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My first post in the last thread was from the last page of the thread before, and it feels like I'm carrying on some kind of tradition to post it again: The Belgian had posted it, and it had made me sad because my own parish church (which I have not seen since June) was built in the 1980s and really, really looks it. Now I'm sad because I can't go to church - I mean, the archbishop has allowed churches to open, the governor has prohibited cities from putting any restrictions at all on churches, so I could go, but it'd be an unwise choice. 
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Jan 13, 2021 15:01
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Hiro Protagonist posted:How do people in this thread deal with the constructed nature of Christianity? So much of what Christians take for granted theologically is the result of centuries of discussion and argument from people who based their thoughts on their assumptions. While it was originally focused entirely on Jewish issues and identity, it quickly focused on Roman theological concerns and developed alongside that culture's assumptions, both logical and cosmic. If the Trinity and Jesus' relationship to God are both developed from a worldview we no longer agree with, can they still be valid? Respectfully, you're begging the question. "How do people in this thread deal with Christianity being all made up?" "No." (Or "Mu." or "n/a" or "NAN", or "divide by cucumber error", take your pick.) "If Jesus's relationship to God is developed from a worldview we no longer agree with, is that still a valid theological concept?" Well gosh, it would be interesting to discuss whether the doctrine of Jesus's relationship to God was developed from a worldview, or whether we agree with that worldview today, or whether the development was itself a disagreement with the worldview, and I think we could probably have an interesting conversation about whether theological concepts can be valid or invalid, too, but I can't answer that question either. Many people in this thread think that we're all approaching God in our own ways, and that God is merely pleased that we are trying to approach, and none of us are entirely correct or entirely wrong, &c. &c. I do not; I think we are only able to approach God because God first approached us, and correspondingly there are some doctrines that are more correct than others. When verifying that "mu" is the response I wanted to your questions, I came across this quote of Isaac Asimov's: "When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." To me, the same principle holds for religion; right now we "see indistinctly, as in a mirror", right now we only "know partially", and it's only when we're in Heaven (and, God willing, we'll all be there together) that we'll "know fully, as [we are] fully known", but that doesn't mean that every blurry glimpse of the truth is equally blurry.
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Jan 15, 2021 04:29
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:"The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous thread availeth much." Honestly that's something I never expected to find on Something Awful, but found anyway: this thread prays for each other, encourages each other, and is just bizarrely wholesome. I love y'all 
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Jan 16, 2021 14:36
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Josef bugman posted:I suppose so but I feel like you need to believe in a divinity or that the universe makes a kind of sense in order to have "faith" I guess. When Christians say we struggle with our faith, usually we mean it as a synecdoche for some or all of the.... experience of being religious, for lack of a better word; the belief part is so important to Christianity that it's how we describe religions in general, even though other religions might not have a statement of belief as their central element. A Calvinist who struggles with his faith might be "backsliding" more than he thinks he should, or he might be feeling unwelcome in his church or bible study. A Catholic might be struggling with habitual sins, or looking at his archbishop and going "that is a successor to the Apostles???" So yes, you need to have a belief about the universe that you hold confidently - "Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen," as the letter to the Hebrews would have it - to "have faith", but you can be part of a "faith community" and "have a faith" without that. Hegel and I (and others) have described this in the thread in the past: that being Catholic (or Orthodox) is about what you do. Believing is one of the things that you do, it's an action, a choice, not an abstract mental agreement. Pascal, after relating his famous Wager, has the non-believer to whom he's talking (that part of the Pensees is written as a dialogue) say (my paraphrase, from memory), "You've convinced me, but I can't do it; I'm not the kind of person who can believe." And Pascal's response is (again paraphrased), "Fine, use holy water, go to Mass, say the rosary." In other words, if you (generic you) want to be a Catholic, but you don't feel like you believe any of the important stuff, what you should do is act like a Catholic acts, and either the internal belief part will follow, or you'll have demonstrated (to yourself, if nobody else) that you wanted it to follow.
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Jan 18, 2021 14:29
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Siivola posted:If a sinner refuses Christ because they want to go to hell, what kind of hell will they get? The boring ol' "nothing good because of the complete absence of God, which is exactly what they asked for" Hell. "I want to go to Hell because I am really, really bad" and "I don't need to worship God, because I am just that awesome" are, from a Catholic perspective, two sides of the sin of pride. Just like there's presumption, "I know this is wrong, but God will forgive me, so it's ok", before an action, there's despair afterwards: "what I did was so very, very bad that God will never forgive me", and they're both setting one's own judgement above God's. Now, just like somebody whose physical appetite for food is damaged in some way such that they compulsively overeat isn't culpable for gluttony, and somebody who's experiencing severe stress after a traumatic experience and lashes out angrily at the slightest provocation isn't culpable for wrath, somebody who suffers from depression isn't culpable for that despair, at least not fully. C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, had a hypothetical where one person being basically recognized as a "good person" might not really have done anything that meritorious, because they had a "good digestion" and a good upbringing, whereas a person with a bad digestion and a poor upbringing deciding, one day, to refrain from one act of petty cruelty, might have accomplished a mighty deed of virtue, and that can be extended to basically all the sins out there. (I am very convinced that Hell exists, in part because it makes our choices in this life meaningful, but primarily because we were created from nothing - everything that was created, was created from nothing - so when we put created things, especially our own selves, above God, we're choosing nothing rather than He Who Is. When we die, we get what we asked for: either an experience of perfect existence with no unrealized potential, nothing taken away or obscured (that is, seeing the One whose constant action is be-ing, face to face), or experiencing nothing at all except our own self and its hollowness. Some of us will still be clinging to some nothingness when we die, so (metaphorically) our fingers will have to be pried away from the nothingness; that's Purgatory, and if you don't think "prying fingers off something" sufficiently describes the suffering that some saints have associated with Purgatory, you've never pried a toddler's fingers off anything.)
