“You think if Jesus comes back he ever wants to see another fucking cross? Thats probably why he hasn’t come back yet. ‘Nope, they’re still wearing crosses.’ That’s like walking up to Jacky Onassis wearing a rifle on your lapel. ‘Just thinking about John, Jacky.’” finger guns
- Bill Hicks
Ironically, the cross is a symbol of unjust suffering. Something which the more prominent wearers like to inflict on others.
No, it represents how Jezus died for our sins, so that we can be free to sin as we please.
As a bored kid in church, this is a question I pondered many times. Why would we choose to honor the method of torture that caused his death?
it’s to honor the sacrifice he made to abscond humanity of their sins.
Yeah, that doesn’t make sense either. How does dying by torture “absolve” (the word you were reaching for) humankind from their “sins,” and what sins are they talking about anyway? Sins are only religious rules, and if religion is a just a human construct, then they aren’t valid anyway.
I’ve never seen a religious message of any kind that made logical sense.
It’s a sacrifice of a perfect (never sinned) life for born and unborn innumerable sinner lives. The sin here is a categorical definition of not being perfect in god’s eyes.
Basically if you were perfect in god’s eyes, every decision, and action, conscious or not, would follow God’s will. Being a sinner just means that, again, in the eyes of God, your every action does not follow God’s will
Here is the logic behind it
An imperfect being life, untold quintillions of them, cannot ever weight the same vs a perfect one in god’s eyes.
The original templates for Human beings, made perfect, willingly sinned , and therefore, made sinners of anyone born of them
The crux of this issue is very deep, but basically, God’s whole sovereignty over his creation were being put to test by an opposing force (Satan) which basically tricked humans to create a situation that enabled the questioning of God legal framework for the then existing humanity and proposing that humans could, in actual fact, self govern and make perfect decisions with their lives without God’s intervention.
The very nature of the questioning line implies that had God cleaned the slate clean, deleting everything as a bad game of Sims, his very nature would have been made obsolete. So this was a non choice in god’s eyes
It also implied that, without sufficient time, imperfect beings would never be able to self organize to discover a way to self govern without God’s intervention.
The third implication was that it was unfair for God to punish innumerable unborn generations for the mistake made by their originating template.
A plan was made by God himself to solve this, the bible calls this a prophecy, in which a perfect life was to be the sacrifice for the born and unborn innumerable sinners which were thrown into that situation (understandable, how can an unborn person have done anything to be a sinner) without being directly responsible for it.
Jesus life, born under the protection of god’s shadow, being born. perfect (again never sinned) more than matches against the weight of any number of imperfect lives.
That’s why the bible calls his sacrifice a “once and for all” kind of deal. It basically applies against 99.99% of anything a human can do consciously or not to sin.
Unasked
Undeserved
Unlimited forgiveness.
I can explain more but that’s basically the gist of it
Thanks for the explanation, but that is absolutely crazy. Literally every word of it is fabricated by humans trying to figure out some way of justifying the control of others. Not one single concept is backed by any factual evidence. It’s all just a fairy tale, or mythology. It’s astonishing that anyone living in the modern world believes any of it actually true, and that they live their entire lives by it.
Even if you believe that this is all the work of “God,” how can any human claim to know what God actually thinks or wants? The entire concept of religion was created by humans who claim to know what God wants from us, and anyone who says that is automatically a conman.
I can only say that once I started studying physics, QM seemed crazy too. I won’t even go into the astrophysics patchwork that is the ∆CDM models, that’s bonkers. Even the CMBR looks like it’s assuming a lot of things to me, and lately it’s been taking a beating with new findings.
There is bunch of things people say or do that are crazy or astonishing for you without context. Id suggest you to try not dismissing those things with a thought if you really want to understand them.
The claim of no factual evidence begs the question of what is factual evidence for the reader. Also self explanatory within the context of the book we are discussing.
As for the question of knowing what God thinks or wants, it’s self explanatory, given that we are dealing in a discussion within the context of a book that, presumably, tries to explain that to readers.
Beyond the advice, you are obviously allowed to think anything about anyone.
I’m a musician, and I can explain music in such fine detail that it would sound like a foreign language to a civilian, the same as your physics analogy. Just because the advanced version of a real world concept is beyond the understanding of most people doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
But religion has to stay simple enough that the average rube can understand it well enough to buy into it, and even then, the leaders demand that at some point, you should stop asking questions and just believe based on FAITH, based on what they TELL you, with no evidence at all.
And the book always becomes the backstop - “Because the Bible tells me so” becomes the fallback defense to everything else, as if that simply closes the discussion. The Bible is nothing but a book of confirmation bias justifications for whatever religious leaders demand from us, usually money. The original accounts were written by barely civilized humans without the same demands for evidence, logic, historical accuracy, etc. that we demand from modern authors, and then compiled, edited, and promoted by people with an agenda to control the population. The Bible is not evidence, and has no place being cited as a source for religious veracity. Making up a religion, and then writing a book to explain it, is not evidence, it’s a con.
If religion can’t be proven based on actual evidence, without bringing the Bible or Faith into the discussion, then it’s nothing more than mythology, and mythology should not be a consideration when managing this country’s, and the world’s, current problems.
IDK and idc. I went to a nun school and I wasn’t convinced either but that’s what I was told it meant
If God is all powerful, couldn’t he just do that without all the bloody, painful, torture part???
That’s what I wondered about.
The Cristian god prolly just enjoys a good drama
I always think of Jesus in the electric chair and followers wearing little “electric chairs” on a necklace
the whole point of Christianity is that Jesus sacrificed himself to absolve humanity of the original sin. The cross represents the sacrifice.
And yet having sacrificed himself, he’s now back hanging out with his Dad in heaven and having a great time. That’s not a “sacrifice”, it’s more like a bad time at summer camp.
