Hieronymus
AAQC-winning posts:
User ID: 419
Hieronymus
3yr ago
That explains so much. I remember being excited to see PCM have a shot at moving off-site, but the number of PCM users who joined was dwarfed by the number of rdrama users who did, so the culture was very different.
Thank you for the reply. I am sorry that I didn’t wait to post until I had time to lay out my thoughts better and to respond more promptly.
In trying to understand the Roman Catholic view of the sacraments, the best examples for me have been baptism and the eucharist, both because we Protestants also acknowledge them as sacraments – whether individual denominations use that word or not – and because the R.C. view is pretty clearly defined: There are certain requirements of form and matter, and if they are met you have a valid sacrament ex opere operato. If those requirements are met under forbidden circumstances you have a sacrament which is valid but illicit. So far I understand.
As a Protestant I regard marriage as a creation ordinance, and I do not see a category of sacramental marriage distinct from natural marriage. But Rome does, and interestingly it puts a wedding between two Protestants in a Protestant church into the sacramental category. So such a wedding must meet the requirements of form and matter, and it must do so with an officiant who is not in communion with Rome and whom Rome does not regard as a validly ordained priest.
My expectation would be that a wedding of two Roman Catholics performed by an SSPX priest would be valid but illicit. They have met at least the same requirements of form and matter as the Protestant spouses have, but they have done so in contravention of canon law. Yet the Vatican’s announcement and the canon you quoted say that such a wedding is invalid. What gives? I am particularly weirded out by this passage:
Only those marriages are valid which are contracted … according to the rules expressed in the following canons and without prejudice to the exceptions mentioned in cann. 144, 1112, §1, 1116, and 1127, §§1-2.
Does this mean that canon law can add requirements to a sacrament, affecting its validity as well as its lawfulness? If so, that’s a rather startling claim. If not, this canon law must be restating requirements of form or matter that already exist for other reasons; but then how are Protestant marriages, which don’t meet those requirements, valid? Consider two silly thought experiments:
- An SSPX priest performs a wedding of two Lutherans. (Let’s say they all want to thumb their noses at Pope Leo.) Is this marriage valid?
- The pope amends canon law to require that baptisms be performed with holy water to be valid. Does this genuinely invalidate other subsequent baptisms?
Edit: Corrected some typos, and now pinging @urquan too.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
"Actual sin" is a theological term to describe sin one has committed personally in contrast to original sin. It doesn't imply that original sin isn't real. I just mean that no human being has just cause to execute someone for original sin.
Use logic not vibes.
If there is a logic to your objections of inconsistency, it relies on an unstated premise I can't quite get at. Maybe you're working from the basis that killing a human being is an offense only against him, whereas in the Christian view it is a sin against God also.
As for the state, God has delegated to the state some authority for capital punishment. Within those parameters, it has some wiggle room. But it's not carte blanche.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
My curiosity is piqued. I couldn't find it, but if you have a link it'd be fun to watch.
Hieronymus
3mo ago
Thank you. That explains some things about Internet distributists and also gives me some things to think over – not least the difference between red and blue state dynamics regarding your second paragraph.
Hieronymus
6mo ago
I'm American, and I've known a lot of people with PTO that combines vacation and sick days. It may be a difference in state labor laws.
Hieronymus
6mo ago
That's a good point, and I appreciate the perspective. My gut take on those laws as a blue-state conservative is more cynical and culture warry.
As an aside, my grandmother was a nurse in a delivery ward among other things. Local doctors sometimes played a role in adoptions then, and from her stories they could be pretty whim driven too, as well meaning as they were.
Hieronymus
6mo ago
Are you thinking of the PCA, which is confessional or evangelical, or the PCUSA, which is mainline?
Hieronymus
6mo ago
IIRC wasn't Cyberpunk the first RPG to do the body type shtick?
Fair! I don’t know if it was first, but it was definitely early. I can’t believe I forgot that.
Hieronymus
8mo ago
Thanks. That's not at all what I expected. Sad to read about.
Hieronymus
8mo ago
Are you comfortable saying which denomination you were raised in? That makes me curious.
Hieronymus
10mo ago
Natural law is the moral order inherent in the order of creation, particularly human nature, as distinct from social custom or positive law such as statutes. In the ancient world it could be discussed by Christians, pagans, and de facto atheists, but in 21st-century America it is mostly a Christian idea.
… how do you guarantee that your reforms don't change, and revert back to standard liberalism?
This is an open question, and a vital one. I have some thoughts but not a satisfactory answer. Realistically, many of these policies couldn’t happen unless there were social change underway already, and I am not optimistic about that change happening absent a black swan event like another Great Awakening. I don’t want to pretend that wise social policy can fix things by itself.
Many of your proscriptions/desires/policies, resemble those of 1950s America, and we know for a fact that those changed to align with progressive mores.
True. I’d argue that the 1950s were kind of unstable to begin with, that the social legacies of the 1920s and of the New Deal had yet to be worked out.
