I can't help myself...Sorry...

God didn't sacrifice anything.  He put himself on earth to and gave the illusion of sacrificing himself but he didn't really sacrifice anything because he just returned to life and ascended shortly after just as he planned.  It was all an elaborate demonstration of power and no actual sacrifice happened.  This is why, today, we have so many actors.  Because acting is the ultimate 'props' to god who was the biggest actor of them all.  He was so good at acting, he even acted like he existed. 

Couldn't we have just sacrificed a bunch of lambs instead?

Again, words from my former faith: 

The purpose of God asking for the sacrifice of a son was not because He wanted the child dead, but was simply a test of faith.  I forget the characters in this story, but the son was not killed, because the father showed enough faith and piety to God to follow his instructions, even though it involved an unthinkable act.

As for abortions, how many people do you think there are who are told by God to abort the child? 

I sacrifice millions of my children every night. I outdo all of yall in piety!

Did Jephthah know his daughter wouldn't be sacrificed?  Oh wait, she was.  Never mind. 

First, if Jephthah did sacrifice his daughter, God did not approve of the sacrifce. Jephthah went against God by sacrificing his daughter.

Second, some scholars believe that actually Jephthah's daughter was dedicated to special service to the Lord and kept a virgin instead of being killed. 

I see. So jesus nailed himself to the cross? I have misunderstood this whole passion play thing apparently.

Maybe you can explain to me how "dying" and coming back to life is a sacrifice? Or how a god, an omnipotent, all-powerful, all-knowing being, can even make a "sacrifice" in the first place? What does it mean when an entity that is the master of all creation claims to "sacrifice" something? What could that possibly demonstrate, except maybe that humans are really, really gullible?

Seriously, what does this whole thing mean? If I'm god and I'm all-powerful, how can I make a sacrifice in the first place? This would be like me, walking out on my front lawn, standing over an ant pile and pulling a hair out, showing it to the ants going, "Look, my children, at this great sacrifice I have done to forgive you of your sins. Worship Mah!"

And of course there's the ridiculous idea that he sacraficed himself to himself in order to counter a rule he made (when, being all powerful, it would be very simple to forgive unconditionally.)

Christ, I'm gone for a day and theists are coming out of the woodwork, ruining their own arguements.

The fact of the matter is that Abraham's sacrifice of his son had very little to do with the sacrifice itself.  Instead, it was a test of Abraham's devotion to Him.  The fact that he was willing to sacrifice Isaac proved that he was totally devoted to God, as it was arguably the greatest thing that Abraham had to sacrifice.

 Now to how real Jesus' "sacrifice" was - his life was pretty bad.  He was poor, he lost his father at a young age, he was a social pariah, he was betrayed by those closest to him, and was tortured, ridiculed, and killed in the most aweful way, all living without sin.  God humbled himself by putting himself into human form, and suffered degredation of the worst kind, when he did not even have to die.

xam, ...would you think i was a weakling if i told you that made my eyes water.

Uhhh, are your eyes waterin because you found my writing good, or because it hurt your eyes? 

The bible says that Jephthah's daughter knew no man.

First, human sacrifice is against the law of Moses. Second, Jephthah had great respect for God. This great respect would prevent him from making a human sacrifice. Third, Jephthah let his daughter bewail her virginity for two months fits an explanation of perpetial virginity better then human sacrifice. Fourth, the bible says she knew no man. Something that would probably not be mentioned if she was going to be killed. Fifth, the Bible provides evidence that such devoted service for women did exist at the central sanctuary. Sixth, It is possible to translate and in v. 31 to mean or. 

 Except that until Jesus came, there was no real mention of any afterlife for anyone after death.  The concept of going to heaven or going to hell came with Jesus.  Before that, death was death.  So by Jesus coming and sacrificing himself, he opened the door for all for eternal life, but also opened the door for eternal damnation.  So Jesus wasn't just being nice - he was changing the order of things.

Look, throughout the OT, forgiveness of sin required sacrifice - there was no way around it.  Sacrifice was needed to absolve one's sins.  It was like saying "I'm sorry I stole that piece of bread, please forgive me.  Here, take my best sheep."  Sacrifices were the destruction of something pure so that one could be in good favor of God.

When Jesus came, he was the "perfect sacrifice".  He was totally pure and holy, and was killed in the worst possible way.  He was the sacrifice for humanity.  To claim his sacrifice, one would only have to ask for it. 

I'll be surprised if you get a good answer to this question from a mainstream Christian who hasn't studied theology.  They themselves don't know and aren't taught where the idea came from.  It's probably a good thing from the standpoint of carrying out a continuing program of religious indoctrination, since the historical explanation makes a lot more sense (and calls the whole "plan of salvation" into question) than the typcial self-contradictory and nonsensical glosses that most Christians learn.

