Aw hell, Sun, I was getting away from Solon's thread to avoid the abortion rhetoric. Now you want to pick it up from where he left off?<gg>
However, I suspect you are correct in your interpretation of abortion as a sin. The Catholic Church has been mystified at the slowing growth of Catholicism. It would not suprise me in the least if the Pope denounced abortion as a way to offset declining birth rates.
It goes back to a good point you were making about Jesus and the Church. You suggested that Jesus did not plan the Church. IMO, the Jewish apostles were so persecuted by the Jewish leaders they were trying to replace, they placed themselves on a pedestal of self righteousness. They filled the New Testament with so many anti Jewish messages, the left all of the Jews behind in their attempt to revise a universal God into a 3 part Trinity. If Jesus was God incarntate, he was still the same God to which the Pharisees were worshipping. In a way, the Church stole God from the Jews.
I seriously doubt that God's intentions for the Church was to blame all Jews for eternity. Rather, his whole message was to condemn the self righteous attitude of the Jewish leaders like the Pharisees. I don't think that God needs to be replaced as a CEO. Rather, the Church needs to promote a celebration of God, without preaching against the religious tradition of other people. Wasn't the new Church just as guilty as the Jewish leaders for self righteous attitudes?
Secularism needs to be replaced with a new awareness of universalism. I have no particular problem with any message of Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, etc... regarding God. However, self righteous intolerance is a violation of human rights from which all men deserve to be protected, especially from those that will condemn others in the name of God.
Interfaith competition is the poorest expression of one's love for God that I can possibly imagine. |
