The crucifix, maybe not the cross. The cross, historically comes from the Latin abriviation for Jesus, PX. Which would then evolve over time to the Roman Cross that looks like a lower case letter t.
The word for cross in Latin refered to an upright pole, a pole with a top beam like the capital letter T and two cross beams like the letter X before this.
Ah - so they think if they aren’t wearing the cross he’ll have forgotten about the whole crucifixion thing?
I mean, to be fair he was only up there for like half a day - so short they allegedly needed to poke him given how unusual dying that quickly was for the execution method (though it was suspiciously shortly after drinking something in two accounts).
So yeah, maybe they have a point and a reminder is warranted.
“Hey you, remember that they nailed you to a cross! Don’t forget! The most important thing in your life was that. You said some other stuff that I don’t really remember and usually zone out about on Sundays, but for sure the whole getting nailed to wood part was really really important and the ultimate summation of your life’s purpose. It was somehow necessary because I like to look at boobs on the Internet. So thanks for that, and again - don’t forget about it, because I’m sure it was very forgettable.”
No no no no, you have it backwards. They’re not trying to remind Jesus of the cross, they’re trying to remind themselves just how painful of a death that the alleged Redeemer of man had to go through.
That part never made any sense to me either. Why do sins need to be forgiven and how does torturing someone allow forgiveness? Seems like torturing and killing the son of god would be a serious sin by itself.
Couldn’t god just realize he created flawed beings and forgive them himself, or not hold a grudge about it? Humans are how he made them according to the religion.
You ask good questions, but if you’re really interested you can look into Christian apologetics re: free will. There are some interesting answers awaiting you. But the gist of it is that God didn’t create flawed beings, he created beings with free will that chose to be flawed.
And Christianity has never said free will is a flawed design, because humans having free will is one of the most important aspects of the religion and is very fundamental to what it means to be a human (a concept that is true both in and outside of Christianity, unless you believe in destiny or something). It is not a flaw to have free will, otherwise God himself would be flawed. In a regular context, it’s kind of like you’re not flawed for existing, but you’re flawed if you do negative things with your existence. I would personally have to be convinced that having free will is a flaw/a negative thing
To quickly answer your first couple questions: death is the punishment for sinning and Jesus is supposed to be perfect and sinless and thus should not die. but instead he died in place of other sinners, kind of like taking the blame for them. And yes, torturing and killing the son of God was indeed a sin, the people who did it were sinful. I don’t think anyone has said otherwise. The ones who killed Jesus were not his followers or supporters
i’m giving you free will now i’m punishing you for making the choice i didn’t like
but seriously, i do appreciate your well-written comment - it’s just that it all gets very tiresome. i have been listening to/reading the apologetics and arguments, getting invited, prayed and ranted at. i have been nodding my head politely, smiling awkwardly, and dodging questions for a great many years, when really i just want to do my own thing and be left in peace with it (without words like “sinner” and “evil” getting tossed around).
I mean, even in a society you have free will and get punished for not confirming to it? Do you think societies as a whole with laws and rules are tiresome and you don’t want words like “criminal” tossed around? Are you going to just leave society and not live in community with others?
You can do your own thing for sure. But everyone, even people who believe and are Christian, are sinners. Literally everyone is a sinner. You can still be at peace with your own thing anyway, even in a religious context. Christians find peace while admitting to being sinners. I’m not saying you need to, you’re totally free to do your own thing. I’m just explaining things really
let me put it this way - it seemed to me that you were interested in explaining your perspective, as if simply offering information to contribute to a greater understanding. when someone expressed their disinterest in your explanation or indicated they did not find it sufficient, it seemed to me as if you were quickly negative. i was left with the impression that you are fundamentally less interested in dialogue and understanding, and more interested in convincing.
this is very typical of conversation with christians in a my 40+ year experience as a non-christian living in the bible belt. i tire of the efforts to explain christianity, when i have, in fact, heard it so extensively for so long. i tire of the conversations that are not REALLY intended to explain, but to solicit agreement and convert.
in other words - i wish more christians recognized that it may not be that non-christians don’t understand your faith, they may simply not agree and not want to hear about it again. and approaching them as if you are interested in dialogue when you really want to convince them feels disingenuous.
these were my thoughts when i read your conversation with the other user above.
I don’t know what part of “death-cultsplainin’” and me replying with “copium” makes you think there was a “conversation” going on
Let me explain my thoughts. I have taken time to write up something for someone else and someone- an unrelated party, barges in and pretty rudely replies with no intention to say anything, just to write a snide one word comment as if it’s supposed to be anything other than a disrespectful comment.
