"....reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle..." (September 26, 1796) And John Adams, who said....
"Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
I guess my thinking was right. I'm sure Washington's and Adams' was. Of course, it's not improbable that some people have read these and realized that, to fundamentally change America, people would have to start to mock God and His followers, using terms like "weak people who need a crutch," "religious zealots," doing things like prohibiting Franklin Graham from praying at the Pentagon, and other things we've all heard to make God's followers look ridiculous. What do you think? Do you think we can continue as we have, prosperous, good, giving, caring people, without the tenets of Christian faith, like the 10 Commandments?
I don't.
When secularists whine about Christians, they don't mean the millions who pray and still go to church or just plain live honest, productive, faithful lives which bring blessings to America...they bring up abortion killers and nuts who act in the name of Christianity but couldn't be farther from the Truth.......we need to set examples in our communities and show real Christian values and also to pray for revival in America.........the 'down side' of Christianity, even if it's all NOT TRUE, is one has lived a happier,
Z
364 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 364 of 364Trinitarians believe that there is not one being or person, as you claim, but three persons in one godhead. By contrast, nontrinitarianism in Oneness Pentecostalism holds that God is only one person who manifests himself in different ways. As Wikipedia says, “They believe that Jesus was ‘Son’ only when he became flesh on earth, but was the Father prior to his being made human. They refer to the Father as the ‘Spirit’ and the Son as the ‘Flesh’. Oneness Pentecostals reject the Trinity doctrine as pagan and unscriptural” — your private ding-a-ling impression of theology notwithstanding, Blemish.
‘Trinitarian’ and ‘nontrinitarian’ are not interchangeable terms. They mean different things.
Blemish: Except Oneness Pentecostals do not characterize trinitarians as adhering to a pagan concept…
The Church is accused of adopting pagan doctrines, invented by the Egyptians and adapted to Christian thinking by means of Greek philosophy. As evidence of this, critics of the doctrine of the Trinity point to the widely acknowledged synthesis of Christianity with Platonic philosophy, which is evident in Trinitarian formulas that appeared by the end of the third century, thus allowing an essentially pagan idea to be imposed on the Church, beginning with the Constantinian period. Nontrinitarians assert that Catholics must have recognized the pagan roots of the Trinity, because the allegation of borrowing was raised by some disputants when the Nicene doctrine was being formalized and adopted by the bishops.
As Wikipedia notes, “Many nontrinitarians have long contended that the doctrine of the Trinity is a prime example of Christianity borrowing from Indo-European pagan sources. According to them, very early in the Church's history a simpler idea of God was lost and the incomprehensible doctrine of the Trinity took its place due to the Church's accommodation of pagan ideas … Those who argue for a pagan basis note that as far back as Babylonia, the worship of pagan gods grouped in threes, or triads, was common,”
Nonetheless, all Christian sects, whatever their differences may be, are united by a belief in Jesus as redeemer who died for man’s sins. Consequently, no scholarly history of Christianity or of man’s religions excommunicates, as you misguidedly do, the Catholic Church, the original church, from the big tent of Christianity.
Don’t worry, Blemish: Your remorseless rudeness pathetically trying to prove your superiority I take for what it is — a sociopathic penchant for bullying. Because you don’t hide that from view, I underline it for all to see. Yet I know you are not a bully by choice.
Indeed, it is paradoxical that the same Internet that enables Christians to spread their love around the globe also empowers bullies defending weak arguments, who frantically attempt to cow opponents while cowering behind the security of their computer monitors.
BOOM!
Exactly. As long as PissBong continues to undermine his feigned desire for honest and respectful discussion by unjustifiably refusing to admit that he's an imbecile, we're stuck with watching him catalogue his difficulties with reading comprehension on every thread he participates in.
Indeed, it is paradoxical that the same Internet that enables Christians to spread their love around the globe also empowers bullies defending weak arguments, who frantically attempt to cow opponents while cowering behind the security of their computer monitors.
Hey don't tell me tell your mirror, Stewart Smalley.
I'm sorry I made you punch your monitor in frustration before realizing you can't get to me.
Hey, Blemish, your compulsive un-Christian bullying behavior and mendacity do not make me angry — they signal your inability to reason and engender my pity for you. For, having no rational arguments in defense of your weak position insisting that Catholicism is not a Christian sect, you must depend more and more on repetitious ad hominem attacks on me, lowering the level of discourse as a result.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, the truth is, as the origin of the Trinity doctrine shows, virtually all Christian sects have some traditional pagan accretions. Singling out Catholicism for ostracism from your ding-a-ling mock-up of Christianity’s big tent is arbitrary and untenable.
Hey Psi Bond - let us know when Beamish lowers the discourse enough for it to hit you atop your pointy head.
Cupid and Psyche
Caesar and Cleopatra
Abelard and Heloise
Romeo and Juliet
Tristan und Isolde
Elsa und Lohengrin
Red Riding Hood and the Wolf
Lucy and Ricky
And now Pissbong and Blemish carrying on the great tradition of tragic, ill-fated love affairs.
Appreciatively,
~ FT
Hey, anonymous, don’t freak out or get discombobulated.
To put it into lingo you will understand — ding-a-ling!
In a contest of ideas, it is bullies who get hurt.
So, seeing the rational case for your ding-a-ling assertion blow up and go boom, Blemish, you are understandably reduced to seeking sanctuary in a lower level of discourse — i.e., in more of your pitiable usual gibberish about imbecility.
As you point out above, Blemish, and amply illustrate yourself, Christians often fail to live up to Christian principles.
Fauxthinker: … And now Pissbong and Blemish carrying on the great tradition of tragic, ill-fated love affairs.
Au contraire, Fauxthinker, it’s a ménage à trois.
Where did I see the case for my arguments destroyed, PissBong? All we've seen is you diligently constructing strawmen misrepresentations of my arguments from your lack of reading comprehension skills, and even your misinterpretations have come to confuse you.
Even handicapping you with my easily defensible realization that all leftists are incapable of rational thought, you still impress upon me that I've vastly overestimated your intellect when I tactfully attempt to get you to admit that you're an imbecile.
Notable in this direction is your bizarre concoction that "living up to Christian principles" on my part should have me overlooking your imbecility because pointing it out has you fuming about not being able to physically assault people on the internet.
Ironically, it is your wholesale ignorance of what Christian principles actually are that fortifies your self-creating impasse in this discussion. As long as you're babbling on in ignorance of the history, theology, and ecclesiology of the Catholic religion and the Christian religion, you will continue to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of your own unfamiliarity with the subject matter.
You're not going to convince me that you're not an imbecile, PissBong. You've put too much work into establishing the veracity of that observation.
But, could you at least make an effort to demonstrate you know at least something about what you're talking about in regards to Christianity and Catholicism's incompatible theologies and ecclesiologies?
Free Thinke,
I'd much rather be debating an intelligent leftist or a four-sided triangle, whichever miraculously comes along first.
Foam as you will, Blemish, you don’t fool a rational person. Making things up about me, pretending I can’t know what Christian virtue is, promulgating disingenuousness on theological doctrine, claiming lack of reading comprehension skills, and your other repetitious infantile deceptions and silly straw man arguments scornful of honest debate do not amount to a hill of blemished beans on the blogosphere.
‘Christianity’ is an umbrella term for all sects that worship Jesus as God and redeemer; it is not a subjective measure of your tolerance for Christian sects different than yours. In other words, Blemish, the world does not revolve around you,or your wildly biased judgments.
I haven't made up anything about you, PissBong. I even acknowledge the detail that you're an imbecile under the delusion that you're not an imbecile.
Your lack of reading comprehension skills have served to create strawmen of my points you wish to assail and me to defend rather than address my actual arguments, which is clear enough indication that you conceded defeat. Your gratuitous displays of ignorance on the subject of Christian doctrine and theology make honest dialogue with you almost as impossible as your failure to acknowledge your imbecility.
You're too stupid to even realize that you're stupid. That's rather sad.
You have wholly fabricated all your argumentative, infantile, haughty, entirely unsubstantiated, albeit repetitive, straw men offered as points.. In fact, Blemish, you’re too mendacious to ever confess your mendacity. It seems you will never learn that your deception circumscribed by juvenile posturing is not a respectable substitute for honest debate. Sadly, you are much too self-intoxicated to understand any of that. You’re too much full of yourself to realize there really isn’t much to you. Sad.
In truth, ‘Christianity’ is a collective term, not a term of endorsement. Hence, Catholicism is a sect of Christianity, regardless of whether you and a few other online like-minded extremists are willing to concede as much. For it is not dependant on a particular individual’s assent to specific doctrines and theology. Similarly, existentialism is a philosophical movement that includes both the ideas of a Danish clergyman and a French atheist.
Are your posts not showing up, PissBong? I can see them on my end of the internet, and you do have a history of spitefully reposting your posts removed by the blog administrators. I don't think you can claim the evidence of your imbecility is unsubstantiated when you've been such a fine custodian and producer of it in deed and action.
Please, be serious. You're an imbecile. Undeniably imbecilic.
I'll address your attempt to recover lost territory:
In truth, ‘Christianity’ is a collective term, not a term of endorsement. Hence, Catholicism is a sect of Christianity, regardless of whether you and a few other online like-minded extremists are willing to concede as much. For it is not dependant on a particular individual’s assent to specific doctrines and theology. Similarly, existentialism is a philosophical movement that includes both the ideas of a Danish clergyman and a French atheist.
It is true that "Christianity" is a collective term, or an even better qualifier - "Christian" is a category.
One the one end of this argument you've got an organization claiming legacy and lineage from a man who was never, ever "bishop of Rome" who's actual legact and lineage organizationally comes from the empire that put Peter to death when he did come to Rome. On the other side of this argument you've got Christians wary of biblical warnings of false prophets, idolaters, anti-Christs, and people Jesus will turn away at the throne of judgement claiming He never knew them, despite their claims of being "Christian."
Thus, "Christian" means something specific, and theologically speaking, means something specific to God's judgement.
Seeing the religion of Catholicism's 4th Century origins begin to fulfill all the marks of decidedly non-Christian and anti-Christian profiles described in the writings of 1st Century Christians that the religion of Catholicism put to death under a different stage name is quite an exploration of theology and ecclesiology that I don't think you are equipped to participate in.
You'll simply have to waste my time on something else you're equally uneducated about. This topic is done.
Blemish: Please, be serious. You're an imbecile. Undeniably imbecilic.
You be serious, Blemish, instead of being laughable. Jesus would not say such a thing. Nor would a devout Christian. He would not self-righteously persist in ruthless personal attacks and name-calling, as you do, that he couldn’t honestly substantiate.
It is true that "Christianity" is a collective term, or an even better qualifier - "Christian" is a category.
‘Christianity’ is a collective term, and the descriptive adjective ‘Christian’ denotes a classification. The widely understood qualification for membership in that classification is worship of Jesus as God and redeemer. You are doggedly seeking to narrow it to those churches that doctrinally reject the apostolic succession, which excludes not only the Catholic Church, but also the Eastern Orthodox Church, which you haven’t said you excommunicate from yourself-satisfying private classification system. Such a manipulated use of an internecine ecclesiological issue of primacy does not serve a valid purpose of classification in the wider world; it serves a radical purpose of endorsement in support of an agenda aggressively promoted by a few crank crusaders. In a similar vein, some hardline rightwingers deny that Islam is a religion.
There are numerous Christian sects, and the number is growing. Is it the job of self-appointed ‘Christian thought police’ to judge whether other pious folks are the Christians they believe themselves to be? I humbly think Christians should learn to live in peace among themselves, instead of denouncing each other as false prophets, thereby perpetuating the schisms and lethal divisiveness of centuries past. For, although many claim they do, no one knows God’s judgment. No one should act as if he does — something you are pretending, not humbly, to do, Blemish.
This topic is done.
Your approach to the topic is undone. Never has this topic been honestly addressed by you, Blemish.
Please, be serious. You're an imbecile. Undeniably imbecilic.
You be serious, Blemish, instead of being laughable. Jesus would not say such a thing. Nor would a devout Christian. He would not self-righteously persist in ruthless personal attacks and name-calling, as you do, that he couldn’t honestly substantiate.
Considering the Jesus I'm familiar with wasn't timid at all about driving money-changers out of a militarily guarded Temple with a horsewhip, I don't find it unreasonable that he'd consider an imbecile to be an imbecile.
The evidence of your imbecility is substantiated and self-substantiated by every post you make. Be seious. This isn't even questionable, or about your theologically infantile misconceptions of some sort of non-biblical "hippy Jesus."
Please, PissBong, at least make an attempt to conceal how stupid you are, as a change of pace.
There are numerous Christian sects, and the number is growing. Is it the job of self-appointed ‘Christian thought police’ to judge whether other pious folks are the Christians they believe themselves to be? I humbly think Christians should learn to live in peace among themselves, instead of denouncing each other as false prophets, thereby perpetuating the schisms and lethal divisiveness of centuries past. For, although many claim they do, no one knows God’s judgment. No one should act as if he does — something you are pretending, not humbly, to do, Blemish.
Apostolic succession doctrine is not entirely biblically indefensible in itself, leaving claims of such to be tested by history and ecclesiology. The religion of Catholicism's claims to apostolic sucession from Peter as "bishop of Rome" are on their face FLAT OUT FALSE as Peter was never a "bishop of Rome" and when he finally went there he was executed by the polytheistic proto-Catholics that ruled there. The various churches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity's claims of apostolic succession are at least defensible as traceable back to congregations founded by other apostles (Mark, Bartholomew, etc.)or subsequently lead by bishops appointed by them. Their claims to apostolic succession CAN BE VERIFIED by history. My argument focuses on the obvious falseness of Catholicism's claim to Peter as historic and ecclesiologic "bishop of Rome," a position he never held (nor could have, from his presence miles and miles away among congregations in Jerusalem and Babylon); along with Catholicism's theological differences with Christianity. Theological differences such as the naming of pagan deities as "saints" and even the hubristically appointed "Christian thought police" authority of Catholicism's throwback "divine Roman emeperor" doctrine contained in the idea of the Pope speaking infallibly ex cathedra as Christ's proxy replacement on Earth ("Vicar of Christ") upon the "throne of Peter," who as I mentioned had no position of authority in the proto-Catholic religion and government that put him to death when he historically travelled to Rome.
If the religion of Catholicism claims that it has "Christian authority" along with its theologically syncretized adoption of deities from other religions due to an apostolic succession from Peter (which it does claim precisely that) and history and ecclesiology so quite plainly demonstrate that this claim to Peter is inherently and unabashedly false, then obviously Catholicism and Christianity are two different religions, one built of false claims and blasphemous hubris, the other based on Christian theology.
The doctrine of apostolic succession itself is not the problem here. The religion of Catholicism's false claim of apostolic succession from Peter is, along with their other non-Christian rituals, dogmas, and practices.
The only thing Christianity and Catholicism have in common is that they are both religions with independently derived theologies.
Roman Catholicism: Christian church that has been the decisive spiritual force in the history of Western civilization. Along with Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism, it is one of the three major branches of Christianity.
— Encyclopædia Britannica
Blemish: Considering the Jesus I'm familiar with wasn't timid at all about driving money-changers out of a militarily guarded Temple with a horsewhip, I don't find it unreasonable that he'd consider an imbecile to be an imbecile.
Considering your penchant for distortion, Blemish, I guessed correctly that you’d say that. Bullies, on the strength of this incident, take Jesus as a model for rudeness and arrogance, but most Christians take him as an exemplar of kindness, humility, and love. He considered the money-changers in th temple to be wicked — not imbecilic, for they, anticipating targeted marketing, knew where the traffic was.
Instead of letting Jesus into your life, as the faithful urge one to do, you project your personality onto Jesus. Most Christians would find it unreasonable that he'd consider repeatedly calling someone an imbecile who wouldn’t agree with his ideas.
The evidence of your imbecility is substantiated and self-substantiated by every post you make. Be seious [seiously?]. This isn't even questionable, or about your theologically infantile misconceptions of some sort of non-biblical "hippy Jesus."
There is no specific substantiation you can present as evidence. The best you can do is be totally vague about it on a grand scale. This is a matter of your questionable judgment of someone who doesn’t share your misconceptions about the purpose of classification, or politics generally.
Please, PissBong, at least make an attempt to conceal how stupid you are, as a change of pace.
Blemish, make an effort to conceal your ridiculous idea of how to conduct a worthwhile discussion with an opponent, so substantive matters can be discussed without your usual unsubstantive diversions and without wasting time and space.
There are numerous Christian sects, and the number is growing. Is it the job of self-appointed ‘Christian thought police’ to judge whether other pious folks are the Christians they believe themselves to be? I humbly think Christians should learn to live in peace among themselves, instead of denouncing each other as false prophets, thereby perpetuating the schisms and lethal divisiveness of centuries past. For, although many claim they do, no one knows God’s judgment. No one should act as if he does — something you are pretending, not humbly, to do, Blemish.
Continued
Apostolic succession doctrine is not entirely biblically indefensible in itself, leaving claims of such to be tested by history and ecclesiology. The religion of Catholicism's claims to apostolic sucession from Peter as "bishop of Rome" are on their face FLAT OUT FALSE as Peter was never a "bishop of Rome" and when he finally went there he was executed by the polytheistic proto-Catholics that ruled there. The various churches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity's claims of apostolic succession are at least defensible as traceable back to congregations founded by other apostles (Mark, Bartholomew, etc.)or subsequently lead by bishops appointed by them. Their claims to apostolic succession CAN BE VERIFIED by history. My argument focuses on the obvious falseness of Catholicism's claim to Peter as historic and ecclesiologic "bishop of Rome," a position he never held (nor could have, from his presence miles and miles away among congregations in Jerusalem and Babylon); along with Catholicism's theological differences with Christianity. Theological differences such as the naming of pagan deities as "saints" and even the hubristically appointed "Christian thought police" authority of Catholicism's throwback "divine Roman emeperor" doctrine contained in the idea of the Pope speaking infallibly ex cathedra as Christ's proxy replacement on Earth ("Vicar of Christ") upon the "throne of Peter," who as I mentioned had no position of authority in the proto-Catholic religion and government that put him to death when he historically travelled to Rome.
Never mind that you now give a pass to hierarchical systems of authority, when, hitherto, you cited it as disqualifier for membership in Christianity. That the founding myths of the religion don’t comport with history, such as you understand it, has no bearing on the classification.. In a similar vein, Americans are divided about what was the legacy of the Founding Fathers, but, except in the thinking of radicals, there is no justification for separating so-called “real” Americans from other Americans that are called un-American.. In Islam, among Sunnis and Shias, a split develeloped over the succession after the death of Muhammad. It cannot be said one branch is Islam and the other is not.
If the religion of Catholicism claims that it has "Christian authority" along with its theologically syncretized adoption of deities from other religions due to an apostolic succession from Peter (which it does claim precisely that) and history and ecclesiology so quite plainly demonstrate that this claim to Peter is inherently and unabashedly false, then obviously Catholicism and Christianity are two different religions, one built of false claims and blasphemous hubris, the other based on Christian theology.
Despite your repetitious reservations, both believe fundamentally that Jesus is the son of God and the savior of men’s souls. But neither of these claims can be historically verified.
The doctrine of apostolic succession itself is not the problem here. The religion of Catholicism's false claim of apostolic succession from Peter is, along with their other non-Christian rituals, dogmas, and practices.
Concluded
Catholics believe their claim of apostolic succession is founded on Acts and other places in the New Testament. There exist doctrinal differences within all religions. As I discussed earlier, nontrinitarians believe the doctrine of the Trinity is a pagan accretion.
The only thing Christianity and Catholicism have in common is that they are both religions with independently derived theologies.
The two have the basic tenets of Christianity in common, something you’re willing to ignore to help your self-interested case. Your self-satisfying private classification scheme is not in wide use, thank God.
Does a good, upstanding Catholic, albeit not a Christian in your far from universal view, make it to heaven — in your humble judgment, Blemish?
Capitalism without Christianity is like a Martini without Vermouth.
Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Catholics believe their claim of apostolic succession is founded on Acts and other places in the New Testament.
By pretending Peter was the "bishop of Rome," which he wasn't, ever.
The book of Acts places Peter in Jerusalem. Peter's own epistles place him in Babylon. In fact, Peter's ministry took him east to Babylon to preach the Gospel to the Jews that lived there still.
When Paul wrote his epistle to the Romans, he addressed the leaders of the Christian congregation there, by name. Peter wasn't one of them. Peter is never defered to as having authority over Christianity by anyone of the 1st Century Christians in the New Testament.
To believe the religion of Catholicism, one must believe Peter was the head of a Roman congregation of Christians that was so doctrinally misguided that Paul had to write them an epistle to correct and advise them.
Nonsense.
The only thing Christianity and Catholicism have in common is that they are both religions with independently derived theologies.
The two have the basic tenets of Christianity in common, something you’re willing to ignore to help your self-interested case. Your self-satisfying private classification scheme is not in wide use, thank God.
Thank who? Did you recently convert from atheism, PissBong?
Christians believe they are forgiven of their sins and saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.
Catholics believe they are forgiven of their sins and saved by repetitively iterating prayers to Mary to pester Jesus into forgiving them a number of times prescribed by a priest. Other "saints" are pestered with incessant prayers according to their role in the pantheon. For example, a Catholic might pray to St. Clare of Assisi for assistance with their television reception.
We're not talking about the same religion.
Does a good, upstanding Catholic, albeit not a Christian in your far from universal view, make it to heaven — in your humble judgment, Blemish?
I find it rather unpersuasive that members of a religion claiming unbroken "apostolic succession" from an Christian apostle they executed a few centuries before they "posthumously executed" their Pope Formosus is "the true church." Everybody makes it to heaven, for judgement before God. Not everyone gets to stay. If "good upstanding Catholic" means they lived a life piously chattering off theologically nonsensical prayers to dead people and formerly pagan deities to speak to Jesus on their behalf, I think it can be said that they lack faith in Jesus to hear them personally, thus answering your question.
psi bond: Catholics believe their claim of apostolic succession is founded on Acts and other places in the New Testament.
Blemish: By pretending Peter was the "bishop of Rome," which he wasn't, ever….
The Catholic Church does not declare in its official doctrine that Peter was the bishop of Rome. As the Catholic Encyclopedia states, “It is an indisputably established historical fact that St. Peter laboured in Rome during the last portion of his life, and there ended his earthly course by martyrdom. As to the duration of his Apostolic activity in the Roman capital, the continuity or otherwise of his residence there, the details and success of his labours, and the chronology of his arrival and death, all these questions are uncertain, and can be solved only on hypotheses more or less well-founded. The essential fact is that Peter died at Rome; this constitutes the historical foundation of the claim of the Bishops of Rome to the Apostolic Primacy of Peter. “
Whether or not you agree on the apostolic succession or believe in Catholicism, it is not relevant to classification. Catholicism is a branch of Christianity.
That you should be permitted to determine who is a Christian is arrogant nonsense.
The two have the basic tenets of Christianity in common, something you’re willing to ignore to help your self-interested case. Your self-satisfying private classification scheme is not in wide use, thank God.
Thank who? Did you recently convert from atheism, PissBong?
Thank God that he does not punish you, Blemish, for making up lies about me.
Christians believe they are forgiven of their sins and saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.
Your distortions notwithstanding, Catholics and other Christians believe that they are saved from their sins by the agency of Jesus Christ.
Catholics believe they are forgiven of their sins and saved by repetitively iterating prayers to Mary to pester Jesus into forgiving them a number of times prescribed by a priest. Other "saints" are pestered with incessant prayers according to their role in the pantheon. For example, a Catholic might pray to St. Clare of Assisi for assistance with their television reception.
We're not talking about the same religion.
Variation in doctrine occurs in all religions.
It is not a different religion if some in one group of Christians have faith in divine help for TV reception, and another group does not. Some Christians believe TV is the invention of the Devil. Popular superstitions don’t determine whether it is Christian. Be serious, Blemish.
Does a good, upstanding Catholic, albeit not a Christian in your far from universal view, make it to heaven — in your humble judgment, Blemish?
I find it rather unpersuasive that members of a religion claiming unbroken "apostolic succession" from an Christian apostle they executed a few centuries before they "posthumously executed" their Pope Formosus is "the true church." Everybody makes it to heaven, for judgement before God. Not everyone gets to stay. If "good upstanding Catholic" means they lived a life piously chattering off theologically nonsensical prayers to dead people and formerly pagan deities to speak to Jesus on their behalf, I think it can be said that they lack faith in Jesus to hear them personally, thus answering your question.
That’s not the question I asked.
I find it rather unconvincing that you can render a fair judgment on Catholicism, since you have shown a clear animus toward it. Nonetheless, as the Encyclopædia Britannica states, Catholicism is one of three major branches of Christianity.
PissBong,
I find you unconvincing because you can't argue persuasively that a religion that worships a bureaucracy of "saints" and mediators between themselves and God is merely a "sect" of a religion that finds such activity blasphemous and biblically indefensible.
That in the past you have argued the ancient religious belief that mankind evolved from dead fish rather than was created by God gave me the impression that you were an atheist, or at least a pseudo-scientific Anaximanderian twit. That you won't even be honest enough to admit that you're an imbecile leaves me doubting that you'd be honest about anything else in discussion.
You're simply going to have to expand your knowledge of the seperate Christian and Catholic theologies and ecclesiologies beyond cut and pastes from Wikipedia to participate in honest discussion about them. Given Catholicism's long history of putting actual Christians to death (or exhuming their bodies from graves to "posthumously execute" them) shoulkd be clue enough that the distinctions between the two religions are highlighted by Catholics themselves.
Blemish: I find you unconvincing because you can't argue persuasively that a religion that worships a bureaucracy of "saints" and mediators between themselves and God is merely a "sect" of a religion that finds such activity blasphemous and biblically indefensible.
In every religion there are doctrinal differenvces.
I find it unconvincing, Blemish, that you don’t know the difference between church Christianity and biblical Christianity, and that branding the former as a different religion in terms of the latter is fallacious and disingenuous.
That in the past you have argued the ancient religious belief that mankind evolved from dead fish rather than was created by God gave me the impression that you were an atheist, or at least a pseudo-scientific Anaximanderian twit. That you won't even be honest enough to admit that you're an imbecile leaves me doubting that you'd be honest about anything else in discussion.
That you continue to make lies about me and create distortions about what I’ve said is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that you return to your pathological imbecilic nonsense, trying to make me the topic, now that you don’t have any more boring repetitive sermonettes explaining why Peter was not a bishop of Rome, which is not the basis on which bishops of Rome claim their apostolic supremacy, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, a scholarly work bearing the imprimatur of the Catholic Church.
You're simply going to have to expand your knowledge of the seperate Christian and Catholic theologies and ecclesiologies beyond cut and pastes from Wikipedia to participate in honest discussion about them. Given Catholicism's long history of putting actual Christians to death (or exhuming their bodies from graves to "posthumously execute" them) shoulkd be clue enough that the distinctions between the two religions are highlighted by Catholics themselves.
Despite your oft-repeated pretenses, Catholicism is not the only branch of Christianity that has put “witches” or heretics to death in earlier, less civilized times.
Catholicism is one of three major branches of Christianity, Eastern Orthodox hristianity having developed independently, and Protestantism having developed relatively recently in the history of the West, spun out of Catholicism, as a reformed theology in which the authority of the church was replaced with that of the Bible, which had been printed and translated into the vernacular for the first time, enabling the multitudes to read it and interpret it for themselves.
You’re just going to have to learn, Blemish, that you have no authority whatsoever to decide for others who is a Christian — that is, with maturity, you’ll learn that your childish arrogance has real limits in the external world.
PissBong,
You derailled the discussion into being about you when you started up your ridiculous objections to the fact that you're an imbecile. I've prescribed a solution to your ignorant condition in suggesting you go about educating yourself about the topics you wish to opine upon. It really is up to you to advance yourself above the pedantics of novice dullards. Be that as it may, it is you that continues to stumble in this discussion by refusing to even become knowledgeable of the well established external fact that you're an idiot. It stymies you.
But let's for a moment set aside your bizarre and unfounded dissent from the reality of your reliably prodigious imbecility, and instead examine its recent products:
It is you who subscribe to a self-refuting, ignorantly simplistic, internally inconsistent, and historically, theologically, and ecclesiologically indefensible false dichotomy of "Church Christianity" and "Biblical Christianity," from which you seek to assert the religion of Catholicism be included as a sectarian branch of the religion of Christianity. I wonder what patchwork you'll attempt in explaining your church / bible dichotomy in the 1st Century when the Apostles were still writing the Gospels and the epistles to various Christian congregations under Roman imperial persecution (as they met in Jewish synagogues and homes, usually) some 300 years before Catholicism's founding at the Council of Nicea, dissenting congregations to be exterminated later. Autonomous Christian congregations pre-existed the Council of Nicea, and in fact were more geographically widespread and greater in number than the extant congregations that participated with delegations to the Council of Nicea and Constantine's syncretism of elements of Christianity into Imperial Roman authority and extend the bennies of being the vicar of Zeus on Earth. Oh, that shapeshifting Zeus, what a trickster.
Who are the "Church" Christians and the "biblical" Christians there in your goofy exegesis from history?
This is exacerbated by the biblically indefensible but conveniently "Church" defensible Catholic contrivance that posthumously naming Peter "bishop of Rome" on the basis that he died in Rome (at their predecessors hands, mind you) confers a type of "apostolic sucession" that justifies their assaults upon autonomous Christian congregations and punitive eradication of dissenting congregations as they rose within the hierarchy, largely coinciding with the translations of the co-opted writings of 1st Century egalitarian Christians in the New Testament into local languages, which revealed (and confirmed) what an absolute mockery of actual egalitarian Christianity the hypocritical and hubristic Catholic state religion concept of "Church authority" is.
