeds in making people behave better. An awful lot of the fruit has turned out to be rotten.

And that imo is the primary problem with trying to convert/convince anyone of the necessity of Christianity. (It deconverted me for years.) Introducing them to Christians, in person or via written materials, tends to leave the impression that we're very ill-informed and like to shout a lot. Reading Bible-based web pages frequently makes me think things like "wow, it's good that there's no additional charge for USING ALL CAPS OR EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! on the Internet." And when the non-Christians you know are doing more good works and alternately, *not* doing things like robbing investors blind, the "better for society" thing gets hard to keep holding up.

There's a difference between thinking that your death doesn't matter greatly (after all, it's going to happen one day no matter what), and thinking that all matter is inherently bad. And the person holding it may be a Christain, but it's got no real basis in the Bible. We'll have a body at the resurrection--apparently one that can eat fish.

The particular girl arguing that it wouldn't matter if she were martyred stated that she didn't think there was anything about this world that was worth losing, her treasure was in heaven etc, that was what her faith taught her; which struck me as particularly ironic coming from a Tolkien fan - not to mention the fact that there is no particular virtue in something if it's a matter of indifference! Martyrdom schmartyrdom, so what... (Tho' iirc the particularly objectionable thing was her being willing to sacrifice *other* people's lives for them with the same indifference, so long as she could maintain her ethical purity.)

And I like beetles. I'm no Thomist. I mean, a beetle that can bite through a pencil? That's just cool.

This was featured on the National Geographic about 20 - 30 years ago. The beetle grub was as long as the cover of the magazine, on which they laid its photograph, end to end, at 100%. It was...impressive. They showed pictures of the expedition team gingerly offering the adults sticks to break.

From:

owl

From: (Anonymous)

If you could be perfect by the law, that would be great. Trouble is, we can't. I've tried. And failed.

I agree that at times we're our own worst enemy as far as witnessing to non-Christians goes. But just because someone says they're a Christian/been christened/goes to church doesn't mean they are. If the fruit's not their, the tree's dead.

Of course, this sort of destroys the claim that people should *become* Christians because it will improve them as human beings, if then we have to admit that Christianity isn't any good for making even Christians into Christians.

The fact of the matter is, that those who are inclined to good works will make them, and those who are inclined to good works and religious will justify doing good works by their faith. But those who have no inclination ot help their fellow sentients will refrain, and find justification for *that* in their religion, too.

Regardless of belief system.

I don't think I'd be afraid to die. I'm afraid of pain, but that's different.

That's something that all the guesses in the world, in advance of the prospect, are worthless until you've actually been there. But it's the question of someone else's death that is the real issue anyway.

"As wicked fools I pitied them..."

From:

evilstorm.livejournal.com

I'd give a decent, thoughtful reply if I could, but I can't, because I don't have enough caffeine in my bloodstream, I'm in computer class, and I'm missing my main source of religious theology i.e. my dad. But here's my rambling, anyway.

Beetles--beetles are cool. Everyone with any sense loves beetles. They're pretty, scary, and look like some robot-mech from the future.

The Gnostics and what-have-you are fringe Christians, they're not exactly mainstream and tend to be regarded by the rest of Christianity with a major sweatdrop and "uhhh...okay." Any RC--Any SANE RC should know better than to let difference in religion be a problem concerning goodness of soul. The official theology, and I'm not sure how many RCs actually live up to this, is "so long as you're not hurting people or hurting God, then whatever floats your boat is cool by us". Universal brotherhood and all that. There're Fundementalists who say that if you ain't Christian, you're going to hell--I call them Fundementalist Nutjobs, for a pretty obvious reason, and most of the RCs feel that way too.

