:grin:

Thanks everybody for your answers!

I can articulate it just fine, it's just based on a claim that is at best (and this is probably being too charitable), very misleading. Feel free to fire:

The Catholic Church teaches that God Almighty came down from heaven to save us... from His own wrath... by allowing Himself to be tortured to death.

...into ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc. and they will confirm this just as well as every Christian in this thread. Or you can look at some of the many Catholic responses to the idea that the atonement is primarily about wrath.

For example:

Protestants will often ask, however, if Catholics do not hold that God the Father poured out the wrath we deserve onto Jesus, then how is God’s wrath satisfied? They will also point to numerous texts in the New Testament referring to God’s wrath, such as John 3:36; Romans 1:18 and 12:19; and Ephesians 5:6. But the key to understanding is in properly interpreting what Scripture is teaching us.

Anger (wrath) is a passion within human beings. God, however, is immutable and impassible. He does not have feelings as we know them. Nor does He experience passions. God also does not have a temper. And our sins do not provoke revenge in God. God is infinitely perfect, merciful, loving and just in all he does, so we must see what we call His anger in light of this truth...


Even though God does not experience the passion of anger, we say that we experience the consequences of sin as expressions of His “wrath.” But this must be understood metaphorically. When we sin, we rebel against God and turn away from him. God allows us to endure the consequences in this life and in the next. Those consequences include disorder, disharmony, pain, suffering and physical death. But these consequences/punishments are not the result of God actively willing torments. Rather, because of His love for us, God has given us a free will to make choices. If we choose to separate ourselves from Him who is Goodness itself and Love itself, then the inevitable outcome will be that we deprive ourselves of His goodness and love.

Another way of understanding “God’s wrath” is to recognize that our disobedience and rebellion do not causes any change in God by nature of who He is. Rather, we are changed by sin. If we reject God’s love and rebel, our hearts are hardened. Lacking God’s love, one will be tormented by the thought of God’s judgment and, as a result, will experience “God’s wrath.” But in both scenarios, what has changed is not God but us.

https://catholicstand.com/the-problems-with-reformed-theologys-penal-substitution-teaching/

Or consider the article from Catholic.com entitled "How NOT to Understand the Cross."

When we talk about “celebrating” Good Friday, or call it “good,” what are we celebrating, exactly? Many Protestants believe the Cross works via a process called “penal substitution.” There are different forms of that theory, but one popular version goes something like this: God is wrathful about our sin, and He needs to vent that wrath on someone. According to the theory’s defenders, if God doesn’t pour out His wrath on someone, then He’d be unjust. Since somebody must get punished, Jesus steps in to be punished in our place. But there are a lot of problems with this theory.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/blog/how-not-to-understand-the-cross

It says of this formulation:

This isn’t just an affront to the Christian concept of “goodness” or justice,” it’s also theologically incoherent. In talking about pouring “divine wrath” upon the Son, or God being unable to even look at Jesus as he stood as “sin-bearer,” you inevitably end up pitting the First Person of the Trinity against the Second Person of the Trinity, and/or pitting Jesus’ divinity against his humanity. This is bad Trinitarian theology and bad Christology. It ends with folks like MacArthur presenting the Cross as some kind of “breach” in the eternal (and unbreakable) Trinitarian communion:

Orthodox theology is even further from this idea. It tends to focus on the healing of humanity and the conquest of death and sin, hence the Paschal refrain: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and on those in the tombs bestowing life!" which is repeated throughout the Paschal service and in the Horologian between Pascha and Pentecost, says nothing about wrath, only victory. Indeed, since there is always diversity of views in theology, it might make most sense to look at the liturgy, or the sermon preached in every Church on its holiest holiday, as it commemorates Christ's death and resurrection:

The Catechetical Sermon of St. John Chrysostom is read during Matins of Pascha.