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Jan 22, 2021 16:29
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Glutes Are Great posted:Hey Cy, you just confused the hell out of me by saying in the old thread that I still had bookmarked that you'd link to the new one and then failed to actually paste the link. A visitor! Welcome! Would you like some coffee? Maybe a donut? Maybe two donuts? What brings you to St. Religionthread's today? 
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Jan 23, 2021 01:31
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To be fair, I think "dedicating [one's] life to being poor and annoying" is a pretty good description of a lot of religious orders!
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Jan 23, 2021 01:54
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Fritz the Horse posted:I see a lot of people posting about their political leanings. As I'm sure you know as a longtime reader in these threads, things sometimes get a little heated around political/doctrinal issues but mostly the thread is chill. I think the key is this is not a debate thread, we're not going to change each other's minds on abortion/right-to-life and such but we can learn from the discussion. Personally I thought the IVF discussion last fall was interesting and not something I'd really given much thought previous to then. Sometimes I don't contribute to a conversation because I'm generally-speaking socially conservative, but not because I think the thread will tar and feather me, more because, generally speaking, I figure nobody wants to hear "well sure you all think this and do that, but the Church teaches such-and-such" unprompted. It's not noteworthy, funny, or helpful. Among the things I appreciate about the thread: I don't have to qualify what I mean by "Catholic Church" most of the time. (I have posted places where I needed to explicitly disclaim that I meant the worldwide organization in full, unimpaired communion with the Pope, because otherwise if I said "the Catholic Church does not ordain women," people would point out that the Anglicans did and the Anglicans thought they were part of the Catholic Church so how dare I &c. &c.)
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Jan 24, 2021 01:38
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Nessus posted:While I absolutely understand and respect if you don't want to do this, what often interests me is hearing about how people understand and engage with their beliefs and positions rather than just wanting them live-searched and quoted. This doesn't mean "tell all the little ways you're heterodox" or anything, either. And when there's an opportunity to do that and I think it'll be interesting and funny, I'm (perhaps overzealously) delighted to do so. A couple threads ago I used the hypothetical, "Suppose someone comes in asking for suggestions for grape juice and rice wafers for a communion service. If they're not Catholic, I will happily invest some time looking at gourmet juice sites. If they are, I will happily encourage them never to suggest using invalid matter for a communion service ever again, and delightedly advise them to forget they ever had such an idea." A lot of the time folks are talking about their wonderful rice wafers at their wonderful $random_Protestant_denomination gathering and I am happy to see their happiness but don't really have anything to add. White Coke posted:An argument I've see pop up is: religious experiences can be caused by drugs like LSD, or by medical conditions like schizophrenia, so therefore any and all religious phenomena are explicable by these means and therefore "untrue". "People with epilepsy sometimes smell something burning prior to having a seizure, therefore every time anyone smells something burning, it's explicable by brain misfires." "But sometimes things catch fire and people smell it." "You can't prove they're not hallucinating the smell!"
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Jan 27, 2021 16:00
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Nessus posted:I would say the load-bearing word in Bruenig's tweets would be "editors." In fact, arguably, it might obligate you to advocate that the permaban be maintained, because it was a near occasion of sin for him to have access to it.
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Feb 11, 2021 02:28
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It's a pretty solid principle, IMO. Such-and-such a person does such-and-such a thing while in a position of power - maybe they're a doctor, maybe they're a senator, maybe they own a website, whatever - and it is a bad thing, and so the person loses access to the power. Forgiveness not only does not require restoring the power, it may require not doing so, because if we forgive, we don't want further harm to come to the person we're forgiving, and putting them in the position of constantly being tempted to repeat their wrongdoing is not kind of us!
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Feb 11, 2021 02:51
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I mean, I don't like the M:tG cards with pentagrams and dripping blood and stuff, but so far I haven't encountered a card with unpleasant-to-me-personally artwork that I actually want to use that doesn't have a less-unpleasant reprint. Being aware that the intent is to shock and dismay and blaspheme doesn't make it not make me feel uneasy.  (I do think it's hilarious that D&D's healing magic works the way it does because Gary Gygax was a Jehovah's Witness - that is, healing being exclusively clerical wasn't just to differentiate Priests from Mages.)
