Castin

I think it's possible to look at Jesus's death beyond scapegoats. A proper understanding of sacrifice is offering one's gifts, ones first fruit. Bloody sacrifices with the intent to substitute one's own sins is rooted in paganism.... bloody sacrifices with the intent of offering a gift is not pagan. Intent matters. As I said the bible says burnt offerings and such r not what matter, it's a heart matter. Yes Jesus death was substitution in that he defeated sin and death on our behalf and was a sacrifice of himself, the greatest act of love. 

Bloody sacrifices boil down to intent and proper understanding 

Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.

If anyone of the ordinary people among you sins unintentionally in doing any one of the things that by the Lord’s commandments ought not to be done and incurs guilt, when the sin that you have committed is made known to you, you shall bring a female goat without blemish as your offering, for the sin that you have committed. You shall lay your hand on the head of the purification offering; the purification offering shall be slaughtered at the place of the burnt offering. The priest shall take some of its blood with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering, and he shall pour out the rest of its blood at the base of the altar. He shall remove all its fat, as the fat is removed from the sacrifice of well-being, and the priest shall turn it into smoke on the altar for a pleasing odor to the Lord. Thus the priest shall make atonement on your behalf, and you shall be forgiven.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all [...] It was the will of the LORD to bruise him; he has put him to grief; when he makes himself an offering for sin ... By his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities.

i dont like penal substitution theory. i dont like the idea that we have a legal relationship with God. i dont like that the point is to satisfy God's wrath and blood lust. i dont like scapegoats. it's based in paganism and isn't biblical other than as a possible interpretation. so, i prefer 'christus victor' theory, with my focus on god's love conquering sin and death. 

From Wikipedia:

In modern times, Luke's competence as a historian is questioned, depending upon one's a priori view of the supernatural. Since post-Enlightenment historians work with methodological naturalism, such historians would see a narrative that relates supernatural, fantastic things like angels, demons etc., as problematic as a historical source. Mark Powell claims that "it is doubtful whether the writing of history was ever Luke's intent. Luke wrote to proclaim, to persuade, and to interpret; he did not write to preserve records for posterity. An awareness of this, has been, for many, the final nail in Luke the historian's coffin."

But at the same time, God saying things like, "gays are bad and I don't like them" to me is free speech.  If he advocated the death penalty for gays, I would take issue with it.  But if he says stuff like, "it's an abomination", to me, that's free speech.

So one must wonder, does Bible teach how self-defense is wrong?

And if so, why dont Christians follow that teaching?

this site is going to the trolls and the toxic partisans

Its not my fault that I am capable of writing more bullshit than others can handle or read, let alone refute.

And even if they refute 10000 characters of my bullshit, I wont even read their refutations and I have another 100000 characters of bullshit ready for them.

Do you think that Polytheist-Witch's last comment is why there are no women on this site?

 It is difficult to understand the context of this whole saga, where the serpent has come from. Because god had created all the animals before he created the Adam yet not a single word about the creation of a serpent with the power to oppose him. Buy all accounts god had looked over his creation and "saw that it was good". But without any explanation a serpent  with the  human voice appears a totally independent creature over which god has no control!?

• "Genesis chapter 2 was written before Genesis chapter 1, and Genesis chapter 2 has absolutely nothing to do with Genesis chapter 1. Genesis chapter 1 is something that came along in later generations because authors did not like the theology of Genesis chapter 2, and so felt that it needed to be updated and corrected and superseded."
  

You might be the 3rd  worse person on site that you want in your religious.group. 

Put nicer

Any religious group would be WAY worse of having to deal with you.  

Security 

Security.  

Get rid of him.

Ill Explain to the others how all you want is  homosexual sex 

24/7. 

Although the sentiment sounds fair, who determines what the rules of the religion are? 

Your interpretation of your religion.  People have all sorts of ways they interpret the Bible because the Bible contradicts its self.  If you’re Christian, you live by your interpretation of the Bible, and if that means going kosher because Jesus never denounced it, you do that.  I think Christians should go kosher because their religion tells them too and no Bible verse undid kosher laws.

The Bible can be pretty infanticidal

Is a complete lie. If you read the Bible, you would know that it supports life, not death.

It seemed as if the overarching goal is to increase membership to avoid it going the way of DDO.  Apparently the site is having trouble getting new members to come in and then stay around to use the site. 

So, regarding DART's Latest Update,  it strikes me as counterproductive (to that end at least). If the problem is new members don't stay,  reducing new member participation on the site and restricting  debates, voting, and forum topics is not a solution.  Do we really think the site gets more new members by offering less?   

I really don't think a "you have to earn the right to participate here" message is going to be particularly inviting to new members.

