Simple really:
- A talking snake with legs convinced Eve, who was made from a rib, to eat a fruit that made her realize she was naked.
- ???
- Jesus had to be born of a woman, obviously.
48If god created the whole universe. Why did he also create the snake in the first place? Was it because he wanted us to have to overcome evil tempations? Or did evil exist before hand, meaning god didn't create everything in the universe?
6Because when the story was conceived there were other gods, the snake may represent evil but it more so represents the “evil of enlightenment brought about by others whispering tales” or the pill of other gods.
Judaism was unique in that it was monotheistic as well as intolerant of other gods which was kinda very much against the grain in those times.
Christianity took the torch from them started a new fire.
2To reduce your question down, you seem to be asking, "Why did x thing get created if it caused evil?"
I like to think that the answer is in how things are created. To create matter, you have to also create antimatter (if i understand that right). Perhaps, for God to create Good, he had to also create evil. A point that I have seen argued is "did god create everything from nothing" like was taught by the Catholic church, or "did god create from existing things" like organization.
In conclusion, what god did and why has a lot of questions around it, and it is easy to split a definition like "create" and get in a heated argument while talking past each other.
I personally think that "being as gods having a knowledge of good and evil" being the boon that the fruit of the tree gave is key to your question as there is no perception of good without the contrast of evil and vice versa.
**Source for personal belief: ** https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis 3&version=NIV The serpent lies to get past the reticence of eating/disobeying by saying "you shall not surely die" then persuades with an assertion that I take to be fact: "be like god having knowledge of good and evil".
0
I've never heard that the snake had legs, what's that from?
4The story goes that after the snake convinced Eve to eat the fruit, God cursed the snake and said that part of the snakes curse was that "on your belly you will go" which leads one to believe that before it must not have been on it's belly.. Moral of the story: If an animal crosses God, it's gonna loose it's legs. Would have been funny if it was an Elephant instead of a Snake....
3
Dont forget that he had to become a "magical zombie asking you to eat his flesh and blood to give you superpowers".
1
ThE LoRd WoRkS iN MyStERiOuS WaYs!
25Let’s just be honest here,
They kinda gloss over exactly how Mary got preggo.
I’m just wondering, did he pull a Zeus and show up as one variety of animal or another?
24Virgin birth was meant as born without sin. So she did the mortal nasty
Which makes the whole Religious Right trying to paint it as her being magically pregnant all so they can make sex ebil even more hilarious
20yup. the question is.... did he show up like a swan. maybe a horse (poor marry. so unsatisfying,) or maybe something else. (tentacles seem like they could be fun.)
8Do you have a source on your claim? Why do you say this when it's completely false? You are spreading misinformation.
Source:
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”Parthenos Definition NAS Word Usage - Total: 15 a virgin a marriageable maiden a woman who has never had sexual intercourse with a man one's marriageable daughter a man who has abstained from all uncleanness and whoredom attendant on idolatry, and so has kept his chastity one who has never had intercourse with women2Permanently Deleted
1
"The angel came in unto her."
Interpret that as you will.
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The angel came through the door and into her abode?
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Or the angel CAME into her vagina?
6I've had a lot more fun with Bible stories since I started subbing in "teenage Jewish hoodlums who know how to get shit done" every time "an angel of the Lord* appeared. I mean, why would actual magical angels need blood painted on doors to know which houses to avoid? Hoodlums, however, can use a code like that. Or how about removing the tombstone and telling the Marys " why do you look for the living amongst the dead?" That's a place for a bunch of enthusiastic, anti-empire teenagers if I ever saw one.
5
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Virgin in this context means unwed.
But good luck convincing a Christian of that ;-)
6Do you have a source on your claim? Why do you say this when it's completely false? You are spreading misinformation.
Source:
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”Parthenos Definition NAS Word Usage - Total: 15 a virgin a marriageable maiden a woman who has never had sexual intercourse with a man one's marriageable daughter a man who has abstained from all uncleanness and whoredom attendant on idolatry, and so has kept his chastity one who has never had intercourse with women1
Got turned into a little sperm and inseminated the egg that way.
3Maybe it was just the tip thing.
3
He ran out of 9th level spell slots and had to use an 8th level slot to create Jesus.
23The question really starts before that. Yahweh is supposed to be "omnipotent" or "all powerful". So, why was The Christ necessary at all? If Yahweh could shape reality just by saying things and they became real, couldn't he just say "I forgive you" and "Original Sin" would be forgiven?
So either Yahweh isn't all powerful and there is some greater power to which he is subservient; or, Yahweh just wanted to dip his dick in an unwilling woman to create his son/self to torture to death. All hail Yahweh!18Apparently bro has a pretty serious code of conduct and adheres to it to a T
4Genocide is not part of it.