It's funny, I was just reading today about an inscription from a clay tablet uncovered in Gudea in ancient Sumeria (at least 7000 years old) that discusses why they sacrifice animals instead of humans.  The tablet-writer said "The lamb is the substitue for humanity; he hath given up the lamb for his life."

This idea is as old as civilization.  Temple offerings are one of those rare human universals that every known culture all though the history of civilization on Earth have participated in.  That fact alone suggests from an evolutionary psychology standpoint that it has some kind of adaptive function.

But the specific explanation for what Jesus' death meant has gone through hundreds of changes in the last 2000 years.  Many early Christians--including, by the way, the author of the Gospel of Luke/Acts--considered the crucifixion to be insignificant.  For these Christians, *baptism* was the way to get eternal life.  Paul of Tarsus with his Pharasee-inspired need for atonement is the one who introduced the idea that the crucifixion was a sacrifice for sins.  Then when Augustine of Hippo introduced the idea of original sin (4th century), the stage was set for this whole business with everybody needing to be saved from hell.

Since then many smart people have been trying to answer the question of exactly how the sacrifice supposedly works with varying degrees of success.  Anselm of Canterbury has a really fun explanation (I think) that talks about the reciprocal relationship between God and the Devil, where the Devil was tricked into breaching their contract by taking a person without sin (Jesus) into hell, and that allowed God to invoke a clause in their agreement that gave Him all the saved souls from that point on.

But for mainstream American Protestants, all that stuff is completely forgotten.  You get a variety of weirdly convoluted answers, but I have yet to see one that actually stands up to the most cursory logical assessement.

Well my own personal favorite theory is that, once you get away from hunting-gathering (where temple offering customs are rare) and into domesticated animals and crops, you wind up with a lot of excess goods.  Its a result of the inevitable increase in efficiency of production; you'll be familiar with this phenomenon if you ever grew zuchinni in your back yard.  You can use up some of the excess stuff making wine or beer or oil or whatever, but at some point there's a bunch of stuff left over and everybody's sick of zuchinni bread already, so why not take the extra down to the god-house and leave it there for the local deity.

Then this works into a feedback relationship where the priesthood starts developing, and in order to survive they charge fees in kind for various services--fertility spells and cures and so forth--until the relationship can become exploitive.  Again those ancient Sumerian tablets show that this was an ongoing problem for the 4000+ years of their civilization, since they always had to be making laws to prevent the priests from overcharging or stealing wood from widows back yards or whatever.

But then the Babylonians get the idea from the Sumerians (like most of their ideas) then the Hebrews live in Babylon for several generations as captives, so they return to Jerusalem in the 7th century B.C. with these Babylonian ideas of sacrifice at the temple for atonement for sin (via the Zoroastrians in Babylon).  By the time of Jesus it had developed into a highly-exploitive system of charges.  The variety and size fees for services that the temple at Jerusalem charged would make the Scientologists look like amateurs.  Nobody ever asks why the money-changers that J threw out were in the temple in the first place--they were financing peoples fee payments.

Then you get Paul, again, who was a Pharasee and raised in this tradition that there can be no atonement without sacrifice, and his idea won out over Luke's because it went along with the Greek tradition of sacrifice at the temple (which, again, they got from the Babylonians). 

Now doesn't that make more sense? 

I think Textom's explanation makes a lot of sense.

The whole notion of a "soul" is an obvious attempt to address the ego and insecurity associated with death and power, or lack thereof. What a soul is, or how it came about is probably ultimately irrelevent because it is an abstraction. However, the murdering of creatures to pay debts is definitely something tangible and worthy of examination.

My whole point is, we have been systemmatically reducing the importance of this ritual over the last thousand-plus years. The christians actually seem to be one of the more backward groups that are still trying to revitalize this obsolete notion.

And as you can see, none of the theists here can offer any explanation, much less something reasonable, that justifies this goofy practice or the respect any semblance of it should garner in present day society. The most they can do is paraphrase bible lore to explain certain examples of the practice while sidestepping the real issue, which is whether or not any of this is even remotely moral or acceptable in a modern society.

Thanks, Pile.

Well in a lot of religions, fees for temple services are associated with burial rituals, so they get their connections with the death and soul that way too. 

Even in modern day China there's a huge complicated set of traditions surrounding buying the right kind of coffin and having it buried just so and then later on digging it up and repackaging the ancestor's bones in a different container for reburial in a communal mausoleum, and every step of the way there's stuff to buy from the most basic incense stick to the most elaborate gold urn.

But you can even see this dynamic of sacrifice in Western countries in the amounts that people are encouraged to spend on funerals--in the grand Egyptian tradition of "he who has the most expensive funeral gets the most enjoyable afterlife."

