Thanks for the clarification. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that for some people what might be loaded language is for others more academic. In that light your word choices make perfect sense. Looking forward to further thoughts.

Hey Scott --

Regarding the vocabulary, I'm using the words in the same sense and ways that scholars of religion (including Christian theologians) use the terms when studying and quantifying religious doctrine and practice. As such, The "Cult of Yahweh" and the "Hebrew Temple Cult" (which overlap, but are not synonymous, since the cult of Yahweh was far more widespread than the temple cult, as the doctrinal disputes between the country and city folk in the reign of Josiah and the time of Jeremiah illustrate) are descriptive terms, in the same way that "The cult of Athena" is technically descriptive for "the group of people that practiced the religion of Athena." The term "Jewish religion" would not be an accurate descriptor of what was practiced in the Old Testament, as 1) the term encompasses a number of different cults and sects, and 2) that religious tradition was born in the diaspora after the destruction of the second temple, and has a very different doctrinal and dialectic character. Hinduism is a religion that encompasses the Thuggee cult, the cult of Shiva, the cult of Krishna, etc. Catholicism has within it different orders (doctrinal traditions that prioritize one doctrine over another, yet all of which pretty much agree on what the doctrines are and what they say), different sects (parts of the church which eschew one doctrine or another, or take on additional doctrines not endorsed by Rome), and different cults (different saints have cults, there is, notably, the Cult of Mary. These are distinctly flavored schools of worship, usually centered around a single location or person).

As for the term Human Sacrifice, it also is technical. The Bible utilizes this language some of the time, referring to Jesus as "The Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." That is invoking a model of propitiatory blood sacrifice as practiced in the Hebrew Temple cult (and most other religions in the world). For a more thorough discussion of the mechanics of sacrifice, I commend you to my essay, published in The SciPhi Journal (http://sciphijournal.com/2009/04/24/16-as-the-g...) last month, but in brief:

Propitiatory sacrifice is a sacrifice made to a god (or a king, or a mob boss) to buy him off. It is something offered in payment for a debt - that debt can be financial, but more often it is a debt of honor (something that, in the modern west, we almost don't have a category for). It's a formal way of saying "See, I'm on your side - please don't hurt me" or, alternately, "See, I'm on your side, and I appreciate the favor you show me *so much* that I'll give you this thing that's really important to me, because I'd rather have what you give me than this other thing I greatly value." That is sacrifice. Unless you're a Docetic (the heresy which held that Jesus was only an illusion, and not really a human), then Jesus's sacrifice, by which the shedding of his (allegedly) innocent blood atones (propitiates god's wrath) for the sins of the world is, by definition, a human sacrifice. See Matt. 26:28

Again, it's a technical description.

Now, on the issue of "bloodthirsty," there it was an expedient rather than a technical term. The Cult of Yahweh was a cult of animal sacrifice - to whit "Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins" (Hebrews 9:22). Leviticus is a book filled with very detailed descriptions of how this formula worked. Yahweh required blood to assuage his wrath - but (with a few exceptions before the covenant with Israel is established) he far prefers animal blood to human blood. Bloodthirsty is much more expedient than going through that kind of description every time -- and, I hasten to add, something being bloodthirsty does not mean it 1) doesn't exist, or 2) isn't worth listening to. Most ancient societies were bloodthirsty in general, as is most of nature, and yet we have inherited an immense amount of wisdom that is both true and worth listening to, including the beginnings of science and some amazing innovations in mathematics. Bloodthirsty is an accurate term, and when discussing the continuity - or discontinuity - of Christianity and Hebrew religion it's easy to forget that the Temple Cult (a religion that, by the way, Jesus was apparently a practicing member of) was one that revolved around animal sacrifice, which believed that blood had a magical quality to appease their diety and insure his good grace - particularly if you've grown up in the church and tend to see the religion of ancient Israel through the lens of 20th/21st century Christianity).

So, no, I'm not sneaking insults in. If I have want to insult a doctrine, I'll happily do so, but as far as I'm concerned the issue at stake in these discussion is "is Christianity true" not "is Christianity moral, pleasant, or inoffensive." To my mind, they are two separate questions.

Thanks for pointing up that these things were bugging you -- I hope this helps.

I'll reply again tomorrow with some important clarifications regarding your reply, where we got our wires crossed on things (such as "which covenant was I referring to, and does it matter?").

Thanks!
-Dan

Sid, his tone (which I may have been misreading) did seem to be rejecting premise 1. Re-reading his rejection of 2 seems to be essentially that because men can't agree on what the sacrifice was for exactly and that it is therefore (if it happened at all) good for nothing. That's not so much a problem with any of the stated premises but rather a problem with "If there is a Holy Spirit then all men claiming Christianity should therefore be in agreement."