I can't speak for all Christian sects, so I'm only going to refer to Catholicism, not because I'm a stuck-up git who thinks that her sect is better than all the others, but because I don't know anything about the rest of'em, I don't have the right to include them in my...dribbling. One of the primary teachings of Catholicism happens to be that God Is Love. Any sort of Love, in any sort of form. That's also why we don't really like gays, because we reckon that it's the sexual act that's unnatural and abhorrent and all that--if you love a member of the same sex like a lover but don't indulge in intercourse, geez, the RC church will very probably applaud you. Because, mainly, it is possible to Love without indulging in sex; love-making is secondary in expression of affection, it isn't really necessary, and if it occurs between a man and a woman it's because it needs to be about procreation AS WELL as about love. But I digress. I think, strictly speaking, that we're not even supposed to go out and evangelize on the streets. We're supposed to live our lives in such a way that people blink and say "Wow...how'd you live like that? How'd you find such meaning in life, how'd you know to do what's right?" And then we're supposed to simply tell them that it's God, explain if they ask for it, but otherwise the rest of it is entirely their choice.

The point about trying and failing--Saint Josemaria Escriva one said "And so we begin, and begin, and begin again". Which pretty much sums it up. Not supposed to try just once, not just twice, but forever and ever, again and again, until you meet God and can honestly tell him "Well...I tried". And that's supposed to be good enough for anyone.

I don't know the logic behind Christ's dying on the cross to redeem all mankind, will get back to you on that later, but the relation between us and God is something like that between elves and the Valar. Or, well, it's closer to that than the image of God as a tyrant king. Respect, and love, is a line that's meant to travel in both directions. To quote a hymn,

"Love it was that made us
And it was love that saved us
Love was God's plan, when He made man
God's divine nature is love
Born of God's love we must love Him
That's why he made us: to love Him
But only when we love all men
Can we partake of God's love
But only when we love all men
Can we partake of God's love."

Something like that, anyway. Which is why it's easier to get into Heaven, after Purgatory, than it is to get into Hell. You have to honestly renounce God with all your soul before you go into Hell. And although He doesn't really treat us as equals, because we aren't, He treats us with the same respect that He would treat an equal with.

And I just went off the line from incoherency to bullshit. Also I get the feeling that I'm preaching. Spork me if I am.

From: (Anonymous)

Any RC--Any SANE RC should know better than to let difference in religion be a problem concerning goodness of soul.

The operative word here is sane.

Clearly *you* are a Post-Vatican II Catholic, with a grasp of the ecumenical spirit of the ideals of that Council - which didn't come out of nowhere, either, they were always there and people had been moving that way for a long time beforehand. The old Baltimore Catechism is a lot more liberal in that regard than most realize.

And even back in the 1950s Fr. Leonard Feeney was excommunicated after a long dispute with mainstream Catholicism where he was setting up his own alternate religious community based on the principle (as they state to this day) that everyone not a baptized Roman Catholic is going to hell automatically, (and so they have to try to convert all of America to Roman Catholicism), and accusing the Vatican of being run by heretics instead, since they weren't pushing this doctrine any more.

If, however, you want to be really scared, read the articles in places that call themselves "Traditionalist Catholic" and believe themselves to be the one, true, faithful group of those who are REALLY Catholic. There are a lot of them online, and they don't really know what to do with themselves now that there is no Soviet Union to fight & the world keeps rolling along as it did thirty years ago. (It's very instructive to read old newspapers and magazines from the 70s right now - the headlines all look just the same. High gas prices, environmental disasters and coverups of people being poisoned, violence in the Middle East, terrorists bombing and hijacking - "In short," as Charles Dickens wrote in the 1800s of the 1700s, "it was a time very like the present."

Women are still the other root cause of evil, though - we should all be good little homebodies like the BVM, and if we wear pants and are "like men" in this "feminist-dominated age" (I don't know what planet they're on, I work with college-educated women who think their partners are heroes for not beating on them) this is against God's will.

