mecca777

Why, if an image of Mary appeared and demanded that, it would certainly be a machination of Satan to deceive the weak-in-faith. Use your common sense.

emotional

Sure, if you define the Bible as "Old Testament + New Testament". Problem is when you do as millions of peopl do (they're called Jews) and define the Bible as the "Hebrew Scriptures" alone, without the Greek parasitical additions. Then there is NO Biblical support for worshipping Jesus.

"God is not a man, that He should deceive, nor the son of man, that He should repent" - Numbers 23:19. Repeat, God is not a man, meaning that Jesus can't be God. Godmen are the stuff of pagan mythology (compare Mithra, Attis and Dionysus).

Howard

Great quote. Gotta remember that one.

Lohan

Unfortunately for that quote, when I went back and read Numbers 23, I see how you can squeeze it into Christian mythology. In fact, you really don't have to read Numbers 23 at all. All a Christian has to do is use the "Jesus was fully God and fully Man" trick, and he wriggles out of another inconvenient Jewish scripture. Being fully God and fully Man has some great permutations, as Christians can claim Jesus was fully God when asked why a perfect God would touch a sinful man's body with a 10-foot pole, and then can talk about how he was fully Man when asked why dying on the cross was such a big bad sacrifice for an eternal God. For me anyway, its theological utility points to its creation by very clever Church leaders, rather than to some divine mystery revealed.

emotional

But the wiggle fails, because the scripture explicitly says "God is not a man". There is a sharp distinction between God and man. A man cannot be God, and God cannot be a man. The Christian system of a One-in-Three God is a god that no Jew or his father had ever known. The NT doesn't just cancel the orthopraxy (law) of the Torah, it cancels even the theology!

The way I see it, Christianity is nothing but a fusion of Jewish monotheism and scriptures together with pagan Godman-Saviour mythology. I have no problem with a historical Jesus, I just say that he was an ordinary man, a failed revolutionary leader, later deified by his followers. (the link is a story of such a thing happening in modern times)

BTW I'm a Jew. Not a practising, Torah-observant Jew (I did that in the past, though), but a Jew nonetheless.

Amos

But Jesus was not God and had to be crucified to set Christ free. Christ was fully God and Jesus was fully human in the dual nature of the God-man and to resolve this tripartite relation Jesus needed to take the sin nature of his world to be crucified before he could resurrect and become fully one with Christ (Christ was set free under the name of Barabbas and only the bare naked Jesus image was crucified).

Mary, of course, was in charge of all this albeit from behind the scene and therefore beyond the detection humans (especially protestants). Mary should in charge of this crucifixion event because she was the cause of this sin nature that led mankind to have dominion as a species. Here now, Mary is responsible for the redemption of man so he may have victory over his own slavery that was needed to achieve this earthly victory.

Edited to add that the dual nature of humans becomes a tripartite relation with God because Mary is the mediator between humans and God and is therefore to identity that pulls the strings from behind the scene: first to fog up up the mind of humans and later to remove this fog.

Jesus is just the personifed idiot that this happens to and that is why we Catholics must be followers (not worshippers) of Jesus.

Howard

I knew Amos would clear things up. What scares me is that I'm starting to understand him.

sullster

Amos,

If Mary was so essential to the whole thing, then why is she stuck with appearing on frosty hospital windows or out in the woods with hallucinating shepard boys?

Amos

But she only appears 'there' in the minds of those with curious eyes and the rest of us are not even aware of her influence in our daily life. We still think that we are in charge of our own destiny and would call that superstition.

The fact that Mary is enigmatic just makes her more difficult to understand.

As for those "shepherd boys," if you are referring to the twelve that were out herding sheep on the night that Christ was born, they were actually the eidetic images of Joseph unto whom Christ was born. They were later called to become his apostles (to prove metanoia), were left behind in Gethsemay to enable the crucifixion of the bare ego and were later recalled into the upper room to show how our earthly richess will be taken into heaven.

Lohan

Howard,

If you can understand Amos, could you please pass me a bit of what you're smoking? I'd like to try it

Emotional,

Good point. Although I suppose the point is pretty much moot, as when has Jewish theology mattered all that much to Christians except where it's been subsumed into their own beliefs.