Given his understanding of the covenants and everything leading up to the crucifixion I can see why he would have a problem with the soteriologies that he has mentioned. I disagree with how he (and apparently a number of other people) view the covenants. so naturally we would arrive at different conclusions.

Hey Dan (and Sid). Yeah I don't think reacting emotionally is a bad thing and that's how your words came across to me. I suppose that might be more a reflection of what's going on in my mind. Words like "bloodthirsty" and "cult" and phrases like "human sacrifice" seem to offer more attack than discussion. Given that and given my passion for my faith I reacted with no small amount of emotion to your post. My apologies for any offense.

I still object to your characterization of communion as re-enacting human sacrifice. It is certainly a remembrance of a sacrifice that a human being made. I suppose I see a distinction between human sacrifice (someone being killed by a religious person for religious purposes) and the sacrifice Christ made (dying at the hands of the Roman government and with the blessing of the Jewish religious leaders with the purpose of freeing us from ultimate death). So it doesn't elevate and sacrelize human sacrifice but is a remembrance of a sacrifice Christ made. Perhaps you don't see that distinction? I will say this is actually the first time I recall that I've seen the crucifixion portrayed as a human sacrifice.

As far as death is concerned, I was talking not about physical death but about spiritual death. I can see I didn't make that clear. Our transgression is our sin against God. I do believe in evolution though I make no claims about knowing how old the earth is. In regards to the Garden and Adam and Eve, whether they literally existed or not, there is still the problem of sin.

re: the Kingdom of God I'd say that it has had an impact though perhaps you and I might not agree on how historical it was.

In regards to the covenant God made, when he put Abraham to sleep and made the covenant to make him the father of many nations he did so. We as Christians are grafted in to Israel and are part of the fruits of that covenant. Christ's sacrifice was necessary for that to happen. And Yahweh is the head of that body. As far as physical borders go, well maybe we'll get there. I don't know. I don't think that's the important part. Father of many nations seems to imply that there won't be one single nation.

You have mentioned that the text where Jesus said that he did not come to abolish the law is isolated and that "that there is a direct contradiction between what Jesus says in such instances and the actual reality of the situation as painted by every other relevant part of Christian history, both inside the Bible and outside it". I elect to believe that what the Bible says that Jesus said is true. I don't see the "contradictions" that you have pointed out to me so far as contradictions. They are the understanding that you and others have arrived at and I respectfully disagree with that understanding. That probably doesn't surprise you.

I don't disagree that "Christian soteriology is fractious, incoherent, and lacks historical consensus". After all, all an "ology" is is the study of something and even with the presence of the Holy Spirit we as humans can be wrong when it comes to matters of study. The Spirit doesn't free us from our errors.

Fair enough, Sid. Thanks for the referee!
-Dan

I'm finally catching up with the conversation. I got to admit, Scott, I was taken aback by this:

"I’m interested when people tell me what they think God should have done. There’s no humility in that."

Given two beliefs that underlie your thinking, I can see where such a statement comes from:

1. God's actions are, by definition, morally good.
2. God acted to have Jesus crucified to atone for some of humanity's sins.
Thus
3. Having Jesus crucified is morally good (i.e. what should have been done).

It's the first one that is the sticking point. It's accepted by those that already believe without proof. If Dan says that he reject 3 and see a better way atonement could have been achieved you assumed he's rejecting 1 and saying that God acted immorally. Of course this would be the ultimate act of hubris to someone who implicitly accepts statement 1.

If I understand him correctly, Dan is refuting statement 2. That's not a lack of humility, it's an attempt to get at truth without making any theological assumption, including statement 1. If two is false then the conclusion 3 is as well - even without considering the truth of 1.

Dan:

If you’re going to be using our correspondence for apologetic purposes, please avoid the slander and ad hominems and stick to the substance of the argument.

I don't think Scott's intent was slander or ad hominem. I sometimes take offense when someone says I've reacted emotionally but then remember that not everyone considers that a bad thing. Thus, from their point of view, pointing out something they think is an emotional response is not slander.

Also, argument mistakes can happen inadvertently. If I know Scott, the context of his statement I quoted above was "I'm truly curious... that seems unhumble" not "You conceited so-and-so... how can anyone take your argument seriously."

Scott -

You do me slander by suggesting that my quibbles about human sacrifice are emotional rather than rational. I tried to make it very clear that this objection is about problems with Christian soteriology. I say "it is consistent with the bloodthirsty cult of Yahweh in some ways, but commits the ultimate abomination of human sacrifice." My characterization of the cult of Yahweh as bloodthirsty is accurate (though the Yahweh cult was in no way unique among its contemporaries in this respect, at least early on) - the entire system is based around propitiatory blood sacrifice to slake the wrath of God against those that violate the Mosaic law. My characterization of human sacrifice as the ultimate abomination is similarly accurate -- it is merely a restatement of the tenets of the Deuteronomic and Levitical law using their own term (abomination - i.e. something which is ritually impure and offensive. A sacrilege).

