Do you believe Lucifer and Satan are the same entity?
That is the traditional belief, yes.
So we agree you’re a polytheist. That’s probably a good thing as far as you’re concerned, because it avoids God forgiving people because God being obedient to God was so pleasing to God that God was able to convince God to intercede between people and God because God knew that God would be a more merciful judge and mediator than God.
Thank you for this.
In Revelation.
That’s impersonal though. It’s not the same dynamic as say the “commander” appearing to Joshua or Gabriel appearing to Mary for the purpose of giving them a message from God.
John’s Revelation was a vision. It’s not like Satan appeared personally to John. He was just shown a vision that included the Lucifer falling.
I’m unable to follow the link, but I’ll take your word for it.
The link works for me and is pretty interesting. It’s a remarkably frank assessment of facts and history.
I’m sure the link works, I just don’t have access to it from this computer.
Yes catholic.com is a good site and I use it frequently.
Regarding this discussion about whether angels get worshiped, or ‘sacrificed to’ or whatever the baseline is for being a god based on how people show their respect/adulation to you:
I’m pretty sure that based on worship, if you can use that to determine Jesus counts as being a god, Mary would also qualify.
This is a very interesting point. Protestants accuse Catholics all the time of “worshipping Mary”. This is mainly because the Protestant idea of “worship” and the Catholic idea of “worship” are very different. For Catholics, worship necessarily must involve sacrifice. Protestants, since they have done away with the mass (which is in its essence a sacrifice), have largely removed the concept of sacrifice from worship. They see a Catholic praying to Mary and think they are worshipping Mary, or they see a statue of Mary and think that it’s an idol.
But in that case, Jesus wasn’t without sin; he was a blasphemer running afoul of the very First Commandment, just like the guys Deuteronomy 13 warned against.
Yeah sure, if he wasn’t God.
But Christians believe that Jesus is God.
I have never, ever heard either of the two notions expressed:
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That sacrifice is required for worship in Catholicism.
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That communion is considered by anyone, anywhere, to be a “sacrifice”.
Now, admittedly, I haven’t exactly devoted myself to studying the mythos of Catholocism, but if these concepts were an actual thing I’d think I would have heard them at some point, at least incidentally.
Quite the contrary, not only have I never heard such things, but they sound outright insane. Can anybody else substantiate that these things have a basis in real Catholic religion?
And again with the freely toggling between 3 and 1 purely based on expediency. Jesus is the same guy as God when it’s heresy otherwise. Jesus ISN’T the same guy as God when trying to explain his so-called sacrifice. This is the kind of stuff that the most basic of logic requires you to reject out of hand.
And most Christians don’t buy into the ‘trinity’ obfuscation; I gather it’s mostly just Catholics that bother with that, I think.
If we had a priest handy, he could transubstantiate these things. It is magical.
Yes, so important, because logic is so much the basis of religion. Something can be and not be anything or anything else at the same time. That is the fundament on which at least the Abrahamic religions are built.
Things that are real are logically self-consistent. Things that aren’t logically self-consistent aren’t real.
If this trinity business involved anything real, there would be a way to explain/describe it that allowed all supposedly true and sensible explanations to work at the same time.
Which is not to say that it’s real - of course the catholic/christian mythos doesn’t describe anything real. But it’s difficult to even temporarily entertain it for the sake of argument if the system doesn’t even hold together. If it were a fiction book I’d throw it down in disgust for being so badly written.
Like I did with the bible.
This is all easy to understand when you look at the historical context. Christianity as the next step of Judaism bombed big time, especially because Jesus did not fulfil the Messianic prophecies, and those in Jerusalem pretty much knew no one got resurrected.
When they went out to the Greek/Roman world, there demigods - the children of a god and a mortal - were well accepted, so it probably seemed natural to make Jesus one. Why else would anyone care when Emperors were divine.
Also the Romans had lots of minor gods in charge of various things. The Christians didn’t have them but they did have saints in charge of travel and lost causes, etc., etc. Very similar.
The Trinity was no doubt a compromise between the monotheistic Jewish part and the naturally polytheistic Greek and Roman Christians. Judaism was monotheistic then, though I agree that its roots recognized other gods - not that it was good strategy to deny the gods of the guys with more swords than you have. I’m sure everyone ignored the children of God in Genesis just like we do.
To sum it up, God having a son mde no sense in the Judaism of the time, but made a lot of sense to the pagans the early Christians were recruiting.