In Reply to: Christ died for ours sin is the same as posted by confused442 on March 25, 2024 at 08:42:35
Number one, (and even though I am a a non-believer by nature, I am saying this as in the best possible sense with no desire to diminish anyone's deeply ingrained sense of faith and trust in the almighty) at its core, religion is an inkblot in a Rorschach test. People project on to it what they already have inside. Spiritual and moral people see their own spiritual guidance and moral code encoded in there while political people see their own politics, in fact , down to the exact flavor of their politics reflected back to them, regardless where on the spectrum they are.
In fact, the more "all things to all people" a religion can become, the more successful it gets. The ones that get passed on generation after generation and have civilizations built in their shadow can do this because of their built-in pliability, which his exactly what allows you and the person next to you read the same Bible and draw two radically opposed takes on the question of Trump, for instance. It is not the Bible that dictates what you believe, and again, I am saying this with the deepest affection for people who are not cynical b*stards like me and who actually have the ability to place their faith in something, it is you who sees the signposts of what you already believe in the maze of words and intents that have been sitting there for millenia in the text of the Bible (or a millenium and a half-ish in the case of the Quran).
Second proposition: people who claim to be highly principled in their beliefs do not arrive at their beliefs through their principles, but use "being principled" as a way to sublimate their pre-existing judgements into something higher. The person who devises a whole principled explanation as to why homosexuality is a sin or should be illegal is not doing so because they thought about it deeply and reached their conclusion, but they simply feel icky about the concept and they work backwards to construct a rationale for their very personal feeling. The same thing with Trump's hush money to a porn star: they know deep down they don't care, so they basically work their way backwards to construct a whole script about how God sometimes works through imperfect man, but also god forbid if Bill Clinton has an affair or something. He cannot be the imperfect man that God works through because they personally don't like Clinton, and they like Trump, who therefore must be in imperfect instrument of God, and all that "principled stance" bs is just that, it is there to lend more solid ground to something that actually comes down to "I like him." vs "I don't like him".
So what does the Church (the abstract entity, not the actual specific organizational unit) mean in all this? It means whatever you want it to mean, because deep down, it's you who is taking that position, not the Church (the abstract entity), not the Bible, it is you. And some (like me) might claim that that's the most important part of the equation.
Bottomline: ignore the whole God and faith angle in all this for your own sanity ... which admittedly is an easier thing to do for a non-believer to say, but at the end of the day, that's all I can add to the conversation.