Experience now gives the lie to some naïve past arguments for liberalization in a way that would make them harder to repeat. In the push for no-fault divorce, people argued (seriously!) that it wouldn’t increase divorce rates. Afterward, social psychologists said that divorce would be good for children. Those are arguments you can’t make with a straight face in 2025. If you wanted to restore no-fault divorce after a change in the status quo, you’d have to argue that no-fault divorce is worth the costs, not that there are no costs.
That is empirical evidence that, no, conservative laws are not naturally resistant to progressive agitation, and in fact, seem very vulnerable to them; hell, conservative customs aren't very resistant to liberalization. So how can you be sure you won't just repeat the cycle all over again?
I can’t be sure.
Western societies were Christian before they were liberal, and liberalism benefited from the customs and ideas laid down under centuries of Christendom. One of the outstanding questions on the modern Christian right is whether classical liberalism necessarily erodes that foundation: Did it have to be that way, or was that just how it worked out? I don’t know.
I think that laws that make it easier to have healthy families and churches and so on will lead to more of them, and that having more of them will feed back into policy. That’s the virtuous cycle I mentioned. I can’t promise that it won’t be outweighed by other factors, but I still think it represents movement in the right direction. It’s just not a silver bullet.
Hieronymus
11mo ago
I was just watching this review of the Framework desktop based on that chip earlier today. If you need more RAM and memory bandwidth than you do compute, it seems neat.
Hieronymus
11mo ago
I agree. But the various steelmen Scott got in reply convinced me that there's no way to rescue that framing that lets you discuss intended and actual consequences at the same time, let alone different levels or stages of intent. There's got to be a better set of terms to discuss those ideas.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
Cultural differences are real and meaningful, but in this case I wonder if the difference in honesty looks bigger due to a difference in norms about how to return lost property. Unless I were in a small town, handing a lost wallet in to the police probably wouldn't occur to me, and then it would likely be option two or three.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I can see why one might think so, as a polytheistic precursor to the version we now have, but it's not in line with Judean polytheists' practice. When King Josiah of Judah decided he was done putting up with all this pagan nonsense, the Jerusalem temple had plenty of artifacts of polytheistic worship for him to burn, grind up, and/or throw into the river.
Hieronymus
1yr ago
I think there are a modest but meaningful number of men online, whether they were successful cads or not, who are coming to realize that rejecting Christian sexual ethics has been bad for people of both sexes. I wonder if they'll be the one group of irreligious moderns who will find the natural law persuasive.
Hieronymus
2yr ago
… but he’s no Roy Moore.
This is definitely a tangent, but I haven’t kept up with political scandals. What do you mean? My recollection is that Moore was accused of some things that were really serious and some things that were merely weird; then, when some of the weird accusations were proved, people spoke as if the grave ones were too, mostly without evidence. But I am fully prepared to have missed some developments in the mean time.
Hieronymus
2yr ago
I happened to read it at that age. Although it's not exactly history, it did put our brief coverage of Hawaii in my US history class to shame.
Hieronymus
2yr ago
I want to offer a data point since your example caught my eye. My go-to butter, from a very respectable American dairy brand, is 81% butterfat. Butter isn’t what they’re most known for and I don’t think chefs seek it out, but I prefer it to the well-reviewed European brands I have tried. So it surprises me that the EU forbids it to be called butter.
On the other hand, America’s minimum alcohol content for liquor to be labeled with the obvious categories (whiskey, brandy, gin, etc.) is 80 proof (40% ABV) as opposed to the EU’s 75 proof (37.5% ABV). I don’t know what that says about us, but I am grateful for it.
Hieronymus
2yr ago
I would love to read it.
I appreciate your and @screye's replies on the culture war aspects. As an American I am used to reading western history with the bias of the author in mind. But that's hard to do for parts of the world where I don't have the context; I can sometimes intuit the author's biases, but their implications are not clear to me.
Hieronymus
3yr ago
Were they still punishing people for wrongthink by taking away their checkmarks, or had that also changed?
Hieronymus
3yr ago
But since the title of "king" generally meant "ruler" and not "husband of queen", there was historically a lot of reluctance to give this title to someone who married the female monarch, particularly in the days when the husband ruled the wife.
Yes, I see avoiding the implication that he ruled jure uxoris. That said, what would have been the implications if he had become co-ruler? It's hard for me to see how Britain would have been worse off for giving Albert or Philip more influence.
Hieronymus
3yr ago
Thanks!
If you have another reliable record of apostolic teaching, you should listen to it. But you don't – both Rome and Constantinople have a history of backdating later innovations to ascribe apostolicity to them. Tradition can be useful, but to call it authoritative is an error.
Fortunately that's not needed here, because the Bible speaks to the issue. If Cruz gets it wrong, well, Cruz gets it wrong.
I'd like to respond with some clever remark about Roman Catholics in power, but that'd be silly because, like Protestants, they are too varied a group to generalize about that way. As far as I'm aware of Eastern Orthodox politicians in traditionally Orthodox countries, they seem more driven by ethnic nationalism than by any particularly Christian concerns.
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