No matter how it's dressed up, originating with Origen, it was and remains there in mass folk Christianity:
It originated in the early Church, particularly in the work of Origen. The theory teaches that the death of Christ was a ransom sacrifice, usually said to have been paid to Satan, in satisfaction for the bondage and debt on the souls of humanity as a result of inherited sin.
Writing in the 4th century, St. Athanasius of Alexandria proposed a theory of the atonement which similarly states that sin bears the consequence of death, that God warned Adam about this, and so, to remain consistent with Himself must have Jesus die as Man's perfect prototype, or let humankind die mired in sin. This has some similarity to the satisfaction view, although Athanasius emphasized the fact that this death is effective because of our unity with Christ, rather than emphasizing a legal substitution or transfer of merits and that when Jesus descended into hades (variously, the underworld or hell, the abode of the dead) he eliminated death with his own death, since the power of death cannot hold God, Who is Life, captive.
East and West, people believe that Jesus died for our sins, that he's our saviour, that he fixes us. Or damns us. Evangelicals are just honest about it.
Right or wrong thread, everyone else is no less honest about it, Martin. Let’s not impugn the honesty of countless people, including fellow Shipmates, okay?
I'm not. Ever. Evangelicals, even liberals, by definition in my experience, in four large and typical Anglican congregations over 19 years, stare the plain reading of scripture in the face. They can't help that. I emerged within evangelicalism and de-reconstructed accordingly, analogous to @Gamma Gamaliel. I couldn't help that. None of us can help how we see these things. Which is the history of the Church. The opposite of honest isn't dishonest in this context.
So you think there is some perfect law that could exist but currently doesn't?
Well, yes—certainly, ultimately, God’s law, but on an earthly level, our fallenness messes everything up.
Don't forget that one time when God's law drowned every living thing save one family. Or when God made specific injunctions "not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you."
I'm not convinced God's law is all that comforting.
If human nature was truly good then we wouldn’t need laws.
I think this depends on whether you consider order to be inherently "good". To borrow a quote from scripture:
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.
Never forget that the purpose of law is order, not justice or good. Equating order with good, without examining the nature of that order, is a very big mistake.
I would agree about your last sentence – that order and good or not necessarily in harmony – but not that the purpose of law, at least metaphysically, is only order. According to St. Paul, those in authority are God’s servants to do us good. If a law is bad out those in authority are unjust (and in this fallen world, that happens a lot, as in the examples above), then that is a violation of that purpose, not the fulfillment of it.
This reminds me of a passage from Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel. The novel's premise is that a detective has been given a humaniform robot as a partner. The detective suspects for various reasons that this partner is actually a human pretending to be a robot. One of those reasons is that he was told that the robot had been programmed for justice. The detective points out that "justice" is an abstract concept that would be impossible to translate into the mathematical terms needed to program it into a robot. This theory gets demolished when the robot informs the detective that "justice" is a state which exists when all laws are enforced, and that an "unjust law" is a contradiction in terms.
Saying that unjust laws contradict the nature of law seems like it's veering dangerously close to the Scottish border.
This is all very interesting, but my point was merely that if human nature was truly good then we wouldn’t need to make laws to protect ourselves from the harmful actions of others.
So you think there is some perfect law that could exist but currently doesn't?
Well, yes—certainly, ultimately, God’s law, but on an earthly level, our fallenness messes everything up.
Don't forget that one time when God's law drowned every living thing save one family. Or when God made specific injunctions "not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you."
I'm not convinced God's law is all that comforting.
Whatever one believes about those Old Testament events (there are various interpretations and approaches to Scripture), I’m talking about transcendent Justice, and the law that Love ultimately fulfills.
If human nature was truly good then we wouldn’t need laws.
I think this depends on whether you consider order to be inherently "good". To borrow a quote from scripture:
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.
Never forget that the purpose of law is order, not justice or good. Equating order with good, without examining the nature of that order, is a very big mistake.
I would agree about your last sentence – that order and good or not necessarily in harmony – but not that the purpose of law, at least metaphysically, is only order. According to St. Paul, those in authority are God’s servants to do us good. If a law is bad out those in authority are unjust (and in this fallen world, that happens a lot, as in the examples above), then that is a violation of that purpose, not the fulfillment of it.
This reminds me of a passage from Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel. The novel's premise is that a detective has been given a humaniform robot as a partner. The detective suspects for various reasons that this partner is actually a human pretending to be a robot. One of those reasons is that he was told that the robot had been programmed for justice. The detective points out that "justice" is an abstract concept that would be impossible to translate into the mathematical terms needed to program it into a robot. This theory gets demolished when the robot informs the detective that "justice" is a state which exists when all laws are enforced, and that an "unjust law" is a contradiction in terms.
