If Jesus did come back would you want to kill him?

[Bubbles]

Hi all. Apologies for starting a thread and appearing to ignore it for so long. I've actually been locked out of this site for no good reason, and this morning "Some" very kindly suggested a workaround using a proxy site that's actually worked.

NS - I fundamentally disagree with you here. There are various potential issues that could be discussed that have nothing to do with just poking the christians:

- "If you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him" is an old saw, variously interpreted. One is that if you did meet a perfect being on your journey then necessarily you cannot know him to be perfect so you should destroy him (or the idea of perfection) and continue the journey.

- If, say, a 90-year-old on his deathbed said, "by the way, I found the cure for cancer 60 years ago but kept it to myself" I suspect many would want to have a few words.

- If you seriously think that a man/god Jesus was real then surely you'd be curious at least about why he took so long in human history to show up at all, about why he didn't fix it so innocents didn't die when he did finally show up the first time, why he sat on his hands and watched so many blameless people suffer horribly over the last 2,000 years etc.

Wouldn't you?

Yes, any parent of a terminally ill or murdered child definately would. ( not that I am, but I can see some serious questions would be asked)

[Rhiannon]

Hi all. Apologies for starting a thread and appearing to ignore it for so long. I've actually been locked out of this site for no good reason, and this morning "Some" very kindly suggested a workaround using a proxy site that's actually worked.

NS - I fundamentally disagree with you here. There are various potential issues that could be discussed that have nothing to do with just poking the christians:

- "If you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him" is an old saw, variously interpreted. One is that if you did meet a perfect being on your journey then necessarily you cannot know him to be perfect so you should destroy him (or the idea of perfection) and continue the journey.

- If, say, a 90-year-old on his deathbed said, "by the way, I found the cure for cancer 60 years ago but kept it to myself" I suspect many would want to have a few words.

- If you seriously think that a man/god Jesus was real then surely you'd be curious at least about why he took so long in human history to show up at all, about why he didn't fix it so innocents didn't die when he did finally show up the first time, why he sat on his hands and watched so many blameless people suffer horribly over the last 2,000 years etc.

Wouldn't you?

I think you are mixing up the omnigod concept and the Jesus Christ of the Bible. He cured individuals who had faith in him. There's nothing to suggest that he could find a cure for a particular disease, or prevent famine or war. The model in the gospels is healing some individual believers, nothing more.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Ri,

I think you are mixing up the omnigod concept and the Jesus Christ of the Bible. He cured individuals who had faith in him. There's nothing to suggest that he could find a cure for a particular disease, or prevent famine or war. The model in the gospels is healing some individual believers, nothing more.

Could not a man/god - especially one who's a third of a "trinity" - have done anything he felt like doing, or are you suggesting that the real god sent him down with only very parochial powers like serving tapas to the 5,000 but not capable of anything bigger?

[Rhiannon]

I'm not a believer so I'm not suggesting anything. If you take the Gospel stories at face value then individual and local miracles seem to be about it.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Chi,

I'm not a believer so I'm not suggesting anything. If you take the Gospel stories at face value then individual and local miracles seem to be about it.

Yes it's just party tricks all the way but as I understand it christians make claims for his abilities way beyond that. If they're right about that, why didn't he exercise any of them either then or since? Surely a genuine man/god could have done away with cerebral palsy for example whenever he felt like it couldn't he?

[Rhiannon]

Not really. Some Christians believe that praying to Jesus should bring physical healing to believers and get a bit bothered when it doesn't until they remember Satan and unrepented sin and stuff like that. Mostly though people think in terms of spiritual and/or emotional healing, mainly because the other kind tends not to happen without the help of a doctor.

God the Father should be able to do anything though.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Rhi,

Not really. Some Christians believe that praying to Jesus should bring physical healing to believers and get a bit bothered when it doesn't until they remember Satan and unrepented sin and stuff like that. Mostly though people think in terms of spiritual and/or emotional healing, mainly because the other kind tends not to happen without the help of a doctor.

