Let's try this again: what was the original purpose of Jesus?

[Erik]

I posted this question some time ago and got no responses from the theists out there, so I'd like to try again. Or maybe it's just too stupid to discuss.

Several mainstream versions of Christianity posit that God is actually three entities: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We'll leave the Spirit out of it for this discussion. God is also eternal, and as far as I know the doctrine is that this triumvirate has similarly always existed. Christians will happily tell you that Jesus was sent to earth 2,000 years ago to sacrifice himself to absolve mankind of sin. OK, but what was his purpose before that? I mean, there has to be something else, right? Otherwise, if Jesus's only purpose is to be a redemptive agent, but has always existed, then what was he before God created man -- just sort of a reserve entity just in case God needed a redemptive agent? Surely that can't be the answer?

Although, to read the Bible, it sure looks like it. You don't find any hard reference to Jesus anywhere in the OT, although there are plenty of other subordinate but nevertheless supernatural characters, like Gabriel, running around. You'd think that when God told Moses "I am who I am" or some such thing, that he might have mentioned something about the other two aspects of his eternal character. "Oh, by the way, I've got a son and a ghost, too, but I'm keeping them in the bullpen for the moment." It isn't until the NT that we find out the truth, eh?

If God has always included an element of a kinda separate entity whose only purpose is to redeem mankind, then doesn't it look an awful lot like mankind was created with the full knowledge that sin would follow? Then where is there room for human free will in this scheme? Indeed, doesn't it make you wonder whether God actually has free will? I mean, if God has always been three parts, one of which is solely a redemptive agent for mankind, then couldn't you infer that it was in God's nature to create a being that would require redemption later on?

So, to avoid this horrifying conclusion, we need another purpose for Jesus's existence. Either that or give up the notion that Jesus has always been a part of the Big Three. What say you, Christians?

[thomas]

Great question. By way of warming up, here is what the Bible does say about what Jesus was doing, and is still doing, as part of the Trinity.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. Jon 1:1-3.

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Col.1:16-17.

"In the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will roll them up like a robe; like a garment they will be changed. But you remain the same, and your years will never end." Heb.1:10-12.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. Jn.1:10

Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. 1Cor.8:6.

So, you can see that Jesus was and is the active person in creation.

[calpurnpiso]

Great question. By way of warming up, here is what the Bible does say about what Jesus was doing, and is still doing, as part of the Trinity.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. Jon 1:1-3.

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. Col.1:16-17.

"In the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will roll them up like a robe; like a garment they will be changed. But you remain the same, and your years will never end." Heb.1:10-12.

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. Jn.1:10

Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live. 1Cor.8:6.

So, you can see that Jesus was and is the active person in creation.
Remember, the samething can be said of the Tooth Fairy. Can you explain what's the difference between the two? As we mentally healthy folks (atheists) know, extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence and neither of the two can provide it....except to Children and the Christ-psychotics who KNOW they are real....:)
What's the difference between the Babble and the Lord of the Rings?

[thomas]

Although, to read the Bible, it sure looks like it. You don't find any hard reference to Jesus anywhere in the OT, although there are plenty of other subordinate but nevertheless supernatural characters, like Gabriel, running around. You'd think that when God told Moses "I am who I am" or some such thing, that he might have mentioned something about the other two aspects of his eternal character. "Oh, by the way, I've got a son and a ghost, too, but I'm keeping them in the bullpen for the moment." It isn't until the NT that we find out the truth, eh?
On this piece, I think the OT has many references to the eventual arrival of a Messiah, and what that Messiah would do, although the eventual result was somewhat unexpected. It also develops some broad themes that are fulfilled by Jesus, for example it shows the power of atoning sacrifice.

To a certain extent, even when the NT was written Christianity hadn't fully worked out the theological implications of what had just happened in the person of Jesus and the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Some of that still took a couple of hundred years for people to find the appropriate words.

[oliverwxyz]

Yeah - as Thomas says, the theology on this, based on John's gospel, is that Jesus was the 'Logos' (Greek - 'word') 'through' whom God the Father created the universe. What this actually means, fuck knows. Perhaps Thomas can explain.
Does it refer to the start of Genesis where God creates things by speaking them into existence - ie 'let there be light' etc? Then in what sense are his creative words Jesus/his Son?? Only in a very metaphorical stretch of the imagination I guess.. anyway..


