“You must make your choice,” C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity. “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up as a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon, or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.” Lewis did not always believe this. Born in Belfast on November 29, 1898, Lewis was raised as an Anglican but rejected Christianity during his adolescent years. After serving in World War I, he started a long academic career as a scholar in medieval and Renaissance literature at both Oxford and Cambridge. He also began an inner journey that led him from atheism to agnosticism to theism and finally to faith in Jesus Christ. “Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully,” he later wrote of his conversion to theism in Surprised by Joy. “Dangers lie in wait for him on every side . . . Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God’. To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat. You must picture me all alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” Two years later, his conversion was completed: “I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.” Lewis’ conversion inaugurated a wonderful outpouring of Christian apologetics in media as varied as popular theology, children’s literature, fantasy and science fiction.
This man died being a Goy who believed a Jew was God.
>>25055202Is there some reason a Jew cannot be God?
>>25055197>can fall at His feet>washing feet>born a sinner>turn the other cheekChristianity is so cucked. Subscribing to it is metaphysically cucking yourself.
>>25055249Another appeal to incredulity. Too proud to bow down before the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent creator of all that exists, like an ant refusing to acknowledge that he is smaller than an aircraft carrier, the attitude of an utterly insane person.
>>25055211A Jew is a human, and God is not a human.>>25055261One can worship the True Creator of the Universe, but bowing before a human that is identified with the True Creator of the Universe is not only incoherent, but even sacrilegious for those who recognize the True Creator of the Universe.
>>25055342Jesus is God
>>25055358Jesus is supposed to be fully human and fully God, but because God cannot be a human (i.e. a created being), then Jesus cannot be God.
>>25055364God can do anything, and Jesus was not created, he always was and always will be
>>25055371God can do anything, but God cannot be anything, since God is meant to be God and cannot be either inside space and time or limited by conditions of the created world.It is an absolute mockery of the concept of God as Creator of the Universe to believe that God can become His creation.If you want a tech equivalent, it's like trying to allocate 2TB worth of data to a 1kB memory space through a virtual link.
>>25055380Your inability to comprehend how God can be something is an appeal to incredulity.
>>25055404It's not an appeal to incredulity if you're going to misuse a word like "God" in such a flimsy way. God cannot be both immanent and transcendent. God must necessarily either be outside of the bounds of the universe so as to create it, or God must be fully contained by the universe.If God is all-powerful, God must be beyond the universe and its set of rules. A god who has communicative intention, memory, judgement of individuals, and other such properties is subject to the rules of space and time by virtue of interacting with them. A god who is subject to causality cannot define what causality itself is.Therefore, God canot be both all-powerful and also subject to the laws of the universe. God must necessarily be beyond anything that manifests itself in the universe, and God cannot become a created being.Do not consider yourself more clever than others because you've memorized a handful of arguments from apologetics writers, for there are many more who have read them, and with a point of view much less sympathetic than yours.
>>25055455Why couldn't God, a being outside of the universe create an avatar of themselves within the universe?I don't believe that Jesus was God, but the son of God. Combining the holy spirit with Jesus and God seems terribly convoluted and combines the boundaries of mysticism and reality. Jesus existed and in historical context, did things in the world that people wrote about. Whether he was guided by the holy spirit or just knew where an when to be remains lost in history but thinking Jesus was God muddies the water between what God is known for and what Jesus did for us.
>>25055380Do you know what a simulacrum or avatar is? While god might not be able to enter, the same as we can't enter a digital world physically, he could certainly enter it in the form of an avatar.It's a common thing in many religions across the globe throughout history. So you're wrestling here with the very same logic. This is the way it is most commonly framed. They enter our world in a form, not of their own, but representative of themselves and still carrying a level of power, as they still exist outside as well.
>>25055197>Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worseLewis was wrong. There are plenty of prophets around who are neither madmen nor the Son of God. Lewis knew this but was hellbent on being a troublemaker.According to Islamic teachings, Jesus and Muhammad were both prophets. Nothing more, nothing less.
>>25055597>Why couldn't God, a being outside of the universe create an avatar of themselves within the universe?Just so you know: if you think of Jesus as an avatar of God rather than as God the Son, you're falling into Nontrinitarianism.In a theological way, mainstream Christianity has God be split into three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. God the Father is the one that says "Let there be light" and the Holy Spirit is the one that creates light. God the Father has no appearance, so whenever God presents Himself, it must be in the form of God the Son.God the Son is begotten by God the Father but precedes all existence, so technically God the Father is fully transcendent, even though God the Son is allowed to have a definite form and appearance.The Holy Spirit has no appearance or voice for humans to hear either, which is why Archangel Gabriel had to come before Mary for the Annunciation of Jesus' birth.In a theological sense, within the boundaries of Christian dogma it all "makes sense", in the sense that everything is defined just well enough for everything to fit together (that is to say, no differently from "having" money to buy a car by getting a loan from the bank, which you must pay off over time). However, in a broader philosophical sense gaps start popping up once you begin to question the nature of God and God's relationship with the existing world (going back to the loan metaphor: actually having to pay the loan in the long run by using "real" money earned from a job).1/?
>>25055597 (replying to)>>25055722 (continued from)2/2I often entertain various notions of God, one of which is God as the Great Clockmaker, or the Great Architect of the Universe, and another which is God as the Universe itself. Both of them are somehow compatible with the existence of fixed laws of nature, but neither are compatible with a God that has a human-like personality. The idea of a God with feelings, thoughts, who arbitrarily decides what is good or what is not, and who "cares" but also hands down punishments on humans just sounds like a projection of human feelings and ways of thinking onto the Universe and its origin. We know human kings are like that, but why would the first cause of the universe be like that? Human thoughts and opinions arise from limited knowledge and responses towards external stimuli that cause pleasure or pain, so to ascribe that to a great being that already existed billions of years ago and has mostly created uninhabitable stars sounds difficult to justify.Therefore, as much as Christian theology may have a complete model of the Divine Trinity that is sufficient for its own purposes, it fails to be convincing for those who expect for God to be all-knowing and all-powerful, but find in the Biblical account of God a Being that is often boastful, jealous, and will hold grudges against individuals who use His name in vain or insult His chosen prophets.