If any man be devout and love God, let him enjoy this fair and radiant triumphal feast. If any man be a wise servant, let him rejoicing enter into the joy of his Lord. If any have labored long in fasting, let him now receive his recompense. If any have wrought from the first hour, let him today receive his just reward. If any have come at the third hour, let him with thankfulness keep the feast. If any have arrived at the sixth hour, let him have no misgivings; because he shall in nowise be deprived thereof. If any have delayed until the ninth hour, let him draw near, fearing nothing. If any have tarried even until the eleventh hour, let him, also, be not alarmed at his tardiness; for the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept the last even as the first; He gives rest unto him who comes at the eleventh hour, even as unto him who has wrought from the first hour.

And He shows mercy upon the last, and cares for the first; and to the one He gives, and upon the other He bestows gifts. And He both accepts the deeds, and welcomes the intention, and honors the acts and praises the offering. Wherefore, enter you all into the joy of your Lord; and receive your reward, both the first, and likewise the second. You rich and poor together, hold high festival. You sober and you heedless, honor the day. Rejoice today, both you who have fasted and you who have disregarded the fast. The table is full-laden; feast ye all sumptuously. The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away.

Enjoy ye all the feast of faith: Receive ye all the riches of loving-kindness. let no one bewail his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one weep for his iniquities, for pardon has shown forth from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Savior’s death has set us free. He that was held prisoner of it has annihilated it. By descending into Hell, He made Hell captive. He embittered it when it tasted of His flesh. And Isaiah, foretelling this, did cry: Hell, said he, was embittered, when it encountered Thee in the lower regions. It was embittered, for it was abolished. It was embittered, for it was mocked. It was embittered, for it was slain. It was embittered, for it was overthrown. It was embittered, for it was fettered in chains. It took a body, and met God face to face. It took earth, and encountered Heaven. It took that which was seen, and fell upon the unseen.

O Death, where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory? Christ is risen, and you are overthrown. Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen. Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen, and life reigns. Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the grave. For Christ, being risen from the dead, is become the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and dominion unto ages of ages. Amen.

Is the Reformed view bad theology? I think so. But it also seems to me to be in many ways most in line with some of the core precepts that have come to dominate modern secular culture (which is maybe why it is the easiest for athiests to understand). There is a deep historical influence there. That Hume's Guillotine would be formulated first by someone who grew up in the context of the Reformed tradition is not surprising for instance.

God, however, is immutable and impassible. He does not have feelings as we know them.

That makes condemnation to Hell a little more horrifying. God has no feelings about it one way or the other.


We're always happy to call the hospital chaplain to tell grieving families that God doesn't really give a shit. :grin:

I can articulate it just fine — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm looking forward to your doing so, then.

There is a deep historical influence there. That Hume's Guillotine would be formulated first by someone who grew up in the context of the Reformed tradition is not surprising for instance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You are always giving psychological explanations, which amount to just-so stories, in order to try to debunk what you don't agree with.

I can articulate it just fine — Count Timothy von Icarus

Your explanations lack cogent argument usually. Your articulations seem to amount to "get lost in the wall of words, and quotes from and references to, supposed authorities, many of them obscure". But perhaps I'm being too charitable.

You are always giving psychological explanations, which amount to just-so stories, in order to try to debunk what you don't agree with.

It's not a psychological explanation. The rise of volanturism and nominalism and attacks on final causality were explicitly based on the idea that natures (and thus the final causes related to them) put God in a sort of metaphysical straitjacket. The reformers also took issue with prevailing notions of human virtue. Hume's finding is the natural consequence of the removal of final causality from ethics and the grounding of goodness in the appetites to the exclusion of the intellect. That's not a psychological influence, it's a direct conceptual influence. Hume is just charting one of the consequences of the the tradition he is a part of.

As Harrison's The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science documents, these shifts were also quite important for the development of empiricism. Theology is all over philosophy and the social sciences into the 19th century. Obviously, this left a legacy.





This is ridiculous. By all means, please explain to me the deep "criticism" I am missing in:

The Catholic Church teaches that God Almighty came down from heaven to save us... from His own wrath... by allowing Himself to be tortured to death. And apparently this strategy worked in spite of the fact that he didn't actually die(people saw him walking around three days later), and most people didn't get saved.

