- Jan 12, 2012
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The cornerstone of Christianity is human sacrifice. Is Christianity a moral creed?
I find Christianity immoral for substitutionary atonement as well as many others of their moral tenets.
Without the blood sacrifice of Jesus, Christianity fails as a salvific religion.
We could thump all day with passages that both support blood sacrifice as well as quote the many passages against it as shown with both types of quotes in this link.
Recognizing that there are many contradictory passages in scriptures, let’s ignore them all and just look at the morality of substitutionary atonement.
Scriptures tell us that to perfect our wisdom, we must get out of the Christian theology. I think that those passages are asking us to confirm our thinking with analogies that do not include Christian dogma.
With that in mind, I offer an analogy for discussion.
Scriptures say we are all children of God.
Imagine you have two children. One of your children does something wrong – say it curses, or throws a temper tantrum, or something like that. In fact, say it does this on a regular basis, and you continually forgive your child, but it never seems to change.
Now suppose one day you’ve had enough, you need to do something different. You still wish to forgive your child, but nothing has worked. Do you go to your second child, your good child, and punish it to atone for the sins of the first?
In fact, if you ever saw a parent on the street punish one of their children for the actions of their other child, how would you react? Would you support their decision, or would you be offended?
Interestingly, some historical royal families would beat their slaves when their own children did wrong – you should not, after all, ever beat a prince. The question is: what kind of lesson does that teach the child who actually did the harm? Does it teach them to be a better person, to stop doing harm, or does it teach them both that they won't themselves be punished, and also that punishing other people is normal? I know that's not a lesson I would want to teach my children, and I suspect it's not a lesson most Christians would want to teach theirs. So why does God?
For me, that’s at least one significant reason I find Jesus’ atonement of our sin to be morally repugnant – of course, that’s assuming Jesus ever existed; that original sin actually exists; that God actually exists; etc.
Do you agree that having another innocent person suffer for the wrongs you have done, --- so that you might escape responsibility for having done them, --- is immoral. Do you agree that to abdicate personal responsibility or use a scapegoat is immoral?
If not, please show how it is morally and legally good to punish the innocent instead of the guilty, bearing in mind that all legal systems think that punishing the guilty is what is justice.
Regards
DL
I find Christianity immoral for substitutionary atonement as well as many others of their moral tenets.
Without the blood sacrifice of Jesus, Christianity fails as a salvific religion.
We could thump all day with passages that both support blood sacrifice as well as quote the many passages against it as shown with both types of quotes in this link.
Recognizing that there are many contradictory passages in scriptures, let’s ignore them all and just look at the morality of substitutionary atonement.
Scriptures tell us that to perfect our wisdom, we must get out of the Christian theology. I think that those passages are asking us to confirm our thinking with analogies that do not include Christian dogma.
With that in mind, I offer an analogy for discussion.
Scriptures say we are all children of God.
Imagine you have two children. One of your children does something wrong – say it curses, or throws a temper tantrum, or something like that. In fact, say it does this on a regular basis, and you continually forgive your child, but it never seems to change.
Now suppose one day you’ve had enough, you need to do something different. You still wish to forgive your child, but nothing has worked. Do you go to your second child, your good child, and punish it to atone for the sins of the first?
In fact, if you ever saw a parent on the street punish one of their children for the actions of their other child, how would you react? Would you support their decision, or would you be offended?
Interestingly, some historical royal families would beat their slaves when their own children did wrong – you should not, after all, ever beat a prince. The question is: what kind of lesson does that teach the child who actually did the harm? Does it teach them to be a better person, to stop doing harm, or does it teach them both that they won't themselves be punished, and also that punishing other people is normal? I know that's not a lesson I would want to teach my children, and I suspect it's not a lesson most Christians would want to teach theirs. So why does God?
For me, that’s at least one significant reason I find Jesus’ atonement of our sin to be morally repugnant – of course, that’s assuming Jesus ever existed; that original sin actually exists; that God actually exists; etc.
Do you agree that having another innocent person suffer for the wrongs you have done, --- so that you might escape responsibility for having done them, --- is immoral. Do you agree that to abdicate personal responsibility or use a scapegoat is immoral?
If not, please show how it is morally and legally good to punish the innocent instead of the guilty, bearing in mind that all legal systems think that punishing the guilty is what is justice.
Regards
DL