They really do want to push everyone into submission to their version of what the world was like in the 1950s, which is as much a fantasy as any utopian community, and they really do believe that everyone who doesn't toe the line as they define it, is automatically going to hell. And if you think that they're not, YOU'RE going to hell as a heretic yourself, you relativist humanist liberal!!11!!! (One thing that Catholic fundies have in common with all other zealots, and many fangirls, is that they tend to use a lot of capitals, exclamation points, and very bad HTML/color combinations on their pages and postings.) Here are a few links, because I have to go to work and anyway, it's really depressing.

http://www.catholicplanet.com/
http://www.latinmassmagazine.com/articles/articles_main.html
http://www.thewandererpress.com/
http://www.newoxfordreview.org/

After all, if you don't accept the doctrine "No Salvation Outside The Church" as formulated not in the Gospels but in 1214 at Lateran IV, with no possible nuances such as Extra meaning Without and it referring to a universal applicability of Christ's sacrifice, then you're a heretic.

http://www.catholicism.org/

The fact that they've been excommunicated for a long time, just proves that the Vatican was taken over by the Devil, just as the apparitions of La Salette and Bayside warned...

It's like an AU/RPG in which these people fully believe. No amount of outside evidence will convince them that the world is not run by vast conspiracies, or that their "history" is fictional, or that their logic is nonexistent. We post-Vatican II Catholics who refuse to accept their version of what is "tradition" and be limited by it, are simply under the power of the Devil and can be ignored.

OTOH, part of the reason they're so frenzied in their rhetoric is that theirs is not a very popular movement at all. They're noisy, but they're not very effective at winning hearts & minds. Or keeping them. (No matter what they say or the grandiose schemes they plan.) They can't even work together, too much infighting. Thus Gibson going off from the SSPX and building his own church for his own family and friends...

P@L.

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

From: (Anonymous)

I'm afraid I don't remember exactly that argument either -- your description of it certainly does ring a very strong bell for me... but are you sure it was in an LJ, rather than on Usenet or some other public forum? *g* Though I've had dime-a-dozen religious debates on the Usenet, my LJ ones tend to be more limited I think.

I'm pretty sure it was on LJ, because I *think* that's how I discovered you had one; I think it was in re a discussion about whether or not it was okay to lie to the Nazis, or something like that. Is that making it any clearer? The two things that really bugged me were the person saying that the world wasn't anything to care about losing (where's the virtue in giving it up, in that case?) and her apparent willingness to sacrifice not simply herself, but other innocent people, to avoid the apparent sin. (I could be totally mixing this up with some other debate with someone else, of course, like I did with the Antipatroi.)

I'm reminded also of the contrast with Beren's song after he leaves Luthien -- he contemplates the possibility of a dark end where everything would be unmade, but nonetheless still calls the world and everything in it blessed and its making good. "Farewell sweet earth and northern sky"

*g* I knew I could count on you to fill in the blanks. Yes, that was one of the things that started the rotation *back* to faith for me - the realization that *this* is what constitutes holiness in Middle-earth (and why I get so bent out of shape when I read people trying to argue that he wasn't *really* a (gasp) environmentalist, no, that's all symbolic... Tolkien's saints are a lot more fun than the ones we were given as kids, for the most part - just like his angels.

"and beetles that look like something designed after way too many drinks,"

*g* More echoes of the Leithian Script, hmm? When Yavanna and her friends had one too many, when celebrating Osse's return to the fold. :-)

Eventually this will all be in the Notes, but this is a tribute to Tolkien's tributes to Mesopotamian mythology which he mentions in Letters, (and which is one of those things which I think makes it so much richer than anyone else's fantasy. There's so much more there than just Celtic or just Germanic.) That was from a bit about some goddesses deciding to make people, knocking back a few beers, and getting a bit competetive about it. (This is supposed to explain some of the problems we have...)

