If you are referring to John XXIII, I couldn’t agree more. In my view, he’s by far the best Pope the Church has had in my lifetime. A truly great man and a truly great Pope.
There was a tongue in that cheek, btw.
For the rest though, it was not a useful hijack on my part and you can disregard my comments.
That’s an unfair categorization of what’s taken place between us. And not only was my reference relevant, it was also “apparently” relevant as well.
Here is the first point I wrote in this thread, verbatim:
You later replied:
To which I replied:
At that point, you replied:
In response, I replied with the comment that mentioned “intellectually dishonesty”, as we see from this reply:
I stand by that remark. I write “Christians in the U.S.” and later supply a reference that uses the phrase “American adults” instead, and over and over again you employ either nitpicking or intellectual dishonesty to argue that I’ve seriously misled readers.
Try that in any other topic and you’d have your ass handed to you on a plate.
Sure, if I had it to do over again now, I would be more careful in my phrasing. There’s even an error in my previous response that I would have edited if I had recognized my mistake in time. But as I insisted earlier, my larger point remains valid.
I have been unable to find Benedict’s own words on this, but not long ago the news was filled with reports that he had asserted that only Catholics will find salvation. Here are a couple of second-hand reports:
No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church? Pope Benedict
Benedict just telling truth on salvation
Any correction, Tom? I would like to read the Pope’s actual words.
Based on your source, it certainly seems I erred with that, but these are the data I used: Religious Bodies of the World with at Least 1 Million Adherents, which lists Catholics at the top with 1,100,000,000 members. Then I isolated just the Christian churches from the rest of that list for a rough total and added them up in Excel (which I may well have done improperly) and got: 398,610,771 as the number of non-Catholic Christians within churches/bodies with more than 1 meg members, which told me that Catholics represent the vast majority of Christians. Oh, well.
Maybe the above is a topic for a different thread?
I, too, would like to find anything that Pope Benedict has said on the topic, recently.
The Wikipedia article on Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, while pretty turgid reading, notes that the movement throughout the last hundred years, or so, has been away from the idea that someone has to be a participating member of the RCC to get into heaven and toward the idea that the church brings the message and the power of Jesus to the Earth, without which no one could be saved. The Church has not claimed that only Catholics are getting into heaven for quite a while and it even excommunicated Fr. Feeney of Boston who was making that claim in the late 1940s.
What Pope Benedict has been doing, both when he was in charge of the [del]Inquisition[/del] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and since his elevation to the papacy, has been to promote the idea that the RCC is the principal holder of the truths of Salvation. This is generally in opposition to the idea that all religions have equal merit and that the RCC is just one of the crowd. (While it is easy to see how that attitude can be insulting, it is also not difficult to see where someone promoting the RCC (particularly from the top of the hierarchy) would tend to hold that position.)
His most recent uproar-causing statement was the release of the document from his old Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith addressing the Unicity and Salvific Universality of the Church. The hoopla resulted from a sentence in the document that stated that the various Christian denominations other than the Orthodox are “not true churches.” Now, while the statement indicated a clearly tin ear on the part of its author and the pope, it does not actually say what many people thought it did. The statement that other denominations are not “churches” relies on the specific, technical meaning of the term as used in the theology of the sixteenth century that addresses the various categories of groups of believers. It does not claim that the believers of those denominations are damned. It does not claim that they are false believers. It simply asserts the belief of Benedict that the RCC (with a nod to the Orthodox) is primary.
It is easy to see how such a statement is insulting to everyone who thinks the RCC has lost its own way, (years ago), but it is not a declaration that only Catholics are saved.
How any of that, (even granting that the language would be seen as insulting by many people) got turned into “Outside the Church, No Salvation”–particularly as interpreted in a way that the RCC has not used for many years–I do not know.
Tom, I’ve moved this sub-discussion to: Re the RCC’s recent “responsa ad dubia”
I still don’t think you’re getting it. I’m not nitpicking over the geographical region (‘in the US’). I’m talking about the difference between the groups ‘Christian believers [in the US, if you like]’ and ‘American Adults’. Statistics that hold true for the set (American Adults) may not hold true for the subset (American Christian Believers). Sheesh.
Actually, since you’ve taken the trouble to explain your chain of reasoning, please allow me to do likewise.
This started off with your statement “the majority of Christians cannot even name the four Gospels” - the statement struck me as astonishing and preposterous - it didn’t ring true according to my experience, but rather than just say I thought it was ridiculous, I asked you to support it with a citation.
The citation you provided said “According to recent polls, most American adults cannot name one of the four Gospels”. Now leaving completely aside the more specific geographical definition, which I don’t think either of us considers to matter, there seemed to be a glaring error of composition - that is, you made a statement about a subset of people, then tried to support it with a citation about the containing superset.
