Required? Could God have saved humanity another way? I don’t know. I defer to Church teaching, which you seem to have already looked up.
Every single time you say stuff like this, you are saying “I believe the parts of the Bible that support what I already believe”. You and/or the sect you believe in are interpreting to suit your needs and wants.
That’s one way to spin it. The other view is to recognize that a body of truth exists, and we’re doing our best to conform to it. If something in the Bible contradicts a known/revealed truth, then we must be reading the Bible wrong, because truth is absolute and cannot change. An example would be the Creation account. Our best scientific knowledge says that the world could not have been literally made according to the Genesis account. So, we have to read and interpret the text with that in mind.
I don’t know if the Flood story was ever meant to be taken as historical fact, or if it was written in the style of legend or myth. That’s for Biblical scholars to decide.
It’s not so much an issue of believing or not believing. It’s an issue of trying to find out how a particular passage of Scripture was meant to be understood. Not all of Scripture is meant to be “believed” in an historical sense, because it wasn’t written as historical fact. A lot of passages in Scripture are like myths that use narrative to point to a higher truth.
What does that have to do with who the deity was? You may as well claim that Elvis didn’t exist until he banged his first groupie, or whatever. What, before that, he was just a fiction?
So if I find some guy who claims that he’s Zeus, reincarnate, then that retroactively changes the last 3000 years and proves that the Greeks were on to something? :dubious:
It is never “The Bible is wrong” when it contradicts reality-It is “We read the Bible wrong”.
The deity from the OT became a man, Jesus. The Jewish religion took the position that Jesus was not their deity. Those who believed that Jesus was the deity became known as Christians. Yes, it’s the same deity. Yes, our understanding of this deity greatly changed with the incarnation of Jesus.
I don’t know what it would do. Probably it would get him locked up. But, I would ask him for some evidence that he is really Zeus. Where are the lightning bolts?
Seeems to be your stock answer when confronted with an inconvenient ‘truth’.
The Bible can’t be “wrong”. That doesn’t really make sense. That’s like saying “my pants are wrong” even when they fit. They would be wrong if they were trying to be a shirt, but they are pants and were designed to be pants, and they serve the purpose of pants.
The Bible is the Word of God, and it serves that purpose, and it’s never wrong for that purpose.
What do you mean exactly when you say “contradicts reality”?
But yes, I don’t see why we can’t be open to the fact that maybe we were reading something wrong if new indisputable facts come to light.
The son of Zeus would no more have lightning bolts than the son of your god would have lightning bolts.
Inconvenient truth? Are you the arbiter of ‘truth’ as well? I fully admit that there are many things I don’t know, and I fully defer to the teaching and tradition of the Catholic Church. If the Catholic Church teaches that Christ’s death on the cross was required in order to atone for sins, then I submit to that.
And that deity is recorded as existing for at least 900 years before Jesus.
“His lightning lights up the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax at the presence of the Lord- at the presence of the Lord of all the earth.”
“Bow thy heavens, O LORD, and come down: touch the mountains, and they shall smoke. Cast forth lightning, and scatter them: shoot out thine arrows, and destroy them.”
I don’t remember Jesus throwing around lightning bolts and destroying mountain, either.
That, folks, is what you call a “conversation stopper”.
He might have winged ankles though…
Did you read the rest of my post? I thought I was pretty clear what I meant by that statement.
Yeah, I was agreeing with you.
So Jesus is captive to King David? I don’t remember Jesus doing that either.
Thank you.
God was captive to King David? I don’t recall that part either.
I took your quotes from the Psalms as implying that because King David described God doing certain things (lightining, mountain melting, etc) or asked certain things of God (destroying his enemies with arrows, etc), that Jesus was then required to do those things. The fact that Jesus did not do those things then proves that he is not God. This implication, if it was one, is false because God does not live in a box built by King David.
Inconvenient truth ?- It’s an established dogma of ALL christianity that “Christ died for your sins” -it doesn’t take much arbitration to state that as ‘truth’ in that context…
So it appears that your faith is in the catholic church’s notion of morality (human sacrifice is good) vs God or some ‘greater’ truth as you consistently defer to them.
You’d best hope they are right - which, of course,is the very definition of ‘faith’.
In the end - I would posit that any organization that has, as its very cornerstone, the idea that ‘God required human sacrifice to forgive you’ as immoral at its very foundation.
“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from his assailant, and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”
“Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery…”
“If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife–with the wife of his neighbor–both the adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death.”