And their papal perversion of "apostolic succession from Peter" into an office that infallibly replaces Jesus on Earth as "vicar of Christ" runs into dilemmas ranging from the Cadaver Synod to the political manuevering and military warring in Italy for the office to endorsing the left-wing labor activist Adolf Hitler in Germany to Mr. Ratzinger's hand in child molestation cover-ups and all sick points in between.
You don't even have to dig deeper into the two religions to find Christianity is a religion of autonomous, egalitarian congregations who believe men are saved by grace through faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and Catholicism is a religion that believes men are saved by participating in rituals such as praying to Mary or other syncretized and nominated dieties made "saints" a number of times designated by a priest.
Two entirely different religions, one from Christ, the other from Rome.
Blemish, you have repeatedly tried to sidetrack the discussion by various disingenuous ploys, including mendaciously claiming I’m an atheist, attributing to me ludicrous assertions about Darwinian evolution, pretending my intelligence is an issue with regard to whether Catholicism is a branch of Christianity, or that my personal knowledge is. However, your fundamental problem is that you cannot claim Catholicism is not Christianity without making up your own deceptive definitions and readings of history. But in doing so, you exhibit your penchant for reshaping the world according to your own intolerant tastes. Similarly, Adolf Hitler, who was given absolute power by the conservative ruling elite, decided which of German-born people were German citizens. Just as autocratically, you want to exercise the power to decide who among Americans are capable of rational thought (no liberals need apply in the world according to Blemish), and who is a Christian (no Catholics need apply). Other rightwing extremists are just as aggressive in seeking to decide for us all who is an American — a “real” American, that is.
Now, to devote a few words to the actual topic:
Following the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity and its favoring by imperial edict, and the first blue laws on March 7, 321, the early independent Christian churches were mostly assimilated into the universal Catholic Church or eliminated. To a great extent, the history of the West during the ensuing Middle Ages was the history of the Catholic Church. In the wake of the invention of printing and the Protestant Reformation, biblical Christianity promoted its claims, which you champion to the elimination of all other Christian claims.
Catholicism and Protestantism are two major branches of the same religion, the former taking its religious tradition from the laying on of hands in an unbroken apostolic succession from those who personally knew Jesus, the latter from the representations of Jesus in the gospels whose authorship is traditionally attributed to four of the Apostles.
Whether Peter, who was martyred by a pre-Constantine emperor, was the bishop of Rome is neither here nor there. Either way, Catholicism is a branch of Christianity. For, even with Sunni-Shiite or Catholic-Protestant schisms, religion depends on fundamental belief, not historical accuracy.
Whether Peter, who was martyred by a pre-Constantine emperor, was the bishop of Rome is neither here nor there.
Perhaps not "here nor there" to an imbecile coy about his ignorance of the subject of discussion, but yes, it otherwise is relevant to the discussion.
If Peter premised to be "bishop of Rome" is the foundation of the religion of Catholicism's attempts at concluding it has primacy over Christianity for itself through "apostolic succession" when Peter was neither bishop of Rome nor ever appealed to nor deferred to as the leader of Christianity among Christians or indeed the other apostles themselves, then Catholicism is asserting a false claim to primacy by "unbroken" apostolic succession from an apostle that they have no connection to (broken? try non-existent) that regardless held no particular ecclesiological rank or importance over other apostles or the egalitarian, autonomous congregations gathered and founded by them. Nor is an "apostolic chain" from Peter of greater significance theologically or ecclesiologically than an "apostolic chain" from Paul, Bartholomew, Mark, or any other apostle.
If Catholicism's claim to linkage to Christianity through Peter is false, linking Catholicism to Christianity is false. If this false claim to linkage to Peter is the basis for Catholicism's extensive claims of "infallible" authority over Christendom itself against percieved agents of blasphemy, heresy and apostasy to be exterminated or exhumed for corpse desecration post-mortem despite these "infallible decrees" being entirely biblically indefensible along with the alien theological mechanisms Catholicism seeks to impose upon actual Christian beliefs such as praying to dead personages (mythological or otherwise) in the form of "saints" to incessantly goad Jesus into divine wish fulfillment services, then yes, Catholicism is not Christianity.
Yes, it does matter where Catholicism claims it acquired its religious authority from, especially in the context of its attempts to extend that self-concieved authority over the religion of Christianity that existed 300 years before them. Same with Catholicism's syncretic hubris in making "saints" of Celtic deities or retroactively adding mundane functions to their portfolio of duty such as placing the spirit of the long dead Clare of Assisi in charge of television signals.
Catholicism's claims to Christianity are laughably dismissable.
Whether Peter, who was martyred by a pre-Constantine emperor, was the bishop of Rome is neither here nor there.
Perhaps not "here nor there" to an imbecile coy about his ignorance of the subject of discussion, but yes, it otherwise is relevant to the discussion.
Perhaps it is relevant to your juvenile argument, Blemish, but with regard to whether Catholicism is a branch of Christianity, it is neither here nor there. As noted hitherto, the premise that Peter is the bishop of Rome is not the foundation of the claim the Catholic Church makes for the apostolic supremacy of the bishops of Rome.
Peter was neither bishop of Rome nor ever appealed to nor deferred to as the leader of Christianity among Christians or indeed the other apostles themselves…
In especially solemn fashion Jesus accentuated Peter's precedence among the Apostles, when, after Peter had recognized him as the Messiah, he promised that he would be head of his flock. This is confirmed by the unanimous voice of tradition which, as early as the second half of the second century, designates Peter the Prince of the Apostles, the founder of the Roman Church.
No matter whether it is Protestants against Catholics or Sunnis against Shiites, competing historical claims for control of a religion are disputed fruitlessly and endlessly. There are presently nearly 500 separate and distinct forms of Christianity in America alone. Some groups, like the Catholics and the Baptists and the Pentecostals, are quite large and encompass many millions of people each. Others are somewhat smaller with a few million or a few hundred thousand members. Many more are quite tiny, with memberships ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. There are also local Christian churches that are completely independent of any larger body whatsoever. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement among Christians that Jesus should have considerable significance — some would say the greatest significance — for how they lead their lives and make their moral decisions. Although they may differ about virtually everything else, all Christians agree that Jesus is pivotal and indispensable to their faith — i.e., to Christianity.
Catholicism's claims to Christianity are laughably dismissable [sic].
I believe as a Christian that we should be good stewards of the environment God gave us.
— Sean Hannity, a leading rightwinger, Fox News, June 3, 2010
But Sean Hannity is a Catholic. So, in the world according to Blemish, Sean Hannity is laughably dismissible. Now there is something on which we can concur.
As noted hitherto, the premise that Peter is the bishop of Rome is not the foundation of the claim the Catholic Church makes for the apostolic supremacy of the bishops of Rome .... In especially solemn fashion Jesus accentuated Peter's precedence among the Apostles, when, after Peter had recognized him as the Messiah, he promised that he would be head of his flock. This is confirmed by the unanimous voice of tradition which, as early as the second half of the second century, designates Peter the Prince of the Apostles, the founder of the Roman Church.
As soon as you decide, PissBong, to settle your contradiction of whether or not the religion of Catholicism claims Peter as its founding apostle or not, you ought to tackle how this interpretation of Peter as "Prince of Apostles" ignores Jesus' calling Peter "Satan" in the same passage.
Or remain laughably dismissible yourself, PissBong.
Familiarize yourself with the subject matter above your current level of ignorance. I'll wait.
More to the point, Blemish, you need to resolve the contradiction between your statement that Peter was not referred to or deferred to as the leader of the Christians and Jesus’ statements naming Peter the leader of his flock and promising him the keys to the kingdom of heaven; you need to resolve the contradiction between your despotic edict that Catholics are not Christians and Sean Hannity’s evident belief that his religious convictions are unquestionably Christian (another Catholic, William F. Buckley, also believed himself a Christian); you need to resolve the contradiction between your objection to the authority of the Catholic Church and your own arrogation of authority to excommunicate Catholicism from Christianity; and you need to resolve the contradiction arising from the fact that the faithful who consider Jesus Christ the most important figure in their lives may not all be Christians by your view.
Until you do so, the hokey version of the world according to Blemish is laughably dismissible — laughably laughable, in fact.
Pathetic. Defaulting to your Pee Wee Herman mode isn't going to extricate you from your contradiction, PissBong, not is compounding your error with additional evidence of your lack of familiarity with the subject matter.
If the religion of Catholicism doesn't (as noted hitherto, heh) premise that Peter as the "bishop of Rome" is not the foundation of the claim the religion of Catholicism makes for the apostolic supremacy of the bishops of Rome, then what is the foundation of the claim the religion of Catholicism makes for the apostolic supremacy of the bishops of Rome? What makes Catholicism's claim to and of an "unbroken" chain of apostolic sucession (if you don't count Pope Formosus and the other breaks) more "supreme" than actual Christian congregations that can trace a chain of sucession back to an apostle with actual historical evidence?
If the religion of Catholicism does in fact (as you plead in self-contradiction) found their claim of apostolic supremacy for the bishops of Rome on their posthumous aasumption of Peter as a "bishop of Rome" because of a claim that Jesus named Peter as leader (Jesus did no such thing, actually), again there is no basis in history, theology, or ecclesiology to believe Peter's "apostolic successor" would also become leader of Christendom.
(Do be a dear imbecile and tell us which stupid argument you're sticking to)
But more to the point:
But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.
Hardly a glowing appraisal from the founder of Christianity for the root of any apostolic claim to Peter, real or concocted.
Try sticking your fingers in your ears and singing "la la la la I can't hear you" or blindfolding yourself with your rectal walls, PissBong. Your glaring self contradiction still won't go away.
In good-sporting faithful deference to the indisputable and pre-established fact that you're an imbecile that is militantly ignorant of his subject matter, I'll let you retract one of your mutually contradictory stupid claims at the cost of developing the other stupid claim in full.
So that you're not over-exerting the rather infeebled limits of your intellect confusing yourself with dilemmas more complex than picking a side in a coin toss, let me spell out your stupid choices and their implications:
a.) Peter as posthumously contrived to be a "bishop of Rome" IS NOT the foundation of the religion of Catholicism's claim to the apostolic supremacy of "bishops of Rome." What then, is the foundation of the claim of apostolic supremacy of "bishops of Rome?"
or....
b.) Peter as posthumously contrived to be a "bishop of Rome" IS the foundation of the religion of Catholicism's claim to the apostolic supremacy of the "bishops of Rome," hence savoring for its organizational self the mortal ecclesiological idea that an unbroken succession chain leading back to Peter confers biblical legitimacy to their claims of perpetually inherited temporal and spiritual authority over actual adherents of the three centuries older egalitarian Christian religion. As Peter was never actually historically a "bishop of Rome" and hundreds of breaking gaps in the political and historical succession of "bishops of Rome" requiring annual revisions exist between Catholicism's imaginary 1st Century connection to Peter and Mr. Ratzinger today, why then should anyone who would believe that an unbroken apostolic succession chain connecting to Peter himself would confer supreme authority over Christianity itself believe that Mr. Ratzinger as "Pontifex Maximus" of the religion of Catholicism is in fact that supreme authority?
These represent the mutually exclusive conceptions you've employed to continue your exploration of the depths of your imbecility and genuine lack of knowledge of the subject. The crossroads of your cognitive dissonance. Choose one stupid argument to run with and discard the other, so that at least you're not visibly compounding the indisputable evidence of your imbecility and ignorance of the subject matter with indisputable evidence of your lack of capacity for rational thought.
As for whether or not Sean Hannity or WF Buckley deluded themselves or were deluded by others into believing Catholicism is theologically or ecclesiological Christian beyond dubious and obviously mythological claims of official historical succession from Peter is beyond the scope of this discussion. If they were here, I'd ask them personally.
But you're here trying to articulate your own imbecilic positions in their stead, so I'm asking you.
As I posted heretofore (on May 31, 2010 4:15 AM), quoting the Catholic Encyclopedia, which represents the Catholic Church’s official theology, as opposed to rumors and your distortions: “The essential fact is that Peter died at Rome; this constitutes the historical foundation of the claim of the Bishops of Rome to the Apostolic Primacy of Peter.”
You are busy doing a lot of apoplectic huffing and puffing, Blemish, and ramping up personal attacks to obscure the grave contradictions in which you have sunk yourself.
It is not the truth or falsity of the apostolic succession, or whether Peter was Satan, which anyone who cares may dispute incessantly until kingdom come, that determines whether Catholicism is a form of Christianity; the classification is determined by the fact that worship of Jesus Christ as the son of God is the most essential part of Catholicism. That much is self-evident to a rational person, though evidently not to those, like you, who have bitter theological and ecclesiological issues with Catholicism.
As for whether or not Sean Hannity or WF Buckley deluded themselves or were deluded by others into believing Catholicism is theologically or ecclesiological Christian beyond dubious and obviously mythological claims of official historical succession from Peter is beyond the scope of this discussion. If they were here, I'd ask them personally.
In other words, Blemish, you are urgently trying to distance yourself from the logical consequences of your logically indefensible proposition that declares Catholicism is not a branch of Christianity ¾ but, nonetheless, at the same time, in your immaculate view, people like Buckley Jr. and Hannity, either by their own earnest efforts or those of others, are intellectually enfeebled. Other Catholics in public life include Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, and John Roberts. (Five of them were appointed by Republican presidents, appealing to them by their socially conservative principles.)
A Christian who autocratically discards other Christians as adherents to Christianity has taken a wrong evangelical turn somewhere. The trouble with born-again Christians, it seems, is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
“The essential fact is that Peter died at Rome; this constitutes the historical foundation of the claim of the Bishops of Rome to the Apostolic Primacy of Peter.”
The essential fact is that Peter's death in Rome at the hands of the same empire that centuries later established the state religion of Catholicism can't retroactively be described as the source of a "unbroken apostolic supremacy of the Bishops of Rome." Even posthumously naming Peter a "Bishop of Rome" and imbuing him ahistorical ecclesiological powers over Christianity itself that he never held in reality much less could pass on to a "successor" by dying in their city does nothing but form a dubious circular argument.
The false induction fallacy of your stupid argument that appeals to the traditions claimed by Catholicism quite emphatically demonstrates your inability to articulate a rational thought, but does nothing to demonstrate an actual historical connection between either Peter and Catholicism or Catholicism and Christianity.
...Catholicism is a form of Christianity; the classification is determined by the fact that worship of Jesus Christ as the son of God is the most essential part of Catholicism. That much is self-evident to a rational person, though evidently not to those, like you, who have bitter theological and ecclesiological issues with Catholicism.
I have no issues with the religion of Catholicism that aren't original to the older Christian religion. The history of the 1st Century Christians indicts 4th Century Catholicism as a pretentious state religion with delusions of grandeur.
As for whether or not Sean Hannity or WF Buckley deluded themselves or were deluded by others into believing Catholicism is theologically or ecclesiological Christian beyond dubious and obviously mythological claims of official historical succession from Peter is beyond the scope of this discussion. If they were here, I'd ask them personally. But you're here trying to articulate your own imbecilic positions in their stead, so I'm asking you.
In other words, Blemish, you are urgently trying to distance yourself from the logical consequences of your logically indefensible proposition that declares Catholicism is not a branch of Christianity...
In "other words," PissBong? Rather than flaunt your lack of reading comprehension skills, why not argue against my case as I stated it? I'm not distancing myself from anything, much less shying away from the inarguable fact that you're quite a fount of logical fallacies. To wit, I'd be much interested in asking Hannity, Buckley, etc. why they believe the nonsensical claims made by their religion. I'd expect to encounter a serious critical inquiry into their beliefs examined side-by-side with Christian beliefs that such intellects would naturally bring to the discussion. But, instead of intellectuals to debate, I have your cowering refusal to answer why you yourself believe the religion of Catholicism's nonsensical claims.
Put a cork in your geyser of stupidity now flowing in the form of attempting to present name-dropped celebrity endorsements in proxy for establishing a rational defense of your argument (what, no Torquemada, Hitler, and John Kerry?).
Not that I'm implying any faith on my part that you might some day even accidently argue yourself out of the proverbial wet paper bag, but if appeals to false authority and false induction fallacies are the best your malnourished mind can muster, just stop. As long as the extent of your knowledge of the subject here begins and ends with misread Wikipedia articles, you're really far out of your league here, PissBong.
In other words, you have no logical arguments, Blemish, just feeble personal allegations and apoplectic smears. It is a logical fallacy to presume that your reiterated
allegation of a dearth of personal knowledge will establish the incorrectness of the classification of churches as Christianity that worship Jesus as the son of God.
Whether the apostolic succession is “true” in some historical or objective sense is of little interest to me, as I thought I made clear hitherto. For, one way or another, despite your childlike viewpoint, it doesn’t alter the basis for classification of Catholicism as a branch of Christianity, something that any person with a perceptible level of intellectual ability can understand. Indeed, no scholarly analysis treats Catholicism as being a non-Christian religion. People like Buckley Jr and Hannity would likely regard you not as someone with a thesis worthy of serious intellectual debate but as a willful bitter crank.
You can e-mail Hannity at http://www.hannity.com/contact. Tell him your news that he isn’t a Christian -- you’ll be lucky if he doesn’t call you a Nazi for your autocratic ruling.
It is not true that the Supreme Court is composed for the most part of non-Christians.
The Catholic Encyclopedia does not claim that Peter was ever bishop of Rome. That’s just a red herring that you -- floundering -- are eager to make something of.
In other words, you have no logical arguments, Blemish, just feeble personal allegations and apoplectic smears.
You really ought to find a way to improve your reading comprehension skills, PissBong, because your "other words" have no relation to my actual words.
It is a logical fallacy to presume that your reiterated
allegation of a dearth of personal knowledge will establish the incorrectness of the classification of churches as Christianity that worship Jesus as the son of God.
With all due disrespect, a blithering idiot such as yourself ought not attempt to invoke logic while engaging in the informal fallacy of misrepresenting my position (the "strawman fallacy").
It is not your undeniable imbecility and ignorance of the subject that distinguishs Catholicism as a seperate religion from Christianity, but rather the incompatible historical accountings, theologies, and ecclesiologies of the two different religions.
Do try to keep up with my argument, PissBong. Follow on the screen with your snot-encrusted finger if you must.
The Catholic Encyclopedia does not claim that Peter was ever bishop of Rome. That’s just a red herring that you -- floundering -- are eager to make something of.
I am not concerned with the claims of the "Catholic Encyclopedia," as I am addressing the religion of Catholicism itself which indeed does call Peter the first "Pope," the affectionate violation of Matthew 23:9 by which they call the person holding the bishopric office over the diocese of Rome in their ahistorical schema to promote Rome as the "apostolic see" succeeding from Peter.
Again, PissBong, your ignorance of the subject matter here is pervasive. You really ought to at least try to become knowledgeable about the topics of discussions you wish to participate in.
Or at least be honest enough to qualify your statements as being the views of a disinterested imbecile.
Blemish: I am not concerned with the claims of the "Catholic Encyclopedia," as I am addressing the religion of Catholicism itself which indeed does call Peter the first "Pope," [the pope is the bishop of Rome, which Peter never was, though the popes are considered the successors of Peter] the affectionate violation of Matthew 23:9 [bye bye Fathers’ Day; the business community and family values crowd will not be pleased] by which they call the person holding the bishopric office over the diocese of Rome in their ahistorical schema to promote Rome as the "apostolic see" succeeding from Peter.
You have let go of the biship-of-Rome red herring, but you are still addressing your caricature of Catholicism, Blemish. Not history but tradition matters most in religion. Catholic tradition holds that the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ. The New Testament, sacred to Catholics, records Jesus' activities and teaching, his appointment of the twelve Apostles and his instructions to them to continue his work. The Catholic Church teaches that the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, in an event known as Pentecost, signaled the beginning of the public ministry of the Church.
How much I may know is not the point, Blemish, nor are my reading comprehension skills, your preferred straw man. It is not about me. It is about the hard reality that no comparative, historical or encyclopedic study of religion affirms that the non-Christian religions include Catholicism, which considers its main mission spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ.
You can still redeem yourself. Blemish, if you are able to realize that you are an abusive, embittered, willful, ranting crackpot. Honest debate would commence with that epiphany.
You have let go of the biship-of-Rome red herring, but you are still addressing your caricature of Catholicism, Blemish.
This bizarre product of your lack of reading comprehension skills really does further undermine your impotent attempts at denying your imbecility, PissBong.
I have not "let go" of any of my argument that you repeatedly fail to even represent correctly in your disdainfully illiterate "other words." I certainly have not relinquished any ground whatsoever in my criticisms of the religion of Catholicism's self-proclaimed authority based on a mythology of Peter being the first biship (sic) of Rome / first Pope and based on a scripturally refutable mythology and departure from historical records of actual Christians in the 1st Century that claims Peter had superior ecclesiological rank over any other Apostles to rule over Christianity and that this contrived ecclesiological ranking system, alien to actual Christianity, succeeds to the bishops of Rome / Papacy only as the "infallible" replacement of Jesus on Earth (Vicar of Christ).
Theologically speaking, the Catholic religion does not worship Jesus as the son of God, it worships Peter and an imaginary "papal" succession from him as Jesus' replacement on Earth. Couple that with Catholicism's complex array of ritual polytheism, and you see the syncretic god-emperor "Pontifex Maximus" office of the Roman Empire really hasn't changed much since it put Peter and Paul and countless other actual Christians to death over the centuries.
Not history but tradition matters most in religion.
Catholicism's traditions seperate it entirely beyond the pale of Christian traditions based on its inversions and perversions of them, in the same way Jewish accounts of Abraham's preparations to sacrifice Isaac and Muslim accounts of Abraham preparing to sacrifice Ishmael seperate those two religions from each other in stark contrasts.
Just as Christianity professes faith in forgiveness of sins through the direct grace of God, Catholicism sells forgiveness of sins through indulgences administered by a ritualized iterations of idolatrous obeisance to a hierarchy of literally thousands of intercessional "saints" syncretizing pagan dieties with biblical figures as prescribed by a priest hearing confessions.
Two very different religions. Christianity is monotheistic. Catholicism, with its manufacture of relics and shrines and commandments to prayer to beings other than God, is idolatrous polytheism in contrast with the Christian religion.
Catholic tradition holds that the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ.
Which is odd, considering the religion of Catholicism was still worshipping Emperor Nero at the time it put Peter to death for practicing Christianity.
The New Testament, sacred to Catholics, records Jesus' activities and teaching, his appointment of the twelve Apostles and his instructions to them to continue his work. The Catholic Church teaches that the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, in an event known as Pentecost, signaled the beginning of the public ministry of the Church.
Again, the religion of Catholicism conflates itself to be tied to Christianity through easily refuted, ahistorical, and biblically indefensible convolutions.
Catholicism is a religion seperate from the religion of Christianity, appearing some three centuries after Christianity was founded.
Blemish: ... Catholicism is a religion seperate [sic] from the religion of Christianity, appearing some three centuries after Christianity was founded.
Thank you, Blemish. In other words, you confirm, albeit unwittingly, that you are an abusive, embittered, willful, ranting crackpot, railing petulantly against your crudely constructed caricature of Catholicism as some non-Christian religion.
Although religious Jews consider the Torah to be the word of God, there are doctrinal divisions among their various congregations, including that the ultra-orthodox do not consider the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state to be kosher. Muslims all believe the Koran is the word of God and Muhammad is his prophet, though they are deeply divided along Sunni and Shiite lines on the succession of authority after the death of Muhammad, who was both their religious and political leader. Indeed, a religion that spawns no internal divisions is not a living religion. Early Christianity rapidly begat Catholicism that in turn begat Protestantism more than a millennium after.
Notwithstanding the feeble, purportedly “historical” objections that you doggedly reiterate, Blemish, Catholics hold the New Testament to be sacred and Jesus to be their savior, and in these fundamental beliefs, the billion or so Catholics are not separate from other worshippers of Jesus Christ (also known as, other Christians). The most that you can sensibly claim is that Catholicism and Protestantism are separate branches of Christianity, which, to sensible people at least, is logically indisputable.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, published by the Catholic Church: “The proof
that Christ constituted St. Peter head of His Church is found in the two famous Petrine texts,
Matthew 16:17-19, and John 21:15-17.” Hence, the basis for the Church’s claim is one of faith in
the words of Jesus as preserved in scripture, no matter what may or may not be supported
by blemished readings of the fragmentary historical materials. In other words, tradition,
not history.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, published by the Catholic Church: “The proof
that Christ constituted St. Peter head of His Church is found in the two famous Petrine texts,
Matthew 16:17-19, and John 21:15-17.” Hence, the basis for the Church’s claim is one of faith in
the words of Jesus as preserved in scripture, no matter what may or may not be supported
by blemished readings of the fragmentary historical materials. In other words, tradition,
not history.
As I stated before, I am not concerned with the self-serving dishonest claims made by the religion of Catholicism in their "Catholic Encyclopedia." I am concerned with the religion of Catholicism itself.
Neither Matthew 16:17-19 nor John 21:15-17 establish Peter as the "infallible" replacement (vicar) of Christ who would enjoy absolute ecclesiological primacy and supremacy over the egalitarian Christian religion. Nor do those passages enjoin Jesus' disciples to recognize Peter as an appointed authority over them and their evangelized converts to Christianity. Nor do those passages manifest any basis for believing that such a fantastically outlandish and biblically indefensible "traditional" deceit about Peter's having ecclesiological rank above all of Christianity could (or would) find itself conveniently "perpetually inherited" by the successors of the Roman god-emperor Julius Caesar in his syncretic political / theological duties over the Empire as "pontifex maximus."
How about that bizarre interpretation of Matthew 16 the religion of Catholicism likes to trot out? I question their attempts to render allegory literal thusly:
"Jesus built Catholicism upon a superior ranked infallible Apostle so that even the gates of Hell can't keep out its followers? Do tell."
Mr. Ratzinger, and you, PissBong, will have to find a more steady platform (rock?) to build upon for the kookish theology that Mr. Ratzinger is now the divinely appointed "infallible" ecclesiological successor replacement of Christ Himself on Earth through ahistorical claims upon a Peter reimagined as either a "bishop of Rome" or the god-emperor of the Roman Empire. Thumping the "Catholic Encyclopedia" to circularly argue for these perverse contradictions of Christian history, theology, and egalitarian ecclesiology simply won't do.
In "other words," Catholicism's "traditional" belief in its own (papal) bullshit does not in any way mitigate the brutal facts that it IS bullshit and IS NOT Christian.
In other words, Blemish, you dislike, or even despise as vulgar nonsense, many of the biblically-based traditional beliefs that are part of Catholicism. Yet that is no proof that it is not Christian. The truth is, your intense (hostile) concern with Catholicism, as a non-Catholic, disables your ability to form an objective notion of its classification, which, by every scholarly account, is unquestionably Christian. You conflate classification of a Christian faith with approval of it.
To be sensible, Blemish, you will need to learn that your personal religious preferences do not warrant the reclassification of a group as non-Christian that consists of a billion or so people around the world that worship Jesus. By the same token, there are those with a different interpretation of God’s word (the Cessationists, in particular), who think glossolalia or think snake handling, which is illegal in several Southern states (many people consider snake handling to be a part of uneducated folk religion, however, churches that practice it claim their scriptural mandate from the gospel of Mark 16:9-20), is inappropriate is Christian services -- but, once again, those protestors’ preferences do not warrant reclassifying these Pentecostals as non-Christian. For religion, of course, is not entirely rational or completely historical.
Paradoxically, it needs to be said that Christians must learn tolerance of one another.
I would be remiss in not pointing out to you once again, PissBong, that your buffoonish "in other words" concoctions do not in any way even approach reformulating my actual argument. As I do not possess any sort of English-to-Imbecile translator to facilitate your rise from ignorance, you're simply going to have to address the terms of my argument as presented rather than engage in demonstrations of your lack of reading comprehension skills in trying to grandstand your "in other words" riffs into becoming your proxy straw man replacement for my as yet unaddressed argument for you to flail at.
With gentlemanly candor, PissBong, I kindly and sincerely ask that you please don't insultingly underestimate my assessment of the gathered evidence of how utterly stupid you are. I even know that you're stupid enough to keep attempting these straw man "in other words" concoctions because you are ill-equipped to deal with my arguments as presented. If you were intellectually capable of responding to my actual argument rather than ballyhooing your self-confused straw man twistings that in your illiteracy of the topic has you wishing that I'd accept defending your reimaginings as my actual argument, we could perhaps then at a later date take this potentially possible occurance of a shift towards rationality on your part and return to questioning the thus far rather obviously indisputable nature of your imbecility. If you want to truly reverse the widely acknowledged perception of your imbecilic nature, here's your chance, PeeWee.
In other words, Blemish, you dislike, or even despise as vulgar nonsense, many of the biblically-based traditional beliefs that are part of Catholicism. Yet that is no proof that it is not Christian. The truth is, your intense (hostile) concern with Catholicism, as a non-Catholic, disables your ability to form an objective notion of its classification, which, by every scholarly account, is unquestionably Christian. You conflate classification of a Christian faith with approval of it.
No. I argue that a religion that places an intercessory ecclesiological and theological heirarchy and pantheon of mortal men, reimagined historical figures, and syncretized pagan deities as priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, saints, and guardian spirits between man and God, to be beseeched in prayer alongside or instead of God is not a Christian religion. Not even close. Mr. Ratzinger is not the replacement of Christ on Earth, despite Catholic hubris claiming he is the "Vicar of Christ."
Catholicism gets its account of Christian history objectively wrong. Catholicism gets its accounts of biblically derived theology and ecclesiology decidedly and objectively wrong.
