attofishpi wrote:Greatest I am wrote:Christians break the Golden Rule when accepting Jesus as savior.
No they don't. It was Jesus that made the commandment of the 'golden rule' and he also instructed his followers to believe in his suffering as a path to their salvation. If anything by way of YOUR thinking - Jesus could be construed as contradicting himself.
I think they do.
Shall we debate the merits of substitutionary atonement with a (real) world scenario?
If you do not like my apology then provide your own and I can deal with it.
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Human sacrifice is evil and God/Yahweh demanding one and Jesus accepting one is evil. Jesus accepted the premise of his sacrifice being somehow just. This is evil.
Those trying to profit from that evil are evil. Do just a bit of thinking and you will agree.
Imagine you have two children. One of your children does something wrong – say it curses, or throws a temper tantrum, or something like that. In fact, say it does this on a regular basis, and you continually forgive your child, but it never seems to change.
Now suppose one day you’ve had enough, you need to do something different. You still wish to forgive your child, but nothing has worked. Do you go to your second child, your good child, and punish it to atone for the sins of the first?
In fact, if you ever saw a parent on the street punish one of their children for the actions of their other child, how would you react? Would you support their decision, or would you be offended? Because God punished Jesus -- his good child -- for the sins of his other children.
Interestingly, some historical royal families would beat their slaves when their own children did wrong – you should not, after all, ever beat a prince. The question is: what kind of lesson does that teach the child who actually did the harm? Does it teach them to be a better person, to stop doing harm, or does it teach them both that they won't themselves be punished, and also that punishing other people is normal? I know that's not a lesson I would want to teach my children, and I suspect it's not a lesson most Christians would want to teach theirs. So why does God?
For me, that’s at least one significant reason I find Jesus’ atonement of our sin to be morally repugnant – of course, that’s assuming Jesus ever existed; that original sin actually exists; that God actually exists; etc.
Having another innocent person suffer for the wrongs you have done, --- so that you might escape responsibility for having done them, --- is immoral.
Do you agree?
If not, please show how it is morally and legally good to punish the innocent instead of the guilty, bearing in mind that all legal systems think that punishing the guilty is what is justice.
Regards
DL