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From: MIQ@PSUVMA.BITNET
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Rowing through the fog
Message-ID: <7457MIQ@PSUVMA>
Date: Thu, 18-Sep-86 14:17:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: PSUVMA.7457MIQ
Posted: Thu Sep 18 14:17:29 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 29-Sep-86 01:45:49 EDT
References: <162@BMS-AT.UUCP> 32500077@uiucdcsb
Lines: 90

In article <32500077@uiucdcsb>, mcewan@uiucdcsb.CS.UIUC.EDU says:
     
>>>>> What's the big deal about "dying" to prove your love when you know you
>>>>> can come back from the grave at will?
     
>>>>      Christ's sacrafice wasn't His life-- it was going through the pain of
>>>> death.  And crucifixion is a *very* painful death indeed.
     
>>>For human beings. Trivial for an omnipotent God.
     
>>      Agony is trivial?  News to me.
     
>Are you a god?
     
     Nope.  Are you?
     
>>      Omnipotent or not, He was in *human* form.  He felt everything that
>> humans feel, including extreme pain.
     
>But what is pain as we know it to an omnipotent being?  For an immortal,
>omnipotent being to spend a finite amount of time experiencing pain as
>finite creatures know it is trivial.
     
     You sure seem to know a lot about omnipotent immortals.  I suppose you
could compare it to a human, with a life-span of about 70 years, experiencing
agony for about 5 minutes.  It's not an *exact* ratio, of course, since a ratio
including infinity is meaningless.  But it's a decent approximation.
     
     Anyhoo, you have a human who lives for about 70 years, and spends 5 min.
in agony.  Sure sounds trivial-- unless you're the human and in the middle of
those five minutes.  And you voluntarily opted to go through it.
     
>>      BTW, in case you feel like another knee-jerk anti-religious response, I
>> just wanted to know that I'm an agnostic.
     
>This is something I thought about a great deal before deciding that the
>Christian reasoning about Jesus' "sacrifice" was complete nonsense. You,
>on the other hand, appear to have just parroted the Christian line without
>giving any thought to it.
>
>And I am not fanatically anti-religious, I just get irritated when someone
>spouts nonsense as though it were obviously true.
     
     Uhhmmmm... it seemed to me that the whole point of this was that, even
*given* that the death & resurrection occurred, it wasn't any big deal.
I'm not spouting nonsense (by that I assume you mean the Christian belief
in Who Christ was).  And again I say, that regardless of what Christ was
(or wasn't) before and after the crucifixion, for those hours on the cross
He was human, and He could and *did* feel pain.
     
     Dave Krause was nice enough to send me some e-mail, in which he
pointed out some of the biblical accounts which back me up on this.  Of
course, you'll be quick to say that the Bible isn't dependable as a historical
account.  But again, this whole thing was started by someone who said that
even *given* the Christian beliefs as true, Christ still didn't make any
noteworthy sacrafice.  If you're assuming Christian beliefs as true, then
biblical accounts become admissable as evidence.
     
     As an aside, someone else mentioned that after a short time, shock would
have caused Jesus to pass out-- or at least stop feeling pain.  I have a
friend who works as an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) who agrees with
this, saying that people who lose fingers/hands/limbs usually feel no pain
because of shock.  On the other hand, I've got another friend who has actually
lost a finger.  He said it hurt like hell.
     
>>  I just get ticked off when people
>> try to argue things they know nothing about.
     
>So do I.
     
     Well, when you get through being ticked off at yourself, try sending an
intelligent reply.
     
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