"the God of the Bible" (or "unbogging the IotD blog")

[Torrere]

As I understand it, the pre-Christian (maybe pre-Jewish?) roots of the faith in YHWH did require sacrifice. I suspect that the faithful were required to make sacrifices to be absolved of sins.

I talked about this with my landlord nearly a month ago, as he happens to have a Master's in Theology. He started studying as a devout Roman Catholic, and finished up as a fierce atheist.

The death of Christ was 'the greatest sacrifice that could ever be made'. Because Christ was sacrificed, the people of the faith no longer had to make sacrifices.

Bob thought that it was kinda wierd that, because God wanted to forgive us of our sins, he sacrificed his son so that he could forgive us of our sins.

(I also introduced him to the idea, found in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, that the religion amongst the tribes in the hills of Ethiopia. Not only is this were the language family (of Hebrew and Arabic) comes from, but supposedly they still have a tradition of vowelless G-Ds and a Y-H-W-H [and some other stuff that I can't remember].)