Christianity, trinity and Jesus as Sacrifice

Just so everyone knows: I was raised as a Catholic.

There's something that's confused me for a LONG time, though.

Supposedly, GOD sacrificed his only son for us. To save us from our sins or something like that.

According to the trinity, though, Jesus and GOD and "the holy spirit" are all the same.

So if Jesus IS GOD, how is Jesus "dying" any kind of a sacrifice? If you're GOD and you know you're immortal, then I don't see how PRETENDING to die is anything but a joke.

Maybe a little play time for the "all-powerful".

But a symbol of immense love? Of TRUE sacrifice? This connection escapes me.

 

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NO ONE, is willing to try to answer this question? I'm truly dissappointed in all you religous people.

What's up?

Am I beyond saving or something?

no tony1?

no loon?

nobody?

You're confirming my disbelief in "Jesus as savior" more loudly than if the Pope had said HE doesn't really buy it and just wanted to be in the Church to play with little boys.

 

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Hi Felix. You have to give people time to respond to these things. You cant just wait an hour and then expect to have 57,000 responses.

Look. The bible was written many years ago and is full of mistranslations and misunderstandings, you have to weed through them. This is probably just a glitch though.

 

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One hell of a glitch, on which this religion is based on.

 

"According to the trinity, though, Jesus and GOD and "the holy spirit" are all the same."
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You seem to be somewhat confused about the natures of the entities which comprise the Trinity. Perhaps, this will help.

www.carm.org/doctrine/whatisthetrinity.htm

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The Trinity.

The trinity is a mess, a kludge to explain away the paradox of three gods when the bible says there is only one. But those early religious politicians didn’t fully realize their mess until 352CE when they officially introduced the Trinity, to resolve the problem. LOL.

The history of religion has always been one of degeneration from the originally revealed pure monotheism to various forms of polytheism. "Christianity," as popularly known, has been no exception.

The Bible, in both Old and New Testaments, is very emphatic about the absolute oneness of God.

"Christendom" today has degenerated to a belief in four gods, three good ones and one evil one. Some parts of Christendom have five gods, as the Roman Catholic Church, which has added a "Mother of God" who is in their system of belief the supreme deity beside a host of demi-gods, one for every day of the year (and more), all of which mythical and man-invented deities are worshipped and prayed to.

A history of the Trinity. http://www.antipas.org/books/trinity/trinity1.html

But gods having multiple personalities is not new. Hinduism has only one god but with multiple personalities. We see again how Christianity excels at copying.

The Lack of a Sacrifice.

Well spotted. But to be correct, God did not sacrifice his son; Jesus sacrificed himself.

One of the most emotional statements in the bible is John 3:16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son. In human terms the sacrifice of ones only son or daughter is enough to make anyone weep and relate to such a wonderful and altruistic father.

But wait – God is immortal, Jesus is immortal, how can either of these ever die? If they can’t die then where is the sacrifice? This looks like yet another Christian fraud. The whole basis of Christianity is that Jesus died for our sins. But what death? A momentary loss of physical life to be resurrected again a few hours later is no sacrifice. In the human sense a sacrifice means a permanent loss, a strong emotional sense that one will never see that child again. But God is omniscient he would know he would see his son again in a few hours – where was the loss, where was the sacrifice? There is no more of a sacrifice here than sending one’s child off to summer camp.

Once again we see that Christianity has no meaningful basis.

 

Trust Cris to have pages worth of arguments.

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Yeah, when I was a wee lad I used to think about this in about the same way while the pastor was getting emotional quoting that very verse.
If god lives in heaven, and when your in heaven time has no meaning, Jesus going to earth would be like:

Jesus-'ok dad I'm going down to earth to die for humanitys sins'
God-'Awright son have a nice time, holler if you need any miracles, bye'
Jesus-'Bye dad'
5 minutes later(40 years)
Jesus-'hey dad, I'm back.'
God-'hi there son, that was quick, so how was earth?'
Jesus-'It was ok, the romans crucified me though Christ that hurts'
God-'Ahwell, you showed them anyway, look their already forming a couple whole new religions about you.'
Jesus-'Nice.'

 

Great points here. I always wondered about these things too. I thought we were all God's children. Or is jesus his only son? I just always thought that I wasn't educated enough about religion. But apparently, religion makes itself more confusing than it needs to be. It seems you need to dedicate years of your life to the study of religion just to understand it, keep up with the modern interpretations, and decide what to consider literal and what not to. Sheesh!

 

Islam: Only true monotheistic religion today.

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Markx:
You're forgetting Judaism.

 

True, thanks for pointing it out. It can be contradicted but I will not say anything, unless I have a solid proof of my calims.

