Wednesday, April 19, 2017

The Meat of the Gospel: Salvation by Carnivory



Guest article:


The Meat of the Gospel: Salvation by Carnivory

by: Retired Prof


On the face of it, the doctrine that a god/man had to die to spare us from horrible punishment for our sins is absurd. Let us accept the idea that a creator designed and constructed an unimaginably vast universe. Say he stocked one tiny speck of it with a breeding pair of sentient, rational beings and vowed to kill them if they displeased him. So far so good. But does it make sense that he would then have designed them vulnerable to temptation and set before them an irresistible temptation? He had to know they were bound to give in, yet when they did he declined to acknowledge his own mistake (or sadistic ploy?) but placed all the blame on them.

In an attempt to mitigate the absurdity, those who devised the doctrine compounded it. They say the creator will save his creatures from his own wrath by siring a son who will never displease him and then having that son sacrificed in their stead. Sure, they will still die, but that is okay, since killing his sinless son will melt his heart enough to make him relent and let them enjoy a pain-free existence after death--as long as they meet certain terms and conditions. Otherwise he will condemn them to horrible suffering. 

How can anyone claim, much less actually believe, that taking the life of an innocent person could restore the lives of guilty ones? Why would the kind of loving creator Christians believe in devise such a convoluted, irrational “plan of salvation”? An omniscient being should manage to keep things from getting out of hand in the first place. If he were as kind and loving as they say, he would not have made creatures so faulty that they had to be kicked out of Eden. He would not have poured upon their descendants a massive flood that drowned not only the sinners who provoked his wrath, but their innocent babies, their livestock—in fact all the sinless bystander-creatures that shared their world, except barely enough for seed stock to repopulate the place. He would not sadistically plan to resurrect the sinners and destroy their lives all over again by throwing them into a pool seething with fire. Furthermore, he should never need to resort to a makeshift fix once he decided that some of his human creatures could be salvaged. Surely he could think of some way to let sin-contaminated descendants of Adam and Eve off the hook without having to torture and kill one additional person—this one entirely free of sin, and his own son besides.

However bizarre this doctrine seems from a rational point of view, it does make psychological sense if we examine how two powerful human influences have intertwined: our conflicted reactions to eating animals and our tendency to believe in the supernatural.

All cultures recognize that we share with other animals the same nutritional reality. For us to live, something else must die. Most of us are untroubled if the thing that dies is an insensate turnip or a mushroom, but animals are a different matter. I once fattened a lamb for slaughter. Every day when I brought feed and water to the pen where he lived alone, he would put his front hooves up on the bottom board, peer over the fence, and greet me with a hearty “baa.” I was the only friend that lamb had. The cold November day when I knocked him in the head and cut his throat, I felt like a total traitor. Even a wild animal or bird I do not have a personal relationship with—when I shoot one my exultation at having solved a suite of difficult problems and thereby gained a quantity of edible flesh is tempered by the image of a vital creature suddenly converted to an inert mass of meat.

Members of our species manage turmoil with rituals, and the rituals many cultures observe in connection with slaughter suggest my kind of turmoil is pervasive. Some American Indians pray for forgiveness to the spirits of the animals they have killed. Hmong immigrants who share some of the hunting areas where I go cover the eyes of deer they are carrying to their vehicle, out of respect for the animal’s spirit. Observant Jews and Muslims eat meat only from animals that were ritually slaughtered. Even secular societies may require rituals. After I shoot a deer or turkey or goose, I must report to the Department of Natural Resources (a kind of secular priesthood) that I performed the slaughter by a prescribed method in the prescribed hunting zone. Meat from domestic animals must be inspected and certified under the secular authority of the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

Humans perform such acts whenever something both awful and awesome takes place. Slaughter is awful because we pity the animal and because its death reminds us we too will die. It is awesome because it delivers satisfying, life-sustaining food. We feel a need to expiate our guilt, celebrate our triumph, and dissipate our mortal gloom. Ever since our species came into being, most of us have felt a need to turn at such times to gods of one sort or another, who we think must be scrutinizing what we do. We design our rituals with those gods in mind. 

Members of cultures that believe all animals have a spirit may condone slaughter by claiming the victims were complicit. Friends who attended a Sun Dance in South Dakota reported that several young men set out on the reservation to acquire a buffalo for the feast associated with the ceremony. They found a lone bull and shot him. As animals often do when shot through the heart/lungs, this one dashed away. The men said it ran toward the road and conveniently died where they could pull up to it and load the meat in the back of their truck. They were convinced that the bull’s spirit had donated his body to the ceremony.

