OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
Bede, Eusebius and Africanus disagreed, yes, but about which young date, between about 5500 and 3952 BC. In other words, all of them were literalists, but read it literally in different ways.
You are missing my point to argue this. My point was that a line during the liturgy doesn't need to be treated like a dogmatic declaration of something.
in 1909 the Pontifical Biblical Commission ruled that the literal historical sense of Genesis 1–3 may not be questioned where it concerns the special creation of man, the formation of the first woman from the first man, and the unity of the human race. In 1950 Humani Generis §37 still ruled that the faithful «cannot embrace» any view in which «Adam represents a certain number of first parents,» because original sin «proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam» (vatican.va).
This does not mean what you want it to mean. In 1909 the commission is narrowing down the required significance of the Genesis allegory to quite a small scope - humans are special, women and men are equal in dignity, all humans are related. These things are required for Catholics to believe, every other interpretation can be as literal or un-literal as you like.
Humani Generis is making a regulatory decision. Papal encyclicals are written very carefully, and they have to be read very carefully. There’s a difference between saying that something is false and saying that you’re not allowed to discuss and advocate it. The language in Humani Generis §37 is very specificly making a regulation, not a truth declaration. There is a formula you would expect from a Pope who wishes to define something dogmatically, it would be something like, "I declare, using my papal authority, in unity with the magisterium, that all Christians are to hold X as true."
The Second Council of Constantinople condemned Origen and Origenist teachings, such as the pre-existence of souls and universal restoration. So the Church later condemned the very authority that you are citing.
I am not citing Origin as an authority, I am using quotes from him as examples of how historical Christians approached the texts.
If you really want to get into Galileo, I recommend this as background reading: https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-table-of.html
Regarding the events you quote, this is how it happened:
24 Feb. 1616. The consultants ("Qualifiers") meet on the 23rd and the following day make their recommendations:
The notion that the Sun is at the center of the world and at rest is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrine of the Holy Scripture in many passages, both in their literal meaning and according to the general interpretation of the Fathers and Doctors" The statement that that the Earth moves "deserves the same censure in philosophy and, as regards theological truth, is at least erroneous in faith."
Reminder: The main reasons why the motions of the Earth are "absurd in philosophy" is that if the Earth revolves around the Sun there would be visible stellar parallax, and if the Earth rotated on its axis there would be Coriolis effects. There were none, thus falsifying the theory that the Earth moves. (There were also other reasons that seemed important because no one had formulated a theory of inertia and so forth.) We can hardly blame the theologians for taking the word of the natural philosophers any more than we could blame the lawyers in the Dover case for taking the word of the biologists.
25 Feb. 1616. But no board of theologians, even those basing their ruling on Settled Science™, can declare a heresy, even a formal heresy (i.e., heretical in form). Lord Cardinal Mellini notifies the Reverend Fathers, the Assessor, and the Commissary of the Holy Office that the censure of the Qualifiers has been reported, and His Holiness [Paul V] directs Lord Cardinal Bellarmino to summon before him the said Galileo and inform him of the decree. If he resists, Galileo is to be presented with an injunction that includes imprisonment.
Pope Paul V is inclined to declare the hypothesis as contrary to faith, "but the Cardinals Caetani and Maffeo Barbarini withstood the Pope openly and and checked him with the good reasons they gave. The decree makes a careful distinction between a mathematical hypothesis and a physical fact and it is only the latter that is to be avoided.
It's what (purportedly) happened on the next day, 26 Feb. 1616, that really sealed Galileo's fate and where his political enemies got him good. But to find out what that was you should read the whole article series, I have no time to expand here.
I simply say these books are not true
What do you mean by true? You are quoting a bunch of songs (Psalms is literally a songbook) with figurative language and saying they're proof of falsehood. I say they're true because the sentiment they are expressing is true. Is Madonna's greatest hits "True?" You're evaluating these things with criteria that they were never meant to be examined by.
