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Notes -
I mean between the Gospels.
This is basically a huge mote in your eye so to speak and I just think you aren't getting rid of it properly:
The Christmas Proclamation from the 1584 Roman Martyrology was read for centuries:
After Vatican II it was changed to «when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world.»
Again, you really cannot get passed this, sorry. This invites Jordan Peterson right into your home, with his it was just a metaphor theology, and he talks about Jung ... and Jung talks about Nag Hammadi ... and Nag Hammadi talks about cosmic Adam. This is a very big problem for your canon. A gigantic problem, which is why your Church (you know them by their fruits) had to persecute Galileo and the others.
The same as the Gospels? Both are men and a God doing things and talking to each other.
Not true, I think this is a coping mechanism for being wrong mostly, and besides I have not spent 100s of hours.
Well I made it clear I think the record you refer to is suspicious. Why are you so much more confident in it?
Heavily disputed. Both between churches and on the basis of textual criticism.
What vindications? If God did miracles on video in Rome once a year, or even once a lifetime, I'd convert.
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:
Augustine:
Also St. Augustine:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
And these articles: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jacalyn-Duffin/publication/5764868_The_Doctor_Was_Surprised_or_How_to_Diagnose_a_Miracle/links/654a6bc3b1398a779d6e12ee/The-Doctor-Was-Surprised-or-How-to-Diagnose-a-Miracle.pdf
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.
Thank you for you comment, I'd say it's the most substantive canon defense in the thread so far, but I still have some problems with it.
I can concede that Origen did read Eden allegorically in part (if only because it was so unconvincing even at the time, in those parts -- we see it gets over more allegorical, the more it is refuted by science and reason), the Galileo affair had a real political dimension (the Dialogue did put the Pope's argument in Simplicio's mouth), and the Gospels can be classified, as Burridge argued, ancient bioi. None of that gets you where you want to go.
Your own witness says otherwise. Augustine, in the same period as De Genesi ad litteram, attacks pagan histories that claim many thousands of years because «reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed» (City of God 12.10). 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. And this isn't merely ancient history: 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). So the allegorical reading was not the natural default. The Church adopted it little by little, under outside epistemic pressure, and still reads part of it literally.
And you're quoting Origen to me. 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.
The politics explain the 1633 trial. They don't explain 1616, sixteen years before the Dialogue. That year the Holy Office's qualifiers ruled unanimously that a stationary Sun is «foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture» (Galileo affair), and the Index suspended Copernicus «until corrected.» The 1633 sentence was «vehemently suspected of heresy.» That was a ruling about what Scripture literally teaches about the physical world, which is exactly the claim at issue.
And guess what, all of the « scripture » is from the Torah:
I simply say these books are not true, or canon, and the proof are these radical flaws, for they are the books of « the father of the devil, who does not stand in truth because there is none in him » you say they are canon but you change the reading after being embarrassed by generations of scientists your own church tried to suppress. If Marcion predicted in 200 AD that the Torah would be found fatally flawed and the «church fathers» (not the actual apostles) declared that Every Word Shall Be Lived By, Not a Word of Yahweh shall Pass Away, guess who would have won? Marcion.
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. The genre also cuts against you: Luke's bios traces Jesus's genealogy back to «Adam, son of God» (3:38), Luke's Jesus cites Noah's flood as an event (Luke 17:26–27). If Genesis is allegory, Luke, which I say is flawed on this basis and others, treated allegory as history.
About 5800 Greek manuscripts, most of them medieval. The first and second century, the period that matters, is the most thinly attested and, by D. C. Parker's account (The Living Text of the Gospels), the most variable. In fact the reconstruction of Marcion's gospel predates all of our canon gospel copies and this is what the idea of Marcion priority is based on. All a lot of copies tell you the text was copied a lot. They don't tell you what it said in 140 AD, much less 40 AD (or what the oral teaching said). The Iliad is extremely well attested too.
Fair complaint in general, but my sources aren't YouTube. They're Klinghardt (Peeters), Vinzent (KCL), BeDuhn, Tyson and Lieu (Cambridge). Marcion priority is a minority position, but it's published, peer-reviewed and argued in the journals.