My objectivity isn't in question. Catholicism is not Christianity. It's a different religion entirely.
To be sensible, Blemish, you will need to learn that your personal religious preferences do not warrant the reclassification of a group as non-Christian that consists of a billion or so people around the world that worship Jesus.
To actually begin to address my argument, you must also acknowledge over 10,000 "saints" worshipped in devotional veneration and obeisance in addition to and instead of Jesus. The polytheistic religion of Catholicism is nothing like the religion of Christianity. Catholicism has over 10,000 more objects of prayer, devotion, and worship than Christianity.
Really try to engage my actual argument, PissBong. Stop sputtering your illiteracy-crafted straw men convolutions and get on topic. Let me know if I need to draw pictures for you.
In other words, Blemish, in defense of your manifestly crackpot opinion that Catholicism is not a Christian religion, you have nothing new to add but recycled sidetracking personal attacks and reiterated ineffectual arguments. The point you manage to avoid addressing once again is that your aggressive objections to how Jesus is worshipped by Catholics do not warrant judging, Catholicism, in opposition to every scholar of religious studies, not to be Christianity, the earliest organized form of it. Classification is an academic discipline, not, as you evidently imagine, a helpful tool for institutionalizing one’s personal preferences and animosities.
No. I argue that a religion that places an intercessory ecclesiological and theological heirarchy and pantheon of mortal men, reimagined historical figures, and syncretized pagan deities as priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, saints, and guardian spirits between man and God, to be beseeched in prayer alongside or instead of God is not a Christian religion. Not even close. Mr. Ratzinger is not the replacement of Christ on Earth, despite Catholic hubris claiming he is the "Vicar of Christ."
Notwithstanding your venomous mischaracterizations, Blemish, nothing in Christianity absolutely precludes any form of ecclesiological structure or church hierarchy. In the first generation of Christians, Jesus was at the summit of a hierarchy with the Twelve Apostles immediately below him, and the flock of Christians below them. In the succeeding generations, Christian churches appeared in many places, including Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, and Rome. Bishops were an important part of Christian organization almost from the beginning (centuries before Constantine’s conversion to Christianity), and were considered by Christians to be the successors of the Apostles.
The first use of the term ‘Vicar of Christ’ for popes, meaning the representative of Christ, appears in the fifth century, in a synod of bishops to refer to Pope Gelasius I. ‘Vicar of Peter’ and ‘Vicar of the Prince of the Apostles’ were also in use in the early Church. The first record of the concept of the Vicar of Christ to refer to bishops is mentioned in the Epistle to the Magnesians of St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, an alumnus of St. John, probably commanded by Peter, with a pastoral sense, written between the years 88 and 107 CE. The term is also occurs in the epistles of Tertullian in the third century to refer to the Holy Spirit.
To actually begin to address my argument, you must also acknowledge over 10,000 "saints" worshipped in devotional veneration and obeisance in addition to and instead of Jesus. The polytheistic religion of Catholicism is nothing like the religion of Christianity. Catholicism has over 10,000 more objects of prayer, devotion, and worship than Christianity.
One Catholic website states that "There are over 10,000 named saints and beati from history, the Roman Martyrology and Orthodox sources, but no definitive head count". That is many times more than have been canonized, i.e., officially recognized, by the Catholic Church. In his book, Saint of the Day, editor Leonard Foley, OFM, says this of saints: "[Saints'] surrender to God's love was so generous an approach to the total surrender of Jesus that the Church recognizes them as heroes and heroines worthy to be held up for our inspiration." In other words, it is the role of saints to inspire surrender to God’s love instead of substitute for God as the object of devotion.
Concluded
Your self-serving distortion of saints notwithstanding, Blemish, Kenneth Woodward notes, “A saint is always someone through whom we catch a glimpse of what God is like -- and of what we are called to be. Only God 'makes' saints, of course. The church merely identifies from time to time a few of these for emulation. The church then tells the story. But the author is the Source of the grace by which saints live. And there we have it: A saint is someone whose story God tells.”
The veneration of saints, or the "cult of the saints", describes a particular popular devotion to the saints. But, although the term ‘worship’ is sometimes used, it is intended in the old-sense meaning to honor or give respect. According to the Catholic Church, divine worship is properly reserved only for God, and never to the saints. The saints can be asked to intercede or pray for those still on earth, just as one can ask someone on earth to pray for him.
Unlike competing deities in polytheistic religions, saints are not thought to have power of their own, but only that granted by God.
The Catholic Church is certainly not unique in the recognition of saints. The Eastern Orthodox Church also recognizes saints.
In the Anglican Church, the title of Saint refers to a person who has been elevated by popular opinion as a pious and holy person. The saints are seen as models of holiness to be imitated, and as a 'cloud of witnesses' that strengthen and encourage the believer during his or her spiritual journey (Hebrews 12:1). The saints are seen as elder brothers and sisters in Christ. Official Anglican creeds recognize the existence of the saints in heaven.
In the Lutheran Church, all Christians on earth are considered saints. Lutherans also regard Christians in heaven as saints and are even willing to honor those that the Roman Catholic Church regards as saints, but in a qualified way. According to the Augsburg Confession, the term "saint" is used in the manner of the Roman Catholic Church only insofar as to denote a person who received exceptional grace, was sustained by faith and whose good works are to be an example to any Christian. Traditional Lutheran belief holds that prayers to the saints are prohibited, as they are not mediators of redemption, but, Lutherans do believe that saints pray for the Christian Church in general. Martin Luther approved respecting the saints by saying they are honored in three ways: 1. By thanking God for examples of His mercy; 2. By using the saints as examples for strengthening our faith; 3. By imitating their faith and other virtues. Hence, in the Lutheran Church, as in the Catholic Church, there is encouragement to take the saints as models for inspiration.
Indeed, there exist Protestant churches that are named after a saint. There is some regard for saints in all branches of Christianity.
In other words, Catholicism satisfies the parameters of Christianity (albeit not yours). For Christianity (from the Greek word Xριστός, "Christ", literally "anointed one") is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament. Christians believe Jesus is the son of God, God having become man and the savior of humanity.
You do not need to draw any pictures, Blemish. A self-professed Christian who thinks that to be abusive is to follow the teachings of Jesus, you leave no doubt at all that you really are a crackpot Christian who is smugly intolerant of hundreds of millions of other professed Christians because of the way they worship Jesus as the son of God and their savior ¾ so extremely intolerant, in fact, that you wish to single-handedly strip them of their sustaining identity as souls that are above all Christian. Thereby you arrogate to your own arrogant person the prerogatives of God himself.
In other words, Blemish, in defense of your manifestly crackpot opinion that Catholicism is not a Christian religion, you have nothing new to add but recycled sidetracking personal attacks and reiterated ineffectual arguments.
Blah blah blah. Epic fail, PissBong. Until you remedy your lack of reading comprehension skills so that you are actually beginning to address my arguments as presented rather than impotently attempting to replace them with your illiterate and irrelevant rewordings and reimaginings of them, I will continue to rightfully posit the existence of real difference between my actual, untouched arguments and your hallucinatory characterizations of them in the form of straw men caricatures your obviously and indisputably imbecilic mind prefers to attack.
Are you sure you don't need a picture drawn for you, PissBong? I realize you have difficulties with English and have no real objective conception of just how utterly asinine and stupid you are, but I don't think after so many daily spins around your merry-go-round of intellectual ineptitude it is too much to ask to have you actually begin to address an accurate accounting of my actual argument. Maybe I'm mistaken and you are indeed far more excessively dimwitted than the level of imbecility I usually and apparently charitably give you proper credit for.
Regardless, do try to return to the reality at hand. You have as yet failed to summarize and represent my actual argument accurately, hence you are confining yourself in cowardice to not even making it to the starting line in a race towards arguing against my actual argument. Stop battering your straw men, PeeWee. Try my actual argument on for size. I dare ya.
The point you manage to avoid addressing once again is that your aggressive objections to how Jesus is worshipped by Catholics do not warrant judging, Catholicism, in opposition to every scholar of religious studies, not to be Christianity, the earliest organized form of it. Classification is an academic discipline, not, as you evidently imagine, a helpful tool for institutionalizing one’s personal preferences and animosities.
In result of my corrections of your past futile attempts to excommunicate your fellow leftist Adolf Hitler and his contemporary progressive socialist ideologies from your side of the political spectrum and into the right-wing, you ought to have become acutely aware of how your real classification errors stem from a lack of concern with academic discipline in properly placing ideological frameworks in their correct categories.
Just as Nazi ideological hatred for capitalism, Nszi state-commanded attempts at eugenically distilling a preferred "master race" through extermination, and virulent Marx imitating and Catholicism approved anti-Semitism are all categorical indicators that the Nazis can not be right-wing and were in fact, as they classified themselves, true socialists of the left-wing, you can not take a polytheistic religion like Catholicism that has no actual tie or inherited authority from 1st Century Christianity, has no biblical supportable ecclesiastical structure, and further posits its earthly head is the holy successor to a historical apostle of Jesus who it has no historical connections whatsoever with (save perhaps as his murderer) while also that this mortal head of the polytheistic religion of Catholicism became the incarnate Holy Spirit of God Himself and / or the vicarious proxy replacement of Jesus Christ due to a vote by a political committee can be properly classified as Christian when absolutely none of its theological categorization parameters match actual egalitarian, monotheistic Christianity and decidedly reveals itself to be non-Christian.
Forget Catholic pilgrimages to enshrine and worship water stains on walls that look like Mary or Catholics making ritual votive offerings to statues that have had their faces painted to manufacture tales of miraculous tears of blood flowing from them for irrational, duped believers or the biblically indefensible Catholic doctrinal contrivances of after-life "Purgatory" and wine and bread becoming the actual blood and flesh of Jesus when placed in a Catholic's mouth. Mr. Ratzinger thinks he's Jesus' latest replacement!
Catholicism is not Christianity, nor was it ever at any time related to actual Christian beliefs.
Square peg, round hole.
Not all your venomous verbosity, Blemish, can succeed in concealing the fact that you have no effective rational arguments, just ragtag straw man proxies to bring up again and again. If, as you protest, I don’t address your “actual” arguments with the seriousness you crave, it is because you have no serious arguments.
You argue speciously that Catholicism is not Christianity because it has a hierarchical authority structure, but such a structure was instituted in the first generation of Christians. It was preserved not only in the pre-Constantine Catholic Church, but also in many Protestant churches that broke with Catholicism fifteen hundred years after the first generation.
You argue speciously that Catholicism is a polytheistic religion, but the saints it honors are believed to derive all power they may have from the one or triune God that Catholics and Pentecostals worship in common. According to the Catholic Church, divine worship is properly reserved only for God, and never to the saints, who are honored as well in the Lutheran, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox churches, among others.
You argue speciously that the apostolic succession is ahistorical as if that matters. Objectively speaking, the fundamental elements of the story of Jesus are ahistorical, including his divinity and resurrection. What matters in religion is not documented history but accepted tradition. It is no different with glossolalia, snake handling, and drinking poison that is indigenous in some Pentecostal services.
You argue speciously that the pope is held to be the replacement of God on earth, but the term ‘Vicar of Christ’ is used in the Catholic Church to refer to the servant and representative of Christ on earth. You want to have your own facts, when you are entitled only to your manifestly crackpot opinions.
You don’t need to draw any pictures for me, Blemish, for I see your game easily enough: It is to avoid the real questions and doggedly try to sidetrack the discussion with recurring un-Christian insults, reintroductions of your ludicrous indefensible positions in previous threads, and anything else you think can distract. Your dishonesty is plainly drawn by yourself for every sensible person to see. When you can find the honesty, Blemish, to focus on your inability to coherently defend your invalid taxonomic contention, let me know.
Re-arguing your former epic distortions of history, Blemish, calculated to promote your animosity toward liberals does not help your argument that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion. It does it injury, instead, for your earlier crank ideas further illustrate the depth of your abysmal crackpot character. Even Glenn Beck, a conspiracy screwball if there ever was one, agrees that Nazism is on the right end of the political spectrum. But that is neither here nor there in this thread. Classification is not, as in your usage, for settling political or theological scores; it dispassionately recognizes the quintessential parameters of the entities it classifies. You merely expose your lack of objectivity by adamantly declining to acknowledge that Catholicism, like all forms of Christianity, is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus, in which Jesus is believed to be the son of God and the savior of humanity. All tolerant Christians recognize that Catholicism was the earliest organized form of Christianity. So, Blemish, you’re like a square wooden peg badly bent out of shape by a round hole.
Not all your venomous verbosity, Blemish, can succeed in concealing the fact that you have no effective rational arguments, just ragtag straw man proxies to bring up again and again. If, as you protest, I don’t address your “actual” arguments with the seriousness you crave, it is because you have no serious arguments.
Come off it, PissBong, you asinine fool. You don't address my actual presented arguments because you can't, full stop. Now in your usual PeeWee Herman style, after having been disarmed of your preferred method of demonstrating your lack of reading comprehension skills, you accuse me of employing "straw man proxies" of my own arguments? Really? What is my actual argument that I've made a "straw man" of? Why would I misrepresnt my own argument with a "straw man?" Do you even know what the terminology means, you blithering idiot? What's worse, your inability to understand English, or your utter unfamiliarity with logical discourse? Seriously, PissBong, why do you deny your imbecility that you otherwise work so tirelessly to make abundantly obvious?
You argue speciously that Catholicism is not Christianity because it has a hierarchical authority structure, but such a structure was instituted in the first generation of Christians. It was preserved not only in the pre-Constantine Catholic Church, but also in many Protestant churches that broke with Catholicism fifteen hundred years after the first generation.
Wrong. I've argued that the bureaucratic, polytheistic religion of Catholicism presents its heirarchical authority structure as superior to those found in the various congregations of the egalitarian, monotheistic religion of Christianity, based on the contrived reimagining of Peter as the founder of a bishopric at Rome and that this bishopfic has a (biblically indefensible) apostolic supremacy over actual Christianity that justifies all manner of biblically indefensible ecclesiological and theological contrivances alien to actual Christianity, such as Mary worship, post-mortem "Purgatory," papal "infallibility," etc.
You argue speciously that Catholicism is a polytheistic religion, but the saints it honors are believed to derive all power they may have from the one or triune God that Catholics and Pentecostals worship in common. According to the Catholic Church, divine worship is properly reserved only for God, and never to the saints, who are honored as well in the Lutheran, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox churches, among others.
Wrong. I have argued that the religion of Catholicism is polytheistic (and therefore not Christian) due to the theological and ecclesiological importance it places on prayers to and worship of its pantheon of "saints," many of which are syncretic reimaginings of non-Christian (Brigid, Bacchus, Demeter, Diana, Ador Ormazd, etc.) or hyper-aggrandized historical and bilbical figures if they are based on actual persons at all. Some Christian denominations do recognize "saints" (though clearly they do not make saints of syncretized pagan deities or non-existent persons), and clearly no Christians pray to or worship those they recognize as "saints" nor do they carry on building shrines to them or pretend water stains and painted statues are miraculous manifestations of them or believe the local water supply is "holy" because of them.
[cont'd]
You argue speciously that the apostolic succession is ahistorical as if that matters. Objectively speaking, the fundamental elements of the story of Jesus are ahistorical, including his divinity and resurrection. What matters in religion is not documented history but accepted tradition. It is no different with glossolalia, snake handling, and drinking poison that is indigenous in some Pentecostal services.
Wrong. I've argued that the doctrine of apostolic succession itself is not biblically indefensible, but rather that the polytheistic religion of Catholicism's tradition of claiming Peter as their apostolic founder is utterly false, thus compounding their error of believing an apostolic chain from Peter would confer supreme powers of authority upon throwbacks to the Roman Empire's "Pontifex Maximus" or any one else. Yes, Catholicism is based on traditions. No, Catholicism is not based on Christian traditions.
You argue speciously that the pope is held to be the replacement of God on earth, but the term ‘Vicar of Christ’ is used in the Catholic Church to refer to the servant and representative of Christ on earth. You want to have your own facts, when you are entitled only to your manifestly crackpot opinions.
Wrong. I have argued that Mr. Ratzinger currently believes himself to be Jesus' "latest replacement on Earth" to be worshipped as previous Roman "god-emperors" that also held the office of "Pontifex Maximus" were worshipped, a religious office within the government of the Roman Empire charged with the "great bridge-building" task of syncretizing the local deities of conquered peoples into association with the Roman pantheon, much as Catholicism has canonized the Celtic goddess Brigid and the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda and other deities as "saints." Constantine simply attempted to syncretize Judeo-Christian figures into the Roman religion some three centuries after Christianity was founded, much to the suffering and persecution of actual Christians who didn't conform to the imperial decree and former Catholics who later protested after becoming literate of actual Christian history, theology, and ecclesiology. Mr. Ratzinger's title of "Pontifex Maximus" is overtly political, made all the more so by the Roman god-emperor Julius Caesar's taking it for himself. Mr. Ratzinger's title of "Vicar of Christ" literally means "replacement of Christ" or "proxy of Christ." "Representative," indeed. Please. Who needs Jesus when we've got the god-emperor Mr. Ratzinger? Make sure you kiss his ring in pious worship and obeisance. He likes that. He's the "Holy Father," after all, which obviously makes him God incarnate.
Catholicism is not Christianity.
You don’t need to draw any pictures for me, Blemish, for I see your game easily enough: It is to avoid the real questions and doggedly try to sidetrack the discussion with recurring un-Christian insults, reintroductions of your ludicrous indefensible positions in previous threads, and anything else you think can distract. Your dishonesty is plainly drawn by yourself for every sensible person to see. When you can find the honesty, Blemish, to focus on your inability to coherently defend your invalid taxonomic contention, let me know.
Invalid taxonomies? I'm rather very confident I've unassailably made a categorization of Catholicism as non-Christian in both its origin and its practices, and validly categorized you as a blithering idiot. Which taxonomical contention do you think you can refute, and more to the point, when are you going to try?
Re-arguing your former epic distortions of history, Blemish, calculated to promote your animosity toward liberals does not help your argument that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion.
I reintroduced your previous attempts at expelling your fellow leftist Adolf Hitler from the left-wing to make an analogy to your facile miscategorizations and overt duplicities in defining Christianity without concern for actual Christian theology and ecclesiology. You basically make Hitler "right-wing" because he "wasn't a Bolshevist" in his socialist opposition to capitalism, usurpation of private property (that of Jews, mostly) in his state seizure of the means of production and economic centralization, and his employment of traditional leftist anti-Semitism. You make Catholicism "Christian" because they "worship Jesus" along with their thousands of other objects of worship in the form of "saints." statues, and oddly anthropomorphic water stains on walls, not to mention drippings from a machine in a chocolate factory that vaguely "look like Mary."
It does it injury, instead, for your earlier crank ideas further illustrate the depth of your abysmal crackpot character. Even Glenn Beck, a conspiracy screwball if there ever was one, agrees that Nazism is on the right end of the political spectrum.
I'm not all that familiar with Gleen Beck's repetoire, but given his past effusive praise of authors who indeed catalog the undeniable leftism of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, authors such as Jonah Goldberg, and Beck's own series that draws parallels between the thugocracy politics of the leftist Barack Obama and the Nazis, I'm going to elect to discount this as an intellectually dishonest mischaracterization of Gleen Beck's actual views on par with your intellectual dishonesty in mischaracterizing yourself as "not an imbecile."
But that is neither here nor there in this thread. Classification is not, as in your usage, for settling political or theological scores; it dispassionately recognizes the quintessential parameters of the entities it classifies. You merely expose your lack of objectivity by adamantly declining to acknowledge that Catholicism, like all forms of Christianity, is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus, in which Jesus is believed to be the son of God and the savior of humanity. All tolerant Christians recognize that Catholicism was the earliest organized form of Christianity. So, Blemish, you’re like a square wooden peg badly bent out of shape by a round hole.
Blah blah blah.
You're welcome to enter the discussion ar any time. Need a map?
Blemish, you come off again as a bona fide crackpot, unwittingly demonstrating that you have nothing but recycled worn-out straw men to help you out and recurrent disingenuous illogic to defend your ludicrous taxonomic contention. You have not addressed the criteria for classification of Christianity because none of your hostile reservations about Catholicism qualify for purposes of classification.
You argue speciously that Catholicism is not Christianity because it has a hierarchical authority structure, but such a structure was instituted in the first generation of Christians. It was preserved not only in the pre-Constantine Catholic Church, but also in many Protestant churches that broke with Catholicism fifteen hundred years after the first generation.-
Wrong. I've argued that the bureaucratic, polytheistic religion of Catholicism presents its heirarchical authority structure as superior to those found in the various congregations of the egalitarian, monotheistic religion of Christianity, based on the contrived reimagining of Peter as the founder of a bishopric at Rome and that this bishopfic has a (biblically indefensible) apostolic supremacy over actual Christianity that justifies all manner of biblically indefensible ecclesiological and theological contrivances alien to actual Christianity, such as Mary worship, post-mortem "Purgatory," papal "infallibility," etc.
Nonsense. Although Jesus’ message promises a society based on universal love (not abuse) in an imminent utopian kingdom to come, in Christian society as it is, there are always founding fathers, pastors, preachers, teachers of the law and morality; leaders are not egalitarian. You allege again what I’ve shown the Catholic Church does not endorse. When Protestantism, what you regard as Christianity, appeared, it was as a sixteenth century reaction by break-away dissidents within the Catholic Church to the Church’s authority. However, whatever your venomous opinion of these issues, they are wholly irrelevant. What is relevant to the point in dispute is that, notwithstanding your severe misrepresentations, Catholicism is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament, which suffices for its classification as a form of Christianity.
You argue speciously that Catholicism is a polytheistic religion, but the saints it honors are believed to derive all power they may have from the one or triune God that Catholics and Pentecostals worship in common. According to the Catholic Church, divine worship is properly reserved only for God, and never to the saints, who are honored as well in the Lutheran, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox churches, among others.
Continued
Wrong. I have argued that the religion of Catholicism is polytheistic (and therefore not Christian) due to the theological and ecclesiological importance it places on prayers to and worship of its pantheon of "saints," many of which are syncretic reimaginings of non-Christian (Brigid, Bacchus, Demeter, Diana, Ador Ormazd, etc.) or hyper-aggrandized historical and bilbical figures if they are based on actual persons at all. Some Christian denominations do recognize "saints" (though clearly they do not make saints of syncretized pagan deities or non-existent persons), and clearly no Christians pray to or worship those they recognize as "saints" nor do they carry on building shrines to them or pretend water stains and painted statues are miraculous manifestations of them or believe the local water supply is "holy" because of them.
Nonsense. Any importance given to prayers to saints is not to be confused with divine worship, according to the Catholic Church, which teaches there is one God. Saints, who have no power but from God, are revered in many Christian sects and taken as powerful inspirations for living a Christian life. There is scriptural warrant for such reverence in the passages where one is bidden to venerate angels (Exodus 23:20 ff; Joshua 5:13 ff.; Daniel 8:15 ff; 10:4 ff; Luke 2:9 ff; Acts 12:7 ff; Revelation 5:11 ff; 7:1 ff; Matthew 18:10; etc.)
Nor should superstitious folk corruptions of the Christian faith be conflated with official Church doctrine. The alleged miracle healing properties of some waters are little different than the alleged miracle healings that some televangelists are believed to have performed. For classification as a form of Christianity, it is necessary and sufficient that it be a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament, which requirements are satisfied by Catholicism. For classification purposes, what is scripturally indefensible or ahistorical according to your hostile opinion is entirely irrelevant.
Continued
You argue speciously that the apostolic succession is ahistorical as if that matters. Objectively speaking, the fundamental elements of the story of Jesus are ahistorical, including his divinity and resurrection. What matters in religion is not documented history but accepted tradition. It is no different with glossolalia, snake handling, and drinking poison that is indigenous in some Pentecostal services.
Wrong. I've argued that the doctrine of apostolic succession itself is not biblically indefensible, but rather that the polytheistic religion of Catholicism's tradition of claiming Peter as their apostolic founder is utterly false, thus compounding their error of believing an apostolic chain from Peter would confer supreme powers of authority upon throwbacks to the Roman Empire's "Pontifex Maximus" or any one else. Yes, Catholicism is based on traditions. No, Catholicism is not based on Christian traditions.
Nonsense. I did not say in the quoted paragraph that you argued that apostolic succession is not biblically indefensible, but rather ahistorical. Evidently, you cannot even say what I said without distorting it.
Scholars say the term Pontifex Maximus was doubtless originally employed with reference to the Jewish high-priest, whose place the Christian bishops were regarded as holding each in his own diocese. Pontifex Maximus is the title of a high authority, not of a god. The humble phrase Servus servorum Dei, Servant of the Servants of God, is now so entirely a papal title that a Bull in which it should be wanting would be reckoned unauthentic.
Catholicism is based on traditions whose justification is believed to be found in the New Testament. Whether you think that is so does not count.
You argue speciously that the pope is held to be the replacement of God on earth, but the term ‘Vicar of Christ’ is used in the Catholic Church to refer to the servant and representative of Christ on earth. You want to have your own facts, when you are entitled only to your manifestly crackpot opinions.
Wrong. I have argued that Mr. Ratzinger currently believes himself to be Jesus' "latest replacement on Earth" to be worshipped as previous Roman "god-emperors" that also held the office of "Pontifex Maximus" were worshipped, a religious office within the government of the Roman Empire charged with the "great bridge-building" task of syncretizing the local deities of conquered peoples into association with the Roman pantheon, much as Catholicism has canonized the Celtic goddess Brigid and the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda and other deities as "saints." Constantine simply attempted to syncretize Judeo-Christian figures into the Roman religion some three centuries after Christianity was founded, much to the suffering and persecution of actual Christians who didn't conform to the imperial decree and former Catholics who later protested after becoming literate of actual Christian history, theology, and ecclesiology. Mr. Ratzinger's title of "Pontifex Maximus" is overtly political, made all the more so by the Roman god-emperor Julius Caesar's taking it for himself. Mr. Ratzinger's title of "Vicar of Christ" literally means "replacement of Christ" or "proxy of Christ." "Representative," indeed. Please. Who needs Jesus when we've got the god-emperor Mr. Ratzinger? Make sure you kiss his ring in pious worship and obeisance. He likes that. He's the "Holy Father," after all, which obviously makes him God incarnate.
Continued
Nonsense. Pontifex Maximus is used in the sense of a bridge made between man and God. The Catholic Church has not canonized the Celtic goddess Brigid and the Zoroastrian god Ahura Mazda. Being Christian is a Church requirement for sainthood. The theological connotations of the title Vicar of Christ have a pastoral sense, evoking the words of Christ to Peter in John 21:16-17, "Feed my lambs... Feed my sheep", so Christ made Peter his vicar and pastor with the responsibility to feed his flock (i.e., the Church), acting as his substitute. In the U.S. system of governance, a person elected as a representative to the House of Representatives acts as a substitute for the people in his district; he does not replace them in the sense of eliminating them.
Catholicism is not Christianity.
In studies of religion, Catholicism is classified uncontroversially as Christianity; whether you agree, Blemish, doesn’t matter.
You don’t need to draw any pictures for me, Blemish, for I see your game easily enough: It is to avoid the real questions and doggedly try to sidetrack the discussion with recurring un-Christian insults, reintroductions of your ludicrous indefensible positions in previous threads, and anything else you think can distract. Your dishonesty is plainly drawn by yourself for every sensible person to see. When you can find the honesty, Blemish, to focus on your inability to coherently defend your invalid taxonomic contention, let me know.
Invalid taxonomies? I'm rather very confident I've unassailably made a categorization of Catholicism as non-Christian in both its origin and its practices, and validly categorized you as a blithering idiot. Which taxonomical contention do you think you can refute, and more to the point, when are you going to try?
The origin of Catholicism is the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and its practices are believed to have their sources in the New Testament. All tolerant Christians accept Catholics as Christians. Whether you agree on that is irrelevant. You, Blemish, are validly classified as an arrogant crackpot for imagining taxonomy is a tool you can exploit for promoting a vicious personal agenda. If you ever have a serious argument, let me know.
Re-arguing your former epic distortions of history, Blemish, calculated to promote your animosity toward liberals does not help your argument that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion.
I reintroduced your previous attempts at expelling your fellow leftist Adolf Hitler from the left-wing to make an analogy to your facile miscategorizations and overt duplicities in defining Christianity without concern for actual Christian theology and ecclesiology. You basically make Hitler "right-wing" because he "wasn't a Bolshevist" in his socialist opposition to capitalism, usurpation of private property (that of Jews, mostly) in his state seizure of the means of production and economic centralization, and his employment of traditional leftist anti-Semitism. You make Catholicism "Christian" because they "worship Jesus" along with their thousands of other objects of worship in the form of "saints." statues, and oddly anthropomorphic water stains on walls, not to mention drippings from a machine in a chocolate factory that vaguely "look like Mary."
You frantically reintroduce your previous mischaracterization of Hitler to excuse your crackpot
misclassification of Catholicism. Historically, conservatives are concerned with conserving the
privileges of men of property, while liberals are concerned with individual liberty and the rights
of oppressed minorities.
Continued
The Nazis were sanctioned to exercise dictatorial powers by the ruling
conservative elite, and, during the war, industrial magnates flourished and prospered and were in
a good position to continue doing so after the war. Meanwhile, liberals and communists and
members of “non-Aryan” minority groups were sent to the concentration camps. Rand Paul’s
recent comments that restaurant owners are entitled to bar African Americans from their
premises confirm the traditional rightwing over-riding concern for the privileges of
men of property. But the fact is, you are trying to distract from your inability to defend your
crackpot contention by restarting a distracting argument over your imbecilic assertions of the
past.