2
The thing is how you want to view it.
Option 1:
Neutral view of religion and history.
People tried to explain their existence and what they could observe. The Bible is just a big collection of stories that tried to explain their understanding of the world. Why it is how it is and who made it and why they made it like that. Why they have to suffer and can have fun....
Option 2:
Overall religious.
God is omnipotent but likes to do shit in a weird way for a reason. This is fine because this is important for some reason and not only what the result in the end is important but the way to it too. Gods decision is always the best.
Option 3:
Sarcastic
God is an asshole who just likes to play with the humans from time to time. Nothing he does is needed to make sense. He could in an instant remove all our problems and create a world where there is no need to suffer. However that would be boring. I mean look around most humans are assholes and we are being created in the image of God.
3The way you are confident that you have covered all arguments is a little grating on me. From my understanding of philosophy and christianity, there is another option, but your extremely broad strokes in "option 2" i guess encapsulates it because it explains all actions and reasons for actions as "weird" and "important for some reason" when describing both the process and the destination.
Option 4:
Kicking the kids out after they should be legal adults
God had a ton of kids. He didn't want them to have failure to launch, so he set up them to have "knowledge of good and evil" and imperfect parents then each of god's kids (now with bodies as humans) have the choice to act as a moral agent. Moral agents can choose to be dicks or altruistic. The best humans get to be "joint heirs with Christ" and inherit all that Christ inherits. The rest... fail to launch and ultimately get a really nice bedroom and computer but that's about it. The kicked-out kid's perspective on their parent right after getting kicked out is extremely mixed.
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So, why was The Christ necessary at all?
The straightforward answer is that Christ was the right tool for the job.
If Yahweh could shape reality just by saying things and they became real, couldn’t he just say “I forgive you” and “Original Sin” would be forgiven?
That is a thing Jesus repeated ad nauseam in his ministries. And since he's an Avatar of God, this is exactly what happened.
So either Yahweh isn’t all powerful and there is some greater power to which he is subservient; or, Yahweh just wanted to dip his dick in an unwilling woman to create his son/self to torture to death.
This is an age-old paradox of language. "Can God create a bolder so heavy that he cannot lift it? Either way, he must not be All Powerful!"
But it limits the way we look at the world to an entirely and superficially magical one. The idea of God as a Wizard in a big crooked hat who says strange words and waves hands and makes a thing happen.
Consider... This paradox is solved without any magical powers. A man with a chisel and a large lump of stone can create a bolder too big for him to lift my main strength. But then that same man can build a lever/pull system to lift said bolder. He has done both! Therefore man is All-Powerful!
God's favored discipline agreed to bare a child. And that child agreed to martyr himself in order to bring about a Christian faith. And that faith exists to bring light and hope and joy to the world. And its easy enough to find a Christian who can attest to that sense of hopefulness through their faithfulness. A seed planted 2000 years ago gives birth to a forest. Feels miraculous to me.
That gets to the problem with these logical angles of attack on a religious belief. They've all been done to death for a thousand years and more. And there are rhetorical rebuttals for any smug one-liner either side can bring to the table. But you can't logic someone out of a view they didn't logic themselves into. The idea of Jesus as a spiritual martyr who provides relief for your guilt and inner turmoil isn't something you can refute casually. Its like arguing with a homopath over the effectiveness of microdosing or with a yogi over the spiritual benefits of meditation.
At the end of the day, all you're saying is "This shouldn't make you feel better!" And all they need to refute you is "Ah, but it does."
-1Christ alive (hehe) you kinda missed the purpose of the New Testament didn’t you?
Jesus was the last child sacrifice.
That’s the story.
That’s the crucifixion in its entirety.
The rest is shoehorned in AND the best part of it none of it actually happened and there is no record of it except for second hand accounts generations later.
So one of the things Roman’s were really good at, records, didn’t record a Jesus being crucified.
It didn’t happen.
5I mean you last line sums it up, If on your balance you can weight the sum total of human systematic logical effort against your anecdotal experience then what is the point of discussion at all?
And you want to know when that looks really ugly? When the faithful see things like "the light and hope brought by faith" and are blind to rivers of blood and human suffering that have not ceased to this day enabled and perpetuated by faith.
It doesn't matter if there is a god, by the things done in God's name the concept of faith must be reject for humanities sake.
4
Because it's all made up, and the points don't matter.
15Give the guy a break, it was his Hot Girl Summer, he just wanted to experiment.
15It's harder to bullshit society about events that happened after they've developed writing.