Popularity isn't a test of truth. There are more Muslims than Catholics. In science, many truths are not popular, for example, HBD. Jerome said the whole world «groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian.» By its own account the true way is narrow and few find it (Matt 7:14). And the verses you lean on, «on this rock… the gates of Hades» (16:18) and «with you always, to the end of the age» (28:20), appear only in Matthew. They aren't in Mark's version of the scene, and they aren't in Marcion's gospel. Whether they belong to the canon I'd accept is the very question we're arguing about.
And in fact the truth did not disappear, I think it persisted heavily for centuries and then went underground, but did not disappear. There are ideas about secrecy around as to why the true doctrine is not preached heavily to the world, maybe it will change, as things like that do.
I read through your documents and one concern I have is that 95% of the miracles are healings. While Jesus healed many people, one problem is that the body tries to heal itself. Suppose cancer self-destructs very rarely in such a way that the body can clean it up; no miracle needed, but this will be reported as a miracle. Other miracles included simply recovering from a stroke ... which happens all the time, slowly, or healing from an infectious disease like pneumonia, which of course is what the immune system is for.
In addition, alleged miracles have no specificity to your church, or even your canon.
Islam has the same kind of evidence. The splitting of the moon (Quran 54:1) and the water that flowed from Muhammad's fingers at Hudaybiyyah, with Jabir saying «we were fifteen hundred», are reported through multiple independent chains of named eyewitnesses. Sunni scholars class them as mutawatir, a level of attestation they treat as certain (Miracles of Muhammad; Splitting of the Moon). That is sworn, contemporaneous, mass eyewitness testimony, the very standard you asked me to accept. They even have their expert physician: Keith Moore, author of the standard embryology textbook, put out an edition «with Islamic Additions» saying the Quran's embryology was beyond 7th-century knowledge (Keith L. Moore). If testimony plus a surprised doctor proves Lourdes, it proves Mecca. If it doesn't prove Mecca, it doesn't prove Lourdes.
While the Vatican has archives, there are plenty of Muslims that claim to see miracles today. On a related note I had an Eastern Orthodox priest claim that God only does miracles for their church and he does one yearly in Israel somewhere for something they do, something about candles ... but no video of this though. Why is Yahweh so afraid of a camera? What's your answer to that?
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.
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."
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:
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.
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.
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?
....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.
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.
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.
I didn't say it does. I showed what the Church believed for most of its history, which was your original claim («most educated Christians for most of history regarded the first 11 chapters of Genesis as myths»). The Fathers disagreed about which young date, so they were literalists regarding that who disagreed with each other.
That isn't what the decree says. Its list includes the creation of all things by God at the beginning of time, the special creation of man, the formation of the first woman from the first man, the unity of the human race, the original happiness of the first parents, the command given to test them, the transgression at the instigation of the devil in the form of a serpent, the fall, and the promise of a Redeemer. «Woman made from man» is not «men and women are equal in dignity».
Pius XII doesn't make it a mere regulation. He gives the reason: polygenism can't be reconciled with «the sources of revealed truth» on original sin, «which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam». And the dogmatic formula you're asking for already exists, at Trent, Session V, canon 1: «If any one does not confess that the first man, Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice wherein he had been constituted… let him be anathema» (Trent V). The current Catechism, §390: Genesis 3 «uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man» (CCC 390). So the allegory has a floor, and the floor is a historical first man and a historical first sin. That's my point: the Church reads Genesis allegorically only down to that floor.
Then he's an outlier. The Antiochenes (Diodore, Theodore of Mopsuestia) attacked Alexandrian allegory, and Augustine's book is titled On the Literal Meaning of Genesis.
Your own quotation makes my case: «in their literal meaning and according to the general interpretation of the Fathers». And the consultants weren't the end of it. On 5 March 1616 the Congregation of the Index, with the Pope's approval, banned Copernican books as teaching «the false Pythagorean doctrine, altogether contrary to Holy Scripture» (Galileo affair). In 1633 Galileo was sentenced as «vehemently suspected of heresy».
Joshua 10:13 («the sun stood still») and Ecclesiastes 1:5 are not songs, and they were the central texts. And it wasn't me who read the Psalms as cosmology. It was the Holy Office.
Maybe he did, but that's less consistent with catholicism than with gnosticism.
