Occasionally a Christian reminds the world that the religion is pagan, its human sacrifice an abomination to the God of Moses

 

What Protestants Get Wrong About the Epistle to the Hebrews

Peter J. Leithart, First Things

 ... The blood of bulls and goats was always impotent; what was needed was the human sacrifice of total obedience, fulfilled in the cross. It’s not a conservative gospel, but a revolutionary one in which first things change place with last things. ...

To wit:

When you come into the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations.  There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD; and because of these abominable practices the LORD your God is driving them out before you.

-- Deuteronomy 18:9ff.

They built the high places of Ba'al in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.

-- Jeremiah 32:35

Not only that, Leithart's interpretation of the Eucharist is an abomination to the Christian God, even whose catechumens were excluded from the Lord's Supper as strangers from the third and fourth centuries:

The Eucharist is the Lord’s, and our, hospitality to strangers.

To wit:

The Church urges the entire assembly of the faithful to pray for the catechumens, even though they are still strangers. Indeed, they do not yet belong to the Body of Christ, they have not partaken of the Holy Mysteries; they are still apart from the spiritual flock … They stand outside the royal court, far from the sacred forecourts. That is why they are sent away before those fearful prayers [of the Anaphora] are said. So she asks you to pray for them, that they may become fellow members with you and no longer be strangers and cut off.

— Apostolic Constitutions, 8.32 PG 1.1132B; Apostolic Tradition, 17, SC 11bis, p. 75

Human sacrifice was an abomination to God in the Law of Moses, but Christians insist Moses' God himself gave his own son's life as a ransom for many

 

And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. -- Genesis 22:10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise. 

Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.

-- Deuteronomy 12:30f. 

When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.  There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee. 

-- Deuteronomy 18: 9ff.

And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:  Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

-- Matthew 20:27f.

And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many. 

-- Mark 10:44f.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  

-- John 3:16

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. 

-- Galatians 2:20

And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour. 

-- Ephesians 5:2

But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God; 

-- Hebrews 10:12

He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son. And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

-- I John 5:10f.

God abhorred human sacrifice by the children of Israel but somehow planned the sacrifice of his own son?

 They did not destroy the peoples, as the LORD commanded them, but they mingled with the nations and learned to do as they did. They served their idols, which became a snare to them. They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood. Thus they became unclean by their acts, and played the harlot in their doings. Then the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, and he abhorred his heritage; 

-- Psalm 106:34ff.

Archaeology confirms that Spanish conquerors of Mexico had told the truth about the enormity of Aztec inhumanity

But no one wants to say so because it's politically incorrect to suggest that the Christian invaders told the truth and justly put an end to the incredibly barbaric Aztecs.

Here's the story, where the reference to "previously thought" refers only to thinking sanitized of contamination by Christian prejudice, which now turns out to have been unprejudiced, and correct:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5893933/The-horror-Aztec-tower-skulls-revealed.html

The full horror of the Aztec 'skull tower' revealed: Archaeologists say THOUSANDS of human sacrifices had their still-beating hearts cut out before their heads were severed and added to a monument the size of a basketball court

• Archaeologists previously found 650 skulls in Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which became Mexico City
• New research shows find was just a small part of massive array of what was once thousands of skulls
• New details of the gory rituals have also been revealed, which include turning skulls into masks

Aztec human sacrifices were far more widespread and grisly that [sic] previously thought, archaeologists have revealed. ... Some Spanish conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls. The skull edifices were mentioned by Andres de Tapia, a Spanish soldier who accompanied Cortes in the 1521 conquest of Mexico. In his account of the campaign, de Tapia said he counted tens of thousands of skulls at what became known as the Huey Tzompantli.

Quelle surprise: Rob Bell speaks up for a version of progressive revelation

Quoted here:

'See? It completely contradicts itself.' And it does, unless you read it as an unfolding story and you realize that these two different passages were written at two different times, and they reflect a growing sophistication in thinking. Now we have something very interesting. We see that people were growing and evolving in their thinking about the divine. That’s a story that we are much more likely to find ourselves in. 

Well, why shouldn't Rob Bell go for progressive revelation?

After all, it's a convenient justification for jettisoning things in the Bible he objects to . . . like hell. To Rob Bell, hell isn't an example of our current state of evolved, sophisticated thinking, so the interpretive principle permits him to relegate it to an earlier, now obsolete stage of God's revelation to man.

But progressive revelation is also basic to the dispensational theology of Bell's former Evangelical faith.

You can take the man out of the Evangelicalism, but you can't take the Evangelicalism out of the man.

The modernist prejudice behind the theory of progressive revelation here is obvious, if little noticed by its critics, implying that the Biblical ancients weren't as enlightened as we are.

This is the sort of dismissive attitude toward the past which makes it impossible to understand them on their own terms, meaning there is a predisposition to misunderstand them.

But Evangelicals, former or otherwise, are particulary vulnerable to this lurch because of the degree to which their own heritage struggled with and assimilated modernism.

Rob Bell is only late heir of an age which long before us was already digesting modernism from the Christian point of view, for example in Thomas Dehany Bernard's The Progress of Doctrine in the New Testament, the Bampton Lecture from 1864.

More specifically, however, progressive revelation was the essential modernist presupposition of J. N. Darby's dispensationalist theology, without which we wouldn't have Evangelicalism in the first place, with its easy compartmentalization of features of God's revelation which are an effront to post-Enlightenment reason: food laws, animal sacrifice, capital punishment, just war, etc.

Apart from the obvious, that there is a development of ideas in the Bible which can be demonstrated historically, the very idea of progress itself remains, however, an unquestioned value of our time which we've inherited from modernity, which overthrew the ancient world's agriculturally inspired ideas of cyclicality, birth and death, and eternal return.

And Christians and secularists alike share it . . . in droves.

But it must be asked: Is it really progress in divine thinking to travel from the age of faith under the Patriarchs, to the slaughter of animals under Moses, to the human sacrifice of the Son of God under Paul, to the mass murdering of tens of millions of the age of the Enlightenment?

The more I look at the ceaseless ages run the more the pattern looks like degeneracy to me.

Over 7 billion people inhabit the planet today. But by 1 AD over 40 billion were already dead. What do we know that they did not? Only that Princess Leia is dead, too.

The prophets of the Old Testament, whose heirs John the Baptist and Jesus were, dreamed by contrast with our Christian world of the interminable Sacrifice of the Mass of a world finally founded by God eternally upon justice, without violence, without tears and without death, however mediated that must be through judgment. Appropriately, they were tortured and killed.

I fancy that we have been fooled into thinking that we have made progress at all by the times in which we have been living, that is, by the Holocene, which began approximately 11,700 years ago.

We don't grasp that we bask in the glow of a dying interglacial, and cannot bear that The Ice Man returneth.

The next round is on me!

Dummkopf Bill Frezza Blames Carnage on Christmas

 

Apparently unable to calculate the enormous numbers of people killed by modern Enlightenment ideologies in the last century, a supposed expert of the shop and till variety decides that monotheism is to blame for all our ills and that we should go back to the days of gods, goddesses, human sacrifice and free love:

For a movement sharing a common heritage claiming peace and love, monotheism seems to do a remarkable job stirring up hatred.

What is it about the business models of these institutions that foment such torrents of violence? What other large scale human endeavor, besides the nation-state, has so much blood on its hands? And not just lately. This has been going on for thousands of years.

"Besides the nation-state"? He must be kidding. Nevermind that the world's last bastion of Christianity interceded to bring an end to the worst war yet only after it was attacked.

Remind me to invest my money with someone who can count.