mhughes0021
Senior Member
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2011
- Messages
- 28,588
Yeah... there was this thing, about 500 years ago, called the reformation. You might have heard of it? Anyways, the major issue that this guy Martin Luther brought up was how unbiblical the idea of purgatory and indulgences was.
Middle Ages Roman Catholicism was brought about when the Roman Empire crumbled, leaving a power vacuum that some ambitious church leaders filled (some for good reasons, others for more money/power). As literacy decreased, the majority of people, even most priests, had no idea what the Bible said, and church doctrine eventually became based upon controlling people and other political necessities rather than on a sound scriptural basis. It worked well at keeping the population under the thumb of their rulers, the rulers under the thumb of the Pope/bishops, and making both the rulers and the Pope/bishops insanely rich at the expense of the rest of the people. Thus more and more church leadership positions were filled by men seeking power and money, not the welfare of the people. While doctrine of this time period usually had at least some kind of connection (however contrived and twisted) to the Bible, in many cases it directly contradicted what the Bible said or filled in areas where the Bible was silent with doctrine that violated the spirit of what it said.
Then a wonderful thing happened. Some guy invented a way to print many copies of texts, and within a few decades people who could read Latin or Greek had their own copy of the Bible to study for themselves. Soon, translations into the common languages of the people began to circulate. Priests, rulers, and literate peasants all over the continent discovered how far the church had departed from it's roots, and revolution inevitably followed. Maybe if you had taken the time to actually read and understand the New Testament, the falsity of those doctrines you mentioned would have been evident to you.
Currently some, but not all, Roman Catholics think the Pope speaks for God in certain situations (this only became official dogma in the 1800's btw), but every other Christian denomination does not believe that.
Funny how people tend to blame God for the evil other people do, but then deny God's involvement in their own actions. God gave man a free will, and for the most part He does not do things that take that away from us. Eventually the evil of mankind's selfishness will reach its culmination, and then God will bring an end to it. Feel free to attempt to take Him to court at that time...
I will hijack this thread no further...
did he not create man inherently evil? Is that not human nature? Is "bringing an end to it" not evil? Or just what we deserve?....cause that sounds like something a human would say.