13Because he already ate all of the spare ribs.
10It's simple, God was actually Aliens, and Adam was an android while Jesus was a human, so they had to inseminate real woman in his case.
10Who was the fake woman they inseminated in the other case?
4Jesus wasn't human. He was obviously from a different species, that is why he was never able to reproduce.
2
Magik
8The Gathering?
5I'd tap that.
4
I am an atheist, but this doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. The answer seems clear: He wanted Jesus to be partly human due to all that stuff about sharing our sins and so forth. It's nonsense to me, but it appears to make sense to believers.
8Nope. Jesus could not understand humanity because he still remembered heaven, could talk to and get answers from God, knew with proof what was gonna happen. Humans have no proof of that, we can't hear a god, no one I know and trust have come back to assure me there is a golden, beer filled, Hawaiian tropic model filled beach party waiting for me after I go through all this cancer bullshit.
3
The same reason why Leia Organa remembers her mother despite her dying in Revenge of the Sith - the power of retconning sometimes has its... drawbacks
7I always imagined she "remembered" through her force sensitivity; not unlike Dune's genetic memory concept
4In Dune people also routinely remembered things they shouldn't if it was a genetic memory.
1
The joke is they are both fiction, haha!
3No, one just happened long ago in a galaxy far far away
4
That obviously means that god is a woman, right?
7Alanis Moresette actually.
14Are you going to hit me with that... fish?
3
I don't think god has a gender. He's omnicient, omnipotent and omnipresent, so obviously He's also omnigender. I use 'He' because it's the accepted pronoun for god.
1
While I agree this is funny (and am aware this is a meme community) I'd be careful to not use this as an argument. Nowhere does it say the only way God could've sent Jesus was through a virgin birth.
7The original gospels didn't even mention virgin birth
3Don't worry, there is no need for arguments against religion. Just ask the question while two religious people are in the room and watch them fight each other to death over different interpretations of hearsay that is thousands of years old.
3
Jesus was “created” as deity incarnate (need the flesh to make the flesh) and Adam as a divine being(given free will as a divine creation…until he chose the wrong thing)?
5I'm not religious but seems pedantic. God didn't consider Adam his son. It was just a creation. Jesus is his son, which is something that has to be made "with" a person apparently.
Also I still ascribe to the belief that old testament god and new testament god are different characters.
3Yeah the idea with Jesus is he was supposed to enter the world like a normal person, be raised by parents, etc. There’s a theological concept of him being god experiencing humanity fully, that includes temporarily being cut off from things like omniscience
3Followed then by being a child sacrifice, the last child sacrifice.
It’s an amazing allegory and the imagery is wonderful but … it’s just a story
2
God didn’t consider Adam his son. It was just a creation. Jesus is his son, which is something that has to be made “with” a person apparently.
If you get into the catechism, there is a very explicit attempt by both the Catholics and the Gnostics to claim Adam and Jesus are iterations of the same original concept of a perfected man. The gnostics get extra funky with it, claiming that there are a host of good and evil spiritual beings constantly at struggle with one another. And Adam and Jesus are iterations of this struggle, as these countervailing forces tangle up with one another. The Catholics just cut through it all and insist "There's one God and he's always winning and anything that looks like its going bad is just part of his plan because he can't lose".
But if you get into Revelations, you see a lot more of the Gnostic theory leak in. And if you actually start digging into Gnostic texts, you end up with something more akin to Zoroastrianism than modern Christianity.
Also I still ascribe to the belief that old testament god and new testament god are different characters.
They definitely aren't written consistently. But how else did you think a 4000 year old chain letter was going to shake out?
3
Good just wants to fuck. Why else are girls so sexy? Checkmate Christians.
2sorry, is there any writing.. that said god needs maria?
2Not her specifically, but some woman as Jesus was to be God's one and only direct son. As in, not made by magic but born out of a person, to be and live as a mortal. So God asked this woman and she said yes, because of the implication.
3
The trolling response is obvious if you grew up around teenagers playing with this idea:
- Men developed faster than women.
- Men started as women in the womb then were able to develop past it.
- God created a first draft in Adam, then said "i bet I could do it better a 2nd time, and I won't start from scratch this time"
- There is always a first child when it comes to siblings. "rolls eyes"
- Well Adam was the first, so there was no bloodlust. Due to eating the fruit, well there was a grudge match scheduled for having the time-out from paradise and introduction of death/bad/good/children - The terms of the grudge match were laid out: fruit of the woman to crush the snake.
2Probably same reason that you can't send file to your friend using localhost.
1God owed Naughtius Maximus a favor.
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