Saying that unjust laws contradict the nature of law seems like it's veering dangerously close to the Scottish border.
It doesn’t seem that way to me in the least, any more than someone doing terrible things in the name of charity contradicts the nature of charity. Unjust laws, in my view, contradict what Law is supposed to be, on a cosmic level, the Divine Order of which earthly laws are only a shadow or image or (as contrasted with archetype) ectype, and often in a broken, distorted, and fallen way. Just as fallen human nature is not what ultimate human nature is supposed to be, and in Christian theology will one day be again (and more than if we had not fallen), so too is fallen/broken law not what it is supposed to be, in my understanding of these matters.
This is all very interesting, but my point was merely that if human nature was truly good then we wouldn’t need to make laws to protect ourselves from the harmful actions of others.
If human nature was truly evil, would we have laws protecting people at all?
To me this is resolved by our being made good by God, but fallen, yet with some idea of what we and the world should be, plus His grace. The nature is originally good, but broken. So we need laws even if we create and execute those laws imperfectly, or even at times unjustly.
I'm still not clear what this vision of justice would actually look like @ChastMastr and if it isn't possible to verbalise what perfect justice would be like then I don't really see the value in this Platonic form.
Some of this is a very old argument. Even in a world in which people did not intentionally break rules, there would still be people, perhaps very small children or forgetful old people, who break rules whose existence was unknown to them (or forgotten) or who take actions that led to unintended consequences. It doesn't sound like a sin, but it could still cause harm. Even in such a world, we would still need emergency medical services, fire departments and the Coast Guard.
"created sick, and commanded to be well", Christopher Hitchens' misquotation of Fulke Greville's "created sick, and commanded to be sound"
(BTW Hitchens said the line was unforgettable.)
Heh. It always struck me as one of those great, pithy lines that makes an impression but that also demonstrates the speaker’s convenient distortion of what they’re attacking.
I'm still not clear what this vision of justice would actually look like @ChastMastr and if it isn't possible to verbalise what perfect justice would be like then I don't really see the value in this Platonic form.
In my understanding, we see through a glass darkly, and can only have the dimmest imagining of these things until we get there. Until then, we have to do the best we can, imperfect and fallen though we are.
The value would be in the matters of good and evil and how they play out in our world, and how human laws are involved.
We can have an idea of perfect justice, but no more than perfect humanity, or any other perfect thing. I believe it will be better than anything we've experienced in this life.
I'm still not clear what this vision of justice would actually look like @ChastMastr and if it isn't possible to verbalise what perfect justice would be like then I don't really see the value in this Platonic form.
In my understanding, we see through a glass darkly, and can only have the dimmest imagining of these things until we get there. Until then, we have to do the best we can, imperfect and fallen though we are.
The value would be in the matters of good and evil and how they play out in our world, and how human laws are involved.
We can have an idea of perfect justice, but no more than perfect humanity, or any other perfect thing. I believe it will be better than anything we've experienced in this life.
I do understand that and I do understand that you are explaining a faith position that doesn't conform to logic. And yet you've introduced this very (to me) platonic idea in relation to explaining normal human activities.
Which to me is a contraction. In the sense that when discussing justice you e introduced the notion of perfect justice existing out there somewhere in the ether but then you can't articulate how that's a helpful or useful idea in Real Life.
I submit it isn't a useful idea, because almost by necessity human justice involves someone gaining at the expense of another. If there was "true justice" in this world, I doubt any of us would be typing words on the internet.
Rather, I say it is a pointless idea with no real veracity other than as a statement of faith.
Incidentally the whole mirror dimly thing reminds me of Plato's cave allegory.
This is all very interesting, but my point was merely that if human nature was truly good then we wouldn’t need to make laws to protect ourselves from the harmful actions of others.
Your point is nonsense. It assumes, amongst other things, that humans are always operating on full information.
There are, for example, a number of laws concerned with safety. If you sell a thing to do X, it has to be tested to standard Y. If you do task A, you have to follow safety rules B, C, and D. And so on.
It's easy to commit harm through ignorance, rather than through malice. If human nature was "truly good", then we might eliminate malice from the equation, but there'd still be ample scope for ignorance, and so a need for a set of laws to eliminate those risks.
