100 comments and growing. Sheesh. The latest from our friend Dick:
No more sacrifices are required.
To a degree, this is right. But the essence of Christianity is the imitation of Christ. And imitating the Lord involves embracing the notion that we give things away: possessions, time, love–and this is done not from a sense of investment, but a sense that we diminish so that the grace of Christ may increase.
Some fundamentalist friends tie themselves up in knots, focusing too much on the literal words. And they miss the deeper meaning.
Clearly, Max and Dick have that old thread bookmarked and keep coming back to it. But if you guys want to refresh your discussion here, feel free. Let me say it clearly: being a Christian certainly involves sacrifice.
Catholic Sensibility 
A clarification: It is NOT Catholic teaching that Christ continues to be crucified physically or die a physical death in heaven over and over again at the “Sacrifice of the Mass”.
Rather, each Mass participates in a supernatural way with the one, everlasting sacrifice of Christ. This is possible because of the hypostatic union of the two natures of Christ, who both came into history (chronological time) and dwells in eternity (kairotic time). The one sacrifice of Christ operates in both dimensions of time through the memorial/remembering (anamnesis) re-presentation of that sacrifice.
(Btw, this is an understanding that has roots in the Jewish understandings of Pesach, which Jesus celebrated in his life on this earth. The annual remembering of Pesach was and is considered to be a participation in the historical Exodus event (zikkaron is the key concept in Hebrew).)
I’ll skip the doctrinal citations. I doubt any of this is of use with Dick or Max, but it might help lurkers to avoid unnecessary confusion as the torrents flow forth. I am not here to argue the point, merely to offer a clarifying intervention for the confused who find it useful.
I think, Liam, that your excellent reply would fall on deaf ears. Fundamentalists (whether evangelical, atheist, or any other type) rarely are interested in dialogue; rather, their own hegemony.