The finds since then (P104 in 1997, P137 in 2018) are scraps. The main revision since then, Nongbri's (God's Library, 2018), pushes the early papyri later, not earlier.
Yes, we can reconstruct *Ev only because Tertullian and Epiphanius quote it against their Luke and tell us where it differed. So we can also reconstruct their Luke which is about 50 years earlier than our earliest manuscript.
No one says Marcion wrote it. The argument (Klinghardt, Vinzent, BeDuhn) is that Marcion found an existing gospel, and canonical Luke is an expanded edition of it. On that view the shared «Lukan style» is expected, because they are the same book. A significant minority date Luke–Acts to c. 110–130 (Knox, Marcion and the New Testament, 1942; Tyson, Marcion and Luke-Acts, 2006; Pervo, Dating Acts, 2006). And «born around AD 85» is a guess. We don't know when Marcion was born.
Luke–Acts is exactly where the copies are least consistent. The Western text (Codex Bezae and the Old Latin) differs so much that Acts in Bezae is nearly a tenth longer, and Marcion's readings repeatedly agree with that Western text. The early papyri all come from Egypt, because that's where papyrus survives. Between Luke's composition and the first substantial copy there is roughly a century with no manuscripts. That is plenty of room.
Marcionite churches were still there three centuries later. In fact, they disappeared only because he told his followers to not reproduce (like the shakers). Oops. He was very popular. Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in the 440s: «I led eight villages of Marcionists with their neighbourhood into the way of truth» (Ep. 81), «of whom… I have converted more than ten thousand» (Ep. 145). Manichaeism lasted into the 14th century in China, and the Mandaeans exist today. Gnosticism is still alive as well so you're just saying the more popular church wins. This is fallacious.
Then healings don't vindicate Catholicism, which was the claim. That leaves the «distinctive» cases, and each one is certified by the Church it vindicates:
On Fatima, a similar miracle occurred in Iran:
Finally, the Fatima phenomenon is weaksauce. Videos from the ACX article alleging something similar show basically nothing. It's literally not a miracle, if it's magic it's illusion magic, but a miracle is higher order. Again, why can't Yahweh do any miracles on camera? Why just weak illusion magic, if it's even true (and if it is true we don't know that its specific to Catholic canon, maybe whoever is doing it will like gnosticism more).
The Quran itself, a 7th-century text addressed to Muhammad's own audience, opens Sura 54 with «the Hour has drawn near and the moon has split». His opponents' reply is reported in the next verse: «continuous magic». It's a public cosmic miracle, in the earliest source, with the hostile witnesses' response.
Lastly, can I ask you why you are not a Muslim? The book says magic was ... around. It's more popular than your religion. Is there something flawed about it? Is it an empirical or logical flaw? What about its moral doctrines? Are you prideful enough to hold Allah to your Western moral standards? Why aren't you a Muslim? I'm asking because maybe this will shine some light on how I think about the OT.
This was not my claim either. I went into lots of paragraphs to be clear on this point, that it was the best account they had at the time as well as being interpreted as an allegory from the beginning, and these two ways of reading the text are not exclusive but are actually part of four modes of reading the Bible that have been encouraged by Christians since the beginning.
I have little hope that you understand me anywhere if you misunderstand this.
Giving a reason for a regulation does not mean it's not a regulation. He certainly didn't make it dogma.
This is not the same as condemning polygenism. Again you are jumping around. "The first man, Adam, when he had transgressed the commandment of God in Paradise, immediately lost the holiness and justice wherein he had been constituted" is perfectly compatible with an allegorical read of Genesis. The bare bones, what you're required to believe in order to be Catholic is that:
God made a man by giving him a rational soul. This is something extra God had to do of His own choice, it's not something that developed naturally from evolution.
God also made a woman through the first man, man and woman share the same nature despite our differences, and this relates the the way in which God ensouled us.
Originally man's life would have been in perfect happiness with no suffering. Then the first man and woman together sinned against God and messed it up.
All humans inherit the fallen human nature and the fallen world these two blockheads made through their sin. We share a common dignity between sexes and races, we share the same fate.
The interpolations from the extended Acts in Codex Bezae do not match the style of Luke and Acts. Pretty much everyone agrees that they are additions, not that Luke/Acts were redactions.
