- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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“I saved you from being sent to hell.”
“Wait, who was going to send me to hell?”
“I was”
“…”
“Praise and worship pls, I suffered a lot for this.”
The OG conservative undiagnosed-something parent.
You know, when you phrase it like that Jesus sounds a lot like Donald Trump…
God is also called father, for he is the Godfather of Godfathers, and your protection money is eternally due.
Won’t someone unmute jeezus
(OT: nice nostalgic username btw. Reminds me I have to take my back pain medication.)
Thanks and same.
Remember that religion is true to the poor, false to the rich, and useful to the powerful.
False to the rich when inconvenient, yes, even as they wrap themselves in the mantle of it for public appearance.
That’s when it’s useful to them.
Remember, the concept of hell doesn’t exist anywhere in Jewish or Christian scripture. It’s a much later Hellenist addition.
I’m atheist but Jesus definitely references hell in the Bible
A quick Google search returned this (a few are from the new testament and the evangelists):
This is incorrect. The word “hell” is not Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic and does not occur anywhere in scripture. Every time you see the word “hell” that word has been intentionally mistranslated from other words that already have clear, unambiguous meanings. Aside from word choices, the concept itself originates in Hellenism, the literal Greek Hades. The Roman cults injected their own tradition into the growing Christian cult, and gradually it evolved in the cartoonishly silly “fiery underworld of eternal torture” concept, a very convenient tool for controlling a populace through dogmatic terror.
That’s about the word “hell”. The concept is there. In fact many of the verses do not mention the name of the place, just the description or punishment
The concept is also not there. In the Hebrew the word sheol is used. This literally means “the grave” and is used for death and the dead, exactly as we understand it in a modern secular sense.
Gehenna is one of the words used by Jesus. This is dripping with meaning from the Old Testament, where children were burned alive in sacrifice to other gods and buried in a potters field nearby. It is symbolic of meaningless, pointless, anti-covenantal death, then being anonymously buried and forgotten like garbage, rather than beloved family.
Jesus also uses Hades — literally the Greek underworld — for a parable to a Hellenist audience. The parable is about culpability and the permanence of the consequences of wickedness. Wicked people would not be swayed even by a dead relative appearing and warning them. This is a parable, a literary device, not a sudden declaration that the Hellenist underworld, foreign to Judaism, is physically objectively real.
Jewish scripture is surprisingly consistent about this. Dead means dead. None of the New Testament authors contradict this. The controversy of the time was whether the dead would be resurrected and judged at the end of all things. That mythology began during the Maccabean revolt — which is also when the book of Daniel was written and assembled — and which is a major influence on Jesus and his teaching. In that mythology, dead is still dead, but they will be resurrected and judged. The righteous will be given a retirement plan and eternal life in a new creation, those who are not found righteous will be burned like trash and remain dead and forgotten forever.
I’m pretty sure that the Abrahamic concept of Hell isn’t from Hades, since Hades is not a place of suffering, just a place where dead people go without punishments or rewards, a concept that occurs in many, many religions. Tartarus, on the other hand, is more similar to the Abrahamic (or especially Christian) Hell, but the main distinction here is that Tartarus is reserved for the people that the gods are REALLY pissed with.
Basically, ancient Hellenic afterlife can be split into three places: Elysium, for very, very good people, Tartarus, for very, very bad people, and Hades for everyone else.
So wait… God saved us by killing himself to save us from himself ???
Well… he saved us by making us kill him so he can forgive us for not listening to his orders.
“Okay, Judas Iscariot. I have a grand universal plan to eradicate original sin from the mortal plane. You have an extremely critical role in all of this: you must betray Jesus Christ, leading to his arrest, conviction and inevitable crucifixion.”
“Sure thing, God. What do I get in return?”
“As thanks for carrying out my plan exactly as I laid it out, you get several pieces of silver.”
"Oh and a sweet deal in the afterlife, right?
…
…
…
And a sweet deal in the afterlife… Right?"
“Well, your name will be remembered forever”
“For being a critical part of the plan right?”
🎵 When I was a young man, the Romans
Took me up to Golgotha, to be a martyred man
I said, “Son, when you grow up, would you be
The savior of the poor, sick, the homeless, and the damned?” 🎵🎵🥁🥁🥁🎶🥁🥁🥁🎶🥁🥁🥁🎵
And if you don’t sin, then Jesus died for nothing.
The whole thing about Jesus saving us by suffering and dying… If god was all powerful, he could have saved us without all the suffering part. Since he had to suffer, there are rules that god must adhere to. If god has to obey rules, then he is not all powerful.
…wat? It’s not because there’s rules (he very well could have simply snapped his fingers), it’s because he wanted to demonstrate to us how much he loved us. It has to do with the whole “he is the embodiment of both perfect love and perfect justice” thing.
“I’m going to torture and murder this man who helped the poor and sick, just to show you how much I love you”.
Yeah, seems pretty on point for the “you are my chosen people, murder everyone else” god.
So god is a masochist?
He could have demonstrated how much love there is by removing all suffering from the world by snapping his fingers too.
It’s interesting how art reframes familiar stories to highlight empathy and responsibility in a simple way.
This is the parable of the sheep and the goats in action lol
MBA in theology
“Father, I apologize. I was wrong.”
“fuck them kids”
What an idiotic strawman.
It isn’t that “this argument wouldn’t work on me”, you addlepated twit, it’s that I WOULDN’T NEED SUCH AN ARGUMENT, LET ALONE THE THREAT OF ETERNAL DAMNATION, TO CONVINCE ME TO DO GOOD, and anyone who does require such a threat is a bad person, kept from committing heinous acts only by fear of retribution, and is worthy of contempt. Full stop.
Christians hate it when you argue against their beliefs AND when you argue for their beliefs.
“picture of wojak face”: how dare you use my purported believes against me. Everyone knows that I can pick and chose what parts of infallible word of a literal god I believe in at any point in time, it’s actually you who’s hypocritical because you don’t share my believes therefore can’t talk about mine.
Matthew 25:36-40 has Jesus being pretty explicit about his followers being called to feed the hungry and comfort the sick.
I have a lot of respect for Christians who understand their Christianity and Jesus’s sacrifice as an obligation to take up the cross and follow him. I don’t have a lot of respect for “Christians” whose belief system solely amounts to their pastor telling them that god hates gays.
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
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.