God the Father should be able to do anything though.

Happy to defer to your knowledge of christian beliefs but I'd be surprised if many christians think there to be a god who can do the big stuff and a son he limited just to party tricks and parlour magic.

[Rhiannon]

Christians think that the biggie Jesus did/does was the Cross - defeating death. You have to bear in mind that even many liberals have their eyes at least partly on the next life; evangelicals even more so.

I'm not saying that beliefs such as you put across don't exist - I've come across them - but the majority see Jesus' earthly ministry as a run-up to the Crucifixion, designed to demonstrate who he was. There were regular healing services held here at one time, very well attended, and all anyone expected was a spiritual and emotional benefit.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Rhi,

Christians think that the biggie Jesus did/does was the Cross - defeating death. You have to bear in mind that even many liberals have their eyes at least partly on the next life; evangelicals even more so.

Yes I know, but why send your son with a party trick visible only to a tiny number who may or may not have recorded it as story that may or may not have caught the wind from among the countless other miracle stories available at the time to make our point rather than, say, saying something like: "This is my son. He's part-divine, and to prove it I'll eliminate overnight a disease that affects whole populations"? 

I'm not saying that beliefs such as you put across don't exist - I've come across them - but the majority see Jesus' earthly ministry as a run-up to the Crucifixion, designed to demonstrate who he was. There were regular healing services held here at one time, very well attended, and all anyone expected was a spiritual and emotional benefit.

But again, if it was designed to show who he was why do it in exactly the same way as you'd expect to find from a peripatetic mystic and street conjuror with no divine capacity at all?

[Rhiannon]

Those are questions that I can't answer, given that I'm not a believer. But I think most Christians will just point to the cross as their answer.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Rhi,

Those are questions that I can't answer, given that I'm not a believer. But I think most Christians will just point to the cross as their answer.

Well, perhaps they're in something of a cleft stick: if they opt for the divine JC, then he'd have all sorts of questions to answer about sitting on his hands all this time; if instead they opt for the human JC, then he'd be off the hook for criminal negligence but the whole edifice of divinity would have collapsed.

[Bramble]

Hi all. Apologies for starting a thread and appearing to ignore it for so long. I've actually been locked out of this site for no good reason, and this morning "Some" very kindly suggested a workaround using a proxy site that's actually worked.

NS - I fundamentally disagree with you here. There are various potential issues that could be discussed that have nothing to do with just poking the christians:

- "If you meet a Buddha on the road, kill him" is an old saw, variously interpreted. One is that if you did meet a perfect being on your journey then necessarily you cannot know him to be perfect so you should destroy him (or the idea of perfection) and continue the journey.

- If, say, a 90-year-old on his deathbed said, "by the way, I found the cure for cancer 60 years ago but kept it to myself" I suspect many would want to have a few words.

- If you seriously think that a man/god Jesus was real then surely you'd be curious at least about why he took so long in human history to show up at all, about why he didn't fix it so innocents didn't die when he did finally show up the first time, why he sat on his hands and watched so many blameless people suffer horribly over the last 2,000 years etc.

Wouldn't you?

I'm not sure how relevant this is to your project but there is a crucial difference between Jesus and Buddha which might make the use of Linji's saying here not quite so appropriate. According to Zen Buddhism (Linji was a Zen master) we are all already Buddhas, although we may not realise this. According to Christianity Jesus - being one aspect of the Trinity - was unique. We can emulate his behaviour but we can never be God.

Meeting the Buddha (on the road) suggests holding a concept of Buddha as something separate and external to oneself. Doing this 'deifies' Buddha as something essentially 'other' which in practice makes it so, in other words keeps one from realising ones own essential nature. This is why it is necessary to kill him. The idea of Buddha as some kind of role model has to be dropped because it reinforces a hierarchical view of things, which in Buddhism equates to pride. By contrast, Jesus is forever a role model and completely 'other'. We can only strive (hopelessly) towards that perfection and can only ultimately fail. Christianity is inherently hierarchical and so we must seek salvation from the higher power. In Zen Buddhism there is no higher power and no vicarious salvation.