Catholics worship one god as the creator of heaven and earth, and teach the gospel of Jesus
worldwide. The titles used for the head of the Church, the historicity of the apostolic
succession, which you dispute, the corruptions of folk religion, which occur in Protestant sects as
well, none of this diminishes the essential nature of Catholicism, which qualifies it as a branch
of Christianity.
It does it injury, instead, for your earlier crank ideas further illustrate the depth of your
abysmal crackpot character. Even Glenn Beck, a conspiracy screwball if there ever was one,
agrees that Nazism is on the right end of the political spectrum.
I'm not all that familiar with Gleen Beck's repetoire [sic], but given his past
effusive praise of authors who indeed catalog the undeniable leftism of Adolf Hitler and the
Nazis, authors such as Jonah Goldberg, and Beck's own series that draws parallels between the
thugocracy politics of the leftist Barack Obama and the Nazis, I'm going to elect to discount this
as an intellectually dishonest mischaracterization of Gleen Beck's actual views on par with your
intellectual dishonesty in mischaracterizing yourself as "not an imbecile."
Glenn Beck’s repertoire on his show consists of daily lectures to his listeners, imparting to them what he considers imperative for them to know, using a chalkboard and mounted images that he affixes to the board. When he illustrates the political spectrum, he draws a straight line and affixes to the left end of it an image of the Soviet flag, and to the right end an image of the Nazi flag. That is the truth that you find inconvenient to accept. He repeatedly has said that communism is on the left extreme and Nazism is on the right extreme, and that, though distinct, they are alike insofar as they both represent “total government” (i.e., totalitarianism, a term Beck never uses), which is indisputable and something I’ve said before.
But that is neither here nor there in this thread. Classification is not, as in your usage, for settling political or theological scores; it dispassionately recognizes the quintessential parameters of the entities it classifies. You merely expose your lack of objectivity by adamantly declining to acknowledge that Catholicism, like all forms of Christianity, is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus, in which Jesus is believed to be the son of God and the savior of humanity. All tolerant Christians recognize that Catholicism was the earliest organized form of Christianity. So, Blemish, you’re like a square wooden peg badly bent out of shape by a round hole.
Blah blah blah.
Is that the sound a wooden peg makes when it’s bent out of shape?
Catholicism is Christianity by virtue of being a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Your personal objections are part superficial and the other part disingenuous.
Concluded
You're welcome to enter the discussion ar any time. Need a map?
You’re welcome to confess your crackpotry at any time. Stick this on your map: Your approval is superfluous for Catholicism to be recognized as Christianity by the world. That is a realization you’ll have to learn to live with when you are grown up, Blemish.
I'll just blast the latest batch of skeet to shoot here, without the unnecessary extensive quoting of your non-essential imbecilities.
... However, whatever your venomous opinion of these issues, they are wholly irrelevant. What is relevant to the point in dispute is that, notwithstanding your severe misrepresentations, Catholicism is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament, which suffices for its classification as a form of Christianity ...
... Catholicism is based on traditions whose justification is believed to be found in the New Testament. Whether you think that is so does not count ...
... The origin of Catholicism is the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and its practices are believed to have their sources in the New Testament ...
Neither the teachings of Jesus nor the texts of the New Testament support, much less contain any basis for the polytheistic religion of Catholicism's contrived doctrines and practices of Mary / "Queen of Heaven" worship, "saint" worship, the "perpetual" virginity of Mary (James, brother of Jesus, anyone?), Purgatory, infant baptism, "transubstantiation" sacrifice rituals / bread and wine worship (putting "Jesus" to death by imagined cannibalism every Sunday), priesthood forbidden to marry (even though Peter himself was married...), salvation through works, an ahistorical imaginary apostolic succession from Peter and a theologically blasphemous supreme authority of Peter somehow passable to successors (real or counterfeit), papal "infallibility," confession of sin to priests for forgiveness via the agency of iterations of petitional prayers to Mary and saints (many of which are pagan deities reimagined), and shielding child molesters from prosecution.
Sorry, no dice. Catholicism isn't based on the life and teachings of Jesus presented in the New Testament at all.
The religion of Catholicism and the religion of Christianity are entirely different.
Glenn Beck’s repertoire on his show consists of daily lectures to his listeners, imparting to them what he considers imperative for them to know, using a chalkboard and mounted images that he affixes to the board. When he illustrates the political spectrum, he draws a straight line and affixes to the left end of it an image of the Soviet flag, and to the right end an image of the Nazi flag. That is the truth that you find inconvenient to accept. He repeatedly has said that communism is on the left extreme and Nazism is on the right extreme, and that, though distinct, they are alike insofar as they both represent “total government” (i.e., totalitarianism, a term Beck never uses), which is indisputable and something I’ve said before.
That's some accomplishment, Glenn Beck using visual aids for his listeners. I'm only passingly familiar with his radio show, and only if I happen to tune it in while driving to work. I don't find him all that impressive (he's no Mark Levin). I've never watched his television show save for a time he had Jonah Goldberg as a guest promoting his book Liberal Fascism. However, I will concede agreement with you. If Beck is placing totalitarianism on both ends of the political spectrum (rather than the correct formulation of totalitarianism on the far left, libertarianism on the far right) then yes, Beck is a crackpot, a seriously kookish crackpot, like yourself.
'Pontifex Maximus' is used in the sense of a bridge made between man and God.
Contrast this tradition of an intecessory role for Mr. Ratzinger as "bridge" between man and God maintained by the polytheistic religion of Catholicism with the beliefs of adherents of the religion of Christianity as taught by Jesus:
Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." - John 14:5-7
As I stated previously, Mr. Ratzinger is claiming to be a god and the replacement of Jesus.
I'll just blast the latest batch of skeet to shoot here, without the unnecessary extensive quoting of your non-essential imbecilities.
Ignoring my point-by-point refutations of your inessential requirements for classification suggests lack of a serious argument and reliance on ad infinitum repetition of misrepresentations previously shown to be invalid with respect to the point in dispute here.
... However, whatever your venomous opinion of these issues, they are wholly irrelevant. What is relevant to the point in dispute is that, notwithstanding your severe misrepresentations, Catholicism is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament, which suffices for its classification as a form of Christianity ...
... Catholicism is based on traditions whose justification is believed to be found in the New Testament. Whether you think that is so does not count ...
... The origin of Catholicism is the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and its practices are believed to have their sources in the New Testament ... .
Neither the teachings of Jesus nor the texts of the New Testament support, much less contain any basis for the polytheistic religion of Catholicism's contrived doctrines and practices of Mary / "Queen of Heaven" worship, "saint" worship, the "perpetual" virginity of Mary (James, brother of Jesus, anyone?), Purgatory, infant baptism, "transubstantiation" sacrifice rituals / bread and wine worship (putting "Jesus" to death by imagined cannibalism every Sunday), priesthood forbidden to marry (even though Peter himself was married...), salvation through works, an ahistorical imaginary apostolic succession from Peter and a theologically blasphemous supreme authority of Peter somehow passable to successors (real or counterfeit), papal "infallibility," confession of sin to priests for forgiveness via the agency of iterations of petitional prayers to Mary and saints (many of which are pagan deities reimagined), and shielding child molesters from prosecution.
There is nothing about child sexual abuse in the Bible; there is no prohibition of it in the Ten Commandments. It is a modern development arising out of secular humanism and feminism that became a public issue in the 1970s and 1980s. Subsequently, all churches have rightly felt compelled to develop policies with respect to it.
For Catholics, the proof that Christ constituted Peter head of his Church is found in the two Petrine texts, Matthew 16:17-19, and John 21:15-17.
The Catholic Church teaches that divine worship is reserved for God, the creator of heaven and earth, never to the saints. Saints are not gods in the Catholic Church. So your repeated allegation that Catholicism is polytheistic is a lie. Catholicism states that there is one God, the god of the Bible. What you vilify as “imagined cannibalism” is a re-enactment of the Last Supper, during which Jesus gave the Apostles bread, saying, "This is my body", and wine, saying, "This is my blood" (Mark 14:22-24). Your whole litany of gripes with Catholicism amounts to nothing more than personal gripes. None of them alters the fact that, despite your doggedly repeated calumnies and malicious misrepresentations, the fundamental nature of Catholicism is that it is a monotheistic religion founded on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and this suffices to classify it as Christianity, as do all scholars of religious studies. Rant and rave against that until kingdom come, Blemish, it changes nothing in the grown-up world.
Concluded
Sorry, no dice. Catholicism isn't based on the life and teachings of Jesus presented in the New Testament at all.
The New Testament has been interpreted in more than one way, including idiosyncratically by bullies like you as giving God’s sanction to abusive behavior. The Catholic Church believes Catholicism is based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in the New Testament; you believe it is not. But you have demonstrated that you are an incensed crackpot. So, sorry, Blemish, it’s no dice: Your hostile viewpoint doesn’t count for a whole lot.
The religion of Catholicism and the religion of Christianity are entirely different.
Catholicism grew out of the teachings of Jesus. It is a form of Christianity that differs from more recent Christian sects in matters of practice and doctrine and which is the higher authority (the traditional Church or the Bible, a book that was not widely available until the time of the Protestant Reformation), but it does not differ from them in the basic beliefs that Jesus is the son of God and humanity’s redeemer, and that God is one.
Glenn Beck’s repertoire on his show consists of daily lectures to his listeners, imparting to them what he considers imperative for them to know, using a chalkboard and mounted images that he affixes to the board. When he illustrates the political spectrum, he draws a straight line and affixes to the left end of it an image of the Soviet flag, and to the right end an image of the Nazi flag. That is the truth that you find inconvenient to accept. He repeatedly has said that communism is on the left extreme and Nazism is on the right extreme, and that, though distinct, they are alike insofar as they both represent “total government” (i.e., totalitarianism, a term Beck never uses), which is indisputable and something I’ve said before.
That's some accomplishment, Glenn Beck using visual aids for his listeners.
It’s not surprising. Television is a visual medium, and Beck is a very showy sort of guy. His chalkboard is covered virtually all over with magnetically attached mounted images when he gets a full head of steam.
I'm only passingly familiar with his radio show, and only if I happen to tune it in while driving to work. I don't find him all that impressive (he's no Mark Levin). I've never watched his television show save for a time he had Jonah Goldberg as a guest promoting his book Liberal Fascism. However, I will concede agreement with you. If Beck is placing totalitarianism on both ends of the political spectrum (rather than the correct formulation of totalitarianism on the far left, libertarianism on the far right) then yes, Beck is a crackpot, a seriously kookish crackpot, like yourself.
The political spectrum is not divided by total government on one end and little government at the other end. Many liberals also prefer that the government not intrude in their private lives. The spectrum’s division is based on the many variations in political attitudes toward property. Totalitarianism can thus occur on either side of the spectrum. Beck is a crackpot; on that we can agree. But we disagree on the reasons for his pathetic condition. On the other hand, the causes for your being a crackpot are a unique special case, Blemish.
'Pontifex Maximus' is used in the sense of a bridge made between man and God.
Contrast this tradition of an intecessory role for Mr. Ratzinger as "bridge" between man and God maintained by the polytheistic religion of Catholicism with the beliefs of adherents of the religion of Christianity as taught by Jesus:
Thomas said to him, "Lord, we don't know where you are going, so how can we know the way?" Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him." - John 14:5-7
As I stated previously, Mr. Ratzinger is claiming to be a god and the replacement of Jesus.
As I stated previously, Blemish, your misrepresentations of Catholicism are disingenuous, and for purposes of classification, superficial. The pope is a servant of the servants of God. That is one of the titles used for him that you want to sweep under your rug, as it were. The pope is the elected chief pastor of the whole Church, a facilitator, not a God, and not a replacement of Jesus, as anti-Catholics heatedly allege. In fact, official declarations of the Church only speak of the popes as holding within the college of the Bishops a role analogous to that held by Peter within the college of the Apostles, of which the college of the Bishops, a distinct entity, is the successor.
An absence of church hierarchy, of any religious leaders, is not a requirement for objective classification as Christianity. Indeed, virtually all Christian sects have some kind of hierarchical church structure. If it were to be considered a disqualifier, as you seem to prefer, then practically nothing would qualify as Christianity.
Modern Catholicism developed organically from the early Church, for, as John Henry Newman, who began his career as an Anglican churchman and scholar and ended it as a Roman Catholic cardinal, wrote:
Modern Catholicism is nothing else but simply the legitimate growth and complement, that is, the natural and necessary development of the doctrine of the early Church.
Continuous futile flailing of personal attacks at me for requiring consistency and honest representation of my arguments over your disingenous illiterate readings of them will not cover that you're retreating back to previously abandoned "Peter is retroactively the first Pope" farce that concludes with the hilariously asinine punchline that Catholicism is an "unbroken" line of apostolic succession because the infallible "Pope" said so.
Take a moment to find out what thinking is like, make up your mind on what your argument is, and get back to me, twit.
We too insistently beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved.
— Pope Benedict XVI, June 11, 2010, marking the end of the Roman Catholic Church’s Year of the Priest celebrations with a public apology for years of sexual abuse of children by priests.
Thus spake Joseph Ratzinger, the reputedly infallible man that you disingenuously allege believes he is God incarnate.
For the record, in the matter of the status of Peter among the Apostles and whether he is Satan or whatever, though these are issues that seem to consume you beyond all reason, and I am aware of what various sides have argued and postulated, I have no opinion.
Fiercely attack me if it gives you any degree of solace, Blemish, ferociously flog your hollow straw men to your heart’s content, presumptuously pretend I don’t know how to read as I puncture your precious but puny points, transparently lie with delirious abandon, as you have done, to bolster your weak and worthless case — yet, nonetheless, the stubborn fact remains that Catholicism is indeed a monotheistic religion founded on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and this irreducible reality, albeit to the manifest distress of passionate anti-Catholics like you, suffices to classify it, beyond rational doubt, as one of the branches of Christianity.
You won’t believe this now, but, some day, when you have grown up, Blemish, you will possess the common sense to comprehend just how strikingly asinine you have been here.
For the record, in the matter of the status of Peter among the Apostles and whether he is Satan or whatever, though these are issues that seem to consume you beyond all reason, and I am aware of what various sides have argued and postulated, I have no opinion.
I suppose that's one way to get out of admitting that you have no informed opinion.
If Catholicism claims it apostolic authority comes from an association with Peter that is ahistorical and its claims are infallible due to a superior apostolic claim based on a theologically and ecclesiologically nonsensical reimagining of Peter and his role in 1st Century Christian evangelical expansion of its numbers, then every thing Catholicism claims about it place in Christendom is a LIE.
You "don't have an opinion" on matters you refuse to examine through the lens of history, theology, and ecclesiology. You're going to cling to Catholicism's house propaganda claims of being Christian in origin and nature rather than verify if these claims are actually true. I have found that Catholicism's historical claims are bogus and its tehological and ecclesiological claims are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus and the autonomous, egalitarian structures of the congregations led by his apostles, including Peter, who was regarded as fallible enough by Jesus Himself to characterize him as "Satan" in the very passage Catholicism claims is "proof" of their infallible apostolic legacy from Peter. Paul wrote an epistle to the Roman congregation and Peter was not there nor at that time had Peter ever been to Rome. Paul also chastised Peter on theological and ecclesiological grounds in the book of Acts and other places, further undermining the Catholic claim to infallibility.
The polytheistic religion of Catholicism's claim of papal infalliability is a novel, biblically indefensible postion contrived 140 years ago. It, like every other doctrine of the Catholic religion, has no basis whatsoever in the teachings of Jesus and the Christian religion.
It's nice that Mr. Ratzinger "insistently begs" for forgiveness of his religion's role in harboring child molesters to a degree it could no longer conceal from the public.
Does he "insistently beg" St. Bibinia (patron of hangovers) and St. Acacius (patron of headaches) to pester St. Dymphna (patron of the sexually abused) to pester the Queen of Heaven Mary with incessant prayers to goad her into pestering Jesus for forgiveness, or does his rank as the apostolic successor of Julius Caesar let him hoild skip level conversations with Zeus not authorized for syncretized Catholics beneath him?
For the record, I don't "hate" Catholics any more or less than I "hate" any other non-Christian religion's members.
I just challenge their hubristic presumptions of theological and eclessiological authority over a religion, Christianity, that they don't practice.
For the record, in the matter of the status of Peter among the Apostles and whether he is Satan or whatever, though these are issues that seem to consume you beyond all reason, and I am aware of what various sides have argued and postulated, I have no opinion.
I suppose that's one way to get out of admitting that you have no informed opinion.
You suppose wrong, Blemish. By supposing so, you only betray your penchant for dishonest distortion. I am aware of the issues and the arguments in the matter of the status of Peter among the Apostles and whether he is Satan or whatever, but I have no opinions about those matters because I am aware that they have no relevance to the taxonomic question you tirelessly dispute here. The grievances against Catholicism that you bring up again and again are either deliberate lies and disingenuous misrepresentations or actual differences that are not pertinent. Whether or not the apostolic succession postulated by the Catholic Church is ahistorical, it is a widely accepted tradition which Catholics find support for in biblical citations (even though it may be as historically dubious as claims for the divinity of Jesus), and, although, it is a characteristic that distinguishes it from many other Christian sects; it is not one that warrants classifying Catholicism as a non-Christian religion. The same applies to your whole litany of other passionately reiterated grievances. For Catholicism is akin to all other branches of Christianity in being a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament.
It's nice that Mr. Ratzinger "insistently begs" for forgiveness of his religion's role in harboring child molesters to a degree it could no longer conceal from the public..
No, it’s good that, contrary to your unconscionable lies, the pope recognizes a judgmental higher authority and can acknowledge that the Catholic Church has been reprehensible with respect to the modern secular ethos.
For the record, I don't "hate" Catholics any more or less than I "hate" any other non-Christian religion's members [ for the record, ‘hate’ is not a word I used here; that is a dishonest insinuation on your part] [I did use the word ‘whatever’, which contains the sequence of letters of the word ‘hate’; perhaps that is the alibi you may want to give].
I just challenge their hubristic presumptions of theological and eclessiological [sic] authority over a religion, Christianity, that they don't practice [bullies don’t practice Christianity either; neither do those like you who insistently try to assert idiosyncratic authority over taxonomy of religious denominations].
The outsized hubristic passion extravagantly displayed by you in this thread is indistinguishable from an overpowering prejudice against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith.
[ for the record, ‘hate’ is not a word I used here; that is a dishonest insinuation on your part] [I did use the word ‘whatever’, which contains the sequence of letters of the word ‘hate’; perhaps that is the alibi you may want to give].
Okay, whatever. I don't have "hate" or "outsized hubristic passion indistinguishable from overpowering prejudice" for Catholicism.
(You dance so ineptly, PissBong. I think you protest the realization of your imbecility a bit too much.)
I simply find that Catholicism has nothing resembling Christianity in it.
For Catholicism is akin to all other branches of Christianity in being a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament.
Except that it isn't.
Catholicism claims it has a pedigree of apostolic succession from Peter, but the New Testament texts have Peter as an apostle to the Jewish community at Babylon while Paul was writing epistles to a Roman congregation neither founded or led by Peter.
Catholicism claims that its [patently false claims of an] apostolic succession from Peter grants it [an equally false] superior status over the pedigrees of congregations with actual and verifiable apostolic pedigrees.
Two claims about Peter that are decisively false. Peter didn't found the bishopric of Rome, and Peter held no special status over other apostles or 1st Century Christian congregations worldwide.
Jesus never taught a polytheistic system of prayer to intercessories between man and God. Indeed, the Lord's Prayer contains no mention of Mary, Brigid, Diana, or Xango (the African deity who had allegedly had a secret life as St. Barbara).
Jesus never taught that eternal salvation could be lost if its warranty wasn't conveniently renewed from time to time for a price by the local emissary priest of Catholicism through contrived rituals involving incense, candles, and splashes of tap water. Nor did Jesus teach that the souls of the dead encounter a sentence of Purgatory to purify them for heaven as if belief in Jesus' death and resurrection on their behalf wasn't sufficient. Nor did Jesus teach that the punishment of eternity in Hell wasn't enough for the souls of the damned without disinterring and mutilating their corpses, as was more infamously done to the body of "Pope" Formosus but a rather widely practiced morbid trait of Catholicism until just a few centuries ago. Even King Henry the VIII, despite contriving his own religion to spite Catholicism's forbidding divorce maintained the Catholic tradition of posthumous execution and corpse desecration.
Catholicism is not Christian, and never was.
[ for the record, ‘hate’ is not a word I used here; that is a dishonest insinuation on your part] [I did use the word ‘whatever’, which contains the sequence of letters of the word ‘hate’; perhaps that is the alibi you may want to give].
Okay, whatever. I don't have "hate" or "outsized hubristic passion […] indistinguishable from overpowering prejudice" for Catholicism..
You may declare whatever, Blemish, but a crackpot is never a good judge of what he has put on the page.
(You dance so ineptly, PissBong. I think you protest the realization of your imbecility a bit too much.)
For the record, I do not hate extraterrestrials — let no person aver that I do.
You think so ineptly, Blemish, that your feeble mental gymnastics have no redeeming social or other human value.
I simply find that Catholicism has nothing resembling Christianity in it.
Your passionate personal impression is immaterial. Catholics celebrate Easter and Christmas for the same reasons as other Christians and study the same scriptures.
For Catholicism is akin to all other branches of Christianity in being a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament.
Except that it isn't.
To virtually everyone else, it is. But don’t be shy saying whatever you think.
Catholicism claims it has a pedigree of apostolic succession from Peter, but the New Testament texts have Peter as an apostle to the Jewish community at Babylon while Paul was writing epistles to a Roman congregation neither founded or led by Peter.
The Catholic Church does not base its claim to apostolic succession on any assertion that Peter was the bishop of Rome.
Catholicism claims that its [patently false claims of an] apostolic succession from Peter grants it [an equally false] superior status over the pedigrees of congregations with actual and verifiable apostolic pedigrees.
So what, Blemish? Every religion believes it is number one with God.
Two claims about Peter that are decisively false. Peter didn't found the bishopric of Rome, and Peter held no special status over other apostles or 1st Century Christian congregations worldwide.
Concluded
The Catholic Church isn’t making the claim that Peter founded the bishopric of Rome.
Jesus never taught a polytheistic system of prayer to intercessories between man and God. Indeed, the Lord's Prayer contains no mention of Mary, Brigid, Diana, or Xango (the African deity who had allegedly had a secret life as St. Barbara).
The Catholic Church does not teach “a polytheistic system of prayer”; that is a big lie that will not become true however many times you repeat it. One can ask others to pray for him, and these can be persons on earth or saints in heaven, but, as the Catholic Church states, divine worship is reserved to God alone, never to the saints.
Jesus never taught that eternal salvation could be lost if its warranty wasn't conveniently renewed from time to time for a price by the local emissary priest of Catholicism through contrived rituals involving incense, candles, and splashes of tap water. Nor did Jesus teach that the souls of the dead encounter a sentence of Purgatory to purify them for heaven as if belief in Jesus' death and resurrection on their behalf wasn't sufficient. Nor did Jesus teach that the punishment of eternity in Hell wasn't enough for the souls of the damned without disinterring and mutilating their corpses, as was more infamously done to the body of "Pope" Formosus but a rather widely practiced morbid trait of Catholicism until just a few centuries ago. Even King Henry the VIII, despite contriving his own religion to spite Catholicism's forbidding divorce maintained the Catholic tradition of posthumous execution and corpse desecration.
Neither did Jesus teach that snake handling or drinking poison, which occurs in Pentecostal services, is a test of faith. Jesus should not be held responsible for the varied evolution of the religion built around the divine worship of him, ranging from Catholicism to Lutheranism to Pentecostalism and Christian Science. According to the reports left to us, Jesus thought himself an orthodox Jew, not a Christian.
Purgatory is an idea that has ancient roots and is well-attested in early Christian literature, while the conception of purgatory as a geographically situated place is largely the creation of medieval Christian piety and imagination. Such a belief in a process of purification or temporary punishment is found in Methodism, Mormonism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Judaism.
Old history, especially misrepresented old history of t he ninth century, is of no consequence here. Disinterment and trial of popes was not “widely practiced.” Bizarre episodes in the history of the medieval papacy or of Anglicanism prove nothing about modern Catholicism. Of course, conflating everything together from every dark or remote period of history is not a valid method of rational thinking — it is merely a malicious smear tactic.
Catholicism is not Christian, and never was.
The objections you are passionate about reiterating — the ones that are not outright lies — are exotic anecdotes or secondary characteristics, not primary characteristics of significance for classification. Your anti-Catholic mantra notwithstanding, Blemish, Catholicism is Christian first and foremost because it teaches worship of Jesus as the son of God, and it has always done so.
[ for the record, ‘hate’ is not a word I used here; that is a dishonest insinuation on your part] [I did use the word ‘whatever’, which contains the sequence of letters of the word ‘hate’; perhaps that is the alibi you may want to give].
Okay, whatever. I don't have "hate" or "outsized hubristic passion indistinguishable from overpowering prejudice" for Catholicism.
You may declare whatever, Blemish, but a crackpot is never a good judge of what he has put on the page.
Apparently so. Even as I continue to point out your profuse imbecilities and ubiquitous lack of reading comprehension skills in hopes that you will someday honor your claim to desire honest discussion by admitting that you are, in painfully obvious fact, a blithering idiot, you want to engage in implying that I "dislike" or "despise" or "hate" or have "outsized hubristic passion indistiguishable from overpowering prejudice" towards Catholics while protesting that I reject your asinine implications. Crackpot, heal thyself.
You want to believe I hate Catholics because I reject in total their demonstrably false pretenses upon Christianity. I've been very charitably respectful in informing you that I am well aware of the fact that you are a blithering idiot. There's really no point in your further degrading your own already weakling, cognitively dissonant arguments that dither between self-defeating, mutually-contradicting nonsensicals about Peter without trying to smear me for catching you at it. As I stated previously, you're just not tall enough for this ride. Calling you an imbecile is probably overestimating your intellect. You quite frankly fail miserably at displaying even a modicum of reasoning skills.
The objections you are passionate about reiterating — the ones that are not outright lies — are exotic anecdotes or secondary characteristics, not primary characteristics of significance for classification.
Religions are primarily classified by what they believe (theology and ecclesiology). Just as Catholicism's "traditional" accounts of history are decisively false, Catholicism's theology and ecclesiology built upon this false history reveal it to have nothing in common with Christianity.
Your anti-Catholic mantra notwithstanding, Blemish, Catholicism is Christian first and foremost because it teaches worship of Jesus as the son of God, and it has always done so.
Except that the polytheistic religion of Catholicism, unlike monotheistic Christianity, teaches that Jesus / God is inaccessible to mankind. Catholics must pray to a plethora of intercessory objects of worship in hopes that they will pester God on their behalf.
In Christianity, Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the light" leading to the Holy Father. In Catholicism, thousands of "saints" comprised of reimagings of historic people and pagan deities and folklore stand as a chain-of-command to send prayers up to God through, and the "pope" is the Holy Father on earth and stand-in replacement of Jesus. In Christianity, man is saved by confessing faith in Jesus' death and resurrection on his behalf. In Catholiciam, man is saved if he completes a variety of sacremental rituals enough to go to Purgatory in order to be redeemed completely by torturous fire because Jesus' grace is apparently impotent and not good enough to save mankind in this regard.
Not only are Catholic beliefs not Christian beliefs, Catholic beliefs are patently offensive to Christian beliefs. Catholicism, despite your ignorant, dissembling schtick, does not represent the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, as presented in the New Testament.
Blemish: ... you want to engage in implying that I "dislike" or "desp-ise" or "hate" or have "outsized hubristic passion indistiguishable [your spelling error, not mine, just trying to reproduce my words] from overpowering prejudice" towards Catholics while protesting that I reject your asinine implications.
No, Blemish your reading comprehension skills are evidently flawed: You want to engage in implying I said something I did not say. What I said is precisely this: “The outsized hubristic passion extravagantly displayed by you in this thread is indistinguishable from an overpowering prejudice against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith.”
There is nothing in what I’ve said that alleges you dislike, despise, or hate Catholics. The prejudice that you doggedly express throughout this thread is (as I said and you deleted from the quote, replacing it with something I didn’t say) against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith. Can you see the important difference between what I said and what you pretend I said? Well, then, Blemish, you who persistently whine about reading comprehension skills: Heal thyself.
Not only are Catholic beliefs not Christian beliefs, Catholic beliefs are patently offensive to Christian beliefs.
On the contrary, it’s patently obvious to sensible people, Blemish, that beliefs cannot be offended, for beliefs are not animate beings having feelings. In reality, only people may be offended. And you are virtually alone in being offended in this case. Hundreds of millions of people piously worship Jesus Christ as the son of God and the savior of humanity, but according to your doctrinaire thinking, many of them are not Christians. You cannot imagine how imbecilic, offensively so, you thereby succeed in making yourself to vast numbers of good folks.
Catholics sincerely believe that the scriptures they hold sacred in common with every other Christian sanction Catholic beliefs.
On the other hand, lying repeatedly, smearing maliciously, misrepresenting promiscuously, and unconscionably exaggerating differences inconsequential for classification, you stridently disagree, Well, so what, Blemish? Surely you don’t hold the crackpot view that your willful opinion eclipses that of hundreds of millions of well-intentioned worshippers of Jesus. Or do you?
Blemish: ... you want to engage in implying that I "dislike" or "desp-ise" or "hate" or have "outsized hubristic passion indistiguishable [your spelling error, not mine, just trying to reproduce my words] from overpowering prejudice" towards Catholics while protesting that I reject your asinine implications.