In the past I enjoyed being able to vote on debates without participating in any. Ah, well.

I will try to find a way to "qualify" people to vote, even if they don't participate in the debates, maybe something like manual qualification for the special members, like yourself :)

"And I just peeked into the religion forum on DDO and was reminded of how toxic the atmosphere of a completely unregulated forum can be." - Castin

https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/74/post-links/1276

I foresee a repeat of inevitable chaos and disorder. Could easily be prevented by those who have the power. There is too much to say, so I do not want to say anything at all

We know the Romans crucified Jesus then went on to destroy the Holy temple and city in 70AD.

So why did the Roman Emperor Constantine in 325 embrace Christianity and make it the official religion of the Roman Empire to later become a universal religion.

Simple answer. The Gospels. Once the Gospels were written and the apostles spread the teachings of Jesus to a wider audience. The full story of Jesus was revealed and embraced by the Gentiles.

Jesus was fully in control of his  ascension into modernity.

Should the Jews then feel betrayed by Jesus?

• We don't have any original manuscripts of the Gospels, obviously. The earliest manuscripts we have, the ones dating from before 200 CE, are fragments -- they don't start at the beginning and they don't contain an end, so we can't tell if they had titles. The complete manuscripts we have date from a later period that is not of much use in determining if the Gospels originally had titles. So the fact that all our (complete) manuscripts have titles does not really tell us much.
  
• Even in these later manuscripts, the way the Gospel titles are phrased changes from manuscript to manuscript -- i.e., "The Gospel According to Saint Mark" vs "The Holy Gospel According to Mark" and so on. More suspicious, where the titles are located changes from manuscript to manuscript -- some titles are at the beginning of the book, some are at the end. This indicates that the titles are scribal ornamentation and were not in the original manuscripts, or else we would expect the titles to always be in the same place and always worded the same way (if they were copied faithfully).
  
• Note how Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, quotes from the Gospels at length but refers to them collectively and anonymously, indicating he wrote before they had been widely attributed to specific men. This is a key piece of data pointing to the original anonymity of the Gospels. Scholars believe they began to be attributed to their now-traditional authors in the second century (and remember, our complete, titled manuscripts date to after that).
  
• For me one of the biggest indicators is just that all of the Gospels are written anonymously in the third person, none of them in the first person, as you would expect of men telling firsthand accounts -- and Matthew, who was supposed to be a disciple of Jesus, feels the need to copy vast swaths of his material from Mark, who never met Jesus. Apostles should feel no need to copy from anyone.
  

I was somewhat more disillusioned with some of the reasons for the votes cast by some of the members and moderators. Member(s)/Moderators were citing Airmax's moderator experience for a role that did not include a moderator's capacity. I can understand wanting to bring Airmax into the fold in a reduced capacity, but for one who has expressed little interest in this site--DART that is--his late bid, at least in my opinion, was nothing short of a nepotistic attempt to shoehorn him in. There are many reasons to which one can allude for DDO's past popularity: (1) fewer online debate platforms, (2) higher attention spans, (3) a younger membership who had little to no work and/or family obligations, (4) members having little to no prior experience with other members before joining the site, so forth and so on. I honestly think it's a fool's errand to try and recreate DDO (though I understand the irony in that DART is essentially a recreation of DDO.) Perhaps the focus of the site's brass should be placed more on member satisfaction and not alienating members on abstract interpretations of the rules. As opposed to seeking out an old friend and stating, "make our community popular, again," the site can focus on expanding the scope of options members here can control how they interact with others. I think there is no one more fit to advise the moderators on these aforementioned prospects than 3RU7AL.

Fast forward to Airmax's actual first post on the site, and it looks like he has a renewed interest in the community. Knowing how good he was at being a mod on DDO, old users including myself supported his presidential campaign on this site and he got elected. His campaign even attracted other old DDO users to DART, some of which were users that quit DDO before I joined in 2016. Sadly, he never did anything after that (and those old members disappeared again), which leads us to the present where he has been justifiably removed from office.

There's a lesson in all of this: When someone loses interest in something, they are incredibly unlikely to regain it for longer than a moment. Some will say you can't blame us for being hopeful, but I disagree. We should've seen it coming. Everyone was so focused on a Michael Jordan-esque comeback story that they forgot about the possibility of a Brett Farve-esque comeback story. Or a Michael Jordan-esque comback story, Wizards edition. Not a perfect comparison, but I hope you get the point.

