I know exactly why I react the way I do, and I believe it is your intention that I do so, which is why our conversation is over. All of your bogus interest and phony argumentation is just to tie knots which become ever tighter so that others descend into your pit of self-pity and desperation. It’s over.
Now, this is particularly pathetic, Bob. You know, in my own hopelessly subjective opinion. You don’t really have a clue as to how to respond to the points I make. And this despite not being a fulminating fanatic objectivist pinhead like Urwrong, Pedro, Obsrvr and all the rest of them here.
That’s why it’s over. You simply have too much invested psychologically in your own comforting and consoling one true path. A path to this very own personal God of yours. A God that transcends the Old Testament itself. A God that the fundamentalists just don’t “get”.
Unless of course your wrong.
Unless of course I’m wrong.
God knows, right?
MagsJ wrote:
Jesus did call himself all three…
(In Philosophy there are some essential intellectual basic standard expectations, for example
How could I check that to see if it is true?
How could I verify these alleged facts?
Can I trust the accuracy of the data given the source from which they come?)
and when I asked "could you give me more details about your statement (another basic point in Philosophy) "Jesus never called himself God, or the Son Of God, but he did call himself The Son Of Man, ",
No response from you.
Perhaps you are not aware…Catholicism is so remote from anything resembling the Scriptures and rarely questioned or challenged that it has effortlessly changed and deleted parts of the Bible to give their Popes’ Supremacy.
Give me child until he is seven and I will give you the man. A Jesuit motto.
The Church (Catholic) has ever believed that the popes alone have the keys to salvation in Christ.
Moreover, she has always affirmed that in providing grace and truth, the papacy liberates, not enslaves.
It frees men from error and sin, and assists them in attaining a spiritual maturity, which greatly facilitates the continual choice of the good.
The papacy is thus absolutely essential to the Church, for under papal guidance the Christian man or woman progressively attains to his or her true end-the perfection of holiness and the unrestricted life of the children of God.
The audacity…
the Scriptures read
Jesus Himself says in John 14:16, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Him.”
Nietzsche is arguably most famous for his criticisms of religion and morality. If I were to write that he in fact was in favour of both religion and morality, I would be overloaded with quotes, extracts, passionate dissertations of how inaccurate my statement was. That is because they read Nietzsche,
The Scriptures have survived centuries and even millenia and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (which date back to 150-170 BC) contain parts of the Old Testament which testify the stories, places and people given in the history of the scriptures.
I am not interested in converting anyone. My only interest is correcting blatantly obvious errors, as one would do in any philosophical subject, and to demystify this grovelling to the so called earthly powers of the Catholic Church
There is definitely a tendency amongst some people to bow to authority, not just in the church, but also elsewhere. The interesting thing about it is the fact that people of opposing opinions do it. It really just depends on what people consider authority to be. To some it is their religious leader, to others the latest prominent scientist, or a guru, a populist leader, and to some it is even the latest conspiracy theorist that appears of local radio. It seems so diverse, but the behaviour is in fact very similar. You could spend your life debunking and demystifying without changing anything.
What I think is important is accepting people who have a passion for something or someone, a bit like meeting a friend in a pub who declares that they are passionately in love with someone. Of course, if the conversation is restricted to their going on about how perfect their passion is, your relationship with this person will depend on how long you are prepared to listen. If you politely stand up and leave, saying that you are happy for them, you might be accused of jealousy and all sorts of other things. It seems to be the situation we are in at present.
Years ago, when ILP started up, we could have conversations in which we learned from each other. I might cringe at the posts I made in 2003, but they showed where we were at that point in time. I have learnt over time that it is no use opposing people, only in stating my own position on issues. We didn’t have as many trolls back then, but there were discussions that were sometimes bitter. It was learning that people passions are just what they are that helped me relax a little.
My passion is the enquiry into what it means to be human, and I let myself be guided by Christian values. I see in them a “power”, a force for good, which is quite paradoxical in some ways, and sometimes I think that the Mystics were those who understood this best. Their tendency to use poetry and romantic ideas to portray their passion and to find the mystery of the sacred akin to an elusive lover, is something that appeals to my poetic heart. It invigorates me. It isn’t orthodox maybe, but like so many who have considered themselves Christian, it is my passion.