The propitiatory model has genuine doctrinal problems (and, I must point out, I'm not the first to notice. Christian theologians have, for two thousand years, noticed these problems). Among these problems are that it sanctifies human sacrifice while claiming to be a Jewish religion - and, as you will be aware, by the time of the Babylonian exile (and arguably a few centuries before that) human sacrifice was considered anathema to the Jews, even while they practiced animal sacrifice quite voraciously. Human sacrifice is particularly and strenuously forbidden by the Mosaic law, and yet God's ultimate plan hinges on people perpetually venerating and re-enacting a human sacrifice? As I said, this (at the very least) points out a severe lack-of-planning problem on God's part.

You object to my characterization of the communion ritual as a re-enactment of human sacrifice, saying that only Catholics believe this, and it's nowhere in the Bible. On this point, you are wrong on both the facts and the logic. The doctrinal difference between Protestants and Catholics is whether they believe that the mass is an *actual* act of sacred cannibalism or merely a symbolic re-enactment of it. Both traditions agree that the communion ritual is 1) important, 2) commanded by Christ, 3) involves (either symbolically or literally) drinking the blood and eating the flesh of the lamb of God (who was a human being). And, as near as I can tell, both traditions are in agreement with the stories told in the Gospels, particularly in Luke 22:19-20, where Jesus explicitly lays out the symbolism involved and commands the regular re-enactment of the ritual. It says: "And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.'"

So, like I said, one of the problems with the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is that it sacrilizes and elevates human sacrifice (in direct opposition to the law of Moses) and it implies that God is a bloodthirsty fellow. Now, God could be a bloodthirsty fellow -- most gods throughout history have been. If a God really did exist that were bloodthirsty, then believing in a bloodthirsty God would not be in any way immoral or objectionable -- certainly disbelieving in a bloodthirsty God when one existed would be quite foolish, and wouldn't change the reality of the situation in any case. So, no, this is not an emotional objection - it's not "I don't like it, therefore it's not true." Rather, this is an examination of the claims of Christianity that points up a clear doctrinal problem that manifests as an internal contradiction.

Moving on...

What you and the Christians you read and go to church with subscribe to is entirely beside the point I made, which is that historically, and worldwide, Christianity cannot agree (and never has agreed) upon a soteriology. Each of the three traditions I outlined has longstanding traditional support from within orthodoxy - and each has its factions fervently supporting it today. I do not require that Christians agree on everything, or that every individual Christian be right about everything -- I DO require that the doctrines (to borrow a phrase from Jesus) bear the fruit they predict. Again, I must clarify, by "require" I mean "in order for me to believe the expressed propositions are true" not "in order for Christianity to meet my moral standards for approval." The question pertinent to me is whether Christianity is true -- whether it is "good" is a separate question. IF I believed Christianity was true, then it would be incumbent upon me to evaluate whether I believed Yahweh was good or evil, and pick sides either for or against him accordingly. But, failing a belief in the truth of Christianity, I am left only evaluating its truth claims (which I find wanting) and its internal consistency (which, I point out, is quite lacking considering the supposed universal witness of the Holy Spirit).

You ask how substitutionary atonement suggests that God is impotent, so I'll walk you through it. The doctrine goes something like this: 1) human beings are all condemned due to Adam and Eve's original rebellion against Yahweh, 2) Yahweh, having already established two everlasting covenants to create and maintain relationships with humanity (the Noahic and the Mosaic), decides that the only way to enter into relationship with humanity is to incarnate himself, piss off the priests and the occupying foreign force, and goad his accusers into crucifying him, 3) as the Lamb of God, his blood sacrifice of himself is infinitely more valuable than the animal sacrifice of the temple cult, so he won't have to worry about inadvertently making his rules too hard to live by, and thus insures that THIS covenant will REALLY last forever, 4) to prove he can make good on his promise, he rises from the dead, appears to people, and tells them "all you have to do is believe."

So, it suggests God is impotent in that 1) his understanding of human psychology is so poor that he couldn't make a workable covenant the first two times he tried it, that 2) based on the lackluster performance of Christianity over the last 2000 years, he didn't do that much better the third time, 3) he knew within just a couple decades that his new experiment wasn't going to work, so he announced plans for another, new future covenant in the Book of Revelation, and 4) he does not differ in his methods from the pagan gods of the time, nor in his appetite for blood (actually, his appetite for blood is a throwback to earlier cults - by the time of Christianity, human sacrifice was well out of favor in most religions. Those are the things which suggests God is impotent: if nothing else, he is so uncreative that he cannot imagine a way to interact with people that humans hadn't previously invented for gods now universally agreed to be false.