"created sick, and commanded to be well", Christopher Hitchens' misquotation of Fulke Greville's "created sick, and commanded to be sound"
(BTW Hitchens said the line was unforgettable.)
Heh. It always struck me as one of those great, pithy lines that makes an impression but that also demonstrates the speaker’s convenient distortion of what they’re attacking.
Is is it a distortion? It sounds like a pretty accurate criticism of what I've heard from many an evangelist and preacher.
"created sick, and commanded to be well", Christopher Hitchens' misquotation of Fulke Greville's "created sick, and commanded to be sound"
(BTW Hitchens said the line was unforgettable.)
Heh. It always struck me as one of those great, pithy lines that makes an impression but that also demonstrates the speaker’s convenient distortion of what they’re attacking.
Is is it a distortion? It sounds like a pretty accurate criticism of what I've heard from many an evangelist and preacher.
Have you? I don’t doubt your experience, and there well may be some preachers out there who say “created sick” (in clear contravention of Genesis, it would seem to me) and “commanded to get well” (which implies we must do it, as opposed to something more like “saved,” which implies God/Jesus does it), but I’ve only encountered them as fringe elements or as caricatures. And I’ve lived all my life in the Bible Belt of the US.
I think if Christianity as a whole is considered, it’s very much a distortion and a massive over-generalization.
"created sick, and commanded to be well", Christopher Hitchens' misquotation of Fulke Greville's "created sick, and commanded to be sound"
(BTW Hitchens said the line was unforgettable.)
Heh. It always struck me as one of those great, pithy lines that makes an impression but that also demonstrates the speaker’s convenient distortion of what they’re attacking.
Is is it a distortion? It sounds like a pretty accurate criticism of what I've heard from many an evangelist and preacher.
Have you? I don’t doubt your experience, and there well may be some preachers out there who say “created sick” (in clear contravention of Genesis, it would seem to me) and “commanded to get well” (which implies we must do it, as opposed to something more like “saved,” which implies God/Jesus does it), but I’ve only encountered them as fringe elements or as caricatures. And I’ve lived all my life in the Bible Belt of the US.
I think if Christianity as a whole is considered, it’s very much a distortion and a massive over-generalization.
I think we're putting different meanings on "created" there. If you're talking about the creation of Adam, he is not portrayed as created sick. However, everyone since him is so portrayed by the doctrine of original sin - we are born with this sickness, this tendency. In the sense that we are individually God's creation, we are created sick - our human reproduction is portrayed like a machine with a fault - everything created through it has this same distortion.
Also the saying is "commanded to be well", not "to get well". This is an important distinction. The point of the saying, to me, is that we are portrayed as coming into the world with this fault already part of us, and yet are held responsible for failing to not have it, which makes as much sense as holding a person born with no legs responsible for their failure to meet the required standard in the 100 metre sprint.
"created sick, and commanded to be well", Christopher Hitchens' misquotation of Fulke Greville's "created sick, and commanded to be sound"
(BTW Hitchens said the line was unforgettable.)
Heh. It always struck me as one of those great, pithy lines that makes an impression but that also demonstrates the speaker’s convenient distortion of what they’re attacking.
Is is it a distortion? It sounds like a pretty accurate criticism of what I've heard from many an evangelist and preacher.
Have you? I don’t doubt your experience, and there well may be some preachers out there who say “created sick” (in clear contravention of Genesis, it would seem to me) and “commanded to get well” (which implies we must do it, as opposed to something more like “saved,” which implies God/Jesus does it), but I’ve only encountered them as fringe elements or as caricatures. And I’ve lived all my life in the Bible Belt of the US.
I think if Christianity as a whole is considered, it’s very much a distortion and a massive over-generalization.
I think we're putting different meanings on "created" there. If you're talking about the creation of Adam, he is not portrayed as created sick. However, everyone since him is so portrayed by the doctrine of original sin - we are born with this sickness, this tendency. In the sense that we are individually God's creation, we are created sick - our human reproduction is portrayed like a machine with a fault - everything created through it has this same distortion.
Perhaps. The best I can say is that the quote doesn’t reflect Christian understanding as I have encountered and experienced it.
Also the saying is "commanded to be well", not "to get well".
Yes, I know. Again, “commanded to be well” doesn’t reflect Christian understanding as I have encountered and experienced it.
Others experiences may be different. Different cultures may be at play. And I’ve never been in what could be described as an evangelical context.
I'm sorry I derailed us onto this tangent, but here we are.