So death, burial, gods, souls and sacrifice are more visibly related in most world/historical cultures than they are in the 21st century Christian west. 

I do agree with what you are saying, Pile.  The reason for the lack of personal sacrifice today, though, is obvious.  First of all, as we established earlier, physical sacrifices are no longer needed to be in God's favor.  The message of Jesus is that your sins have already been payed for, so nothing else is needed.  This lack of a need for sacrificing anything, be it money, time, or social status, gives many excuse to live a more comfortable life.  Churches usually say that things should be given to God in thanks for his gift, yet most do not have the impetus to do so.

Just when you think things have become as ludicrous as imaginable, nope.

See, this god that was so meticulous before, outlining all his rules and regulations, from how to handle women on PMS, proper genital manipulation, which foods you can eat and what days you can work, to how to beat slaves, properly deal with women as property and the preparation of ritual sacrifices, suddenly, AMBIGUOUSLY dictates after jesus' resurrection that the rules have changed. A few vague references appear to imply that "things have changed" but to what degree and how? Well that's conveniently left out, so every christian has his own version of what jesus' sacrifice really meant. How conveeeeeenient.

What "truth" are you talking about? (That isn't currently credited to P.T. Barnum?)

What truth in the bible that jesus "discovered" isn't something anyone with half a brain didn't already know? Killing people is a bad idea? Being kind is a good idea? Wow! Thanks jesus. I was wondering about that.

A lesson eh?  That implies you learn something, hopefully that makes you a better person in one respect or another, right?  The only lesson I see that christians have learned seems to be, "How not to be a sociopath" since many christians claim without jesus that's what they'd be.  Is that the lesson he teaches?  Fear me or else you'll turn into a psycho?

So what exactly is this lesson his followers have benefitted from? 

What lesson was this that mankind didn't already know? And what lesson have his followers learned that they demonstrate today?

I don't see christians being any more forgiving, loving, or benevolent than non-christians.

I don't see people who have accepted jesus as their savior being any better people. I don't see them killing less creatures. I don't see them making more of a contribution to mankind.

I don't see a goddam thing that any of jesus' followers have done for society that has anything exclusively to do with jesus and his teachings.

So seriously... what the fuck? What the fuck are you people talking about?

I have to put this in no uncertain terms: What the fuck?

If someone does something nice for someone else, I don't hear people go, "Oh that must have been a christian. Those christians are so nice!"

People didn't go, "Those volunteers who came down to New Orleans to help out. Must have been christians..." Nobody assumes that only good people are christians, because the TRUTH is people of every conceivable faith and philosophy know enough to recognize that there are certain moral standards that transcend stuper-natural dogma. And most certainly the christians have not demonstrated that their movement stands out from any other as being more noble, truthful, benevolent, or least of all moral.

So again... what the fuck? What the fucking fuck are you fucking talking about?

What the fuck has jesus done that makes you so special, and what is your fucking special ass doing for this world and its people that any of can point to and go, "Ok, yea, well, you're right... that certainly is a very unique, positive thing that only christianity has done for society."

Not a goddam thing. Not a fucking, god-damned thing.

So what the fuck did jesus die for? What the fuck do christians stand for? Why the fuck are there 30,000 different sects of you little fucks who can't get along with each other, much less anyone else, and explain to me again, what fucking truth, love and benevolence you epitomize? And why the fuck do every one of you fucks accuse your fellow christians of not being christian enough when they show they're no fucking better, moral or truthful than anyone else?

This is what really makes me angry. Christians spout on about the superior morality of their beliefs, but is it demonstrated in their actions? No. Do you have any idea what percentage of money collected at churches goes towards programs to help people, verses salaries, bigger churches and stupid dingleberries for the altars? Church finances would put to shame even the biggest scam non-denominational charities. I can deal with someone saying something like jesus died to do something positive for humanity, but WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE OF THIS? What the fuck has his followers done except build churches, tv stations and try to terrorize everyone else who doesn't drink their kool-aid?

So there doesn't seem to be a single ludicrous presupposition in this whole ridiculous jeebus-died-for-us scam, that I can't concede that doesn't reveal yet another gaping hole filled with hypocrisy.

Pile, your last post made me laugh ahrder than I have in a long time.

Deviant, I know you mean well, and that you are trying to say that Jesus's life and death was just a moral lesson, but there is more to it than that.  If God wanted to teach us some morals, he could have just made an after-school special on the dangers of sin.  God humbled himself to the level of man, and lived under the worst conditions a man could endure.  There was more to it than just "teaching a lesson" - God was, in fact, changing the order of things.  No longer would God punish people while they lived on the Earth, but instead created an afterlife - good and bad - that was open to all.  He was not just open to his "chosen people", he was open to everyone - as long as they accepted him.  This was a great departure from the God of the OT, where there was no afterlife, and God was only for a small minority of people. 

