Do we pay for our wrong-doings? Can someone pay for me?

My final reply to my respected atheist friends last reply went like this:
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A sacrifice of self in payment for crimes is the standard “make things right” story.

Whether it’s jail time, money fine, 50 lashes on the back, or the electric chair – if you did wrong you must suffer for it.

The fact that a single perfect person could somehow exchange and take on the penalty that belongs to others is the ultimate love story.

It’s a beautiful and rich story if nothing else. But yes I agree the death sentence torture picture carried around as a symbol is a bit bizarre and sadistic. But the one soldier that risked his life to save others, or the father that faced the enemies to protect his family and dies … these are the ultimate love stories, don’t you think? What is love if it is not the loss of something of self for the gain and salvation of another?

I don’t agree with the sacrifice of self for payment system as a universal proper means to reestablish evil humans with a holy god … but it seems to ring deep within the human psyche as a fair exchange. (at least with Christians and primitive tribes like Aztecs and others that sacrificed animals and people to appease their gods.)

White Jesus is of course a cultural and historical massaging of an image to be more like us. Christians in Africa tend to make Jesus negroid. It may not be accurate but it’s not evil.

And the whole “problem of evil” doesn’t have a good answer but there’s no thinking person who hasn’t considered this – many ending up having faith in god still. … If nothing else there’s the whole “God made man free” and/or the “God made man good and he corrupted himself (fall from garden)” storyline .. . I don’t buy these but I’m not sure I buy that – “if there was a good god he would stop all people (and animals) from ever hurting each other” bit either.

Something’s going on and he may or may not exist…. But the existence of pain and suffering itself doesn’t indicate he doesn’t. In fact, if you go the yin/yang route, humans can’t know joy without knowing sorrow…… can’t know life w/o knowing death… etc. etc…

Maybe the urge itself just to cry back “hey it’s not fair” is just a childish cry. Maybe humans have growing up to do still to make sense of mysteries we don’t understand.

But on a very simple level – yes …. If God is All-powerful and God is All-good then the “All good” totally rules! and there is no such thing as pain, sorrow, death, violence, disease!

1 + 1 = 2

I suspect, if there is a God, our assumptions of the 1 + 1 are not correct. He is not All-Powerful and/or he is not All-Good.

Of course he may not exist.

Truthfully, it’s easier to think that he’s pure imaginary anyway, but the existence of evil doesn’t in my mind necessitate the call.

That’s why I think there’s something to the myth of the Garden of Eden. It was the very taking on of man of the first ‘knowledge’ of good and evil. Binary - either/or categorizing of reality itself according to the myth is what BIRTHED the consciousness (and self-consciousness) of man.

It isn’t like Adam only knew ‘good’ before the fall and then he knew ‘evil’ afterwards. He knew NEITHER good NOR evil before the fall. He knew BOTH afterwards. This is the story of the birth man – some deep primordial memory, like in a dream, that rings deep enough within man to become the primary creation myth of Western civilization itself.

In evolutionary terms, when man became man (with self-awareness and such – remember how they ran around naked till this thing happened… and THEN they became ashamed (self-conscious) of themselves. Others smarter than myself hypothesize that this growth of awareness coincides with the beginnings of language itself in the history of man (Walker Percy). Others think this birth occurred possibly due to mind-altering drugs within cultures that sparks the brains into leaps of evolution and alternate forms of thinking (Julian Jaynes, “Food of the Gods” Terence McKenna)

Mitch