The Christ legend

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A little background to put my answers in perspective. I came to believe in God 20+ years ago through my participation in AA & Al-Anon. Therefore my faith is first and foremost practical; i.e., it works in me to change me, and make me capable of growing into the good, temperate, loving person I want to be -- to be a better, happier, and more peaceful person than I could be by my own willpower. If faith in God does not affect me, it's meaningless to me.

That said, having once experienced the effect of "turning my will and my life over to the care of God as I understood Him" (to quote the AA 3rd step), in order to go deeper into that experience I felt the need to delve into a richer tradition where I could find the symbolic language and ritual with which to relate to the divine. I chose Catholicism because I had family roots in it, although I hadn't been raised in church. Also because it has a long and rich tradition. I've studied and continue to study scripture, Christian mysticism and monasticism, and theology (least of all, as I find it to be too much head and not enough heart). So that, in a nutshell, is where I'm coming from.



The number one key concept I learned in AA, that forms the foundation of my subsequent Christian faith, is to surrender self-will in favor of seeking and following the will of God. The sin of Adam and Eve is disobedience; specifically, they disobeyed God in eating of the fruit of the tree of "knowledge of good and evil". What the serpent tempted them with was "the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad." In other words, the sin -- which in my own experience underlies all other sins -- is in wanting to be their own gods, rejecting God's will and going by their own will instead, thinking that by knowing good & evil they would be able to run their own lives without deference to their Creator.



The fundamental "Christian principles" are the direct opposite of Original Sin: obedience, humility, self-sacrifice. Philippians 2:6-8:

You see how this is the reversal of original sin?


Christ was not created. Christ IS God. God Himself incarnated into human form in order to a) demonstrate the proper human attitude and obedience to God, and b) to accept on our behalf the consequences due to humanity as a whole for the human failure to trust in God and submit to His will. There's a whole Trinitarian brain-twister about the trinity and unity of God, by which on the one hand we can say that Jesus is God Himself made man, and at the same time differentiate between the Father and the Son ... to me that all seems like presumptuous speculation about the nature of God, but whatever. The point is that Jesus is not created, He is God Himself.

Jewish law prescribed periodic sacrifices to God, of part of people's crops & livestock, to atone for their sins throughout the year. The Letter to the Hebrews (see Chapter 9) spells out the theology of Christ as both perfect high priest who offered the sacrifice of His own body, and, at the same time, the perfect sacrificial victim (the Lamb of God), to end all temporal sacrifices.


If Christ had turned back in fear of the suffering He would have to endure, if He had been unwilling to submit His human will to the divine will, then yes, the plan would have failed. The point, again, is submission to divine will in reversal of Adam & Eve's disobedience.


God does not will evildoing, although He sometimes brings good consequences out of it.


Again, God ultimately sacrificed Himself, obviously not in the sense of putting an end to Himself, but in the sense of willingly undergoing extreme suffering and even the experience of human mortality. As for earlier animal sacrifice in the Jewish tradition, nearly all of the sacrificed animals (and crops) were actually eaten by their offerers together with the priests. It was no different from slaughtering them for home consumption; the difference is that they were taken to the temple to be slaughtered so that an additional layer of meaning attached to the killing and consuming: kind of like saying grace before supper, on a larger scale. As for the few "holocaust" sacrifices, i.e. those that were wholly burned on the altar, I would look at it as a concrete sign of one's willingness to give something up to God, in recognition that everything we have to offer we have received from Him. He makes the livestock fertile and healthy, he makes the sun shine and the rain fall and the seeds sprout into grain. Again, the "holocaust" is to be seen as an offering of food and wealth, not of the animal's life; grain and fruit were also included in the offerings.

So ... is this any help?

The whole thing is an abomination as far as I can see. Jesus Christ was made a martyr for no reason. He is the ultimate symbol of injustice and victimization. For two thousand years it is still the same. People don't want to educate or even evolve. They want to remain ignorant and childlike. They want to place responsibility of their actions and behaviors elsewhere and continue to use Jesus Christ's suffering on the cross to absolve them of their wrongdoing so they will be forgiven of their sins and obtain eternal life. Dream on buddy. It's barbarism glorified to this day, and it's bloody sick and perverse too. It's a magnet for all manner of corruption and immorality. I have no respect for this religion or the people who follow and revere it. It is an ultimate evil.

As someone else in this thread pointed out, if Adam and Eve had no concept of good and evil, they could not have known it was evil to disobey God. If they had the initiative to wonder about this mysterious distinction I wonder how this would make them equal in power to God in being aware of it. And how could humanity exist sensibly at all with no understanding of what might be beneficial or disastrous? What kind of human beings could Adam and Eve be without this elemental perception? I simply do not understand. Why is this bad?

In general your attitude seems to be one of total subservience to a completely undecipherable absolute power that demands no perception of general comprehension of what and who and where we are as human beings in a huge and fascinating universe.
I have honestly tried to make sense of this attitude and I am sorry to say it still strikes me as not sane. This is not an insult, it is merely a flat statement of total consternation.

The great fact is just this, and nothing less: That we have had deep and effective spiritual experiences which have revolutionized our whole attitude toward life, toward our fellows and toward God's universe. The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous. He has commenced to accomplish those things for us which we could never do by ourselves.