What did you find humorous about the fact that jesus, even if he existed, even if god existed, even if he was the son of god, even if there was an original sin, even if somehow god's sadistic treatment of early man made sense, even if jesus' sacrifice "saved" humanity, even if jesus was resurrected, even if jesus and god gave a "plan" or "lesson" to humanity... CHRISTIANS ARE STILL FLAMING HYPOCRITES WHO HAVE NOT DEMONSTRATED A SHRED MORE DECENCY AND MORAL FORTITUDE THAN ANYONE ELSE ON THE PLANET?

On second thought. You're right. It is hilarious.

Thank you for your comments, the laughs, and for butting heads with me. There is so much to respond to that I do not where to begin. I am feeling barraged. Some of you had some very critical, yet positive feedback. I just spouted out the interpretation that I know. I was just trying to be helpful and add something constructively. Whether Jesus death was symbolic or just waste is open to interpretation.

To add some clarification, I am here because I believe in metaphysical god. I am not an atheist nor do I appreciate organized religion. I believe that Jesus was a metaphysical student/teacher. I also believe that Jesus is one the most influential and misunderstood people ever among Atheists and Christians alike. I am here to either strengthen or weaken my belief system through critical reasoning, spiritual inquiry, and freedom of thought. I am not a Bible thumper nor do I take the Bible and teachings of Jesus literarily. I believe that organized religion is riddled with its corruptions and absurdities.

Good question. Sex is our god given right. I do not agree with people of faith who practice abstinence. It’s natural to have sex, but not to rape young kids and alter boys. The only explanation that I can offer at the time is that repressed sexual needs lead to perverse behavior whether these people “have Jesus in their hearts” or not. I think that misguided faith can be or is potentially harmful and destructive.

I am not sure what accepting Jesus into your heart is all about. I just think that he is was a great metaphysical student/teacher that had lot to offer. I never read nor stated that you needed Jesus to control your “thoughts”, so that you can control behavior. Via allegories and the use of intelligent prayer, Jesus proposes a way to control your own thoughts. My understanding is that he was just offering guidance and not complete reign over you.

"Saved"

Okay, I'm going to give my wholehearted and frank opinion on this word. It is the overarching reference to the purpose of an algorithm, introduced to human minds either via a literal spiritual-minded genius man named Jesus or via the group responsible for the mythological literature of the same, whichever you like, works just the same.

The cold hards facts of the OT: The thinking was a complete mess.

Charlatans and fakes with magnesium burn miracles were running the place into the ground. Everyone was going to hell in those lands. Could anyone disagree? Mutilate the children, sell the girls and kick the lepers were the algorithms of human thought in that community in those days. How do we know? They immortalised it in their bible. This was the perfect backdrop for a super-saviour to perform true miracles and talk some sense into the people. To go to the deepest extremes of self sacrifice to point out the priority human values: reason, love, kindness. Let's face it, is there a story that needed a miraculous saviour more than the OT bible? Granted, some of todays literal stories need one, but not necessarily more than they obviously did, right?

So a new paradigm of thinking 'saved' present and future in one go. A new 'ministry' introduced to revitalise the loving god algorithm. The mystical elements are mostly misread and our culture has new charlatans and new magnesium burn tricksters. But, the algorithm of thought, the paradigm of reason, has been with us a long long time now we are still saved by it (albeit it sometimes in the arms of atheism), Jesus is still immortal and eternal, In all the good that ever came from the gentle persuasion of reason, the spirit of truth, the pursuit of perfection, and sincere self sacrificing humanism. It doesn't matter if you think Jesus was the source of all this good or not, that is not the point of the story. The story is stamped with all the diginification that historical authority could give it and that is all that matters. It's canonised over all the authority that went before it, so the 'saviour' keeps 'saving' with his words of love, questions of philosophy and encouragement to put the worldly goods second and humanity first. That hell the OT was headed for has a long standing adversary installed in pertuity to kick its proverbial up and down history. And it has; in spite of the primitive barbarisms and craziness still pedalled by the charlatans over history, humanity has built the most amazing tools of reason and discovery and used them to get answers and increase the consciousness of man. We improved, in spite of it all, we improved enmasse where it counts. In the psyche, which is the soul. That is how we were saved . That is how it was our souls which were saved in that story about Jesus. Whether it's the literal account of the first Western rational diplomat with an honest and good heart or just a mythology, it encapsulates the reality of the situation quite well and is immortalised in the world's favourite book for two thousand years. Hence it is every bit the saving grace it claims to be even if it has only done the job on a small scale in comparison to everything else it's still one in the set of things that did get us here. It is one with the only true loving god humanity ever had.