Prison, Hell, and Child Abuse

(Photo credit: Chris.Gray)

Today's Podcast

Prison is a scary place and no parent wants their child to end up there. As part of teaching your children about the world, it is a good idea to tell them about prison and the kinds of things that people can do to end up there. If you think your children are particularly at risk for going to prison, you might spend a fair amount of time warning your kids about the kinds of activities that land them there. If you see them engaging in dangerous behavior, a prudent course of action would be to warn them against those behaviors.

However, suppose you obsess about the possibility of your kids going to prison and talk about it all the time. Perhaps even with the intention of scaring them to keep them safe. Your children could easily suffer some psychological issues from this and we might want to call this child abuse.

Now, suppose we hear about a parent who is teaching their child about prison, do we assume that the action is child abuse? I would argue that such an assumption would be irresponsible of us. Sure, it is possible that the parent could be obsessing about prison and causing their child to live in a world of fear. But it is also possible that they are teaching their children about prison in a reasonable way.

For my purposes, prison is just an analogy for hell. The point here is that I "recently" (damn, more than a month ago) wrote about my dislike of the common atheist meme that indoctrination is child abuse. A very brief summary of my argument was that since the Christians truly believe that hell is real we shouldn't call it abuse when they tell their children about it. In the comments, Cephus pointed out that some NAMBLA members really believe that having sex with young boys is good for the boys, by my logic we couldn't call this abuse either*. Clearly with this example at hand it is clear my logic was flawed. The beliefs of a person committing an act does not affect whether or not their action is abuse.

So I thought back about what had been annoying me in the first place that motivated me to write that post. What I don't like is the wholesale statement that indoctrination is child abuse. Teaching your children your religion does not necessarily constitute child abuse, it depends on how you do it. Replace "prison" with "hell" in my first 3 paragraphs and we can see an example of this. Teaching your children about hell can be very damaging psychologically, but it doesn't have to be. If it is mentioned briefly and never emphasized it probably won't cause any issues (my wife grew up in this type of environment).

In my first post I focused on the wrong detail. Whether the parents believe in hell or not is irrelevant. If they teach their kids about hell in an abusive way then it is abuse. If they teach their kids about hell in a responsible way it is not. Whether or not hell is a real place is irrelevant to the discussion (although it does add a dimension of disgust for atheists to think the kids are being subjected to psychological torture for nothing).

So is indoctrination child abuse? I think the only reasonable answer is "sometimes". Certainly some denominations are worse than others. I would say that fundamentalists fit this category more often than other churches. But even that is not universal. If you want to talk about religion as child abuse, I think the only reasonable thing to do is focus on a particular behavior and identify why you see it as abusive. This could spark an interesting discussion, who knows, you might even convince someone of your point of view. But making the broad statement that all religion is child abuse will just turn off any religious people who are listening.

(*note: I am in no way saying that the actions of NAMBLA members are equivalent to teaching your child about hell. In fact, the whole point is that they are significantly different, and yet my logic applied to both indicating that the logic is flawed)

Indoctrination and Child Abuse

Today's Podcast

It is not terribly uncommon to see atheists make the claim that raising someone with religion is tantamount to child abuse. Recently (say, over the past year or so) this has really irked me when I hear it. I wish atheists would stop using the argument as it seems quite hyperbolic to me. Statements like this have huge potential to alienate exactly the types of Christians that I would like to engage with. On the other hand, I have to admit that when I was going through the early stages of my atheism this type of statement resonated with me big time. In this post I am going to explore these two conflicting thoughts on this common statement.

Why does this stuff resonate so well with many atheists?

I first heard the "religion is child abuse" meme when I was new to atheism. At the time I was very angry at religion, I see it as responsible for a lot of the pain I experienced as a child. The fear of hell and thought-crimes were the biggest offenders, but there were a great many things about the religion that affected my childhood in a negative way. I was terrified of hell a lot during my childhood, there were plenty of nights where I was unable to sleep as I had these fears running through my head. I was afraid to try new things unless I was certain it was acceptable from the church's perspective. I was afraid to ask questions as the answers might lead me to losing my faith. Being mired in fear is a really shitty way to grow up.