Calling the Gospels bioi is mere sophistry, a post-hoc categorization. It is unconvincing. It doesn't tell you that Luke and Matthew are legitimate, nor the redacted (suspected) parts of Mark and Joh. Philostratus's Life of Apollonius is also a bios, and Apollonius raises a dead girl in Rome and appears after his death.
You are conflating different parts of my reply as arguments for other parts in my reply. I am saying that the Gospels and Genesis are not the same genre and do not have the same literary conventions. A feature of the genre the Gospels was written in is that there were honest attempts to gather eyewitness testimony and stick with things confirmed in already circulating stories. They differ from modern biographies in that there was much less concern with chronology and instead things were grouped by ideas.
Why are you so sure Apollonius did not raise a dead girl in Rome?
by D. C. Parker's account (The Living Text of the Gospels),
....Your source is a book written in 1997? So be it, but we have found more texts since then.
Marcion's "Gospel" has virtually no direct physical evidence and exists almost entirely as a reconstructed text through his opponents. If you're using that as criteria, the New Testament also can be entirely reconstructed from citations from Church Fathers.
The earliest papyrus fragments for the gospels we have are from c. A.D. 125–175. We have 0 direct early physical copies of Marcion's writings.
Reconstructions of Marcion are made primarily with Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem, Epiphanius' Panarion, and Pseudo-Origen's Dialogue of Adamantius. Using these same three texts, you also could reconstruct a significant amount of Luke! And the parts of Luke you can't reconstruct from these, primarily Luke 1-3, you could reconstruct from works published before Tertullian, like Justin Martyr's writings.
Most NT Scholars date Luke to before AD 90. Marcion was born around AD 85 and could not have written first. Marcion’s text displays clear linguistic and stylistic features unique to Luke's specific Greek style, meaning Marcion was pulling from a pre-existing Lucan text.
All a lot of copies tell you the text was copied a lot.
It takes time to make a copy in the ancient world. It takes time for copies to go from one land to another across the Mediterranean. The more copies we find early on in far away places the more it attests to an early date. The consistency of the copies attest to a faithful rendering of the original. There just isn't a lot of room in the historical record for an interpolation of an original Marcion text to have been edited into Luke and then circulated wider than Marcion's original text.
Popularity isn't a test of truth. There are more Muslims than Catholics.
That's not the point. The point is that if Jesus did not leave behind a lasting legacy then he failed. If gnosticism is true, then Jesus did not leave behind a lasting legacy.
Re: Miracles. The topic of "vindicatory" miracles is a huge one and I'll just scratch the surface here, but I have no problem with healings happening in different faith contexts. God loves all of us, He may choose to heal any of us as he sees fit.
Someone having their leg amputated and buried, then getting an official beggars license on account of his missing leg from a government agency, then appearing in public without a leg for years, and then having the very same leg that had been buried appear on his body overnight and begin functioning again, is not a natural healing. It might not be proof of Catholicism specifically, but it's not the body fighting cancer.
The fulfilled prophecy and miracle at Fatima is less easy to dismiss. Scott Alexander tried and i think he failed. Fatima is vindictatory in a unique way because it is tied to prophecies and a distinctively Catholic message.
Demonic possession is also vindicatory in a unique way because time and again, only Catholic priests with the faculties given to them through their bishop are able to exorcise demons, while other faith traditions struggle.
Eucharistic miracles are vindictatory in a unique way because they happen in Catholic contexts and vindicate a distinctive Catholic doctrine.
The Orthodox miracle of fire is not a miracle and they admitted to it a while ago. . There are still lots of lay Orthodox who think it's a miracle and it's a bit of a letdown like telling your kids Santa is not real so they don't really push back as hard as they ought.