This is getting too long. Calanda is not like the hadiths, my argument was not that the hadiths were from long ago but rather contradicted testimony written down earlier regarding this event. I feel like you keep missing what I am saying and which point I'm making by what I'm saying. It's an experience not unlike talking to an LLM.
Did you look at the photos and the analysis from Fatima? https://apcz.umk.pl/SetF/article/download/SetF.2021.001/28737 Photographs capture a light source from something that could not have been the sun. It also doesn't help that all these explanations for various phenomena contradict each other. The explanation against the colors is that they saw an effect that takes place is that this only happens when there is a specific, non visible cloud cover over the sun. But also the explanation for clothes drying (an effect also captured in photos) within minutes is that the sun was very hot/bright, the kind of hot that only happens when there is no cloud cover. Which is it?
Why am I not a Muslim? Because Catholicism is true. Once I accepted Catholicism as true, everything fit together, everything. All stories, all science, all longings of my heart and all the mental itching that told me I was missing something big, it all fell into place. The closer I grow to God through the practices of Catholicism the more certain I am. But I guess my path leading to it was the philosophical exploration of the uncaused cause, arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, the history of the Church, the witness and example of the saints, the proof present in their lives that a transformative union with God is possible, and not just possible but something with a clear path to those willing to try.
It is true and there is very little anyone can do that will convince me otherwise. I know it is true like I know I breathe air. And because it's exclusive against the strongest Islamic claims, I know that Islam is unfortunately false, and not only false but frightening and sad.
I would avoid saying disparaging things about my capacity to understand. It's more that the argument is futile, the OT says what it says and I actually don't care about genre classifications or attempts to walk back what it says. Whether or not it is « ancient biography » or « allegorical » to « Origen », I don't care because such mistakes are completely, utterly unacceptable to me. I demand correspondence with reality from the word of God. Sorry -- I was born secular and I have no other choice! I have no other standard to choose by, except my moral feelings (which is judging God)! You can't call a flawed document the word of God by saying actually I misunderstood the genre and I don't understand when it's just pulling my leg.
My position is rejecting the entire book not anything about Codex Bezae.
Yes and it's mostly people looking at the sky. Strangely nothing of the sky.
I am pretty sure I leaned towards saying it could have been magical in my response. However I had reservations about the power of the magic and the source.
Why isn't it frightening and sad? It has a nice history too, it has taqwa, just what is your issue with Islam? If you want to keep talking I think this should be the new topic, I am not convinced by the genre argument or the interpretation of the OT, although it is nice to know that Catholics at least see there is a problem and take up a half-measure solution, instead of doing whatever the literalist protestants are doing. To me that will always be more correct, and the miracles are interesting, just not what nonbelievers expect, not super exclusive to catholicism but maybe correlated, so I will read more.
I kind of feel like that about what I am posting about, in fact I haven't been able to get some of the doctrines of Valentinus and Marcion out of my head for almost 10 years. They just make that level of sense. When I run into something quoting « Isaiah » or talking about « Abraham » it's as if it were the Quran. It's almost ridiculous, and seems unenlightened. We know it's all not real too. There was no long-lived Abraham, there was no exodus. The Jews clearly worshiped just another tribal deity, and were the narcissists that said theirs created everything, so I guess the real everything came to humiliate them. Plato, and the gnostic books are far superior. I understand Catholics do that less than the lower forms of protestantism, but again, how about not at all?
Anyway I married a woman who is an atheist and I said we should go join a church together. And she wants me to convince her. So I kind of tried to with orthodox theology but she just had too many questions, and I got embarrassed about the orthodox answers, because I think some of them are embarrassing.
Her: Why did God make Adam sin if he's all knowing?
Me: Uh, free will idk.
Her: Why do humans have free will?
Me: No idea, calvinists say they don't.
Her: Why did God make cancer?
Me: Original sin.
Her: Why do we pay for the sin of Adam and Eve?
Me: I don't know, maybe we are all parts of cosmic Adam and cosmic Eve and they were broken up by God and cast onto ... wait, that's not really orthodox, now I'm getting embarassed. This makes no sense.
Her: How do you know what church to join?
Me: I have no idea.
Her: I think God is too cruel.