How does a person [moderator redacted] make sense of this? Could it be that most Christians throughout history didn't know this is the Christian narrative? Or did they know, but just held it at arm's length? Are myths always this way? Or is Christianity a special case?

It looks to me like a false claim (the bolded) paired with insults, and confusion about why "Christians" (apparently all Christians now) don't know that this terse (arguably caricatured) rendition of penal substitution atonement theory is "the Christian narrative?"

What's this deep criticism it will be hard to articulate?

Feel free to also explain why even that particular brand of theology would be ridiculous if God existed. Presumably, if this is a particularly egregious narrative, it cannot be just because it posits the existence of a God/Gods, otherwise the Christian narrative would be nothing special in terms of world religions. So why would it be ridiculous for God to act in the way described?

I have my own reasons for thinking it's deeply flawed. However, I think it will actually prove quite difficult for many ethical systems to explain why an all powerful being ought to act or be one way and not any another (in part because some of these are intellectual descendents of this same theology).

A conceptual explanation just is a psychological explanation if it is assumed that a philosopher thinks a certain way on account of the time and cultural milieu they find themselves in and not on account of their own analyses.

This is ridiculous. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is it?

You asked what ChatGPT thought. It said:

This is not merely irreverent. It's a crystallization of several profound theological problems — or aporia — that critics, skeptics, and even believers have long wrestled with. — ChatGPT

and proceeds to unpack a series of issues, ending with

The Catholic Church isn’t unaware of these criticisms. In fact, many modern theologians have tried to move away from juridical, retributive models. The Church emphasizes:

● God is not angry and vengeful. “Wrath” describes the alienation caused by sin, not God’s disposition.
● Jesus is not punished by God. He shares in human suffering, in solidarity, and opens a path back to God by showing perfect love.
● The Cross reveals love, not wrath. It’s not a price paid, but a revelation of God’s nature.
● In this view, atonement isn’t God changing His mind — it’s God changing ours.

The question now is: Does Christianity survive this tension? Or does it deepen the mystery in a way that still speaks to human guilt, suffering, and hope? — ChatGPT

It might be helpful to at least recognise the difficulty had by a non-Catholic, in coming to terms with what is not as simple a doctrine as it might seem for Catholics.

The full Chat is at:
https://chatgpt.com/share/687f097f-f0a0-800f-900a-c8f130cc2bb9

(Here I am attempting to use ChatGPT to fill in the account it seems to me you have been unable to present)

Yep.

It looks like avoidance.

I'm not holding my breath. I don't think there are any teeth on the cogs.

I don't see it gaining much traction for you and I.

Time for some silentism perhaps.

That makes condemnation to Hell a little more horrifying. God has no feelings about it one way or the other. — frank

In one model of damnation, hell is not a consequence of God's wrath. God loves all but can't force people to accept that love. Hell is seen as the natural consequence of the sinner's rejection of that love.

As a human analogy, consider the case of a father that loves his son who decided to join a criminal gang. The father tries as best as he can to convince his son to abandon his ways. Out of his pride, however, the son rejects his father's love and, in fact, resents him. This despite the fact that, after all, the son is actually acting for his own detriment. As time passes, we can imagine that the son gradually becomes more and more entrenched in his ways and it becomes more and more difficult for him to change his ways - not because he is not offered the possibility to change his ways but it is because as time passes, the son becomes more and more entrenched in his evil ways.

In another model of damnation, hell is simply the 'just punishment' that a sinner deserves. Such a punishment is not made out of revenge. In this case, mercy from that punishment is offered from God but the sinner rejects that offer and, then, he suffers the just punishment.

An analogy here would be the following one. Consider a man that made a crime and he is offered the chance of have his penalty significantly reduced if he sincerely repents and cooperate with justice and law enforcement. This man, however, refuses to just do that and he is sentenced to his own penalty. Again, it's not that the judge sentences the criminal out of revenge but, simply, he gives him the right punishment.

Note that the two models here do not view punishment as due to revenge, hatred or indifference from God's part and perhaps they can be reconciled with one another.