For Islam, I'm not an expert but my understanding is that Mohamed did not perform miracles in his life. In the Quaran, (Q 17:59, 10:20), he explicitly declines to perform physical, cosmic miracles on demand, presenting the Quran itself as his sole sign. The hadiths which describe miracles come from the 8th century and after, and cannot actually be eyewitness testimony. The hadiths may be oral traditions representing stories from earlier in time, but are not "eyewitness" testimony the same way we have testimony of the Miracle of the Sun from miles around recorded within days of the event, photos, etc.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3hr ago
I guess it could be literal but it doesn't have to be literal and even if it were literal the words have symbolic significance as well.
Ancient genealogies serve a purpose that we moderns find obscure. There are two major parts to point out:
The genealogies shows a lessening of human lifespans. This seems to show a growing weakness inside humanity that is portrayed through the genealogy.
The genealogies portray famous names to them, possibly referencing other folk heroes and stories that are lost to time. They connect different traditions into one grand narrative.
I think the ancients felt a pleasure to hearing genealogies that we cannot connect with but probably resemble modern cinima's Memberberries phenomenon.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4hr ago
It's an allegory if there isn't a literal fruit or nachash.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4hr ago
"Nobody wanted it."
Would you prefer Nuclear winter in the next ten years over this Iran war? It really depends on the alternatives being discussed.
The people who support the war genuinely believe that Iran was on a path towards getting nukes and had a will to use them against the Great Satan. If that is the case, then the Iran war is something everybody wants. They just had to make that case but they failed.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5hr ago
You can take any given line and it's rich in meaning. For example:
Genesis 3:6: So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise,
These are regarded to this day in Christian circles as the three categories of temptations - physical comfort/pleasure (lust of the flesh), mental curiositas/pleasure (lust of the eyes), and pride. And as a consequence of the fall we have rebellious bodies, darkened minds, and weakened wills.
As far as compatibility with known anthropology, Archbishop Leonard proposed a view which was privately endorsed by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI:
Between the world before the sin of Adam and the world after the first sin, there is a qualitative discontinuity; one must therefore not picture the original fall as taking place inside the present world. The sin of Adam is precisely at the origin of the present condition of man and of the world insofar as they are infected by evil...
Adam and his sin are not to be situated inside our universe with the physical and biological laws that we presently know it to have.
Our hypothesis amounts . . . to placing Adam and Eve in a real preternatural world, but one not coinciding with the present universe, somewhat as we situate the risen New Adam and the glorified New Eve in a real new world, but one not overlapping our cosmos.
The consequence of the sin of Adam is then precisely that the whole of the preternatural universe falls and becomes, from the initial big bang until today, this universe such as we know it, handed over to the irreversibility of time and to the laws of life and death of a nature abandoned to its own resources.
This is also similar to von Balthazar's view. There is an idea circulating that if humanity did not fall, the world of evolution would not have been as it is now. That the choice of humans to do wrong created the natural evils along with the general concupiscence.
I do not know if i subscribe to that view, and it's not necessary to answer evolution. Instead, it seems equally plausible to me that the fall of the angels, which preceded ours, had real consequences for us. The angels have real responsibilities and can have real failures. Maybe the Angel of Progress became the demon of Natural Selection, red in tooth and claw, after he fell. The important thing in the allegory is that we would have had nothing to fear from these demons if we had not fallen ourselves.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7hr ago
I think it's likely the Iran war was necessary for the future stability of the world, but that Trump did not do what he needed to get the American people's buy in. He needed a single solid pitch for it and then stick to it for the duration. But instead he kept changing his tune.
The American people would not have been entirely opposed to a message like, "The USA has messed up on Iran for decades now. Obama's deal with Iran put them in a stronger position than ever. We have tried surgically removing their ability to build a nuclear bomb but were unable to do so. Here are the indicators that they are building a bomb and here is the intelligence that they would use it on US soil.
"To combat this, we need to either set back their industrial capacity to the point where they cannot economically complete a bomb, or destabilize the regime to the point where they can no longer politically make a bomb.
"This will require sacrifice from the American people - our blood, our treasure, a slimmer wallet for the duration of the war. But we are not a fearful people. We are not afraid of sacrifices to make a better world for our children. Every one of our ancestors that came here braved harsh conditions, deprivation, and uncertainty in the hope that they were building a better world for their children. We can do no better, and we choose to do no worse."