So I imagine most Christians would make little sense of the idea of killing Jesus. Jesus may have been a man but as God he is a concept and must remain so. To kill the concept would be fatal to the religion, whereas in Zen it is essential. One sometimes comes across the idea that God is not a concept or object of any sort (in negative theology) but perhaps for obvious reasons this has never been mainstream and (in my limited experience) most Christians find this at best very puzzling and at worse downright dangerous. I have also noted that those who do dip their toes in this water invariably also swim in the sea of cataphatic theology, which deals in concepts and talks of God as an object. There would seem to be a large measure of cognitive dissonance involved in maintaining these two positions simultaneously and I have noticed that those who find the dissonance troubling are sometimes dismissed as 'literal minded people!' There are some interesting characters in the history of Christian thought who seem to have come very close in their writings to dissolving the God concept altogether but they are invariably also 'believers' in some other part of their psyche, presumably because one couldn't kill God without killing Jesus, or at least 'reducing' him to just another human, and then what would be left of Christianity?

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hi Bramble,

I'm not sure how relevant this is to your project but there is a crucial difference between Jesus and Buddha which might make the use of Linji's saying here not quite so appropriate. According to Zen Buddhism (Linji was a Zen master) we are all already Buddhas, although we may not realise this. According to Christianity Jesus - being one aspect of the Trinity - was unique. We can emulate his behaviour but we can never be God.

Meeting the Buddha (on the road) suggests holding a concept of Buddha as something separate and external to oneself. Doing this 'deifies' Buddha as something essentially 'other' which in practice makes it so, in other words keeps one from realising ones own essential nature. This is why it is necessary to kill him. The idea of Buddha as some kind of role model has to be dropped because it reinforces a hierarchical view of things, which in Buddhism equates to pride. By contrast, Jesus is forever a role model and completely 'other'. We can only strive (hopelessly) towards that perfection and can only ultimately fail. Christianity is inherently hierarchical and so we must seek salvation from the higher power. In Zen Buddhism there is no higher power and no vicarious salvation.

So I imagine most Christians would make little sense of the idea of killing Jesus. Jesus may have been a man but as God he is a concept and must remain so. To kill the concept would be fatal to the religion, whereas in Zen it is essential. One sometimes comes across the idea that God is not a concept or object of any sort (in negative theology) but perhaps for obvious reasons this has never been mainstream and (in my limited experience) most Christians find this at best very puzzling and at worse downright dangerous. I have also noted that those who do dip their toes in this water invariably also swim in the sea of cataphatic theology, which deals in concepts and talks of God as an object. There would seem to be a large measure of cognitive dissonance involved in maintaining these two positions simultaneously and I have noticed that those who find the dissonance troubling are sometimes dismissed as 'literal minded people!' There are some interesting characters in the history of Christian thought who seem to have come very close in their writings to dissolving the God concept altogether but they are invariably also 'believers' in some other part of their psyche, presumably because one couldn't kill God without killing Jesus, or at least 'reducing' him to just another human, and then what would be left of Christianity?

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I wasn’t particularly attempting a comparison of Buddhist and Christian beliefs, but rather was responding to the charge of gratuitous offensiveness by mentioning that the notion of killing the perfect being has resonances in other belief systems. I’m aware of the difference between the Buddhist indivisibility tradition and the Christian reliance on “other” – for the latter supposedly we can join god but we can never be god etc.

As for why christians would or should ask a returning JC a few tough questions though, the point remains I think: only by the use of some pretty convoluted casuistry could you argue that not appearing for some 150,000 years of human history, then appearing briefly but making no long term fixes, then not showing up for 2,000 years while countless innocents suffered and died horribly was the behaviour of a man/god possessed of the “omnis”.

