jar - On Christianity

I hear that."Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels." Edited by robinrohan, : No reason given.Edited by robinrohan, : No reason given.

How does Jesus Christ fit into your version of Christianity? What's his function?

This makes no sense unless you are claiming that God is just giving his subjective opinion and that He might very well be wrong.Edited by robinrohan, : No reason given.

I guess that's the point of the crucifixion rather than just dying of a heart attack or something.

So the authors of the New Testament were wrong from the beginning (about the "He-died-for-our-sins" concept)?

There is if God is absolutely right in His judgment of us.

I thought they mentioned that in the Bible a lot--that He died for our sins.

Romans 3:25 Whom God hath set forth [to be] a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;1John 2:2 And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for [the sins of] the whole world.1John 4:10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son [to be] the propitiation for our sins.So the authors were wrong about him from the beginning.

The fireman is not "propitiating," however. That means to conciliate an offended powerful agent--i.e., God.So these authors who lived around 60-100 AD, who grew up in the same culture that Jesus did, who perhaps knew people who knew Him, got him wrong, whereas you, living 2000 years later, in an extremely different culture, mindset, different language, different associations, etc., got him right.

What a cop-out!

I'm not sure, but what I wrote would have been the authors' minimal familiarity. Then Jar says, "That's just what I believe, blah, blah, blah . . . I may be wrong, blah, blah, blah. "Jar "believes" that he understands Jesus' message better than those who lived in that era, in that culture.

Yeah, it's real "nice."

I mean whoever wrote the Bible.

Except in some special case, where there is a secret agenda which is later exposed, we understand less and less about a person's intentions
as the years accumulate. His contemporaries and those who were his near-contemporaries understood Jesus' utterances and actions far better than we can because they were much more aware of the context of his remarks, the references he made which are lost on us, the traditions, the laws, and so on.To give an example, Brian's thread on the incident with Barrabas is intended to painstakingly investigate what would have been well-known to anyone who lived in that time and in that area. Brian can only conclude that it was "highly unlikely" that such a tradition existed. A contemporary would have known for certain.

What, after all, are we to do with such passages as this?Mat 26:26 And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed [it], and brake [it], and gave [it] to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.Mat 26:27 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave [it] to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;Mat 26:28 For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.Jesus seems to be saying he's paying for sins with the shedding of his blood. Jar wants to ignore such passages because it doesn't make sense to him. He wants to "modernize" the ideas so that it WILL make sense to him. He turns Jesus into a good-humored party-going liberal suburbanite who thinks we "have to learn to love ourselves"--ideas straight out of modern pop culture. Edited by robinrohan, : No reason given.Edited by robinrohan, : No reason given.