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Feb 24, 2021 19:57
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StrixNebulosa posted:To be more elaborate: I think the overall teachings of Jesus are good. Be kind to each other. Take no poo poo from authorities. Have faith in a higher power that there is a greater good, a greater purpose. Be a moral person. These are universal and worth living by. However, I just...don't have that faith in a higher power. I would like to believe there's something better out there, but I can't for whatever reason - and at this point I'm okay with that. God may or may not exist, but it's worthwhile to be good anyways. Just about any religion with a moral code is going to have at least some of that moral code expressible as "be good to each other". Maybe that's because God's law is written on our hearts, maybe it's because communities hold together better when they direct their members to treat each other well, but either way I don't think it's accurate to say that anything like that sums up the teachings of Jesus. I mean, to quote the conversation I was having with ThePopeOfFun in the discord, "Jesus isn't nice, and he routinely causes crowds to want to kill him," to which I replied, "and it doesn't seem like he's anti-authority so much as the authorities didn't like him," and, really, if you think about it, somebody who presents himself as the fulfillment of all the prophets the local religion has had, who sends his followers absolutely destitute into villages expecting them to get fed and housed for free while they teach, who draws big crowds without unambiguously affiliating himself with any kind of authority is, at the minimum, somebody to keep a very close eye on, and if you're the governor of a fractious foreign province you might decide just to attach the guy to a tall pole so it's easier to keep an eye on him. Put another way, I think everybody (in this thread, in the world, every everybody) should be a practicing Catholic, but, failing that, I'd rather somebody say, "We worship the best parts of humanity as exemplified by the romantic notion of Satan put forth by the likes of Milton," than "I follow the teachings of Jesus, but only the ones that everyone from every religion also accepts," because at least then there's a conversation to have, I guess? CarpenterWalrus posted:Absolutely! The ritual magic is really what sets Church of Satan apart from even other Satanic groups like Temple of Satan. This question really gets at the core of what ritual is: the good ones break down that anxious insincerity. Even though I'm not a Catholic, I find Mass to be really emotionally affective. Same thing with the whipped-up fervor I used to feel when I would go to Evangelical revivals. It's all meant to focus everyone's spiritual "energy," for lack of a better term, to achieve a singular purpose. Ritual often comes before belief, I find, and is an excellent vehicle for fostering that belief. Without getting too much in the weeds, the primary difference between "Right-Hand" ritual like Catholic mass, and "Left-Hand" ritual like the Satanic Black Mass, the target of that focused belief is what or whom you're trying to commune with. For "Right-Hand" religions, you're trying to become more closely aligned with the religious ideal, or god-head; God, Jesus, Mohammed, etc. For "Left-Hand" religions, you're trying to improve what is already at the core of yourself; trying to become the god-head. This is why the trappings of the robes, incense, music, candles, altar, and the naked lady on the altar are so important--not in and of themselves, but because they make it easier to buy into the whole scenario and forget how doofy it is. Like this, this is the kind of conversation I mean. HEY GUNS and I have been insisting for at least four iterations of this thread that ritual isn't the seasoning you sprinkle on top of your religious life (where some people like more and some people like less and some people just leave it off) but is instead absolutely central to it, and along comes somebody who is definitely not Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, saying, "Ritual often comes before belief, I find, and is an excellent vehicle for fostering that belief," which is a pretty good translation of "lex orandi, lex credendi," in my opinion.
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Feb 25, 2021 20:13
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CarpenterWalrus posted:I consider the pomp and circumstance of Catholic ritual to be its greatest strength. I, personally, have known a few agnostics who've full-on converted to Catholicism because of the appeal of the rituals. I think if Catholic leadership leaned into its aesthetic, it could attract a lot of Millennials/ Gen Z who're looking to slot into that spiritual infrastructure. I think you're right about the attraction potential, and I also think that experiencing the Church's rituals sincerely and regularly really could produce sincere conversion- someone who's open to experiencing numinous experiences, who experiences them in a Catholic context, is likely to find it easier to make the choice to accept the Church's teachings. (Really, to accept the Church's teaching authority, more than the teachings specifically.) But many, many people my generation and younger (I'm an older Millennial) will find a lot of things the Church teaches to be very hard to accept, and that's hard for a potential convert, because converts don't often see how hard cradle Catholics find it. (Or how much cradle Catholics just ignore teachings they find hard, whether that's "capital punishment is unnecessary to protect a community and is in practice discriminatory, unjust, and cruel besides, so Catholics must not support it," "marriage is only possible between a man and a woman," or "slaughtering a goat and examining its entrails for omens is unacceptable in every circumstance.") It also upsets some people that punching a priest can result in an automatic excommunication, whereas being a slumlord, turning someone away for a vaccine because they're not a legal resident, or denying someone necessary medical treatment do not.
