Posted on 09/02/2013 1:19:06 PM PDT by RBStealth
The basic point of the series is that we are living on borrowed capital from the Catholic tradition and burning through it like Paris Hilton spending Daddy's money while creating nothing of value to replace it. As each phase of history passes by, we keep saying that nobody will ever take the next logical step from the premisses we have just set up as a platform for jettisoning some aspect of the Christian tradition. Then we are perpetually surprised when somebody does and the new revolutionary attacks the old one by citing the precedent established by the previous revolutionary. The Protestant revolts against the Church and then is stunned when the post-Protestant rejects the Bible. The 19th Century post-Protestant rejects Christianity assuming that Christian morals are the natural habits of all decent ladies and gentlemen and then are surprised as one by one the 20th century strips all that away.
(Excerpt) Read more at ncregister.com ...
Mark Shea not my favorite Catholic commentator, but this is good.
As others have noted, with each generation Protestantism strips out some previous held belief or doctrine, and then doubles down with intensity on some other dear held belief. A sort of compensation. All of this has occurred for the last 500 years and we as a culture and significant portions of Christianity are becoming, or actually are, de-Christianized.
Kind of a stretch IMO. The next step after “Protestants” is not turning away from God.
He sure doesn't have to worry about always being right.
The Roman Catholic, Paris Hilton, is a huge business success.
Did God choose the Romans to be his people?
Did Moses part the Mediterranean for the Romans to flee slavery in Egypt?
There's the Word of God. And there's the word of the HRC.
I'll stick with God's Word.
We don't need the church. We need GOD!
You’re cheating! You’re looking in the Book for the answers instead of blindly following their . . . .institutions teachings.
Not all change is bad...at least they aren’t selling indulgences any more. I’m more of a Lollard myself, if not a full fledged Agnostic.
I hate Mark Shea thinking he's right all the time, too:
"The notion that capitalism is somehow necessarily and inevitably a friend of Jesus Christ is one of the greatest American delusions of the past century. That doesn't make capitalism evil. It makes it a "philosophy according to human tradition" and no necessary part of the Faith."
-- Mark Shea, from the thread Capitalism, Colossians and the Miller Brewing Company....on the political front, Obama is, of course, basking in the glow of what brave troops under his command accomplished (thus do pols always exploit the troops they send to fight for them) while poor Rush Limbaugh is left with the thankless task of trying to figure out a way to tear down and mock what Obama actually did while ignoring that George "Not that interested" Bush couldn't be bothered to do it a mere six months after 9/11. Limbaugh's deeply pathetic and partisan sneers of sarcasm are a sorry attempt to detract from a rare moment of American unanimity, not around Obama or Bush, but around the fact that a monster whose continued mocking presence on planet Earth was a festering sore infecting Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, PA--and that this monster is finally gone. In contrast, George W. Bush showed genuine class and a spirit of love for his country and for the victims of Osama. For just one day, I wish Limbaugh could have shut up, forgotten the party spirit, and been glad for his country's sake. His behavior demonstrates everything that's wrong with elevating good of party over love of country. We get it, Rush. You despise Obama. Let it go for one day and be glad, for your countryman's sake, that justice has finally come to the architect of 9/11, even if it costs letting Obama look good for a day.
-- Mark Shea, from the thread More Bin Laden AftershocksOne of the frequent complaints one hears about Catholics is that we cannot think for ourselves and basically live on a daily diet of whatever the Pope spoon feeds to us and tells us to think....reader Peter Sean Bradley sends along this latest bulletin from the world of anti-Catholic experts on Catholic faith, wherein Fundamentalist pastor and radio star John MacArthur tells you something I bet you never knew...But what do you know? You’re just a stupid Catholic who believes everything he’s told. The people who uncritically regurgitate whatever MacArthur tells them are way smarter than you. They think for themselves when they cut and paste claims like the one above without a movement of the gray matter. It is as critical, self-aware intellects that they paste and repaste the list of Roman Catholic Inventions, credulously swallowing the urban legend that it comes from a former priest who saw the light and completely ignorant of the fact that it originates with professional anti-Catholic Loraine Boettner...."You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” as Christians ought to know.