Does it seem like when I said “thanks for contributing nothing to our discussion” I was trying to convert someone? I don’t know where you got that idea. I was expressing that one word replies aren’t good conversation at all. It’s just annoying. My thoughts here are that it’s pretty rude to come into a conversation just to go “haha cultist”. I think people who look down on religion need to stop finding every opportunity to disrespect and be condescending to others who are invested in the topic.
Someone asked questions and I was just answering them. And for some reason you think I am in the wrong here when someone is clearly replying to me without an interest in actually talking to me. You know that person could have easily said nothing. If someone “may not want to hear it again” there are numerous solutions to this: close the thread, collapse the comment, reply with “sorry I really don’t like this”. Snarkily replying with “cultist” is not one of them. It’s just rude and disrespectful. Maybe you guys should stop conflating disrespect with actual expression of disinterest, because it’s not.
In no circumstance do I find one word snarky replies a sufficient or respectful way to reply to someone engaging in an actual discussion. Like ever. Religious discussion context or not, it’s just a terrible reply. Idk why you think me replying with “yes whatever you want” is somehow me trying to convince him into a religion, like what. You are projecting and inserting things into this situation that are not there
look, i don’t think you’re a bad person or something, and honestly i regret saying anything.
i’m just letting you know that, you may sometimes get snarky one-word replies because people tire of hearing about it. i would bet money the greatest majority of non-christians in the us, who are open about their non-christianity, have heard all this before.
again - it’s not that most of us don’t understand your faith, it’s that many of us are not interested in having it explained again and are unlikely to agree with your beliefs. there are people you simply will not convince of your correctness, no matter how many explanations you provide.
Yes, I know all of this and get it. I get that you’re tired of it. But all I see is someone being unnecessarily snarky in someone else’s conversation and you defending and justifying it with “we’re tired of it”. I didn’t make a big deal of it at all, if someone’s going to disrespect me like that I’m not giving it the time of day, but you’re here justifying it so now I have to reply why it’s not an ok response and have to justify my own reply because you projected that I am trying to convert this random drive by commenter when I was clearly not
Why don’t we just accept that you two are being unnecessarily disrespectful? I do not enter other people’s conversations and reply with “I don’t want to hear this”. That’s all there is to it
no, i don’t agree that i was being disrespectful - and i think it’s interesting that someone trying to explain a non-christian pov to you is received that way.
i think i wasted my time. this is why i typically nod politely when christians talk to me, it’s just easier.
I typically nod politely when Christians talk to me, it’s just easier.
So when you say “whatever you say” it’s just easier, but when I say it in reply to a one word comment that’s just disrespectful it’s me trying to convert someone to Christianity… ok. Do you not see your hypocrisy? You are the one who is accusing me of something and when I justify myself and disagree you’re just like “I’m wasting my time”. I did not come into your conversation to tell you about Christianity, you came into mine to tell me I’m trying to convert someone when i wasn’t at all. I was literally just equally replying snarkily
I understand non Christian povs. I’m just saying, Christian discussion or not, “death-cultsplainin’” was never appropriate and is an unwarranted response. That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing more to explain there. I don’t come into a soccer team discussion and say “cultist” to a person who is a fan of one team. Christian or not it’s disrespectful and non contributive. You’re just trying to justify rude behaviour because you’re personally tired of theological discussions.
Do you agree that the original “death-cultsplainin’” comment is unwarranted or do you think their comment was necessary and justified? Like be objective about it. If you think it’s the latter, then we can just agree to disagree on how we engage in online discourse. In any context, I prefer not to call people cultists without explanation and think that’s inappropriate, and you can prefer to think that’s fine, sure. But such comments objectively lead to lower quality conversations and negative vitriol so I choose to say it’s not appropriate and adds nothing to these threads aside from raising negative emotions. You don’t have to be Christian to understand my sentiment. I understand yours fine. I’m just telling you why its not appropriate.
So… these are excellent questions and I’m afraid I personally can’t answer all of them since I’m not that knowledgeable here. But I do believe people smarter than I have come up with better answers than I will give too. I’m afraid I don’t understand your question regarding original sin being forgiven. I’ll try to answer the rest from my experiences, though
So think of it this way: if God created humans to have free will, this means they can choose to be bad. You may be asking, why would God create a world where bad can exist? Doesn’t that seem flawed? But if God were to create a world where bad can’t exist, then humans wouldn’t have true free will. God didn’t create the world with bad things in it, he created the world as good (in Genesis, the first chapter of the bible, he continually says “it is good” after everything he creates.)
