Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: hassell@news.colorado.edu (Christopher Hassell) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Could Jesus have sinned? Message-ID: Date: 14 Jun 91 03:29:05 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder Lines: 97 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu lindborg@cs.washington.edu (Jeff Lindborg) writes: [] In article kk00+@andrew.cmu.edu (Kathleen P. Kowalski) writes: [] >In response to your question about why God didn't create us without the [] >ability to sin, it is my own opinion that he chose not to do that [] >because he wanted us to have a choice. He didn't want us to love him [] >because there was no other choice, but because we wanted to. I [] >personally don't think that love that is forced is worth much. [] so instead of not giving us a choice to love him, he gives us the [] ever-popular "love me or else" concept. Oh so much better to be [] sure. Is love derived of fear of punishment any better than love [] that is forced? Something tells me you are left with a popular view of today's culture: We'd be fine if God came and fixed us. or even better We'd be fine if God just made our lives easy! [] You are still left with a petty, spiteful, God who seems more bent [] on revenge and hatred than anything else... You have a quick keyboard with those adjectives. Love me or else occurs only in a world with a totally nondescript person, and a bully with no morals in his/her mind. It is the nondescript person you have left too nondescript. Unless someone is blind, they should be able to see the world for what it is now: full of many people who have distinctly "unloving" views and attitudes towards other people, toward themselves sometimes, and even any ideals at all! The understanding of Original Sin is pretty straightforward: Give one rattle to a pair of babies, unless one has an anti-rattle bias, the one who gets it will be "happier" and disinterested in the one who wants it, who is deprived and alone and who usually knows it to the tune of crying. Even at that age, the scarcity of our own compassion, because of ignorance as WELL as greed is what original sin is about. (a rattle is a rattle you know.. even if made by money :-) In children, it has not flourished and blossomed as we know from the potential we see so often in children. They learn quickly that we use it and even require it of new folk, in order to respect them (sin that is). Children are actually quite mystified when they see another child crying, because they want to know what it is that divides the others sadness from them. That is the curse that we ourselves have in original sin itself. Original sin, in this case, implies that you are NOT just another person to whom God says "Love me or be dead!". You are someone who is basically cold and dead already by his more precise and unbiased measure of sin (as all of us are dead in sin) to whom God says "Love me as I love you and do live!". Much is NOT said about what happens to those who do not follow Christ, but it is only from those people that Hell is applied to (a rich man is the specific example) and Jesus himself speaks of how someone has "crossed from death to life" if they follow him. We presume easily that he spoke of more than just the Isrealites. You see, it is NOT a complete fantasy when Christians talk about the "ways of the world". You, again, have introduced God into a world with "detached" humans with no needs and no problems. I pose that you yourself are highly interrelated to God in every thing you do and don't do.. and that detaching yourself as if you are "harassed by this God fellow" is merely a common and passively arrogant view that you don't need God nor his love of YOU. (not even vice versa as I might guess). When I speak personally, please note that it is to anyone who would take issue with the above, and not to the one courageous soul who wrote the first letter. [] Jeff Lindborg [] "He who thinks but does not learn is in trouble. [] He who learns but does not think is lost." [] -Confucius Here's a neat verse: Ecclesiastes 8:16-17 (where else?) "When I applied my mind to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done on earth, how neither day nor night One's eyes see sleep; then I saw all the work of God, that man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. However much man may toil in seeking, he will not find it out; even though a wise man claims to know, he cannot find it out." Such is the ultimate of thinking and learning both, though much may be known and many many good things are said in Ecc. about wise men. -- If you are getting mail from me, my apologies for confusiong you ############## ### C>H> ### boulder.colorado.edu!tramp!hassell #### "Nietzche is dead." - God