(March 19, 2013 at 10:04 pm)jstrodel Wrote: I want to show reverence for God. Besides, H'Shem's beautiful personality cannot be compressed into a single word. God is the nicest person that you could ever meet. I love God. God is my best friend.Refusing to identify him by name doesn't show reverence. You've made numerous posts attesting to your love and reverence for god. Speaking his name shouldn't undo all of that.
jstrodel Wrote:Necessity: Christ's death was necessary to pay for the sins of the world because God's holy character requires a sacrifice for sin
Mark 2:5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”
Jesus forgave a man his sins without requiring a sacrifice. He did so by simple acclamation. When the priests who saw this questioned his authority to do so, he proved it by healing the man's paralysis.
Did Jesus sin, by not observing protocol? Keep in mind that the concept of expiatory sacrifice was so binding that god did not release Jesus from giving his own life, even though Jesus prayed to god to find another way. If a sacrifice wasn't necessary, Jesus self-sacrifice is meaningless. If a sacrifice was necessary, Jesus committed a sin by ignoring protocol... which makes his self-sacrifice meaningless, since he would not have been a perfect man anymore.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