So God creates the world as good and put humans with free will into the world. And because they have true free will, they also have the choice of making the world bad, which is what ended up happening. The pint is, “Bad” as a concept must exist in order for there to be true free will
So if bad can exist, then logically there has to be consequences for bad things. Otherwise it’s not bad. If there are no consequences it can’t be bad, it just doesn’t make any sense. So sinning, which is the bad we’ve been talking about, has the consequence of death. I hope that kind of answers the question of “why do people have to be punished for sins”
Humans were not intended to be ignorant, and they were already intelligent. They just didn’t have specific knowledge. And this is true even to this day. We as humans don’t know everything and we never will. But humans had free will even before they had the knowledge from eating the fruit. They willingly disobeyed God’s instructions before they even ate the fruit. They were already intelligent. I guess in a sense they were designed to be ignorant if by ignorant you mean “does not have unending knowledge about everything in existence”. Then indeed, humans were never designed to have 100% of all the answers. If they did, they would be no different from God. And this is clear even to this day. Not even science can explain everything and we’re always discovering/learning new things. An aside: from here you can kind of see that the bible is pretty accurate about the way it describes humans objectively, from having free will to having gaps in complete knowledge of the universe
God didn’t take anything out on Jesus, but Jesus sacrificed himself for other humans. I’m not sure of the imagery of hell, note that I could be wrong here , but Hell is separation from God, not necessarily a physical torturing session. And this makes sense, when you sin, you go further away from God since you’re disobeying him. And when you disobey someone, that means you don’t trust them. And if you don’t trust them, you’re not getting any closer to them. And hell is just eternal separation from God, which, to a Christian, is the worst thing you can experience if you truly believe God is the greatest gift and biggest form of love you can experience. That’s kind of the gist of it
I couldn’t answer your questions on humans in hell before crucification since I need to sleep now, but I do have some ideas/potential answers. I do think it is a question worth looking into, for both you and I!
The notion of being guilty by proxy is mind boggling but it would be/is a good tool to control people through fear, which is essentially most creeds business.
The notion is mind boggling because being guilty by proxy is not how it works anyway. If you could find a 100% objectively guiltless man I’d totally concede that guilt by proxy is how it works, but let’s face it, literally everyone on this earth is not perfect or blameless. You don’t need a proxy to be guilty, everyone already is, its not hard to see when you look at the people in the world
If every man after Adam is guilty by proxy, Jesus would’ve been guilty as well as soon as he was born. But Christianity clearly posits the opposite of that
The guilty by proxy argument predicates that every human being, at the moment of conception, is already guilty of an act onto which said human had no participation on. That is being guilty by simply existing.
We’re are not getting into the argument of nobody being exempt of fault, either by action or lack of it.
The “loop hole” used to exempt JC Sandals of the original son was having him being conceived with no human intervention, therefore, sinless. After all, it is argued he was born of a virgin woman, willed into existence into flesh yet not conceived as any other.
What constitutes a fault? Are we to consider fault only actions or lack thereof taken counciously or any outcome that negatively influences another or anything, even if such outcome arises from an unpredicted(able) steming from an action taken with a good purpose?
I don’t have exact answers for this, but if you look at it as if Adam was indicative of all of mankind (which he was), you can see it less like people are condemned when theyre born but more like all people are inherently broken/flawed/sinners. Original sin was just the first example of it. If there were people out in the world who were objectively flawless and sinless I’d take a totally different stance, but mankind being broken and evil is just pretty consistent with history and with the bible
Christianity doesn’t exactly say it’s a grievous error to be born and that you’re condemned for it, it more says that you’re inherently broken but you can still be redeemed
We can agree to disagree then. You didn’t really explain anything either.
We’re an inherently selfish species from a biological perspective, people aren’t just fundamentally altruistic. If evolution shaped our morals to encourage us to be nice to each other to benefit the whole species, why is it still such a struggle for people to be selfless?
I find it very hard for you to convince me that as a species we are neutral when the very people we put into power and govern over us are narcissists and power hungry people who have little care about every individuals lives that they govern over and are obsessed with self gain.
On an individual level, being altruistic/good natured/selfless is something that has to be fostered and you have to be intentional about. Growing up, we’re taught lessons, in school and in media, etc., on how to be good/how to treat others. We’re taught to do good things and don’t do bad things. Why? Because our nature is to do bad things
If you have to be intentional about being good and not being bad, then that means your default state is being bad. It’s easy to be selfish and only do things that you want and only care about yourself, because that’s our nature as a species.
