this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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Atheism
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You ask good questions, but if you're really interested you can look into Christian apologetics re: free will. There are some interesting answers awaiting you. But the gist of it is that God didn't create flawed beings, he created beings with free will that chose to be flawed.
And Christianity has never said free will is a flawed design, because humans having free will is one of the most important aspects of the religion and is very fundamental to what it means to be a human (a concept that is true both in and outside of Christianity, unless you believe in destiny or something). It is not a flaw to have free will, otherwise God himself would be flawed. In a regular context, it's kind of like you're not flawed for existing, but you're flawed if you do negative things with your existence. I would personally have to be convinced that having free will is a flaw/a negative thing
To quickly answer your first couple questions: death is the punishment for sinning and Jesus is supposed to be perfect and sinless and thus should not die. but instead he died in place of other sinners, kind of like taking the blame for them. And yes, torturing and killing the son of God was indeed a sin, the people who did it were sinful. I don't think anyone has said otherwise. The ones who killed Jesus were not his followers or supporters
The notion of being guilty by proxy is mind boggling but it would be/is a good tool to control people through fear, which is essentially most creeds business.
The notion is mind boggling because being guilty by proxy is not how it works anyway. If you could find a 100% objectively guiltless man I'd totally concede that guilt by proxy is how it works, but let's face it, literally everyone on this earth is not perfect or blameless. You don't need a proxy to be guilty, everyone already is, its not hard to see when you look at the people in the world
If every man after Adam is guilty by proxy, Jesus would've been guilty as well as soon as he was born. But Christianity clearly posits the opposite of that
Let's not take that route.
The guilty by proxy argument predicates that every human being, at the moment of conception, is already guilty of an act onto which said human had no participation on. That is being guilty by simply existing.
We're are not getting into the argument of nobody being exempt of fault, either by action or lack of it.
The "loop hole" used to exempt JC Sandals of the original son was having him being conceived with no human intervention, therefore, sinless. After all, it is argued he was born of a virgin woman, willed into existence into flesh yet not conceived as any other.
You make a really excellent point, and I think I retract what I have posited. But I think nobody being exempt of fault is quite true, no?
The easiest reply would be "it dependends".
But...
What constitutes a fault? Are we to consider fault only actions or lack thereof taken counciously or any outcome that negatively influences another or anything, even if such outcome arises from an unpredicted(able) steming from an action taken with a good purpose?