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Do you understand how, to somebody who is not a Christian and who is not invested in believing in the most favorable possible interpretation of your faith, this just seems like extra-special pleading? Surely there are a great many things which Jesus is recorded has having said which you consider deeply profound insights and statements of Jesus’ - and, by extension, God’s - true beliefs. Why, then, should we take seriously your contention that this particular statement - one which just happens to present an extremely inconvenient dilemma for your other non-religious philosophical and material commitments if taken literally and seriously - is just obviously a joke and Jesus didn’t really mean it, unlike all the other stuff he said that you agree with?
Sure, I understand completely. I used to be a fairly militant atheist and used to sometimes bring up the camel quip myself.
That said, I'm not interested in 'the most favorable possible interpretation' of the scriptures, I'm interested in using my mind to test and discern what interpretation is most pleasing to God (Romans 12:2).
Funny enough, not really. The first time I sat down and really read the gospels, most of the stuff was kind of nod along, "yeah that makes sense," but there's no earth-shattering revelations on the surface level. You have to study for those insights.
This is the question I just answered, tho. You're never going to understand the gestalt of a man/God's philosophy from isolating a single sentence. You have to look at all the parts in conjunction to get a sense of the whole. In this case, Jesus spoke more than once about rich people and getting into heaven. Yes, he did say the camel thing. He also told Zacchaeus - another rich guy - that he was going to heaven. Therefore, since it is impossible for a camel to go through the eye of the needle, but demonstrably possible for a rich guy (Zacchaeus) to get into heaven, Jesus was obviously not being literal or completely serious when he said the camel thing.
And again let's remember the context in which he said it: He had just called out some rich poser. The guy was skulking away with his tail between his legs. "Then Jesus said to his disciples" aka he turned away from the crowd to make an aside to his buddies (Matthew 19:23). Sometimes when people say things to their friends that are not completely serious, it is called a joke.
Finally let's look at the disciple's response: "The disciples were astounded. “Then who in the world can be saved?” they asked." Clearly they did not get the joke. But Jesus lets them off the hook, "look[ing] at them intently and say[ing], "Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible.” Clarifying that 1) He was not being literal about the camel thing 2) rich people can indeed go to heaven 3) He had a playful sense of humor.
Okay, but there are tons of examples of Jesus telling those same people that he is God incarnate, that eternal salvation is only possible through following him and taking seriously his commandments and proclamations. Given this, don’t you think that if he really had been God incarnate and really was intent on leading his followers to salvation, he would have, I dunno, been a bit more responsible about speaking clearly and not making muddled and seemingly-contradictory statements?
Joking around and making statements which seem to be literal imprecations about the correct way to live - with, again, the stakes having previously been established as whether or not you will receive eternal salvation, or suffer eternally - but which are actually jokes, or flippant statements, or intentional obfuscations… this seems much more like the behavior of a normal mortal human man, a charismatic but narcissistic cult leader with both the standard human failings and additionally the failure modes particular to that specific personality type.
All true
This is an excellent question. The short answer is yes, the longer answer is not only is this common for basically everyone to think today, Christian or otherwise, but that it was common when Jesus was walking around doing His thing. Bugged the shit out of people, especially all his friends, that he wouldn't just give a straight answer.
But the even longer answer is that He actually did both, and he explained why he usually spoke in parables. He did sometimes give straight answers (in fact in the example that started this conversation about the rich guy and the camel thing, Jesus answered his questions about what to do). And one of the last things he did (at supper) was to just lay it out plain: "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another" (John 13:34)
As far as why he wasn't usually more clear about everything, it was so "they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven." (Mark 4:12) "They" being "us" in that sentence, as in, he didn't want to make it too easy for us or we'd just go along and our 'belief' wouldn't have much if any value.
Remember that for thousands of years and many generations God tried the whole "talking man in the sky" thing - often explicitly telling people "do not do that or I will smite you" and they'd fuckin do it anyway every single time! Speaking clearly had, historically, limited value in teaching things or getting people to think about them. I'll say again that we are (now) called to use our minds to think through and discern what's actually true (Romans 12:2) and for me, this sequence (God tried just telling people -> didn't work -> Jesus tried asking us to think for ourselves instead) tracks.
