Discussion on Jesus as Sacrifice For Our Original Sin

so Mirrizin says:

Nachum Braverman, a Jewish Rabbi, describes the process

"You rest your hands on its head and you confess the mistake you made. Then you slaughter the cow. It's butchered in front of you. The blood is poured on the altar. The fat is put on the altar to burn. How do you feel? (Don't say disgusted.) I'll tell you how you feel. You feel overwhelmed with emotion, jarred by the confrontation you've just had with death, and grateful to be alive. You've had a catharsis. The cow on the altar was a vicarious offering of yourself"

...

Christ took the guilt with him. The point of a Jewish sacrifice, I think as I've recently read (check with blackskimmer, perhaps? or davidmordichai? Prefect?) would be not to appease God by giving something away, but to project your guilt onto a living thing and then symbolically slaughter it to remind yourself of what you had done, and then to shock yourself back onto the right path.

Jesus wasn't killed because God likes killing. Jesus was killed because he was trying to get his (God's) point across. Christ took it all with him so that we could see the way to go.


and I said:
jesus was all about shock! his message: get out of the slumber of your everyday family life, political life, religious life and WAKE UP, drop everything and follow me and examine your life.

were's my thoughts on why god committed seppuku?

why jesus died for our sins < blackskimmer > 05/25 13:23:37

the formulation i came up with back when i lived some christianity was this:

life for humans in this universe inherently involves sinning. no way to avoid it, not hard thought nor technology. there are always mysteriously unavoidable dilemmas. i.e. abortion, saving lives, hell even just to die at your appointed time seems like a sin against such a splendid being.... that's how life is for organisms as complex as us. Sometimes we even blame ourselves for our own deaths. Certainly this is a biblical take on the situation, that human failing is responsible for the introduction of death in the world.

Even birth, to conceive a child, an act of love, of creativity, of hope, creates the possibility of danger, to the mother and the child.

so what do you do? recall Arjuna's dilemma in the baghavad gita. he was a warrior in charge of an army in a major battle. he was up on the hill watching the two sides and started to imagine all the suffering and destruction that would occur if he sent his side into battle. also all the suffering and destruction that would occur if he didn't fight and the other army attacked...

so he froze! it took the whole book for krishna to convince him there was no way possible for finite humans to understand which way to act brings less suffering in many cases, but we cant just crawl under a rock and NOT enter the fray.

what i take jesus dying on the cross to mean is that our life involves sinning, that's a given, not quite we 'inheritted it from an act of adam' but that's just how it is to be human, even to be interesting.

We are not perfect robots, but creative beings, and beings born into the act of creative evolution. all creation involves risk, involves invention of ideas and choosing between them. to be able to take part of this creative act of evolution requires that we be vulnerable. to congenital illnesses, to cancers. to death. we find this horrifying, but the alternative is to be perfect, eternally fixed.

but who can love a perfect robot? we love each other because we can identify with the other's frailties.

i figured there are two levels of responsibility? if you think YOU are responsible for getting yourself into one of these impossible dilemmas where either choice is a sin, if you think you are responsible for your own death, then you are in anguish and freeze. and even if you freeze something bad will happen anyway because you didn't act...

the message of jesus dying is: 'you are NOT responsible for being in that situation, it is the common human condition. I, God, put you there by creating you that way. i'm the only one who could forgive you for being human! so now go and choose one of the choices that you think is best, and act on it. and even if you think it is not the perfect choice, go ahead and bumble through it anyway (no perfect choice may be possible) TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for that choice and live with the consequences, but don't be burdened by thinking you put yourself into the position to make that choice.'

and then we are called to emulate god in his forgiveness, to forgive each other for not being perfect.