The main point is this theory stresses Jesus' equality with God - he did not just pop into existence when God decided to have a son with Mary sometime 2000 years ago... God had always had three sides to his nature. The Trinity idea, which was not clearly formulated at the time the gospels were written, seems to have been developed to explain the idea of One God yet who is referred to both as the Father and creator and as a son (Jesus) and at other times as a Holy Spirit.

Hence the Son has always existed as part of the triune nature of God - and yet at the same time he is said to have been 'begotten' by the father - again Thomas can you explain? Or does this only refer to the 'begetting' of the human-god Jesus (the 'Son' incarnate) with Mary? On the other hand if that was the case , in what sense is this eternally-existing being a 'Son'? Or is this just a title of some sort? As for the whole Trinity concept - 3 'persons' in one, it is notorious for being totally incomprehensible and inexplicable apart from through 'faith'. It leads to questions like - how come Jesus used to pray to himself? Why did he accuse himself of forsaking himself? Why did he send himself to die as a sacrifice to himself in order to allow himself to let humans off their sins? Why did he descend on himself in the form of the spirit at baptism, or send himself in the form of the spirit to the disciples at pentecost etc?

I believe the real original purpose of JC, if he existed, was that he was a preacher, in a similar vein to John the Baptist, who believed a Kingdom of God was coming, when the Romans would be overthrown and God's Messiah (who he may or may not have thought was himself) would usher in a new era of justice and prosperity, perhaps along with eternal life for the faithful and resurrection for the faithful dead. He urged people to repent their sins and give up attachment to material things in preparation for this event.

Oliver

[vgrid101]

The OT prophesied messiah was not to be GOD coming down to save mankind...

We just got the bonus!

There are only 2 times where all 3 are together.

Conception, and baptism of Jesus.

Luke 1:35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

Luke 3:22 And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him, and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.

FYI

1 John 5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

No dirty comments about how the power of the Highest just likes to sit in the corner and watch while the Holy Ghost gets 13 year old virgin action!!!

PRAISE JESUS!!!

YIC
V

[thomas]

Yeah - as Thomas says, the theology on this, based on John's gospel, is that Jesus was the 'Logos' (Greek - 'word') 'through' whom God the Father created the universe. What this actually means, fuck knows. Perhaps Thomas can explain.
Does it refer to the start of Genesis where God creates things by speaking them into existence - ie 'let there be light' etc? Then in what sense are his creative words Jesus/his Son?? Only in a very metaphorical stretch of the imagination I guess.. anyway..
Well, explaining is notoriously difficult here, but I can try. I think of the difference as God the Father being the "will" or the "intent" behind the creation and Jesus being the "action" that actually did the creating. Remember that when the Bible says God and not Father that can refer to all three beings in one, so Genesis can be read as all three acting.

The main point is this theory stresses Jesus' equality with God - he did not just pop into existence when God decided to have a son with Mary sometime 2000 years ago... God had always had three sides to his nature. The Trinity idea, which was not clearly formulated at the time the gospels were written, seems to have been developed to explain the idea of One God yet who is referred to both as the Father and creator and as a son (Jesus) and at other times as a Holy Spirit.

Hence the Son has always existed as part of the triune nature of God - and yet at the same time he is said to have been 'begotten' by the father - again Thomas can you explain? Or does this only refer to the 'begetting' of the human-god Jesus (the 'Son' incarnate) with Mary? On the other hand if that was the case , in what sense is this eternally-existing being a 'Son'? Or is this just a title of some sort? As for the whole Trinity concept - 3 'persons' in one, it is notorious for being totally incomprehensible and inexplicable apart from through 'faith'. It leads to questions like - how come Jesus used to pray to himself? Why did he accuse himself of forsaking himself? Why did he send himself to die as a sacrifice to himself in order to allow himself to let humans off their sins? Why did he descend on himself in the form of the spirit at baptism, or send himself in the form of the spirit to the disciples at pentecost etc?
The main dispute in the early church (settled at the Council of Nicea) but still rumbling on today is regarding if Jesus was "begotten" or "created". Both refer to the "beginning" and not to Jesus' birth. The position that said that Jesus was created by God, before the earth was created is call Arianism. Some religions still have the concept today, e.g. Jehovah's Witnesses. When Christians say that Jesus was "begotten" by the Father, it implies that both have always existed, and neither was created by the other. It is, exactly as you say, an issue of equality between them. Or more precisely, it seems unacceptable that Jesus is somehow "less than" God, which He must be if God created Him.