That combined with one of the lines in either LT1 or Lost Road, about how Yavanna gave Ulmo "spells" to populate the deeps, and lists all the things that they came up with, but notes that nobody's quite sure how pearl-oysters got there (a running gag) suggested the idea of partying Demiurges thinking up the stuff that blows your mind when visiting an aquarium... God doesn't just have a sense of humour, but a sense of humour like a deranged four-year-old. I mean, really now -- glow-in-the-dark shrimp? Pipefish? or those things that look like mer-mice under the microscope? Where's the gravitas in that?

P@L.

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

I think it was in re a discussion about whether or not it was okay to lie to the Nazis, or something like that. Is that making it any clearer?

Oooh, yeah, now I remembered. And you are right, it was indeed on LJ, and now that you mentioned the "lying" topic, it was easy for me to search through my stored LJ mail notifications and locate the exact message. :-)

The thread where that brief argument occured was here (about halfway down): http://www.livejournal.com/users/gehayi/28714.html in

gehayi's journal, though it was not gehayi but

zannechaos that I disagreed with. And you are right, she did say among other things, "If I get killed, I'm not missing out on much."

Looking back at it, btw, that post of mine does feel slightly rude of me -- I probably argued just a tad more vehemently than I should have in another person's livejournal. Ah, well... :-)

From: (Anonymous)

Looking back at it, btw, that post of mine does feel slightly rude of me -- I probably argued just a tad more vehemently than I should have in another person's livejournal.

I thought you were pretty restrained, actually. More than I would have been if it had been me.

(And that makes sense, because I stay away from LJ unless specifically directed to, and a friend had asked what I thought of the Thalia fiasco.)

What drives me nuts is when people use bad logic. Claiming the causal relationship, "I do X because *I* am a Christian", with all the packed-in assertions that X is necessary to Christianity, only non-Christians would disagree, etc etc - and totally clueless of the fallacies in the argument, and of the falsity of the premises: X does not necessarily follow from Christianity, nor solely from it, and if you knew more theology/history, you'd know that you self-righteous little twit--

See, that's what *I* would have said... Tact? What's that?

P@L.

From:

skaly.livejournal.com

And having already established the timeless theme we know it's also not just about this city or this time. Such suffering occurs to a greater or lesser extent in *all* cities, throughout *all* times.

I love that idea. Reminds me of the "soft places" from Sandman, a story which, btw, also took place in a desert.

From:

owl

True, but using my theory that would NOT be because God's feelings are hurt because of our disobedience (to tell the truth that always felt like a rather lame reason to me). It would rather be because the suffering we cause by hurting other people would *automatically* be felt (or have been felt) by God himself.

But wasn't your theory that God had suffered the wrongs done specifically to Jesus--a sample of human suffering, so to speak? Why would my commiting muder in the twenty-first century have to do with the incarnate life of Jesus? He'd be able to forgive Judas and Pilate and the Sanhedrin, but how would he forgive the murder of Gerry McCarthy?
Your theory seems to be as much a 'mystery' as the orthodox one.

And why wouldn't God be hurt by our disobedience? Ask any parent of rebellious drugged-up teenagers. God wants us to love Him, to have a perfect relationship to Him, but we mess it up, ignore Him, hate Him, only speak his name when we drop stuff on our toe, etc etc. Why would that make no difference to him than if we were obeying Him?

So every sin would be a sin against God, *because* it's at the same time a sin against other people.

What about sins against the self? Suppose you hate someone. They mightn't care, they mightn't even know about. But that hatred's eating you up inside, destroying you. It's still hurting someone, even if that someone is yourself. Any sin is a fault in you as a human being, a shortfall of the way you ought to be. So it doesn't have to be an 'anti-social' sin to be a sin.

But as I mentioned this of course has the side-effect that you can't have sins that are sins against God *alone*. Human suffering would always have to be involved in order to call it a true sin. That's where the real trouble of being able to forgive starts, if God would have to suffer the pain we caused to others before he could say "you are forgiven."

What about yelling 'I hate you, God!' at the sky? Do you think that's a sin? But the only human being it's affecting is yourself.