Yeah that's a perfectly fair point, but that's Jesus for ya. He could be snippy (called his best friend Satan when he got upset at the thought of him dying lol Matthew 16:23). He had a temper ("I come not to bring peace..." Matthew 10:34). He could be jealous (“Anyone who loves their father/mother/son/daughter more than me is not worthy of me" Matthew 10:37). He got nervous (Luke 22:44). He got sad ("Jesus wept." John 11:35). He loved his friends (John 15:13). He loved his mama (John 19:25). He was both human and divine.
One of the universe's greatest mysteries, maybe the greatest, because Christ already existed at the moment of creation (Let us make man in our image, after our likeness Genesis 1:26)
It’s only a mystery if you decide, based on faith, to accept the divinity of Christ, based on factors other than his behavior and statements. Otherwise it’s not mysterious at all: he acted like a normal human man because he was a normal human man.
I’m happy to admit there’s been nothing in my life that defied the observable laws of the universe to suggest the existence of any divinity. That is, if we exclude physically-possible-but-miraculous ‘everyone in that car should have been dead’ type of things, yeah I completely see your point.
But I’ve come around to thinking it is decidedly more likely that some unobservable spiritual forces exist and that Jews somehow play an important role, than it is that they’ve been doing their thing all this time because of literacy and nepotism. It’s not all just one big coincidence.
Okay, I too have come to believe that unobservable spiritual forces probably do exist. I have no idea how you get from that conclusion to “Yeshua Ben Nazareth, a 1st-century Galilean carpenter and mystic, was the literal incarnation of those spiritual forces, and therefore it is very important that I analyze his teachings and model my own life after those teachings to the best of my ability.” There is a whole world of other possible religions to believe in - including any of the various extant strains of Judaism, if you’re so convinced that the Jewish people specifically have some particular connection with, or part in, this spiritual realm!
A lot of people a lot smarter than me have written libraries full of books on this exact topic, but I'll give my best shot at a short answer. The story has verisimilitude. Maybe not every detail, but taken as a whole.
I do plenty of this, I just call it the Old Testament. And in terms of 'all religions are equally true - that is to say - equally false' it's just not very compelling to me because it means declaring myself to be more clever than virtually every single one of my ancestors for more than a thousand years. If Christianity is just a stupid hoax, then I have to reject my entire cultural history as stupid and my entire ancestry as a bunch of suckers. This was a source of consternation for me actually as an atheist who liked the West
I’m not necessarily suggesting that all religions have equivalent truth value - I’m merely asking why you believe that Christianity specifically has the highest truth value of any available religion. Certainly the accounts of at least the rough outline of Jesus’ life strike me as plausible - they have enough contemporary attestation that it’s reasonable to accept that the man existed and that he did and said many if not most of the things he’s reported to have done and said. However, if you doubt the part of the account that’s by far the most important, and also the most implausible - namely, the resurrection - then nearly all of it makes sense as simply a flattering account of a successful cult leader, promulgated by his most loyal disciples after his death.
Do you believe that, for example, the Koran is a less plausible account of Muhammad’s life than the New Testament is an account of Jesus’? What about the Doctrine and Covenant’s account of Joseph Smith’s life and sayings? I daresay that if your number one concern is verisimilitude, you’re better off being a Muslim or a Mormon, since the latter two can muster an even greater and more historically well-attested claim to accurate representation of their central figure.
I agree that this poses a very serious problem, but I think there are other conclusions one can reach which are considerably less damning and dismissive. I have written before about how the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe in many ways strongly resembles the spread of what we call “wokeness” or “globalist liberal progressivism” today. It was a religion spread by missionaries who promised rulers and influential political/cultural leaders access to a wide network of financial and political interdependence and power. These rulers adopted the ideology out of cynical calculations, and then “converted” the rank-and-file members of their society to a highly attenuated and syncretized version of the religion which, at least at first, allowed those people wide latitude to continue to privately practice many aspects of their previous native religions.