As to how one comprehends all this, that's tough. One way to think about it is that if God was always God the Father then there must have always been a Son, otherwise in what sense was He the Father ? It's almost like what is proposed is a symbiotic relationship between them. All of this is really just men stumbling to find words to describe something beyond our understanding.

And the trinity, well, many of your questions are regarding Jesus' time on earth, when not only did we have the whole one person, three persons thing going on but also the whole mystery of Jesus, wholly man, wholly God. I believe the way to understand those mysteries about the trinity that you raise is to think of those interactions as being between Jesus, wholly man, and God. I know this is just pushing the problem around, but it helps me rationalise some of this without my head exploding.

One last thing, and I don't know if this helps at all, but if you fire a single electron at a piece of card with two slits in it, which slit will the electron pass through ? The answer, detectable as interference behind the card, is that it passes through both slits. How can one electron pass through both slits ? I don't know and neither does anybody else. But it does. It's a packet and a wave at the same time. How can a packet be a wave ?(caveat : not a physicist, waiting for somebody to shoot me down in flames here)

[AGENT-ADAIR]

the original purpose of jesus was to suck cocks. Now his followers suck ass, for they have forgotten the true meaning of christmas.
/agree.

Thats why on christmas, i go to the local porn shop...

[Erik]

thomas,

I appreciate your efforts here on a particularly difficult issue, as you are the first Christian I know who has tried to tackle it. What still confuses me a bit is why the most powerful being in the universe has a father-son aspect to it at all. I mean, I can point to uses (purposes, if you like, but a word I would avoid using from an evolutionary standpoint) of just about any part of my biology.

But the purposes you set forth for Jesus prior to his appearance on earth don't look to me to be terribly different from what God was already doing himself. It seems to me that the entity "God" was acting as a single unit at that point, so that I'm not sure there was a separate reason to have a son at all. On the other hand, Jesus's role as redemptive agent was a clearly distinct function.

Also, on the OT references, I recognize that Christians believe there are references to Jesus in descriptions of the Messiah. But the Jews clearly always believed and still do, that the Messiah is a man, not god as man. One might think that if that weren't in fact true, God would have straightened them out on that fairly central point a little sooner.

[thomas]

Let me try an explanation of, or at shed least a little more light on Christian theology. God has made a progressive revelation of who He is through history. So today we understand that God is comprised of three beings and distinguish between their characteristics as three people. Prior to Jesus, that actual truth wasn't any different only people's perceptions of it. So, now we say that God the Father is the intent or will of God, Jesus is the action of God and the Holy Spirit is the presence of God. That's a really concise summary, and I'm sure heretical in some part of it's content, but directionally correct.

Look at the example given above of Jesus' baptism. God the Father, expresses His intent "this is my son", Jesus is the physical man enacting God's will and the Spirit descends from the cloud to indicate the presence of God within Jesus the man.

So, when we look back at the OT and assign the actions of the different Trinity persons to the monotheistic God ( e.g. Jesus was the creating person ) we are engaging in revisionist history. Of that there is no doubt. But we're on good ground because we're using the examples I gave above of NT "re-interpretation" in the light of new knowledge about God. I hope this helps in answering your question "what was jesus doing" ? It's not so much "what was Jesus doing" and more about which part of the God revealed in the OT we now label as Jesus, given our new knowledge.

As for Jesus not being expected to be a God, that's true and maybe God's big surprise ! I don't know why He did it that way and I can't even guess. I think, at least, that it wasn't the first time in the sense that the OT crew went through several covenants, each time learning more about what God was like.