I don’t agree that we just “are” and that we just “exist”, it just sounds like someone that doesn’t want to face the truth that mankind is not a perfect species. Vague statements like “we can only be as evil as we are good” doesn’t actually mean anything. You just stated a bunch of facts like “death gives life meaning” and “shadow defines light”. Sure. I agree. So what? Nothing that you said really clarified why humans aren’t inherently bad in your eyes. You just said a bunch of generic statements that not even Christians disagree with as if I’m supposed to understand why your position makes sense now
The contrast though is that you don’t “earn” heaven either. Nothing makes a Christian and a non Christian so inherently different from each other that one fundamentally deserves heaven and the other hell. It’s saved by faith, not by works
The doylist explanation is that a lot of religions back in the day practiced animal sacrifice to their deities (including judaism, e.g. Noah sacrificing animals after the flood and Abraham sacrificing a ram in place of his son once god was bored of telling Abraham to kill his kid to prove his faith). Jesus getting sacrificed is supposed to be a mirror of this for Christians and an “ultimate” sacrifice. They don’t sacrifice animals to god anymore because jesus just keeps doing the heavy lifting for them.
I see brain rot has be transferred from reddit. Christians worship the cross because it was Jesus’ death on it that gives salvation. It was through this death by man that forgiveness occured.
Jesus was giving really explicit instructions on how to achieve salvation before they nailed him up there so I’m going to call your interpretation a swing and a miss. Sounds like one of those retcons that happened after the Romans took over the church like that whole wacky ‘let’s canonize Christ’s actual murderer and blame it on the Jews’ caper.
That’s an idol. The worship of idols is a sin. Sorry, your religion forces you to sin, and because you believe sin takes you to hell, unless you denounce your religion, you’re fated to suffer in hell - forever.
Actually worshipping the cross would be considered idol worship putting a thing before Jesus. No other gods before me and whatnot. I’m not Christian so I won’t claim to know.
It was also my understanding that Jesus suffered for humanities sins by bleeding from every pore in the garden of gethsemane. Is that different than salvation? Genuine question.
I was told the cross was a symbol that represented the intersection of the divine with the physical world, since Jesus said “into your hands I commend my spirit” or whatever.
Not an expert, just curious about the minor differences taught between the various Christian sects.
I’m not from Reddit either but my brain is still rotten, sorry.
I think anyone who thought just a bit about this would have realized that cross is nothing but some icon. Not really something to be worshipped.
The whole redemption scene is quite enigmatic to give meaning tbh, but one convincing explanation I’ve heard is that it is to “kill” self. Your ego is strong, and often blinds you, sometimes making you overly greedy. Only by murdering ego, one might be truly “grown up” and free from various chains. Maybe Jesus has gone through such a pain just to teach that? Well, idk.
I grew up evangelical, and the way evangelicals use the cross this argument makes sense. But the catholic crucifix as a depiction of the suffering of Christ makes more sense as a symbol to put a believer’s mind and heart in the right place for supplication.
Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. We may ask what is relevant but anything beyond that is dangerous. He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that - do not listen.
Silly Jesus, it’s not about what you like. It’s about symbolism, and using that symbolism to persuade and oppress, and start wars, and justify shitty behavior.
Well… cuz if u would ever read bible, u would know the cross is a symbol of redemption for mankind. Same goes for Jesus hanging on it, it’s a scene of what Christian’s believe to be the ultimate act of love, sacrificing urslef for another. I think it makes perfect sense to pick cross as a religion symbol.
The whole redemption thing itself doesn’t even make sense unless you buy into inherited guilt and into sacrificing another to absolve yourself from guilt which are both rather outdated concepts in our modern morality.
It makes more sense when you know that 2nd temple Judaism had an entire economy built around animal sacrifice for sins, and that the temple central to that is destroyed a few decades after Jesus died as Christianity was starting to take off.
So positioning Jesus’s death not as an embarrassing failure to manifest earlier messianic prophecy but as this ultimate sacrifice making the animal sacrifices that could no longer be performed unnecessary was a very convenient belief to attract Jewish converts.
Of course, then Mark 11:16, where Jesus bans anyone from carrying animal sacrifices through the temple in the first place while alive becomes an inconvenient detail, which is probably why it later disappears from Luke and Matthew.
So Christianity probably really was a split from 2nd temple Judaism at the time of Jesus on the point of animal sacrifice, but then following his death the death itself gets reworked back into the paradigm of animal sacrifice by those coming later (i.e. Paul) which then later makes it more attractive to Jews who no longer have a temple after 70 CE when it takes even greater prominence.