When a couple of people pointed out this apparent disparity between your citation and your assertion, you interestingly responded that “All but a tiny percentage of Americans are believers “of the book”, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims” - which confused me even further - why would Jews and Muslims, if they are included in your statistic, even be expected to be able to name the four gospel writers? - This weirdness reinforced my impression that there was something awry with your application of the statistics.
From then on, right up until now, you seemed to continue to be under the impression that my query is with the geographical region described, which it isn’t and which fact I have tried several times to make clear. My query regards the composition of ‘American Adults’ - and whether statistics general to that superset, can be reliably expected to be represented in the subset ‘American Christian Believers’.
Sheesh in return. I got your point, all right. It was just that I believed then and I believe now that it is too nitpicking and pedantic to invalidate my larger argument, which I contend has prevailed. After all, the overwhelming majority of Americans are Christians, so what holds for the majority of American adults would very probably also hold for the majority of American Christians. I’m aware that I couldn’t get away with relying on that very probable correlation in a scientific journal, but here it’s a gimme. Especially given the history I related in my previous, long response to you.
Double-sheesh, in fact, since the history you related in your 04:01 AM post is inaccurate, or at least seriously misleading.
You’ll notice that I haven’t disagreed with the ‘larger argument’ that Christians are quite ignorant of their own religion.
And please, you’re going to have to show me where. I may be wrong, misinformed, even woefully stupid, but I swear to you I am not deliberately trying to mislead or be dishonest here. I don’t do that.
I believe that is a false claim because you are apparently taking my comment out of context. Apparently, I haven’t repeated this enough times for you. I repeat again:
When you issued your complaint, I replied:
The point being that I did NOT assert there what you just claimed I had in your quoted post. I contend that the second sentence, the one it seemed then you were complaining of and is the closest thing I wrote to you that you’re now complaining of, was another reference to American Christians in context, and while you’ve long ago made your point that my remarks wouldn’t pass muster with a social scientist on strict statistical grounds, in the end my reasoning – while not transparent until I elaborated later – is sufficiently sound enough to support my claims.
Now, I may have gotten sloppier when writing to others, but the correct history between us is the one I outlined late in page 3, not your newly revised history.
That is another misrepresentation. As I explained to the poster who actually tried to rebuff me on that point – which was not you – the context of that remark was the discussion regarding the the ability to list the Ten Commandments rather than the ability to name the four Gospels.
Your post has confused the issue rather than clarified it.
You keep on making insinuations that seem to be characterising me as dishonest. I’m not being dishonest. I’m about ready to give up now.
I get your main point, I even agree with it in principle.
That may have been your intent, but the plain fact is that you offered the Jews and Muslims response directly to a line of inquiry kifler made about the names of the four Gospel writers.
We may still be talking past each other, but apart from my earlier comments saying that you were either being overly nitpicking -or- being intellectually dishonest, my intent was not to characterize you as a liar but rather being inaccurate. I now explicitly retract any claim or insinuation that you were lying. But just for the record, someone of your obvious intelligence surely knows that there’s a substantial difference between dishonesty and intellectual dishonesty.
Well, it’s possible I had lost track of the detailed threading of the debate at that point, but I think you are being unfair by insinuating that I was aware that kifler was talking about the Gospels, seeing that when I explicitly replied to his complaint, I wrote:
So leaving the impression that I didn’t believe the argument at that point was over the Ten Commandments isn’t accurate.
I’ll admit to nitpicking. I’m certainly not here to argue any theological position, despite that being apparently expected of me (not by you, as far as I can remember) at points in this thread. I’m very often more interested in the structure and integrity of the debate than its content and for this reason, what seems trifling in the context of the point at large can occupy me quite intently. I’m sorry for all the tension this has caused.
BTW, I’m also sorry this has taken up so much of your thread ITR champion - if there’s anything left to discuss (or if you want to get a mod to close this one and restart the discussion anew or something), I promise to keep my nose out of it.
That was very gracious of you, Mangetout. Thank you for the discussion.
It’s an attitude more than anything. To reduce your level of ignorance you need to value knowledge and be prepared to accept new eveidence. Religion can foster ignorance by promoting dogma over debate, but this isn’t true of all faith groups or religious individuals.
You implied that atheists believe that the Big Bang “created the world” not preceded the Earth. Then you implied that atheists believe that “science has all the answers”. IANAA, but science-minded people will say that science does the best job of answering those questions that can be answered. And that enough evidence has been accumulated to assert that the Big Bang probably happened.