Of course of JC was just a sort of proto David Koresh then the issue goes away, but so then does the fundamental rationale for the faith. That’s the cleft stick: mortal = no divine; divine = criminally negligent.

It’s the christian thinkers who have – of who have come close to – dissolving god who interest me more than the by and large literalists who pitch up here, but I’m struggling to find a proponent of this approach. There must be thoughtful and nuanced christians (Wiggs is one such I think) who despair at the nursery-level thinking of some of the arguments here, but sadly not many of them feel the need to talk on this mb.

Ah well.

[Bramble]

Hi Bramble,

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I wasn’t particularly attempting a comparison of Buddhist and Christian beliefs, but rather was responding to the charge of gratuitous offensiveness by mentioning that the notion of killing the perfect being has resonances in other belief systems. I’m aware of the difference between the Buddhist indivisibility tradition and the Christian reliance on “other” – for the latter supposedly we can join god but we can never be god etc.

As for why christians would or should ask a returning JC a few tough questions though, the point remains I think: only by the use of some pretty convoluted casuistry could you argue that not appearing for some 150,000 years of human history, then appearing briefly but making no long term fixes, then not showing up for 2,000 years while countless innocents suffered and died horribly was the behaviour of a man/god possessed of the “omnis”.

Of course of JC was just a sort of proto David Koresh then the issue goes away, but so then does the fundamental rationale for the faith. That’s the cleft stick: mortal = no divine; divine = criminally negligent.

It’s the christian thinkers who have – of who have come close to – dissolving god who interest me more than the by and large literalists who pitch up here, but I’m struggling to find a proponent of this approach. There must be thoughtful and nuanced christians (Wiggs is one such I think) who despair at the nursery-level thinking of some of the arguments here, but sadly not many of them feel the need to talk on this mb.

Ah well.

I suppose one problem is that so much of religion is underpinned by the craving for (human, my) significance in an apparently indifferent universe. Apparently Hegel wrote that humans will never be happy until they live in a world of their own making. Theology duly 'makes' a universe that is really all about us. OK, it's about God, but for the most part only about the God whose credentials we supply, so it's little surprise that he turns out to have an inordinate fondness for us rather than, say, beetles, as the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane once suggested. The trouble with this is that it not only makes us great (or perhaps just grandiose), it makes God absurdly small and anthropic, with much of our pettiness and peculiarity, so perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect theology to bear much scrutiny. But the project of human sanctification and significance certainly isn't confined to the religious; it unites most of our kind. The non-religious may not believe that the universe came custom-built for our purposes but we're damn well going to make it ours by our own efforts because effectively we are God now. I don't know that I like this version any better - at least religion sometimes speaks of humility as a virtue.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hi again Bramble,

I suppose one problem is that so much of religion is underpinned by the craving for (human, my) significance in an apparently indifferent universe. Apparently Hegel wrote that humans will never be happy until they live in a world of their own making. Theology duly 'makes' a universe that is really all about us. OK, it's about God, but for the most part only about the God whose credentials we supply, so it's little surprise that he turns out to have an inordinate fondness for us rather than, say, beetles, as the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane once suggested. The trouble with this is that it not only makes us great (or perhaps just grandiose), it makes God absurdly small and anthropic, with much of our pettiness and peculiarity, so perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect theology to bear much scrutiny. But the project of human sanctification and significance certainly isn't confined to the religious; it unites most of our kind. The non-religious may not believe that the universe came custom-built for our purposes but we're damn well going to make it ours by our own efforts because effectively we are God now. I don't know that I like this version any better - at least religion sometimes speaks of humility as a virtue.

I’d readily strike with a wet kipper any man who disagreed with pretty much any of that. It’s fantastically solipsistic isn’t it, this “God created a whole universe just for little old me and what’s more he’s at my beck and call when I make the right genuflections and supplications to fix Granny’s cataracts” but there it is nonetheless.