Big Book (link -- is there a way to make links easier to see?).

Meadow, what one perceives is not always true. There are a lot of things you have said here which indicate your feelings towards Christianity/Churchianity, but I ask you to consider that the values you place on things influence your perception of things. Consider the latest Star Trek movie. For those who value a lot of special effects and remaking the wheel, Star Trek XI was good. For those who value canon and any of the Star Trek series other than Enterprise, they may perceive Star Trek XI as crap.

The same logic applies to your beliefs.

Hit the "quote" button in order to view the bulletin board code, as it is shown most easily in the post editor. I'll quote my above text and disable the BBCode so as to let it be visible for analysis. As for the general procedure of BBCode, any coding acts the same way as parenthesis.

So, to add color to a text you need to make the initial code sequence,



Then add text to it,

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Thank you!

Therefore when Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross, it was kind of like God sacrificing himself on the cross. God finally felt what it was like to suffer as a man. Sometimes I think about that as if it was twofold situation - yes Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins... but what if God also learnt empathy?

You maybe want to read Carl Jung's "Answer to Job". Job gets his life crapped upon because Satan has this bet with God that Job will stop worshipping him if he's mean, and Job ends up yelling at God as to why he has to let all this bad stuff happen, and the reply is in so many words 'Because I'm God and I can do whatever I like, OK?' IIRC, Jung argues that this demonstrates exactly why the Incarnation, in mythic terms, was necessary. Job's God is not a God who understands what it's like to be human; Jesus, by incarnating, would understand the whole human predicament rather better.

Question is not what we think of the old legends; question is, do we have the courage and imagination to write our own?

The serpent obviously lied when he said that this would make them like gods ... they did not become like gods and neither did their descendants. The temptation is in grasping at being like God, at trying to take over control from God. The temptation of the "knowledge of good and evil" means the temptation to make one's own judgments about how to act, rather than discerning and submitting to God's will.

I'll leave aside the trinitarian problem right now, since my perspective on it is not necessarily theologically orthodox so it won't answer your questions.



As I said, I came to faith through the 12-step programs, before coming to Christianity, and that is the foundation of my understanding of my relationship with God. I can't explain my faith in Christian terms, but I can interpret Christianity in the light of my lived faith experience. The foundation of AA is submission to God, to "turn our will and our lives over to the care of God" and "asking only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out." That is also how I understand the foundation of Christianity. It may be that someone else has a different viewpoint, or at least a different emphasis, based on different life experiences.

I am not an alcoholic, but I definitely know what it is like to be sick of myself, out of control, not living up to my own ideals, acting impulsively, failing to keep resolutions over and over. If you can relate to any of that, you may be able to relate to the AA literature. Even if not, it's hard to deny how many lives have been transformed by the program. This paragraph from Chapter 2 of the AA Big Book describes my experience in a nutshell:



If you are interested, I suggest reading Chapter 4 ("We Agnostics")and Appendix II ("Spiritual Experience") of the Big Book (link -- is there a way to make links easier to see?).

I don't know how to come at the questions of Christianity with reason as the starting point. I can only come at them from lived, experiential faith as the starting point, and interpret the questions in that light.

You maybe want to read Carl Jung's "Answer to Job". Job gets his life crapped upon because Satan has this bet with God that Job will stop worshipping him if he's mean, and Job ends up yelling at God as to why he has to let all this bad stuff happen, and the reply is in so many words 'Because I'm God and I can do whatever I like, OK?' IIRC, Jung argues that this demonstrates exactly why the Incarnation, in mythic terms, was necessary. Job's God is not a God who understands what it's like to be human; Jesus, by incarnating, would understand the whole human predicament rather better.

Ironically I'm in the process of reading that right now - and if God exists inside of the framework of time (within the same four dimensional object as ourselves, perhaps as a bi-product of it) then this idea makes a lot of sense. It seems like Carl Jung was really just illustrating, at least as far as I've read, how prudent - even in a miserable state - Job was in dealing with God. I don't think he even mentioned Job yelling at God, more like he realized he was a bug, something God could put out under his foot like a cigarette butt, and because of that he just kept his mouth shut when Yahweh came down (at least in Jung's account of the story) and started blowing his hair back with a big power demonstration - if someone billions/trillions of times more powerful than yourself is blowing off steam and acting like they're seven, that's exactly what you'll do - just sit there and wait till they stop, hoping to find whatever angles or edges you can to get a hold of what threads of reason you can and finesse your way into bringing their mental state on line without getting yourself of course killed in the process.

The only think I'm still wondering - I think I'd want to go back and read Job again after reading this book, just to make sure I understand how much and what angles he took creative license with in order to make an analogy. He makes a disclaimer at the beginning that he's not making a religious proclamation - I'm not sure if that's because he simply feared that sort of pedestal and scrutiny or because, as he claimed, he's really trying to take societal symbolism and imagery and weave it into an analogy to explain the subconscious/conscious relationship and the core philosophy of his ideas. I know that in life he had a tendency to be a bit ambivalent and dubious off of certain angles (a mixed bag of finely honed strengths as well as some rather large exposures) - might be something to even do a Jungian analysis of Jung by .