It was a bad three-day weekend.
If God is all powerful then why not just absolve us from the sin?
If this sacrifice was required, then he is not all powerful or he is into torture pron.
I’m not an expert in the Bible, but I don’t think it really ascribes omnipotency to God. I think it’s better to understand it as God being able to do all that can be done. So He may have limitations, but they are such that no other being can do something that He is unable to do.
From that sense, He is not able to save humanity freely, but he can set forth a process through which He can achieve this goal with some cost. I.e., He can create a divine being (that is either Himself in whole, Himself in part, or a direct descendant of Himself depending on your interpretation) that is able to spread His message and display an act of extreme self-sacrifice.
I don’t really understand exactly what the sacrifice did or what needed to be fixed, but I do think the stories make a lot more sense if you accept that God has some limitations. For instance, I assume that Noah’s flood was his first attempt to fix the problem (by killing everybody except for the most righteous of His creation), but it failed because He can’t do everything and doesn’t know everything. And the story of Jesus was His next attempt to sort things out.
But that’s just me thinking about them as fictional stories that really need to be edited rather than a divine and infallible truth.
Ok…so there are rules that God must obey…so he’s not all powerful, otherwise he would just change the rules
Yeah, none of that makes sense. How much do you have to disengage your intelligence to somehow believe in that baloney enough to actually rule your life by it? Seriously weird.
look pal i cant even be in a church without breaking out in hives, im just throwing out an easy explanation
Jesus was born in September and christmas trees are giant dicks. Yes you read that right. They’re penises. Festively festooned penises. Blame the catholics. They steamrolled every pagan tradition they could find into the catholic canon in order to convert the peasants to their particular cult.
Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Okay so what makes pine trees dicks? I knew about Jesus being in the wrong month and about taking over the pegan winter festival, but nothing about dicks.
I can’t speak for everyone, but when I wear a cross it’s in reference to Matthew 16:24
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?”
To me the cross is symbolic of finding the courage to live our lives motivated by a radical love in order to overcome the fear of death and pain.
It’s like Goku once said while fighting to save the world “this is the power to go further beyond”
I feel though like wearing a token cross in honor of being told to take up a more literal cross seems like paying lip service to a very serious call to action with very low actual stakes.
Like being told to stand up to the guns of an army to stand firm for justice and then wearing little rifle pendants instead claiming that means you look to live your life consistent with that principle even as you stay well away from actual fighting.
You may personally of course live your life consistent with the values and that is just a symbol, but it’s broadly a symbol that has been cheapened by casual overuse, and to some extent corrupted by folks using it as a symbol of their alignment to God and implied divine authority granted by that association.
Yeah, in my opinion it shows the power consumer culture has to erode the meaning of things. “This symbol used to stand for something, but it got too popular and now it’s just slapped on stuff to sell merch.”
It’s a bit like being told to go out into the world and tell everyone about your religion, and you do it by taping a cardboard sheet to your front and back with “Jesus is Lord” written on it.
Haha, I can actually get down with that. Anyone crazy enough to do that is probably a genuine person who’s willing to engage with the insanity of existence.
I was joking, though. There are actually people who wear sandwich boards with religious messages on them, specifically to fulfil the call to proselytise.
They often stand near shops.
I almost respect people who really try to talk to me more for actually fulfilling the spirit of it, rather than the letter.
Y’ever think about how if Jesus died by a guillotine there’d be guillotines everywhere
You think if he was shot the gun manufacturer would use that in their advertising?
I like crucifixes, i study their design and craftsmanship while the Karen wearing it is berating me at work and threatening to call my manager.
The American Christian message: Act like Jesus and we will crucify you too.
I have always thought that choosing the cross as the universal symbol of Christianity is the most twisted and sad thing in the world.
That is why I prefer the Ichthys. It represents Jesus’s high point, when he performed a miracle for the all the people. For me, it’s better to remember people at their best than at their worst.
Referenced by my favorite Philip K Dick novel VALIS, the symbol of early Christianity: Fish cannot carry guns.
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It also means that! The fish and the loaves, the fisher of men, the fish that Jesus ate after his resurrection. It is a symbol with a very broad meaning.
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Many Christian, but non Catholic denominations definitely do not use, or phased out the usage, of crosses ( also fish symbols/religious stamps/rosaries and so on) as they understand this fact
Also they understand that Matthew 16:24 is referring to a Stavros/stauros, literally a wooden torture stake/pole, in allegory to taking a heavy responsibility, in general, as previous context shows that spreading the lord’s message, with the difficulties it may bring, to extract a heavy toll on the average person’s life, up to the point of having to sacrifice said life
They also understand that even thought the old law have been abolished, the spirit of it keeps on on many of their aspects, so no worshipping idols of any kind (imaginary or physical) is seen as the practical approach
Sam Kinison had a routine where he was pretending to be Jesus explaining why he hadn’t returned yet: “yeah, I’ll be back as soon as I can PLAY THE PIANO AGAIN! OH OHHHHHHHH!”
The government just declassified documents that describe the first time humans made contact with an alien race. We found out that not only do the aliens know about Jesus, he revisits them every year for a big celebration. "Every year?” the humans asked, “We’ve been waiting for him to come back for over 2000 years! How did you get him to return?”
“I don’t know, we’re just friends. The first time he visited, we gave him a big bag of our finest chocolates. What did you guys do?”
Not a religious person here, but I think it’s a metaphor, where we all are carrying a cross, like jesus did, but smaller… and lighter…
just another example of Christians cherry picking what they what to use from their religion and using it out of context to better serve their agendas.
Of course he liked crosses! There was even that one cross he used to hang at.
Nailed it.
It was inherited from Zoroastrianrism.
