According to the Nicene Creed, Jesus Christ was “crucified under Pontius Pilate” for our sake. However, according to the Gospel, he was crucified for the sake of punishment for his crimes in the state. This brings up the question of how his execution was for our sake when it was a penalty for a civil crime. If, as the Gospel according to Matthew suggests, he planned his crucifixion, using Pilate and the legal system as ploys in his larger scheme, is his death ultimately a suicide? This then calls for an explanation of how a suicide can be for the sake of another.
According to the next line of the Creed, Jesus “suffered death and buried”. This fits with the purpose of a punishment as generally they entail some sort of suffering. It also fits with a sacrifice, though, as sacrifice entails some sort of loss. If this is the case, Jesus sacrificed himself for our sake, “our” referring to those who endorse the Nicene Creed at least,and possibly others—the Creed does not specify. But this method of sacrifice is very unusual. Animals being sacrificed do not sacrifice themselves, nor are they sacrificed via being convicted criminals executed for their crimes. This detail complicates how Jesus’s death may be a sacrifice as the method has no precedent.
The other possibility, then, if the death itself is not a sacrifice, but the death is for our
sake, is that the actions surrounding it are for our sake. For example, if a soldier were to free a group of prisoners of war but were then executed for doing so, his death could be said to be for their sake. Likewise, Jesus’s acts which led to his execution may then be the actions that are for our sake whilst his death itself is the culmination of those actions and the sacrifice in the sense of personal loss that he endured to be able to have committed such acts.
Tag: christianity
In Hell
Torture all-encompassing
As fires reach from below
Beasts dwell here
feasting on boiling flesh
The monkey plays his horn
to the tune of burning blood
Weeds grow and thrive
in the skulls of the damned
War crimes define the scene
Screaming is the only sound
In Hell.
Where beasts and dragons reign
Clamp the neck
Hang the body
upside down
in Hell
Remix
Another iteration. New. Again.
Again let’s go again let’s go again.
Remix. Repeat. Remix. Repeat. Again.
Let’s go again let’s go again let’s go.
It’s all been done. Do it again. Once more.
All-American suicide. Revive.
Sell me your toes. One dollar each. Regrow.
I know you slip. I heard from Dante you
will burn, too. Can you feel the fire burning?
There is a spectre haunting this house and
I wonder who it could be. Maybe that
old ghost of Communism is back. Or is
God back? Maybe a broken family.
Let us begin again. Once more. Again.
I’ll tell you over and over. Again.
One more Pan-European patricide.
Perhaps the whole world will sing too. Somebody
once told me to ask what I know for sure,
but I was not sure I knew what he asked.
Try all you want to make me understand.
All that you can do is remix the words.
I’m not sure you know anyway what you mean.
Sound and fury signifies nothing. But we
make do with what we have and what we are
nothing. Negate the being and remix.
Repent. Reiterate and then repent.
Go collect all the gems and free the slaves.
If you can summon your heart’s desire.
The nothingness that is me is no thing
that is you is the other is just Hell
so to Hell with the other people! Leave
me be alone. Forget the meaningless
despair, though. Just rock and roll all nite or
love it when you one-two step please don’t stop.
Hide tragedy. Say never again,
Just once more for our justice so they say,
now never again except now we get
a turn for our revenge. Retribution.
But there’s no crime without a victim so
I guess you’re fine. Recapitulate and
decapitate. Remix the words and you’ll
get something new. Reiterate the moves
and you can have some meaning. But feel the
respect for nothingness.
Even if the Bible is not the law, it is the document a lot of Americans look to for values
In the US, a lot of people are Christian. Christianity is a big enough force in the country that the “Religious Right” is a thing. While not all Republicans are concerned with religion, it’s at least a staple of the party, and any conservative politician will at least pay lip service to it. The Trump administration is no exception, and it has indeed tried to justify itself with the Bible.
In response to this and the absolutely infernal acts the administration is propagating, some others have pointed out that a good reading of the Bible will lead one to find condemnations of categories of things that include treating immigrants and refugees horribly.