No, Blemish your reading comprehension skills are evidently flawed: You want to engage in implying I said something I did not say. What I said is precisely this: “The outsized hubristic passion extravagantly displayed by you in this thread is indistinguishable from an overpowering prejudice against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith.”
There is nothing in what I’ve said that alleges you dislike, despise, or hate Catholics. The prejudice that you doggedly express throughout this thread is (as I said and you deleted from the quote, replacing it with something I didn’t say) against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith. Can you see the important difference between what I said and what you pretend I said? Well, then, Blemish, you who persistently whine about reading comprehension skills: Heal thyself.
When you finally do begin your long journey towards learning the basics of reading comprehension, a concept known as "subject-verb agreement" will come up. Don't be afraid. No matter how intimidating to your feeble mind mastering the difference between adverbs and adjectives will be, and how prepositional phrases can be both or neither, you must strive, strive dear PissBong, to catch up with the 3rd graders. So that you too will one day recognize that the sentence "The outsized hubristic passion extravagantly displayed by you in this thread is indistinguishable from an overpowering prejudice against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith" stripped of superflous content will grammatically reduce to "The passion is indistinguishable from prejudice."
Yes, you're either implying that I hate Catholicism, or trying to argue against my postion with a lame argumentum ad populum informal fallacy, or likely both. None of those avenues available to you to try to wriggle free of your illiteracy and unfamiliarity with logic are a refutation of either of my arguments: the argument that Catholicism isn't Christianity and the argument that you are an imbecile.
As for your implication that I "hate" Catholicism, one need only lightly peruse this thread to find you relentlessly saddling up to joust with strawmen rather than my argument, with gems like "In other words, Blemish, you dislike, or even despise as vulgar nonsense, many of the biblically-based traditional beliefs that are part of Catholicism" and other inane phraseology. [You imply feelings of hate on my part, and presumptuously include a circularly reasoned fallacy in your faulty premise that the "traditional beliefs that are part of Catholicism" are "biblically-based."]
Nonsense. I do not hate, despise, dislike, or display passion indistinguishable from overpowering prejudice towards the polytheistic religion of Catholicism. I just find no biblical, historical, theological, or ecclesiological basis to include Catholicism as a "branch" of Christianity.
My invitation to you to address my argument is still extended. At least be polite enough to R.S.V.P. if you're not going to make it.
Catholics sincerely believe that the scriptures they hold sacred in common with every other Christian sanction Catholic beliefs.
And some insincerely believe that. So what? Is it a fact, or a falsehood? Does scripture in fact sanction Catholic belief, or is that claim about scripture false?
I argue that the Catholic claim about scripture is false.
On the other hand, lying repeatedly, smearing maliciously, misrepresenting promiscuously, and unconscionably exaggerating differences inconsequential for classification, you stridently disagree, Well, so what, Blemish? Surely you don’t hold the crackpot view that your willful opinion eclipses that of hundreds of millions of well-intentioned worshippers of Jesus. Or do you?
I don't have any crackpot views. I certainly have not lied about or smeared, misrepresented or exaggerated anything about the polytheistic religion of Catholicism.
I argue that the Bible does not sanction Mary worship. I argue that the Bible does not sanction the praying to and worship of saints. I argue that the Bible does not sanction the doctrine of Purgatory. I argue that the Bible doesn't sanction "papal infallibility." I argue that the Bible does not sanction forbidding priests to marry. I argue that the Bible does not sanction worshipping wine and bread as if it were Jesus and then eating it. I argue that the Bible does not sanction posthumous execution and corpse desecration. I argue that the Bible does not sanction harboring child molesters from prosecution. And so on. I argue that the Bible does not sanction Catholicism.
My argument is not concerned with hundreds of millions of well-intentioned worshippers of Jesus. My argument is directed at Catholics, remember?
Blemish: ... you want to engage in implying that I "dislike" or "desp-ise" or "hate" or have "outsized hubristic passion indistiguishable [your spelling error, not mine, just trying to reproduce my words] from overpowering prejudice" towards Catholics while protesting that I reject your asinine implications.
No, Blemish your reading comprehension skills are evidently flawed: You want to engage in implying I said something I did not say. What I said is precisely this: “The outsized hubristic passion extravagantly displayed by you in this thread is indistinguishable from an overpowering prejudice against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith.”
There is nothing in what I’ve said that alleges you dislike, despise, or hate Catholics. The prejudice that you doggedly express throughout this thread is (as I said and you deleted from the quote, replacing it with something I didn’t say) against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith. Can you see the important difference between what I said and what you pretend I said? Well, then, Blemish, you who persistently whine about reading comprehension skills: Heal thyself.
When you finally do begin your long journey towards learning the basics of reading comprehension, a concept known as "subject-verb agreement" will come up. Don't be afraid. No matter how intimidating to your feeble mind mastering the difference between adverbs and adjectives will be, and how prepositional phrases can be both or neither, you must strive, strive dear PissBong, to catch up with the 3rd graders. So that you too will one day recognize that the sentence "The outsized hubristic passion extravagantly displayed by you in this thread is indistinguishable from an overpowering prejudice against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith" stripped of superflous content will grammatically reduce to "The passion is indistinguishable from prejudice."
You don’t know what you are talking about, Blemish. Subject-verb agreement is a grammatical rule that I did not violate in the cited sentence. Stripping a sentence of what you erroneously call “superfluous content” is a technique of grammatical analysis that facilitates the identification of grammatical parts of speech. You misapply it here. You cannot use it to determine essential meaning of the sentence. Reducing it to "The passion is indistinguishable from prejudice" obscures the sense in which the word ‘prejudice’ is used. The word was not used in the sense of prejudice against Catholics; it was used in the quite different sense of prejudice against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith. No grammatical rules, such as subject-verb agreement, were violated in doing so. As I said, you don’t really understand that of which you speak.
Yes, you're either implying that I hate Catholicism, or trying to argue against my postion with a lame argumentum ad populum informal fallacy, or likely both. None of those avenues available to you to try to wriggle free of your illiteracy and unfamiliarity with logic are a refutation of either of my arguments: the argument that Catholicism isn't Christianity and the argument that you are an imbecile.
Your desperate argumentum ad hominem and what you try hard to read into it notwithstanding, I am only implying that you have a prejudice against according to Catholicism customary respect as a well-intentioned Christian faith. In other words, you are prejudiced against the customary recognition of Catholicism as a Christian denomination. You may or may not hate Catholics: I don’t know whether you do and I don’t care. It is just your misclassification of Catholicism based on doctrines and traditions you reject that concerns me here.
Concluded
As for your implication that I "hate" Catholicism, one need only lightly peruse this thread to find you relentlessly saddling up to joust with strawmen rather than my argument, with gems like "In other words, Blemish, you dislike, or even despise as vulgar nonsense, many of the biblically-based traditional beliefs that are part of Catholicism" and other inane phraseology.
You said, “Catholicism's ‘traditional’ belief in its own (papal) bullshit does not in any way mitigate the brutal facts that it IS bullshit and IS NOT Christian.” That strong language in expressing an opinion indicates to sensible people that you despise Catholicism as vulgar nonsense — but not necessarily that you despise Catholics.
[You imply feelings of hate on my part, and presumptuously include a circularly reasoned fallacy in your faulty premise that the "traditional beliefs that are part of Catholicism" are "biblically-based."].
You apparently don’t understand what “a circularly reasoned fallacy”is. It is not what you seem to think. Religious Christians believe something is true if they can find a basis for it in the Bible. The traditional beliefs in the meqaning of the bread and wine of the Eucharist are based by the Catholic Church on the words of Jesus in the New Testament. So are the apostolic succession and other traditional beliefs.
Nonsense. I do not hate, despise, dislike, or display passion indistinguishable from overpowering prejudice towards the polytheistic religion of Catholicism. I just find no biblical, historical, theological, or ecclesiological basis to include Catholicism as a "branch" of Christianity.
You do display an antipathy toward Catholicism by insisting, contrary to fact, that it is a polytheistic religion. Catholicism is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ as presented in the New Testament, and thus is a branch of Christianity. The differences you passionately hype, the ones that are not lies, are insufficient to justify classifying it as one of the non-Christian religions.
My invitation to you to address my argument is still extended. At least be polite enough to R.S.V.P. if you're not going to make it.
Your solipsistic arrogance betrays your sad lack of understanding. No sensible person can suppose that you have made a serious argument for regarding Catholicism as one of the non-Christian religions. In fact, no scholar of religion regards it as such. Differences from other branches of Christianity that you happen to consider unjustifiable do not affect the fundamental classification.
Catholics sincerely believe that the scriptures they hold sacred in common with every other Christian sanction Catholic beliefs.
And some insincerely believe that. So what? Is it a fact, or a falsehood?
It is a fact. Sincere Catholics believe they are following the teachings of Jesus. The significance lies in the fact that religion is all about belief.
Does scripture in fact sanction Catholic belief, or is that claim about scripture false?
In fact, that is not a question that has an objective answer. The point is that both Catholics and non-Catholic Christians believe the same scriptures sanction their beliefs.
I argue that the Catholic claim about scripture is false.
It is a pointless argument. No one on earth knows anything that amounts to an objective proof onec way or the other.
On the other hand, lying repeatedly, smearing maliciously, misrepresenting promiscuously, and unconscionably exaggerating differences inconsequential for classification, you stridently disagree, Well, so what, Blemish? Surely you don’t hold the crackpot view that your willful opinion eclipses that of hundreds of millions of well-intentioned worshippers of Jesus. Or do you?
I don't have any crackpot views.
It is a crackpot view to believe your strenuously argued idiosyncratic opinion denying that Catholicism is a Christian religion has any importance at all in this world.
At least, you are not continuing to argue that beliefs have feelings that can be offended in a way that you approve.
I certainly have not lied about or smeared, misrepresented or exaggerated anything about the polytheistic religion of Catholicism.
It is a lie to call it “the polytheistic religion of Catholicism”. The Catholic Church teaches that divine worship is reserved to God alone.
I argue that the Bible does not sanction Mary worship. I argue that the Bible does not sanction the praying to and wroship of saints. I argue that the Bible does not sanction the doctrine of Purgatory. I argue that the Bible doesn't sanction "papal infallibility." I argue that the Bible does not sanction forbidding priests to marry. I argue that the Bible does not sanction worshipping wine and bread as if it were Jesus and then eating it. I argue that the Bible does not sanction posthumous execution and corpse desecration. I argue that the Bible does not sanction harboring child molesters from prosecution [Lot, Abraham’s nephew, who was saved from the destruction of Sodom, offered his virgin daughters to the men of Sodom outside his house, instead of the angels inside that they desired to “know”]. And so on. I argue that the Bible does not sanction Catholicism.
You argue ineptly, Blemish. You read the Bible to suit your arguments, and none of your arguments — the ones that are not misrepresentations, lies, hype, or smears — address the characteristics that are necessary and sufficient for classification of a Christian religion. Mere differences prove nothing in that regard.
My argument is not concerned with hundreds of millions of well-intentioned worshippers of Jesus. My argument is directed at Catholics, remember?
Remember, Blemish, that hundreds of millions of well-intentioned worshippers of Jesus are Catholics, despite your absurd huffing and puffing and chest beating all over this thread.
I really see no basis for not calling you an imbecile when you say things like "Sincere Catholics believe they are following the teachings of Jesus. The significance lies in the fact that religion is all about belief" in the same overarching presentation that Catholicism is thusly Christian because "...Catholicism is based on traditions whose justification is believed to be found in the New Testament."
If religion is indeed "all about belief" [it is] and Catholic traditional beliefs are in fact not justifiable and indeed are repudiated quite harshly by the texts of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) then the religion of Catholic beliefs and the religion of Christian beliefs are in fact in such incongruence and disagreement and diametric opposition that yes, they are seperate religions. Christians pray to and worship Jesus exclusively. Catholics include Jesus in their prayed to and worshipped pantheon of intercessory spirits and saints.
Catholics may believe their traditions are based in the Bible all they want. The Bible says otherwise. Christians have a superior claim to having their beliefs and traditions justified by the Bible (indeed, the Bible is their holy scripture) over Cathoic pretentions to it that fall apart under examination. Indeed making the Bible available for examination in a reader's own language broke the polytheistic religion of Catholicism's corrupt and self-serving attempted monopoly on scriptural interpretation and earned John Wycliffe the traditional Catholic practice of posthumous execution and corpse desecration (a traditional Catholic belief and practice also not justified by the Bible). Historically, Catholicism persecuted and executed Bible translators with the same zeal the persecuted and executed Christian congregations that refused to submit to Roman pretentions to authority over their faith centuries before protestants from Catholicism joined them. Indeed the Bible you quote from in English is Christian in origin, and possession of non-Latin translations of the Bible were at one time capital offenses before Catholicism (due to egalitarian principles influenced by Christianity's clear readings and understanding of the Bible) lost most of its political and judicial clout over the former holdings of the Roman Empire.
[cont'd]
It is adequately clear from the history of Catholicism's attempted usurpation and subversion of actual Christianity some 300 years after Christianity was founded that Catholics (particularly atavistic Latin Mass only Catholics) believe themselves justified in persecuting actual Christians as "heretics" and "anathema" to them. Alongside the damning nature of the Bible's thorough debunking of the Catholic pretension to scriptural justifications of their doctrines and practices of Mary worship, child molestation, and "papal infalliability," what more evidence do you need that as "religions are all about belief," the polytheistic religion of Catholicism itself distinguishes itself as a different religion from Christianity via its historical violent efforts to assert itself into and over actual Christian believers?
If you wish to plant your flag upon and defend your atrocious convolutionary manglings of English to feebly assert that you are not actually implying I "hate" Catholicism but rather that I'm "prejudiced" against the custom of respecting Catholicism as a biblically defensible product of Christian belief without even a basis in establishing said biblical defense, well duh. I've not wavered at all from my argument that the doctrines and practices of Catholicism are not bibilically defensible, ergo not Christian. I'm no more "outsized hubristically empassioned" about adhering to the validity of demonstrating Catholic pretensions to biblical justifications of their beliefs are false than the validity of holding on to the claims that adding two apples to a set of two apples results in four apples or that an illiterate buffoon such as yourself can inarguably be regarded as an imbecile.
You can gainsay, construct strawmen, name-call, appeal to false authority, dither in circular reasoning, and employ all other logical induction fallacies in your wheelhouse of imbecility to continue to attempt to make Catholicism Christian where thousands of inquisitors, torturers, corpse desecrators, and child molesters have failed, but I'm still going to be here patiently awaiting your arrival at addressing my argument.
Remember to R.S.V.P. if you're not coming.
If religion is indeed "all about belief" [it is] and Catholic traditional beliefs are in fact not justifiable and indeed are repudiated quite harshly by the texts of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) then the religion of Catholic beliefs and the religion of Christian beliefs are in fact in such incongruence and disagreement and diametric opposition that yes, they are seperate religions. Christians pray to and worship Jesus exclusively. Catholics include Jesus in their prayed to and worshipped pantheon of intercessory spirits and saints.
And so, there is no basis in reality for not thinking you a crackpot, Blemish. Your fallacious, albeit farcically fervent, arguments do not prove anything, yet you are utterly convinced that they do, thus proving something about you. A person such as you who is so self-righteously certain, and claims scriptural warrant for his certainty, belongs to the infancy of our species.
You constantly miss the point, Blemish. Because religion is all about belief, it is pointless to argue that the beliefs Catholics have do not conform to your harsh idea of what is sanctioned by the Bible. For they believe the Bible sanctions their beliefs. It should be noted that the Bible did not exist for the first generation of Christians, and the books of the Bible, even the Gospels, contain contradictions with each other. So your doctrinaire proclamation that the texts of the Bible repudiate religion of Catholic beliefs harshly exposes your need to misstate your case.
The Bible itself does nothing: various people reading the Bible do stuff. The Bible is large and contains multitudes; as is well known, some parts contradict other parts. To paraphrase your pathetic fallacy about Christian beliefs, the Bible is offended. But, to put it more rationally, the Protestant concept that everyone is free to interpret the Bible for himself is violated by anyone who claims to have the one true key to what it means.
Catholics may believe their traditions are based in the Bible all they want[thank you, Blemish]. The Bible says otherwise [correction: the Bible is unable to speak for itself: interpreters speak instead to declare what they believe the Bible says]. [You arrogantly proclaim that] Christians have a superior claim to having their beliefs and traditions justified by the Bible (indeed, the Bible is their holy scripture [which was written many decades after Jesus’ death; the first Christians were not “people of the Book”]) over Catho[l]ic pretentions [pretensions]to it that fall apart under [under your hardly impartial and undisclosed] examination. Indeed making the Bible available for examination in a reader's own language broke the polytheistic [the Catholic Church teaches monotheism] religion of Catholicism's corrupt and self-serving attempted monopoly on scriptural interpretation and earned John Wycliffe the traditional Catholic practice of posthumous execution and corpse desecration (a traditional Catholic belief and practice also not justified by the Bible [not a traditional Catholic belief, but a medieval papal political practice] ).
Continued
Historically, Catholicism persecuted and executed Bible translators with the same zeal the persecuted and executed Christian congregations that refused to submit to Roman pretentions [sic] to authority over their faith centuries before protestants from Catholicism joined them [ Wycliffe’s followers are known as Lollards, a somewhat rebellious movement, which preached anticlerical and biblically-centered reforms. He is considered the founder of the Lollard movement, a precursor to the Protestant Reformation (for this reason, he is sometimes called "The Morning Star of the Reformation"). He was one of the earliest opponents of papal authority influencing secular power]. Indeed the Bible you quote from in English is Christian in origin, and possession of non-Latin translations of the Bible were at one time capital offenses before Catholicism (due to egalitarian principles influenced by Christianity's clear readings and understanding of the Bible) lost most of its political and judicial clout over the former holdings of the Roman Empire [which I’ve said several times before in this thread, and you are acknowledging for the first time].
According to your version of history, Christianity did not appear until the sixteenth century. But, in the sixteenth century, in the view of all the scholars, a rebellious new form of Christianity evolved out of the old Christianity, taking as its justification variant readings of the Bible that had been compiled by the Catholic Church and had recently become widely available through the invention of printing in the West.
It is adequately clear from the history of Catholicism's attempted usurpation and subversion of actual Christianity some 300 years after Christianity was founded that Catholics (particularly atavistic Latin Mass only Catholics) believe themselves justified in persecuting actual Christians as "heretics" and "anathema" to them. Alongside the damning nature of the Bible's thorough debunking of the Catholic pretension to scriptural justifications of their doctrines and practices of Mary worship, child molestation [Lot, Abraham’s nephew, who was saved from the destruction of Sodom, offered his virgin daughters to the men of Sodom outside his house, instead of the angels inside that they desired to “know”], and "papal infalliability [sic]," [In Catholic theology, only the actual 'act of teaching' is properly called "infallible". It is grammatically incorrect to say "the pope is [sometimes] infallible" or to say "the Immaculate Conception is infallible". Infallibility does not refer to the inability to sin (impeccability), or to the personal holiness of a person, although it is occasionally misunderstood in that sense] what more evidence do you need that as "religions are all about belief," the polytheistic religion of Catholicism itself distinguishes itself as a different religion from Christianity via its historical violent efforts to assert itself into and over actual Christian believers?
Catholicism does not distinguish itself from other branches of Christianity in believing that Jesus Christ is the son of God and the savior of humanity. Or in believing that the Old and New Testaments are sacred scripture. Nor does it differ in its monotheism, for the Catholic Church teaches that divine worship is reserved for God alone. That is, it does not distinguish itself in the things that matter for classification.
The Catholic Church is not the only Christian church that supported persecutions and executions:
Continued
The Puritans were a number of religious groups that sprang up during the 17th century as opposition to the Church of England. Puritans opposed many of the traditions of the Church of England, notably the Book of Common Prayer, but also ceremonial rituals such as the use of priestly vestments (cap and gown) during services, the use of the Holy Cross during baptism and kneeling during the sacrament. The colony of Massachusetts at the time was heavily influenced by Puritan thought, but was not a theocracy. A few Protestants (such as Roger Williams) prior to this period had contended that this level of religious involvement in the State was contrary to the pure teachings of the New Testament, in which the church was separate from the state, and unrepentant sinful behavior that merited serious spiritual discipline was administered by supernatural means.
Nonetheless, in the infamous Salem witch trials, the Puritans convicted twenty-nine people of the capital felony of witchcraft. Nineteen of the accused, fourteen women and five men, were hanged. One man (Giles Corey) who refused to enter a plea was crushed to death under heavy stones in an attempt to force him to do so.
If you wish to plant your flag upon and defend your atrocious convolutionary manglings of English to feebly assert that you are not actually implying I "hate" Catholicism but rather that I'm "prejudiced" against the custom of respecting Catholicism as a biblically defensible product of Christian belief without even a basis in establishing said biblical defense, well duh [the basis is Jesus’ words, which I have cited]. I've not wavered at all from my argument [which is no more than a proclamation of a conviction] that the doctrines and practices of Catholicism are not bibilically [sis] defensible, ergo not Christian. I'm no more "outsized hubristically empassioned" about adhering to the validity of demonstrating Catholic pretensions to biblical justifications of their beliefs are false than the validity of holding on to the claims that adding two apples to a set of two apples results in four apples or that an illiterate buffoon such as yourself can inarguably be regarded as an imbecile.
Speaking of grammatical rules, your paragraph above contains a grammatical error (strip it down and you may see it).
You make it clear that you ardently wish to twist what I said into convenient convoluted misrepresentations of my words that can support your cretinous misreading. You are doing the same thing with the Bible and church history to support your crackpot view that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion. None of the scholars of religion concurs. For religion is about beliefs, not about whether you. Blemish, accept those beliefs — or believe that the biblical basis given for them is valid. Notwithstanding your passionate denials over the last couple of months, Catholicism is a monotheistic religion founded on the New Testament stories of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, which means it satisfies the necessary and sufficient conditions for classification as a Christian religion.
You can gainsay, construct strawmen, name-call, appeal to false authority, dither in circular reasoning, and employ all other logical induction fallacies in your wheelhouse of imbecility to continue to attempt to make Catholicism Christian where thousands of inquisitors, torturers, corpse desecrators, and child molesters have failed, but I'm still going to be here patiently awaiting your arrival at addressing my argument.
All these accusations are projections onto me of what you are persistently doing here.
Speaking of indefensible things, the Virgin Birth of Jesus, which is a belief in both Catholicism and Protestantism, is not defensible. Parthenogenetic reproduction is not possible in humans. Only with belief is it defensible.
Concluded
Remember to R.S.V.P. if you're not coming.
Let me know when you are ready to address the real argument. It’s not about me, and it’s not about what you don’t like in Catholicism. And it’s not about your favorite straw men.
You can declare anything you wish against Catholicism but you cannot change its classification as a branch of Christianity.
Remember: An apple is an apple whether it is on the tree or on the table.
According to your version of history, Christianity did not appear until the sixteenth century. But, in the sixteenth century, in the view of all the scholars, a rebellious new form of Christianity evolved out of the old Christianity, taking as its justification variant readings of the Bible that had been compiled by the Catholic Church and had recently become widely available through the invention of printing in the West.
Even your reliably predictable and legendary lack of reading comprehension skills can not move the historical beginning of Christianity from the 1st Century to the 16th Century.
Christianity began in the 1st Century, under persecution from the Roman Empire. By the 4th Century, the Roman Empire began to impose its extant system of political and religious syncretism used on peoples it controlled (such as their identification of the Macedonian war deity Ares with their god of war Mars) upon Christian congregations, adding biblical figures to their pantheon and persecuting Christians who sought to preserve Christianity from Roman polytheistic syncretism by refusing to submit to Constantine's decree. Where there was persecuted Christianity before, after Constantine's decree there was persecuted Christianity and officially sanctioned polytheistic "Catholicism" demanding of the extant Christianity to recognize Roman authority over them or perish. Despite continuous "Catholic" Roman imperial persecution of Christian congregations that refused to submit to Constantine's sanctioned encroachments, Christianity continued to flourish unabated in lands unmolested by Roman imperial dominance. The "Protestant Reformation" was a movement of Catholics rejecting Roman authority and re-aligning with extant Christianity that never submitted to Rome's authority in the first place, made possible largely by the common availability of the Bible texts translated into local native languages to demonstrate what was always contained in those texts - a damning rejection of Roman "Catholic" pretensions upon Christianity.
As for the Bible itself, the New Testament texts were themselves written by 1st Century Christians and preserved as doctrinal canon within Christian congregations long before the syncretic polytheists of Rome co-opted them and began supressing their possession and distribution among Christians in the Roman Empire.
Both Christianity and the Bible survived and have survived Roman imnperial "Catholic" attempts to subvert them to political purposes.
"Catholicism" was and is a political attempt by polytheists to subsume Christianity to an authority that is alien to Christian theology or ecclesiology, with bloody results.
Catholicism is not Chrsitianity, at all.
Notwithstanding the manufactured alternate history you propagate (I know these are the stories they tell each other on the anti-Catholic blogs), Christianity was persecuted in the first three centuries mainly because Christians generally refused to worship the emperor as a god, which was required by the official Greco-Roman religion. Constantine, the emperor who converted to Christianity, discontinued the practice of divine worship of the emperor. He is “the soldier who hacked his way to total control of the Roman Empire and became convinced that the Christian God had destined him to do so — for Constantine, his side of the bargain was to turn Christians from a harried, suppressed cult, accused of ruining the empire, into the most favored and privileged of all Roman religions” (Diarmid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, 2009, p. 5).
However, the Greco-Roman religion did not die easily. Julian (331-363 CE), the last of the Constantinian dynasty, was the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire and it was his desire to bring the empire back to its ancient Roman religious values in order to save it from "dissolution". He purged the top-heavy state bureaucracy and attempted to revive traditional Roman religious practices at the cost of Christianity. His rejection of Christianity in favor of Neoplatonic paganism caused him to be called Julian the Apostate. Among other things, he restored pagan temples that had been confiscated since Constantine's time.
It is your well-evidenced lack of reading comprehension skills, Blemish, that makes you think I am moving the beginning of Christianity to the 16th century. You are the one who is inadvertently doing that. Knowledge of the Bible was not widespread until then, and the Catholic Church, aspiring to universality, subsumed the early churches, some of which followed interpretations of the Christian religion that were deemed heretical. Thus, none of these churches was extant in the West at the time of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which gave rise to a reformation of Christianity. The Reformation was not possible before the invention of the printing press, which you fail to give its due. Printing was recognized as a new power, and publicity came into its own. In doing for Luther what the copyists had done for Wycliffe, the printing press transformed the field of communications and fathered an international revolt. The advent of printing was an important precondition for the Protestant Reformation taken as a whole, for without it one could not implement a “priesthood of all believers.” Sixteenth-century heresy and schism shattered Christendom so completely that even after religious warfare had ended, ecumenical movements led by men of good will could not put all the pieces together again. Not only were there too many splinter groups, separatists, and independent sects that regarded a central church government as incompatible with true faith, but also the main lines of cleavage had been extended across continents and carried overseas along with Bibles and breviaries. Within a few generations, the gap between Catholic and Protestant had widened sufficiently to give rise to contrasting literary cultures and lifestyles.
Yet, long after Christian theology had ceased to provoke wars, a few fiercely anti-Catholic evangelicals do their best on the Internet to christen Catholicism as a non-Christian religion. Your cohorts in cyberspace make the same mistake as you, thinking that purported theological errors of the Catholic Church are relevant as primary characteristics for classification.
By the necessary and sufficient characteristics for classification of a Christian religion, Catholicism is a Christian religion, as all scholars attest.
Yet, long after Christian theology had ceased to provoke wars, a few fiercely anti-Catholic evangelicals do their best on the Internet to christen Catholicism as a non-Christian religion. Your cohorts in cyberspace make the same mistake as you, thinking that purported theological errors of the Catholic Church are relevant as primary characteristics for classification.
By the necessary and sufficient characteristics for classification of a Christian religion, Catholicism is a Christian religion, as all scholars attest.
You say this concise example of your perennial buffoonery with the same zealous convolutionary thinking that has you claiming to seek "honest discussion" yet unwilling to admit that you're an imbecile.
If religion is all about belief, and it is, then believers of the same religion have the same beliefs. There can be sectarian differences in beliefs within the sects of a religion, but not mutually excluding, contradictory beliefs.
The theological errors of the polytheistic religion of Catholicism (in contrast with monotheistic Christian theology) places Catholicism out of the belief sets held by all sects of the religion of Christianity. These are not "purported" theological errors, but real determinations of deviation from the biblically defined parameters of Christian belief.
Just as the imbecilic belief held by Obama and friends that an "emergency" shut down of the internet will protect America from economic damage done by theoretical hackers that could damage America's economy by shutting down the internet is self-defeatingly illogical, the idea that Catholicism's beliefs are founded upon biblical qualifiers for inclusion within Christianity when in fact they are not is self-defeatingly illogical.
For example, you'll find nothing but condemnation for praying to and worshipping "the Queen of Heaven" in the Bible, yet praying to and worshipping Mary as "the Queen of Heaven" is condoned and practiced by the polytheistic religion of Catholicism.
The biblical texts report Jesus having a younger brother, James, born of Mary and Joseph, yet the polytheistic religion of Catholicism prays to and worships Mary as an "eternal virgin."
You've been insisting that because Catholics "sincerely believe" their doctrines are based on the life and teachings of Jesus found within the Bible that they should be included within Christianity, even if examination reveals that their doctrines are contradictory and alien to what is found within the Bible. Catholicism excludes itself from consideration as a Christian sect because it is not Christian in its beliefs.