This doesn’t stop me asking others what their passion is, rather than going on like that friend in a pub, boring everybody with their portrayal of the perfect lover who is, unfortunately, in reality just another human being. And we must accept that, in the end, our passions are as human as we are. They are only our conceptions of what we conceive to be perfect. What is behind the mystery of our existence will perhaps one day be clear, until then, we just have our own images, like faces in a clouded mirror.
In John 14:6 Jesus does not say he’s God. If you think that’s what it means, that’s your interpretation, one of many.
All I can do here is to ask those who believe in the God of Moses and Abraham, “how important it is to establish whether Jesus Christ Himself is in fact intertwined in this God’s Script.” Is He or is He not an integral component of this particular religious denomination? Whether he was God on Earth or not would seem to pale next to how one construes Him to either be or not to be their own personal savior on Judgment Day.
Ask a Christian, ask a Jew, ask a Muslim. What of Judgment Day for each of them?
Or, for the God of Moses and Abrahm, does it really come down merely to what your “interpretation” is on Judgment Day. You may be utterly wrong about the existence of Jesus Christ or Muhammad. But God is still willing to grant you immortality and salvation if you can, what, convince Him that you still deserve it?
felix dakat wrote
Obviously you did not read my post. just skimmed through.
Let me explain.
was in response to the
“The Church has ever believed that the popes alone have the keys to salvation in Christ”.
Catholic Culture, The Authority of the Pope by Jeffrey A. Mirus, Ph.D.
What a ridiculous post! …you’ve never been able to help yourself though, have you.
You offered no real evidence to support your counter-claim, but I’ll be happy to accept real evidence.
Converting anyone from what, to what? You seem to think to know my religious and/or spiritual beliefs and leanings, and are trying to school me on that basis… a basis that is none of your concern or within your range of understanding. #ItsComplicated
Yeah I still don’t see how you got from the Jesus is God proposition to your criticism of the Catholic Church. But the latter is what you seem to be interested in and the former is what caught my interest. So if you have nothing further on that, I’m done. Since I never was a Roman Catholic, it’s of peripheral interest to me.
I don’t get how what I claimed relates to the excerpt from that book.
Perhaps Shield took a ‘leap of faith’, with that addition to the argument! lol
…but the simple reality is, that Shield is always chomping at the (argument) bit, to get at me.
MagsJ wrote:
You said it and I asked you for proof and you have weaseled your way out of answering.
Is this your normal practice? Glibly post untruths and when challenged you respond with attack.
Preface… to the Eucharistic Prayer
- Priest: Lift up your hearts.
- People: We lift them up to the Lord.
Of course you are a catholic.
You give me the impression as someone who hasn’t ever read any of the arguments against the catholic church
No… I just couldn’t be bothered to respond to you, and I still see no valid counter-claim coming from you.
I was born into the Roman Catholic faith, and? tho the non-religious quote excerpts from the bible too, and what has that issue got to do with my claim re. what Jesus called himself? Debate that, or move on!
Oh…
MagsJ wrote:
Ha…the grandiosity of a narcissist
Stop it, you’re making me blush… 
Or maybe one of the ones? How many ones are there? Anybody counting?
I’d guess it’s 1 per million people, who have the Holy Spirit, like that.
John 3:8 says "The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” So the Spirit is impossible to track empircally to support or falsify your “guess”.
What is this now about Jesus not saying he’s the Son of God??
Ain’t you folks even read the Bible?
Just open the Gospel of John anywhere, in it Jesus practically doesn’t say anything besides he’s the Son of God.
And so on and on and on. The dude in this gospel is like a sort of Terminator, never straying an inch from his course even in his words. Hardheaded sonuvabitch.
Jesus’s personality is significantly different in the Gospel of John than it is in the synoptic Gospels Matthew Mark and Luke. The genealogies and divine birth narratives in Matthew and Luke not withstanding, Jesus seems more human in the synoptics gospels than he does in John. In the synoptics he typically communicates in parables or aphorisms whereas in John’s gospel he speaks in long theological discourses with himself at the center. In John’s gospel it is sometimes not possible to distinguish the difference between Jesus’s monologues and the commentary of the narrator. The Gospel of John can be comprehended as a theological reflection on the significance Jesus as the Logos of God. As such it has fewer probable historical underpinnings than the other Gospels. Curiously the geographical references to Judea are quite historically accurate suggesting that the first century author (John?) was more familiar with the place then in the other Gospels. He was probably a Judean, whereas the others were not.