You dodged the question quite handily again with a character jibe when you say "I'm interested when people tell me what they think God should have done. There's no humility in that," implying both that I'm arrogant/prideful (and that this somehow counts against my argument, which is intellectually dishonest), and that I have made a pronouncement on what God should have done (which I didn't). In one sentence you managed to poison the well against me and straw man my position, and then you went on to fail to deal with my point that Christianity has no unified soteriology and that this militates against the supposed universal witness of the Holy Spirit. I apologize for the directness in the next sentence, but I do not wish to equivocate on this point:
If you're going to be using our correspondence for apologetic purposes, please avoid the slander and ad hominems and stick to the substance of the argument.

Now that the unpleasant part is out of the way, on to the rest of the post! :-)

I can't help but notice that in the paragraph when you say "Jesus' blood didn't slake God's thirst for blood, it satisfied the covenant God made" there is not talk of hell or punishment for sin, only talk of death. You state that because of Jesus' death, God does not require the death of every other human. This is untrue -- everything still dies. Jesus's death and resurrection did not change the status quo where death is concerned. You also say that "our transgression against God is serious," but you do not identify what that is. Since you elsewhere seem to accept the evidence for the evolution of life on this planet (though, obviously, you would believe that God started and perhaps also guided the process), and there was no literal fall in a garden of Eden, I have to ask: What is our transgression?

You said, in response to my question "What did the resurrection accomplish?" that "I’d say it was the beginning of Satan’s defeat. It did establish the kingdom of God on earth, though that’s not a political body. More importantly, it provided a way for us to be saved from God’s wrath. If he were truly bloodthirsty there would be no such way." Thank you for giving a concrete, unequivocal answer.

In response to your answer, I have to ask "that's it?" Christians would have the rest of us believe that the resurrection is the single most important event in the history of the world, and yet this rather dramatic act by a nearly omnipotent God accomplished very, very little. Establishing the "kingdom of God" is a bit of a non-starter. Such a thing, as Jesus described it ("the kingdom of God is within you") has no measurable impact on history. Such a definition of the "Kingdom of God" is also highly contra-prophecy - the OT prophecies of the Messiah predicted a *physical* kingdom of Israel, with pre-ordained physical borders and with Yahweh at its head. As far as saving us from God's wrath, I can only repeat my objections above 1) by the OT lights, such an avenue for satisfying the wrath of God violates the Mosaic law in the most flagrant of ways, 2) it shows up a terrible lack of imagination and maturity on the part of Yahweh. Being governed by one's wrath is, after all, a hallmark of emotional immaturity that we most frequently associate with hormone-swamped teenage boys. Holding another party to the contract they made, prosecuting them to the extent of it, and possibly offering them grace is far more in line with adult behavior. Of course, you intimated that you think this is exactly what's going on with Yahweh when you said that Jesus's sacrifice "satisfied the covenant," but in that assertion you are falt wrong, and demonstrably so. Here's why:

In order for Jesus's death to satisfy the terms of the covenant, it would have to be in the terms of the initial covenant -- it wasn't. Further, it was explicitly *against* the terms of the initial covenant. Thirdly and finally, the Mosaic law trumpeted itself as everlasting - and yet, Christianity claims to be the "new" covenant superseding the old covenant to such an extent that all of the old law no longer applied (except for the proscriptions on adultery, strangling animals, and eating blood, per the council of Jerusalem in Acts).

I doubt you'll find any of this terribly convincing. There are, after all isolated texts where Jesus says things like "I have not come to abolish the law," and these are held by most Christians to be hermeneutically sacrosanct. Since I have no pre-commitment to Jesus either being correct or telling the truth, I can (and do) point out that there is a direct contradiction between what Jesus says in such instances and the actual reality of the situation as painted by every other relevant part of Christian history, both inside the Bible and outside it. In such an instance, looking at Christianity from the outside, my reaction is the same as my reaction to other prophets in history who say things to softpedal their own radical position. I look at what they say, measure it against what they and their followers do, and often wind up suspecting that the prophet is either a charlatan, an ignorant, or self-deluded. Which was Jesus? I have no idea - but whichever he was (or if he was, against all the problems with Christian doctrine, REALLY the messiah), it doesn't solve the central problem of this objection, which is that Christian soteriology is fractious, incoherent, and lacks historical consensus, all while Christians still claim the witness of the Holy Spirit shows them the truth of their beliefs.

Heading over to post #4 (I still owe you an answer/elaboration for #2 don't I?)
-Dan Sawyer

Great post Scott