In cultures that worship a creator who is separate from creation, people may excuse killing other creatures by saying their god demands the slaughter. Cain, for example, couldn’t get by with trying to foist off vegetables as a sacrifice. Only meat would do—meat from the finest unblemished specimens. Someone once expressed the opinion that priests wrote Genesis that way because they bore the solemn duty to eat the sacrifice on behalf of YHWH, and they would rather be obliged to eat lamb chops or T-bone steaks than arugula or Brussels sprouts. Still, it seems unlikely that priests could persuade herdsmen to donate their most prized animals unless the herdsmen felt burdened with turmoil and found they could relieve it by placating their god with a sacrifice.

Most cultures have believed in gods who were similarly pleased by top-of-the-line sacrifices. The more prized the sacrifice, the greater joy it gave to the gods, and the more leniently they would treat the person who made it. Some cultures carried this trend beyond animal to human sacrifice. It made sense. What is even more valuable than the finest bullock? A captured slave. What is more valuable than a slave? Someone who represents the future of one’s own tribe. Incas seized on females entering prime breeding age. Aztecs upped the ante by sacrificing gods. Though these gods came in the physical form of human beings, they were identified symbolically as divine avatars. Christians also ritually sacrifice such a god/man, inflicting symbolic, not actual death. The slaughter of Jesus, the linchpin of salvation, is re-enacted yearly in passion plays. Believers then symbolically eat the sacrificial flesh and drink the sacrificial blood in the Catholic/Anglican Eucharist, the Protestant Lord’s Supper, or the Armstrongist Passover. The symbolism is a powerful way to affirm the believer’s closeness to Jesus. No relationship can be more intimate than the assimilation of one being into another.

So this part about sacrificing Jesus so that others may live makes perfect emotional sense. The Lamb of God is performing the same role as a literal lamb, except symbolically, on a spiritual level. Just as they know material meat will help keep them alive during this life, Christians believe spiritual flesh and blood will keep them alive forever.

However significant and moving the ceremony may be for others, I can’t see my way clear to turn loose of my preference for the literal over the symbolic, reason over emotion, flesh over spirit. It is impossible for me to believe sincerely that anything, not even a consecrated wafer and a sip of magic wine that represent the nutritive substance of a guy who died two thousand years ago, could keep me alive forever. And I refuse topretend to believe it could. The absurdity of other tenets associated with the Christian plan of salvation gives me confidence that my skepticism is justified.

Maybe you are different. You may be a person who glories in convoluted logic. You may feel it opens up mystical possibilities, which you find deeply satisfying in a way you can’t quite explain. If so you should carry on, for the sake of the emotional depth. You are under no obligation to follow the mundane example of secular folk like me.

48 comments:

Darren C. said...

We can talk specifics about religion later, but first I'd love to see a lucid explanation of how matter received existence from absolutely nothing.

Unknown said...

Medium Rare, with A1 sauce. Thank you!

Miller Jones/Lonnie C Hendrix said...

Retired Professor,
I usually enjoy your commentary, but this post is so condescending that it demands a response. First, I should say that I don't have a problem with the fact that you have reached different conclusions than me, and I understand the reasoning that produced those conclusions. However, your suggestion that a belief in Jesus Christ as Savior is completely illogical is inconsistent with some of the very points which you make in your post.
You propose that any reasoning which accepts that an innocent man had to be sacrificed to pay for the sins of all is "absurd" and "convoluted." Yet, you go on to skillfully point out that nature itself could be employed to corroborate reaching such a conclusion.
Every living member of the kingdom Animalia (including us) must kill and eat another living thing to sustain and help perpetuate its own life (plant, animal, fungi, etc.). It takes energy to reproduce, and that appears to be the main focus of all life on this planet - the perpetuation of itself.
In fact, I don't think that it is too great of a leap in logic to suggest that all life seeks immortality. Sure, individual organisms die along the way (even whole species), but life is perpetuated.
Hence, it appears to me that the sacrifice of one man to sustain the whole is not too unreasonable of a concept to latch onto when one considers the reality of the natural world we inhabit. And, what crime had the cow committed which had to be killed and ground up to make the hamburger I consumed last week? Is it reasonable to conclude that that cow was completely innocent and undeserving of its fate?
OK, you don't accept the Jesus as Savior thing - I get it; but please don't disparage the reasoning of those of us who do as absurd and convoluted!