The execution of the war was pretty good, only thing I would change there is I wish they started the blockade sooner.
You can do the right thing and have it be politically unpopular. That's actually more likely than something being politically popular and it being the right thing.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
21hr ago
It's had a Republican governor about 50% of the time since it began having governors.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
21hr ago
The Christmas Proclamation from the 1584 Roman Martyrology was read for centuries:
"In the year, from the creation of the world… five thousand one hundred and ninety-nine; from the flood, two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven…"
Yeah it's a very baller line. I recommend everyone visit a Easter Vigil mass and a Christmas Midnight mass once in their lives at a large parish to experience it.
Doesn't mean it's required to believe those are exact dates, or otherwise the exact dates wouldn't have been debated so fiercely. Bede disagreed with Eusebius who disagreed with Julius Africanus who disagreed with a bunch of Protestant scholars all working from the same text and genealogies trying to find the exact day of creation.
Most educated Christians for most of history regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as myths that present theological truths about our identity as humans in relationship with God. Reading the Garden of Eden as something that has to be literally true or else all of the Bible and Christianity is false is something that developed relatively recently.
Origen:
I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally" (The Fundamental Doctrines 4:1:16 [A.D. 225]).
Augustine:
at least we know that [the Genesis creation day] is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar" (Genesi Ad Litteram, AD 415).
Also St. Augustine:
It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.
With the scriptures it is a matter of treating about the faith. For that reason, as I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.
I do not want to give the impression that I think all Christians knew about evolution and the big bang since the 1st Century. Of course St. Augustine thought the Earth was created in a spectacular way by God. If I recall correctly "science" at his time thought the Earth was created in Spring and the Genesis account didn't indicate that (or something like that I can't look it up right now), which is why he wrote what he did about following the science instead of treating the creation accounts as literal.
But it is true that the average Christian looked to the first 11 Chapters of Genesis for allegorical, theological truths primarily, and a description of the actual beginning of the Earth secondarily. Same with the book of Joshua, it was primarily seen as an allegory for the importance of excising sin from the soul, and only secondarily as an actual historical record of something that happened. And this way of reading the narratives is not a post hoc rationalization in the face of evidence that should have disproved it, but rather just the natural way it's been approached applied to our present knowledge.
The beginning of the book of Genesis provides a thought provoking, textured, allegorical recounting of the origins of man. Everyone saw that there were two, contradictory accounts of the origin of man in the first two chapters. The purpose of handing down these chapters was not to present an accurate account of history but to present a Biblical anthropology. Most commentary on these stories focus on the relationship of God and man presented in the stories as perennial spiritual truths. They were also taken as the best account they had of the beginning of the human species, but we have since learned more through other means of exploration.
had to persecute Galileo and the others.
You don't know your history here. The Galileo affair was due to him being bad at politicking and writing a book where he called the pope an idiot. More than that, wrote a book where a character was called Idiot and had the Idiot character speak the Pope's lines.
The same as the Gospels? Both are men and a God doing things and talking to each other.
So confident and so wrong. The Bible is a collection of books of many genres. There is wisdom literature, proverbs, folklore, political satire. The Gospels are written in a very particular style - Ancient Biography. This was the most accurate way of recording events at the time and demonstrates a desire to stay to the truth. Genesis was not written in Ancient Biography, Ancient Biography was a style only developed in the centuries leading up to the Birth of Christ.
Well I made it clear I think the record you refer to is suspicious. Why are you so much more confident in it?
The textual evidence for the New Testament is by far the best we have for anything more than 500 years ago. The number of manuscripts, the spread of the manuscripts, the dating of the manuscripts eclipse everything else.
Not true, I think this is a coping mechanism for being wrong mostly, and besides I have not spent 100s of hours.