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Feb 26, 2021 15:40
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Zazz Razzamatazz posted:Counterpoint to that is that the mainline protestant churches have fully embraced all of that and are still having declining attendance numbers. But not with extravagant ritual, and definitely not in a liturgical language, so it's possible they could poach potential converts with high-church positions on sacraments, liturgy, and the like. Have a coffee shop in your church atrium because everyone's hungry after fasting three hours! Sell incense sticks 'guaranteed' to make your home altar smell like church!
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Feb 26, 2021 19:21
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So... baked potatoes? No bacon, no cheese, no butter, no sour cream, of course; I know there's Hindus who avoid onion and garlic but I don't know if chives count there.
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Mar 8, 2021 17:12
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Slimy Hog posted:That's kinda my point though, since Passover ends at some point too. If we're saying fasting/abstention periods count then there is no food that is outside a religion's rules. So we know that all animal products are banned for sure, along with onions and garlic, and potentially beans (the Pythagoreans didn't eat them and there might still be an extant religion that doesn't); wheat, barley, spelt, and rye would have to not be "new grain" (this isn't related to abstention periods but to when in the year the grain was planted); any plants would have to have been verified to be free of insects, and plants that can't be so verified would be ruled out. I think we're going to be serving rice and potatoes at our hypothetical ecumenical lunch.
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Mar 9, 2021 02:37
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Keromaru5 posted:I'm not sure about manipulation, but it is basically trying to dare God into something. It's like, yeah, Jesus says you'll be able to handle snakes, though he also, when tempted by the devil to jump off a ledge so the angels will catch him, told him that you shouldn't put the Lord to the test. Beyond the obvious issues with putting the Lord your God to the test, your predecessor (who literally did pre-decease you!) obviously trusted the Lord's promises, because he handled snakes (right up until his faith failed him or whatever), right? Are you not Which is probably prelest, but I can totally imagine some guy's
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Mar 17, 2021 00:27
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CrypticFox posted:I have a somewhat odd question. In 1 Corinthians 7:18 Paul writes that people who are already circumcised should not attempt to become "uncircumcised" or "remove the evidence of his circumcision," without elaborating. Isn't circumcision irreversible? How would "uncircumcision" be accomplished? IIRC one of the reasons Jews were discouraged from Greek athletic events is that the athletes performed naked and thus Jewish athletes would be tempted to disguise their circumcisions, but assuming I am recalling correctly, the source I read didn't go into any greater detail. Wikipedia says: quote:At the neonatal stage, the inner preputial epithelium is still linked with the surface of the glans.[49] The mitzvah is executed only when this epithelium is either removed, or permanently peeled back to uncover the glans.[50] On medical circumcisions performed by surgeons, the epithelium is removed along with the foreskin,[51] to prevent post operative penile adhesion and its complications.[52] However, on ritual circumcisions performed by a mohel, the epithelium is most commonly peeled off only after the foreskin has been amputated. This procedure is called priah (Hebrew: פריעה), which means: 'uncovering'. The main goal of "priah" (also known as "bris periah"), is to remove as much of the inner layer of the foreskin as possible and prevent the movement of the shaft skin, what creates the look and function of what is known as a "low and tight" circumcision.[13]
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Mar 29, 2021 01:22
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Nth Doctor posted:Christ is risen indeed! Because he was younger and faster, not like the old creaky fisherman Peter (who was probably only three or four years older, but details), and yet he was polite enough to wait, look at all his
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Apr 4, 2021 14:38
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:Really just wish christians would embrace skillful means like buddhists do when this topic comes up I keep forgetting to ask: what does that sentence mean? I know all the words in it, but not what it means put together. (Much like I understood the words in the Protestant phrase "stand upon the word" but not what it meant.)
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Apr 12, 2021 17:16
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White Coke posted:There’s a difference between saying that Easter has clearly pagan elements as practiced, and claiming that the entire holiday is derived from Germanic paganism, when most Christians don’t even call it Easter but Pascha or some kind of variation. Anyone trying to de-emphasize something that clearly draws on Christianity’s origins in Judaism should be challenged, especially when they’re trying to impugn Nordic-Aryan characteristics on the religion where there aren’t. That, and sometimes what's "obviously" pagan origins isn't. Catholics use candles! Sure, and before electric or gas lighting how would you illuminate a building? And incense! Sure, and so did the Jews. And they celebrate the spring equinox! Except Eostre was almost-certainly not honored at the equinox, because as far as we can tell from the Venerable Bede, the people who would have honored Eostre celebrated full moons, not equinoxes or even the solstice. Well well well what about the Easter Bunny???? Eostre was even more certainly not associated with hares or rabbits, for the very good reason that neither were wild on the island of Great Britain until the 12th century. Okay fine but Easter comes from Eostre! Sure does, and while we're at it I have a funny story to tell you about Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday... So, like, I get the idea of saying "sure, fine, keep lighting a bonfire, but now when you do it think about Christ, our Light", that makes sense, and I guess "skillful means" could cover "oh, that story you have about that one god is actually about St. Such-and-such, who really liked Jesus, did you know that?" but when we're looking back at the past, saying "wow our ancestors were smart to co-opt that" (or wow, those Christians were evil to co-opt that, whatever) when that thing didn't actually get 'borrowed' by Christians at all just makes the person saying that look foolish at best. (At worst, it strengthens the argument of the specific sort of Protestant who thinks Catholicism comes from Babylon and devil worship.) And, for the record, all of what I know about Eostre comes from someone who is personally interested in reconstructing paganism as it was practiced on the island of Great Britain; the reason he cares whether or not hiding colored eggs was a pagan practice is because he cares about what pagan practices were, not what the Victorians thought they were, and definitely not what anyone interested in "pure Aryan religion" thinks they were.