Anonymous said...

I believe that in another 50 to 100 years, the business of religion will no longer exist because the con men wont be able to fool the masses due to the proliferation of knowledge over the internet and media. I find it a huge relief to think that my kids and grandkids wont be victimized by religion and the pulpit pimps who use it to live the high life at the expense of vulnerable, superstitious, brainwashed believers. Thanks for the article.

DennisCDiehl said...

Very nice and insightful. Thank you for taking the time to present this. There indeed is this deeply held concept of sacrifice in place of that which needs to be fixed, forgiven or forgotten.

One particular aspect of the sacrificial and theological contribution of the story of Jesus that troubled me was that Jesus did not stay dead. Every "type" of sacrifice in the scriptures and every sacrifice in every other culture for every reason imaginable stayed dead. Of course if Jesus had stayed dead then all the theology that followed in the NT would be meaningless as would a the carrot of the Second Coming.

A client of mine started to cry uncontrollably during a session and shared that her only teen daughter had committed suicide. I have had three such clients over the years. I asked if her pastor encouraged her at all and she said no. She said he said, "Well God lost his only child as well." She blew up and said, "NO! In THAT story, Jesus knows he will not be dead long. God knows He will bring him back in mere days BETTER THAN EVER. If I knew my daughter was coming back on Sunday, I'd be getting the party ready all weekend. THAT story of Jesus was merely a WEEKEND INCONVENIENCE. Shouldn't a sacrifice stay dead??? My daughter is STILL DEAD!"

She finally expressed through her grieve and anger at "THAT story" what up to that time I had not really thought of that way. "A weekend inconvenience..." Wow...had not thought of that being put that way. Now I can't unthink it.

I know this kind of seeing and thinking is offensive to the sincere. I believe we were and are all sincere in these things. I find that the most sincere, when they wake up from an incorrect view become the most vocal about what went wrong. Experience and reality speaks louder than emotional and idealistic needs.

Anyway, thanks for the contribution to the discussions that are larger than just what dorks those who think they know and thus can lead others are.

PS She also wondered if Jesus actually committed suicide by overturning the tables and causing a disturbance during Passover daring the Romans to take him out.

DennisCDiehl said...

A "weekend inconvenience" is not really much of a sacrifice is it? How often I heard that Jesus was "marred more than any man" and that his death was the worst ever, painful, humiliating and beyond the pale." However, thousands were crucified by the Romans. Eight Hundred Pharisees in a day once and nailed up all over town anyway possible.

Antiquities 13: Chapter 14
Alexander Jannaeus, the Maccabean king (103-76 B.C.E.), turns against the Pharisees and has hundreds crucified.

2. Now as Alexander fled to the mountains, six thousand of the Jews hereupon came together [from Demetrius] to him out of pity at the change of his fortune; upon which Demetrius was afraid, and retired out of the country; after which the Jews fought against Alexander, and being beaten, were slain in great numbers in the several battles which they had; and when he had shut up the most powerful of them in the city Bethome, he besieged them therein; and when he had taken the city, and gotten the men into his power, he brought them to Jerusalem, and did one of the most barbarous actions in the world to them; for as he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified; and while they were living, he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes."
Josepheus

In the Gospel account, Jesus dies in a mere 6 hours which was very short for crucifixion mean to take days and whose end was to be eaten by dogs, not buried by rich men with fine spices.

If you want to read of a really bad way to die over days and compare it to Jesus being "marred more than any man" search out the fate of General Crawford at the hands of the Wyandot Indians of Ohio in the 1700's . It would have been better he never to have been born.

The story of Jesus death does indeed have meaning. But that meaning has evolved over centuries. The meaning has been argued from the moment the body was taken off the cross.

The actual accounts of what happened are muddled and contradictory so it is also normal to be skeptical and cautious about what others who think they know, like COG tale weavers, tell you for sure what will be in your lifetime and how much it's going to cost you.

nck said...

Interesting stuff and fireside chat.
Some non scholarly comments from me.

-From scripture it seems that the Jews had private jurisdiction around the temple mount.
They (not the Romans) wanted to arrest him. BUT they feared the crowds who considered him a prophet. Anyone schooled in politics, coups, religion, democracy, dictatorships and crowd control know that you cannot fight the crowd. We can liken Jesus to Gandhi or Martin Luther King. To an outsider it may look like a suicide mission. But in reality the entire British Empire or the Southern Police force or the Jewish police was powerless in these matters of revolutionary heroism.