[oliverwxyz]

Thomas

Thanks for trying to clarify. However I would doubt that the idea of God as a father originally referred to his role as father of 'the son' - perhaps it was just a general title referring to his creation of men/angels/the universe etc? Is her referred to as a father in the OT at all? I don;t recall specific examples. However I read recently that Jesus was not the first to call God 'Abba' - 'Dad' - and other rabbinical sources show this usage too. IMO if the historical jesus referred to God in this way it was in my first sense, not in the sense of a unique relationship of shared God-hood.

And if someone is 'begotten' by someone esle it surely impies that the someone else existed before them?

Quote:
''When Christians say that Jesus was "begotten" by the Father, it implies that both have always existed, and neither was created by the other.''

To labour a possibly obvious point, 'Begotten' is just an old fashioned way of saying to 'fathered by' - ie by having sex. As in Adam begat Cain etc. It doesn't relate to any special co-existence, apart from when it is stretched to mean this in Christian theology.

[oliverwxyz]

I think the whole Son thing never arose before Christianity becasue no one before that was literally claiming to be his Son - there are times when the phrase son(s) of God is used in the OT but it is metaphorical, as in its use in some of the prophets for the people of Israel and , I think, sometimes for Israel's kings. Also there is that odd reference in genesis to the 'sons of God' seeing that the daughters of men were attractive and having sex with them, which seems to refer to angels...

but once Christians were going around saying jesus had liuterally been God's Son then theologians had to work out what the relationship was between teh son and God the Father - and eventually to preserve the idea of God's unity (monotheism) they came up with this trinity idea and the idea the son had always been a aprt of the deity. - ie cos otherwise it's suggesting a new bit of God can be created out of no where. I guess if Jesus/ or the Jesus depicted int he gospels/ had come stright out and said I am God, i am just visiting the Earth in a human body' then there would have been no need, but he prayed to his 'father' etc. And he said there were things the father knew that he didn't -, such as the time when the Kingdom would come.

The Nicene Creed
I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds

................... but even this suggests to me a time when there was no 'son'.....

[oliverwxyz]

It's interesting also that this 'begetting before all worlds' was done with no mother. How did it work? Or did God have a wife we don't know about ;-) Or does God reproduce more like an amoeba, by splitting in two?

But if the Father and Son are just different aspects of his nature, a bit like a person can have different aspects - worker, son, father, lover, friend, sportsman.. - in what sense are they seperate 'persons'? Or is God like someone with multiple personalities? And one of the personalities can become seperated off and live in a human body, while the other can manifest as a dove or tongues of fire etc?

[garylc1]

I hope this works, I’m formulating some thing s with WORD so as to collect my thoughts and get it together. As to beget and begot definitions, who knows. It’s like so many things of religions and the bible that leaves out or omits for us to argue or contemplate why.
So in keeping with the topic “does god exist?”. Just let me throw this one out to the theists. It seems as though God, a power in plurality, found their selves in trouble for a moment in Genesis 3:22 that reads:
22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side [e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (NIV)

And by the way, Matthew Henry or any of the other commentators on the bible will not touch on this. So you see now we have this other tree. So does this mean if Adam and\or Eve could have gotten to this tree of life would that have fucked the Godhead up or what? So God had to drive them out! Isn’t that a little less than the showmanship of something that can speak into existence the entire fucking universe? I would like to think that a god I could worship would be a little jazzier than that. Are the little cute cherubim still there waving swords?
Oh yea one more for now. Where was The Son when the flesh Son was on earth and who in hell was he trying to fool by praying to the Father when they shared equanimity in the Godhead at the level in heaven (sic). The Old Testament said on occasion that God winked at certain things but he don’t now well I’ll wink at the creators of this simpleton but complicated piece of theological bullshit.” Oh yea of little faith”,…..”Goodness gracious great balls of fire” Comments welcome,
Thank you,
Gary C.

[thomas]

Thomas

Thanks for trying to clarify. However I would doubt that the idea of God as a father originally referred to his role as father of 'the son' - perhaps it was just a general title referring to his creation of men/angels/the universe etc? Is her referred to as a father in the OT at all? I don;t recall specific examples. However I read recently that Jesus was not the first to call God 'Abba' - 'Dad' - and other rabbinical sources show this usage too. IMO if the historical jesus referred to God in this way it was in my first sense, not in the sense of a unique relationship of shared God-hood.
Like I said in the post to Erik, this is all about how we talk about and describe our concept of God. And it's in the light of a progressive revelation by God of His nature, and the development of mankind. So, the point is not about if God was referred to as the Father before Jesus existed, the point is how Christian theologians worked through their new image of God, in the light of new revelation.