More's the pity. To try to explain with an example we would both agree with, let's say I debate a flat earther. I point to a basic trigonometric proof based on shadows. They then argue back that this effect was explained by the sun being a sphere, it does not mean the Earth is a sphere.
They were able to fire back this response in quick time because they have read a blog post or watched a video saying such. Another flat earther had already made a "Top 10 objections DEBUNKED" video. In order to refute this, now I have to break out the old waves and optics textbook, try to make a diagram, try to make it as simple as I can to someone with little knowledge of physics, and then I can maybe break it down enough to show why that objection does not hold.
The level of effort required to debate something you're not familiar with against someone who is obsessed with the topic to is not worth the effort. And gnosticism is esoteric these days.
Does it worry you that gnosticism isn't as popular as orthodox Christianity? If the truth disappeared shortly after Jesus's Ascension into Heaven, then I would doubt Jesus's power and significance. Even leaving aside all His comments that he was building a Church that would assault the gates of Hell and would be with us until the End of time, which I don't know are cannonical to you or not.
What vindications? If God did miracles on video in Rome once a year, or even once a lifetime, I'd convert.
You don't have to watch this video, I just want to share it to show it's not just one or two weird things, it's a ginormous ball of miracles: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7X_HmSQ6A1A?si=iwe66674GNuWpkrV
I do recommend these two videos though:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ikdDzR-5EA8?si=zMNP1cBkcomQEuvV
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DgIduVknMnc?si=WGHRDpVVOxue89za
https://apcz.umk.pl/SetF/article/download/SetF.2021.001/28737
If you want a video of a miracle performed on command, watch a Hollywood movie. I don't know why a video is considered gold standard for evidence over sworn contemporaneous eyewitness testimony, medical imaging records, lab tests, and other evidence which seems much more convincing to me.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
23hr ago
Omission says something, and the Catholic logical OR never was convincing to me.
There was no intentional omission here, I misremembered a few details (I was thinking he was a more recent translation but this was from the 70s, for example.) My point that he's not a religious scholar but a linguist still stands, along with he did not start off as a Christian when doing his translation.
This is not getting past the archaeological and geological issues with the creation of Adam and the Garden of Eden, sorry. You can easily add another 10,000 years and it's still wrong.
What genre do you think the first chapters of Genesis are? They are clearly not biography or history. As the USCCB writes:
The seven-day creation account in Gn 1:1–2:3 tells of a God whose mere word creates a beautiful universe in which human beings are an integral and important part. Though Gn 2:4–3:24 is often regarded as “the second creation story,” the text suggests that the whole of 2:4–11:9 tells one story. The plot of Gn 2–11 (creation, the flood, renewed creation) has been borrowed from creation-flood stories attested in Mesopotamian literature of the second and early first millennia. In the Mesopotamian creation-flood stories, the gods created the human race as slaves whose task it was to manage the universe for them—giving them food, clothing, and honor in temple ceremonies. In an unforeseen development, however, the human race grew so numerous and noisy that the gods could not sleep. Deeply angered, the gods decided to destroy the race by a universal flood. One man and his family, however, secretly warned of the flood by his patron god, built a boat and survived. Soon regretting their impetuous decision, the gods created a revised version of humankind. The new race was created mortal so they would never again grow numerous and bother the gods. The authors of Genesis adapted the creation-flood story in accord with their views of God and humanity. For example, they attributed the fault to human sin rather than to divine miscalculation (6:5–7) and had God reaffirm without change the original creation (9:1–7). In the biblical version God is just, powerful, and not needy.
How should modern readers interpret the creation-flood story in Gn 2–11? The stories are neither history nor myth. “Myth” is an unsuitable term, for it has several different meanings and connotes untruth in popular English. “History” is equally misleading, for it suggests that the events actually took place. The best term is creation-flood story. Ancient Near Eastern thinkers did not have our methods of exploring serious questions. Instead, they used narratives for issues that we would call philosophical and theological. They added and subtracted narrative details and varied the plot as they sought meaning in the ancient stories. Their stories reveal a privileged time, when divine decisions were made that determined the future of the human race. The origin of something was thought to explain its present meaning, e.g., how God acts with justice and generosity, why human beings are rebellious, the nature of sexual attraction and marriage, why there are many peoples and languages. Though the stories may initially strike us as primitive and naive, they are in fact told with skill, compression, and subtlety. They provide profound answers to perennial questions about God and human beings.