I don't think either the Father or the Son knew the outcome of events. Likewise a lot of people I know, knew that the British wouldn't be as stupid to commit suicide by Brexit or the US wouldnt invade Iraq for lack of evidence. But hey. People decide differently and all long positions should have been short in hindsight. So I feel that a huge amount of risk was involved sacrificing this kid. You raise one to enter seminar and what happens, they choose AC, if you know what I mean. Or worse even, they choose to become an aspiring artist.


-In penal law a sacrifice is needed to mend the damage to society in a holistic sense. To restore the balance of the disturbed Universe so to say. It is not enough for criminals to settle OUT of court with their victims. An arrangement should be public and overseen by a judge. In our individualistic society strange perhaps. But it is absolutely necessary to have a public, ritualistic display of balance restored for a society to function. Sin is not a private matter.

nck

Anonymous said...

It's a relief to have a subject other than the stupidity of some COG group leader. Yes, the Salvation process is at times difficult to understand. Why a loving Father would require His Son to suffer a gruesome death is not a plan I would have conjured up.

Let's face it, humans cannot relate to "spiritual" existence. It's beyond our senses and our life experiences. And God's Plan has been described as a Mystery. What we do know is that all of mankind's attempts to explain his existence come out as bizarre and illogical.

When I ran Sabbath school 40 years ago, I told my teachers to promote the atmosphere where the kids can ask any question. Now as adults, we can get in trouble or be labeled as weak in Faith, if you have too many questions. But I believe a good Creator would want his children to strive to understand the mysterious world He created.

The Plan under the most simple terms is that an eternal and powerful Being decided to expand His Family. But He didn't want robots as children or servants. So He had to give them free will. Choice is the central component. And His created clay models would be temporary, until they were refined to the point where they could be transformed into something eternal. This human life is filled with so many opportunities to chose and suffer at times from our choices, it must be the key to the Salvation Process.

The mother who lost her daughter was ignoring the fact the God's Plan allows for a physical resurrection, something only COG's seem to understand. All hope is not lost. A loving God has a plan that allows for temporary suffering so that there is opportunity for a joyful, eternal existence.

In short, our temporary human existence, filled with many varying degrees of suffering and hardships, is an essential learning experience needed to ultimately be used to transform us into eternal loving beings. Learning to love and overcome hardships, is to learn to be like God.

Anonymous said...

Excellent article and comments, and they speak to the fact that the "Story of Jesus" is best recognized as a story having mythological and metaphoric connotation (with their attendant insights, wisdom and parallels to so many pre-Christian 'god-man' myths).

Anonymous said...

I do not at all remember the movie... it was about some character out of Greek (I think) mythology who got some glowy magic arrows to defeat the enemies of some god or other. This poor hero guy defended his god and save him. The god was so proud of him for his efforts. We all thought, "Gee, that should have earned him eternal life", but, no, it didn't. The Greek god was so proud of him and really deeply appreciative of his sacrifice, but in the end, it was his sacrifice and he died. The god showed up to look over his son after the hero guy died, I guess, to repeat the pattern of sacrificing the god's favorite family members. I'm not sure in this case that much got lost in the translation. It's like Revelation talking about the dead saints waiting for the resurrection and how proud God is for their sacrifice, but after all that's said and done, they're still dead.

It certainly gives pause to cause one to wonder about the Old Testament manic depressive Yahweh going around and demanding sacrifice and hinting at eternal life. No one questions whether in his delusion that he couldn't possibly give eternal life to his followers who sacrificed for him, even if he COULD give them eternal life.

After all, eternal life is only for the gods.

All the rest must sacrifice and die. And be dead for good.

Anonymous said...

Or... what the world could look like 100 years from now, without....

Dennis said...

Darren, try Prof Lawrence Krause on everything from nothing.

Anonymous said...

What's all this mystery nonsense about Christ's sacrifice. How many times must I repeat this. The bible from cover to cover is action- reaction, cause and effect. Every law in chemistry and physics has a equal sign. Meaning that the greatest law of the universe is equilibrium. It is metaphorically more powerful than God, so even God is subject to it. For instance Christ pointed out that both He and His Father work. If there was going to just one exemption to this law, it would have to be Christ, since His was sunless and co creator if the universe. Yet despite Christ's plea that God remove the cup of crucifixion from Him, God the Father said no. Meaning that there are NO EXEMPTIONS For all of eternity to the law of equilibrium.