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Apr 13, 2021 02:32
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Lutha Mahtin posted:this is also not true. it is completely possible for an overview-style text about christianity to be both (a) written from a particular school of theology, and (b) fair and accessible to a newcomer I'm unsure that this is true if one's goal is "in general I want to learn about Christianity". Like, you can definitely get a good understanding of, I don't know, Oneness Pentecostalism, from a text narrowly focused on that, but you're unlikely to figure out what about that school of theology is actually unique to it, and what it shares with other formulations of Christianity. This seems like it would be true with any school of theology that's in reaction to, or sees itself as a correction of, some denomination's generally held beliefs. Nessus posted:My impression had always been that "God the Father" was being assigned a male gender status more or less arbitrarily or perhaps in some counterpoint to Mary, while Jesus was himself a historical person who was male. (The Holy Spirit, who knows what's up with that guy.) Not exactly arbitrarily. God the Father is Jesus's father rather than mother because Jesus's mom is Mary, yes, but the family nature of the Trinity existed before anything (including "before") was created; Father-Son-and-Holy-Spirit is who God actively is/has been/will be being. It isn't purely metaphorical like God as shepherd, fortress, vine, or the like, and it's not functional like creator or sanctifier are. (Before creation, God was not yet the creator; before there were people to make holy, God was not yet the sanctifier.)
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Apr 14, 2021 02:05
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Nessus posted:From God's perspective, was not the Creation and the existence of people to sanctify something that had already happened? Or does God exist in some kind of second-level linear time while all of us knuckleheads live in a first-level linear time that is a unified eternity from God's perspective? God is completely outside of time, God is timeless, time doesn't affect God because it's a created thing and things don't affect God. God doesn't exist in a different kind of time because God doesn't exist, God simply is. The angels and those humans who are in Heaven experience "aeviternity" - they have a past and a future, so they're not eternal or unchanging, but they share in God's timelessness. That's why Heaven can't get boring, because it's not ten thousand years' worth of singing praises, it's just... singing praises, constantly in the now. It's also why a million people can ask St. Jude for something in the same second, relative to someone stationary on Earth, but he can perceive those requests: he doesn't need time to hear them or time to consider them, because he participates in God's timelessness. There's a saint who, while alive, prayed constantly for her brother, who had committed suicide, and after some number of years, was told that because she had prayed for twenty years, her brother had repented of his sin in the moment between doing whatever it was that killed him and actually dying of it. That's the kind of... participating? experiencing? enjoying? timelessness that those already in Heaven have(? are?) all the time. I don't know whether those in Hell experience time like we do or not. I have spent literally half an hour trying to write this paragraph. I think they participate in God's time-less-ness (i.e. they have aeviternity) in the same way that, by continuing to exist, they participate in God's is-more-ness. (I just invented "ismoreness", as far as I know. If I'd invented it half an hour ago I might not have had to write and rewrite this.)