Good call on the non-time-linearity, although I think the incarnate Jesus would have experienced time in the same way as we do. God obviously wouldn't--why would He be subject to something he created as part of the space-time-matter universe?

As for your dislike of mystery: there will always be a mystery, even if only in the very fact that the universe exists. Even if we could explain everything else, there would still be that un-analysable inexplicable fact of existence.

Not to mention that IMO faith is easier to manipulate and abuse, than pure reasoning is.

There are very few people in the world who can actullay think. the majority of people don't, which I find depressing.

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

But wasn't your theory that God had suffered the wrongs done specifically to Jesus--a sample of human suffering, so to speak?

According to mainstream Christianity Jesus *is* God. So saying "God suffered what Jesus suffered" wouldn't be much of a theory more like a tautology.

The "sample of human suffering in order to gain the authority to forgive" was one part of the theory -- but as I mention in my original post one could expand the theory to say that (and I quote) "Jesus was at the same time of his crucifixion actually suffering the pain that all members of mankind ever felt (or would ever feel, till world's end) because of other people's sins."

Ofcourse you don't need to have this process of mutual suffering actually happening on that exact time of the crucifixion. One could also claim (another variation of the same theory) that the cross simply represented the suffering that God is constantly experiencing
throughout time, for the same reason.

He'd be able to forgive Judas and Pilate and the Sanhedrin, but how would he forgive the murder of Gerry McCarthy? Your theory seems to be as much a 'mystery' as the orthodox one.

Omniscience of past, present and future -- my theory (even its more extreme variation where God isn't just "sampling" human suffering in order to forgive it, but rather experiencing ALL human suffering ever caused, throughout time) doesn't actually require anything other than omniscience. God knowing people's sins before they make them.

And omniscience is already a part of mainstream Christianity, so I'm not adding any further mystery to this, I think...

Any sin is a fault in you as a human being, a shortfall of the way you ought to be.

I think we disagree on our usage of the word "sin". Though every sin is supposedly caused by some (moral) flaw, not *every* flaw is a sin.

E.g. no Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox has ever needed to go to confession and say "I can't solve differential equations." Those are just individual people's human limitations. Even on moral issues, a person can err and still not sin, if he did the best he could. People are finite creatures.

Now, in the case of moral flaws tend to be seen as "sins" by most mainstream Christianity... my opinion is that the flaws themselves (like the self-destructive hatred you describe) shouldn't be seen as sins but rather as sicknesses of the soul. A religious person may still feel he/she needs the help of God to help him/herself, but I don't see why he wouldn't actually require the *forgiveness* of anyone.

(Ofcourse I know that in this case mainstream Christianity disagrees with me, since all the "Seven Deadly Sins" don't refer to actual actions, but rather the personality flaws (diseases of the soul) that may cause eventual sinning.)

But if an obese friend tells you: "My love of food has become self-destructive. Help me out.", it feels awfully silly to say "I forgive you for the gluttony." It's only when someone other than the person doing something is harmed, that forgiveness is good or even required to have...

"And why wouldn't God be hurt by our disobedience? Ask any parent of rebellious drugged-up teenagers"

Any parallel will stretch so far, but I think that the parallel with disobedience (or ingratitude) to parents, is exceptionally easy to break.

Any parent whose relation with his children is such, that the children are not even sure if he actually exists or not? I think that such a parent, whose children don't even know for sure that he's there, can't expect any kind of obedience or gratitude in return at all.

And if God's helping us out without us knowing about it, IMO he still shouldn't expect the kind of gratitude and obedience than he might feel he deserved if he did his stuff in the open.

From: (Anonymous)

E.g. no Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox has ever needed to go to confession and say "I can't solve differential equations."

Which is a very good thing, as far as I'm concerned...

P@L.

(ObRef: Gary Larson, The Far Side, "Math Phobic's Nightmare," where the chap at the Pearly Gates is told by St. Peter, "You just have to answer one question. So, there are two trains going in opposite directions...")