Compare this to the non stop claims for more government handouts, and high shrill attacks at any attempt to cut back 'entitlements.' These socialists constantly bring up widows, babies, disadvantages children as a means of justifying these non-equilibrium government policies. America is drowning in debt, yet there would be rioting in the streets if entitlements were even slightly cut back.
And in the COGs it's no different. The entitlement mentality prevails with the non biblical 'give way.' The cowardly ministers, like their secular counterparts are too afraid to teach otherwise.
Retired Prof, you have read my posts on this before, so why play stupid?

Anonymous said...

Retired Prof, great article. You have expressed what I have thought for a long time, and done it very well and very logically.

Anonymous said...

"the greatest law of the universe is equilibrium"

Wrong. So wrong.

The greatest law of the universe is entropy.

Consider the arrow of entopic time.

you have read my posts on this before, so why play stupid?

Anonymous said...

Nice job, Retired Prof. Cue sincere outrage in 5...4...3...

Christianity is the belief that 6,000 years ago a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree, thus incurring a curse from an imaginary "friend" who is his own father, who then figured the best plan to fix that was to wait 4,000 years before magically impregnating a teenage girl with himself so that she would bear him as her son, so that he could undergo an ancient ritual of blood sacrifice to himself, before returning from the dead so that he could then dispel that curse and bring eternal bliss, but only for those who symbolically eat his flesh & blood and telepathically tell him they love him and accept him as their lord.

Christianity is the belief that god himself created us "good," and then instantly turned around with a scheme to saddle us with a debt so exorbitant that no one could hope to ever possibly repay it, unless they too were a deity with magical powers. Then, he blames us for the debt, and thus shirks all responsibility for it, even though he himself engineered every conceivable parameter of the incursion of that debt, to the extent that he himself predicted the incursion of it—as well as its repayment—since the universe was on the drawing board (Revelation 13:8).

Then, since the debt is, for all practical purposes, infinite per person, he created a repayment plan. First, since, after all, he is magic, he generated sufficient magic fictitious funds in invisible fiat currency over the course of a weekend to pay off everyone's debt, and offers to do so—but only if you volunteer to be his slave (Ephesians 6:6), which is tantamount in accounting terms to surrendering as repayment for that trumped-up debt every last widow's mite you could ever hope to earn or possess. In so doing, he holds this indebtedness, one which is entirely his fault, over your head like a sword of Damocles for your entire life. He doesn't pay it. You do. He just invented some legal fictions to extort everything of value from you. Then he demands you love him and say "thank you" on bended knees.

continued…

Anonymous said...

…continued

Growing up in the COGs, I recall sermons about "natural law" and the consequences of one's actions. That's fine. I understand that. If I make a mistake of dropping an anvil over my toe, I will reap the natural consequence of it. I accept that. I am willing to take responsibility for my actions and the natural consequences that flow from them. If I win a Darwin Award for being stupid enough to remove myself from the gene pool, I will accept the blame. What I don't understand is, after smashing my toe with an anvil, a cosmic police officer writing me up with an artificial consequence for having made this mistake. Sure, smashing your own toe with an anvil isn't technically a "sin," but I really don't see a lot of difference between that mistake, and the natural consequnce that follows from it, and a mistake that is classified as a sin, and the natural consequence that follows from that as well. Why can't the natural consequence be penalty enough? Why does a cosmic cop have to drum up an artificial penalty to boot? And that artificial penalty is *literally* incendiary. I can't fathom the barbarism of anyone, who with magical powers to raise people back to life, would use that power to inflict such gratuitous brutality as to do so for the sole purpose of immediately extinguishing it in a pool of molten magma. That's on top of all the natural consequences, and is just payback for something that cannot fail to be petty.

But enough about normal human suffering, what about Jesus pain and suffering? Isn't he entitled to damages for his bad weekend? Well, what about Jesus pain and suffering? To begin with, Jesus wasn't the only guy to get crucified, so his pain and suffering is far from unique. Jesus has nothing on Spartacus, just for example. Second, I didn't ask anyone to be crucified on my behalf for mistakes made by Adam and Eve, a legendary couple the human genome indicates never existed, and then retroactively applied to everyone for "reasons." None of this has ever had anything to do with me. Literally, I had no options, no choices, and no control over any of it, so any responsibility for it thrown my way, is completely out of reasonable bounds. I had never before existed when any of this supposedly went down, so Jesus didn't die for me, or for anything I might or might not do 2000 years on. To implicate me in it is lunacy.