And if someone is 'begotten' by someone esle it surely impies that the someone else existed before them?

Quote:
''When Christians say that Jesus was "begotten" by the Father, it implies that both have always existed, and neither was created by the other.''

To labour a possibly obvious point, 'Begotten' is just an old fashioned way of saying to 'fathered by' - ie by having sex. As in Adam begat Cain etc. It doesn't relate to any special co-existence, apart from when it is stretched to mean this in Christian theology.
You are correct in what you say, but specifically in Christian theology when we say that Jesus was "begotten not created" what is being said is that Jesus and God have always existed as two persons as part of the Trinity. And as I said the main reason for saying this is to affirm that Jesus was as much God as God the Father and not in any way lesser.

[thomas]

It's interesting also that this 'begetting before all worlds' was done with no mother. How did it work? Or did God have a wife we don't know about ;-) Or does God reproduce more like an amoeba, by splitting in two?

But if the Father and Son are just different aspects of his nature, a bit like a person can have different aspects - worker, son, father, lover, friend, sportsman.. - in what sense are they seperate 'persons'? Or is God like someone with multiple personalities? And one of the personalities can become seperated off and live in a human body, while the other can manifest as a dove or tongues of fire etc?
In my opinion, this is just about how we as humans talk about and describe God. So, your questions, while valid, end up being somewhat meaningless. I mean this in the sense that you are trying to get beyond the description and see how it relates to "how things really are" when really the description is the best we've got, by definition.

Having said that I think you are somewhat on the right lines. There is an aspect to the Trinity that is describing different aspects of God. I think one of the reasons we have the concept of the Father, Son and Spirit being separate persons, is precisely to deal with the issue you raise about what happened when Jesus was on earth. The question is what can we say about Jesus. We want to say that He was wholly God ( in fact He implied that about Himself ). But then was the Father, less God when Jesus was on earth ? No. Hopefully you see where I'm going with this.

[thomas]

but once Christians were going around saying jesus had liuterally been God's Son then theologians had to work out what the relationship was between teh son and God the Father - and eventually to preserve the idea of God's unity (monotheism) they came up with this trinity idea and the idea the son had always been a aprt of the deity. - ie cos otherwise it's suggesting a new bit of God can be created out of no where. I guess if Jesus/ or the Jesus depicted int he gospels/ had come stright out and said I am God, i am just visiting the Earth in a human body' then there would have been no need, but he prayed to his 'father' etc. And he said there were things the father knew that he didn't -, such as the time when the Kingdom would come.
I think you are correct in your analysis of how the notion of Trinity came about. That is, early christians trying to find words and concepts to describe what had just happened. I believe the concept of the Trinity can be found in the NT in several places, and I believe the concept of the Trinity was based on those scriptures.

An excellent book that talks about this and several other topics is the rather snappily titled Learning Theology With The Church Fathers (http://ivpress.gospelcom.net/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=2686). I highly recommend it. It is quite conservative, but gives a good picture of how the theology of the church was formed, and a good overview of Christian theology.

[oliverwxyz]

I hope this works, I’m formulating some thing s with WORD so as to collect my thoughts and get it together. As to beget and begot definitions, who knows. It’s like so many things of religions and the bible that leaves out or omits for us to argue or contemplate why.
So in keeping with the topic “does god exist?”. Just let me throw this one out to the theists. It seems as though God, a power in plurality, found their selves in trouble for a moment in Genesis 3:22 that reads:
22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side [e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (NIV)