You just continue to be disingenuous. I'm done talking to you.

Cc: @Banno @frank

:up:

I can tell now that neither of them want to have a productive conversation: they just want to straw man and desecrate on their "enemy". It's intellectually vicious and stupendous.

BANNO. @frank ignored the Thomistic response I gave: even if you don't think that kind of response will be received as plausible by frank, they didn't even try to respond to one of the top answers historically to the very issue they wanted to address in the OP; and they continued to desecrate on the idea of God's sacrifice.

How can you not agree that that is intellectual vicious? It doesn't matter if at the end of the day you find it implausible: it's one of the most prominent responses to this issue.

No we don't need to talk about it: all you need to concede is that there are some legitimate sins; then God would have to incarnate himself through hypostatic union to absolve those sins. We don't need to agree on specifically what is sinful.

He said:

I read your post. It just didn't make any sense to me. — frank

So it seems your attempt to reach him was unsuccessful.

Frank would not be the first name to come to mind hereabouts, as being "intellectually vicious".

I gather form your other comments that Thomism was more a rhetorical strategy than a statement fo your actual view? Now for Thomism, Jesus is god. I think I see why Frank may have not understood your point.

Yes, I was providing a common Christian view to why Jesus had to die: I wasn't commenting on if I am a Christian or not. I clarified that to @frank and they ignored that too! :roll:

No we don't need to talk about it: all you need to concede is that there are some legitimate sins; then God would have to incarnate himself through hypostatic union to absolve those sins. We don't need to agree on specifically what is sinful. — Bob Ross

Wait a minute. If God says masturbation or gay sex or eating the wrong thing is a sin that needs to be absolved, isn't that the end of the discussion right there? Even if I grant that other sins are legitimate and might need absolving, the God of the Bible, by declaring nonsinful actions sinful, is obviously not the entity to do it.

Thank you for reminding me why this is such a dangerous technology in the hands of people who don't understand it (particularly GPT, with its default sycophantic tilt).


Ask it, or Grok, or Gemini, "is this (Frank's post), an accurate presentation of Catholic theology?" That's the point. If you ask GPT to explain why anything is deep, it will come up with something. The point isn't that there isn't tension in atonement theology, but rather than Frank has merely offered a factually incorrect statement paired with "Christians are so dumb they must have had their brains removed. Why don't they know the truth of my factually incorrect assertion," and then you have tried to defend this bigotry as "deep criticism."



You can't just post things as your own assertion. AI is designed to tell users what they want to hear and comes packaged with strong confirmation bias. GPT in particular will praise almost anything you assert as your own as "deep" and "profound" (including plans like selling your own excrement online). This is not how you should use AI, and precisely why it leads people to psychosis and is dangerous.

So, following common advice, open a totally new conversation, and just paste it in quotes with the question "is this accurate?"(i.e., indicate that that you want feedback, and not for it to enter it's default sycophant mode).

If I wrote:

"Most athiests believe nothing is good or bad. Athiest science teaches that molesting children is fine and just as good as giving them medical care! (false claim, tangentially related to real claims, re anti-realism vis-á-vis values, that are being caricatured). How are these people so dumb? Their brains must have been cut out. Do most athiests not realize that athiesm implies this? Do they just ignore the teachings of their science?"

This would be about on par with Frank's post. Would it be a "deep criticism" because it (barely) touches on real issues related to anti-realism?

A conceptual explanation just is a psychological explanation if it is assumed that a philosopher thinks a certain way on account of the time and cultural milieu they find themselves in and not on account of their own analyses

Hume takes the categories and assumptions of his milieu as a starting point, so this seems totally fair in his case. He does provide a robust analysis, given certain premises. His premises come from his historical context.

Goodness. You've read things into my post that weren't my intention at all.

I meant the OP as a question about the nature of myths. Maybe I should have picked on the OT instead?