"This to me is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own." —Sam Harris

Anonymous said...

And let's not forget Jesus refused to be sacrified alone. He felt the need to take someone else down with him.

John 17:12b ...Those whom you gave me I have kept; and none of them is lost except the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled.

Acts 1:16 Men and brethren, this scripture had to be fulfilled, which the holy spirit spoke before by the mouth of David concerning Judas, who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus

Why did this need to be the case? Why couldn't Jesus have just given himself up to the Romans? Probably for literary purposes, as it makes a juicier and more dramatic story to have a villain betray him.

But maybe, against all rationality, you believe this isn't just an ancient Hellenistic novel, but is instead, literal truth. In which case, how despicable would this god be to condemn in advance of his birth, a then-innocent man, by ordaining him as a cursed vessel, conscripted for perdition. Who benefits from Judas' gratuitous and totally unnecessary suffering? Well, corrupt, organized christianity, for one...

Anonymous said...

LOL!
Yep, I had to "lol" at Black Ops Mikey appropriately calling the Old Testament god, "manic depressive Yahweh", because it's true.

It's a god invented by leaders of ancient people with the purpose of keeping the masses in check.

It's no coincidence that the god is imbued with many of the worst of human attributes. Such a god would surely be feared.

Anonymous said...

The ancient jews were ass-backwards and invented ridiculous stuff which is why the Greeks laughed at them. But the self-appointed People of God hate the guts of soul-less gentiles which is why they hated greeks for ridiculing them and hated roman rule over them more than any other people hated being ruled over. How dare those mere animals, those gentile children of satan insult or rule over the holy children of god, the human beings!!!

Retired Prof said...

April 19, 2017 at 9:26 AM, playing stupid is a nasty job, but somebody has to do it. Your comments are so incredibly smart that stupid ones are required, to maintain the equilibrium.

Anonymous said...

10.05 AM
Fart jokes are better than your 'entopic time' video.
The Wikipedia article on entropy had the formula:
S= Kg* In* Omega.
Note the formula has a equilibrium equal sign.

Anonymous said...

S= Kg* In* Omega

And anonymous claims to understand the formula.

Or entropy.

Must have gotten used to lying.

anonymous63 said...

anonymous 8:11 AM

You are a perfect example of the kind of COg attitude that drives daggers in the hearts of so many. You not only drive it in, you twist the blade over and over again. There was a minister in UCg several years prior to the split with COgWA that apologized for all the people he had hurt in not understanding grief and loss. He had just lost his mother. His first major loss.

Your comment, "The mother who lost her daughter was ignoring the fact th[at] God's Plan allows for a physical resurrection, something only COG's seem to understand. All hope is not lost."

I don't know whether you are that clueless or are just a perfect example of the lack of love in the COg's. That comment is, at the least, an ignorant(unlearned) statement. At most it is, and it comes across this way, without empathy or compassion, cruel, heartless (ungodly) and very self-righteous.

Proverbs 25:20. As he that takes away a garment in cold weather, and as vinegar upon nitre, so he that sings songs to a heavy heart.

You have left someone feeling very cold and in danger of death due to taking away their protection from the 'cold' and if you have ever put vinegar on baking soda (nitre) you know what a reaction that causes. It boils up and foams over. If in an enclosed 'vessel' it can explode.

People that say things like you have, minimizing or mocking someone's pain and saying they have no understanding or faith is totally out of line. You should be ashamed of yourself. Would you talk to a small child that way who had lost a parent? If you would, I suggest you keep your thoughts to yourself until such time as you find some sense of compassion and empathy because you will cause damage the likes of which you. have. NO. clue.

I lost my mother as a small child, and my child (only live born) as a mother. People like you TRIED to destroy me. Who are you really serving?

Anonymous said...

The horror of no religion is that people become lying conniving predatory scum who have no scruples. That seems worse than a lot of religious people.

Anonymous said...

Jesus, because he never sinned, was only gone for the weekend, but there was the risk that he would fail in his mission and be gone forever, and not come back.

Anonymous said...

I have no problem eating hamburger because domesticated cows have it better than wild ones probably do, and if we weren't raising and eating them, most of them would never be born in the first place.

Anonymous said...