And by the way, Matthew Henry or any of the other commentators on the bible will not touch on this. So you see now we have this other tree. So does this mean if Adam and\or Eve could have gotten to this tree of life would that have fucked the Godhead up or what? So God had to drive them out! Isn’t that a little less than the showmanship of something that can speak into existence the entire fucking universe? I would like to think that a god I could worship would be a little jazzier than that. Are the little cute cherubim still there waving swords?
Oh yea one more for now. Where was The Son when the flesh Son was on earth and who in hell was he trying to fool by praying to the Father when they shared equanimity in the Godhead at the level in heaven (sic). The Old Testament said on occasion that God winked at certain things but he don’t now well I’ll wink at the creators of this simpleton but complicated piece of theological bullshit.” Oh yea of little faith”,…..”Goodness gracious great balls of fire” Comments welcome,
Thank you,
Gary C.
yeah right, I wondered about that too. As it says in Genesis that God only commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from one tree (in the middle of the garden) then I guess perhaps he was going to let them eat from the tree of life and thus live forever - but he really hates anyone to get above themselves and try to be too like him : eg the rebellion of Satan. So once they had eaten from the tree of knowledge he had to chuck them out.

BTW cherubim are not cute and small, that's a misconception, they are big and scary and more powerful than archangels. The hierarchy goes angels and archangels and then cherubim and seraphim (and I think thrones and dominions and principalities, but I forget the exact order.... they worked it all out in the middle ages).

Here we go, wikipedia , hierarchy of angels (that is such a good encyclopedia, don;t know how they manage it with it being written and edited by anyone on the internet)


In descending order of power, these were:
First Hierarchy:
Seraphim
Cherubim
Thrones
Second Hierarchy:
Powers
Dominions
Principalities
Third Hierarchy:
Virtues
Archangels
Angels

[oliverwxyz]

Thanks for trying to explain Thomas, I feel it is still one of the weirder and harder to grasp aspects of Christioanity and for that matter one of the areas in which Islam makes more sense (not that I'm a fan of Islam - see islam thread). It was also one of Mohammad;s big bones of contention with Xtianity. The koran is strongly critical of the idea God is anything other than one being/ one person, with no incomprehensible stuff about three-in-one or a man being god and man.

[Rocketman]

I think the original purpose of Jesus was

1.) To inform mankind that there is no heaven or hell but what we make in this life.
2.) That an individual has worth and meaning intrinsically and only a world that frees us from the grosser vaguaries and cruelty of nature and includes all regardless of social class, appearance or monetary worth is worth striving for
3.) That building heaven on earth (an achievement of complete empathy) is possible only when human kind embraces sacrifice of the self as the method for achieving it
4.) That by your actions you may die, but you will continue to effect the world even if you aren't around to see it.
5.) That we are not intrinsically bad. We are not born with a caul of " sin" on us, but rather we are instrinsically without morality. It is by our choices that we educate and create ourselves, that we choose our behaviour. by choosing what we will, we change our world.
6.) And that you can kill a man without defeating him.

In my country we have a national hero. He was a kid, a cripple, and a guy who set out to do something that he couldn't even finish. Heck he didn't even make it halfway.

He failed.

He died.

He did not come back from the grave.

A cripple and failure.

300 million dollars worldwide has been raised to fight cancer because of his actions.

His cancer killed him, but it did not beat him.

With people like that we do not need the promise of god. We have something more temporary, more fragile, more rare, and so greater.

If there are human beings with that ability of trancendance in existance, we should be emulating it, instead of worshipping it.

but then again, it's just an opinion.

[kmisho]

To me one of the most interesting things about the jesus/hero myth is that his 2 main purposes were depicted in a way that puts them at odds with each other.

Surely the fact that jesus was crucified is of primary importance. It was obviously extremely important that jesus suffer and die. The idea seems to be that jesus's torture and death somehow evened the score.

But the idea that jesus's resurrection was proof that death was conquered, or even that death did not in fact exist, was clearly also a main message. This is the basis, of course, of the most important christian rite: Easter.

The problem: Isn't the idea that jesus died for our sins cancelled out by his resurrection? If not, why not?

As I often say to christians who tell me jesus died for my sins: I am unimpressed by jesus pretending to die.

[Rocketman]

It only matters ---the crucifiction only mattes -if he were not a god. His rebirth was a metaphor--an idea that is in and of itself worthwhile cannot be killed.

But it can be obfuscated with mysticism and used to promote a self serving institution.

Perhaops the next messiah can give lessons about how to prevent a message from being perverted into religious thought.