The irony of course is that looking at some of the early apocryphal sayings of Jesus on the ridiculousness of sin and salvation as an inherent birthright that shouldn’t be given over to another to be lent back out at interest - this development of the crucifixion as an ultimate sacrifice on behalf of humanity was possibly the exact opposite of a historical Jesus’s whole point, even if it was favored for survivorship bias given the destruction of the temple.
Where exactly does it say that the cross is the thing that should be the symbol for the religion?
That doesn’t happen until around the 3rd century, 200 years after most of the new treatment was written.
Fun fact: initially the cross was a symbol made on the forehead or with the hand. So if you were looking for Revelation prophecy fulfillment, maybe the buying and selling of salvation under the sign of the cross on forehead and in hand should be the thing people are worried about, and not RFID payments.
Just like how Christians worry about blaspheming the Holy Spirit as a supposedly unforgivable sin while conveniently overlooking Paul’s swearing he’s telling the truth on the Holy Spirit in Romans 8 (a chapter entirely absent in Marcion’s version of the letter).
It’s always wild to me when believers act like they actually know anything about the book while clearly not knowing much about it at all, as opposed to at least having the wisdom to know what they don’t know.
You seemed to have wholly misinterpreted the comment you’re replying to in your condescending rambling. Kinda crazy that you even mentioned RFID payments somehow in your tangent. You lost the plot big time
No one said “the bible says the cross is a symbol for the religion of Christianity”. Not a single verse says that, and no one claimed so. but the cross in the text is important and is symbolic of redemption/love/sacrifice. You don’t need the text to say that, it’s just a simple literary analysis. That’s how symbols work.
Like what are you even saying with your last paragraph there? If you read the Bible, the importance and significance of the event where Jesus died on a cross is kind of hard to miss. It’s wild to me that you can make a comment like yours and then pretend you’re so wise and intelligent and above other people while you’re rambling nonsense about RFID payments. Get a grip, dude.
If you read the Bible, the importance and significance of the event where Jesus died on a cross is kind of hard to miss.
Not really. There’s one line in the Synoptics about “unless you carry the cross as I do” and a few mentions of the cross in the Epistles, but it didn’t have nearly the significance it later takes on in the religion.
The gospels certainly cover the crucifixion with the passion narrative, but at the time it was more about dealing with the embarrassment of the cross than its glorification - the Messiah was supposed to be a war leader who led the Jews in a final battle of liberation and instead their guy was crucified.
So the narrative is mostly around trying to address how really this embarrassing event was fulfilling prophecy and addressing why he didn’t just magic himself off of it (eventually developing the narrative to the point that in John he effectively does just that spiritually, leading to later beliefs like docetism - that he was a phantom without corporeal form and didn’t suffer at all on the cross, popular around the time the focus on the cross was starting).
Again, you can see that in the earliest of the Epistles the cross is referred to as “the offense of the cross” (Gal 5:11), and at this early point the significance is clearly still developing as Paul sees the cross as symbolically crucifying the world to him in Gal 6:14 (Paul’s undisputed letters have 2-5x the personal reference of the non-Pauline Epistles, much like the writing of vulnerable narcissists).
The Christology around the significance of the cross simply isn’t where you think it is when the NT is being composed to support your view of it as symbolically hard to miss. In the text itself, it’s actually quite easy to miss, which was why it took two centuries to become a thing.
What a well formulated response. You’re right about everything you’ve said in regards to what the text literally says, but you’ve still missed the point.
I was speaking hyperbole, the bible is massive and definitely lends itself to missing the significance of certain events, especially if you blitz through it. But Jesus dying is still a significant event of the book, without it the whole book itself loses its narrative cohesion and collapses on itself. And handwaving mentions of the cross/Jesus dying on the cross away as “a few mentions of it in the epistles” (which is 21/27 books in the NT btw) is exactly what you’re doing, downplaying the significance of the event. The epistles arent random side stories in the bible, they’re one of the most applicable and relevant portions of the whole text
Jesus coming and dying is alluded to before it happens, prophesied, then recounted and written about multiple times throughout the whole text. It is indeed a significant event. You don’t need the text to focus literally on the cross itself for it to be a symbol of the event that occurred. Which is what I’ve already said prior. “the cross as a symbol is directly supported in the text” is exactly what I already said is not being discussed. You seem to be arguing points that no one is arguing.
Look, you read the Bible, you study the text, and you realize Jesus death which happened on a cross is a big deal, the cross then is merely a symbol of that event. It’s that simple. The cross is not a symbol of itself, which is what your analysis seems to imply. The cross being a symbol is not some conspiracy about gaslighting people on what the bible says about the cross. It’s just an easy way to represent what is one of the most significant events of the bible in addition to the direct references to it
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