I am not even sure WHAT you are talking about. What is cruel? The basic facts of inheritance? Now you sound like the criminal complaining that he didn’t ask to be alive… as if THAT makes any sense.
In any case, you are the one that believes God rewards with heaven and punishes with hell, not me. I believe in things as a result of the logical consequences of how things work. You walk off the top of a building and you will fall to your death. Whining to God about how unfair it is, is not only childish but idiotic. Likewise if you insist on clinging to self-destructive habits and refuse change then those habits will tear you apart and devour you. It is just pain logical consequences, and complaining that you were following someone else is absurd, whether you are walking off a building or continuing in your sins. So that we are just following the habits of those since Adam and Eve is the silliest of excuses. We simply have to stop doing these things which are destroying us and that is all there is to it.
Take this as an example. If i was in a great dept and i died and left it to you wouldnt that be unfair?
And the most important of all thats exactly what im trying to say. That our sin is an individual sin. Everyone is accountable for himslef. Humanity rejected God as whole. The idea that two people rejecting God and then all of humanity has to pay the wages of their rejection is just absurd.
And if you spent your whole life working hard and saving money and left it to your children when you die, how would that be any more fair to everyone else?
Life isn’t fair.
Is God fair? NO! God is just. I believe in God’s perfect justice. But I certainly do not believe in any childish notion of fairness. There is no such thing.
Agreed. You seem to have jumped to some weird conclusion from what I said to something completely different. The topic of original sin. The question is what is this thing called “orginal sin?”
Simply the first sin? Yes.
Consequences we all face because of that first sin? Yes.
The inheritance of some kind of guilt for the sin of others? No. I do not believe that.
Something which makes it impossible for us not to sin? No. I do not believe that.
It is not absurd. How many suffered the consequences when one man decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How many suffered the consequences when the founding fathers of America failed to take a stand against slavery for racial equality? It is the nature of life that we have both benefit and problems in our inheritance from our ancestors.
Of course you add to this and make it worse when you make this all about God rewarding people and about going to heaven or hell. But that is a problem with YOUR thinking, not mine!
Well humans did that. They took a decision without thinking the consequences that it might have. For example the Japanese Emperor in the WW2 when he attacked pearl harbor. He didnt care for the people in Hiroshima. It was his decision.
God is not like that. He cares about us. So he wouldnt give a choise to a “representative” group of us to decide if we can stay with God or not.
Yes God cares for us all. Doesn’t mean God caters to some childish notion of fairness to make sure every child gets the same pieces of candy in exactly the same amounts. Quite the contrary… some die of starvation, abuse, or painful illnesses. It is not fair. This “fairness” is not even a coherent notion. What we can look to God for is a readiness to welcome us all home into His loving arms. And so we have a fundamental faith in this life God has given us, that no matter how unfair, it is still good and worthwhile.
He doesn’t. The world operates according to completely impersonal mathematical rules for a reason – it is a necessary requirement for the existence of life itself. As for what happens afterwards, it is not about rewards and punishment. It is about Him being ready to heal us if we allow Him to.
Well thats new. Isnt christianity an award religion? At least at a percentage i was seeing it that way and it comforted me since i suffer from some sort of depression.
Christianity is far from a simple thing. And one of the things is a heavy criticism of “award religion” going all the way back to the writing of Job.
To be sure, like all religions, it is telling us there is a reason to do what is good and not to do what is evil. But both Judaism and Christianity is also telling us that things are not so simple as “bad things never happens to good people.” Christianity also tells us that heaven and hell is not just about rewards and punishment for what we do. Yes there is a perfect justice awaiting us all, and as it says in Romans 2:6 that God will render to all according to their works with no get out of jail free cards. Sin is a degenerative disease we all suffer from. Left alone this will destroy every single one of us. But there is a cure. Heaven and hell is about whether we avail ourselves of that cure. That is the fundamental Christian message.
Now… I don’t think this is quite so simple as… the religion of Christianity is the cure. I don’t buy into that at all. But I still believe in the central message of Christianity. Christ is our savior and through Him this awful disease which plagues us can be taken away. In that way we can be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect with all self-destructive habits gone. Because that is the only way any place can ever be heavenly when people don’t act in these terribly destructive ways, whether to each other or to themselves.
