It’s weird. He studied Christian theology for 20 years, and yet he’s asking you to explain to him the basics of God’s speaking through Scripture and the Church. If he spent that whole 20 years ‘studying theology’ as a member of a Baptist Church I could perhaps understand it.
It does make you wonder why an alleged experienced Catholic is equating sola scriptura with basic Christianity.
Keep holy the Sabbath, for one. Is it ok to interpret it as not keeping holy the sabbath? To not do work on Sunday?
Well, clearly you could interpret the meaning of the word ‘work’. And you could say that picking up sticks in your garden is not work.
And you could say that some work is acceptable since other moral considerations are more important. Therefore, emergency and medical work is justified.
Jesus was criticized for working on the Sabbath.
Great example of a passage that’s not open to interpretation, there. 
Whatever, picking up sticks was a trivial example. Work in general. Picking up sticks is work for some, an a jolly good ole time for others, I’m sure. Might be even erotic for a select few.
What method do you all use to decide what is more likely fact and what is most likely fable?
How do you all qualify your beliefs and call them to knowledge?
Step - by - step
All human morality and ethics is based upon bullshit along with not diddly squat. The end.
Yes, but, more crucially, I believe this:
That the particular political framework that any of us might come to embody in our interactions with others from day to day is largely an existential fabrication/contraption rooted inter-subjectively in history, culture and personal experience. In other words, rather than in [as some argue] a narrative/agenda said to reflect [philosophically, epistemologically] the most rational/virtuous manner in which one can come to think, to feel to behave with or around others.
Also, that political frameworks come to clash “for all practical purposes” around conflicting goods. That’s the second part of my own personal dilemma here. Even if I can determine in essence Who I Am in moral/political conflicts with others, my arguments are no less based on the assumptions that I make about issues like abortion. Just as their own are. And my premises don’t make their premises go away anymore than their premises make mine go away.
Yes, but in a world sans God, few folks grapple with the implications of that as I do. Most embrace one or another rendition of “humanism”. They come to believe that mere mortals have the capacity to reason their way toward “natural rights”; and toward “enlightened” moral and political philosophies.
For myself however any capacity to accomplish this is then confronted with the profoundly ambiguous and inherently problematic nature of dasein and conflicting goods. There are no moral obligations that one can ascertain as a “serious philosopher”, only particular prejudices that come and go over the years.
From my frame of mind though this is no less rooted in historical and cultural contexts; and in the individual experiences that we have. And even to the extent God is deemed “personal”, one still comes into conflict with others, such that the manner in which they construe this personal God becomes a part of their moral and political agenda; such that, in turn, the manner in which they choose to behave on this side of the grave becomes the embodiment of what they imagine their fate to be on the other side of it.
Yet it is when I seek to probe this utterly crucial relationship existentially that many here will back off. In my view, they wish to keep this solely on a philosophical plane. As though with respect to moral conflicts, immortality and salvation – the relationship between them – they can just make the world that we live in – that we clash mightily in – go away.
And I’m just trying to prod them into expounding on these things existentially so that [perhaps] the rather glum [grim] conclusions that I have come to can begin to crumble in turn.
I visited the state capitol building and went to their library, fairly interesting. They had a nice collection of some very old books, one of which showed some laws for the colonies pre U.S.A.
One can see the conveyance of Christian morality inherent within the laws, which are often a reflection of “morality” or a general moral consensus, of some sort of the people.
Christianity the ultimate religious hypocrisy.