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

Heh! I hadn't known about that comic strip, but this is amusing -- because I once had a dream which was very similar to that. Dreamed it perhaps 10 (or more) years ago.

I had dreamed that the Second Coming had come and all of mankind was gathering in vast crowds to be judged. This was centuries in the future, btw, and so we were all gathering in some planet other than Earth. (And as a sidenote, I was talking with Wesley Crusher as I was walking with the rest of the crowd, and I remember having to fib about how I knew all about the Enterprise's exploits since even in a dream I was well aware that "I saw you in a TV series" wouldn't go down very well. So this can be considered a ST:TNG/Christianity crossover. :-)

Anyway, in the end of it all, the whole "separating the righteous from the wicked" thing seemed to concern quizzing the various people on trivia about various historical/religious personas from the early church, saints and the like. Things one might perhaps find in a religion quiz at junior high.

But I was just amused when other people looked frightened and I kept telling the people around me things to the point of "nah, this can't matter, half the apostles were uneducated."

I think I woke up before I was judged myself. :-)

From: (Anonymous)

The corollary is the Far Side cartoon with "Hell's Library," as the damned patrons wander through the fiery aisles looking at the titles on the spine, which all say things like MATH PROBLEMS - MORE MATH PROBLEMS - 101 MATH PROBLEMS...

Star Trek is funny but apt, since though they operate on a superficial level, they do use a lot of theology/philosophy in their concepts. Those who say that secular society doesn't care about good, evil, etc have never been to a packed sf con debate full of fen talking about the definitions of evil in say, horror films and Greek mythology and comic books and LOTR...

From:

owl

Yes, I said your 'God had to experience sufering' might actually be true (partly. I don't think any of the theories of the atomenment explain it totally.)

I think we disagree on our usage of the word "sin
Yes, I realised that as soon as I read your first post.
I didn't say every flaw was a sin, I said sins were faults. I was fumbling around trying to find synonyms that would get my meaning across, seeing as you're uing 'sin' to mean something different than I do.

But if an obese friend tells you: "My love of food has become self-destructive. Help me out.", it feels awfully silly to say "I forgive you for the gluttony."

For you, yes. But if God has experienced all human suffering vicariously, by your idea, then that gluttony would have hurt him the same way it's hurting the obese person--sometimes you have to forgive yourself for things, too.

Any parent whose relation with his children is such, that the children are not even sure if he actually exists or not? I think that such a parent, whose children don't even know for sure that he's there, can't expect any kind of obedience or gratitude in return at all.

And if God's helping us out without us knowing about it, IMO he still shouldn't expect the kind of gratitude and obedience than he might feel he deserved if he did his stuff in the open.

What are you looking? Skywriting? 'Hello world, this is Jehovah here!' It's not like He's the Deists' watchmaker that abandoned the world once he set it going. He got involved with the world to the point of dying for it. He will help you know him, if you ask.
At some point you have to stop intellectualising about God, and 'taste and see that God is good'.

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

What are you looking? Skywriting? 'Hello world, this is Jehovah here!'

Yeah, pretty much. Or a divine email would do.

He's done a pretty good job of seemingly allowing the possibility that he's not there at all. So, how can he expect belief as if it's a granted? Not everyone can live on blind faith alone.

But if God has experienced all human suffering vicariously, by your idea, then that gluttony would have hurt him the same way it's hurting the obese person--sometimes you have to forgive yourself for things, too.

*g* Hey now -- my idea was that he was suffering in *order* to be in a position to forgive. You are now reversing the reasoning I gave -- you are making forgiveness required *because* He vicariously suffered, rather than suffering being required because He wants to be able to forgive it.

For the suffering to be a true sacrifice on behalf of God, it has to be his choice. In which case "Nobody asked you, God, to suffer the harms I caused to myself." is a meaningful disagreement, the way I see it.