Me: Judging god is prideful.
Her: How do you judge so that you don't become Muslim or Buddhist.
Me: I don't know, listening to the pneumos?
Her: What is that?
Me: A person of the trinity?
Her: What's the trinity?
Me: It's one God but three people. But it's one though.
Her: How does that make sense?
Me: I don't know. In the Bible that's how many there seems to be but it's not explicit.
Her: The Bible says the Earth is 6000 years old.
Me: That's an allegory.
Her: Then so is Jesus.
Me: No because ...
Her: Then why doesn't it just say what you said?
Me: I don't know, I might have said a heresy when I said it happened outside of this universe.
Her: Why doesn't God do something to make everyone believe now?
Me: I have no idea. Why doesn't he do a public miracle on video?
Her: Why is he obsessed with people believing in him anyway? I think a remote God makes a lot more sense.
Me: Well you can't say God is a narcissist because that would be pride.
Her: If he wants people to worship him, why doesn't he show himself to them?
Me: Maybe there's different types of people and it's a process to filter them ... wait, is that heresy?
Her: Nietzsche said it's slave morality and cope.
Me: But Jesus is mighty though because he's God.
Her: Why did he die then?
Me: Well he's alive in heaven.
Her: Why did he die first?
Me: To save us from our sins.
Her: He can forgive us, why didn't he just do that.
Me: I don't know. The last priest I talked to said it's a Mystery.
Her: Hahaha
...
Can you see how this is annoying? With gnositicism:
Her: Why did God make Adam sin if he's all knowing?
Me: The demiurge is not all knowing.
Her: Why do humans have free will?
Me: The divine spark.
Her: Why did God make cancer?
Me: The demiurge made the genes poorly.
Her: Why do we pay for the sin of Adam and Eve?
Me: When they entered the world, they forgot where they came from. Either the Demiurge did it to them or it was a property of his world and the entrance is « sin ».
Her: I think God is too cruel.
Me: The demiurge is not omnibenevolent.
Her: How do you judge so that you don't become Muslim or Buddhist.
Me: Listening to the pneumos?
Her: What is that?
Me: We are pneumatic, so we have a connection to it, and it tells me Jesus is right and Mohammed wanted a harem.
Her: The Bible says the Earth is 6000 years old.
Me: That book is false, it was really cosmic, read this other book.
Her: Then so is the Gospel
Me: Luke and Matthew are false, here's the Gospel of Truth, Thomas, and Marcion's Gospel, and a restored version of John.
Her: Why doesn't God do something to make everyone believe now?
Me: He did. The crucifixion is a publication. Maybe we'll get another message in our life time that is explicit.
Her: Why is he obsessed with people believing in him anyway? I think a remote God makes a lot more sense.
Me: Gnosis is a calling for people to leave this universe because it is corrupt, it is not about worshipping the demiurge.
Her: Nietzsche said it's slave morality and cope.
Me: The orthodox corrupted it to feed it to the hylic masses, who demand to worship their own image. Gnostic texts say he is a great man.
Her: Why did he die then?
Me: He did not die, he put on Jesus. The body died but not the soul. And he went down to Hades where the demiurge was and put him in his place, and took his captives, because the demiurge does not know justice.
Her: He can forgive us, why didn't he just do that.
Me: We must prove ourselves through gnosis; he is not angry at us.
Her: Interesting...
...
I can't become catholic without her. And that leads me to Islam. I suspect you don't like it because you're judging by prior ethical and political standards. Catholicism, to me, as a secular who must use his brain, has alright morality. It's not all that tickles my insides, as you said, but it leaves out some silliness that protestants do.
To start with ethics I would like to begin with the state. Aquinas is the breath of fresh air in Catholicism because of what he says on tyrants but I would like to not even have the debate because Romans 13 is blatantly bad. Hylic states are bad, period, pneumatics should not be subject to the flesh by force, and Plato was right and we need a pneumatic city. There's a start under gnosticism that Catholicism does not provide.
I don't believe God gave us a Book but rather a Church. I find the Old Testament very fruitful for spiritual truths but only after guidance. Your idea that line by line it has to be literally exact or else it's all false is just not a good argument. You're arguing against a position I do not hold and will not hold and have no obligation to hold.
