The problem I still have with Christianity..
And I’m entirely open to discovering I’m wrong about this, but there is a inherent problem I keep running into and can’t get away from.
The basic tenant, or one of them, is that you are so bad and wrong and awful that someone else had to die for your mistakes.
This really doesn’t sound true to me. I don’t think any of my mistakes – and I will grant I’ve made many, from huge to tiny – are something anyone should have to die for.
People say, well, it HAS to be this way because God is a just God who requires that a debt be paid.
My response is you’re making God sound like a computer with free will and no ability to change his mind and just decide to wipe the slate clean without killing anyone or making anyone suffer. And that just doesn’t sound right to me, at all. I believe God is the best of all of us, and therefore I believe in a VERY powerful and flexible God. I don’t believe in a God that would get so trapped in his own ruleset that he had to make someone hang from a cross in incredible amounts of pain before he could forgive anyone.
However, this is where the concept of infinity and infinite sets of strings comes in. There is by definition a infinite set of strings which represent people dying on crosses, the things other people would see, the pain they would feel, etc. Infinity, well, one flavor of infinity, contains all possible experiences, all possible strings which could then become experiences. So it did “happen” in the sense that everything has happened. But was there anyone connected to the many pure virtual bodies that had this experience? That I can’t say. The whole thing smacks of a particular flavor of mental illness / cognitive distortion to me.. black and white thinking.
On the other thing, I’ve very much noticed that I’m not the only crazy one hanging out down here. Another interesting explanation, and indeed a compelling explanation to me for a bunch of the old testament, is as follows.
What you believe controls what you experience, by programming the neural networks between your senses and your mind to highlight certain experiences and minimize or not record others. If you program yourself to fear God – and I’m pretty sure somewhere in the OT they do say you should fear God – you will experience a God that’s scary. That’s in the set of things your free will will let you do with this supercomputer that is you. All the killing people, turning things into pillars of salt, destroying the world, wars, etc all fit perfectly with the idea of fearing God.
If, on the other hand, you program your mind to love God, to think of God as a friend and ally rather than a enemy, you will experience a world that is the opposite of scary, and you’ll end up riding the wave that I think Jesus was riding during a lot of his career. At the END of his career, Jesus started to fear God at least somewhat.. “Take this cup from my lips”, he says, BUT DOESN’T BELIEVE GOD WILL DO SO.
And THAT is how you end up with some poor slob dying on a cross. Of course he lived through it – we’re all eternal creatures! And I bet he felt rather dense when he realized his mistake…