RE: Would Jesus promote punishing the innocent instead of the guilty?
August 13, 2020 at 7:10 am
(This post was last modified: August 13, 2020 at 7:20 am by The Grand Nudger.)
The greeks absolutely believed in sin, it was odysseus sin that kept him so far from home for so long. They even believed in a force that carried sin from one place to the next, inflicting itself cyclically down through families.
The greeks also believed in divine forces that suffered and died for man, sacrificial gods. That's how we got fire. Light. You asked for an example of a sacrificial god and got an entire sacrificial pantheon from an uncontacted continent. It might not be any historic contingency that makes people imagine gods this way.
The point is, if your objection to there being piles of gods like christ is that this implies or depends on christians copying those religions - as it was, then your objection is irrelevant. No, it doesn't mean that, depend on that, or imply that. They did copy from other religions..but that's probably not how they arrived at the type of god they did, which is a type of god that exists in some form or another in every pantheon that we know about (and we assume much the same for the ones we don't and can't know about). Favor, redemption, and reward are universally desired goods. When we conceive of the divine as a transactional agent, we insist that they can provide these goods. Reciprocity is a universally observed human behavior. We struggle for our gods, and we insist that our gods will and have struggled for us. We die for them, they die for us. When human beings set the terms of the divine contract the document that follows is overwhelmingly human in it's aim, values, and insistence.
The greeks also believed in divine forces that suffered and died for man, sacrificial gods. That's how we got fire. Light. You asked for an example of a sacrificial god and got an entire sacrificial pantheon from an uncontacted continent. It might not be any historic contingency that makes people imagine gods this way.
The point is, if your objection to there being piles of gods like christ is that this implies or depends on christians copying those religions - as it was, then your objection is irrelevant. No, it doesn't mean that, depend on that, or imply that. They did copy from other religions..but that's probably not how they arrived at the type of god they did, which is a type of god that exists in some form or another in every pantheon that we know about (and we assume much the same for the ones we don't and can't know about). Favor, redemption, and reward are universally desired goods. When we conceive of the divine as a transactional agent, we insist that they can provide these goods. Reciprocity is a universally observed human behavior. We struggle for our gods, and we insist that our gods will and have struggled for us. We die for them, they die for us. When human beings set the terms of the divine contract the document that follows is overwhelmingly human in it's aim, values, and insistence.
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