so - not “complete support” - but “support when they do things I like, but only provisionally”
You’ve goine from “complete support for ANY group” to “I kinda empathize with these folks as long as they don’t do bad things” - which, other than the NRA (really?) ALL of them have.
So - in a thread about why 'bible must be taken literally" and that when a statement must be “X” - no interpretation allowed - your own statements must be interpreted liberally? This comes as no surprise - but you have complete control over the meaning and context of your own statements - yet, you choose not to be more fucking careful.
See - the reality is I ‘knew’ this is likely, possibly, maybe what you meant - but it’s NOT what you fucking said.
Maybe now - **TonySinclair **gets the point I was eventually headed for. It’s not despicable to challenge someone on thier posts - maybe I went to the farthest, violent extreme - but its what his post allowed.
Yeah, it’s fucking brilliant to compare a fucking casual MB post that somebody dashed off in a couple minutes, with the fucking Holy Scriptures that were edited and redacted over centuries, then fucking declared to be divinely inspired and inerrant by various fucking councils of scholars and theologians, and are claimed to be inerrant by the fucking heads of major denominations even fucking today.
Agreed. It’s also the reason some moderate and liberal Christians have spoken against Bibilotry - making the Bible an idol. The Bible isn’t God, it’s writing about God and to help understand God. Some more fundamentalist churches, we feel, make that mistake.
There is somewhat of a fine line there, I admit. Though I think, especially with the advent of the charismatic movement, that some of the heresy of Montanism is… well, far less heretical perhaps? Maybe.
Probably a decent deal of them. Though I don’t think following them is necessary to be validated a righteous person or ‘pure’.
I’m sure all of us user our rational choice process as part of determining what fits and what doesn’t. To what level, I can’t answer.
I think the mythopoetic nature of the 2 Creation stories (rather than a literal nature) has been affirmed by me due to what science has taught us, but what makes you think I don’t believe the Holy Spirit is active in scientific research? Interestingly enough I think it’s been asserted by many Christians even prior to Darwin that the Creation stories were more mythopoetic than historical - as when Darwin’s notions came out, the Catholic Church reacted by saying (basically), yeah, we got no problems with that - that could be how God did it (though they did affirm an actual Adam & Eve at the time and I think it’s officially in the Catechism).
Yes, we see the world through the prism of a perfect God, and read Scripture through that prism. You see the world through another prism. I, being a postmodern Christian, don’t think either of us can know the objective truth but can only view the world through our own prisms. The Christian part of my postmodern thought being that objective truth is only knowable to God and He offers it to us over time. You may not agree and I’m not even saying you have to. I respect your prism of viewing of the world - probably more than I respect the prism that some of my co-religionists (the fundies) do so.
Oh, and may y’all have a good All Saints Day! (whether you believe in it or not)
What if your rational choice process disagrees with what the HS is telling you?
Darwin and religion is interesting. In the first part of the 19th century a good deal of science was being done by ministers, since in England vicars with rich parishes had a lot of time on their hands. Their assumption was that the findings of science were going to support the Bible story, or the broad aspects of it. (That the earth was much older than 6,000 years was already well accepted.) The evangelicals were suspicious of this program.
The Catholic Church has no problems with evolution now, but I’m not sure about back then, and the C of E certainly did. The big problem with Darwin was that he showed that man was a product of evolution and not something specially created. This, at the time, was a big deal, and it discredited the ministers doing science movement.
Today the church has developed theistic evolution, where God invisibly directed evolution to create us, which is an unfalsifiable concept. But don’t confuse the situation today with the situation 150 years ago.
Well, Darwin’s Evolution of Species has never been on the prohibited list, nor was their any official dogmatic statements on Evolution:
Of course, more than a few Catholic authorities were likely not fans of the text, but they were always more concerned about evolution pertaining to humans. But it was always kind of a hovering area, where the Catholic Church decided not to speak authoritatively on the subject.
(as to you first question, why do you think that I don’t believe that the rational choice process may be part of the Holy Spirit’s work as well?)
What you’re missing here is the difference between journalism and evangelizing. You are - ironically - taking this as a literal report of an incident in Jesus’ life. But it isn’t - it’s a piece from a work written maybe fifty years after the man died, that is explicitly for the purpose of teaching and encouraging Christian devotion. The writer presumably chose that story to tell in order to convey a lesson about morality (in this case, that obeying the spirit of the law is more important than the letter). If a Jesus also talked about, say, the possibility of rain later that week, while at that dinner with the Pharisee, you wouldn’t expect Luke or Mark to record it, would you?