I don't deal a lot with Gnostics so I'm not going to argue it with you. It's like diving into a Book of Mormon debate with a Mormon. Or a round Earth with a flat Earther. Someone who has spent 100s of hours on a topic is going to trounce someone who's only given it attention recently, even if the second person is correct. I am still confident in the historical record, Apostolic succession, and the vindication of present day Catholic spirituality and miracle claims.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
Genealogies are not there to provide a timeline in the way a modern reader might try to fit in. For one, it's not required to list exact father-son dyads, but someone listed as a son of someone may actually be a grandson or great grandson.
For another, Matthew is writing David, David, David in his genealogy and you don't see it because you aren't a first century Jew. In ancient writing, numbers are represented by letters. Think Roman Numerals. The name for King David and the number 14 are represented the same way in the language gMatthew was written in.
There are ways to sync up the nativity narratives but your specific objection is weird. "But in John and Mark he's just from Nazareth." In Matthew Jesus is taken from Bethlehem when he is around the age of 2 and goes to Egypt, and then after a few years goes to Nazareth. Let's say you were born in Georgia but moved to New York City when you were four. Later on, you travel around the US and people say you are from NYC. Are they wrong or inconsistent?
You are using an intentionally gnostic translation of John instead of a more neuteral source. Lattrimore is my go-to secular translation of the New Testament. He made waves with his Odyssey translation and is generally respected and far from a Christian hack. His translation of John 8:31-47 is:
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him: If you remain with my teaching, then you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. They answered him: We are the seed of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone; how is it that you say: You will be made free? Jesus answered them: Truly truly I tell you that everyone who commits sin is the slave of his sin. But the slave does not remain in the house forever. The son remains forever. If then the son sets you free, you will be free in truth. I know that you are the seed of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me, because my teaching does not work in you. What I have seen with my father, I tell you; do then what you have heard from the father. They answered and said to him: Our father is Abraham. Jesus said to them: If you are the children of Abraham, then do what Abraham did. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth I heard from God. Abraham did not do that. You are doing what your father did. They said to him: We were not bred from promiscuity. We have one father, God. Jesus said to them: If God were your father, you would love me, since I issued from God and come from God; for I did not come on my own account, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? Because you are not able to listen to my reasoning. The father you come from is the devil and you wish to do your father’s will. He has been a man killer from the beginning, and he does not stand upon the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaks his lie he speaks from what is his own, because he is a liar and so is his father. And because I speak the truth you do not believe me. Which one of you proves me in error? If I speak the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is from God listens to the words of God. That is why you do not listen, because you are not from God.
And Lattrimore is not a Christian, he's translating from the Greek according to the most natural translation.
Jesus is not saving us from the Hebrew God but from our own sin and error.
Christian theology starts with this basic truth: we are made in the image and likeness of God and this comes with responsibility, which we have failed at. We have wills and intellects and were supposed to participate in Creation by taking dominion over the material world and instantiating the good over it, not as automatons but as free beings. We chose otherwise. Because of our choices we can never be happy unless there is a way to reconcile our current miserable poor choices with the original good we were made for.
This was impossible for us to accomplish on our own but it was possible for God. Our creator sent His begotten Son on a Rescue Mission for our sake. Jesus accomplished this Rescue Mission by being a Human of infinite worth, as He was also God. This Human offered something that was His to possess - His Divine self - as a sacrifice on the behalf of the human race, of which He also was. His life, death, and resurrection is humanity's sole boast through which we have accumulated infinite merit. Because of this infinite merit our redemption is made possible.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
For the past recent history, every midterm election the incumbent President loses the House. The Republicans losing the House this year should be baked in, unsurprising, not a sign of any significant animosity against the Republicans.
