I am, however, bothered by your claims about Christ's sacrifice because I don't think they make any sense, are strangely flippant, and more or less contradict what you've already said.
Maybe I am flippant because I don't take the subject, especially the son of God part, all that seriously. I can understand mankind's need for a God that conforms to man's own vision of himself and his world, but I don't understand the need to conjer up a repetitive "son of God," unless they are transferring the message to the messenger and mistakenly worshiping the messenger. But where they then dredge up the Holy Spirit and what that's supposed to signify completely mystifies me.
If you could stop telling me what it is I believe, I'd appreciate it. Not because I'm terribly offended by your guesses, but because none of them have yet been right.
Sorry. You're quite right. I don't much like it when you say I'm implying or assuming things that are completely different from what I've tried to communicate. Guess it's natural we don't understand people coming from such opposite points of view.
For example, your suggestion that Christ's sacrifice was unimpressive given the fact that he was God. My response is that being God is precisely why it was such a sacrifice: a being of that power and wisdom willingly subjecting itself to pains it could easily avoid it it wanted to, and those pains coming at the hands of the ungrateful people He was doing it for, many of whom He must have known would never thank Him for it...that's a humiliation for anyone, and for the creator of the Universe, it's a humbling without measure.
This illustrates one of our main points of disagreement. You see and accept Jesus as God. I understand the theory, the assumption, if you will, that he's God who has come to earth in the form of man and to a certain extent as man. Putting aside the stuff about virgin birth, the idea is that he's man born of woman through almost the normal process, conceived in the womb, delivered as a baby after a period of pregnancy. Grows into a toddler, learns to walk and speak becomes a boy, grows into manhood and then as a man is put to death. OK, that I can see, that makes sense, he's a man with all the usual problems including oppression and death. I can go with that. What gets me is this flipping back and forth between man and god--curing the blind, casting out devils, raising the dead, healing the sick, feeding the hungry mass with seven loafs of bread and fishes, walking on water. If the idea is that he's supposed to be a God who became a man, then a man couldn't do those things. Which to me makes it look like he's God playing at being a man but switching back and forth at will. It would seem more meaningful to me had he functioned simply as a man all the way through--unblemished by the sins and pettiness to which man is heir, perhaps, maybe even an almost perfect man, but a man just the same. I can understand the concept of the man taking on the role of a sacrificial goat and dying for all men's sins. But I don't see the point of dying for all men's sins
and then coming back. No other man comes back from the grave, no sacrificial animal becomes suddenly "unsacrificed." Otherwise, what would be the point of the sacrifice in the first place?
I'm familar with the theory that Jesus descends into hell for the three days prior to his resurrection--I think even the Baptists say something about that. Others go to hell for all eternity or until prayed out or forgiven, depending on various theories, but they go to hell for a long time. Except Jesus, although he's supposed to be the sacrifice for the whole world. As the sacrifice for the whole world past, present, and future, seems to me he should be in hell a heck of a lot longer than 3 days. The only reason he in't apparently is because he is the Son of God--the nepotism to which I flippantly referred. I guess it's just me and the way I look at things, but that sorta undercuts the whole symbolism of the dying and suffering for man's sins. And that's one reason I really don't include Jesus in the general discussion of God. Nor the Holy Ghost, which I've never understood.
. . . you've been going on about how incredible and vast and amazing God must be if He exists. Now you're suggesting that it's no big deal if this same vast, amazing being comes down and humbles itself in such an extreme fashion. That simply doesn't add up.
It doesn't add up due to our failure of communication. It's not so much that I'm saying God is vast and amazing and this or that. My theory--and that's all it is since it can not be proved or disproved--is that if there is a God, then by the very nature of his existance beyond this planet, beyond man's concepts, beyond our very nature, he would have to be also beyond man's imagination, beyond man's ability to describe or to picture what God is really like. It seems to me, however, that man
thinks he knows who and what God is. Man says I'm made in God's image, I speak to him and he hears me, he knows my every thought and move, God loves me, God will protect me. In other words, man has assembled his idea of God based more on man's wishes and suppositions than on any real knowlege of God.
I on the other hand claim I have absolutely no idea what God may be like if he does exist. I don't have enough information to make that judgement. Now I can use my imagination and what I've read of pagan gods and the Bible and philosophy and this and that and I can come up with something that I say this is what I think God is. But what's the odds of me being 100% accurate? I don't think I can imagine what God would really be like, and I don't think you or anyone else on earth can either. I'm saying people who do assign certain thoughts and powers and purposes to God should keep that in mind. But I doubt if any do. I think mankind is satisfied to make God in man's image and give to him the powers and opinions man wants him to have, without ever knowing in this lifetime if God is really like that, or like something different or exists at all in what we conceive as a Godlike form. Just my opinion and thoughts on the subject. You of course have your own, I suppose. Not assuming to say what you believe this time!
It's logical that, if we were to construct a God, we'd make it kind of like us, but it's also logical that if God wanted to create independent minds other than His own, they would in some ways be a reflection of Him.
I agree it's logical for man to make a God based on man's understanding of himself and his relation to God. But I don't see the logic of God creating us as a reflection of him. Why should he? And if we're a reflection of God, then what does the horse, cow, dog, whale reflect? Did he make up all these other forms and then at last make us in his image? Then why are the digestive tracts and other organs of various animals so similar? Would God have need for a digestive track? What would he eat? Do we have reproductive organs because God has reproductive organs? Lungs because he has lungs? To what extent are we truly a reflection of God, especially other than Jesus, I don't think there is any reference in the Bible to God ever appearing to anyone in human form or as any other animal. Just as bright lights, clouds, smoke and thunder and flaming bushes. If he truly has human form why appear as inannimate objects?
It's just the sort of thing I wonder about in these discussions, and one of the reasons I think there may be more--or possibly less--to God than most people think.