Hitchens' comments were not about Eve and Adam, but about every human being born since in the context of original sin, which he believed an immoral doctrine, paired with substitutionary atonement, which he also believed to be immoral, topped with eternal damnation and torture for merely declining (or remaining ignorant of) a purportedly free offering of eternal bliss based on insufficient evidence.
And I'd wager we've all herd some versions of these things in church, or know people who have, or know churches that make these preachments.
But there are also large swaths of Christianity that don’t touch teach those things, including, as I understand it, all of Eastern Orthodoxy. And there are other parts of Christianity that may teach something like original sin, but have a very different take on it than the take that Hitchens was reacting to.
It’s pretty easy of us to assume that Christianity as we’ve encountered it = Christianity as a whole, but that just isn’t the case. Hutchens’ quote may be accurate for a portion of Christianity, including the portion he encountered most or was most repulsed by. But it’s an over-generalization if taken as accurate with regard to all forms of Christianity.
I'm still not clear what this vision of justice would actually look like @ChastMastr and if it isn't possible to verbalise what perfect justice would be like then I don't really see the value in this Platonic form.
In my understanding, we see through a glass darkly, and can only have the dimmest imagining of these things until we get there. Until then, we have to do the best we can, imperfect and fallen though we are.
The value would be in the matters of good and evil and how they play out in our world, and how human laws are involved.
We can have an idea of perfect justice, but no more than perfect humanity, or any other perfect thing. I believe it will be better than anything we've experienced in this life.
I do understand that and I do understand that you are explaining a faith position that doesn't conform to logic. And yet you've introduced this very (to me) platonic idea in relation to explaining normal human activities.
Which to me is a contraction. In the sense that when discussing justice you e introduced the notion of perfect justice existing out there somewhere in the ether but then you can't articulate how that's a helpful or useful idea in Real Life.
I submit it isn't a useful idea, because almost by necessity human justice involves someone gaining at the expense of another. If there was "true justice" in this world, I doubt any of us would be typing words on the internet.
Rather, I say it is a pointless idea with no real veracity other than as a statement of faith.
Incidentally the whole mirror dimly thing reminds me of Plato's cave allegory.
First, I would say that it is logical. The supernatural/ metaphysical/ philosophical/ theological does not need to be illogical. It is not something that can be proven by any of the sciences, but that’s not the same thing as not being logical.
Second, it is indeed Platonic, though a Christian-specific kind. :-)
Third, most of this response of mine has had to do with what the “purpose” of things are, and thus I think it’s quite relevant. If you believe that there is an overarching purpose to life in this world and things in this world and activities and actions in this world that is transcendent and supernatural, that is related to principles that we (in a Christian concept of these things) should try to follow, then I think it’s very important.
Fifth, we of course disagree that it is pointless. For that matter, I’m not primarily or exclusively or solely looking at this in terms of its “usefulness” – while I think that that is a good thing for it to have, I’m just thinking about what I believe is true rather than how “useful” or not it might be.
I don't see any point in a belief like that. Stating it seems to me like stating any other useless belief, for which the only response can possibly be "that's nice".
I don't mean to be disrespectful, I'm sorry if I come across like that. You are of course entitled to believe whatever you like.
In this particular case it feels to me like here is a belief that makes no practical difference in the world. It doesn't help with anything in the messiness of trying to establish laws and justice. I don't really understand what importance it has theologically, but I suspect not very much.
Furthermore it feels like this is an idea which has been sucked in to the religion from the ancient Greek philosophers. And if Christianity is essentially a form of modern Platonism, that's a pretty good reason for me to look no further at it.
I've said what I've said about mathematics, but in every other respect think Plato talks bollocks.
"created sick, and commanded to be well", Christopher Hitchens' misquotation of Fulke Greville's "created sick, and commanded to be sound"
(BTW Hitchens said the line was unforgettable.)
Heh. It always struck me as one of those great, pithy lines that makes an impression but that also demonstrates the speaker’s convenient distortion of what they’re attacking.
Is is it a distortion? It sounds like a pretty accurate criticism of what I've heard from many an evangelist and preacher.
Have you? I don’t doubt your experience, and there well may be some preachers out there who say “created sick” (in clear contravention of Genesis, it would seem to me) and “commanded to get well” (which implies we must do it, as opposed to something more like “saved,” which implies God/Jesus does it), but I’ve only encountered them as fringe elements or as caricatures. And I’ve lived all my life in the Bible Belt of the US.
I think if Christianity as a whole is considered, it’s very much a distortion and a massive over-generalization.