In response to this response, some have stepped back and tried to deny any authority to the Bible either way:
In some sense, yes, this is right. Though the second paragraph makes a subtle shift. Most people who are talking about the application of Jesus’s words to tearing kids from their parents are not trying to make a legal argument. I would be very surprised to find someone saying that tearing kids from their parents is illegal. Plenty of people are saying that it’s wrong, or that people should not tear kids from their parents, but that’s not the same as saying it’s illegal.
There are Constitutional provisions in the US restricting how laws can interact with religion. Though there’s an under-appreciated distinction between policies and the reasons behind policies. This comes up when people talk about the political compass too. Someone could be, say, authoritarian-left for a variety of different, even contrary reasons. But if you’re just trying to measure the concrete policies people support, then the motivations are abstracted away.
Likewise, people have all sorts of motivations for voting the way that they do. Many people, citizens and legislators, look to religion for guidance on which ways to vote. And if it’s something like what to set the income tax rates at or whether usury ought to be legal, then that’s a thing people can do. (There is some slippery room with legislators openly voting based on religious beliefs for policies without religious content, but even then, most people will let their values or morality tell them how to vote, and many people get those values from religion. You’re just one step removed.)
So in the sense of whether the Bible is the document that the agents of the state are supposed to consult in governing the country, no, of course not. You look to the laws and the will of the people. However, most of the people behind the laws and will are Christians. You might not like that. I’m not arguing whether that’s a thing worth trying to change, but for now, it is the case, and it will almost certainly be the case for at least several more years. So even if you think a long-term strategy of diminishing Christianity or religion in general is good, short-term solutions to urgent problems are also needed.
Public opinion and outcry does seem to have some effect on what the US government does. (Just yesterday Trump signed an order to keep families together. This may have been the Republican plan all along, but nonetheless, the plan at least had to incorporate public reactions.) So, to get good outcomes, we should include persuading the public to support the right policies. To do this requires appealing to the values people have. (We should also try to instill better values, but, again, that’s a long-term move.) In this case, adherence to the values of Christianity is a value a lot of people already have, and Jesus is pretty clear on this topic. So even if you or I think the Bible is not the document to look at for guidance in organizing society, plenty of people do, and they’re going to act as such. So we may as well point out that Jesus said to be good to people, as well as other things condemning pretty much everything ICE and company do.
Now, one might argue that if the majority religion were some other religion that supported these atrocities, then we would want people to steer away from what it says. Sure. We rarely appeal to every value anyway. In that case we would not look to adherence to religious teachings as a value and pick other values to appeal to. We can see this here, anyway. Most people probably take the obtaining of wealth as a value. Taking in refugees does not clearly serve that end. But for our purposes, that just means we don’t appeal to the value of money on this topic.
Today’s a Christian holiday; time for social media to smugly reveal that there’s some connection between Easter and Ishtar
There’s plenty of images to this effect, so I’ll just put one here for reference:
A fun fact. Well, it would be a fun fact if it were true. But it’s not. “Ishtar” sounds like it looks like it would sound like. Those aren’t her symbols, either, nor is she the goddess of fertility. The name “Easter” more likely comes from “Eostre” which is Germanic. I mention this because it’s relevant to the next point. Regardless of the inaccuracies here, the point does remain that the holiday celebration has some connection with another holiday celebration that isn’t Christian.
Even if we fix the factual matters, the smugness just reveals a lack of awareness. When Christianity was spreading, the Church was pretty upfront about this. The Bible doesn’t really specify holidays. Jesus explicitly says you can have some holidays or no holidays or all holidays or whatever. Just make sure you direct the focus of the celebration in God’s direction.
So in order to ease people’s transition into Christianity, the Church took the liberty of keeping the existing celebrations, while just changing the intended purpose. It’s a pretty good strategy, I think. Most people are just happy to have the celebration. If they have to switch from celebrating the rebirth of the plants (springtime) to the rebirth of the Christ, so be it. They get some wine, either way.
This gets to the last line, which often is posted as, “Gotcha, Christians! You thought you were celebrating your god, but actually you were celebrating sex!” I’m not clear how at all this is supposed to work. Because the celebratory activities were/are used by some people for one thing, that thing is the only possible purpose? If that’s the case, I want to know what having a big meal celebrates. It’s used for a bunch of holidays, so seeing the one true thing that is celebrated by large meals would be interesting. Perhaps that’s not it, since it appears to be crazy.