The fear was instilled so deeply that there was even a couple of years when I didn't believe in any of it anymore and yet I was still afraid of hell. I definitely wasn't a Christian and I was pretty sure I didn't believe in God anymore, and yet I just assumed this meant I was going to hell. I had some pretty serious struggles with depression during this time. I have heard similar things from quite a few atheists, it really shows how strong indoctrination can be. Many atheists say that the reason this kind of fear is instilled in people is so the church can keep members, although I would guess that the causation is the other way around, the church still exists because it instills this kind of fear but they don't subject people to fear for that reason.

Source

But details aside, the point is that I look back at my childhood and I see that the indoctrination I experienced as a child definitely caused me years of unnecessary anguish. In this state I heard people say that religion is child abuse and it really resonated. Furthermore, pictures like this will pop up from time to time and I find them creepy as hell. I feel really sorry for those kids, it seems to me that they will either be Christians for life or they will experience the kind of pain I did when they leave the church. I really wish there was something I could do to make that not happen.

But is it appropriate to call this child abuse?

What makes something abuse? Is it simply that it causes someone distress? Imagine my son is playing in our front yard and I scream at him, which makes him stop what he's doing, sit down, and cry. If I'm doing this just to fuck with him I'm a horrible father and we might want to call it abuse (especially if it is a regular occurrence). If I just stopped him from running in front of a car then perhaps I just saved his life.

So where does indoctrination fall? Let's focus on the doctrine of hell for a moment, is it abuse or not? I think many atheists see it as causing pain for no good reason. Hell doesn't exist and yet they were tormented for years because of the thought of going there after they die. Being tortured for eternity is terrifying, and the made up threat is designed to keep them in line. From this perspective it definitely feels like abuse.

But what if hell were real? Whether or not it scares them is beside the point, you must warn your children about hell and in so doing help them avoid it. If hell were real it would be your duty to tell your children about it, a little fear is a small price to pay compared to an eternity of torture. If my son was running in front of a moving car and I sat back and did nothing I would be a negligent father, if hell were real and I said nothing the same logic would apply.

So what is the real situation? Does hell exist and the Christian parents are doing their due diligence by telling their children about it, or is hell made up nonsense and they are causing their children undue pain? This is the disconnect, Christians think we are in the first situation and atheists think we are in the second. Many atheists see the unnecessary pain and call it child abuse, but the Christian parents think they are saving their children's souls. Even if we are right, I think child abuse is an unfair charge.

Return to my analogy with my son running out in front of a car. Suppose that after I scare him I realize that the car was parked. He was never in any danger, it turns out I scared him for no good reason. Does this make me a bad father? Does it make my actions child abuse? Hell no! I should probably pay more attention to my surroundings and those of my son, but an abuser I am not.

The Christians see a car aimed at their children and they are trying to keep them from getting run over. It is up to us to convince them that the car is parked. We need to work to convince them that hell is not real. We should tell them that we think they are wrong and more importantly tell them why. But we should not call them monsters for doing what logically makes sense based on the beliefs that they hold. All that does is make us look like dicks and gives them a reason to dismiss us.

**edit 27 April 2014** I have been reconsidering my thoughts on this topic. I am still working through some of and I am planning on writing another post on the topic soon (probably in a couple weeks, this week and next weekend will be very busy for me). If you have anything to add please throw a comment in. I'd love to hear more perspectives on this.

2nd edit: I finally wrote a follow up post

Is An Actual Infinite Possible?

I recently got into a conversation about infinities with humblesmith spanning a recent post on his blog and an old post on mine. He made some interesting comments on my post and it got my mind working a bit. As I was writing my reply, I realized it was a bit long for a comment so I thought it would be suitable as a post on it's own instead. It will actually spawn a couple of posts, as my long time readers will know, I love talking about infinities.