I think we're putting different meanings on "created" there. If you're talking about the creation of Adam, he is not portrayed as created sick. However, everyone since him is so portrayed by the doctrine of original sin - we are born with this sickness, this tendency. In the sense that we are individually God's creation, we are created sick - our human reproduction is portrayed like a machine with a fault - everything created through it has this same distortion.
Also the saying is "commanded to be well", not "to get well". This is an important distinction. The point of the saying, to me, is that we are portrayed as coming into the world with this fault already part of us, and yet are held responsible for failing to not have it, which makes as much sense as holding a person born with no legs responsible for their failure to meet the required standard in the 100 metre sprint.
First class. Original sin and sin and blood atonement for it... Love wouldn't make that up.
As an aside, I was watching people with no legs sprinting in the 100 metres just the other day. Alongside the guys with one leg cycling and the guy with no arms doing archery, it's one of the most impressive things I've ever seen.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, I'm sorry if I come across like that. You are of course entitled to believe whatever you like.
In this particular case it feels to me like here is a belief that makes no practical difference in the world. It doesn't help with anything in the messiness of trying to establish laws and justice. I don't really understand what importance it has theologically, but I suspect not very much.
Furthermore it feels like this is an idea which has been sucked in to the religion from the ancient Greek philosophers. And if Christianity is essentially a form of modern Platonism, that's a pretty good reason for me to look no further at it.
I've said what I've said about mathematics, but in every other respect think Plato talks bollocks.
I suppose we’re going to have to disagree on lots of things here… I don’t think that Christian beliefs receiving things that I believe to be true from various sources negates those Christian beliefs. You can certainly be a Christian without believing in anything that relates to (or parallels anything in) Platonism; I would implore you not to give up on Christianity on that account, and certainly not because of anything I’ve said! :O 😢
Comments
I'm not. Ever. Evangelicals, even liberals, by definition in my experience, in four large and typical Anglican congregations over 19 years, stare the plain reading of scripture in the face. They can't help that. I emerged within evangelicalism and de-reconstructed accordingly, analogous to @Gamma Gamaliel. I couldn't help that. None of us can help how we see these things. Which is the history of the Church. The opposite of honest isn't dishonest in this context.
Don't forget that one time when God's law drowned every living thing save one family. Or when God made specific injunctions "not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the LORD your God has commanded you."
I'm not convinced God's law is all that comforting.
"created sick, and commanded to be well", Christopher Hitchens' misquotation of Fulke Greville's "created sick, and commanded to be sound"
(BTW Hitchens said the line was unforgettable.)
This reminds me of a passage from Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel. The novel's premise is that a detective has been given a humaniform robot as a partner. The detective suspects for various reasons that this partner is actually a human pretending to be a robot. One of those reasons is that he was told that the robot had been programmed for justice. The detective points out that "justice" is an abstract concept that would be impossible to translate into the mathematical terms needed to program it into a robot. This theory gets demolished when the robot informs the detective that "justice" is a state which exists when all laws are enforced, and that an "unjust law" is a contradiction in terms.
Saying that unjust laws contradict the nature of law seems like it's veering dangerously close to the Scottish border.
Whatever one believes about those Old Testament events (there are various interpretations and approaches to Scripture), I’m talking about transcendent Justice, and the law that Love ultimately fulfills.
Though in orthodox Christian belief, we were not created sick in the first place.
It doesn’t seem that way to me in the least, any more than someone doing terrible things in the name of charity contradicts the nature of charity. Unjust laws, in my view, contradict what Law is supposed to be, on a cosmic level, the Divine Order of which earthly laws are only a shadow or image or (as contrasted with archetype) ectype, and often in a broken, distorted, and fallen way. Just as fallen human nature is not what ultimate human nature is supposed to be, and in Christian theology will one day be again (and more than if we had not fallen), so too is fallen/broken law not what it is supposed to be, in my understanding of these matters.
To me this is resolved by our being made good by God, but fallen, yet with some idea of what we and the world should be, plus His grace. The nature is originally good, but broken. So we need laws even if we create and execute those laws imperfectly, or even at times unjustly.
In my understanding, we see through a glass darkly, and can only have the dimmest imagining of these things until we get there. Until then, we have to do the best we can, imperfect and fallen though we are.
The value would be in the matters of good and evil and how they play out in our world, and how human laws are involved.
We can have an idea of perfect justice, but no more than perfect humanity, or any other perfect thing. I believe it will be better than anything we've experienced in this life.
I do understand that and I do understand that you are explaining a faith position that doesn't conform to logic. And yet you've introduced this very (to me) platonic idea in relation to explaining normal human activities.
