You know, regardless of their devotion to Mary, nobody could love Jesus like my Catholic brothers and not be a Christian.
If anything, perhaps we “evangelicals” tend to over-de-emphasize the role of Jesus’ earthly family in his life, particularly that of His mother.
Mother of God? Perhaps I would rephrase that as “Mother of God’s Son”. But He was God incarnate, so, “Mother of God” is not a stretch.
I used to be very concerned about the Ishtar/Tammuz thing, and the similarities between that religion and Christianity.
But Satan is a masterful counterfeiter. What came first, God’s plan of Salvation through His Son’s Birth to a virgin, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, or Satan’s counterfeit Babylon religion?
What about Christmas vs. Saturnalia?
Again, a masterful ploy by Satan to remove the joy of celebration from the Christian.
Consider.
Jesus was crucified on the Passover when He was 33 1/2 years old. Passover occurs on the first full moon after the vernal equinox, sometime in March or April.
If Jesus was 33 1/2 in March or April, then He had to have been born in September or October.
Count backwards nine months from September/October, and you get December/January, which is when He wold have been conceived.
As a Christian, I believe that life starts at conception, therefore, the Advent of Jesus Christ is correctly celebrated in the December/January time frame.
God’s plan for Salvation, which planned also the dates of His advent, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, came long before the Roman feast of Saturnalia.
Now, there remain many doctrines of the Catholic church with which I disagree, but I’m not ready to call the Catholic Church the Whore of Babylon. Good grief!
Why all the different sects and “denominations”? I don’t know. But we are called to Unity, not to Division.
Read 1st Corinthians 1:10-15 and Ephesians chapter 4, the whole chapter.
Differences of opinion must not divide us. Even differences in practice. We can have spirited discussions of these things, but we must not divide over them.
The last thing we need now is acrimony among the brethren.
I'm still a bit troubled by that similarity, but it is, as you said, a masterful counterfeit, just like the Ishthat thing.
Odin may have hung from a tree, but even the story says that he did this for his own gain, not as a freely given sacrifice
From wikipeda
In Rúnatal, a section of the Hávamál, Odin is attributed with discovering the runes. In a sacrifice to himself, the highest of the gods, he was hung from the world tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nights, pierced by his own spear, in order to learn the wisdom that would give him power in the nine worlds.The counterfeit forgery is diabolical -- well it is from the devil.
The last thing we need now is acrimony among the brethren.
I agree. The more I thought about this article today, the angrier I got, because it is very obvious that the left is trying everything possible to divide us and sow mistrust.
You have been grossly misled. The “similarities” to pagan religions were invented by 19th and 20th century atheists looking to hurt Christianity.