God did not make Adam sin. I think your question is getting at, why does God make humans knowing that they will chose Hell over Him. And my response would be He doesn't know before He makes a human which way they'll choose.
If free will is real, then "knowing the result of a free choice never made" is like "can God make a square circle." It's logically inconsistent and therefore not covered under omnipotence/omniscience. God has a very good idea of what choices a human would make, but does not know what choices a specific human will actually make until after He's committed to making them.
God had hope that Adam would avoid the temptation to sin and make the correct choice, up until He created Adam and then was locked into this course of action.
Because only someone with free will can love, and God created us to love Him and each other.
We are experiencing the consequences of their actions but nothing has been taken away from us that rightfully belonged to us. God gave Adam and Eve special grace to enjoy a life beyond their natures. Original sin removed us from that grace, it is nor ours by right but was a gift they rejected. This life of struggle is what our natures deserve on their own. We pay for our own sins, Adam and Eve paid for theirs, no one is being treated unfairly here.
Another way to look at it though is that the "curses" of God at the end of Genesis 3 is a remedial lesson on love. Adam failed to protect his wife, Eve failed to love her God, their failure was one of love. In response, Man will toil, Woman will suffer, but by doing so this is the remedy, the school of love. By undergoing the curse, we learn to love as our first parents did not, we sacrifice for others.
History, saints, etc.
The worst suffering in this life is a blip in time compared to the goodness that awaits us.
Going to respond with a quote from Dorothy Day to start:
The Trinity is the unity of the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love that unites them.
It doesn't exactly say that, this is what people after the fact said because they try to use math without understanding the cultural context in which certain parts, like people's ages and genealogies, were written.
The New Testament is substantially different from the Old Testament. It starts with five ancient biographies, followed by epistles written very early on, and ends with some banging apocalyptic (in the sense of "removing the veil of the bride" rather than "end of the world") literature.
There is something in the Search that is valuable and God does not want to squelch it. I think this line of thought is only pressing if you think that everyone is going to Hell except a small few, and that we don't all have the opportunity to be saved. Whereas I believe Jesus gives everyone a choice as they die, regardless of what they knew during life.
Why do you think God is obsessed with people "believing" in Him? Rather, I would say He wants us to love Him because it is in our nature and failing to live up to this hurts us. He cares that we're hurting ourselves.
Nietzche died alone and crazy.
Because that would not be comporting with the dignity He wishes to give us. The problem isn't one of just forgiveness but that we are broken and in need of healing. If He just snapped his fingers and forgiven us it would have been unjust to His nature and unmerciful to ours. Instead, Jesus, true God and true Man, was able to offer Himself as a sacrifice. Because He is God He has infinite worth, because He is human He actually is a real human being doing something incredibly selfless and sacrificing something of infinite worth.
Now we can take part in Jesus' sacrifice and have its merits applied to us. And this is not a cheap and easy fix, but something that elevates our dignity and inspires love towards our God who went to such extremes to save us. And remember that the original sin, the whole problem to solve, was that we need to learn love.
This is a cop out answer. If you say the crucifixion is a publication and sufficient to make everyone believe now, then the same holds for Christianity.
No. I was clear that I am not Muslim because I found the truth, and once you find the truth you don't keep searching.
This is not my position. In Mark there's a geographical error. It's plausible it's just an oversight and I don't want to throw out the core of Mark for it (although I believe there are some interpolations in the text that was canonized, the core however is not like that of Luke and Matthew, I believe it is gnostic like John at its core. Higher criticism supports this, I believe the Secret Mark letter, and Johannine theology was very gnostic).
The big points of the OT are unbelievable. Genesis is unbelievable as written without a garden on Earth recently. The core of the OT is unbelievable without a young Earth and giants found in archeology. The amount of time the patriarchs lived is unbelievable. The flood is unbelievable. Exodus IIRC has serious evidence issues. Jonah and the dag is unbelievable. In fact its taxonomy of dag is flawed. Yahweh couldn't reveal the difference between fish and sea mammals? You would agree all of its laws are flawed. You live by basically not a single word of deuteronomy or leviticus. Again if he's Yahweh's messiah that makes little sense a priori. I know there's an epicycle as to why law fulfilled means law abolished but it's not convincing, to use Matthew against you it's somewhat clear you should obey the law.
