CAN SINS BE TRANSFERRED TO A WILLING SCAPEGOAT? i.e.... is Christianity Moral in its foundational claim? I was just in debate with a chap online regarding how one person can take on the sins of another/or many and pay the price for them... Do you agree this is possible? To illustrate my point I extracted a piece from my SKA@Carnarvon novel In this extract, there is a debate raging between a Texan fundamentalist (Gabriel Broad - excuse his Texan accent... theyre not typos!) and his South African evangelist sidekick (Andy Selbourne) and a husband and wife who are scientists challenged to the debate - Marsha and Alok (Al) - they are debating one another on the issue of morals - what do you think? ****** “Is it moral to believe that our sins can be forgiven by the punishment of another person?” Marsha came back at him. “I submit that the human sacrifice of one person by no measure of decency can remove the sins of another. I’ll go further and say that to even contemplate it is utterly immoral.” “Y’re confused, lady…” Broad bridled from the meaty jabs he’d taken, “Ya’all try but y’re off th’ mark. If ya’all owe money and I h’ve money, I can pay y’re debt. Why… if I’m a good-kinda fella I might sit’n prison for ya’ll. Why, I might ev’n take y’r place in the ‘lectric chair.” “In a world where punishment is to see retribution only, that Mr. Broad probably would work,” Marsha conceded. “But when I commit a crime… when it’s not just paying a debt but there’s an actual victim, you, as a third-party simply cannot elect yourself as the object of retribution on my behalf – it doesn’t and cannot reverse my culpability. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t perpetrate the crime… it doesn’t wash my slate clean – no matter how many times the claim is made that it does. What you’re talking about here is a scapegoat, and scapegoating is a Pagan idea; an idea, I must point out to you is at the very basis of your faith.” At outset Broad had seen Marsha’s nerves and he’d thought she’d be a pushover; the weak link he could attack. But he realized now that the devil was in this despicable woman. “What nons’nce!” Broad snapped, the frustration starting to show. Marsha shrugged, “I’d hoped you’d have something more substantial than that to say.” Broad just glared at her in response and she smiled sweetly. “Perhaps I can describe scapegoating,” Al suggested. “Why don’t you? Show us how clever you are, friend,” Andy chimed in. “Well, when they felt they’d transgressed against a god, a tribe would take a goat from the herd and wish their sins into the poor animal and then they’d drive it into the wilderness to die of starvation and thirst… In their minds, the goat took the sins away from the village. That the sins are then vindicated.” “That’s from a long time ago,” Andy smiled. “Not really,” Al smiled back, “Right now… this year… Jewish Orthodox adherents hold a live chicken and swing it around by its legs over theirs heads during the Kaparot ceremony ahead of Yom Kippur… The chicken absorbs their sin, and then they rip its head of and throw it in the bin… because of course, that makes sense…” “And that is why we don’t need to do that, Jesus Christ took the sins of man so that we may never have to do that anymore,” Andy responded. “And you don’t see the irony in that reply?” Marsha explored, but he ignored it and there was a pregnant pause. “I think this is where we’re diverging,” Al suggested. “You don’t get real absolution by going to a third party for your forgiveness. You can’t set up a church as an intermediary that takes donations and hands out liberties and call your debts paid and your victims satisfied… I know it’s convenient and feels good, but it is just wrong – it certainly isn’t moral. The only forgiveness that is reasonable to a thinking and moral person must come from the victim – you cannot pay your tithe or drop your coin into the hat when it comes around and clear your debt against a third party. I’m sorry, but that is immoral. There can be no self-proclaimed third party in the deal that can be in the business – and it is a business – of taking payment on a victim’s behalf, payment that the victim sees nothing of. No. That is fundamentally immoral. It abolishes the principal of personal responsibility on which a moral modern society is and must be founded.” “Ya’all will never und’stand that th’ Lord was nail’d to a cross and gave of his life so that y’all can sit there a’making mock’ry of his selfl’ss act.” “I’m afraid I’m struggling to make much sense of that response, Mr. Broad. All I can say is that were I plucked up and whisked back through time then dropped at the crucifixion of Christ, I would feel a moral obligation to stop his torture and execution on the ridiculous trumped up charges he was alleged to have been executed for. Would you not have intervened? I’d hope you would.” “It was fated… it was fulfilling prophecy,” Andy Selbourne asserted. “A suicide mission?” Al asked. “You don’t know the Father’s mind – you can’t presume to.” “Honestly… a father like that…? I don’t want to know him, I can’t imagine how it could be moral?” “And, this is another reason I cannot accept responsibility for a man allegedly tortured to death two thousand years before I could possibly be implicated in his death, that is just absurd,” Marsha stepped seamlessly into the breach of momentary silence. “The allegation that he died ‘for me’ and that I must accept his death as part of my salvation… I’m sorry, but that in itself is not vaguely a moral claim of any kind. I find that deeply disturbing and I utterly reject it.” “And of course, Marsha,” Al took over. “Let us not forget that this torture of a scapegoat man was done to repay an even more odious claim – that I have a part in an original sin of a yet more distant female ancestor who ate an apple she was forbidden to eat, even though we are taught that she had no sense of right and wrong prior to eating the apple… I must say that again and pause; prior to eating the apple by which to understand what wrong is… Honestly…? The absurdity of these claims is possibly immoral in and of themselves. It is a logical fallacy.” “Well… you can attack and hate God and live out your miserable empty lives in sin; but our God is the God of love,” Andy insisted, making ‘love’ sound like a warm marble garbled in his mouth. “Of love?” Marsha pantomimed him. “Of love,” Andy was unrelenting. “So, before you introduced the concept of love to, say, Polynesia… to the indigenous of the Amazon, to… to the Bushmen here in Africa… there was no love?” “Not love like the love God brings into the hearts of men, abolishing sin and violence.” “You mean like the peace we see in Palestine compared to the violence of the Kalahari?” want to read more? amazon/SKA-Carnarvon-War-Bible-Belt-ebook/dp/B00NZ2CB6G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413747460&sr=8-1&keywords=ska%40carnarvon
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 09:50:35 +0000