Eventually, the descendants of those initial cynical/partial converts were acculturated into sincerely believing the syncretized version of the religion; they didn’t notice the manifold contradictions between, on the one hand, the core text of the religion, and on the other hand, the profoundly Germanicized version they were actually practicing. The philosophy expressed by Jesus does not seem to countenance the construction of lavish and glorious cathedrals, or any of the other elements of medieval European civilization which coexisted with a surface-level profession of Christianity. That’s because they were never really fully bought into the Eastern, magist, radically millenarian core of Christianity to begin with; to the extent that Jesus’ message contradicted the deeper impulses of the European bio-spirit, the Christian parts were superseded by the European syncretization. It’s no coincidence that only by openly reconciling Christianity with earlier Greco-Roman paganism did Europeans truly transcend the limitations of the source material.
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You have a lot more information than they do. You can compare Christianity's history of claimed miracles to Islam's or asian religions, and notice they're about as well attested. You can compare the modern physical explanation for the history of evolution, nature, and the cosmos to the history of Christianity (and Islam)'s supposedly divinely inspired claims. You can observe the structural, geographical, and political influences on the evolution of metaphysical claims and 'divinely inspired' doctrine. You can compare those to the natural history of things like physics, chemistry, biology. What would a prayer-effect-on-survival RCT find? Are the divine inspirations claimed by members of other christian sects or Islam fake, even though they're roughly as passionate as those of the members of your sect?
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Presumably though then you must admit, that if you had been born into a different culture, you would be using exactly the same logic to believe in Shintoism or Buddhism or Hinduism etc? Somebody's ancestors were comparative suckers if only one is true.
It's not a universizable system in other words.
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I don't think the response above is a particularly good way of phrasing things, but a verse was presented and a claim was made that the verse is a general rule. He provided another verse that contradicts that supposed general rule. Nothing in the text of the first verse actually establishes a general rule, the existence of such a rule is an inference, and the second verse shows that the inference is false.
Maybe the text is completely contradictory, and it's all gobbledegook. Maybe it's actually a bit more complex, and grabbing single sentences out of a massive text loses important context. What it isn't, is true that Jesus taught, or Christians believe, that material wealth precludes salvation. That is a misconception fostered by people looking for easy dismissals.
For the record, I do not think Jesus is joking in that passage. What that guy actually needed to do was give everything away and follow Jesus. That was the thing he was not willing to do.
I love my wife and would do anything for her. I do not actually have to do everything for her, but I am willing to do whatever she needs me to do. That commitment is made without limit, and yet I can continue to live a life that is, in many ways, still mine, so long as it does not conflict with my commitment to her. What I cannot do is to put some thing before that commitment, choose some other thing over her should a conflict arise. Zaccheus' money doesn't come between him and God; he voluntarily pays back those he's wronged and gives to the poor because he wants to do the right thing, and Jesus approves. The Rich Young Ruler wants to be seen as righteous, but his money is more precious to him than actually being righteous, and that's why he goes away. There's numerous other examples throughout the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament that drive the point home, but this would require actually reading the thing or listening seriously to someone who has, and who has time for that, when one can mine pull-quotes out of context for a political agenda?
I actually agree with you here. I think making it a joke, is probably tonally not in line with how Jesus speaks. But likewise it isn't a global stricture. Some rich people can get into Heaven, some can't. I think that is the most consistent reading.
But some Christians apparently believe He was joking, and some believe He meant that all rich people were barred from Heaven. Can people with all three interpretations all still be Christian? Probably I'd imagine.
(also directed to /u/fcfromscc) perhaps I could've been more clear - yes Jesus was actually seriously telling that guy to give up his worldly possessions and follow Him. He was calling the rich guy's bluff that he was leading a spotless moral life. Obviously rich guy loved his money more than he loved Jesus.
The joke came afterward, after the fella was retreating in shame from being called out, and it was directed at the disciples at the expense of the rich guy. It's a hyperbolic put down, like 'this fucking guy - it'd be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.' Imagining a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle is inherently humorous.
Regardless, it is not a salvation issue, unless you happen to be a rich person who believes He meant all rich people were barred lol Then you might be in trouble
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