dastardly stem wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 4:54 pm
Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Tue Dec 20, 2022 4:39 pm
The problem is the use of slippery terms with lots of potential for equivocation. Maybe start by more rigorously defining all the different terms you are using to describe Jesus's mental state. "It is important to the story, it seems to me" is your interpretation of the text. There's nothing wrong with that. But then to say the story doesn't make sense based on your own interpretation is based simply on your own interpretation. I've used the term omniscience because it represents 100% certain knowledge with no room for uncertainty or doubt. But you seem hesitant to adopt the term, leaving wiggle room for uncertainty and doubt.
If you interpret a story in a way that you claim results in a story that makes no sense, isn't the most reasonable response give genuine consideration to other readings of the text?
My interpretation makes sense. All I did was ask Huckelberry about his comment regarding his claim that Jesus was uncertain. I challenged it because I've never heard anyone suggest Jesus was uncertain. And in light of what the stories about him say, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to say Jesus was uncertain. He seemed confident and quite certain. I figured that was a large point of the stories written about him.
I'm not sure why you are bringing omniscience into this at all. Someone who says Jesus was not certain has my attention. That doesn't seem true based on the stories about him.
Dude, it's in your own title "The Atonement makes zero sense." I'm not saying that your interpretation doesn't make sense, per se. I'm saying you are choosing to interpret the story in way that leads you to conclude that the story makes no sense.
"He seemed confident and quite certain." I've earned my living, in part, by "seeming" confident and certain when, in fact, I am very uncertain. Inferring the presence or absence of doubt from a person's speech and actions is a very fraught process, even when we witness the speech, actions, body language, etc. of a speaker. And that's true when the witness lives at the same time, speaks the same language, and is part of the same culture as the speaker.
From reading what you've written, you seem to me to confident and quite certain that "the atonement makes zero sense because Jesus' "suffering" was merely an inconvenience. But, if I'm going to be realistic, I don't know your internal level of certainty or doubt in your conclusion. You may be playing devil's advocate. You may be trying out an idea and seeing how people react to it. You may be 100% certain that you are right and that I'm a complete idiot for disagreement with you. I can guess, but with any degree of certainty. And whatever guess I might make about the level of certainty that the authors of the gospels intended to communicate about Jesus's international thought processes has such a low level of certainty that, at best, I can simply speculate.
I don't recall any of the gospel authors communicating the inner thoughts of Jesus. The stories tell us what Jesus said and what he did. You and I are directly communicating in writing as contemporaries speaking the same language, living in the same society, and coming out of the same religious tradition. And we misread each other's internal thought processes all the time, even though we have access to each other to ask questions and seek clarification.
Our brains have built in biases that make it very difficult for us to accurately assess another person's internal thoughts accurately based on their words and deeds. And the less we have in common in terms of language and culture, the less likely we are to be accurate. Here's we're working with three or four versions of a story written by authors we know little to nothing about. One thing we're pretty sure of is that the author's did not witness the events portrayed in their stories. We don't know history of the stories themselves between the events portrayed in the stories and the written versions that we have. There are good reasons to believe that the authors may not have all been from the same culture, and there is textual evidence that the author's had biases that reflected the accounts. I don't think we know with a high level of certainty wether the earliest copies of the stories we have were first written in that language or were translated from something else (but I could be flat ass wrong about that). But we know that the authors lived in a culture that is quite alien to our modern culture and relying on English translations of Greek stories introduces another significant obstacle to inferring internal thought processes from what is stated in the stories.
One thing I know is that the religious tradition I was raised in largely ignores centuries of writing by lots of different theologians trying to understand the meaning of those four stories. The LDS version of the Godhead is so divorced from that of the trinity that, even after decades, I can't escape what I was taught when I try to understand how Christians think about the Trinity. In terms of parsing language, the New Testament in general and the gospels in particular contain the most parsed language over the last couple of millennia. And there is no universal agreement about what the words attributed to Jesus meant, let alone his internal thoughts.
I get the general impression that we both view ourselves as rational skeptics. I think an essential part of being a rational skeptic involves what an old country lawyer in Colorado described as "never overrun your rabbit." (I like that better than don't get out over your skies for purely aesthetic reasons.) Being a rational skeptic requires an attitude of humility when it comes to reaching conclusions. It's critical to understand what we don't or can't know -- maybe more important than what we purport to know. It makes me think of the subtitle of Carrier's book on the historicity of Jesus: "Why we Might Have Reason for Doubt." Whatever the contents of the book, I think the subtitle represents the stance of a rational skeptic.
I see nothing in the relevant texts that is inconsistent with either uncertainty or doubt in Jesus's internal thought processes. Beyond that, I would suggest that any line of reasoning that leads you to dismiss 2-3 days of physical torture as a mere inconvenience is red flag that there is something amiss in your reasoning. I don't know if there is a term for an argument that is its own reductio ad absurdum, but I'd suggest that's the neighborhood your argument is in.
