Why didn't he pull himself off the cross? Why didn't he eat the bread in the desert...

Why didn't he pull himself off the cross? Why didn't he eat the bread in the desert? Why wouldn't he simply show he was God so he could save even the skeptics from eternal damnation? Dostoevsky really railed into this during The Grand Inquisitor, but I don't quite understand why Jesus would even care if anyone was saved in the first place. Free will is free will, so why should he have to prove who he was / why humanity should believe in him?

>I don't quite understand why Jesus would even care if anyone was saved in the first place
Would make for a pretty shit religious book if he didn't, innit

Because God so loved the world.

Yea but he obviously didn't care about maximizing the amount of people saved.
But apparently not enough to give definitive proof for the skeptics during Jesus' life.

Have either of y'all read that chapter in BK

Yes we fucking read that chapter.
Don't argue with me like I'm an apologist, you can find plenty of those on reddit. I'm simply telling you what is believed.

"Maximizing the amount of people saved" is autistic speak. You aren't approaching this in the right state of mind. You're talking about salvation. It's a profound mystery, not an engineering problem.

Pretty sure Christianity isn't founded on utilitarian principles, lad. Then again, I haven't read the Bible since I was 13

HE HAD TO DIE IN ORDER TO OVERCOME DEATH, THE WAGE OF SIN

ALSO JESUS IS THE BREAD, GOD IS GREATER NOURISHMENT THAN BREAD

HE PERFORMED MIRACLES

JESUS CARED BECAUSE HUMANITY IS TO FULFILL ITS PURPOSE AS A TEMPLE FOR GOD

>it's a mystery ooooooo~
Nice try tha obscuring hierophant.
But I'll grant it's a mystery- to men. But to God it's not- to him it is even simpler and plainer than an engineering problem. And He could have made it is as clear to us as it is to Him in an instant. Would this infringe our free will? That cannot be said without heresy, for the theologians of Christianity maintain that God, even though he cannot do evil or the unjust, still is free.
He did what He did because He wanted to. There's no human parallel to God's actions, save, vaguely, in the ravings of madman or the fantasies of a most bizarre pervert or the writer of a tragedy. Everything that occurs is, by definition, the most pleasing thing possible to Him. What God wants is what exists, what God does not want never exists. There's no further cause for God's desires, for He is the first cause- he needs no justification or reason to weave the universe exactly as it is in his nature to do.
Of course, the Christians, for whom God is the deification of human law, don't acknowledge this, instead imagining that God is weak, oppressed and shunted about by nothingness, and just as dissatisfied and bitter with the world he's supposedly lord of as they are.

>But I'll grant it's a mystery - to men.

You are a man, supersperg.

Care to explain your criticism a bit further?

>Why didn't he pull himself off at the cross?
would've been magnificent

Did you read the chapter? Dostoevsky clearly tells you why Jesus did what he did.
If you force belief on people it's not belief it's tyranny. They would believe out of fear, not love. Gods greatest gift is free will.

But God'll torture you eternally if you don't love Him, and it's not like this is a secret- it's one of the major doctrines appealed to to gain converts.
God -does- force belief on people, He just does it remarkably inefficiently.

You are still viewing the workings of God from a limited, human and materialist perspective. This is not how it works. Everything is done as it is for a divine reason but this does not mean that it makes sense to us. Faith's strength is that it is undertaken by choice, given freely as Christ gave himself for us.

>But God'll torture you eternally if you don't love Him
Nah, there is no evidence of this in the bible. Instead it's more likely that your soul will be destroyed and you will be dead while the soul of belivers will spend eternity with God.

Oh like all the people in 1st world countries forced to believe right now?

Hell obviously doesn't force people to believe. The devil is more akin to comfortable, secular life than to some monstrous torturer.

>for the theologians of Christianity maintain that God, even though he cannot do evil or the unjust, still is free.
No they don't you piece of reddit teenagery.

But how does that make it different from any other religion? Why have trapping of religious tradition at all? I bet the Aztecs also wondered if the sun god really really needed all those human hearts, and explained it was for reasons too omnipotent to understand. If we cannot treat the scripture and record as fact, then how the hell do we judge the importance of any particular act or thought?

At least Manicheanism boiled it down to being good or evil, but with Christianity, all you need is faith and it doesn't matter what you did.

>all you need is faith and it doesn't matter what you did.

What it sounds like you are referring to is Sola Fide and is a Protestant concept, not followed by Catholics or the Orthodox.

yeah but according to Catholic tradition all you need is to be baptized on your deathbed and you get a free ticket to heaven

in that case ritual is more important than faith or works

Because Jesus is supposed to represent the suffering of life OP, and the idea that you can die and be reborn while you're still alive, and cope with the suffering.

It shouldn't be hard to imagine the symbolism there if you see him as a superhero like in the Marvel Universe.

Because Jesus is removing free will from the people by saying to them: bow to me and receive salvation. By suffering, he instead becomes a martyr and a symbol which people can aspire to achieve so that they can become closer to God.

Because if man was to be judged on works alone we would all be in hell, bar none. Mankind commits evil, it's our nature. Baptism is more than ritual, it's spiritual, it's a rebirth of the soul. The action of baptism is more symbolic of the transformation than anything else.

Those who turn away from their lives of sin to be with the Lord are saved.