No amount of engaging in "as all scholars attest" shaped argumentum ad populum fallacies and other dull implements from your toolshed of imbecility is going to change that.
You're simply going to have to address my argument, or RSVP that you're not going to make it.
Yet, long after Christian theology had ceased to provoke wars, a few fiercely anti-Catholic evangelicals do their best on the Internet to christen Catholicism as a non-Christian religion. Your cohorts in cyberspace make the same mistake as you, thinking that purported theological errors of the Catholic Church are relevant as primary characteristics for classification.
By the necessary and sufficient characteristics for classification of a Christian religion, Catholicism is a Christian religion, as all scholars attest.
You say this concise example of your perennial buffoonery with the same zealous convolutionary [convoluted?] thinking that has you claiming to seek "honest discussion" yet unwilling to admit that you're an imbecile.
I know it’s very hard for someone of your sort to admit he’s a quixotic crackpot, which is dramatized by your imbecilic foaming with agglomerative abandon above. The classification of
Catholicism as a Christian religion is really not a theological or cclesiological issue; it is an
elementary taxonomic one. If supposed theological errors or minutiae of church organization counted for anything important in classification, hundreds of Christian splinter sects of Jesus followers would have to be classified as separate non-Christian religions. For, beginning as early
as 49CE (when what Paul Johnson calls “the first council of the Church” occurred), Christianity has seen innumerable variations in doctrine and continues to evolve.
If religion is all about belief, and it is, then believers of the same religion have the same beliefs. There can be sectarian differences in beliefs within the sects of a religion, but not mutually excluding, contradictory beliefs.
On issues that are not fundamental to classification, there can be opposing contradictory beliefs. And there have always been such. Hey, in 1530 Martin Luther told his followers that they should get married and have their children baptized in Catholic churches rather than among Zwinglians.
The theological errors of the polytheistic religion of Catholicism (in contrast with monotheistic Christian theology) places Catholicism out of the belief sets held by all sects of the religion of Christianity. These are not "purported" theological errors, but real determinations of deviation from the biblically defined parameters of Christian belief.
Catholicism is a monotheistic belief — there is no deviation there. The saints do not have the powers of God, and the Catholic Church teaches that they are not to be worshipped as gods. It is only your slanderous contention that Catholicism is polytheistic. No scholar of religion (not even the conservative historian Paul Johnson) says that.
Just as the imbecilic belief held by Obama and friends that an "emergency" shut down of the internet will protect America from economic damage done by theoretical hackers that could damage America's economy by shutting down the internet is self-defeatingly illogical, the idea that Catholicism's beliefs are founded upon biblical qualifiers for inclusion within Christianity when in fact they are not is self-defeatingly illogical.
Your imbecilic analogy, Blemish, is illogical, self defeatingly so. (Temporary network shutdowns by system administrators have frequently been used to contain the damage, but the apt question is whether the commander-in-chief should have that power for reasons of national security, as Lieberman thinks.) If, as is true in this case, A and B are independent propositions, it does not logically follow that not A implies not B. Although you don’t think so or say you don’t, Catholicism bases its theology on the beliefs that Jesus is the son of God and the savior of humankind. These are tenets fundamental to all Christian sects.
Concluded
For example, you'll find nothing but condemnation [in Protestant sects] for praying to and worshipping "the Queen of Heaven" in the Bible, yet praying to and worshipping Mary as "the Queen of Heaven" is condoned and practiced by the polytheistic religion of Catholicism.
’Queen of Heaven’ is a title given to the Virgin Mary by Christians, mainly Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox Churches. Catholic teaching on this subject is expressed in the papal encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam, issued by Pope Pius XII. It states that Mary is Queen of heaven because her son Jesus is King of Israel and heavenly king. In Hebrew tradition the mother of the king is queen. The Church, as the encyclical says, always taught that Mary is far above all other creatures in dignity, and after her Son possesses primacy over all. Veneration in Catholicism for Mary as the mother of God only underscores Jesus’ unique position in the faith, something which is common to all Chrsitian sects.
The biblical texts report Jesus having a younger brother, James, born of Mary and Joseph, yet the polytheistic religion of Catholicism prays to and worships Mary as an "eternal virgin."
You allude to a fourth-century controversy, one of many arising from the New Testament. The Gospels mention that Jesus had sisters and brothers. Hence, it is argued, Mary could not have remained a virgin. There are numerous such conundrums in the Christian sacred literature. They do not prove anything relevant to the classification of Catholicism.
You've been insisting that because Catholics "sincerely believe" their doctrines are based on the life and teachings of Jesus found within the Bible that they should be included within Christianity, even if examination reveals that their doctrines are contradictory and alien to what is found within the Bible. Catholicism excludes itself from consideration as a Christian sect because it is not Christian in its beliefs.
Like all Christians, Catholics sincerely believe Jesus is the son of God and the savior of humankind. These are fundamental Christian beliefs that do not contradict scripture. Theological deviations between Christian sects are not primary considerations in classification. Nor are the judgments of outsiders to the faith on its legitimacy.
No amount of engaging in "as all scholars attest" shaped argumentum ad populum fallacies and other dull implements from your toolshed of imbecility is going to change that.
Scholars are not the vox populi.
None of your denials, lies, smears, misrepresentations, mangled missunderstanding of logical fallacies, and other staples from your imbecilic repertoire can change the fact that the basic beliefs and scripture of Catholicism are the same as for all forms of Christianity.
You're simply going to have to address my argument, or RSVP that you're not going to make it.
To put it gently, your ridiculous argument does not merit any more response than I have tolerantly given it, for classification of a Christian religion is based on fundamental beliefs — not on an evidently hostile non-member’s opinion about what he deems to be orthodox belief.
You’re simply going to have to honestly address the argument that the classification is not predicated on purported or concocted theological errors, or else admit you have no legitimate argument.
I shall lie in wait.
Catholicism as a Christian religion is really not a theological or cclesiological issue; it is an
elementary taxonomic one.
A taxonomy of religions, being "all about beliefs," would classify them by their theological and ecclesiological beliefs and practices. Catholic beliefs are not a "variation" of Christian beliefs, but a total contradiction of them.
On issues that are not fundamental to classification, there can be opposing contradictory beliefs.
Theologies and ecclesiologies are fundamental to meaningful taxonomic classifications of religions. Hence, a religion (Christianity) that expressly forbids the worship of the "Queen of Heaven" (see the book of Jeremiah) is not the same religion as one that actively promotes worship of the "Queen of Heaven" in a polytheist pantheon alongside God (Catholicism).
Catholicism is a monotheistic belief — there is no deviation there. The saints do not have the powers of God, and the Catholic Church teaches that they are not to be worshipped as gods.
The teachings contained in the Bible consider prayer and worship directed at anyone or anything other than God to be polytheism and idolatry. The teachings contained in the polytheist system of Catholicism contradict this.
Catholicism bases its theology on the beliefs that Jesus is the son of God and the savior of humankind.
Except that Catholicism does not believe Jesus is the savior of mankind. Christians believe man is saved by the grace of God through faith, not works. Catholics, being of a different religion entirely, believe man is saved through works, sacremental rituals, and a post-mortem torture in "Purgatory." They don't even have faith that Jesus alone can save them.
You allude to a fourth-century controversy, one of many arising from the New Testament. The Gospels mention that Jesus had sisters and brothers. Hence, it is argued, Mary could not have remained a virgin. There are numerous such conundrums in the Christian sacred literature. They do not prove anything relevant to the classification of Catholicism.
Except that it is relevant that Catholic pretensions to Christianity via justification from the Bible can not be actually justified from the Bible, ergo they are not actually Christian.
None of your denials, lies, smears, misrepresentations, mangled missunderstanding of logical fallacies, and other staples from your imbecilic repertoire can change the fact that the basic beliefs and scripture of Catholicism are the same as for all forms of Christianity.
Christians do not believe the Bible supports Catholicism's polytheistic system of devoting prayer and worhip to anyone or anything other than God. To a Christian, God is holy, water is not.
To put it gently, your ridiculous argument does not merit any more response than I have tolerantly given it, for classification of a Christian religion is based on fundamental beliefs
Thank you for your gentle RSVP in admitting you're never going to show up in this debate.
— not on an evidently hostile non-member’s opinion about what he deems to be orthodox belief.
No hostility here. Orthodoxy is biblically supported. Catholicism is not.
You’re simply going to have to honestly address the argument that the classification is not predicated on purported or concocted theological errors, or else admit you have no legitimate argument. I shall lie in wait.
You can lie standing up or sitting at your computer as well. You've been lying all along, why stop now?
You're simply going to have to honestly address the fact that you're an imbecile, and the fact that the polytheistic religion of Catholicism has innumerable historical, theological, and ecclesiological reasons to be excluded from classification within Christian beliefs.
Catholicism as a Christian religion is really not a theological or cclesiological issue; it is an
elementary taxonomic one.
A taxonomy of religions, being "all about beliefs," would classify them by their theological and ecclesiological beliefs and practices. Catholic beliefs are not a "variation" of Christian beliefs, but a total contradiction of them.
You confuse the situation in the arcane alleys of your mind. To be precise, religion is mostly about empirically unverified religious beliefs. But taxonomy of religious faiths is about fundamental beliefs — i.e., about indispensable tenets. Except in your crackpot thinking, Catholicism does not contradict the fundamental Christian beliefs that posit Jesus as the son of God and the redeemer of humankind, and the New Testament as divinely inspired. Contradictions of your reading of the Bible are not contradictions in an objective sense..
On issues that are not fundamental to classification, there can be opposing contradictory beliefs.
Theologies and ecclesiologies are fundamental to meaningful taxonomic classifications of religions. Hence, a religion (Christianity) that expressly forbids the worship of the "Queen of Heaven" (see the book of Jeremiah) is not the same religion as one that actively promotes worship of the "Queen of Heaven" in a polytheist pantheon alongside God (Catholicism).
Fine points of theological and ecclesiological issues are only meaningful to classification of the hundreds of denominations within Christianity, not to whether or not a faith is Christian. Some denominations resemble Catholicism in many aspects and others are more remote. Catholicism teaches that divine worship is reserved for God alone. There is no “polytheist pantheon”, except, of course, in the slanders of fiercely anti-Catholic evangelicals. A faith that venerates the Queen of Heaven may or may not be the same denomination of Christianity as one that officially disapproves of such a doctrine. For there are contradictions inside and outside of sects. The Ten Commandments expressly forbid graven images but sculptural and 2D visual representations of Christ are found in Catholic and Protestant homes. The Queen of Heaven whose worship Jeremiah so vehemently opposed, was probably Astarte, a goddess in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East; it was not the Virgin Mary, the mother of God.
Catholicism is a monotheistic belief — there is no deviation there. The saints do not have the powers of God, and the Catholic Church teaches that they are not to be worshipped as gods.
The teachings contained in the Bible consider prayer and worship directed at anyone or anything other than God to be polytheism and idolatry. The teachings contained in the polytheist system of Catholicism contradict this.
Catholics do not direct divine worship at anyone but God. For the Catholic Church teaches that divine worship is to be directed toward God, who alone has the powers of a god.
Catholicism bases its theology on the beliefs that Jesus is the son of God and the savior of humankind.
Except that Catholicism does not believe Jesus is the savior of mankind. Christians believe man is saved by the grace of God through faith, not works. Catholics, being of a different religion entirely, believe man is saved through works, sacremental rituals, and a post-mortem torture in "Purgatory." They don't even have faith that Jesus alone can save them
Except that what matters for classification is that Jesus, who is believed to be the son of God, is central to their faith. It is hardly news that there are doctrinal differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. They are what distinguish Catholicism and Protestantism as different branches of Christianity.
Continued
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, which represents the doctrine of the Catholic Church, "The person of Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, the Son or the Word of the Father, Who 'was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man.' These mysteries, though foretold in the Old Testament, were fully revealed in the New, and clearly developed in Christian Tradition and theology." Thus, the close relationship for Catholicism between the Old and New Testaments, Christian tradition, and theology is highlighted.
You allude to a fourth-century controversy, one of many arising from the New Testament. The Gospels mention that Jesus had sisters and brothers. Hence, it is argued, Mary could not have remained a virgin. There are numerous such conundrums in the Christian sacred literature. They do not prove anything relevant to the classification of Catholicism.
Except that it is relevant that Catholic pretensions to Christianity via justification from the Bible can not be actually justified from the Bible, ergo they are not actually Christian.
Except that your opinion (which is opposed to that of hundreds of millions of others who say that their beliefs are founded on the Bible and Christian tradition originating with Jesus) does not count for a whole lot, because, in our postmodern age, every Christian can read and interpret the Bible for himself, according to his personal religious beliefs, and worship Jesus as he sees fit — alleged orthodoxy be damned.
None of your denials, lies, smears, misrepresentations, mangled missunderstanding of logical fallacies, and other staples from your imbecilic repertoire can change the fact that the basic beliefs and scripture of Catholicism are the same as for all forms of Christianity.
Christians do not believe the Bible supports Catholicism's polytheistic system of devoting prayer and worhip to anyone or anything other than God. To a Christian, God is holy, water is not.
Once again, Catholics believe only God has the power of God. They also believe that God’s creation is holy, and the Bible is holy. Holy smoke, Blemish!
To put it gently, your ridiculous argument does not merit any more response than I have tolerantly given it, for classification of a Christian religion is based on fundamental belief.
Thank you for your gentle RSVP in admitting you're never going to show up in this debate.
You are forever distorting meanings in an ungentle manner to suit your own purposes. Your ridiculous arguments misunderstanding the nature of taxonomy deserve no serious response. I have shown up more than was necessary to expose your absurdity.
— not on an evidently hostile non-member’s opinion about what he deems to be orthodox belief..
No hostility here. Orthodoxy is biblically supported. Catholicism is not.
Your hostility is betrayed in your adamant refusal to concede that Catholicism is a Christian religion of Jesus followers, as even conservative scholars attest. Sincere Catholics believe that their beliefs are orthodox Christianity, whereas you believe that yours are. It is a matter of highly subjective judgment about theological matters and what Jesus’ words mean, which is not the stuff that taxonomy is based on.
You’re simply going to have to honestly address the argument that the classification is not predicated on purported or concocted theological errors, or else admit you have no legitimate argument.
I shall lie in wait.
You can lie standing up or sitting at your computer as well. You've been lying all along, why stop now?
As predictable as ever, I guessed this would be the sort of juvenile response you would give. Thank you, Blemish.
It is no lie that Catholicism is classified with no serious dispute as a branch of Christianity.
Concluded
You're simply going to have to honestly address the fact that you're an imbecile, and the fact that the polytheistic religion of Catholicism has innumerable historical, theological, and ecclesiological reasons to be excluded from classification within Christian beliefs.
As you clearly demonstrated above, you have no genuinely responsive, legitimate argument. To be honest, you're simply going to have to deal candidly with the undeniable fact that you are an obsessed crackpot who, despite your epic efforts, will never succeed in amending the Christian classification of Catholicism. I shall not wait, however, for the happy day when that epiphany enlightens your pathetically befuddled thinking.
Verily, there are infinite possibilities for putative, pretended, or concocted theological errors, and, in the hands of a (badly blemished) crackpot, many devout practicing Christians, not just Catholics, would be told that they’re not allowed to think of themselves as Christians if that were made the basis for classification. Happily, however, Christianity is the property of all Christians — not just of the crackpots.
A taxonomy of religions, being "all about beliefs," would classify them by their theological and ecclesiological beliefs and practices. Catholic beliefs are not a "variation" of Christian beliefs, but a total contradiction of them.
You confuse the situation in the arcane alleys of your mind. To be precise, religion is mostly about empirically unverified religious beliefs. But taxonomy of religious faiths is about fundamental beliefs — i.e., about indispensable tenets. Except in your crackpot thinking, Catholicism does not contradict the fundamental Christian beliefs that posit Jesus as the son of God and the redeemer of humankind, and the New Testament as divinely inspired. Contradictions of your reading of the Bible are not contradictions in an objective sense.
Your continued employment of ad hominem fallacies as proxies for addressing my argument merely bolster my case that you are an imbecile, one quite ignorant of the subject matter at hand, PissBong.
One of many indispensible tenets of Christianity is the biblical commandment not to pray to the "Queen of Heaven," period. Whether or not Mary is now the "Queen of Heaven" is empirically unverifiable. But the polytheistic Catholic worship of the "Queen of Heaven" (regardless of her identity) is empirically verifiable as forbidden by the teachings of the Bible and an objective contradiction of an indispensible tenet of Christianity. Moving goal posts after you've lost the game won't alter the fact that you've yet to put points on the scoreboard.
Theologies and ecclesiologies are fundamental to meaningful taxonomic classifications of religions. Hence, a religion (Christianity) that expressly forbids the worship of the "Queen of Heaven" (see the book of Jeremiah) is not the same religion as one that actively promotes worship of the "Queen of Heaven" in a polytheist pantheon alongside God (Catholicism).
Fine points of theological and ecclesiological issues are only meaningful to classification of the hundreds of denominations within Christianity, not to whether or not a faith is Christian.
Adherence to commandments from God as recorded in the Bible is an indispensible tenet of Christianity.
[cont'd]
Some denominations resemble Catholicism in many aspects and others are more remote. Catholicism teaches that divine worship is reserved for God alone. There is no “polytheist pantheon”, except, of course, in the slanders of fiercely anti-Catholic evangelicals. A faith that venerates the Queen of Heaven may or may not be the same denomination of Christianity as one that officially disapproves of such a doctrine. For there are contradictions inside and outside of sects. The Ten Commandments expressly forbid graven images but sculptural and 2D visual representations of Christ are found in Catholic and Protestant homes. The Queen of Heaven whose worship Jeremiah so vehemently opposed, was probably Astarte, a goddess in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East; it was not the Virgin Mary, the mother of God.
The indispensible Christian tenet of obeying God's commandments not to make or worship graven images in general and the "Queen of Heaven" in specific should convict those who would otherwise profess belief in Christian teachings that they are commiting a grievous error and sin against the Bible they claim to draw guidance from and the God they claim to worship. On the other hand, the polytheistic religion of Catholicism's celebratory defiance of indispensible Christian tenets in the obedience of God's commandments recorded in the Bible place that religion outside the pale of Christian belief.
Except that your opinion (which is opposed to that of hundreds of millions of others who say that their beliefs are founded on the Bible and Christian tradition originating with Jesus) does not count for a whole lot, because, in our postmodern age, every Christian can read and interpret the Bible for himself, according to his personal religious beliefs, and worship Jesus as he sees fit — alleged orthodoxy be damned.
This novel application of your undeniable imbecility now has you dithering between classifying religions by indispensible tenets and claiming Christianity is nothing but dispensible tenets so that polytheistic Catholicism can be included.
You're never going to show up in this debate, are you?
Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?
— Jules Feiffer
You confuse the situation in the arcane alleys of your mind. To be precise, religion is mostly about empirically unverified religious beliefs. But taxonomy of religious faiths is about fundamental beliefs — i.e., about indispensable tenets. Except in your crackpot thinking, Catholicism does not contradict the fundamental Christian beliefs that posit Jesus as the son of God and the redeemer of humankind, and the New Testament as divinely inspired. Contradictions of your reading of the Bible are not contradictions in an objective sense.
Your continued employment of ad hominem fallacies as proxies for addressing my argument merely bolster my case that you are an imbecile, one quite ignorant of the subject matter at hand, PissBong.
I am not making an ad hominem attack, Blemish when I describe the mental act you display that mixes up fundamental beliefs with all religious beliefs. Ad hominem attacks are your staple stand-in for legitimate argument. However, I would be willing to eschew all references to you, extending even to your blemished name, if you did the same for me. It is a self-deluding fallacy if you suppose that I initiated such tactics in this thread.
One of many indispensible [sic] tenets of Christianity is the biblical commandment not to pray to the "Queen of Heaven," period. Whether or not Mary is now the "Queen of Heaven" is empirically unverifiable. But the polytheistic Catholic worship of the "Queen of Heaven" (regardless of her identity) is empirically verifiable as forbidden by the teachings of the Bible and an objective contradiction of an indispensible tenet of Christianity. Moving goal posts after you've lost the game won't alter the fact that you've yet to put points on the scoreboard.
The New Testament contains no clear prohibition against veneration of Mary as the Queen of Heaven, which is the title given to her by Catholic Church doctrine. Many Christians believe the New Testament supersedes the Old, making Christians not liable for every one of God’s laws in Deuteronomy.
You’ve yet to score any valid points with respect to the real argument, which is about taxonomic principles, not theology. You keep trying to substitute your own private goal post.
Theologies and ecclesiologies are fundamental to meaningful taxonomic classifications of religions. Hence, a religion (Christianity) that expressly forbids the worship of the "Queen of Heaven" (see the book of Jeremiah) is not the same religion as one that actively promotes worship of the "Queen of Heaven" in a polytheist pantheon alongside God (Catholicism).
If theologies and ecclesiologies are fundamental to meaningful taxonomic classifications, then there are thousands of non-Christian religions where there are presently thousands of Christian sects. Each sect splits from a parent sect as a result of disputes over religious differences of some kind, including over ways of reading the Bible. The OT Book of Jeremiah has references to some pagan goddess called the Queen of Heaven, mentioning burnt offerings made to her, as well as offerings to other pagan gods. It is quite a stretch to interpret this as being relevant to veneration of the Virgin Mary as the mother of God, which is ultimately a tribute to Jesus, the central figure in Christianity.
Continued
Fine points of theological and ecclesiological issues are only meaningful to classification of the hundreds of denominations within Christianity, not to whether or not a faith is Christian.
Adherence to commandments from God as recorded in the Bible is an indispensible tenet of Christianity.
Not true. The indispensable tenets of Christianity concern the nature of Jesus and the obligation to follow his teachings. Biblical commandments are pertinent to individual behavior, but many of these have not been taken literally. For example, the second of the Ten Commandments prohibiting the making of graven images. And nany do not observe the Sabbath.
Circumcision is considered a commandment from God in Judaism. In 49 CE, in the first of the council of the Church, in which Paul, Jesus’ brother James, and Peter participated, it was decided that, contrary to what certain persons had been saying, undergoing circumcision was not necessary for salvation, thus making Christianity more appealing to non-Jewish converts.
Most importantly, the ideal of submission to God’s commandments is common to Islam, Judaism, Christianity, indeed to all religions and sects. So this is not of any use in classification for distinguishing one religion from another.
Some denominations resemble Catholicism in many aspects and others are more remote. Catholicism teaches that divine worship is reserved for God alone. There is no “polytheist pantheon”, except, of course, in the slanders of fiercely anti-Catholic evangelicals. A faith that venerates the Queen of Heaven may or may not be the same denomination of Christianity as one that officially disapproves of such a doctrine. For there are contradictions inside and outside of sects. The Ten Commandments expressly forbid graven images but sculptural and 2D visual representations of Christ are found in Catholic and Protestant homes. The Queen of Heaven whose worship Jeremiah so vehemently opposed, was probably Astarte, a goddess in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East; it was not the Virgin Mary, the mother of God.
The indispensible Christian tenet of obeying God's commandments not to make or worship graven images in general and the "Queen of Heaven" in specific should convict those who would otherwise profess belief in Christian teachings that they are commiting a grievous error and sin against the Bible they claim to draw guidance from and the God they claim to worship. On the other hand, the polytheistic religion of Catholicism's celebratory defiance of indispensible Christian tenets in the obedience of God's commandments recorded in the Bible place that religion outside the pale of Christian belief.
There is disagreement within Christianity concerning what are God’s commandments that must be followed, and how they are to be understood. Should Christians avoid eating pork? Should they keep a kosher household? Should they avoid wearing garments of mixed fibers? What is God’s commandment on divorce? These things have been interpreted in different ways. But all versions of Christianity, including Catholicism, agree that Jesus is the son of God and the redeemer of humankind, and these are indispensable tenets of Christian faith.
Except that your opinion (which is opposed to that of hundreds of millions of others who say that their beliefs are founded on the Bible and Christian tradition originating with Jesus) does not count for a whole lot, because, in our postmodern age, every Christian can read and interpret the Bible for himself, according to his personal religious beliefs, and worship Jesus as he sees fit — alleged orthodoxy be damned.
Concluded
This novel application of your undeniable imbecility now has you dithering between classifying religions by indispensible tenets and claiming Christianity is nothing but dispensible tenets so that polytheistic Catholicism can be included.
Your reading comprehension skills fail you here. What I said is that the Bible, which is holy for Catholics and other Christians, is on many details open to personal interpretation as to what constitutes orthodox belief.
But the fundamental beliefs of Catholicism are nonetheless the same as for all other versions of Christianity, and these are the necessary and sufficient characteristics for classification as a Christian faith.
A religion is about belief — not about what some outside challenger judges to be orthodox belief.
You're never going to show up in this debate, are you?
I did show up and found you plainly not up to the task of dealing with the real question. I should have done it all on the Internet.
For Catholicism is classified without serious dispute as a branch of Christianity. None of your digressive arguments can change that fact.
I am not making an ad hominem attack, Blemish when I describe the mental act you display that mixes up fundamental beliefs with all religious beliefs. Ad hominem attacks are your staple stand-in for legitimate argument. However, I would be willing to eschew all references to you, extending even to your blemished name, if you did the same for me. It is a self-deluding fallacy if you suppose that I initiated such tactics in this thread.
I do not consider the indisputably accurate determination that you are an imbecile to be an ad hominem attack. It is you in your relentlessly contrarian spasms of imbecility that keeps neglecting this pre-established fact. To understand your dithering, inconsistent positions accurately is to understand they were formulated by an imbecile. I mean no disrespect by that. We can't all be geniuses. You're just merely an inconsolable moron. I humbly submit every post you've made here at Z's as the growing evidence of that fact.
On the topic at hand, you need to decide whether or not theologies and / or ecclesiologies (the beliefs that religions are "all about") have a place in classifying religions into taxonomical groupings, or decide whatever your asinine posturings will evolve into next in your efforts to render a polytheistic and syncretic biblically errant religion like Catholicism a sect of Christianity. Especially when alongside praying to and worshipping Mary and other characters and personages fictional or otherwise, denying the perfection of Jesus' power to forgive sin alone by contriving both purportedly necessary sacramental rituals and the doctrine of Purgatory, and other non-Christian theological contrivances mentioned in earlier posts, the religion of Catholicism has built a theology of advertising itself as "Christian" through an ahistorical and decisely erroneous pretension to having an actual apostolic continuity at all, much less one that leads back to Peter and gives the "Pope" the power of "infalliability" when contriving new theologies themselves as Peter's heir (from Peter's chair), despite Peter himself never having any such power, biblically and historically speaking.
Your ecumenically stupid definition of what is "Christian" by ignoring theology and ecclesiology allows you to insert the polytheistic religion of Catholicism into the taxonomy of Christian sects, but your absurdities laughably and ultimately fail because they by the same measure can't exclude Voodoo, Church of Satan, Obama supporters, or even Jim Jones and his Kool-Aid drinkers from Christianity. Voodoo recognizes Jesus as the son of God and the Bible as the source of his teachings. Satanists do as well (symbolically, at least). Obama is the Messiah, according to several media accounts, and Jim Jones, like the Pope, thought himself to be the replacement of Christ on Earth.
Sorry, Catholicism is not Christian, by even your own standard, else Santeria is too.
Sorry, Blemish, but your fierce foaming and fuming here, without much grammatical sense or any logical sense, but with single-minded consistency, confirms the intuition that you’re a crackpot. Although this may appear to be an ad hominem attack, realistically speaking, it is the most charitable evaluation of your cogitation.
You are the sort of person, not unknown on the right, who believes that some Americans are not Americans at all because they don’t give credence to all the same things that you do. Voodoo really is not a Christian religion; Historically, it is an African import to the New World. It is only true that some worshippers of Jesus — aka Christians — have interwoven into their Christian faith a belief in the superstitions of Voodoo about evil spirits. Similarly, some worshippers of Jesus believe the appropriate way to worship him is to play around with deadly snakes or drink poison — they are called Pentecostals. Other Christians believe that illness is from God, and allowing professional medical treatment is to interfere with God’s will — they call themselves Christian Scientists. Baptism for the dead, vicarious baptism or proxy baptism is a religious practice of baptising a living person on behalf of an individual who is dead; the living person is acting as the deceased person’s proxy. It has been practiced since 1840 in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The person performing the baptism says, “Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you for and in behalf of [full name of deceased person], who is dead, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints vicariously baptizes people regardless of race, sex, or creed. This includes both victims and perpetrators of genocide. Some Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their supporters have objected to this practice.
Jehovah’s Witnesses base their beliefs on the Bible, and prefer their own translation, the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. A doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses teaches that the Bible prohibits consumption, storage and transfusion of blood, including in cases of emergency. This doctrine was introduced in 1945, and has been elaborated upon since then. In 1964, Jehovah’s Witnesses were prohibited from obtaining transfusions for pets, from using fertilizer containing blood, and were even encouraged to write to dog food manufacturers to verify that their products were blood-free. Later that year, Jehovah’s Witnesses doctors and nurses were instructed to withhold blood transfusions from fellow Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Verily, since the days when the early Catholic Church gave Christianity its original form in the West, Christianity has evolved, over the last two millennia, into very diverse forms of expression. Many of these forms of Christianity are undeniably strange to outside observers. Although religion is all about belief, belief is often not about reality.
According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, which represents Catholic Church doctrine, “Superstition ought not to be confounded with religion, however much their history may be interwoven, nor magic, however white it may be, with a legitimate religious rite."
Concluded
Obama is the Messiah, according to several media accounts.
Yes, Limbaugh and Hannity have regularly called Obama “the Anointed One”. That could be why shrewish righties want to crucify him — it’s just a joke, like you. And the desperate arguments you make.