I take your point too that the god we’ve invented is a remarkably parochial one – a few party tricks 2,000 years ago to some illiterate desert nomads and a whole bunch of logical fallacies later re little Timmy’s surprise recovery after prayer when the doctors had given up and Bingo Schmingo!...God!

That’s partly at least why I’m more interested in the more subtle and nuanced theologians – presumably learned and intelligent people after all, rather than in the mediaeval ontologies we see so often here. That said, I remember trying to plough through some of Rowan William’s thoughts only to find them as confused and logically hopeless as those of the nursery school theologians, yet he’s generally thought of as being at the thinking end of the spectrum I think.

As for being god now, my fifteen-year-old (who’s become a vegetarian) asked me the other day whether it would be more morally wrong for a super advanced species to farm humans for food than it is for humans to farm, say, chickens for the same purpose.

Kids say the darndest things eh?

[Gonnagle]

Dear Nearlysane,

What kind of forum do I want, the kind of forum where Blue and Bramble have excellent discussions like these.

Gonnagle.

[Bramble]

Hi again Bramble,

I’d readily strike with a wet kipper any man who disagreed with pretty much any of that. It’s fantastically solipsistic isn’t it, this “God created a whole universe just for little old me and what’s more he’s at my beck and call when I make the right genuflections and supplications to fix Granny’s cataracts” but there it is nonetheless.

I take your point too that the god we’ve invented is a remarkably parochial one – a few party tricks 2,000 years ago to some illiterate desert nomads and a whole bunch of logical fallacies later re little Timmy’s surprise recovery after prayer when the doctors had given up and Bingo Schmingo!...God!

That’s partly at least why I’m more interested in the more subtle and nuanced theologians – presumably learned and intelligent people after all, rather than in the mediaeval ontologies we see so often here. That said, I remember trying to plough through some of Rowan William’s thoughts only to find them as confused and logically hopeless as those of the nursery school theologians, yet he’s generally thought of as being at the thinking end of the spectrum I think.

As for being god now, my fifteen-year-old (who’s become a vegetarian) asked me the other day whether it would be more morally wrong for a super advanced species to farm humans for food than it is for humans to farm, say, chickens for the same purpose.

Kids say the darndest things eh?

Strictly speaking theology should mean the study of God but in practice it means the study of human thoughts and ideas to which the word God has been applied. I'm not sure how one would study God as such or even if this even makes any kind of sense unless we're talking a purely naturalistic god. My wife once put a question of mine to Rowan Williams regarding the matter of whether God as a concept or belief can ever be anything other than idolatry, to which he replied 'It's crampons on the rock face'. Crampons are, of course, for snow and ice rather than rock, and perhaps concepts are similarly the wrong tool for the job (of theology), but I don't know whether this is what the man meant. I like to think so.

I like the sound of your 15 year old 

[floo]

Strictly speaking theology should mean the study of God but in practice it means the study of human thoughts and ideas to which the word God has been applied. I'm not sure how one would study God as such or even if this even makes any kind of sense unless we're talking a purely naturalistic god. My wife once put a question of mine to Rowan Williams regarding the matter of whether God as a concept or belief can ever be anything other than idolatry, to which he replied 'It's crampons on the rock face'. Crampons are, of course, for snow and ice rather than rock, and perhaps concepts are similarly the wrong tool for the job (of theology), but I don't know whether this is what the man meant. I like to think so.

I like the sound of your 15 year old 

How can you study something for which there is not the slightest bit of evidence it exists, like the deity?

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hi again Bramble,

Strictly speaking theology should mean the study of God but in practice it means the study of human thoughts and ideas to which the word God has been applied. I'm not sure how one would study God as such or even if this even makes any kind of sense unless we're talking a purely naturalistic god. My wife once put a question of mine to Rowan Williams regarding the matter of whether God as a concept or belief can ever be anything other than idolatry, to which he replied 'It's crampons on the rock face'. Crampons are, of course, for snow and ice rather than rock, and perhaps concepts are similarly the wrong tool for the job (of theology), but I don't know whether this is what the man meant. I like to think so.