In this post, I want to address the claim made in the Kalam cosmological argument (and elsewhere) that "an actual infinite cannot exist". I'm not 100% sure what is meant by this, but it seems to be referencing the limit definition of infinities. So let's take a moment to discuss limits.

Infinity as a Limit

Let's say you have a series of numbers, for example:

hastily made with wolfram alpha

¹/₂,²/₃,³/₄,⁴/₅,...
The pattern here is simply that the n^th number is ⁿ/_n+1. There are a few interesting things about this sequence, first, no matter how large 'n' is, the fraction is less than 1. Secondly, you can get as close to 1 as you wish by picking a large enough n. (for example, if you wish to be less than 0.01 away from 1, you can do it with n=100). We say that 1 is the limit of this sequence, the fact that we never get there is irrelevant, what we care about is that we can get as close as we wish.

So that's how a limit to a finite number works, what about limits to infinity? Simply put, we say a sequence has infinity as a limit if it grows without bound. In other words, for every number A there is some integer n such that every number in the sequence past the n^th is bigger than A. Take for example the sequence of the powers of 2 (2,4,8,16,...), no matter how big a number you pick for A, there is some point when the rest of the sequence is bigger than A. So the limit of the sequence is infinity.

We 'Never' Reach Infinity

I'm pretty sure that this is what people are talking about when they say actual infinite doesn't exist. To borrow William Lane Craig's example in the post that started this whole thing, suppose I am piling up baseball cards one at a time and I continue doing this forever. We can describe the number of cards in the pile as a sequence (1,2,3,4,5,6,...), it's a pretty boring sequence, but it's trivial to see that the limit is infinity. However, there is no point in time when there are an infinite number of cards on the table, therefore, infinity doesn't exist. I am pretty sure this is the idea that is referenced with the statement "an actual infinity doesn't exist".

There is something to this, and it is a very interesting topic for investigation. We say the limit is infinity, and yet we never reach it at any point on the actual timeline. But this is the way it has to be, because once you pick a specific time on the timeline and examine it to see whether or not there is an infinite number of cards, you have cut off the sequence. You have changed the situation to a finite limit of finite numbers, of course the result will be finite. So it is true that in this situation there is never a moment where we have a pile containing an infinite number of things. In this setting perhaps it is reasonable to say that an actual infinity doesn't exist, but to extend that to all situations where an infinity might come up is a bit hasty.

Part of the difficulty here is that infinities can do some crazy things, and you have to be really careful with them, especially when you have multiple infinities interacting with each other, and that's sorta what we have here. "Never" and "forever" are both words that may or may not contain an implicit infinity, depending on how they are used. When we say that we will continue doing this "forever", do we really mean forever or do we mean for an arbitrarily large finite amount of time? What about never, is this referring to an arbitrarily large finite time or a limit? My intuition suggests that never is talking about an arbitrarily large finite time and forever is really talking about in the limit, in this sense we have a disconnect. [Although I'm a mathematician, so who knows how my intuition will line up with yours :)]

Let's Dispense with the Cards

Using the example of piling up cards does seem to illustrate some points, but it also creates some problems (Where do we get the cards? Does this assume infinity from the start? Where do we put them? Will they collapse into a black hole eventually? etc) So let's shift our example to just counting up time that has passed. We will count up seconds "forever", much of what we said above with the cards will transfer over, do we ever get to a point where we have counted an infinite number of seconds? No, we don't for the same reason as above, once we look at a point in time we have restricted ourselves to the finite. What if we step outside of our own universe and look at the whole thing all at once? I would say that in this case we can say that an infinite number of seconds is possible.