Maybe the date is the thing. Easter borrows activities from the celebrations of the vernal equinox, which is celebrated for the bringing of fertility, sex, etc. But, if we’re going by dates, Easter is directly connected to Passover. Which makes a lot more sense since Jesus’s death was timed as to be parallel with the celebration of Passover. So if you want to say what Easter is really about on the basis of date, then Easter is really about God sparing the Jewish nation from the final plague in Egypt. But that would mean that something is fixing dates to aboutnesses of celebrations. And once all 366 days are taken (or can we also do n-th weekday of the month? You could come up with a few more, but we’re still pretty limited) then we cannot have any new reasons to celebrate. If a country is founded on December 25th, anything it does to celebrate on that day will be about Saturnalia.
So activities and dates are individually out, but perhaps a more holistic picture can save the smug social media user. If we take all of the things mentioned into consideration, Easter is really about both Ostara and Passover. In some creative sense, this isn’t far off. It’s about rebirth and God sparing his people. But that creative sense only works if we allow for creativity (i.e. creating, not just imaginativeness). A far more plausible explanation of holidays than there being something that fixes their meaning is that there are people, people do things, sometimes people pick specific things for specific days, and any meaning to that is made by the people. If I want to celebrate a close friendship by video chatting and each of us chugging a soda on the 15th of April every year, so be it. If I want to celebrate my love of absurdity by throwing a dart at a calendar and then on that day throwing a calendar off a highway overpass, I might run into legal trouble, but if the celebration is about anything, it’s about what I decided it’s about. The meaning comes from the people celebrating.
If celebrations are about whatever the people celebrating decide to celebrate, then for most Christians, Easter is in fact really about the resurrection of Christ. Sure, the use of eggs and bunnies has historical roots in some other traditions, but when we’re looking for what a celebration is about, the roots we seek are found in the intentions of the people celebrating.
ASMS: Public Jesus
I believe this one explains itself.
Metal and Christianity
It’s interesting to see how intertwined metal and Christianity are.
Slayer? Singing songs about hell and has a crucifix at the concerts. But the singer is Catholic. He also notes Catholic services do the same thing.
Iron Maiden released a song called “The Number of the Beast” and got moral guardians’ upset despite being based on the Bible.
Avenged Sevenfold gets it’s name from the Bible (whoever kills Cain will get 7 times the retribution.) “Beast and the Harlot” is also a story torn from Revelation.
DragonForce refers to God a lot. It helps that most of the members are Anglican. In an interview Herman Li said that when they talk about “the master” and other such figures in their songs, they’re referring to God.
James Hetfield was raised a Christian Scientist. Didn’t go well, though.
Helloween has several blatantly Christian songs. Like “Save Us”.
Evanescence was considered a Christian band until they explicitly told the Christian records stores they were not. Stores complied when they swore in an interview.
Black Sabbath used the occult symbolism to sell records. Geezer is a Christian.
Some people try to convince themselves Marilyn Manson is Christian. Just look at Yahoo Answers. He is not, though.
Lots of people listen to Lamb of God thinking they’re pro-Jesus. That doesn’t last long.
There’s always fun arguing whether “Chop Suey” by System of a Down is about Jesus. Of course, calling Jesus’s spiel “self-righteous suicide” doesn’t end well.
Godsmack is in a similar boat to Lamb of God.
HIM is supposed Christian. And by supposedly I mean it stands for “His Infernal Majesty”.
Linkin Park does the occasional Christian song.
Attack! Attack! has Christian songs very forthright. Not a Christian band because some members aren’t.
Head left Korn when he converted.
We Came As Romans is mistaken as Christian because some of their songs have uplifting messages. I think some people want too badly for their favourite bands to share their favourite religion.
Flyleaf is a Christian band despite them saying they aren’t.
One time Judas Priest was set to play a concert for a audience of nuns. Someone didn’t do their research.
Twisted Sister stabs at it here and there.
There is also, of course, the entire genre of Christian metal. I at one point even made a playlist of songs. It’s a bit tilted towards power metal. August Burns Red and As I Lay Dying are rather popular even in the metal mainstream. (Divinefire not so much.)
