In choosing to make a man God (Form side, lesser in stance than the seat of the Godhead, which typifies both spiritual force and the issuance of mercy) this has reduced the very capacity of God to reach out and forgive these people.

Nearly no one believes in a truly immaterial, entirely spiritual in basis Godhead any longer.

This has extraordinarily severe consequences, nowhaddimean?

Reductionistic, absurd, boxing ourselves in, ripping each other apart, not able to come together and point ourselves in the direction of freedom. Some might say "Robbing Peter to pay Paul." You've simply got to look past the physical in your ultimate search for God.

I wanna know who Jesus was having his 'Passion' with, Christians.

Himself?

I am piling up so much damn TNT, you have *no idea*!

I don't have any use for any of it.

i got a different interpretation of it

what Jesus seemed to say was his "good news" that you will be forgiven or given mercy in proportion to the amount of mercy or forgiveness you are prepared to give to others. The way to salvation for mankind was not a blood sacrifice on a cross, that was Paul's total misunderstanding, but rather going to the cross and enduring the greatest possible injustice and responding to it with a plea for God to forgive those doing it to him was almost a way of saying "see, I'm willing to be forgiving in the face of enduring this, whoever you are personally pissed off at or have a grudge with you must forgive in this way... and then you shall be forgiven. Pick up your cross and follow me."

But of course, the good news was bad news to most people who read Christ's words, because people don't want to forgive, don't want to let go of their grudges, they just want to dwell on feeling wronged by the injustices they continually inflict on one another in a hellish "pay it forward" but not paying goodness forward... but rather taking out what's been done on them on others if they can't dish it back to the one that did it to them. This just feeds and keeps the cycle going. People delude themselves into believing they don't keep that cycle going, but that is exactly what they do by being selectively gracious, by being unkind to people they feel don't deserve kindness for whatever reasons they think they have a right to treat some of humanity with dignity and others as exceptions.

I don't need to believe in hell, or an afterlife, or even a God to know that hell is a place we carry inside us and that as long as we hold our grudges, as long as we continue to feel victimized and use it as an excuse to keep a cycle of vengeance going outwardly or inwardly stew in feeling powerless and ineffectual to exact our revenge... we remain psychologically in our own hell and make it so for other people around us. Forgiving people need not be an unselfish act, it's not about others deserving forgiveness that we should forgive them, it is to purge ourselves of emotions where we continue to relive the injustices done to us over and over again. For when anything bad was done to us by any other, it was done in each event once, but when we cannot forgive it we make ourselves relive the memory of the experience over and over again pointlessly. If heaven and hell are only metaphorical, it's like being mad at a spouse over something said and choosing to dwell on it while your child takes their first steps, looks up, and smiles at you. That experience could be heaven, but with what is going on inside the bliss of observing it is lost, missed, heaven is all around but the choice is to hold onto the pain and the grudge and live in hell. Thus hell could be thought of as a state of mind, as is heaven, and both occupy the same place.

How many different states of mind can dance on the head of a pin? :)

Anyway, because it isn't easy to let go of these grudges, not easy to forgive, people would rather believe that the key to entering heaven is to hold onto their grudges, and believe that the sacrifice of a God taken flesh covers all of their sins and they can self righteously parade themselves around feeling like victims and imagine everyone that ever hurt or disappointed them unrepentant and bound for a hell they themselves will not enter but be able to stand in pretty gardens and look down to observe their eternal sufferings. How sad? Like anyone actually deserves eternal punishment? As if torture forever was "justice". No, if there is a God and there are such places as afterlives I'm sure that everyone is told they can enter heaven at the gate if they just forgive everyone and leave their grudges at the door, and people are like "what, I gotta forgive uncle Bob who sold me that lemon car!!!! Shit, I'd rather be in hell then, I see uncle Bob there, and there are crowbars lying around everywhere so I can just pick one up and give him that good beating he deserved and never got". And so many angry and self righteous people would choose hell, I'm sure that when people make that choice, the gate of heaven could be in front of them always for eternity, with a force field, that will only admit them if they lighten up, let go of the grudges, and forgive. But as they are about to let go of the grudges, sincerely forgive, it occurs to them always they have one last bit of business to settle, one more TIt for tat, Hell could be a physical paradise with no flames, no shortage of food, it could be a comfortable garden filled with every pleasure identical to heaven on the other side of the gate but if the people in it can't let their gripes go they'll just live forever acting out the dynamic between the couple in "the war of the roses" movie. They each other's torment, maybe like Satre's "no exit".

That is the only way I could see a "loving" God even tolerating the existence of an eternal hell, if such myths bear any truth, if only to give people possessed with a free will an eternal chance to let go of their grudges, forgive everyone, and walk through the gate into heaven.

My interpretation is unpopular, as forgiving is simple but not very easy. Still it's my hedge, that even as a skeptic if I die and to my surprise "meet my maker" I know that if I have been forgiving, if I don't carry that baggage, if I bear no grudges and wish no one that harmed me any ill... then whatever I may have done wrong will not be counted. Some might say "but you didn't ask for Jesus in your heart and say the sinners prayer" or "you didn't believe in the myths literally" or "you doubted" and thus you will go to hell anyway... but if Jesus was the embodiment of being gracious even when faced with hate and cruelty and if I have done the same than I do know him even if I doubted and still think him a myth. For a soldier or a cop knows that there is much in what they do that nobody can understand unless that person becomes a soldier or a cop, same for a carpenter, a baker, anything you truly do not understand except by doing it. And so it is that if you do not know how to be gracious, you cannot understand Jesus, even if you think him a God and throw his name around you'll be ignorant of the life he walked, of the struggle to remain forgiving. You'll also attribute much to him that wasn't true, I think the apostle Paul really messed everyone up with his interpretation on things because I think he couldn't handle forgiving certain people, his attitude was so... bad. So much easier to think it's all about some mystical shit about blood shed and original sin, whatever.

Read this shit, Jason.