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Apr 14, 2021 15:11
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HopperUK posted:It's like trying to talk about what happened 'before' the Big Bang. That isn't even a question it makes sense to ask because time was created at that moment also so there isn't anything 'before' it any more than there's anything north of the North Pole. But our human experience is utterly tied up in the linear perception of time so we can't even get our heads round it. Right. One of the books I read, and I wish I knew which one, said that people think of God in basically four different ways: Level 1: "God is literally an old guy in a special place." Level 2: "Well obviously God isn't literally a guy (old or otherwise), and I can't literally walk or fly to that place (because of its specialness), but God is like a guy in a place." Level 3: "All guys are like God, to a greater or lesser extent, and all places are like Heaven, to a greater or lesser extent, but God doesn't know things or have things or be in places, God just is." Level 4: {People who have experienced God directly. You'll notice there's no quotation marks.}
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Apr 14, 2021 15:37
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Lutha Mahtin posted:the fact that you don't keep up with modern theology doesn't make something outside of the mainstream. and regarding female language for god, try uh opening the bible sometime Leaving aside any question of validity, correctness, or liceity, a book describing "how [we can] rediscover the feminine God within the Christian tradition" is describing a non-typical process for the average Christian alive today, never mind the Christians alive before us. Not being in the mainstream of theological thought does not make something bad. A Protestant should not take "that's a novel approach to theology" as an insult! That said, one of the reviews to the book on Amazon is quote:This should be taught in every theology course. It's not "bash the guys" feminism. It shows other dimensions of the "white bearded male and his long brown haired son" God. Not better or worse, but more. As far as "try uh opening the bible sometime" goes, we can go around all day, right? This is why Catholics think we need the Pope to be the final arbiter of what Catholics ought to believe (and in turn why he has to be unable to err when doing that arbitration), it's why it matters to the Eastern Orthodox whether a theological opinion is common or uncommon, new or ancient; it is not possible to say "the Bible says, and therefore," authoritatively for literally anything believed by any denomination of Christianity. Someone can point to God as a nurturer, or point out, as my Women and the Hebrew Bible class did in college, that "El Shaddai" has been suggested to mean "the God with/of/having breasts", or quote Luke 13:34; someone else can point out that Jesus only says he wants to gather Jerusalem's children like a hen does, that "sophia" and "sapientia" just happen to be grammatically feminine, and that that grammatical distinction doesn't mean anything about gender any more than "socks" being animate in Plains Cree while "shoes" is inanimate suggests that socks are actually alive. (https://plainscree.atlas-ling.ca/grammar/words/nouns/gender-animate-and-inanimate/ is my source here; I was searching for animate/inanimate grammatical gender.) Bar Ran Dun posted:Our words and symbols are constructed tools. When we assert that they are God's words, we put the end and means of humans from a particular context in the place of God's ends and means. We privilege a male and Greek way of thinking from a particular context. I'm not saying to not think in that way, I mean I do for a large chunk of how I think. We should recognize that it wasn't the only way to think and that its symbols aren't the only symbols we can use to talk about God. I mean, as far as "those symbols aren't the only ones", sure, if someone wants to use different pronouns or nouns or verbs or whatever in eir own private prayer, that's not really my business. If a Protestant denomination decides to change its liturgy, or a Protestant decides to pointedly say "Mother" instead of "Father" when eir congregation is reciting the Lord's Prayer, again, that's not my business, except of course that the hypothetical person is being rude. (I know a specific person who pointedly refused to use any male pronouns for God while praying in a church in the midst of a congregation, and I know that this person did that because it happened several times while I was standing right there, so this isn't a strawman!) When I care is a) when someone proposes altering the Catholic Church's communal prayers b) when someone proposes altering the Catholic Church's lectionary c) when it's a question of "what does the Catholic Church actually teach on such-and-such a topic". Like, we know from several iterations of this thread that the Catholic Church opposes hepatomancy. If someone wants to talk about how deeply meaningful they find the examination of sheep livers, how kind and charitable it is to provide free lamb chops for the poor, that's fine, as long as they don't suggest that Catholics actually may practice hepatomancy.
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Apr 14, 2021 16:55
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Lutha Mahtin posted:bud, the bible uses feminine language to describe god and aspects of god in several places. that's what im talking about. im not talking about sola scriptura or the pope or anything zonohedron posted:As far as "try uh opening the bible sometime" goes, we can go around all day, right? Someone can point to God as a nurturer, or point out, as my Women and the Hebrew Bible class did in college, that "El Shaddai" has been suggested to mean "the God with/of/having breasts", or quote Luke 13:34; someone else can point out that Jesus only says he wants to gather Jerusalem's children like a hen does, that "sophia" and "sapientia" just happen to be grammatically feminine, and that that grammatical distinction doesn't mean anything about gender any more than "socks" being animate in Plains Cree while "shoes" is inanimate suggests that socks are actually alive.
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Apr 14, 2021 17:40
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Bar Ran Dun posted:How does God reveal God to us? My first answer to that question is by the event of Jesus as the Christ. My second answer is by God’s reason, wisdom, and love in all of the rest of us. quote:All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
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Apr 14, 2021 18:41
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Bar Ran Dun posted:We use familial words to talk about our relationship with God. Something I’ve always remembered is the assertion that when we talk about God with symbols we are also saying something about the symbol. If we use the symbol King to talk about Jesus we are also asserting something about Kings. So when we use familial terms to talk about God we end up implying things about our relationships within our actual families. Wouldn't that also suggest that avoiding specific terms implies things, as well? I know that the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd uses that as an approach to children because "father" is so potentially fraught, for example.
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Apr 15, 2021 00:35
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NikkolasKing posted:No, I meant more that people should read the holy texts themselves because how else can you have faith? How can you know "I am Christian" unless you can read what Christianity is all about? The Gospels are not there just for a privileged few, they're three to inform everyone of the life of Jesus Christ. Shouldn't the Word of God be available to any soul who wants it? I am Christian because I was baptized into Christ's death, I worship with Christ's holy, catholic, apostolic Church, and I believe the doctrines that that Church teaches, because it was revealed to her by God, who cannot deceive or be deceived. The Gospels are trustworthy because the Church produced them and tells me I can trust them; they aren't there for a privileged few, which is why I hear (am required to hear) a section of the Gospels every week, and I could, if I were sufficiently devoted, hear one every day. Faith isn't about knowledge, it isn't about the intellect, it's an action, a thing you do.
