philechat

Not necessarily true. Confucius eshewed the "love God" part and preached "respect the gods, but stay away from them." On the other hand he also made statements such as "Love your neighbor" and "Do not unto others as you would not others do unto you" (the Golden rule) much earlier than Jesus did.

As for the idea of self-sacrifice. Many non-Christian societies practiced it to an even greater extreme than the Christian ones. The Japanese sumerai were required by their code to commit suicide if they could not protect their lords properly. The Buddha had numerous stories of self-sacrifice attached to him.

yguy

What I'm missing is how this contradicts anything I've said.

I don't see anything noble about that sort of self-sacrifice. God would never command such a thing, except as a test as in the incident with Abraham and Isaac. The crucifixion was only comparable to pagan sacrifices in the most superficial sense. It was the greatest sting operation ever, in which satan was tricked into accepting an innocent man into Hell. "Greater love hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friends" - NOT for God.

philechat

i.e. Not all wise men in history agree with Jesus' commandments. Many commandments and moral laws were invented independent of God-belief.

I am not talking about God. Confucius also taught sacrifice for friends, for family members, and for the country. So Jesus' concept of self-sacrifice is hardly unique. Of course the sacrifice is not for God--Prometheus accepted the punishment from Zeus because of his love for the humans.

yguy

That may be, but that doesn't mean God didn't have a hand in their codification, nor that all such codifications are correct.

You make a logical error in that you presume that because Confucius came before Jesus, the idea was not original with Christ. "Before Abraham was, I am."

philechat

By what criterion do you judge as correct? Gut feeling? The Bible? The number of people believing in it?

You have a strange sense of time, my friend. Thinking the deity of your culture to be the original inventer of the morality of the entire world. What if I declare Mohammad (PBUH) to come before Jesus and Abraham? All unfalsifiable.

yguy

Have you ever done something wrong and known it was wrong without anyone ever having told you? Of course you have. Whatever that is tells me whether an idea is right or wrong. In cases where that inner voice is silent, I withold judgment - when I'm in my right mind, anyway.

Quote:

You have a strange sense of time, my friend. Thinking the deity of your culture to be the original inventer of the morality of the entire world.

There is nothing cultural about God. That's why you can find such profound truths in so many different places.

Quote:

What if I declare Mohammad (PBUH) to come before Jesus and Abraham? All unfalsifiable.

Don't you mean falsifiable? Sure it is. I base that belief on the fact that it's in the Bible, which I consider neither absolutely infallible nor exclusive truth, but nevertheless the greatest concentration of spiritual truth ever written...and I have not found evidence to the contrary.

philechat

So it's gut feeling to you. However how much of these gut feelings were indoctrinated by culture to be true? In the past the Chinese had the gut feeling that women must bind their feet. In the sumerai culture people had gut feelings that warriors should kill themselves for honor. Among the Muslim fundamentalists the gut feeling is to hijack the airplane and have it fly into the American buildings.
Why would it be the Biblical God? Why not the Chinese gods, the greek gods, the Muslim Allah, the Austrilian Dreamtime. Why is the God of the Bible alone not cultural?
Unfalsifiable meaning if you could have those interpretive cop-outs for objections from all sides, such as distorting the timeline of history. And so far I am doubtful that you read the religious texts of all religions in the world, and...well, each to their own truth . The greatest concentration of spiritual truth for me has been books by purely secular authors, if you want to know.

yguy

Intuition would be closer to the mark.

None. Christ came to free us from such indoctrinations; from the need for them, that is.

If my understanding of them is reasonably correct, most of those are Gods that can be objectified, i.e., one could, if one met one of them, one could point and say, "There he/she is". You couldn't do that with God. In that sense the Buddhists are closer to the mark than most, IMO.

Cultural gods are man-made.

I don't see how I've distorted any timeline.

Hell, as far as that goes, I haven't read the whole Bible.

Whodathunkit?

Wiploc

At issue is whether there is any logical reason to do as Christ said. Do you know of any such reason?
crc

philechat

When the intuition of mine told me God does not exist?
Show me a person who believed in Christ without any contact with other Christians, and I will believe in him.

Not Allah...the Islam God Allah could hardly be objectified. Nor is the Tao and the Chi in China, Brahma in India, the orphic Dionysus, the Australian Dreamtime, the Nirvana of the Buddhists, and the Zeus of the stoics and the neo-Platonics.
You say that God you believed in is not the God of the Israelites?
Christ before Confucius, before Abraham, before Plato and Aeschylus?
Read it in full my dear. See how cultural this God really is. Go ahead and make as wild an exegesis as you want it to be to excuse God from the cultural references. It's a fun mental exercise for the theologians the past 2000 years.

Anything from the poets to the philosophers to the physicists to the music composers. Which direction must we head?