I think the Senate races are more interesting and I think if there isn't a at least a moderate blue wave it calls polling into question. To such an extent that any poll is questionable to me. Presidential approval ratings, favorite breakfast cereal, the popularity of pro life positions, all of it becomes questionable to me.
Why might polls be so bad? Either Republicans are just sick of institutions and if they get a call from a media group or place that ends with "-institute" they hang up immediately and Democrats don't. Or it's an artifact from AI.
As AI agents become better at conning people, mimicking people's voices, sounding more natural, etc, spam calls go up tremendously. In consequence, many carriers and phone manufacturers have instituted harsher and harsher call filters. I would be interested if pollsters are collecting the phone manufacturer and cell carriers of their respondents and if patterns emerge there.
The more conspiratorial answers would be that DOGE cut out a lot of grift that was going to ballot harvesting at retirement homes and bussing people from the ghetto, and without that the Democrats are unable to turn out the way they have in the past. Or the 3 million people who were deported or self-deported were also more likely to vote in our elections than the other 40 million foreign born people in the US?
Or the polls are correct, we get a blue tsunami, and we discover the will of the American people matches the polls in lockstep.
I don't know the answer but we will find out tomorrow. Looking forward to it.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
I even changed my flair to pink.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
6d ago
It's because boys are stupid and men are awesome. It's a byproduct of maturity, which is the better assessor of long term financial and emotional stability than their current discretionary money. A 32 year old who might not have a great job still can demonstrate that they will not quit in a huff when they face some pushback from their boss. A 23 year old with a small inheritance is less proven.
Once upon a time people became adults much earlier (see other top level thread). I think a 25 year old could be old enough to marry if they have had responsibility thrust upon them from their teenage years. But most people aren't forced to be responsible until later and later.
Relatedly, did you know that in times of economic downturn in America, the teenager labor force participation rate goes down? It's because they have to compete in the job market with underemployed adults. The teenage laborforce participation rate never really recovered from the 2008 crash.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8d ago
Maybe it gets better but I got to the part where the woman who was taken as a sex slave by the Mongol horde stand ins was rescued only to be raped by I forget who. And I felt that I was just reading the author's barely disguised fetish (though women are usually the ones who write stuff like that...)
The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim. It was too much.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9d ago
I did not enjoy The Prince of Nothing. Pretty much every female character in the first half of the first book gets raped and exists to be a sex slave or prostitute. I don't think all men are that shitty. And one of the men is a huge Marty Stu.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
12d ago
My husband and I got to room 46 and then thought the same thing "we'll just take a break" and then never came back to it. I get the feeling that there are diminishing returns, and you can grind another 20 hours to find the next ending or whatever but at a certain point the randomness and needing to plan things over multiple days gets annoying.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
15d ago
My brother, that was my argument. My argument is that your comments are just as unhelpful as the "strawmen" comments would have been. They aren't strawmen because I did not attribute them to your actual position, actually the scenarios only work because you would not agree to them, therefore exposing the contradiction in your position. This is called "Reductio ad Absurdum" in debates, but that is perhaps too much Latin so I will switch to Greek-based words:
When we speak of God, we can either say what God is not, apophaticly, or speak anagogicaly. When we say a single sentence of what God is or what He has done, we will never have our words encompass Him. To nitpick each other on this, especially on a public forum, is not helping the Kingdom of Heaven.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
18d ago
My brother, thank you for the loving correction. I have no wish to quarrel about words, as St. Paul admonishes us against.
If you asked me, "Hell is a place, yes or no?" I'd say, No. If you asked me "Is evil a substance, yes or no?" I would say no. You did not ask me, but complained that my devotional language is imprecise. If I had instead posted, "God is an apple tree among the trees of the forest" you would have likewise found fault with the theology, but it is the language of the Song of Songs.