And that hardly seems fair. My mother and sister suffered from this but I have not. We all have our own challenges which is not to say that they are somehow equal or fair. I see no evidence that they are. But I do have a faith that it is all worthwhile, and those who endure great challenges will have the reward of being what others need in the future. So fair? No. But the balance of justice eventually? Yes. I believe so.
I believe that Christianity is the only way
I also do believe God rewards(you use the term heal ) his people. Hell is just a place that not only people are not rewarded but also live in their imperfections. As to fairness: Yeah life is not fair and it bothers me. But since God is God he can be is a fair God too and not only a just one
I believe that with our species there is more than just the evolution on a biological level but also the ability to develop emotional and social development passed down to each generation. We see that now as ideas considered backwards fall away to newer concepts that become “controversial”.
So I believe Adam was simply taught better concepts than what was guiding the world.
Agreed. So I always object to those is suggest that what distinguishes people from animals is morality. I don’t buy it, and I don’t think the evidence supports it. The only real difference we can point to between man and animals is an abstract language with all the representational capacity of DNA and more. So we are not talking about mere communication. Animals have that, of course, along with social structures, emotions, and moral norms.
But I think the implications of the language difference are bigger than most people suppose. I think being comparable to DNA means that language can play much the same role in the formation of living organisms as DNA does for biological creatures. And I think the living organisms founded on human language is that of the human mind. I don’t agree with the dualists who take the mind as being something supernatural or non-physical but I do agree that there is a considerable effective dualism between mind and body, and that the human mind is more than just the brain.
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This is a really interesting article and reasonably consistent with some “discussions” I have seen elsewhere on the issue of an adversarial being. The Bible’s lack of “interest” in giving specific details about the individual --beyond his existence and deceptiveness – is understandable. Jesus says in John 8:44 that “when he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (ESV—the NIV says “when he lies, he speaks his native language”). Nothing terribly complimentary here. Aside from warning us of his reality and evil intent – and letting us know that Jesus’ death on the cross signalled the start of the eventual defeat of him and his forces —hy give evil more notoriety than it deserves?
I suppose that the reality of the existence of some evil being (of the male persuasion) is, at bottom, the most clarity the text affords. All else is interesting but not as firmly stated.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
52
Interesting questions, Nickolaos… I have wondered some of this. The implication of the few things said about him (the Satan) in the text is that he became proud — which means he thought more of himself than he ought – and, to speak colloquially, wanted to be his own man. That would be "why"he rebelled.
As “adversary,” he is generally opposing everything that God tries to do. I suppose that, to be cynical, one could say that that is what God gets for giving us free will — humans as well as these angelic/demonic beings. I think "sin"is something that God’s creatures do out of our own free will — that is, our own desire to be our own boss, be our own little gods. So "sin"was not created, it just "began,"so to speak, when creatures to whom God had given freedom of choice — decided to use that choice for evil and not good, to reject rather than revere God.
[quote=“mitchellmckain, post:30, topic:42874”]
Do I consider Adam and Eve to be real? Yes. First human beings too. Just not the first homo sapiens. So this has nothing to do with the “Origin of the Species.” I do not believe that humanity is just a biological species. We are also the children of God. That is we have two sets of inheritance. One is in our DNA which is a product of evolution and by which we are brethren to all life on the planet. The other is an inheritance of mind from God transmitted by language. Sin is found in the corruption of the latter inheritance and not in the biological one. So this has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution.
[/So, I quite agree that homo sapiens species evolved thousands at a time and there was never just two members of the homo sapiens species. But I will never agree with you that our humanity is just DNA and a biological species. I quite agree that the idea that Adam and Eve are the sole genetic progenitors of the human race is scientifically unsupportable, but I totally disagree with your idea that human beings are nothing but animals and our humanity is nothing but our biology and chemistry.
Evolution is just DNA. No inheritance of acquired characteristics. Right here you are saying that being human is just DNA and nothing more.
I disagree with this logical equivalence you keep making.
I say there is a difference between the biological species “homo sapiens” and human beings.
The biological species “homo sapiens” evolved.
But human beings are more than just “homo sapiens” — more than just animals, DNA, and evolution.