-- Mark Shea, from the thread Credulous Suckers Who Believe Whatever Their Pope Tells Them....guys like Glenn Beck make their job way easier because they really are irresponsible with their endless hysterics and comparisons of everything with a pulse to Hitler....Beck spends his show feeding hysteria about obscure crap that, as ever, is going to doom us all....who are we kidding if we completely exonerate Beck thereby? Is “incitement” a word without any real world referent?....A civilization (like ours) that treats freedom of speech as a license for irresponsible rodeo clowns to incite murderous nuts or irresponsible clowns like Andrew Breitbart to slime people without apology is a civilization that is about to destroy yet another of its liberties....
-- Mark Shea, on the thread Big Laws and Small Laws [Mark Shea on "Nanny Staters" vs the "Right Wing Noise Machine"]After several posts by Mark Shea on the subject of “conservatism”, I must admit I don’t like those conservative Catholics very much. Anyway, at least how Mark Shea describes them. Fortunately, I haven’t met very many who fit Mark’s description. And I think I would have run into them, for I am a conservative Catholic....My name is Patrick. I am a Catholic. I call myself a conservative. I put my Church first and my party about 108th. I prefer small government because I believe it protects our God given liberties, including our religious liberties, best. I believe in the Constitution. Not because it is a document handed on from on high but because it was written by men who understood what dastardly deeds of which men with power are capable. Moreover, I support the Constitution because it is the arrangement to which we all agreed. Until that changes, it should still apply, no? I believe in free enterprise, not because I hate poor people, but because I think that it offers the best chance at prosperity for the most people. Does it eliminate inequity? Surely not. However, all the other systems I have seen tried produce even more inequity or even worse. So free enterprise seems like the best idea. I believe in a strong defense, but a strong defense that never subjugates the dignity of any individual to a greater good. No ifs, ands, or buts. No way. No how.
-- Patrick Archbold, on the thread Who Is Mark Shea Talking About?
No more inquisitions!! I hate seeing people burn at the stake for their beliefs.
Exactly.
As I posted to the NCR site:
Naturally, being a Latin, the author fails to notice the first steps in the progression, in which the West turned its back on Holy Tradition: the jettisoning of the fundamental equality of all bishops to create a top-down structure for the church on the model of every merely human institution, with a single leader at the top, and the replacement of the phronema of the Holy Orthodox Church with the rationalism of Thomism.
Perhaps in that post I should have also quoted St. Justin of Celije: “The Pope was the first protestant.”
Ooooh, that's going to leave a mark.
It’s also quite ridiculous, since most of the Popes of Rome were either utterly unqualified for the position, or otherwise freaks and creeps. As Calvin observed,
“If morals be inquired into, we shall find few or almost none whom the ancient canons would not have judged unworthy. If one was not a drunkard, he was a fornicator; if one was free from this vice, he was either a gambler or sportsman, or a loose liver in some respect. For there are lighter faults which, according to the ancient canons, exclude from the episcopal office. But the most absurd thing of all is, that even boys scarcely ten years of age are, by the permission of the Pope, made bishops. Such is the effrontery and stupidity to which they have arrived, that they have no dread even of that last and monstrous iniquity, which is altogether abhorrent even from natural feeling. Hence it appears what kind of elections these must have been, when such supine negligence existed... the general and approved practice is (and it is carried on as it were systematically), that drunkards, fornicators, gamblers, are everywhere promoted to this honour; nay, this is little: bishoprics are the rewards of adulterers and panders: for when they are given to hunters and hawkers, things may be considered at the best.” (John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Ch. 5)
And these are the same guys who boast that they are the successors of the Apostles!
And complain about being right all the time. Denominational Pride is still repulsive to others.
Sorry to dissapoint you
Actually, it started some fifteen hundred years earlier than that.
In Orthodoxy, God formed the perfect way for His people to stay true to the faith and not astray into Arianism, Marcionism, Gnosticism, etc.
Bipolar “I hate seeing” — how old are you? did you actually see this happening? :)
About what? That he is a collectivist, Obama loving shill who, since he had a snit about waterboarding about 8 years ago, has turned into the leftists' best friend?
He was always irritating in his writing style, but has, as age moves on, has become increasingly shrill...and who has the blind arrogance where he cannot perceive his own shift in POV?
Sorry to disappoint you if you actually give him the time of day...
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