Which to me is a contraction. In the sense that when discussing justice you e introduced the notion of perfect justice existing out there somewhere in the ether but then you can't articulate how that's a helpful or useful idea in Real Life.
I submit it isn't a useful idea, because almost by necessity human justice involves someone gaining at the expense of another. If there was "true justice" in this world, I doubt any of us would be typing words on the internet.
Rather, I say it is a pointless idea with no real veracity other than as a statement of faith.
Incidentally the whole mirror dimly thing reminds me of Plato's cave allegory.
Your point is nonsense. It assumes, amongst other things, that humans are always operating on full information.
There are, for example, a number of laws concerned with safety. If you sell a thing to do X, it has to be tested to standard Y. If you do task A, you have to follow safety rules B, C, and D. And so on.
It's easy to commit harm through ignorance, rather than through malice. If human nature was "truly good", then we might eliminate malice from the equation, but there'd still be ample scope for ignorance, and so a need for a set of laws to eliminate those risks.
Is is it a distortion? It sounds like a pretty accurate criticism of what I've heard from many an evangelist and preacher.
I think if Christianity as a whole is considered, it’s very much a distortion and a massive over-generalization.
I think we're putting different meanings on "created" there. If you're talking about the creation of Adam, he is not portrayed as created sick. However, everyone since him is so portrayed by the doctrine of original sin - we are born with this sickness, this tendency. In the sense that we are individually God's creation, we are created sick - our human reproduction is portrayed like a machine with a fault - everything created through it has this same distortion.
Also the saying is "commanded to be well", not "to get well". This is an important distinction. The point of the saying, to me, is that we are portrayed as coming into the world with this fault already part of us, and yet are held responsible for failing to not have it, which makes as much sense as holding a person born with no legs responsible for their failure to meet the required standard in the 100 metre sprint.
Yes, I know. Again, “commanded to be well” doesn’t reflect Christian understanding as I have encountered and experienced it.
Others experiences may be different. Different cultures may be at play. And I’ve never been in what could be described as an evangelical context.
Hitchens' comments were not about Eve and Adam, but about every human being born since in the context of original sin, which he believed an immoral doctrine, paired with substitutionary atonement, which he also believed to be immoral, topped with eternal damnation and torture for merely declining (or remaining ignorant of) a purportedly free offering of eternal bliss based on insufficient evidence.
And I'd wager we've all herd some versions of these things in church, or know people who have, or know churches that make these preachments.
It’s pretty easy of us to assume that Christianity as we’ve encountered it = Christianity as a whole, but that just isn’t the case. Hutchens’ quote may be accurate for a portion of Christianity, including the portion he encountered most or was most repulsed by. But it’s an over-generalization if taken as accurate with regard to all forms of Christianity.
First, I would say that it is logical. The supernatural/ metaphysical/ philosophical/ theological does not need to be illogical. It is not something that can be proven by any of the sciences, but that’s not the same thing as not being logical.
Second, it is indeed Platonic, though a Christian-specific kind. :-)
Third, most of this response of mine has had to do with what the “purpose” of things are, and thus I think it’s quite relevant. If you believe that there is an overarching purpose to life in this world and things in this world and activities and actions in this world that is transcendent and supernatural, that is related to principles that we (in a Christian concept of these things) should try to follow, then I think it’s very important.
Fifth, we of course disagree that it is pointless. For that matter, I’m not primarily or exclusively or solely looking at this in terms of its “usefulness” – while I think that that is a good thing for it to have, I’m just thinking about what I believe is true rather than how “useful” or not it might be.
In this particular case it feels to me like here is a belief that makes no practical difference in the world. It doesn't help with anything in the messiness of trying to establish laws and justice. I don't really understand what importance it has theologically, but I suspect not very much.
Furthermore it feels like this is an idea which has been sucked in to the religion from the ancient Greek philosophers. And if Christianity is essentially a form of modern Platonism, that's a pretty good reason for me to look no further at it.
I've said what I've said about mathematics, but in every other respect think Plato talks bollocks.
First class. Original sin and sin and blood atonement for it... Love wouldn't make that up.
I suppose we’re going to have to disagree on lots of things here… I don’t think that Christian beliefs receiving things that I believe to be true from various sources negates those Christian beliefs. You can certainly be a Christian without believing in anything that relates to (or parallels anything in) Platonism; I would implore you not to give up on Christianity on that account, and certainly not because of anything I’ve said! :O 😢
I prefer anthropology to anthropophagy