The penalty is death because otherwise sinners could inherit eternal life and their sinning ways would make everyone in the kingdom miserable for eternity.

Why should I care if some sinful dink has to die? I am sick of suffering because of lying cheating selfish dinks. Let those evil dinks die; they deserve it. It's better than letting them stay around and drive innocent people to suicide.

Anonymous said...

According to the Talmud, gentiles are not human and have no soul, and are children of Satan. The Talmud takes the worst of the OT and makes it even more hateful. It was bad enough when genocide was commanded--to slay men, women and children--but the Talmud is even worse. A lot of neocons (former hard left commie Trotskyites are Talmudic Jews. Trump's son in law Jared Kushner is a Talmudic Jew. All this helps explain ruthless US policy in the middle east.

Trotsky was the commie who said Stalin was a weenie because he didn't kill enough Russians (ie. gentiles).

Oh yeah, Bernie Sanders is a Trotskyite too.

Anonymous said...

As wrong as COG theology is, I think many people never understood it. It is frequently either misunderstood or misrepresented on this blog.

Anonymous said...

"People like you TRIED to destroy me."

I seriously doubt anyone is trying to destroy you. They just see things differently. Only 2% of the population are psychopaths and are born evil. Plenty more have the jerk gene. Chances are though, most people on here just see things differently.

Anonymous said...

"try Prof Lawrence Krause on everything from nothing."

God help us. Krause is 100% retarded. Read "The Big Bang Never Happened" by Eric Lerner.

Anonymous said...

Entitlement?

Well, since the government and corporations have traded the jobs a person can actually live on to countries where people can live on $1.00 a day, I think I feel entitled to be pissed off about it and to some kind of compensation so I don't starve. You would riot too if you were starving.

Anonymous said...

"The Wikipedia article on entropy had the formula: S= Kg* In* Omega. Note the formula has a equilibrium equal sign."

Equilibrium cannot be indicated by a single mathematical operator because equality and equilibrium are different concepts. Equality is a fairly simple concept, whereas equilibrium is the state of a system as a function of time.

E=mC^2 is the exchange rate between matter and energy, without respect to what might be happening to that matter and energy in any system it might be a part of. In the middle of a supernova explosion, when the system we call a star is in radical disequilibrium, still the conversion factor remains fixed at all times.

On the other hand, it is possible to say that in a moment in time on October 2, 1923, the conversion factor between gold and reichsmarks was 1oz = 6,631,749,000 marks, despite the fact that the German currency's value was in radical disequilibrium. By October 9, the exchange rate had fallen to 1oz = 24,868,950,000 marks. The fact that an equal sign is employed here tells you nothing about the equilibrium or disequilibrium of the exchange rate, but is merely an instantaneous observation without respect to changes in time.

Anonymous said...

11.39PM
What you are describing is the practical problem of monitoring the exchange rate of a currency in free fall. Today's computers and instantaneous communication would largely solve this problem. It would be the equivalent of today monitoring a stock in free fall. Live data via the internet has solved this problem.

Anonymous said...

11.10 PM
That 2% of the population are psychopaths is from 1980s books on the topic. Today it is much higher. According to a TV morning show, the typical American high school classroom has several psychopaths. This means 10% plus. Times have changed.

Darren C. said...

I've never read Krause myself, but I am certain his idea of "nothing" is actually something. He has to redefine "nothing" that way in order to make his theory.

My point is that if the Professor cannot grasp the concept of salvation as explained by Christianity -- calling it stupid -- then he ought to have even stronger words against the idea of the cosmos coming from absolute nothingness.

His bitterness blinds him. Sadly.

DennisCDiehl said...

Anon 11:16. What an ignorant response

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...
The horror of no religion is that people become lying conniving predatory scum who have no scruples. That seems worse than a lot of religious people.

April 19, 2017 at 10:42 PM


Religion has been and is still used as an excuse to murder, commit genocide, rape children, treat women as property, enslave the masses, steal property and land, and other atrocities. Now that we have come to realize that there is no magic, no intervening super being, and that all religious books were written by men who had agendas, it is time to move on and apply ethics and fairness to govern. Time to grow up and admit that Santa, Easter Bunny, Satan, Allah, Jehovah, etc., are all make believe. To me it is obvious that there is a source of all creation, but it's not some god spoken of in any religious book.