 

"Islam: Only true monotheistic religion today."
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www.souldevice.org/quran2.htm


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Uh, inspector, and your point is?

 

"Uh, inspector, and your point is?"
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The Qur'an contains contradictions. The Qur'an states that it is a perfect book preserved on tablets in heaven (Surah 85:21-22). If the Qur'an is a perfect book from Allah, then there shouldn't be any contradictions in it, right?

I am merely advising markx to re-examine the facts.




I hope everybody has a safe New Year's eve and a great 2003.

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And yes the Quran contains some very strange, embarrsing and obvious errors, some quite humorous.

But in terms of a true monotheist religion then I would suggest that Islam is truer than Christianity since there is no requirement for a trinity and although Christianity insists there is only one god the trinity does sour that claim somewhat.

 

I might put in a word ... Hinduism rocks... it's the single greatest threat to my atheism, I must say I am often tempted...

 

Facts? So you think you know the facts from the "websites" or by doing "word" and "phrase" searches. So these are the so called facts?. Thank you for your advise to re examine the facts. It really helped me since I came from a christian family and did my homework for about 5 years before I converted to Islam. Also all the so called errors you mentioned or what I have seen so far on the web or people claiming that they have found errors in the Quran, are all due to their lack of knowledge and it shows their ignorance about the Arabic language as well. Majority of western writers have Zero knowledge of Arabic Language or the history of the Quran, it revelations and the timing and circumstances of those revelations and that is what bothers them and bother me too.

Now, this the exact thing they did to Bible. Totally destroyed it. Translations after translations and finally they messed it up so bad that they cannot go back now. I can refute each and every one of your "claims of error". Because I have studied the arabic language to understand and see for myself for those so called errors either there are errors in Quran or not. I am not like you or many other so called christian scholars who posses no knowledge of language or history of Quran. Now it will turn into Quran and Bible debate/thread, and I think I am going to start a new one tonight.

Since you asked for it. I don't enjoy ripping other's religion but seems like you are interested in facts, so we will talk about facts only. Biblical Facts and Quranic Facts.


Cris, first I like to congratulate you, since you can see the main point of my post and so did Xev. I have more respect for an atheist then a believer either muslim or christians because he/she questioned the religion and he/she question the science in religion and not follow the religion because you born with it.

You wrote,

"And yes the Quran contains some very strange, embarrsing and obvious errors, some quite humorous."

Some of those errors may sound funny or embarrassing or humorous to you but you may want to exclude some of them because if I believe in "a single God" and I believe that He is capable of doing anything, I may not look for their explanations because that would be part of my faith and it is not something with me only but any one with a religion might say the same thing for e. g, Jews, hidus, christians or muslims. But if you still like to talk about them, you are more then welcome.

Peace

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Hi Felix - I've also thought about this, and I have read all the replies to this point. Suppose God actually did create man, and endowed him with something called 'free will'. And suppose he respected that thing called 'free will' so much that he refused to violate it. (Exodus 8:15 notwithstanding). The only way God could influence man in such a case is if he was invited to by man. A Catholic friend of mine put it this way: "He willed to will God's will." He gave God permission to use himself as tool. More than that, it was what he desired more than anything else.

So then, Jesus was a flesh man who chose to die to himself, to turn himself over completely to God and be filled by the Holy Spirit of God who will lead him from that point forward. At the point that this act of self-sacrifice is perfected, who can tell the difference between Jesus acting out the perfect will of God, and God acting in full power in Jesus. Not even Jesus could tell the difference. But if God is a perfect being who could have nothing to do with imperfection, then this dwelling of God in Jesus and Jesus in God could not have happened, not unless Jesus was perfect and sinless. Jesus' perfection, his sinlessness, was neccessary to fullfill specific Old Testement prophecies regarding his sacrifice - he was a sin offering for all mankind, in the way that OT Jews were required to sacrifice unblemished first-born lambs as an expiation of sin. God dwelt in Jesus (and in the apostles and all believers) through the Holy Spirit - and if any Christian can explain that, I'm all ears. But I'm convinced that the appearance of a trinity is due to a limitation of man's perception. (I use that one a lot in my theology)

So then, as far as the merits of the sacrifice are concerned, God lost the only human in all Creation who got it right, someone who could do what God created him to do - heal the sick, raise the dead, be a true son of his here in Creation. And Jesus, a flesh man, got to have nails driven through his flesh and die a horrible death because an invisible spirit told him he needed to, and that he would rise again after he died? Talk about a leap of faith!

Questions to Markx - as a Muslim, don't you worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as do the Jews and Christians? Doesn't the Qu'ran acknowledge Jesus as a prohet?

