How should we think about biblical sacrifices, Jimmy Aiken, right now?

Hello and welcome to focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for Living, Understanding, and Defending the

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It's a little bit weird in a way if you think of it from a modern perspective. Sometimes we don't but like why does the

God of the eternal God transcendent in every way? Why does he tell people like, okay here's what I want you to do to have a good relationship with me?

Go get yourself a lamb now bring the lamb to the temple and you know and kill the lamb and eat the lamb

What is this all about like Why did this ever even happen?

Why is this part of biblical history,

all this stuff about sacrifice?

Well, you start thinking about it, it's weird,

and if you start having weird thoughts,

you think, I need to ask Jimmy A Aiken so that's what we did. So Jimmy, I think for a modern person, the idea of particularly animal sacrifice is so

foreign to us that, you know, we even have to have court cases about whether religious groups can do animal sacrifices or not.

So I think I'd like to start by just asking you, why did God in the Hebrew scriptures get involved in the animal sacrifice business at all.

Well, one of the reasons that animal sacrifice seems strange to us today is because

we're a bunch of pampered moderns that don't do our own butchering.

To us, meat comes in packages from the store. It doesn't come from the animals that you personally keep

and then need to butcher when you want to eat meat. But this is a very unusual

situation in human history.

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