Trinopus - I just finished Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, which is an excellent general history of Christianity. Well worth reading.
According to the author’s bio, MacCulloch wrote a history of the Reformation, as well: The Reformation: A History. I haven’t read it, but it’s won a couple of awards. I imagine it’s worth checking out.
I’ll echo this. Fantastic book. MacCulloch is, IIRC, an atheist, but is fascinated with the history of religion. It’s a great overview on the entire history of Christianity - I learned a massive amount about the early church from it.
Well, heck no. Many sects have positions that absolutely contradict positions held by others.
On the other hand, there is also a lot of overlap, so it isn’t 40,000 completely different packages of beliefs. Also, many of them still respect those who hold different beliefs. For instance, “total immersion” baptism fans get along pretty well with “just moisten the top of the head” baptism fans. Each might say, “Well, the other guys are doing it wrong,” but most of them will still acknowledge that a real baptism has taken place. Jesus isn’t gonna kick anybody out of Heaven just because their baptism missed a spot.
(Like Thetis dipping Achilles by the heel…)
Probably not…but they might just claim that really wrong opinions weren’t actually guided by the Holy Spirit, but by Satanic deceit. There is a warning in the Bible about false preachers and false messiahs. Maybe the new guy who comes along, preaching “Baptism in colored sands” is guided by the Holy Spirit…or maybe by deceitful spirits.
One Biblical guideline: judge them by their fruits. If they build churches, grow in popularity, do charitable work, and attract good and decent people in large numbers…they’re likely worthwhile.
(This is one of the things that makes it very difficult for orthodox Christianity to condemn the Latter Day Saints: their “fruits” are very, very good! They’re an extremely populous sect, who do a lot of good in the world, and their individual members are, by and large, some of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet.)
I’m not sure either way. A Christian friend of mine is big into Speaking in Tongues, and into a personal relationship with Jesus. But what does that imply? If Jesus never says anything that contradicts orthodoxy, then what’s the point…but if Jesus does say something that contradicts orthodoxy, that’s edging dangerously close to Montanism.
(Some teach that, once the Bible was closed with The Revelation, there are no more personal revelations, and so anyone who has a personal visit from Jesus is being deceived. But, as you note, this is getting close to Bibliolatry."
Grin! I was in a really fun role-playing-gaming session with a group of my best friends! GURPS, playing trader-voyagers in a bronze-age setting, visiting new tribes of people along an unknown coastline and exchanging trade-goods with them. RPG for the highbrow (or pseudo-intellectuals.) Anyway, not just hack-and-slash!
You think? I got the sense that he was a committed Anglican, but intellectually honest enough to write an objective history.
I particularly enjoyed that he he spent as much time on the history of non-Western Christianities, like the Church of the East, or the Ethiopian Orthodox. He also briefly traced the rise of secular atheism in a non-judgmental way.
I’ve already mentioned that we have few clues to what Jesus really said, and especially not in conversation. In the context of this discussion, we were assuming Jesus was the source for this. And, if one thinks the NT and this passage in particular is inspired, it might as well have come from Jesus saying it.
The dietary laws were not invalidated by Jesus, but I assume they think that part was inspired also.
It hardly matters, since whether Jesus said it or Jesus inspired it, they could have given the message using a law which didn’t save lives. Mixed fabrics, perhaps. That’s a safe one.
It’s well known how the world reacted to Darwin’s Origin or Species after it was published in 1859, plenty of outrage from Protestants and Catholics, although some were willing to accept it. After the first edition, later editions had to put in the words Creator, and a few other parts. Many were not ready to accept what the book had to say about human origins.
Most are familiar with the movie Inherit the Wind in which Scopes is found guilty for violating the Butler Act which was passed in 1922 which effectively forbade teaching evolution in Tennessee. It wasn’t until 1967 before it was repealed.
The Catholic Church did speak. Half a century after the publication of Origin of Species Pope Leo XIII and the Pontifical Biblical Commission guided by their expert consultors made their decision in June of 1909. The literal meaning of Genesis 1-3 was still accepted, and Adam and Eve were real historical people, not symbolic. It wasn’t until 1948 the Commission met again and reversed their decision saying it was no longer necessary for them to teach it as historical after all.
Oh, it seems like you are right. I seem to recall the into to Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years him mentioning that he considers himself a “friend of Christianity”. It seems he went through a deist phrase when he was writing the above work, but it seems like it was due to the Anglican Church being anti-homosexual, but now has returned as a Deacon.