… or even Jim Jones and his Kool-Aid drinkers …
They may have been emulating the Christian martyrs of the first century CE, or the poison drinkers in Pentecostalism, although they apparently did not consider themselves Christians.
Somehow you got it in your head, Blemish, that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion (even Z does not believe that’s true; indeed she has warned posters not to belittle Catholicism), and, apparently, no one can ever make you whole again (talking sense doesn’t help) — for, zealously, you seek to mangle and warp as much of human history as you can ransack, propagating false proclamations, bullying (thus turning Jesus’ Golden Rule on its head) and trying passionately to prove your crackpot contention, even though it is an established fact that Catholicism is classified without serious dispute as a branch of Christianity.
Obama is the Messiah, according to several media accounts.
Yes, Limbaugh and Hannity have regularly called Obama “the Anointed One”. That could be why shrewish righties want to crucify him — it’s just a joke, like you. And the desperate arguments you make.
I'm fairly certain Limbaugh and Hannity are blaspheming against Evan Thomas' God in sarcasm. But it's true enough the left-wing media annointed and continues to worship Obama as a, if not the "Messiah" going as far back as stepping on John Kerry's nomination convention to proclaim Obama "should be running for President" in 2004, when his hands were still calloused from working a staple gun and had no real political experience whatsover. You can explore the religion of Obamaism more here.
… or even Jim Jones and his Kool-Aid drinkers …
They may have been emulating the Christian martyrs of the first century CE, or the poison drinkers in Pentecostalism, although they apparently did not consider themselves Christians.
Jim Jones was a left-wing socialist and a voracious student of the leftists Stalin, Mao, and Hitler in modelling his oratory and cult leadership. Jim Jones drew his inspiration from them, not Christianity (Martyrs of the 1st Century Christian faith were murdered, they did not commit mass suicide, you idiot). Jones was fond of slashing his palms to bleed from them before his followers to pretend to manifest "stigmata" as "proof" that he was "Jesus." As Jones' deluded followers believed him to actually be "Jesus" and thusly worshipped him as "Jesus," by your absurd taxonomy they were "Christians."
On the other hand, the same application of logic and rationality that leftists are universally incapable of renders the claims of Jones' worshippers to be errorneous and false, just as they strike down polytheistic Catholicism's claims to Christianity by pointing out that Peter really didn't have any ties to Nero's imperial position as "Pontifex Maximus," neither did he nor his direct successors have any particular hierarchical superiority over other adherents of the Christian faith.
Somehow you got it in your head, Blemish, that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion (even Z does not believe that’s true; indeed she has warned posters not to belittle Catholicism), and, apparently, no one can ever make you whole again (talking sense doesn’t help) — for, zealously, you seek to mangle and warp as much of human history as you can ransack, propagating false proclamations, bullying (thus turning Jesus’ Golden Rule on its head) and trying passionately to prove your crackpot contention, even though it is an established fact that Catholicism is classified without serious dispute as a branch of Christianity.
Again, making ad hominem attacks and your floundering employment of logical fallacies are no satisfactory substitute for your lack of intellectual capacity in addressing my argument. I do not "belittle" the polytheistic, Mary worshipping, Hitler supporting, child molesting religion of Catholicism. I simply do not consider it to be a part of Christianity, and have supported my argument by showing that the Catholic claims to following the teachings of Jesus found in the Bible to be demonstrably absurd and false, by and with history, theology, and ecclesiology.
I've been more than patient with you to catch up with my argument.
Should I use monosyllabic words?
Obama is the Messiah, according to several media accounts.
[Y]es, Limbaugh and Hannity have regularly called Obama “the Anointed One”. That could be why shrewish righties want to crucify him — it’s just a joke, like you. And the desperate arguments you make.
I'm fairly certain Limbaugh and Hannity are blaspheming against I'm fairly certain Limbaugh and Hannity are blaspheming against Evan Thomas' God in sarcasm. But it's true enough the left-wing media annointed and continues to worship Obama as a, if not the "Messiah" going as far back as stepping on John Kerry's nomination convention to proclaim Obama "should be running for President" in 2004, when his hands were still calloused from working a staple gun and had no real political experience whatsover. You can explore the religion of Obamaism more here..
Christ, I’m fairly certain you don’t get it. Pundits describing Obama as “a sort of God” are talking in metaphorical, not theological terms. Someone who is a sort of God is not a God. In fact, Obama has asked Americans to pray to God; he hasn’t asked them to pray to him.
Most importantly for the issue here, if someone says Obama is a sort of God, it does not logically follow that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion, no matter how you try to spin it. In confused rightwing circles, Reagan is talked of as a god.
It could be that the only thing that will save the world is your ineptitude at argument.
… or even Jim Jones and his Kool-Aid drinkers …
They may have been emulating the Christian martyrs of the first century CE, or the poison drinkers in Pentecostalism, although they apparently did not consider themselves Christians.
Jim Jones was a left-wing socialist [what’s a rightwing socialist?] and a voracious student of the leftists Stalin, Mao, and Hitler in modelling his oratory and cult leadership. Jim Jones drew his inspiration from them, not Christianity (Martyrs of the 1st Century Christian faith were murdered, they did not commit mass suicide, you idiot [like the people at Jonestown, they chose death rather than betray their beliefs]). Jones was fond of slashing his palms to bleed from them before his followers to pretend to manifest "stigmata" as "proof" that he was Jesus [ Jones began telling those who would listen that he was the reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, Vladimir Lenin, and Father Divine]. As Jones' deluded followers believed him to actually be "Jesus" and thusly worshipped him as "Jesus," by your absurd taxonomy they were "Christians."[they did not worship him as Jesus].
Taxonomy of Christian sects requires worship of the Jesus who died on the cross in the first century CE and was resurrected to redeem the sins of humankind, not worship of an impostor who said he was the reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, Vladimir Lenin, and Father Divine.
I read the Wikipedia article, too. You left out one significant detail. The FBI recovered a 45 minute audio recording of the suicide in progress. When members apparently cried, during the taking of the “cyanide-laced grape flavored Flavor Aid”, Jones counseled, "Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity.” They believed themselves to be socialists and communists, not Christians. “On that tape, Jones tells Temple members that the Soviet Union, with whom the Temple had been negotiating a potential exodus for months, would not take them after the Temple had murdered Ryan and four others at a nearby airstrip.”
The Jonestown incident has no legitimate logical connection to the issue you dispute here about whether Catholicism is a Christian religion.
Concluded
On the other hand, the same application of logic and rationality that leftists are universally incapable of renders the claims of Jones' worshippers to be errorneous and false, just as they strike down polytheistic Catholicism's claims to Christianity by pointing out that Peter really didn't have any ties to Nero's imperial position as "Pontifex Maximus," neither did he nor his direct successors have any particular hierarchical superiority over other adherents of the Christian faith.
You have sinned against all logic, and then, as always, you unrepentantly project your logical deficiency onto your political opponents. The people at Jonestown have nothing to do with the beliefs of Catholicism. You are promiscuously conglomerating everything together and expecting it to make sense. It does not.
Somehow you got it in your head, Blemish, that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion (even Z does not believe that’s true; indeed she has warned posters not to belittle Catholicism), and, apparently, no one can ever make you whole again (talking sense doesn’t help) — for, zealously, you seek to mangle and warp as much of human history as you can ransack, propagating false proclamations, bullying (thus turning Jesus’ Golden Rule on its head) and trying passionately to prove your crackpot contention, even though it is an established fact that Catholicism is classified without serious dispute as a branch of Christianity.
Again, making ad hominem attacks and your floudering employment of logical fallacies are no substitute for your lack of intellectual capacity in addressing my argument.
Notwithstanding your repetitive blustering ad hominem claims against me, your only argument is a frantic tactic to distract attention from the fact that there is no dispute in serious forums and scholarly books over the non-controversial proposition that Catholicism is a branch of Christianity.
I do not "belittle" the polytheistic, Mary worshipping, Hitler supporting, child molesting religion of Catholicism. I simply do not consider it to be a part of Christianity, and have supported my argument by showing that the Catholic claims to following the teachings of Jesus found in the Bible to be demonstrably absurd and false, by and with history, theology, and ecclesiology.
You could have fooled any sensible person because that certainly sounds quite belittling. It seems that you need to be taught the meaning of the words you use. And that holding a religion responsible for the sins of some of its members is not a Christian thing to do. To be consistent, you would have to do the same for Protestant sects — e.g., the sins of a number of televangelists, or the murder of “heretics” and other persecutions by Protestant societies that evolved following the split from the Catholic Church.
You have only demonstrated that Catholic doctrines and practices are false according to your reading of the Bible, but your readings are not the last word or the one accepted by millions of other people. I shouldn’t have to be the one to tell you this, but the Bible has been read in many different ways. In any case, the characteristics you depend upon are not the ones of taxonomic importance for classifying Catholicism as Christian or non-Christian.
I've been more than patient with you to catch up with my argument.
You don’t get it — you have no legitimate argument. You are off in the corner spouting unresponsive drivel.
Should I use monosyllabic words?
It would not help your case at all. It would, in fact, be just as bad.
Christ, I’m fairly certain you don’t get it. Pundits describing Obama as “a sort of God” are talking in metaphorical, not theological terms. Someone who is a sort of God is not a God. In fact, Obama has asked Americans to pray to God; he hasn’t asked them to pray to him.
One of Obama's common stump sermons during the 2008 campaign season had him reading from a teleprompter: "My job is to be so persuasive that if there's anybody left out there who is still not sure whether they will vote, or is still not clear who they will vote for, that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama;" even outside or in rooms without windows. Aside from demonstrating his obvious imbecility, Obama's rhetoric complimented and cultivated the consistent left-wing media message that Obama is a "messianic figure." I appreciate your belated efforts to say Obama shouldn't be taken seriously, but it is what it is. Religious imagery, or "metaphors" if you prefer, were associated with Obama's campaign. I'm sure those cleaning up after his professed industry model of oil drilling safety blew up could use some of that "oceans will fall" messianic magic he promised.
Most importantly for the issue here, if someone says Obama is a sort of God, it does not logically follow that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion, no matter how you try to spin it. In confused rightwing circles, Reagan is talked of as a god.
Your lack of reading comprehension skills is hurting you again. Your side of the media dubbed Obama the "Messiah." By your illogical argument, "Obama as Messiah" is either the belief of a sect of Judaism or a sect of Christianity. Peter was promised the keys to heaven for recognizing Jesus as the Messiah. For recognizing Obama as the Messiah, Chris Matthews got a homoerotic thrill up his leg. Your mileage may vary, or course, but your argument can not.
Jim Jones was a left-wing socialist[what’s a rightwing socialist?]...
Exactly. Nice of you to finally take ownership of your fellow leftist Adolf Hitler.
I read the Wikipedia article, too. You left out one significant detail. The FBI recovered a 45 minute audio recording of the suicide in progress. When members apparently cried, during the taking of the “cyanide-laced grape flavored Flavor Aid”, Jones counseled, "Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity.” They believed themselves to be socialists and communists, not Christians.
According to many biblically illiterate apologists for socialism online, Christianity itself is supposed to be "socialist." Making Jim Jones the vicarious replacement of Christ on Earth as the polytheistic religion of Catholicism currently does for former Hitler-Jugend Joseph Ratzinger is a cultic tendency, not a Christian tendency.
I do not "belittle" the polytheistic, Mary worshipping, Hitler supporting, child molesting religion of Catholicism. I simply do not consider it to be a part of Christianity, and have supported my argument by showing that the Catholic claims to following the teachings of Jesus found in the Bible to be demonstrably absurd and false, by and with history, theology, and ecclesiology.
You could have fooled any sensible person because that certainly sounds quite belittling. It seems that you need to be taught the meaning of the words you use.
Which words are you having trouble with? Catholicism prays to and worships beings alongside and / or instead of God, which makes them polytheistic, or if you prefer, henotheistic. The Vatican threw its support behind the Nazi Party because Hitler's socialism was congruent with "Pope" Pacelli's Catholic Worker liberation theology specifically and Catholicism's tradition of anti-Semitism in general. The subject of Catholic priests homosexually molesting children has found modern scrutiny, finally, but even that tenet of Catholicism goes back centuries.
I did offer to go monosyllabic for you, but I think you understand my words adequately enough to know you can't refute them.
Christianity: The religion based on the work and teaching of Jesus, who lived c. 4 B.C. – A. D. 30 … The main modern forms of this religion are Catholicism, Orthodoxy Eastern, and Protentantism.
— The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought, 1977
Christianity: major religion, stemming from the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of Nazareth (the Christ, or the Anointed One of God) in the 1st century AD. It has become the largest of the world's religions. Geographically the most widely diffused of all faiths, it has a constituency of some 2 billion believers. Its largest groups are the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Protestant churches.
— Encyclopædia Britannica, 2010.
In the two millennia of its history Christianity has been divided by schism and roiled by heresy, based on doctrinal and organizational differences. Today there are three broad divisions, Roman Catholic, Orthodox Eastern, and Protestant; but within the category of Protestantism, there is a particularly large number of divergent denominations.
— Columbia Encyclopedia, 2008
Christianity (from the Greek word Xριστός, Khristos, "Christ", literally "anointed one") is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament. Christianity is comprised of three major branches: Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy (which parted ways with Catholicism in 1054 A.D.) and Protestantism (which came into existence during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century). Protestantism is further divided into smaller groups called denominations.
— Wikipedia
Christians believe in angels, demons, and/or saints that are inferior to God. Christians do not consider these beings as gods, though they are sometimes the object of prayer and veneration. However, Christian churches which teach praying to saints insist that such prayer is only proper when limited to asking for the angel or saint's intercession to God. They do not teach that saints possess any powers of their own, and any miracle attributable to their intercession is the product of the power of God and not any supernatural power of the saint.
— Wikipedia
On his TV show, Glenn Beck stated in an awestruck tone that the people thought of George Washington as a god. I suppose that would be pretext enough for you to say, like with the disingenuous rightwing spin on Obama’s campaign rhetoric (taking it far more seriously than it was ever intended), that, therefore, it must be an obvious logical conclusion that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion.
Nowhere does Obama say he is the son of God or the Messiah, or that he is receiving counsel from “a higher Father”. Nor have any of his White House aides claimed such things. Such attributions in the media are metaphorical, not theological, in intent. Nonetheless, the rightwing spin mills are working overtime. (“Reagan is God,” twittered Michael Klatman in February; I doubt this was an epiphany.)
"Obama: For Now, Perspiration Over Inspiration", by Andrew Romano, Newsweek, January 31, 2008:
Reading the recent flurry of stories about Barack Obama--the Clinton-slayer! the youth candidate! the next Kennedy!--it'd be easy to imagine that his campaign is all inspiration and little perspiration at this point, with rainbows and starshine bursting from the tailpipe of his tour bus. Obama both lampoons and slyly encourages the perception.. In New Hampshire and South Carolina, for example, the senator was fond of telling audiences [of college students, trying to persuade them to get out and vote], that "at some point in the evening, a light is going to shine down and you will have an epiphany and you’ll say, ‘I have to vote for Barack.’"
Concluded
As the illustration above, which is typical, demonstrates, your overstretched irrational argument refutes itself, as any sensible person can see. Your insinuations notwithstanding, Catholicism is not a non-Christian religion because Jim Jones was a communist planning to take his group to the Soviet Union.
God may have made everything out of nothing but the nothingness shows through your digressive comments here.
Religion is all about belief, but some believers get unlimited mileage claiming to “know” what is divinely authorized belief.
Taxonomy of Christianity is based neither on the sins of churchmen throughout history (which, to judge by your belittling account, are Catholic only) nor on theological transgressions of your subjective Bible reading, nor even on polity and church organization, which vary within Christianity — but on fundamental beliefs. And, indeed, on fundamental beliefs, Catholicism is indisputably Christian, as all scholars attest.
Let me know if you need that put in more plain speech.
On his TV show, Glenn Beck stated in an awestruck tone that the people thought of George Washington as a god. I suppose that would be pretext enough for you to say, like with the disingenuous rightwing spin on Obama’s campaign rhetoric (taking it far more seriously than it was ever intended), that, therefore, it must be an obvious logical conclusion that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion.
Glenn Beck's posthumous aggrandization of George Washington as a "god" likely has more to do with his Mormon belief (also not Christian) that men can become gods of their own planets someday, and not any sort of actual historically contemporaneous reference from George Washington's lifetime. As mentioned previously and your recent tacit agreement, Glenn Beck has it wrong about the Nazis being "right-wing." Dude probably thinks Washington grew up in the Pacific Northwest (in the state of Washington, naturally) where there are actual cherry trees to chop down. Glenn Beck is hardly a relevant source for anything but sadness over the products of America's public education system.
However, the Jonestown cult's contemporaneous worship of Jim Jones as a "reincarnation Jesus" and the media's contemporaneous cultish worship of Obama as "Messiah" are intrinsically no different in their theological identity theft than the polytheistic religion of Catholicism's current claiming Joseph Ratzinger is Jesus' latest replacement on Earth (Vicar of Christ).
Nowhere does Obama say he is the son of God or the Messiah, or that he is receiving counsel from “a higher Father”. Nor have any of his White House aides claimed such things. Such attributions in the media are metaphorical, not theological, in intent.
"He's running a theological campaign," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran for president in 1984 and 1988. "At some point, he took off his arms and grew wings." The question for voters, however, is can Mr. Obama deliver on his flowery promises?
Sometimes this is a difficult road being in politics," Obama said. "Sometimes you can become fearful, sometimes you can become vain, sometimes you can seek power just for power's sake instead of because you want to do service to God. I just want all of you to pray that I can be an instrument of God in the same way that Pastor Ron and all of you are instruments of God." He finished his brief remarks by saying, "We're going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."
Perhaps in forgetting and / or forgiving Obama's unfulfilled delivery on "flowery promises" you are among those who "couldn’t recall a single thing that he had said" yet converted to Obamaism anyway under feelings of being "in the presence of the Divine," as Jonathan Alter piously coos. Regardless of how it is you've recovered from the mind-erasing stupor and hangover that is taking Obama seriously, it's fairly clear from converts to Obamaism past and present that Obama indeed is believed by some to be, and actually thinks himself to be the Messiah, seeking a "Kingdom on Earth." Perhaps in 2012, if Obama is delusional enough to pursue re-election, you will be further moved from recasting Obamaist "theology" as "metaphor" and on to its appropriate category, "left-wing Democrat bullshit." But for now, you'll just have to take up your cross and follow Obama in ridicule of his cult.
Taxonomy of Christianity is based neither on the sins of churchmen throughout history (which, to judge by your belittling account, are Catholic only)
Ah, the disgusting "Archbishop" Timothy Dolan defense. The polytheistic religion of Catholicism is not the "only" place to find tenured child molesters, so we shouldn't single them out?
...nor on theological transgressions of your subjective Bible reading, nor even on polity and church organization, which vary within Christianity — but on fundamental beliefs. And, indeed, on fundamental beliefs, Catholicism is indisputably Christian, as all scholars attest.
Except for that Mary worshipping, Hitler supporting, child molesting ecclesiology that definitively seperates Catholicism from consideration as adherents of Christianity.
On his TV show, Glenn Beck stated in an awestruck tone that the people thought of George Washington as a god. I suppose that would be pretext enough for you to say, like with the disingenuous rightwing spin on Obama’s campaign rhetoric (taking it far more seriously than it was ever intended), that, therefore, it must be an obvious logical conclusion that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion.
Glenn Beck's posthumous aggrandization of George Washington as a "god" likely has more to do with his Mormon belief (also not Christian) that men can become gods of their own planets someday, and not any sort of actual historically contemporaneous reference from George Washington's lifetime. As mentioned previously and your recent tacit agreement, Glenn Beck has it wrong about the Nazis being "right-wing." Dude probably thinks Washington grew up in the Pacific Northwest (in the state of Washington, naturally) where there are actual cherry trees to chop down. Glenn Beck is hardly a relevant source for anything but sadness over the products of America's public education system.
It’s no lie that chopping down cherry trees isn’t cool in many places and, by George, does not wash in some.
To digress briefly to address you, Beck is correct as far as Nazism being rightwing.. National socialism is no more socialism than the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was democratic. In politics, as most people know, truth in advertising is the first thing to go. What I was pointing out is that your phrase “leftwing socialism” is a redundancy similar to “rightwing conservatives”, “rightwing monarchy”, and “rightwing Nazism”. But your old dearth of reading comprehension skills kicked in before you could understand that.
You give no evidence of knowing what a relevant source is. When I cite them, as I did in my last post, you completely ignore them. As far as Glenn Beck is concerned, he is as much a relevant source as anyone else in the media or on rightwing blogs that you quote.
There has been a series of sometimes-deadly conflicts between Mormons and non-Mormon Christians. In your mind, Mormonism is not Christian? Which Protestant sects make the grade, in your opinion?
Spin as you will, Jim Jones was an atheist who wanted to take his group to the atheist haven of the Soviet Union; he was not a Catholic and not the leader of a Christian religion, and not pertinent to this discussion.
Nowhere does Obama say he is the son of God or the Messiah, or that he is receiving counsel from “a higher Father”. Nor have any of his White House aides claimed such things. Such attributions in the media are metaphorical, not theological, in intent. [Nonetheless, the rightwing spin mills are working overtime. (“Reagan is God,” twittered Michael Klatman in February; I doubt this was an epiphany.)].
Regardless of how it is you've recovered from the mind-erasing stupor and hangover that is taking Obama seriously, it's fairly clear from converts to Obamaism past and present that Obama indeed is believed by some to be, and actually thinks himself to be the Messiah, seeking a "Kingdom on Earth." Perhaps in 2012, if Obama is delusional enough to pursue re-election, you will be further moved from recasting Obamaist "theology" as "metaphor" and on to its appropriate category, "left-wing Democrat bullshit." But for now, you'll just have to take up your cross and follow Obama in ridicule of his cult.
Spin it however it pleases you, spin it silly, but all that you cite, all the scraps you collect from around the Internet, as can be seen by a sensible person with adequate reading comprehension skills, are about campaign exuberance, not about the birth of a new religion, which, in any case, unlike Catholicism, would not be Christian, since Obama is not the son of God or the Messiah, nor does He (it’s a little joke) claim to be, and neither does the media, except perhaps Rush Limbaugh.
Concluded
Millions of Americans will likely vote for him in 2012, as they did in 2008, not because they think he is God, but because they perceive him to be the best political alternative (to the lies, wrong-headedness, mean-spiritedness, and reactionary policies of the right).
Taxonomy of Christianity is based neither on the sins of churchmen throughout history (which, to judge by your belittling account, are Catholic only).
Ah, the disgusting "Archbishop" Timothy Dolan defense. The polytheistic [saints are not gods in Catholicism, despite your disgusting insinuation] religion of Catholicism is not the "only" place to find tenured child molesters, so we shouldn't single them out?
Ah, no, that is not what I had in mind. The Salem witch trials were prominently in mind, as well as the persecutions of heretics and non-Christians by Protestants, Protestant ministers who have been convicted of stealing from the donation box, and Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bskker, Ted Haggard, et al. Also the intolerant, bullying attitude of some Protestant evangelicals, evidenced on the Internet and elsewhere.
...nor on theological transgressions of your subjective Bible reading, nor even on polity and church organization, which vary within Christianity — but on fundamental beliefs. And, indeed, on fundamental beliefs, Catholicism is indisputably Christian, as all scholars attest.
Except for that Mary worshipping, Hitler supporting, child molesting ecclesiology that definitively seperates Catholicism from consideration as adherents of Christianity.
That is an exception with no relevance to the taxonomy of Christianity. Nor is it unique to Catholicism. For Christians believe in angels, demons, and/or saints that are inferior to God, and churchmen of other Christian sects have transgressed civil laws and religious or secular laws of morality. Neither was anti-Semitism confined to Christians who were Catholics. Brutally tarring all of Catholic belief with the sins of some is not a moral practice. Even considering the many belittling criticisms that you or anyone who chooses can make of the Catholic Church, Catholicism is indisputably a Christian religion.
Catholics are like other Christians in making the claim that they are the “true” Christians. You, who are no doubt without sin, do it by doggedly casting accusations of damning sin, doctrinal deviations from your ideas of orthodoxy, and impolitic church organization, in order to impugn the faith of all Christians who profess to be Catholics. Nonetheless, your mammoth effort signifies nothing — but, then, again, a great many people think they are thinking when they are just rearranging their prejudices.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
— G. K. Chesterton
To digress briefly to address you, Beck is correct as far as Nazism being rightwing.. National socialism is no more socialism than the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was democratic. In politics, as most people know, truth in advertising is the first thing to go.
Such as your futile attempts at classifying the school of socialist thought and practice presented by the Nazis as libertarian by mislabelling it "right-wing."
Such as you’re mistaken. I’m not a politician. Notwithstanding your futile attempts to confuse the difference, national socialism is not international socialism. Like present-day rightwingers, Nazis were, by their fundamental beliefs, devoted to preserving and protecting the special privileges of a designated master class.
What I was pointing out is that your phrase “leftwing socialism” is a redundancy similar to “rightwing conservatives”, “rightwing monarchy”, and “rightwing Nazism”. But your old dearth of reading comprehension skills kicked in before you could understand that.
As Hitler, Goebbels, the Strasser brothers, and many other Nazi ideologues stated and as evident by their actions, Nazism was neither capitalistic nor libertarian, but just another strain of socialism (hence left-wing). The zeal of left-wingers (Marx, Proudhon, Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky, Mussolini, Hitler, et. al.) to say their views were the "one true socialism" doesn't place any of them in the right-wing camp.
Historically, it is a predilection of rightwingers to first redefine appealing ideas to suit their interests and then publicly embrace them.
As I’ve said before, Hitler and his cohorts were calculated liars. They were not the political allies of the trade unions or the international socialists. And, despite your pretenses, Nazi politics does not fit the two or three political categories with which you are familiar. But this, too, has nothing to do with whether Catholicism is a non-Christian religion, a proposition that cannot be logically defended with or without such digressions and recycled rationalizations on a topic from olden days.
Ah, the disgusting "Archbishop" Timothy Dolan defense. The polytheistic religion of Catholicism is not the "only" place to find tenured child molesters, so we shouldn't single them out?
Ah, no, that is not what I had in mind. The Salem witch trials were prominently in mind, as well as the persecutions of heretics and non-Christians by Protestants, Protestant ministers who have been convicted of stealing from the donation box, and Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bskker, Ted Haggard, et al. Also the intolerant, bullying attitude of some Protestant evangelicals, evidenced on the Internet and elsewhere.
I do not consider the actions of thieves and charlatans [and witch hunters?] convicted either by secular law or more importantly in violation of biblical principles to be operating in accordance with the teachings of Jesus as found in the Bible. Truth in advertising is the first to go as well with any of the aforementioned deviant hucksters claiming "Christianity”[but not the first to go with the vast majority of Christian believers].
Yet it does not induce you to say that Protestantism is a non-Christian religion.
The relevant point is that the faith of these reprobates who profess to be Protestant Christians is not exploited — following the logic you applied against deviant Catholics — to impugn the faith of Protestants. As you say, that is not Christianity at work.
Concluded
…This is not Christianity at work.
You said you believe Christianity is supposed to be about faith not about works.
As if every other church is without sin, and no church can reform itself. But that’s how redemption works.
It must be a sin to trash the faith of designated Jesus worshippers because of the horrible violations of the secular ethos and civil law by some churchmen, whether they are Catholic, of which you have a lot to say, or Protestant, of which — for some reason of your own — you have little or nothing to say.
Such as your futile attempts at classifying the school of socialist thought and practice presented by the Nazis as libertarian by mislabelling it "right-wing."
Such as you’re mistaken. I’m not a politician. Notwithstanding your futile attempts to confuse the difference, national socialism is not international socialism. Like present-day rightwingers, Nazis were, by their fundamental beliefs, devoted to preserving and protecting the special privileges of a designated master class.
Present day right-wingers are devoted to preserving capitalism. The further right you go, the more laissez faire the sentiment becomes. The right wants limited and smaller government, standing upon individual libertarian principles to preserve private property ownership. Right-wingers past and present have absolutely nothing in common with the left-wing totalitarian urges of either national or international socialists.
Your continued attempts to disown your fellow leftist Adolf Hitler by smearing the right with his brand of socialism merely return to the roots of the undeniable nature of your imbecility, and offer nothing intelligible to any discussion.
As before, a clear sign that you're willing to have a polite, respectful, and honest discussion of that particularly lively topic would have you freely admitting that you're a blithering idiot. From meeting in agreement upon those basic undeniables, we could then move on to educating you about shapes and colors.
Historically, it is a predilection of rightwingers to first redefine appealing ideas to suit their interests and then publicly embrace them.
See, now you've caught us right-wing conspirators. [/sarcasm] We historically haven't killed 200+ million people in the name of socialism and communism as part of a long plot designed just to make you leftists look bad by pointing at you.
Are you at least intelligent enough to realize how absolutely dipshit stupid you are? I mean that respectfully, of course. Apparently you're having difficulty with quantifying just how comprehensively devoid of intellect you are. I'm merely here to help.
It must be a sin to trash the faith of designated Jesus worshippers because of the horrible violations of the secular ethos and civil law by some churchmen, whether they are Catholic, of which you have a lot to say, or Protestant, of which — for some reason of your own — you have little or nothing to say.
Show me an autonomous Apostolic Christian sect, an Orthodox Christian congregation, or an organized denomination of Protestant converts to Christianity from polytheistic Catholicism that as doctrine and practice shields, harbors, and protects child molesting clergymen from prosecution under civil and criminal law, and I'll dismiss their spurious claim to being Christian as well.