One of the things that humblesmith challenged me with is that my argument is circular, and I think this is a good spot to address it. In a sense I have started by assuming infinity is possible (when I said that we could count seconds forever), and now I have concluded that infinities can exist. In a sense he is right, this only works if forever exists which we assumed from the start. However, the key here is that I'm just trying to argue that this is a possibility. As far as I can tell, there are two possibilities, the universe ends at some point in the future (like a big crunch) or it doesn't (heat death for example). If the big crunch happens then my argument wouldn't work, and even from a perspective outside of our universe with a broad view we would not be able to observe an infinity. But if there is heat death (or some less boring eternity in our universe) then we could see infinity from the outside perspective. But again, I'm only arguing for this to be a possibility, so even if it doesn't work in our universe, I think we can argue that it could exist in some universe. Arguing that something is possible is much easier than arguing that something is impossible.

Infinite Regress

Turtles all the way down
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Often when this comes up the claim is that an infinite regress is impossible. As far as I can tell, the argument for this is some version of the baseball card example above. However, an infinite regress of causes is more akin to the infinite number of seconds than the infinite number of physical objects. The only difference is that we are talking about an infinity going backward in time rather than forward. This might seem like a bit of a leap, but it's honestly not that different. By looking forward in time, we can see that an infinite number of moments is possible, why can't we just orient causation backward and have the same thing. Once again, I am not claiming that this is how it is, or that this happened, just that this is a possibility. Remember, the apologist claim is that an infinite regress is impossible, the opposite claim is not that is did happen, just that it could have happened. My assertion is simply that an infinite regress is still on the table.

Any Apologists Reading?

I have seen the claim that an infinite regress is impossible in many places. However, I have never actually seen it explicitly spelled out why that is the case. When it is hinted at, it always seems to be referencing the limit definition of infinity, so that is what I ran with. If there is a different argument as to why please let me know. I'd love to check it out, and if it gives me another excuse to write about infinities, all the better.

Rotten Core but Thick Fruit

As I mentioned in last week's post, my mother died unexpectedly a few weeks ago. My biggest concern was how my father was going to handle this, they have been married for around 40 years and pretty much everything he does has her in mind. What is he going to do now that she is gone? When I first got into town my sister and I had a conversation and she said our dad is planning on going back to church. This actually made me happy, he grew up in the church and when I was growing up he always seemed to take a lot of joy in church activities. It seems like it would be good for him to get back to something like that.

I found it somewhat surprising that this is the reaction I had to my dad going to church. My opinion of Christianity is pretty low, why would I want my dad to take part in it? Well...It is a set thing to do once a week, come down to a place and be surrounded by other people. Take part in a bit of ceremony, mill about and talk to people before and after, and I think he enjoys some aspects of the actual service, such as the music. Ultimately it is the social aspect that I want for him. If he misses a week, someone in the church will probably notice and give him a call to make sure he's okay (not just because he missed a week and people there are fanatical, but because they know what he just went through). I like the idea that he will have something to do every week to keep him from spending all of his time milling about in his house by himself. Furthermore, my dad is the kind of guy to get involved in things. If the church runs a soup kitchen he will volunteer to help out, and again, it will be a good social thing for him. I don't often think about the good things that come from church, but there is definitely a good side of it. Along these lines, I also spent a lot of time observing and listening to people as well as reflecting on what I heard people talking about when I was growing up. The take-away message that many regular church-goers have is that Jesus is a good guy and they should be more like him. If that's what they get out of church I'm all for it. The church does bear some fruit, and I think there is an argument to be made the the fruit is thick.

However, the core is rotten. The central tenet of Christianity is that we are all sinners, we all deserve to be tortured for eternity, but if we ask God for forgiveness we can go to paradise instead. There are many other things about Christianity that I have issues with, but most of them vary from church to church. This one, however, seems to be pretty constant. It is necessary really, it's the reason we need Jesus. And I think this core message, the idea that we are all inherently evil, infects everything that the church does. A simple example, an aunt of mine (who doesn't know I'm an atheist) was talking to me about the importance of including religion in my son's upbringing. Within her pep talk, she randomly mentioned that we are all sinners and we all do bad things. She then quickly included "at the very least everyone has bad thoughts". Something about the offhanded inclusion of thought-crimes just to drive home the point that we are all evil really stuck out to me.

