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To: Alex Murphy

I don't understand. What did they argue with? Obviously, if you adhere to Church dogma on the Immaculate Conception, the Blessed Virgin Mary would never have needed to be born again.


690 posted on 01/31/2007 7:06:52 AM PST by wagglebee ("We are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom." -- President Bush, 1/20/05)
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To: wagglebee

"Obviously, if you adhere to Church dogma on the Immaculate Conception, the Blessed Virgin Mary would never have needed to be born again."

Absolutely true.
But it does raise a thorny issue with which the early Church wrestled and was of divided mind about.
If Mary was conceived and born completely free of original sin, and never sinned thereafter, then she was also born free of the curse of Adam for that sin.

So, did she die?
WHY?
Why would a woman born in the state of Eve, with NO stain of original sin, and no personal sin, die? Death was the curse, the corruption which entered the flesh BECAUSE OF original sin. Mary didn't have it. Logically, she should have been as immortal as Adam and Eve were before the fall, because she was unfallen.

The Church struggled with this for a long time.
Some said she died and was assumed bodily into heaven.
Others said she didn't die, but slept and was assumed.

Death is a punishment, a curse by God, for the corruption of original sin. A sinless Mary cannot logically have been doomed to die. She did not bear the contamination that would cause the curse to operate.
Unless of course God went ahead and killed her anyways, to be consistent, because the curse is on the whole world that all flesh must die.
If that's so, had Jesus not been crucified, he would have had to grow old and die.
In spite of being sinless.
It's a strange curse that God laid upon the earth.

And it raises another question: why did the dinosaurs die?
They were before men. And yet they killed and were killed, and they all died. Physical death cannot have entered the world with Adam and Eve. It had to already have been there.
Whatever "the death" is, in Genesis, it must be spiritual.
And yet that's not what God said. God said "die".

It's a conundrum that really cannot be answered logically. Which is why we mustn't take Genesis literally or it damages faith.
Jesus said that the whole Old Testament meant love your neighbor as yourself, and love God above all. That's what GOD meant by it. Maybe we should condense all of that morass of history and writing into those two sentences and focus on them, because we end up in terrible bash traps if we go literal with Genesis.


702 posted on 01/31/2007 8:54:05 AM PST by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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