I think it has to do with a desire old members tend to have. They desire a culture that was closer to the old DDO, where there was more discussion and less flaming. There was drama, of course, but much more of the time seemed to be spent organizing tournaments, playing mafia games, or joking around in forums. Even the discussions were better. There was a time on DDO when the Religion forum was the only toxic forum. Political polarization in society then led to the Political forum being corrupted as well, eventually to the point where DART's Politics forum got to the sad state it is now. The Main forum on DART has a history of drama and flame wars, which is something I rarely saw on DDO.

The consensus among historical scholars is that Jesus of Nazareth did exist as a historical person. I have no trouble believing that.

Me neither.

For me the difficulty lies in what can be confidently known about him. Did he really think he was the son of God, or was that a belief that developed after his death? Was he really betrayed by Judas? What exactly did Jesus teach -- how much of what we know as "Christ's teachings" were really his teachings? To what degree did he actually anticipate his death? And so on.

All fair questions that I would be more that interested to have answered by the devout Christians.  But I won't be holding my breath, Castin

Once you accept Jesus  indeed existed as a historical person.  The specifics of Jesus’s life and teachings are found in the Biblical Jesus. All your questions are answered in the Bible.

“The first question we have to answer is How do we know what we know about Jesus? How is it possible for twenty-first-century people to know with any reasonable certainty what he did and said in the first century? Obviously, none of us was there when Jesus walked the earth. So how do we gain access to him as a historical person?

For many people, the answer to this question is simple: open up your Bible and read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; they tell us what Jesus did and said. Indeed, for almost nineteen centuries, most Christians—and virtually everyone else, for that matter—believed that the Gospels of Matthew and John were written by eyewitnesses and disciples of Jesus and that the Gospels of Mark and Luke were written by companions of the apostles Peter and Paul.”

"Most people who are not conversant with biblical scholarship probably think that knowing about the historical Jesus is a relatively simple matter. We have four Gospels in the New Testament. To know what Jesus said and did, we should read the Gospels. So what's the problem?" -- Jesus Interrupted, p. 143

"The problem is in part that the Gospels are full of discrepancies and were written decades after Jesus' ministry and death by authors who had not themselves witnessed any of the events of Jesus' life.

... They were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after Jesus' death by people who did not know him, did not see anything he did or hear anything that he taught, people who spoke a different language and lived in a different country from him. The accounts they produced are not disinterested; they are narratives produced by Christians who actually believed in Jesus, and therefore were not immune from slanting the stories in light of their biases. They are not completely free of collaboration, since Mark was used as a source for Matthew and Luke. And rather than being fully consistent with one another, they are widely inconsistent, with discrepancies filling their pages, both contradictions in details and divergent large-scale understandings of who Jesus was.

How can sources like this be used to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus? It's not easy, but there are ways."

I have said it many times before on this forum that this is the author of Matthew's gospel once  again reaching for his trusty OT in a desperate attempt to link Jesus to the OT prophesies as being the one to come and prophesised about.

No abuse. No derogatory language. No trolling or abuse.

Some scholars indicate rightly that the Hebrew word in Isaiah means young woman not virgin.  No one says it is impossible to translate it virgin.  The Septuagint - an OT Greek translation by Jewish scholars pre Jesus, did translate the word virgin.  

Some scholars indicate that there are better words for virgin if that meant to be the point. 

NT Christian scholars would indicate that the translation of the word in the NT from the OT is confirmed firstly, by the inspiration of the Spirit of God who breathed it out and confirmed its meaning.

Secondly that the Septuagint which was commonly used at that time by Jews and the Christians, including Paul, translated it that way.

thirdly, that the context in the gospels of Matthew and Luke clearly understood it to mean virgin.

Fourthly, though it is acknowledged it may well have other meanings and moreover virgin is not its primary meaning, it is not impossible for it to mean virgin since indeed Jewish scholars have translated it that way.

Why does me remarking that I was surprised mean that I expect you to care what she thinks?

I don't care what you expect or don't expect of me.

My point was that it's irrelevant, and I wanted to make that point.

Do you even know anyone who cares what Ivanka thinks, left or right?

Clearly the Democratic Party did since they called her up just to make a big deal about some opinion of hers that was only useful for making headlines.

Democracy is the ultimate priority because if it fails, no other priority can be addressed.

The failure of democracy is a symptom of the problems we have today. Not the cause. Same problems Russia and Venezuela have with their Democracies.

About that, this appears to be something else some people I read previously do not understand in this thread. There is a difference between a whataboutism, and issuing priority.

From what I see, the conservative side of this thread isn't deflecting from issues, but critisizing the hyperfixation upon a specific issue as insignificant to the greater American predicament. 

Democracy is integral to the survival of the nation.

Absolutely not. There is nothing about Democracy that ensures individual survival. It's mob rule. Thankfully the USA is a Republic.