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To: Zionist Conspirator
People who've been here long enough know your story. You're angry at the Catholic church for not rejecting evolution and source criticism, and you think that Catholics are particularly hard on Fundamentalists.

Consider that what you perceive may have a lot to do with where you live. The Catholic Church is an international institution, and I doubt Catholics in Italy or India or Indonesia or Angola are much agitated about Protestant Fundamentalists.

Consider also that it has a lot to do with you. Somebody who comes to people demanding that they take his point of view has a way of dominating the conversation, and even if he doesn't, such a person will assume that his ideas are the center of all discussion.

And consider also the history. Do you really expect an institution that's been accused for centuries of obstructing science and free intellectual inquiry should simply reject two centuries of research and scholarship out of hand? Do you really think that would make for a better world or a better understanding of religion? Do you really think that Judaism or Christianity have always been hostile to scientific inquiry and scholarly investigation?

I also get that you thought that you had found some kind of primeval, ur-alt, original religion in Catholicism and then you came upon something even older, something so old that you assumed it couldn't be refuted (ignoring the fact that it couldn't be proved, either). Okay, good for you, but one has to wonder why you are forever tossing bricks back at the Catholics. Is it disappointed love, or just a way of indulging age-old anti-Catholic prejudices?

It's also clear that you regard yourself as some kind of great defender of Fundamentalists, even though you've attacked and even mocked their most cherished belief on several occasions. You'll have to admit that's a little strange, and hard to take. You want to have it both ways. You want to be the defender of simple Bible-believers, and also be the modern skeptic who sees through Christianity.

I guess that's what you think you have to do to get through life, but you might consider that it may strike other people as patronizing in the extreme. Evangelicals or Fundamentalists or Bible believers aren't the poor cowed victims that you make them out to be (when you're not dismissing or insulting them in your own way). They're part of the discussion, just like everybody else. If you really respected them, you wouldn't be forever reducing them to a caricature of helplessness and victimization.

15 posted on 05/18/2018 1:52:58 PM PDT by x
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To: x
West Virginia's a great place to be from and some just don't know when to stop running.
16 posted on 05/18/2018 1:55:38 PM PDT by RegulatorCountry
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To: x
And consider also the history. Do you really expect an institution that's been accused for centuries of obstructing science and free intellectual inquiry should simply reject two centuries of research and scholarship out of hand? Do you really think that would make for a better world or a better understanding of religion? Do you really think that Judaism or Christianity have always been hostile to scientific inquiry and scholarly investigation?

What does Catholicism say about the well-known scientific fact that dead people don't come back to life or that virgins don't have babies?

I suppose we need a couple more centuries of "research" and "scholarship" to get there, eh?

I also get that you thought that you had found some kind of primeval, ur-alt, original religion in Catholicism and then you came upon something even older, something so old that you assumed it couldn't be refuted (ignoring the fact that it couldn't be proved, either).

It has been proven. The fact that you choose to identify the world's only self-vindicating claim of religious revelation as just another exercise of "blind faith" is your problem.

17 posted on 05/18/2018 3:10:00 PM PDT by Zionist Conspirator (Vegam Yehudah tillachem biYrushalayim . . . .)
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To: x
Consider also that it has a lot to do with you. Somebody who comes to people demanding that they take his point of view has a way of dominating the conversation, and even if he doesn't, such a person will assume that his ideas are the center of all discussion.

In a way I hesitate to post this, because there is absolutely no way for me to prove what I am going to say (quite unlike the Revelation at Sinai). Personally, I don't know why in the world you don't simply ignore my posts since they so bother you. But be that as it may . . .

I did not enter the Catholic Church screaming for everyone to reject evolution and source criticism. Quite the opposite. I was quite prepared to accept the fact that there was something wrong with me and mine (unlike all those illiterate peasants the ancient churches are so proud of). It was the historical argument that cinched it for me (goodness knows, it's all they have going for them), and I asked only if, since in times past Catholics were much more literal in their Biblical interpretation, I could therefore retain these earlier beliefs (since I assumed what was once perfectly legitimate could not suddenly and magically become excommunicable heresy). Granted, the flagrant hypocrisy of accepting some alleged supernatural phenomena while rejecting others because "we know now stuff like this doesn't happen" is about as two-faced and hypocritical as you can get, and can only be driven by an absolute mania to distance oneself as far as possible from those awful people who live in trailer parks.

But when I went out of state to study Divinity and was facing all this stuff for the first time, "my" Church gave me absolutely no support. In fact, it agreed with the atheist professors. When I went to "my" denominational counselor I was told to "get out" because my beliefs "just weren't Catholic." But did I? No. I had come to believe that Catholicism was the one true religion, and the day being a holy day of obligation, I went straight to "my" church for mass where I refrained from communion because I was such a bad, rebellious Catholic (unlike all those homosexuals the Catholic Church wants so badly to court). I actually confessed my Biblical literalism as a sin in the confessional because my "infallible" church evidently labeledd it "bad" and "heretical." The priest was an older man with white hair, yet he spent some fifteen minutes (with a line forming outside the confessional) to try to convince me of all the errors the Bible contained. I actually went to an eastern Catholic church for I felt welcomed for a while, but quit at the end of Lent when one of the seminarians there said he had absolutely no evidence that a man named Noah ever existed (or that he didn't). I talked with him about being now stuck in a "one true religion" I simply in good conscience could not agree with, and he basically told me it was all right. After leaving there, I had both an Eastern Orthodox and a Myophysite church to investigate. The latter had a particularly beautiful liturgy, but it was a typical liberal ethnic church where apparently the only thing they believed in was their holy nation and their grudges.

Naturally, when I found out (thanks to an Eastern Orthodox booklet) that the true doctrine of human nature is found in the Talmud, I felt as if I had been cheated. Here are all these ancient religions boasting of their at once greater antiquity and oxymoronically their greater liberalism (did not compute). Why wouldn't I be bitter?

I saw a religion that claimed that the ancient Biblical religion had to be replaced even though there was nothing wrong with us, the so-called savior had not in fact "died for my sins," and that Judaism's teaching on human nature remained the correct one.

Then why in blazes the need to start an entirely new religion if the only thing wrong with the first one was that all the ritual and calendar dates needed to be changed? How can I not regard chrstianity as the greatest and cruelest joke ever perpetrated on the human race, with my own people with their sincere beliefs that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are true and that J*sus had indeed died in their place as the supreme suckers of the whole operation?

I've told this story often, but I know it will mean nothing to you. But here on FR I often read posts attacking snobby liberal elitists and defending the American "redneck." What makes a "conservative" Catholic elitist any better?

What about all the various blasphemous vermin who post here exclusively to celebrate their holy white European chromosomes? What about all the people who post about all the hundreds of thousands of years Blacks are "behind" whites on the evolutionary timescale? How are these b@st@rds and my people even on the same board? How could we ever be allies? Good gravy, is hearing the words "ax" or "exscape" that grating??? That is all this is about???

Since you will not even try to get inside my head or give my case even a hearing, I suggest you simply ignore me from here on.

As for me, I am delighted that the ancient fraudulent evolutionist churches are going down the drain, clinging to Darwin and Wellhausen with their cold dead fingers to the very last.

18 posted on 05/18/2018 4:39:57 PM PDT by Zionist Conspirator (Vegam Yehudah tillachem biYrushalayim . . . .)
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