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Apr 27, 2021 02:00
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NikkolasKing posted:I just thought it meant the The Bible or specifically the parts of The Bible where Jesus speaks. If I can't read, but I hear what my own Lord said every Sunday when I worship with His Church, and I see art depicting scenes from the Scriptures that my Lord gave His Church, I'm not having anything denied to me. If all books are hand-copied, and I can't afford a copy of my own, my lack of a personal Bible isn't about societal control, it's about money. Moreover, it is a very recent idea to think that a person should just be able to pick up the Bible and be their own interpreter; you read a passage, or have it read to you, and then you interact with your own church community about what it means, and ideally this is a community in communion with the bishops who are the successors of the apostles selected by Christ. (Protestants eunt domus) yeah yeah it's the Message I want to quote it as a story posted:God’s angel spoke to Philip: “At noon today I want you to walk over to that desolate road that goes from Jerusalem down to Gaza.” He got up and went. He met an Ethiopian eunuch coming down the road. The eunuch had been on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was returning to Ethiopia, where he was minister in charge of all the finances of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. He was riding in a chariot and reading the prophet Isaiah.
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Apr 27, 2021 14:45
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NikkolasKing posted:And how do you know the Church, or even just your local priest, isn't full of poo poo and lying to you if you can't confirm anything they say or do on your own? If I don't trust what my priest is saying, I can ask his bishop. If I don't trust my bishop, I can ask other bishops. That's how I confirm what they're saying, not by reading a passage and saying "but I think it means this  ". In fact if I don't know if a book is copied correctly, I do the same thing; I don't decide based on whether I like the words!Edit to answer your edit: quote:I imagine anybody in the English-speaking world hears Bible quotes brought up semi-regularly to support lovely, lovely arguments. As Christians, you probably notice and take offense to this more than most.. But how would you know Evangelical rear end in a top hat A is making up stuff or taking it out of context unless you could red The Bible yourself? zonohedron fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Apr 27, 2021 |
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Apr 27, 2021 15:25
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NikkolasKing posted:It's not about accuracy per se, it's about interpretation or emphasis. Those with power use that power and medieval clergy tended to have a lot of power. They would thus interpret the Bible in ways that favored their privilege. The Bible has to be interpreted, just like Philip had to interpret it for the Ethiopian. Ultimately I have to trust that Christ instituted a Church with the authority to teach in His name, and that since this Church used that teaching authority to give me the Bible in the first place, I can also rely on the Church to tell me what it means. It isn't a system of "Pastor Bob reads the Bible for you, and tells you what it means, and if you don't like it, see what Pastor Joe says, but don't look at it yourself," because Fr. Robert and Fr. Joseph should both be interpreting it the way that Bp. Patrick tells them to, and Bp. Patrick should be telling them to interpret it the way that all the other bishops do - and by all I mean all, all the bishops since the Apostles, not just all the ones who happen to be alive right now. For the Eastern Orthodox this is where it stops; for Catholics (both Eastern and Latin) the Pope is the final arbiter if there isn't consensus among "all the bishops always". That's why Pope Pius IX could declare that Mary was preserved from sin from the first moment of her conception, even though Thomas Aquinas (among many others!) taught otherwise - it's his job to be the final vote. Conversely, Pope John Paul II did not have to be the final vote on a discussion of who may be ordained; he merely said that "the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents". (This is more or less the only kind of thing that the Pope would be doing, in an Eastern Orthodox view - announcing "yep there's consensus" rather than saying "since there's not consensus, I say such-and-such".) Deteriorata posted:Of course. There are still illiterate people around who are also good, faithful Christians. Here I would disagree and say both that faith is an action and that our actions are critical to our salvation - God doesn't declare us saved and then we should want to act like it, God infuses us with holiness and then we have to cooperate. So of course we should want to know God as well as we can, and know the Scriptures as well as we can, and understand what God's Church teaches about Him to the greatest degree that we can, because that's what we do when we love someone - we get to know them! On the other hand, you can know a lot about someone and not love them.
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Apr 27, 2021 19:19
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NikkolasKing posted:That is harsh yes and I apologize. But a lot (most?) people back then explicitly didn't have a choice so of course they can't be at fault. But once more going back to my initial musings, this sort of separates us Moderns, or at least me, from people back then. I just don't understand supporting something without knowing as much as you can about it. You're confusing being a Christian with being a member of a political party, or a social organization, or the like, I think. You don't support the Church like you would one of those groups; you're just part of it. It's kind of like saying to a child that you don't understand why they haven't renounced their citizenship until they understand more about the country they're a citizen of. It's also not a matter of how much the people around us know, because most people I know aren't theologians, and someone having read every single verse of every single book of the Bible wouldn't mean they necessarily know more about Jesus than someone who's never read a word of anything.
