I see the mistakes are made by shutting down scriptures to man’s interpretation. (“The distortion is of our own making Thomas.”)
Yes – and I would suggest this is clearly evident when you sought to argue the Trinity with your mother (post #24):
1: “
... yet my reading of the New Testament found way more verses that indicated Jesus was not God.”
Your 'reading' might well cover a multitude of sins, LOL. So you found verses indicating that Jesus
was God, and verses indicating that Jesus
was not God, and you counted them up, took one from the other, and there's the answer? A decision about a Revealed text based purely on a material determination? That’s really neither a reasoned nor rational insightful, let alone spiritual, reading.
2: “
I ended up with 100’s of passages ...”
To support your assertion, so you discount everything else.
3: “
So armed with this undisputable evidence ... ”
The evidence is far from indisputable though, is it? Or it is, when you've discounted the rest. if you think it is, I would point you to about 2,000 years of informed discourse. The process you describe evidences flawed reasoning from the outset.
Had you allowed for the possibility that Jesus Christ is, indeed, the Incarnate God; that His is a Hypostatic Union of the Divine and human, then the contradictions can be resolved and one can understand why the Church believed, from very early on, that Christ overcame the world and sin and death, and that through Divine Love opened the way to everlasting life.
"God became man that man might come to God" the aphorism goes, from St Irenaeus of Lyon in the 2nd century on, famously via Athanasius of Alexandria. This was no theologian's flight of fancy, but founded on Scripture, in St John, in St St Paul: “Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Galatians 4:7) and St Peter (2 Peter 1:4).
I would think you saw that Baha’u’llah was offering just as Jesus had before Him, that it is Faith that enables true life and the lack of that Faith is death, even if one thinks they are alive, this also reflected in the Quran.
I see clearly there is more to Christ's offer than Baha'u'llah allows – partakers of the Divine Nature, not merely the exemplary 'attributes' of human nature evidenced in the lives of prophets, saints and sages.
That is the Quandary Thomas, if we reject a true Messenger, all the proof we use for that rejection, negates all the Messengers, as they are as One.
It seems to me your fail to see Jesus is more than a Messenger.
And your assertion that by rejecting one you reject all is an error of (metaphysical) attribution. At the level of the One, all is One; at the level of Forms, of the world, they are distinct and diverse. Adhering to one is neither a rejection nor a negation, it's an embrace. One must respond "with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind" (cf Luke 10:27).