Yup, how on earth would one ever think of studying a god other than by taking at face value the stuff he’s supposedly decided to tell you through non-contemporaneous, multiply translated and heavily edited “holy” texts? Whatever else this god may be he’s a lousy PR man…

As for RW, presumably he meant bolt anchors but it would have been helpful to know why he thought it was actually anything more than Velcro at best, and indeed why he thought there was a rock face to start with. You need to make several pretty major assumptions I’d have thought before talking about crampons or bolt anchors. I like the wrong tools for the job analogy, though I’ve yet to hear of any tools more suitable.

That’s the thing though with RW and others of his ilk – beautifully enunciated and mild in tone as his pronouncements may be, they tend to be prolix and obscurantist to a degree that makes them – for me at least – impenetrable. I think the idea is that we’re just too theologically illiterate to grasp the subtlety of his meaning, but it all seems a bit emperor’s new clothes to me – especially when he gets evidently tangled in his own rhetoric. I remember for example a radio interview on (I think) some aspect of gay rights when he stared telling us that the bible was the inerrant word of god, but finished by explaining that we could interpret it differently as the Zeitgeist changed. What use then would it be if we have no method to figure out whether out current interpretation is the “correct” one?     

I like the sound of your 15 year old

Thanks. She’s a sweetie – she bought a load of small presents at the weekend that she’s leaving around the house for her big sister to find to help with the stress of taking the International Baccalaureate exams in a week or two. I like to think we’ve done something right at least 

[SusanDoris]

Strictly speaking theology should mean the study of God but in practice it means the study of human thoughts and ideas to which the word God has been applied. I'm not sure how one would study God as such or even if this even makes any kind of sense unless we're talking a purely naturalistic god. My wife once put a question of mine to Rowan Williams regarding the matter of whether God as a concept or belief can ever be anything other than idolatry, to which he replied 'It's crampons on the rock face'. Crampons are, of course, for snow and ice rather than rock, and perhaps concepts are similarly the wrong tool for the job (of theology), but I don't know whether this is what the man meant. I like to think so.

I like the sound of your 15 year old 

Not long ago, I started a topic on another forum), 'What do toptheologians know, really know, about God?' The answer is of course that all any theologian can know is what other theologians have said about the imaginary being. There were many interesting tangent discussions, but not a single fact!

[Bramble]

Blue, We can probably all agree that God is a mystery. There's a line from a guy called Cheng-tao Ke that goes, 'In not being able to get it, you get it'. I like that. I think I get it.

[Bramble]

Susan, Indeed!

[bluehillside Retd.]

Hi Bramble,

Blue, We can probably all agree that God is a mystery.

Well, so far as the concept "God" is concerned it doesn't seem to be mysterious to me at all - just a manifestation to our species' pattern-finding nature and preference for a conspiracy theory over no theory at all. If it turned out that there was a God (or lots of gods) though then there'd be mysteries aplenty alright, not least the mystery of why He/they created a universe exactly consistent with there being no god at all.

There's a line from a guy called Cheng-tao Ke that goes, 'In not being able to get it, you get it'. I like that. I think I get it.

Then you don't!

[Brownie]

Dear Nearlysane,

What kind of forum do I want, the kind of forum where Blue and Bramble have excellent discussions like these.

Gonnagle.

Too right!  Fascinating.

[Nearly Sane]

Dear Nearlysane,

What kind of forum do I want, the kind of forum where Blue and Bramble have excellent discussions like these.

Gonnagle.

Agreed, and because of which I owe blue am apology
 What had appeared after the first few posts a mock the Christians thread has now that blue can post become very interesting, and is a good template for how we can talk about theism without the jejune snobbery