It's not like He's the Deists' watchmaker that abandoned the world once he set it going. He got involved with the world to the point of dying for it

Except that we don't actually know that for sure -- in fact as I mention in my first half of the review in reality I quite disbelieve that Jesus was anything more than an ordinary human being -- all the following theories I offered, are for me a theological what-if game where I partially suspend my disbelief so as to enter the Christian universe.

You believe in him, but IMO God would be an unreasonable deity if he expected *everyone* to believe in him. That's why I'm saying the parallel with disobedience/ingratitude to parents is an extremely frail one.

From:

skaly.livejournal.com

You believe in him, but IMO God would be an unreasonable deity if he expected *everyone* to believe in him.

I agree with you. I always thought it was a bit unfair that a perfectly good person might not be allowed into Heaven just because he didn't believe in Jesus Christ as his Savior. I've actually spoken to some token Christians about this, and their response was something along the lines of, "The whole point of Christ is that everyone is a sinner and everyone needs to be saved." And this upset me, because it sounded like something that was decided before I was even born. See, I believe God gave us free will, and I don't particularly appreciate the idea of having my life judged until it's over and can be looked at in its entirety. (And now we potentially have the argument that my life *can* be judged before it's even begun, because God is not necessarily "linear." He's everywhere, everytime.) What's the point of free will if it's already been decided that I'm just another sinner that needs to be saved? What's the point of even living, if you already know how it ends?

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

"Sinner" just tends to mean "someone who has sinned" in Christianity. As in *ever*. So you don't need to know someone's life in its entirety to know whether they are "sinners" or not. A single sin suffices to call people sinners. And since some people believe that Adam's and Eve's sin passes on already from birth to the whole of humanity...

You seem to me to be perhaps treating the word as if it means "villain" or "bad guy" instead. Treat it more like "not being perfect, given how perfection is God's alone" and you may find the word to sting a bit less.

As for people not being allowed into Heaven just because they don't believe in Jesus, I think that's only believed by some Protestant groups. I don't believe it's a belief shared by either the Catholics nor the Eastern Orthodox.

From:

katsaris.livejournal.com

As for the example of "I hate you God" that you mentioned -- no, I wouldn't really consider it a sin. Imagine a child who because of the (actual or not) neglect of her mother is hurt -- hit by a car, disabled, raped, choose-your-suffering-of-choice.

In anger for that parental neglect which the child feels caused his/her suffering, the child then says "I hate you, mother."

The mother might be hurt, but any good mother would have been hurt much more by the actual suffering experienced by her child -- not by the fact that the child chose to blame her afterwards.

And IMO no good mother would demand an apology, or even think that the child's "I hate you" was something it would have to be forgiven for, uttered as it was amidst his/her pain.

No matter how much those words might hurt the mother.

From:

evilstorm.livejournal.com

Sort of in the sense that the mother would not expect an apology, but any good kid would give it anyway, because the kid knows it's Not Right. Or we could end up with a Script situation, because the mother would almost certainly be apologizing too.

From: (Anonymous)

Aris--

The 'standard model' of the Crucifixion against which you're reacting is called 'substitutionary atonement'. It is certainly not the only interpretation that Christians hold. The Nicene Creed just says "For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; He suffered death and was buried."

Another important model is "Christ the mediator". Consider Hebrews 2:

"For indeed he who makes holy and those being made holy all have the same origin, and so he is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters ... Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, he likewise shared in their humanity, so that through death he could destroy the one who holds the power of death (that is, the devil) and set free those who were held in slavery all their lives by their fear of death. ... Therefore he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he could become a merciful and faithful high priest in things relating to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people. For since he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted."

So here we have Jesus suffering death because he needs to fully understand the human condition before he can act as our mediator or ambassador to God. God wants, in your words, to treat us from a position of equality, and empathy, and mutual suffering. It's a very short step from there to your "moral authority to forgive".

-Mark

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