Anyway, we're pretty far from a "forum" of trust and charity at this point. I invite you to step back into that domain.

even setting aside "wrath," to say the primary goal is: "to save us from himself," makes it seem like the problem of sin is entirely extrinsic. That is, it suggests that the entire problem with sin is that it has made God mad, not that it is inherently bad and bad for man. This would imply that if God simply chose not to "have a cow" over sin, there would be no issue at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Agree. If someone understand sin only from the outside, as an infraction about which some external judge imposes a sentence, they will not understand our blameworthiness for the crucifixion, and they will not recognize God’s mercy despite this blameworthiness, nor forgiveness despite blameworthiness, and ultimately love, redemption and eternal life. Viewing the Bible’s God from the outside, they see wrath in the one who accuses and judges the sinful - sin only leads to hateful judgement, wrath, and punishment and death. They don’t see death as a natural consequence, self-inflicted though warned against, but at best they would see death as a punishment extrinsically imposed. Undeserved if not overly dramatic. And they cannot see the sacrifice of a truly innocent one as a triumph over all weakness and vanity. The crucifixion seems vain itself.

Because they instead see innocence as our true baseline condition and one that need never change or is in any need of redemption, (as if we are all just children - boys will be boys and if God created boys then what did he expect), then why would God blame us for anything we boys do? Now some sort of extrinsic theatre like the crucifixion has no impact on such a basically blameless creature, leaving only the impression of its absurdity and bizarreness without logic. They do not see that we are all the crucifiers, and responsible for sin and therefore all of its effects, and do not see that, without God’s help, the consequences are fixed and permanent. It simply cannot make sense to make sinners out of innocent children as if “sinners” is just a label and not a condition.

I don’t blame people for not getting it - but I do blame them for making fools of their brothers who try to answer their insulting “questions”.

Anyway, we're pretty far from a "forum" of trust and charity at this point. I invite you to step back into that domain.

The forum where you opened with the insult "someone must have had their brain cut out to be Christian?"

If you cannot see why your post is pretty much a parallel of:

Most athiests believe nothing is good or bad. Athiest science teaches that molesting children is fine and just as good as giving them medical care! (false claim, tangentially related to real claims, re anti-realism vis-á-vis values, that are being caricatured). How are these people so dumb? Their brains must have been cut out. Do most athiests not realize that athiesm implies this? Do they just ignore the teachings of their science?"

I cannot help you. I tried, without the insults, to correct you on the factual claim, which you have refused to acknowledge. For someone honestly "interested in what Christians believe," you sure don't seem particularly interested in what Christians have to say about your description of their beliefs.

Ok. Have a good day.

In ancient history it was commonly understood that the earth was flat and that the sky (the heavens) moved across the sky from east to west every day.

We can be certain about those mentioned things.

The only thing we can be certain of is that in our finite world, a ground (medium) is necessary for this place to exist. This is the role signified by the Holy Ghost.
Yes an omnipotent God can in theory create without a medium. But in our case there is a medium spacetime (the universe), or heaven. That’s the only conclusion we can come to.

As a former Christian, I was taught that the point was that God is perfect, and, by his nature, cannot allow imperfection/sin into heaven. The sacrifice of Jesus was supposedly the price God paid in order to make human souls redeemable. It wasn't taught like you're describing; it was sold as the sacrifice of Jesus almost acting as a sort of loophole God used in order to save humanity from its own imperfections.

Glad I'm not the only person who realized the holy spirit maps to the Christian God's feminine aspect

I would argue (at least some) Christians believe God would prefer no one go to hell, and the sacrifice of Jesus was the alleged evidence of that.

It wasn't taught like you're describing; it was sold as the sacrifice of Jesus almost acting as a sort of loophole God used in order to save humanity from its own imperfections. — MrLiminal

How did they explain the source of human imperfection? It's often framed in the scriptures as the outcome of events in the Garden of Eden. Is that what you got out of it?

Yeah, the argument is that humans were permanently tainted by the fall, which required the sacrifice of Jesus to make humans redeemable. The logic is that humanity fell through the actions of Adam and Eve and accepting Jesus is the way to use free will to get around our inherent sinful nature.