Ok, didn't realise you already came for a Catholic background. :) Well.... I'm not sure where you get that the church == Paul. My understanding was NT was the result of many eye-witnesses, take the gospels for example, 4 authors, right? Paul's letters play a major part that's true. Not sure where the pauper's religion comes from? Never heard that myself. There were rich and poor alike . Joseph of Arimathea was rich wasn't he? I don't see how you justify the claim that OT is "from the mouth of God" more than NT? As for God choosing not to act, what I always understood about that was that humans choosing to be good by their own free will was the ultimate goal, the "holy grail" so to speak. If God intervened when we did bad things then we wouldn't have free will. This must be extremely hard to take if you're in Ukraine right now getting bombed thinking "Come on God why aren't you stopping this". My understanding is, in the context of this life just being a "dress rehearsal" for what is to come after death, that it makes some kind of sense. I heard it said, that trying to work out what God is up to is for us like watching someone sewing and looking at all the messy threads on the underneath, with little clue what the end result will be. Someone could be making something amazing, but if all you ever see along the way is a mess of threads, you could question that they're making anything at all, then one day, there it is in all its glory. Thought experiment for you - would you be happier in a world where God kept intervening and stopping people being mean to each other? Would that make people be better? Would they have any way of learning to be better to each other if God always stepped in? Alternatively, is building a world one day, presumably not in this world. where humans all decide of their own free will to act justly and kindly to each other, a goal worthy of putting up with a lot of s** with along the way? Granted, if you're on the receiving end of evil in the meantime it must be extremely hard to take, but then we're told God shares that suffering and is present during it.... Basically, it seems to me Christianity throws up all manner of difficult almost impossible Qs but that to me doesn't negate it and I can't really see an alternative viewpoint without even more problems. All the best :)
Thanks for the conversation, but I can't really keep this going because of the format of HN. Feel free to PM me on reddit though (same username). I will leave you with this:
> I'm not sure where you get that the church == Paul
I meant more like, Paul is responsible for the shift from the Jewish bearing to the Gentile one. He preached to the Gentiles and made the religion palatable for them. He got into huge fights with the other Church founders about this, and was treated very harshly by the Jewish authorities who would beat him and kick him out of their towns.
Here is an excerpt from the well regarded 'The Rise of Christianity' by WHC Freund[0] (page 110):
"By 64, however, the new religious movement had taken root.
Without detracting from the work of Peter, John, and the other disciples in
the decade following the crucifixion, the credit belongs to Paul. Jesus was
indeed the very ground of his being, but Paul had never experienced Jesus’
ministry, and his interpretation of it gave Jesus’ message a new and unex¬
pected dimension. He transformed the proclamation of God’s kingdom to
“the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:24) into a world move¬
ment. Despite all handicaps, Paul judged precisely the prevailing mood of
very many fellow Dispersion Jews. The Galatians, as we have seen, re¬
ceived him with rapture (Gal. 4:14). On the mainland of Europe the Chris¬
tians of Philippi were devoted to him. He offered a religion which, though
basically Jewish, was stripped of the encumbrances of the Mosaic Law and
its Pharisaic interpretations, a religion that had sufficient in common with
Stoic ethics and the worship of the mystery cults to attract adherents on the
outer fringes of the synagogue and even beyond. The ideal of a community
in which there was neither bond nor free, Jew nor Greek, but which was
united through love in a Savior (cf. Gal. 5:6), and freed thereby from the
Law, the power of fate, and the malevolent astral lords of time, could also
become the ideal of many of the inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world.
The Savior whom Paul preached was not a savior god of current pagan
myth but a historical figure invested with deity."