If my imprecise language could bring people to heresy, then that is a grave fault. But I think there is much spiritual fruit in pointing out how surprising Jesus is.
If I said, "Jesus is present in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar," and in response someone said, "No, Jesus is God and God is everywhere," that would miss the point. Jesus is especially present in the Eucharist in a surprising way and it is worth commenting on.
If I said, "Jesus's incarnation changed everything, God establishing a physical, material presence on Earth in the form and substance of a man is surprising. It elevates the dignity of man," and in response someone said, "God already was there, God is everywhere, why are you surprised?" that would miss the point.
But instead I say, "Jesus' death changed everything, God dying is surprising, God traversed the one place you would least expect Him to," and this you find fault with. God be with you.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
19d ago
1939 Europe was peak. Who do you think would win now, 1939 Europe or 2026 Europe, assuming nukes were off the table?
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
19d ago
As a generally modest woman who is sometimes disturbed by the nakedness of other women, I just found it sad rather than transgressively funny. Just another reminder that our civilization is wobbling off course.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
19d ago
Evil is the privation of the good, Yes or No?
God is absent from Hell in terms of grace and beatitude, Yes or No?
Hell is the subjective experience of God’s uncreated glory and presence by those who reject Him, Yes or No?
Hell is far from God in affection, spirit, and beatitude, Yes or No?
I am not saying that Hell or Evil is a substance in and of itself, which is what you keep arguing against. Anything that exists has the grounds of that existence in God. But Hell is defined by having a separation from God and a lack of the beatific vision.
By calling evil a lack, I'm avoiding giving it a substance of its own.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20d ago
Jesus is God and he was in no way damned or suffered in form of being severed or diminished from consubstantiation with the trinity.
And I did not imply this.
Jesus descending to Hades as a victor over death to preach Gospel to dead with now healed nature
Yes, and that's God in Hell as a victor over it. God in the place that is defined by God's absence - the place of His willing withdrawal to allow us freedom. So there is no place you can go where God is not right next to you, loving you. That is the point I made, not that Jesus stopped being part of the Trinity or whatever odd thing you are imputing to me.
You misunderstood me and keep accusing me of heresy. I am mostly summarizing Bishop Barron's words, and Bishop Barron is influenced by Hans Ur Von Balthazar here. Balthazar proposes:
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Within the Trinity, the Father’s act of generating the Son is an act of total self-emptying love (kenosis). In generating the Son, the Father opens up an infinite "distance" or space of love between Himself and the Son, filled and united by the Holy Spirit.
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Because there is already an eternal "space" of self-giving love between Father and Son, that space can stretch to encompass the finite distance created by human sin. The abandonment on the Cross is not a sudden rupture of divine love, but the manifestation in historical reality of the divine, self-emptying love that exists eternally within God.
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By bringing His divine, obedient love into the abyss of non-communion, Christ transforms the "place" of absolute abandonment from within. The ultimate darkness is inundated with divine light.
This is not penal substitution. This is not a rupture of the Trinity. This theory aligns with prior revelation and doctrine.
Again, this is not about prayer or meditation. It is about ontological change and deification.
I... we have such different background assumptions on this I don't think we'll get very far here. Separating deification and ontological change from the progression of prayer is breaking my brain a little to try to figure out what we even might have in common.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20d ago
Just like it doesn't matter if Matteress Girl was actually raped, it doesn't matter if Talarico was in a mental hospital. What matters is that some percentage of voting Texans saw that Talarico was in a mental hospital, passed that information verbally onto other voting Texans, and some percentage of these infected with the rumor never receive the cure of truth. The amounts might be low, but there's basically no repercussions for starting a rumor like this given the opportunity and at least some upside so it will happen again.
Why do you think these are better answers? Why are these limited responses better than "the answer in its entirely would fill a book wider than the universe and at every twist and turn we will find intellectual satisfaction and appreciation for the harmoniousness and fittingness of the event for all of eternity?"
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