Anonymous said...

anon 6:26 PM
I in no way would minimize the pain that comes from watching a loved one die. I too have been scarred by the sting of death. My beautiful and sweet young wife die a horribly painful death from cancer at the age of 37. I also lost my dream girl from youth who was looking for a second chance at life at the age of 47. Her parents came to her apartment and beat her 2 hours before she died. The pain is still there and can never fully go away in this life.

However, I do find some consolation from 1 Thes. 4 v 13 "But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope". If there is no resurrection, not just for the first fruits, but especially for the vast majority of mankind who had no clue and had no hope, then we are but fools believing a myth. But I choose to believe that a loving Creator will some day wipe away all tears and set things straight. It's just a matter of time.

Anonymous said...

"What you are describing is the practical problem of monitoring the exchange rate of a currency in free fall. Today's computers and instantaneous communication would largely solve this problem. It would be the equivalent of today monitoring a stock in free fall. Live data via the internet has solved this problem."

I was, in fact, describing the difference between a mathematical operator and the concept in physics of equilibrium, and how wrong it is to think they're interchangeable, or that an equals sign must denote a state of equilibrium. I do not know how you could fail to notice that.

Well, that's 2 out of the 3 Rs, 'rithmetic and reading, that you haven't mastered yet. Computers seem to be making your problems worse.

Anonymous said...

anonymous63 you expressed so well the suffering we can experience when people close to us suffer and die. WCG always was a bit blank about this. First we weren't supposed to go to doctors, then told if we were sick we had sinned somewhere or our parents had sinned by having bad genes, and then if someone dies we will see them again..... really, and how long does that take and will it actually ever happen? Even 'worldly churches' handle this better and are often offer a refuge for the grieving whether they believe or not.
When ministers came fresh from AC most were too young to know personally about grief, but we all get our lessons. The Bible itself has some weird insensitive stories, like the story of Job where his 10 children died and then God gives him 10 more, as though that is ok.

Anonymous said...

Einstein plagiarized the theory of relativity. So said Max Born the famous quantum physicist and many others. Everyone in physics knew it in the early days but the mass media drowned out their voices. It is now a fact of forgotten history. Read the book "Albert Einstein the Incorrigible Plagiarist" Since people like Krause and Hawking will never admit to such things because all their garbage is based on Einstein's frauds it's pretty easy to tell that people like them are either ignorant fools or pathological liars.

Anonymous said...

"E=mC^2 is the exchange rate between matter and energy,..."

By the way, the concept was not new. The formula itself was developed by J.J. Thompson and di Pietro before Einstein came along, but because Albert the giant liar and the "man of the century" by the fake news Time magazine had friends in the media, he got the credit.

Anonymous said...

Jesus's physical sacrifice as a man has been terribly overplayed. His was not the most painful death by any means from a physical standpoint. Though I have no idea the pain of death might be for Jesus as God. I simply do not know.

But, God never says that it would be the most awful of deaths. Man said that.

There simply had to be a sacrifice of blood. We can all speculate on why that makes sense, or for some, why it does not. It was the death and not the pain that removed our sins from us. Yes, His death was not permanent, but the reason for His death was life; His life resurrected and then others later as Christ was the first born of many brethren.

Though throughout my life I have speculated on the questions of the article and the comments, I do not have a need to fully understand all these "mysteries". That has not always been the case for me, but now I have joy in knowing the Lord and His peace. It is real and I can only say it comes through accepting Christ's sacrifice and focusing on your walk with the Lord rather than not measuring up. Big topic, I'll leave it at that.

Anonymous said...

Maybe Einstein just brought out knowledge that was floating around at the time. I think mankind as a whole gains knowledge, but the timing has to be right. No point inventing the internet before electricity, or if you do it is called science fiction.

I have read that Einstein's first wife thought of the theory of relativity or had a big part in the ideas. Then she became schizophrenic (or so it was claimed) and got locked up in an asylum and Einstein remarried (his cousin I believe). Of course back in those days women really weren't taken seriously, but the first wife did go to university at the same time as Einstein and studied with him.

I remember WCG said something like - various inventions and discoveries which seemed to come out of the blue were revealed to mankind by spirits, maybe the bad ones. Someone in WCG had an answer for everything. They even said men would never get to the moon, not that it did us a lot of good.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps others have suffered more than Christ. But have many have chosen to do it voluntarily to help other?

Anonymous said...

"Anon 11:16. What an ignorant response"

Sorry Dennis. I guess I shouldn't expect people to read a book that makes their heroes look stupid.