So why don't you obey the orthodox Jew scribes today (the answer is that the Church has an epicycle based on a contradictory Paul passage or something)?
Ancient opinion on the literary quality of the Old Testament:
Julian, Against the Galilaeans (c. 362; tr. W. C. Wright, Loeb 1923, pp. 381–383):
On the Ten Commandments (pp. 359–361):
Celsus, The True Word (c. 175–180, quoted by Origen):
Why make temptation if it could lead to infinite negative utility? Adam could have free will in the garden with no forbidden tree placed right there, and a serpent that the omniscient Yahweh allowed to seduce Eve? God couldn't even provide his dumb little children a reminder? Like argue with the serpent, thus allowing them an informed choice? What kind of parent lets their naive little child talk to a serpent like that? And then sets the child on fire if the child doesn't take well to being kicked out into the wilderness?
In addition, this is « open theism ». It is not the position of the Church. This is the first among several heterodox doctrines you have introduced in this comment. While I agree with you more than the Church, it's a terrible look for the Church. It means after basic pressing, their members cannot defend their own doctrine. Just like me making up heterodox stuff when my wife pressed me. The doctrine is nearly undefendable.
Vatican I, Dei Filius, ch. 1 (1870):
Catechism of the Catholic Church §600:
Other heterodox points:
The Council of Trent anathematises exactly this. Session V, canon 2: «If any one asserts, that the prevarication of Adam injured himself alone, and not his posterity… or that he… has only transfused death, and pains of the body, into the whole human race, but not sin also, which is the death of the soul; let him be anathema.» Canon 3: Adam's sin, «being transfused into all by propagation, not by imitation, is in each one as his own» (Trent, Session V). The Catechism: «By his sin Adam… lost the original holiness and justice he had received from God, not only for himself but for all human beings» (CCC 416). We don't just live with the consequences; on Catholic teaching we inherit the sin.
This is a massive departure from the Church and the canon. I conclude you cannot truly defend either. «Death puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifested in Christ» (CCC 1021). «There is no repentance for the angels after their fall, just as there is no repentance for men after death» (CCC 393). A choice offered at death, regardless of life, is the speculative «final option» theory, not Church teaching.
Aquinas: «if He had willed to free man from sin without any satisfaction, He would not have acted against justice… if He forgive sin, which has the formality of fault in that it is committed against Himself, He wrongs no one» (Summa III q.46 a.2 ad 3). And calling it unmerciful to our nature is not true ... it would have been more merciful.
Vatican II: the Church's teaching office «is not above the word of God, but serves it», and «the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation» (Dei Verbum 10–11). God gave a Church and a Book, and the Church says the Book is inspired and without error.
No, because of the stakes. I hold to transmigration of souls. Therefore, people have a lot of chances to believe as according to their soul. I believe in hierarchy of soul; some never believe because they don't hear the pneumos. The hiddeness is built in. You believe in infinite hell for being skeptical in a short life (well, you don't I guess, because you departed from the Church and canon). The stakes are so high in the canon theology, that God should reveal himself clearly in everyone's life, thus giving them an informed choice to make. You believe this too I guess, with your final choice theology. But that's not the church. But maybe, based on what you are saying, I could join for the community, and rub shoulders with the other secret heretics, who believe such things.
I would just prefer the priest to preach the ultimate truth as opposed to these doctrines that even you, a member, reject.
I think it's best to move past this, and the genre remark. It doesn't work on either I or my wife. Both of these are quite post-modern arguments, we care about reality and mechanics, we do not care for classifications and « cultural context ». At the pearly gates, if Peter asks me why I lied, I suppose I could say I was doing a genre bit. And if he asks why I sinned, I can talk to him about cultural context. Surely, as one who beliefs in false statements that can be excused by genre and culture contexts, this will get me into the heavenly Kingdom (of St. Matthew, Moses, and Abraham!), despite being a heretic.
The trinity is okay because in gnosticism there are emanations from the One and it's very similar, however it is much easier to start with an ontological argument to arrive at the One, and then use Platonism to discuss the emanations of the Ideals.
If you did not learn about Islam you do not know it is not more true than the Church doctrines (many of which you have rejected silently).
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