We are children of God because we have another inheritance from God which is not in our DNA“
Can you help me understand your thoughts as stated above - are you saying there are some humans who are merely creatures with human DNA, and other humans who have also been gifted the ‘mind of God, transmitted by language’?
How do we tell the difference, or have the former humans been out-performed by the latter and become extinct?
I am genuinely interested in your ideas, but confused.
Satan is literally someone who opposes. So that when Jesus says “get thee behind me Satan” He is not calling Peter the Devil just admonishing his opposition to the plans of God.
Lucifer or the Devil may be, by definition, in opposition to God, but that does not mean that the term Satan in synonymous with that being.
As for as the Nature of the Devil is concerned: the basic Ying/yang of creation dictates that where there is a force for good there will be an opposite (not necessarily equal) force for evil epitomised by the Devil.
Yes that is possible. Just because someone is genetically and anotomically homo sapien doesn’t mean they necessarily behave like people or human beings. How they are raised and taught makes a difference. But it is not some exclusive magical difference, and once on the Earth this inheritance of ideas would be communicated rather rapidly to everyone (compared to evolutionary time scales). This also means that creatures who do not have our DNA or species might obtain this same inheritance to some degree also. I even like to co-opt the term “meme” coined by Dawkins to identify this other inheritance with “meme” or “memetic” life as opposed to gene or genetic life. The point is that being human is not just about DNA and chemistry – how we think and behave is even the more important part of being human. And how we think and behave is NOT determined by our genes – affected by our genes sure, but not controlled, only or even primarily, by our genes.
Just jumping in here to comment on various points, as I find this thread quite interesting. I’ve never really heard this perspective Mitchell, that the devil in fact did not rebel. I think we’ve all sensed and known evil - I know I have. Evil when it is stared right in the face is as chillingly opposite to God as you can get. The great red dragon was clearly not “ simply made by God to be as He is, knowing and doing what God made him to know“. That would be strange in the extreme - God creating a being that tried to overthrow him and that cast a third of his beloved angels down. Surely it wasn’t
Surely something had gone insanely wrong for this to happen. A rebellion.
Indeed, in the opinion of Christians through the centuries, it has been thought Satan was once a heavenly being - of some kind (perhaps not Lucifer as some propose - although I think he was probably Lucifer) but certainly a being who was in heaven and later cast down with his demons. The demons certainly recognised Jesus, Jesus who came from heaven, when he cast them out on earth).
Your comments in post 10 suggest that the devil was doing God’s will when he lied and tried to tempt Eve. I don’t know about that … seems pretty duplicitous of God, plus James says that God does not tempt … he tests but does not tempt - and we all know that moment when Eve took the fruit was after being tempted and lied to, deceived. Those actions can’t have been from God’s will - from a being carrying out ‘what they were meant to’. I’m not sure what theology or set of teaching that is based on but it’s pretty off.
Hmm. This is the being who charged into heaven with his host causing a massive war that Michael had to get his hands dirty in. Man and his position in the universe might be significant but not that powerful. We were made ‘a little lower than the angels’.
This comment is deserving of recognition simply for how cool it is
I gather from the rest of the thread I scanned that we are not talking about justice, brutality and the Old Testament anymore? All good, just asking.
The angel was made by God to be as he is. The angel did not create sin and evil that was us. But we refused responsibility for this and blamed the angel. So it says right in Genesis 3 that God assigned him to be our adversary (Satan). Again the responsibility for what happen is ours.
Satan was always our adversary not God’s and the idea that Satan was seeking to overthrow God is preposterous. This thinking is more Zoastrian than Judeo-Christian and taken from extra-canonical texts. The war in Revelation 12 was AFTER the birth of Christ and the angels which were thrown down were not God’s angels but Satan’s. And the war was about ending Satan’s dominion over the world.
It was the task of the angels to help living things learn and grow. But that only happens by overcoming challenges. So when the angel Lucifer talked to Eve about the fruit, He was doing His job. It was our task to respond by following the commandment which God gave us and thereby learn both faith and responsibility.
How was it duplicitous for God to expect them to pay attention to the commandment He gave them? God’s commandment was the same as that of any parent telling their children not to play in the street lest they die. Next you will be telling us that parents are being duplicitous when they let their children play outside at all, where they might be tempted to disobey their parent’s commandment.
