(July 30, 2014 at 12:57 pm)RobbyPants Wrote: So, why was it necessary for God to have Jesus sacrificed for our sins?The JWs explain that when Adam and Eve sinned, they introduced imperfection into the human race. Since there were no other humans, that meant all humans were now imperfect and cursed to be sinful, therefore unable to keep from acting against god's will and thus doomed to death. In order to reverse this, a perfect human life would need to be sacrificed while still unblemished by sin. The idea is that dying without sinning meant that god "owed" Jesus a human life, and Jesus offers that unblemished life in place of those of humanity.
That does imply that god was obligated to act, but the JWs explain that by saying that god's sense of justice is so perfect and so pure that he thus felt obliged to follow through with this plan instead of simply changing the rules on the fly. I think it's that sort of viewpoint that makes me reject the idea that god can be considered on a separate moral level to mankind. If god has decided to place himself under the same moral framework that he built for mankind, then he has allowed himself to be judged by it as well.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