So I had these things rolling around in my head while I was sitting in the pew with my dad on Sunday morning. I got this picture of a nice thick, juicy apple that represents the church. There is plenty of good stuff in there. But the core is rotten, and that rot has tendrils reaching out for the edge. Go ahead, take a bite, you'll get some good stuff, but it's pretty difficult not to get a taste of the rot as well.

Behold my amazing artistic skills

Someone Smarter than Me Probably Knows This

Reading the bible is hard. It is a very old book, so much of what is written in there can be difficult to interpret. Who knows what figures of speech have been lost to time. Add to that the fact that it has to be translated into our language, and the possibility of misreading the real intent of the text becomes fairly high. When a Christian comes across a passage that seriously challenges their preconceptions, their first instinct is often that their understanding of the passage must be wrong. To determine that their understanding is indeed wrong takes a lot of work, and often they will simply assume that such work would yield answers and simply move on without giving it a second thought. This seems like a terrible thing.

But in the interest of fairness I tried to come up with an analogous situation for me to come across. The best example I can think of is in the realm of quantum mechanics. There are a lot of things in quantum mechanics that are really counter-intuitive. It is quite possible that I could read a fact about quantum mechanics which doesn't sound right to me. I would assume that I am most likely wrong and my knowledge of quantum mechanics is lacking. Chances are that I would not go to the trouble to learn enough about quantum mechanics to fix these gaps in my knowledge, I would simply assume that such a search would lead to an answer and be on my merry way. I don't really think anyone would begrudge me for this.

Am I being unreasonable to the Christian, or is there a significant difference in these 2 situations? The more I think about it, the more I think the problem here is that I haven't given enough information. One the surface, it seems that these 2 situations are the same and show that I am being unfair, but I think if we add more details to make 2 people more analogous, and the expectations of them will turn out roughly the same.

I think a key factor is how the Christian came across the confusing verse. If someone (perhaps an atheist like myself) approaches them and shows them the verse out of the blue, I think it would be reasonable for the Christian to just shrug it off and assume that an experienced theologian would have an answer. This situation feel analogous to a random person like myself coming across a confusing fact about quantum mechanics and just moving on with their life. If either person gets curious and pursues the matter further, great. But I don't think they should be expected to follow every confusing thing they come across in life, our time is limited after all.

On the other hand, if the Christian came across the verse reading the bible on their own, or perhaps during a bible study, I think it would be somewhat reasonable to expect them to reflect on the problem and try to find a real answer. If they are doing these things, they are presumably trying to better their understand of the bible and their religion. I think it would be somewhat disingenuous of them to continue on 'studying' other parts of the bible when they have already come across an interesting item and they have ignored it. This seems analogous to a physics student who comes across a difficult section in their textbook which they don't understand, and instead of going to the trouble to figure out the details, they just turn the page and keep on going with the next section. I think we can all agree that this is a description of a bad student.

The last group that I want to think about is any Christian who is trying to "spread the word". These are people who are out actively trying to get people to convert to Christianity, and honestly probably the group of people I was thinking about in my first paragraph. For them, I think it is reasonable to expect that they actually have an answer (or at least are willing to go out an seek an answer) for the troubling things that come up in the bible. It is simply not okay for this group to completely ignore difficulties with their religion and assume that other people have the answer that they don't. This would be analogous to me trying to go around and convince people that quantum mechanics is correct. If I were to take on a role as a teacher, you would definitely expect me to understand these details. Once again, we see that if we alter these two situations to make them truly comparable, there is no real difference in expectation.