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Apr 28, 2021 01:30
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NikkolasKing posted:I don't support capital punishment but I'd sooner support it than believing in Hell. Because, as humans, we have limits and we have to operate within those limits. Politics is thus a matter of limits and being practical with how lovely life in this world is. Religion is by is very nature a higher order activity to help us overcome the shittiness of the world. So you're okay with someone supporting capital punishment, because you recognize that politics is about making compromises and sometimes you gotta let the government kill some people if that's what it takes to make other people feel safer, but you're not okay with someone believing that some people would, if given the choice, permanently reject God in favor of worshipping only themselves, because....  Basically you're describing religion as something like... an exercise routine? Like, it's better for you if you get 30 minutes of aerobic exercise a day, but even once a week is good, but some people just don't feel like it, and whatever, it's their health? And you shouldn't decide that your exercise routine is nine hundred jumping jacks every morning at six am, that's excessive and weird. On the other hand, for a lot of us, religion is more about being who God is calling us to be, it's a direct response to a direct request, "be holy as I am holy," and so while obviously we gotta know who this person telling us to be holy is, so we can better do the thing he's saying, reading the seventy-three books that his Church recognizes as inspired by him is just part of that, and not everybody's going to be able to do that.
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Apr 28, 2021 15:38
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Deteriorata posted:Faith is not a purely intellectual enterprise. You cannot learn or reason your way into faith. Or to quote John Henry Newman, in a letter he wrote to a friend: quote:The Catholic doctrine concerning faith and reason is this, that reason proves that Catholicism ought to be believed, and that in that form it comes before the Will, which accepts it or rejects it, as moved by grace or not. Reason does not prove that Catholicism is true, as it proves that mathematical conclusions are true, e.g., but it proves that there is a case for it so strong that we see we ought to accept it. There may be difficulties which we cannot answer, but still we see on the whole that grounds are sufficient for conviction. This is not the same thing as conviction. If conviction were unavoidable, we might be said to be forced to believe, as we are forced to mathematical conclusions--but while there is enough evidence for conviction, whether we will be convinced or not, rests with ourselves--This is what the priest means, when he is first asked -If a man has not evidence enough to subdue his reason, what is to make him believe?' and then answers 'His will.' and this is just our trial--and one man rejects what another accepts--On the contrary, were we forced to believe, as we are forced to admit that two sides of a triangle are greater than the third, there would be no trial of our affections, nothing morally right in believing, or wrong in not believing. I think most of y'all non-Catholics could reasonably substitute y'all's own denominations and/or religions as appropriate, though some Protestants would suggest that reason can't prove anything until grace acts on it, rather than reason proving just fine but the will needing grace to accept.
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Apr 28, 2021 16:32
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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:In my opinion no religious or scientific explanation of the genesis of the universe that has been provided is completely satisfactory. All explanations eventually run into the problem of explaining of how of a thing came into being from nothing. There is no difference I can see between saying that the universe was always been here or that a particular deity has always been here. I really don't understand why people might say the former is foolish but the latter is just common sense. The difference is in whether the universe or the deity has existence or is its existence. Thomas Aquinas didn't think it was possible to philosophically prove that the universe hadn't always existed, and the only reason his proofs assume that it was created is because God revealed that it was. God doesn't have existence, and never came into being; God simply is. The universe is contingent and composed of many parts, so it needed to have gotten its existence from somewhere, which is what requires an entity who doesn't require things. I know there's a couple people who've posted in the thread whose conception of God is basically "the universe as a whole, rather than any of its individual parts", and for them the question's even simpler: the source-of-all-existence and the-place-where-everything-that-exists-does-its-existing are just the same.
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May 14, 2021 19:51
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mycophobia posted:Saying God "is" is the same thing as saying He exists, i.e. it's nonsense. We're trying to talk about an entity that is by definition the source of everything, literally everything, including time and space and existence and reality. He is outside of all of these things and therefore it is impossible to talk non-metaphorically about God, or at least God the Father, because we cannot even imagine anything without time, space, etc. We (well, Catholics) can say "God is" without it being nonsensical, because God said that "I Am Who Is" was his name. God's constant action is be-ing; what God does is be, and he be-s in a way we can't, because our existence is not only conditional, it's constantly supplied by God by God's continual be-ing. (Someday I will invent a conlang where talking about this makes sense.)
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May 14, 2021 20:10
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Nessus posted:What if God created another universe which had no connection with ours, other than a shared creator? Or other universes after the end or permanent stasis of this one? That'd be cool, and if, God willing, I reach Heaven and suddenly "know fully, as I am fully known", I'll get to find out all about it 
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May 15, 2021 14:18
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 04:16 |
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Jesus has building instructions for everyone, says my six-year-old: "sand is the worst"
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May 18, 2021 14:21
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