 

The Trinity is a way of describing God as He has been understood by Christians from Jesus onwards. Remember that the New Testament didn't exist when Jesus started his work, and the Christianity that originated then only knew God as the Jews knew Him - completely and utterly One. It has only taken shape as a new understanding of God's personality became clear.

The concept of a the three-in-one God makes more sense of you imagne a sphere - but one that extends past all human comprehension. It actually crosses the boundaries that forms our comprehension. We have the concepts of fathers, children, and intelligence/soul/spirit, love, etc. If God used Himself, all those facets of His own personality, everything that is possible to know, as DNA and blueprint for His creation, then we could consider ourselves as a two-dimensional imprint in the image of the sphere. The very fact that we are visible, physical beings rather than pure spiritual, means we are limited to what we are: physical creations. When we look at that sphere, we only see sections of it as it relates to our physically limited perception.

Whatever went wrong in Eden, the concept of God has always been problematic. People has always wanted to be able to see God. With their eyes. They made idols, which of course is an insult to the real God. They needed laws to tell them explicitly what God said so they could hear it with their ears. God's own people wanted a king to rule over them, so that they could see that authority. Everytime God revealed Himself so that they could grasp Him. He is king, so a gave them a king, but emphasised that they should stay obedient to Him alone. He gave them priests, prophets, temples, laws. All of these were just incomplete without God.

But in the end people even deified themselves, like the Romans. Every time people thought they were getting closer to God, they were actually going farther away. So God revealed His love in the form of His only Son. Remember that all we know of "son" and "love" came from God's archetypes. God would have known what the kind of love a father and a son would have before He had created them. God was complete even before He created mankind. Otherwise it would follow that God created simply out of loneliness or boredom. But he put part of that eternal sphere within our realm. God did not need to limit or 'downscale' Himself, He only had to be himself "as a man". The rest of the sphere stays intact, but out of sight. Jesus was really a man, and really died. His separation from God was physical one in all senses but one - that he was God. He was God's word made flesh so we could listen and see him. God humbled Himself and identified so closely with us that He was indistinguishable from any of us. Jesus did suffer and die, more blameless than anybody on earth could be. It was a real sacrifice because sacrifice itself was only a human form of appeasing God. Jesus was what sacrifice was all about. It was not murder, because Jesus died by His own choice, and it was not fake, because Jesus had the choice. Just like we do.

The same with the Holy Spirit, which is the spirit of God - that which is Godly and Holy. Every personality is completely God, but separate in our reality. Jesus was a complete man, he bled, and he shed skin. The Jews say that if He was God his skin would have ascended to heaven and not decayed to dust. Jesus had everything that could humanly have been known about God. He was also God's anointed and chosen (the way kings were originally set apart). The Holy Spirit is the witness to God and the Son, the very presence of God. Also complete within its own right, but not separate from God.

Like Turduckin says, it is because of the limitation of man's perception that these distinctions are held, but they are in no way three separate entities. It is like that with all things on earth. We only see a part of everything at a time, a can only comprehend a part at a time. Have you every tried to remember a previous song while another one is playing? Try to imagine remembering three songs at the same time...

 

Felix, I apologize i didnt respond to this much earlier, there are just so many posts here......
The reason why God came down to take the punishment that belongs to us is that in order to take away the sins of humanity, an offering of a sinless one can only make such act possible..
No human sacrifice, or prayers is enough to reconcile our murders, greediness, lustfullness, etc.

The whole reason why they offer burnt sheep and lamb offerings then to God for the forgiveness of sins, is that cows and sheeps are their most valuable possesions at the time. You are judged by your wealth according to the numbers of your cattle, the more you have, the richer you are...At the time, it is the one closest and dearest to their hearts, as ferrari, big breast and nice curves, mansion houses or "bling bling" currently speaking are the things that are closest to our hearts...
God is pleased when man detaches from what they love the most to show that they love God above all things (thats why they burned cattles at the time)...

Now, the sins of man has multiplied (as a seed grows), adultery is widespread, greediness, hate, man started adoring his own body etc. Man's hearts have been polluted by all sorts of idolatry, from women's curves, to nice houses, golden statues, (bling bling) etc...(U cant obviously burn your body as a sacrifice, or another person. Something as necessary as the body which is the temple of God is profaned to the fullest. )...
God can no longer stand the face of humanity in itself, so filled with greed...So in order for man to be forgiven, God realize that a savior is needed. Thats why Jesus have been prophesied even in the book of Genesis. God knew the moment adam and eve sinned, that he will get involve for their sin will multiply.."A woman will concieve a son, he will crush the serpents head, while the serpent will bite his heel"- Genesis...

Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world..NO LONGER DO WE HAVE TO DESTROY WHAT IS DEAREST IN OUR HEARTS, BUT WE CAN TURN TO HIM, AND THROUGH HIM GOD FIND US WORTHY....