Justice by Proxy

Let's a assume for the moment that a murder has been committed and we all agree that for justice to be served the perpetrator needs to go to jail for life without the possibility for parole. Suppose further that he is a young man and his father does not want him to have to spend the rest of his life in prison, the dad offers to serve the young man's prison sentence for him. If we allow this to happen has justice been done? Obviously not, you can't get off Scott free just because someone else is willing to serve your sentence for you. We wanted to put the son in jail for a reason, we want to remove him from society and we demand he be punished.

Well, this is an atheist blog, so I'm sure it's pretty obvious where I'm going with this, let's think about the Jesus story. According to the Christian narrative, we are all sinners and deserve to be tortured for all eternity. But in an act of love Jesus died on the cross and paid for our sins. As long as we are willing to accept this gift, we are free from hell and get to live in the eternal paradise of heaven instead. Apparently justice has been done. This makes absolutely no sense, and I would argue it is similar to the situation described above. We all deserve to go to hell, Christians say this all the time, just like our murderer deserves prison. Jesus gets us out of hell by dying for us, which Christians claim is justice served. However I'm sure they would not let the father serve his son's jail time.

Although on second thought this analogy isn't very accurate, the trade proposed by the father is much more equitable than the one involving Jesus. The father was going to trade one life sentence for another, I suppose it's not completely equal as his life sentence would be about 20 years shorter than his sons would be, but it's pretty close. Jesus on the other hand canceled out an infinite amount of torture by dying for 3 days. Since the ratio infinity to 3 is zero, we can't make it completely analogous, but let's do what we can and say the father instead offers to serve 3 days in prison to cancel his son's life sentence. It wasn't justice before, and we are going in the wrong direction. Furthermore, the deal with Jesus doesn't just get us out of eternal torture, it gives us eternal paradise. We deserve punishment, but Jesus paid for our sins and we get a reward for it. So in the case of our murderer, he shouldn't just gain freedom, he should also be rewarded, say with a million dollars.

Let's see how this deal looks now, a 20 year old guy is convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. The father comes in and says he wants justice to be served and is willing to sit in a prison cell for three days in exchange for his son not having to go to prison and should instead get a million dollars from the court. Oh, and one more thing, if anyone else is convicted of murder from now until the end of time, they get the same deal provided they are willing to believe such a deal was struck.

Hebrews 2

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Warning Against Neglecting Salvation (v. 1-4)

We must pay close attention to the message of salvation by resurrection or we will fall away from it. This is very dangerous, because we have heard from angels in the past that every transgression will receive a "just retribution", and these messages proved to be true. Clearly avoiding this great salvation would be a transgression. Also, via signs, wonders and miracles, the holy spirit has distributed gifts according to his will.

This was a lot of stuff in just 4 verses. I'm not really sure what to make of the idea that if we don't pay enough attention to this message we will fall away from it. That seems to be true of everything right? Stop paying attention to something and it will become less important to you and fall away. I wonder if there is something more here than what I see.

The idea that the messages from the angels have proved to be reliable is laughable. I wish I knew exactly what they are talking about, what what they consider to be proof. Could they be claiming that in the scripture God claims something will happen, and then later in that very scripture it does happen? I'm not impressed.

I have less time today than normal to dig through commentaries, but it seems that yes, the proof is word of mouth and scripture.

The message about the salvation is pretty interesting, they simultaneously use carrot and stick. If you accept the salvation then you get paradise, but if you don't you will be punished harshly. Christians claim this is proof of God's love, but that doesn't make sense when you consider the punishment part of it. Imagine if someone pulled a gun on you and said if you follow them they'll give you a million dollars but otherwise they'd shoot you in the face, would you consider this generosity? I think we'd all call that person insane, and yet when Jesus pulls this same trick it is considered love.

The Founder of Salvation (v. 5-18)

Jesus was temporarily made less than angels, but now he has now been put in charge of everything. The tasted death for the sake of humans (or is it just for Abraham's family?) and beat the devil.