Christianity does not practice idolatrous Mary worship; does not invoke polytheistic prayers to and worship of "saints" as participatory intercessors between man and God; does not blasphemously deny the efficacy of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross with a biblically alien concept of Purgatory; does not attribute miracles to water stains, toaster ovens, chocolate factory drippings, rock formationsm or painted statues; does not pretend the apostle to the Jews at Babylon (Peter) created a bishopric at Rome, does not pretend Peter had any superior apostolic role over Christianity, much less an apostolic role that could be inherited and succeeded from him by Roman syncretizers under the pedigree of Julius Caesar's office as "Pontifex Maximus," does not subscribe to an 11th Century Roman contrivance that the "Pope" is the replacement (Vicar) of Christ, does not subscribe to the 19th Century Roman contrivance that the "Pope" is infallible, and does not even remotely entertain the idea that child molesters should be kept as church leaders.
Catholicism is not Christianity. Christianity is not Catholicism. They're two entirely different religions.
Jesus said, “A certain person was entertaining guests. When dinner was ready, the host sent a servant to invite the guests. The servant went to the first one and said, ‘My lord invites you.’ The guest said, ‘Some merchants owe me money, and they are coming to me tonight. I must go to give instructions to them. Please excuse me from dinner.’ The servant went to another guest and said, ‘My lord invites you.’ The guest said, ‘I have bought a house, and I have been called away for the day. I have no time.’ The servant went to another guest and said, ‘My lord invites you.’ The guest said, ‘My friend is to be married, and I must arrange the dinner, so I will not be able to come. Please excuse me from dinner.’ The servant went to yet another guest and said, ‘My lord invites you.’ The guest said, ‘I have bought a farm and I am going to collect the rent, so I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me.’
The servant returned and said to the lord, ‘Those whom you invited to dinner have asked to be excused.’
The lord said to the servant, ‘Go out on the streets and bring back whomever you find to eat my dinner.’ Business people and merchants will not enter the realm of my Father."
— Saying 64, The Gospel of Thomas, ca. 2nd century CE (barred from the Biblical canon)
Such as your futile attempts at classifying the school of socialist thought and practice presented by the Nazis as libertarian by mislabelling it "right-wing.".
Such as you’re mistaken. I’m not a politician. Notwithstanding your futile attempts to confuse the difference, national socialism is not international socialism. Like present-day rightwingers, Nazis were, by their fundamental beliefs, devoted to preserving and protecting the special privileges of a designated master class.
Present day right-wingers are devoted to preserving capitalism. The further right you go, the more laissez faire the sentiment becomes. The right wants limited and smaller government, standing upon individual libertarian principles to preserve private property ownership. Right-wingers past and present have absolutely nothing in common with the left-wing totalitarian urges of either national or international socialists.
You may actually believe that, but the reality is different. Rightwingers are devoted to preserving the state-subsidized privileges of wealthy businessmen and making the unemployed pay the price for the sins of their former bosses. Liberals also support capitalism, albeit with appropriate controls over the excesses to which it is prone. Rightwingers past and present have in common with the Nazis an overriding interest in preserving and advancing the interests of the powerful at the expense of Americans in marginalized groups.
Your continued attempts to disown your fellow leftist Adolf Hitler by smearing the right with his brand of socialism merely return to the roots of the undeniable nature of your imbecility, and offer nothing intelligible to any discussion.
As I guessed you would at this point, you fall back on the crutches of bullying and ad hominem arguments. To quote you, Blemish, "[your] making ad hominem attacks and your floundering employment of logical fallacies are no satisfactory substitute for your lack of intellectual capacity in addressing my argument." Your futile, passionate attempts to extricate Adolf Hitler from the right end of the spectrum, where even the arch-conservative Glenn Beck places him, underscore the crackpot viewpoint you aggressively promulgate in both political issues and religious ones.
As before, a clear sign that you're willing to have a polite, respectful, and honest discussion of that particularly lively topic would have you freely admitting that you're a blithering idiot. From meeting in agreement upon those basic undeniables, we could then move on to educating you about shapes and colors.
Concluded
As I mentioned heretofore, an honest discussion would commence with your candid admission that you are a sour crackpot. All the bullying you do will gain you no points for subtle, intelligent discussion — will not even get you to square one — and when you understand that, you just may be educable on other points of Christian decency and dignified conduct on the Internet.
Historically, it is a predilection of rightwingers to first redefine appealing ideas to suit their interests and then publicly embrace them.
See, now you've caught us right-wing conspirators. [/sarcasm] We historically haven't killed 200+ million people in the name of socialism and communism as part of a long plot designed just to make you leftists look bad by pointing at you.
If there has to be a conspiracy, it must be a heavily-promoted rightwing campaign to smear liberals — i.e., the vast majority of leftwingers in America — who do not support communism and state-sanctioned murder (or even torture and capital punishment) with sympathy for state-sanctioned murder.
Rightwingers have shown their predilection for redefining appealing ideas to benefit themselves ever since the end of the American Revolutionary War, when the Tories, who supported the Crown, were superseded by a right wing fiercely arguing for their inflexible concept of what they insist the Founding Fathers wanted America to be (like, for example, a Christian nation).
Are you at least intelligent enough to realize how absolutely dipshit stupid you are? I mean that respectfully, of course. Apparently you're having difficulty with quantifying just how comprehensively devoid of intellect you are. I'm merely here to help.
Are you sufficiently self-aware to realize how unreservedly asinine a crackpot you are? Just saying what is — I mean no disrespect, of course. It seems you lack a grown-up’s ability to gauge the wide-ranging extent of your crackpot silliness. Sadly, as I’ve found, merely talking sense to you does not help.
It must be a sin to trash the faith of designated Jesus worshippers because of the horrible violations of the secular ethos and civil law by some churchmen, whether they are Catholic, of which you have a lot to say, or Protestant, of which — for some reason of your own — you have little or nothing to say.
Show me an autonomous Apostolic Christian sect, an Orthodox Christian congregation, or an organized denomination of Protestant converts to Christianity from polytheistic Catholicism that as doctrine and practice shields, harbors, and protects child molesting clergymen from prosecution under civil and criminal law, and I'll dismiss their spurious claim to being Christian as well.
There are numerous Google-able cases of Protestant churchmen indicted for child sex abuse, some of whom are still serving as pastors.
Alfredo Hinojosa Soto, a 77-year old minister at New Jerusalem Pentecostal Church in Cornelius, Oregon was charged with sodomy and sexual abuse of young girls in his congregation in 2001 (KGW TV, M-ay 9, 2002). He was sentenced to 90 days in jail. “According to the [civil] lawsuit [in 2008], the church knew Soto was a predatory sex abuser and was aware that he had made sexually suggestive remarks to other girls in the congregation.”
However, your argument until now has been that one reason you believe Catholicism is a non-Christian religion is because a number of Catholic priests are guilty of molesting children, not because the Catholic Church is protecting them. Which the Church is no longer doing. Redemption is a Christian concept, you should know.
Christianity does not practice idolatrous Mary worship; does not invoke polytheistic prayers to and worship of "saints" as participatory intercessors between man and God; does not blasphemously deny the efficacy of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross with a biblically alien concept of Purgatory; does not attribute miracles to water stains, toaster ovens, chocolate factory drippings, rock formationsm or painted statues; does not pretend the apostle to the Jews at Babylon (Peter) created a bishopric at Rome, does not pretend Peter had any superior apostolic role over Christianity, much less an apostolic role that could be inherited and succeeded from him by Roman syncretizers under the pedigree of Julius Caesar's office as "Pontifex Maximus," does not subscribe to an 11th Century Roman contrivance that the "Pope" is the replacement (Vicar) of Christ, does not subscribe to the 19th Century Roman contrivance that the "Pope" is infallible, and does not even remotely entertain the idea that child molesters should be kept as church leaders.
Christians, including Catholics, believe in angels, demons, and/or saints that are inferior to God. Christians do not consider these beings as gods, though they are sometimes the object of prayer and veneration. However, Christian churches which teach praying to saints insist that such prayer is only proper when limited to asking for the angel or saint's intercession to God. They do not teach that saints possess any powers of their own, and any miracle attributable to their intercession is the product of the power of God and not any supernatural power of the saint.
Concluded
Taxonomy of Christianity is based neither on the past or present sins of churchmen (which, to judge by your smears, are exclusively Catholic) nor on theological transgressions of your subjective Bible reading, nor even on polity and church organization, which vary within Christianity, nor on any temporal characteristics — but on fundamental beliefs. And, indeed, on fundamental beliefs, Catholicism is indisputably Christian, as all scholars attest.
Catholicism is not Christianity. Christianity is not Catholicism. They're two entirely different religions.
Christianity is not Catholicism — it is a collective term that includes Catholicism and thousands of other forms of Christianity, your predilection for discriminatory exclusivity notwithstanding.
You cannot legitimately designate a “master class” among the myriad sects of Christianity
Present day right-wingers are devoted to preserving capitalism. The further right you go, the more laissez faire the sentiment becomes. The right wants limited and smaller government, standing upon individual libertarian principles to preserve private property ownership. Right-wingers past and present have absolutely nothing in common with the left-wing totalitarian urges of either national or international socialists.
You may actually believe that, but the reality is different. Rightwingers are devoted to preserving the state-subsidized privileges of wealthy businessmen and making the unemployed pay the price for the sins of their former bosses.
It's become all too predictable that when you preface a remark with a clause of reification you consistently follow it with pure delusion, to the point that when you invoke the phrases "historically speaking" or "in reality" we know you're not going to say anthing congruent with either history or reality.
A quick check of Congressional voting records as rated by both the American Conservative Union (right-wing) and the Americans for Democratic Action (left-wing) reveals that those politicians who voted in favor of legislation that "preserves the state-subsidized privileges of wealthy businessmen and making the unemployed pay the price for the sins of their former bosses" (such Bush's 2008 bank bailouts and Obama's 2009 "economic stimulus" packages) are consistently well to the left of conservative. Not right-wing at all.
Sorry, PissBong, reality is safely outside your grasp.
Your continued attempts to disown your fellow leftist Adolf Hitler by smearing the right with his brand of socialism merely return to the roots of the undeniable nature of your imbecility, and offer nothing intelligible to any discussion.
As I guessed you would at this point, you fall back on the crutches of bullying and ad hominem arguments. To quote you, Blemish, "[your] making ad hominem attacks and your floundering employment of logical fallacies are no satisfactory substitute for your lack of intellectual capacity in addressing my argument." Your futile, passionate attempts to extricate Adolf Hitler from the right end of the spectrum, where even the arch-conservative Glenn Beck places him, underscore the crackpot viewpoint you aggressively promulgate in both political issues and religious ones.
There is no need to extricate Hitler from the right-wing as historically, politically, and actually he never was right-wing. Your touting Glenn Beck as "arch-conservative" is hilarity cubed. He's a regular Russell Kirk, WF Buckley, Friedrich Hayek, and Sir Edmund Burke all synthesized into one, huh? You idiot. Get on the planet the ballpark's on already, waterboy.
There are numerous Google-able cases of Protestant churchmen indicted for child sex abuse, some of whom are still serving as pastors.
Alfredo Hinojosa Soto, a 77-year old minister at New Jerusalem Pentecostal Church in Cornelius, Oregon was charged with sodomy and sexual abuse of young girls in his congregation in 2001 (KGW TV, M-ay 9, 2002). He was sentenced to 90 days in jail. “According to the [civil] lawsuit [in 2008], the church knew Soto was a predatory sex abuser and was aware that he had made sexually suggestive remarks to other girls in the congregation.”
Then I would contend that this particular autonomous Pentecostal church's leadership hierarchy is doubtlessly outside Christianity, and if there is an ecclesiological body of governance over deciding if this particular minister and congregation may operate as a Pentecostal-denominated church currently allowing Soto to remain a minister of a Pentecostal-denominated church, then that governing body is just as outside the teachings of Christianity as Catholicism's "Pope" and "College of Cardinals" are with their zealous preservation of the centuries old Catholic tenet of priests administering child molestation as a sacrament.
I don't know specifically if the Pentecostal denomination itself has a governing body allowing Soto to continue as a minister or if the congregation itself holds that power autonomously and locally. I do know Mr. Ratzinger and his Catholic underlings have had their hands (forgive the pun) in maintaining child molesters as priests of Catholic churches, and this sordid tradition goes back centuries (over 3,000 specific cases of Catholic-sponsored child molestation have become public in the last ten years alone). Lest you try to further confuse the issue, Soto's child molestation is not Christian behavior, nor does it mitigate the ecclesiological defense of mass (forgive the pun again) child molestation actively pursued by the polytheistic religion of Catholicism which was never Christian to begin with.
However, your argument until now has been that one reason you believe Catholicism is a non-Christian religion is because a number of Catholic priests are guilty of molesting children, not because the Catholic Church is protecting them...
There goes your lack of reading comprehension skills rendering you riven of capacity of representing my argument correctly. My argument has not changed, at all.
...Which the Church is no longer doing. Redemption is a Christian concept, you should know.
It remains to be seen whether or not 2010 is actually the year the polytheistic religion of Catholicism abandoned its centuries old practice of placing and maintaining child molesters in leadership positions and defending its "right" (rite?) to do so.
You may actually believe that, but the reality is different. Rightwingers are devoted to preserving the state-subsidized privileges of wealthy businessmen and making the unemployed pay the price for the sins of their former bosses.
It's become all too predictable that when you preface a remark with a clause of reification you consistently follow it with pure delusion, to the point that when you invoke the phrases "historically speaking" or "in reality" we know you're not going to say anthing congruent with either history or reality.
The ultimate irony of religion, historically speaking, is that it does not unite peoples but divides them. Two groups that both worship Jesus as savior and redeemer of humanity.can disrespect one another for any number of different reasons, as you illustrate. Thus religion becomes a political tool for carrying out discrimination. One who disbelieves what you believe is deemed a pagan — or worse.
A quick check of Congressional voting records as rated by both the American Conservative Union (right-wing) and the Americans for Democratic Action (left-wing) reveals that those politicians who voted in favor of legislation that "preserves the state-subsidized privileges of wealthy businessmen and making the unemployed pay the price for the sins of their former bosses" (such Bush's 2008 bank bailouts and Obama's 2009 "economic stimulus" packages) are consistently well to the left of conservative. Not right-wing at all.
Republican senators all voted against continuing unemployment compensation. They consistently vote for not increasing the minimum wage and for cutting taxes on the wealthy. And for giving tax breaks to corporations. Businessmen have long considered the GOP the go-to party for the promotion of the interests of business. I wonder why Wall Street bankers are shunning fund-raisers from the Democratic Party, as recently reported, if, as you suggest, it is the left that votes to support their prerogatives. A quick check of Congressional voting records will not tell you where congressmen stand on 2010 bills that have not come up for a vote.
Sorry, PissBong, reality is safely outside your grasp.
Sorry, Blemish, but your hands appear sticky from generously fudging reality.
Your continued attempts to disown your fellow leftist Adolf Hitler by smearing the right with his brand of socialism merely return to the roots of the undeniable nature of your imbecility, and offer nothing intelligible to any discussion.
As I guessed you would at this point, you fall back on the crutches of bullying and ad hominem arguments. To quote you, Blemish, "[your] making ad hominem attacks and your floundering employment of logical fallacies are no satisfactory substitute for your lack of intellectual capacity in addressing my argument." Your futile, passionate attempts to extricate Adolf Hitler from the right end of the spectrum, where even the arch-conservative Glenn Beck places him, underscore the crackpot viewpoint you aggressively promulgate in both political issues and religious ones.
There is no need to extricate Hitler from the right-wing as historically, politically, and actually he never was right-wing.
Hitler was rightwing from the beginning: A WWI veteran, he believed in the supremacy or exceptionalism of Germany and the German people, that Germany had been betrayed at the end of WWI, and that extreme steps were needed to restore the country to its right place on the world stage.
Concluded
Your touting Glenn Beck as "arch-conservative" is hilarity cubed. He's a regular Russell Kirk, WF Buckley, Friedrich Hayek, and Sir Edmund Burke all synthesized into one, huh? You idiot. Get on the planet the ballpark's on already, waterboy.
Blemish, you crackpot, if you wish to discuss politics, you are going to have to learn the jargon. An arch-conservative, in common usage, is not a leading intellectual on the right, but someone who is a strident exponent of harsh rightwing views.
Beck, who has a loyal TV audience of millions to whom he lectures and sermonizes nightly, easily fits that description. But of course, he is not an intellectual, though he calls himself a thinker and has taken to flashing, not the high school diploma he did earn, but an honorary doctorate as if it were real, which he got for agreeing to give a commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (which he omits to identify).
Neither did William F. Buckley deny that Nazism was a rightwing phenomenon. But, as you know, he was a Catholic, so, of course, he could hardly be expected to achieve the critical mass for an intellectual revolution.
There are numerous Google-able cases of Protestant churchmen indicted for child sex abuse, some of whom are still serving as pastors.
Alfredo Hinojosa Soto, a 77-year old minister at New Jerusalem Pentecostal Church in Cornelius, Oregon was charged with sodomy and sexual abuse of young girls in his congregation in 2001 (KGW TV, M-ay 9, 2002). He was sentenced to 90 days in jail. “According to the [civil] lawsuit [in 2008], the church knew Soto was a predatory sex abuser and was aware that he had made sexually suggestive remarks to other girls in the congregation.”
Then I would contend that this particular autonomous Pentecostal church's leadership hierarchy is doubtlessly outside Christianity, and if there is an ecclesiological body of governance over deciding if this particular minister and congregation may operate as a Pentecostal-denominated church currently allowing Soto to remain a minister of a Pentecostal-denominated church, then that governing body is just as outside the teachings of Christianity as Catholicism's "Pope" and "College of Cardinals" are with their zealous preservation of the centuries old Catholic tenet of priests administering child molestation as a sacrament.
The International Pentecostal Holiness Church, which was founded in 1911, is the church’s governing body: ”It [the civil suit] asks for similar damages against the church and its Oklahoma-based governing body, the International Pentecostal Holiness Church, alleging negligence in hiring Soto and failing to warn the congregation.” Apparently you apply different standards here. Whereas you have said from the outset that Catholicism is not Christianity, you have not said the same about Pentecostalism or Protestantism. These sects have hundreds of thousands of churches. In the last hundred years, even if only 0.5% or 1% of ministers committed sexual predation on children while under the control of their churches’ governing bodies, that amounts to thousands of violations of the secular ethos. (Child sex abuse did not become a public concern until the 1970s. The Bible has no commandments forbidding sexual or even physical abuse of children. However, there are commandments specifying that sons that are gluttons and drunkards shall be stoned to death. (Deut 21:20-21), and that one should beat one’s children with a rod. (Prov 23:14) )
According to the lawsuit, the church knew Soto was a predatory sex abuser and was aware that he had made sexually suggestive remarks to other girls in the congregation.
However, your argument until now has been that one reason you believe Catholicism is a non-Christian religion is because a number of Catholic priests are guilty of molesting children, not because the Catholic Church is protecting them...
There goes your lack of reading comprehension skills rendering you riven of capacity of representing my argument correctly. My argument has not changed, at all.
Seriously, with little logic, you initially proclaimed that Catholicism couldn’t be Christian because of the occurrence of cases of child sex abuse carried out by Catholic priests. You made that part of an oft-repeated basis for condemning Catholicism itself. As if, counterfactually, temporal history rather than fundamental beliefs determines its classification.
Concluded
...Which the Church is no longer doing. Redemption is a Christian concept, you should know.
It remains to be seen whether or not 2010 is actually the year the polytheistic religion of Catholicism abandoned its centuries old practice of placing and maintaining child molesters in leadership positions and defending its "right" (rite?) to do so.
The Church has already paid out one billion dollars in punitive damages, the Pope has made an abject public apology, and reform in policy has been undertaken. But, from what I know of you, redemption gets no exemption — you will not change your severe personal opinion of Catholicism.
Not that that makes the slightest difference to the classification of Catholicism , which is a branch of Christianity, as all scholars attest.
However, your argument until now has been that one reason you believe Catholicism is a non-Christian religion is because a number of Catholic priests are guilty of molesting children, not because the Catholic Church is protecting them...
There goes your lack of reading comprehension skills rendering you riven of capacity of representing my argument correctly. My argument has not changed, at all.
Seriously, with little logic, you initially proclaimed that Catholicism couldn’t be Christian because of the occurrence of cases of child sex abuse carried out by Catholic priests. You made that part of an oft-repeated basis for condemning Catholicism itself. As if, counterfactually, temporal history rather than fundamental beliefs determines its classification.
While it's not at all surprising that a blithering idiot such as yourself would continue to fall back on employing strawmen rather than addressing my as yet unassailed point, I again have to point out that your lack of reading comprehension skills will not advance you any further in your hallucinatory efforts to attribute to me an argument I never made.
One reason I contend the polytheistic religion of Catholicism is not Christian is not that Catholic priests are guilty of molesting children, but rather that the ecclesiological hierarchy that governs the Catholic religion has spent centuries knowingly emplacing child molesters in its leadership position and protecting them from removal or prosecution. The polytheistic religion of Catholicism effectively endorses child molesters as priests, else you wouldn't see them trying to pass off the idea that these priests are victims of homosexuality or pornography controlling their actions. My argument remains the same as it has been from day one. One reason Catholicism is not Christian is the great effort it has placed upon knowingly shielding child molesters within its ranks, as I've been arguing all along. Do make an effort to at least head towards adressing my argument.
Whether or not Pentecostal leaders are shielding child molesters as well doesn't make child molesters or those who maintain them positions of religious authority Christian.
It remains to be seen whether or not 2010 is actually the year the polytheistic religion of Catholicism abandoned its centuries old practice of placing and maintaining child molesters in leadership positions and defending its "right" (rite?) to do so.
The Church has already paid out one billion dollars in punitive damages, the Pope has made an abject public apology, and reform in policy has been undertaken. But, from what I know of you, redemption gets no exemption — you will not change your severe personal opinion of Catholicism.
Well, the guilty have to pay. As I've said, it remains to be seen whether or not the polytheistic religion of Catholicism truly does purge its ranks of protected child molesters maintained in positions of authority over its biblically indefensible Mary worship rituals and "indulgence" scams, or if they will continue to play public relations games with one of their oldest tenets - that of refusing to submit to civil authority in matters of criminality among its agents until dragged into court.
While it's not at all surprising that a blithering idiot such as yourself would continue to fall back on employing strawmen rather than addressing my as yet unassailed point.
Blemish, you fulminating crackpot, human history is inauthentic, realistically speaking — at least, insofar as the purposes of taxonomy. The contingencies of conformity with the civil law, and other temporal factors, do not relate to the atemporal fundamental properties, which are what need to be taken into account for classifying a sect as a form of Christianity. As I’ve said, by fundamental properties — rather than inevitable doctrinal differences with non-Catholics or the smears they doggedly tout — Catholicism is a branch of Christianity, as all scholars attest.
That fact has never been honestly addressed by you, notwithstanding your copious digressive arguments and ad hominem fallacies.
Blemish, you fulminating crackpot,
Ad hominem attack.
human history is inauthentic, realistically speaking — at least, insofar as the purposes of taxonomy.
At least you stopped yourself from the typical leftist stupidity of "all history is the history of class struggles."
The contingencies of conformity with the civil law, and other temporal factors, do not relate to the atemporal fundamental properties, which are what need to be taken into account for classifying a sect as a form of Christianity.
As the polytheistic religion of Catholicism is a continuance of imperial Roman syncretism under the auspices of the "Pontifex Maximus" and has absolutely nothing to do with the religion of Christianity that preceeded it in history by over 300 years, consideration of historical fact is relevant here, particularly given Catholic theology and ecclesiology claiming special powers for the "Pope" based on distortions of history.
As I’ve said, by fundamental properties — rather than inevitable doctrinal differences with non-Catholics or the smears they doggedly tout — Catholicism is a branch of Christianity, as all scholars attest.
Defective induction fallacy.
That fact has never been honestly addressed by you, notwithstanding your copious digressive arguments and ad hominem fallacies.
I have addressed as much of your blithering idiocy as merits even dignifying with a response, as you continue your intellectually dishonest games of denying your imbecility yet claiming to seek honest discussion and trying to distort and pervert my arguments into strawmen because your lack of reading comprehension skills can muster no real argument.
I have not committed any ad hominem fallacies. The fact that you are an imbecile lacking reading comprehension skills is pre-established and well supported by your posts in this thread as well as many others.
Blemish, you fulminating crackpot,
Ad hominem attack.
No, a well-established fact for which you have unwittingly given abundant evidence — most notably by your logically unjustified but vigorously argued opinion that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion.
human history is inauthentic, realistically speaking — at least, insofar as the purposes of taxonomy.
At least you stopped yourself from the typical leftist stupidity of "all history is the history of class struggles."
At least you identify the stupid stereotypical propaganda that you give credence to. However, to be fair, I wouldn’t say all rightwingers are like you.
The contingencies of conformity with the civil law, and other temporal factors, do not relate to the atemporal fundamental properties, which are what need to be taken into account for classifying a sect as a form of Christianity.
As the polytheistic religion of Catholicism is a continuance of imperial Roman syncretism under the auspices of the "Pontifex Maximus" and has absolutely nothing to do with the religion of Christianity that preceeded it in history by over 300 years, consideration of historical fact is relevant here, particularly given Catholic theology and ecclesiology claiming special powers for the "Pope" based on distortions of history.
Though not as twisted in their interpretations, many other Christians can give a comparable litany of temporal grievances against the Protestant sects. Nonetheless, both Catholicism and Protestantism share a fervent faith in Jesus as the son of God and the savior of humanity, which is the reason both are branches of Christianity.
As I’ve said, by fundamental properties — rather than inevitable doctrinal differences with non-Catholics or the smears they doggedly tout — Catholicism is a branch of Christianity, as all scholars attest.
Defective induction fallacy.
You fail to understand what that fallacy involves.
That fact has never been honestly addressed by you, notwithstanding your copious digressive arguments and ad hominem fallacies.
I have addressed as much of your blithering idiocy as merits even dignifying with a response, as you continue your intellectually dishonest games of denying your imbecility yet claiming to seek honest discussion and trying to distort and pervert my arguments into strawmen because your lack of reading comprehension skills can muster no real argument.
I have addressed your fallacious crackpot arguments with more seriousness than they actually deserve. Your deficient reading comprehension skills and your inability to address the central taxonomic issues without subterfuge have produced no serious arguments on your part.
I have not committed any ad hominem fallacies. The fact that you are an imbecile lacking reading comprehension skills is pre-established and well supported by your posts in this thread as well as many others.
What you are prone to label my “ad hominem fallacies” are charitable but accurate descriptions of your conduct that afford a proper perspective on your crippling dearth of reading comprehension skills and dismal lack of logic — both more than amply illustrated in this thread — that, despite all your self-delusional posturing, render you incapable of coming up with a single legitimate argument. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine you conceiving any valid argument, considering your well-known, self-revealed deficiencies.
Only conceit explains your single-minded blindness.
And now you're back to Pee Wee Herman mode. I think it's safe to say your intellectual arsenal is fully depleted of all of its Nerf darts.
Since you've preferred to deliver a two-month long demonstration of your abject unfamiliarity with logical discourse over actually addressing my argument, I also find it safe to believe you're never going to get around to doing so, and it is putatively verifiable that you're just not intellectually up to the task.
In closing, I will point out that your invalid contentions amount to little more than "Catholicism is Christianity" because "scholars attest so" while my valid contentions state "Catholicism is not Christianity" because Catholicism contrasts and conflicts with Christian teachings and beliefs.
I've made an argument based on history, theology, and ecclesiology.
You've made an ass of yourself with defective induction fallacies.
You may have the last word. Perhaps we will engage again on a topic you know something about, whatever that may be.
For the purposes of your marathon quest to show that Catholicism is a non-Christian religion, the ad hominem tactics and bogus smears you employ constitute a fallacious argument, albeit one on which you have relied more and more.
Blemish: … In closing, I will point out that your invalid contentions amount to little more than "Catholicism is Christianity" because "scholars attest so" while my valid contentions state "Catholicism is not Christianity" because Catholicism contrasts and conflicts with Christian teachings and beliefs …. .
As I expected: In closing, you seek to disingenuously score points by mischaracterizing what I’ve been saying, while you misrepresent your argument, which is built upon temporal factors, pretending all the while that you are addressing the central atemporal taxonomic question, although it is unrelated to the sectarian theological squabbles you obsess over incessantly and senselessly reiterate.
As I’ve said often enough, in the taxonomy of religions, Catholicism is a Christian religion because it shares with all other forms of Christianity the fundamental beliefs that Jesus is the son of God and the savior of humanity. Also, Catholicism shares with the rest of Christianity a belief in the holiness of the New Testament (which gives several accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus), the cross as a symbol of their faith, and the annual celebration of the two main Christian festivals, Christmas and Easter (which, by the way, derives its name, according to the English monk and historian known as the Venerable Bede, from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Esostre; rituals related to the goddess Eostre focus on new beginnings, symbolized by the Easter egg, and fertility, which is symbolized by the hare).
Besides showing you have no understanding of inductive logic, you have merely managed to show — i.e., when not propagating smears about it — that Catholicism differs in a number of temporal respects from the form of Christianity to which you have given assent — but such a solipsistic argument, of course, does not suffice to validate the (preposterous) proposition that declares: Catholicism is not a branch of Christianity.
As if the term ‘music’ referred only to the music that appeals to you. How simple the universe would be if that were so!
In future, when next you belligerently postulate what you self-importantly think is the case, I hope — for your own sake — you’ll provide legitimate evidence that you have some little inkling of just what is entailed.
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