I never understood the most basic, fundamental point of Christianity - how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?
“Oh, you think it’s so easy? You get crucified, and if you really do it, I’ll forgive everybody’s sins.”
“That’s bullshit. You won’t do that.”
"I’ll go you one better - I’ll forgive their sins forever.
All right, you got a bet!"
If I committed a murder, that murder doesn’t just go away just because some random, third party person died somewhere, 2000 years ago. My victim is still dead, the family is still sad, and I’m still a murderer.
The next time I’m in front of a judge, can I claim my crimes are already absolved because a guy died long ago? Of course not, I’m going to jail. The government doesn’t buy that story because it makes no sense, and I’m not buying it either.
It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.
The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.
I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.
There’s one thing that still bugs me about this narrative. Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice. He wasn’t killed as an offering to God for the sins of humanity. He was killed because he was giving the peasants ideas that the ruling class didn’t like. Unless God sending him to Earth in the first place was the sacrifice, by the logic that God knew how it would turn out. But then God is the one offering the sacrifice… to God.
That is actually the Christian understanding. To make it even weirder, in a sense, Jesus is God in this scenario. So God sacrifices Himself for the sins of humanity.
Well I am an atheist myself, but the key is that in the old testament god gave every human the blame for the original sin.
And the special thing with Jesus dying and taking all sins with him is, that now god won’t hate every human just because Adam and Eve stole some fruits.
This some weird story but yeah. Basically after Jesus, god wasn’t that angry anymore.
Original sin is not a concept found in the Bible. That concept developed later. If you read Genesis, Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden just for knowing good and Evil, with an implication that this was too close to godhood for God’s liking
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Later scholars interpreted this as an “original sin” that gets passed on to all humans but that isn’t in the original text and even today Jews don’t believe in original sin despite having the same scripture to work from.
I never understood the most basic, fundamental point of Christianity - how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?
“Oh, you think it’s so easy? You get crucified, and if you really do it, I’ll forgive everybody’s sins.”
“That’s bullshit. You won’t do that.”
"I’ll go you one better - I’ll forgive their sins forever.
All right, you got a bet!"
If I committed a murder, that murder doesn’t just go away just because some random, third party person died somewhere, 2000 years ago. My victim is still dead, the family is still sad, and I’m still a murderer.
The next time I’m in front of a judge, can I claim my crimes are already absolved because a guy died long ago? Of course not, I’m going to jail. The government doesn’t buy that story because it makes no sense, and I’m not buying it either.
Edit: Numerous insightful replies, I’m impressed. Thanks, gang!
It’s based on the old idea of offering sacrifices to atone for sins. Do bad thing, sacrifice a dove or whatever to God to make up for it.
The idea is that God decided to do away with the sacrifice system using said system, by sending and then accepting a sacrifice great and pure enough to wipe the slate clean forevermore - his own self/son.
I’ve heard that it hits people from cultures where they do still sacrifice for every sin particularly hard - we might not have the frame of reference to really get this fully anymore.
There’s one thing that still bugs me about this narrative. Jesus wasn’t a sacrifice. He wasn’t killed as an offering to God for the sins of humanity. He was killed because he was giving the peasants ideas that the ruling class didn’t like. Unless God sending him to Earth in the first place was the sacrifice, by the logic that God knew how it would turn out. But then God is the one offering the sacrifice… to God.
That is actually the Christian understanding. To make it even weirder, in a sense, Jesus is God in this scenario. So God sacrifices Himself for the sins of humanity.
Well I am an atheist myself, but the key is that in the old testament god gave every human the blame for the original sin.
And the special thing with Jesus dying and taking all sins with him is, that now god won’t hate every human just because Adam and Eve stole some fruits.
This some weird story but yeah. Basically after Jesus, god wasn’t that angry anymore.
Original sin is not a concept found in the Bible. That concept developed later. If you read Genesis, Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden just for knowing good and Evil, with an implication that this was too close to godhood for God’s liking
Later scholars interpreted this as an “original sin” that gets passed on to all humans but that isn’t in the original text and even today Jews don’t believe in original sin despite having the same scripture to work from.