This seems to be the overall point of this section, that Jesus was put on our level for a short period of time, below the angels, but now he is at the top. There were a few specific verses I wanted to address in more detail.

v8 "Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him."

Wait, so is everything under his control or not? What is the message here? I'm assuming that everything will be under his control at some point, this doesn't sound like an omnipotent God to me.

Guzik doesn't quite answer my question, but he brings up an interesting point here. He says that everything is put under control of man, I guess that is something else that is in the bible, that man is in charge of everything? This sounds familiar to me. So Jesus had to become a man for this to still be true. Jesus is in control of everything, but Jesus is a man so everything works together. This sounds like a pretty shady loophole to me. For an analogy, suppose a billionaire said he would let a small very poor village have control over a large portion of his assets, but then he sent his son to marry one of their women, then put his son in control of it all. Would he be keeping his word? What if further, the son didn't live in the village, but instead came home and controlled them from a distance. Do we think the billionaire kept his word? Maybe technically, but certainly not the spirit of it.

Gill on the other hand, does address my observation head on. He points out that everything is under control of Jesus, but we don't see it. This is a very good point, just because we can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't so. I consider this a good answer.

v9 "...Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death..."
v10 "For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all  things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering"

Suffering if a fact of life, and sometimes it is necessary, sometimes it can even be noble. But the suffering itself should not be celebrated. The thing gained by the suffering should be the focus, here the focus is clearly on the actual suffering itself.

Also, Jesus is made perfect through suffering? Wasn't he perfect before? He was the image of God wasn't he?

Guzik says "It isn’t that there was anything lacking in His Deity, but only in His experience: how does God in heaven know suffering by experience". Interesting argument, but what about every other possible thing we can experience. Does Jesus have to experience it to understand it? Why is suffering so special here? Does God have to kill someone before he understands it and knows it is wrong? Actually, now that I think about it that might explain the old testament.

v14 "...that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil"

If I'm reading this right, God sent Jesus to die so that he could beat the devil, who had the power of death. Does this sound like the actions of an all powerful God to you? It sounds to me like the actions of a God who is part of a pantheon. If God is all powerful, shouldn't he have had the power of death? Why did the devil have it? Why did Jesus have to die to take this power from the devil?

Guzik tries to get out of this by saying the devil had rule over death because of the sins committed in the garden of Eden. His taking of Jesus was unlawful so Jesus took away his right to rule over death. He then points out that this approach is problematic because Jesus laid down his life, however, Satan clearly wanted to kill him, so he committed "attempted unlawful murder". This is pure nonsense as far as I'm concerned. Even in his own narrative, it wasn't murder, although I guess Satan committed the desire for murder, so it is a thought-crime at best.

v16 "For surely it is not the angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham"

I'm guessing people try to spin this as Jesus was here to help all humans, but then shouldn't it say the offspring of Adam? The offspring of Abraham is the Jews right? One group of people, not everyone. This seems to conflict with the idea that Jesus was here to save everyone.

As expected, Guzik interpreted "seeds of Abraham" to be "people of the faith". Is this a legitimate interpretation? I don't know, it doesn't seem right to me, but I am a bit out of my element here. But weren't these people very interested in genealogies?

For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation)

Good:

Once again, I found nothing of value in this book. I was thinking about how a Christian might respond to that, they would object I'm sure, saying that the whole book is good. God sent his own son Jesus to die for us. Jesus was willing to die for our benefit. This is a story we hear often, but the entire idea is bankrupt. Not only does it make no sense for Jesus to die on our behalf in this way, but he shouldn't need to? What did I do that needs redemption? Oh Adam ate an apple? Seriously? And if I did need redemption, how does Jesus' death help me out? This whole idea is terrible and it glorifies suffering, and the fact that so many Christians find this a positive thing is just another strike against it in my book.

Bad:

2:9-10 glorification of suffering

"But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering."