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Quote (Nick Hassan @ Sep. 29 2009,15:51) Hi CA,
Then why is the catholic church of death and not life?
Whited sepulches of human manufacture.
Woe to them that call good evil.Self-willed not afraid to speak evil of dignities…
Quote (Not3in1 @ Sep. 29 2009,07:03) Quote (Nick Hassan @ Sep. 29 2009,10:39) Hi not3,
What have you decided is true?
Men or God's Word?
My options are 1.) Men or 2.) The Bible?Neither has my vote of confidence.
Men are human beings (inspired or not).
The bible has been changed. God does not change.
I am more concerned about the good news of the Kingdom of Heaven and it is self evident, at least for the most part. The only part that may not be self-evident is Jesus instruction to immerse his students in water so they will receive the Spirit of Righteousness. The rest, and perhaps immersion, stems from who God is.God is righteous and wants his people to be righteous as he is.
God can do anything except evil.
God promises his people that if they believe that Jesus is the Anointed One then they will be righteous as he is righteous.That is a start though those can be further expanded.
Quote (Nick Hassan @ Sep. 29 2009,17:34) Hi CA,
GOOD?I guess that is how you rate her.
She has much blood on her hands.
If she has blood on her hands they are from the nails that pierce them because she and her children follow their Lord in the way of the cross and are crucified with Christ.But what do you know of these things?
Hi CA,
An altar boy till 15 and daily mass goer till I read the bible which burned into my soul and then found gaping holes in the catholic ritualism and formula salvation I had been brought up to rely on.
I saw God's continiuing work among mankind and the falsehoods of man's religion fell away as I obeyed the call of Peter in Acts 2Quote (CatholicApologist @ Sep. 29 2009,17:19) Quote (Nick Hassan @ Sep. 29 2009,15:51) Hi CA,
Then why is the catholic church of death and not life?
Whited sepulches of human manufacture.
Woe to them that call good evil.Self-willed not afraid to speak evil of dignities…
And woe to them that call evil good.Nick We too came out of that Church and since we left that Church, and have been baptized according to Scripture. We are forever thankful to God that He called us out of that Church. My Husband was a Altar Boy too. And I sang in the Children Choir. In the Basement of our Church's Basement was still evidence of the torture Chambers present. It was like a dungeon. Very scarry to me. At Christmas time they made a nativity scene in the Basement.
Hopefully our Catholic some day will see what that Church is all about and leaves too. I just can't understand that He still does all those abomination to God like Maria worship and the Mass. Not to speak of like Christmas and Easter and the trinity doctrine.
Peace and Love IreneThere is not a lot of love for the Catholic Church here, or Islam or anything other then the particular brand of religion each favors. In many cases we can all state examples of how this or that faith has fallen in the practices of their faith or in the details of that faith. There are truths in many of these creeds yet we also see the flaws and discount them in total. A question was once asked to the sage Ramakrishna as to why religions degenerate, he answered, “The rain-water is pure, but becomes soiled according to the medium it passes through. If the roof and the pipe be dirty, the discharge is dirty.” Truth is out there, but humans are imperfect and thus the message gets polluted. Furthermore I doubt truth is ever confined to, or perfectly preserved in anyone's holy scripture, for all are written and interpreted by imperfect men of limited intellect and perception. How many of us look to each other as fools or evil because they don't acknowledge God's truth as they see written in their particular version of holy scripture? Even when (like at this site) most agree on what holy scripture is we castigate and accuse each other over the subtle interpretations of same. It would be humorous if it wasn't so sad.
Cato wrote:
Quote Even when (like at this site) most agree on what holy scripture is we castigate and accuse each other over the subtle interpretations of same. It would be humorous if it wasn't so sad.
Have you considered that some do that in their search for the pure stream?
Quote (CatholicApologist @ Sep. 29 2009,17:41) Quote (Nick Hassan @ Sep. 29 2009,17:34) Hi CA,
GOOD?I guess that is how you rate her.
She has much blood on her hands.
If she has blood on her hands they are from the nails that pierce them because she and her children follow their Lord in the way of the cross and are crucified with Christ.But what do you know of these things?
CA………surely you jest, Pick up any Church history book and read it for a change and when you read all the Horror Your Church has committed on man Kind and the atrocities it has committed, understand these are (NOT) lies they are truths of the Evil that Church has committed , there is much blood on Her Hand CA. Being willfully ignorant of then is no excuse CA. Your are a Representative of the EVIL Church. Even in our generation we have seen Her Evils. Talk about burying your head in the sand.gene
Hi CA,
You retreat into the holy martyr role when you are shown the danger you place yourself in?
It does not washQuote (Cato @ Sep. 29 2009,23:17) There is not a lot of love for the Catholic Church here, or Islam or anything other then the particular brand of religion each favors. In many cases we can all state examples of how this or that faith has fallen in the practices of their faith or in the details of that faith. There are truths in many of these creeds yet we also see the flaws and discount them in total. A question was once asked to the sage Ramakrishna as to why religions degenerate, he answered, “The rain-water is pure, but becomes soiled according to the medium it passes through. If the roof and the pipe be dirty, the discharge is dirty.” Truth is out there, but humans are imperfect and thus the message gets polluted. Furthermore I doubt truth is ever confined to, or perfectly preserved in anyone's holy scripture, for all are written and interpreted by imperfect men of limited intellect and perception. How many of us look to each other as fools or evil because they don't acknowledge God's truth as they see written in their particular version of holy scripture? Even when (like at this site) most agree on what holy scripture is we castigate and accuse each other over the subtle interpretations of same. It would be humorous if it wasn't so sad.
Cato What is sad, that inspite of some showing how wrong some doctrines are, it does not matter to them. But IMO if one has God's Holy Spirit and has been Baptized according to Scriptures, we do see some truths. We all have to learn and we have God's Holy Sirit to guide us. At least I can see in myself how much God has revealed to me and my Husband, since we were Baptized. Let the mind that was in Chris be in you. That at least some here are striving for.
Peace and Love IreneHi Cato,
Where were we commanded to love false religions or human institutions?
Is scripture, which you call holy, not really holy?“Private interpretation”
Apart from the question of the adequacy or inadequacy of the Bible, the problem of its interpretation is one of the first importance. It can have authority for us as the Word of God only provided we rightly grasp exactly what God intended to say. No meanings other than those he intended to be read into the text by men have any divine authority at all.
It has been said that once one admits that the Bible contains the revelation of God himself, then we have to admit that no man can go wrong if he is guided by it. If he were really guided by it, that would of course be true, at least as regards that part of divine revelation which has been recorded in its pages. But the trouble is that a man can wrongly think he is being guided by the Bible when in reality he is not, owing to his having misunderstood it. And is it not true, passing over for the moment the fact that for over a thousand years before the invention of the printing press it was impossible for each man to have a Bible, that when universal distribution became possible sincere and earnest Bible readers arrived at a multitude of conflicting conclusions? If private interpretation were God's way, the same Holy Spirit would have led all confiding in his assistance to one and the same truth.
Against these considerations, the command of Christ has been urged that we “search the Scriptures” (John 5:39). But the thousands of well-intentioned Protestants who have quoted those words as if indeed they were a command have been led astray by the translation in the Protestant Authorized Version of the Bible, a translation which has been corrected in the Protestant Revised Version to “You search the Scriptures.” Christ was stating a fact, not giving a command. He was addressing a group of Jews and blaming them for not recognizing him as the fulfillment of all that the Scriptures had predicted about him. The . . . Protestant Revised Standard Version describes him as saying, “You do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe him whom he has sent. You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness to me.”
As a matter of fact, the whole passage is fatal to the contention that by searching the Scriptures one will necessarily arrive at the truth. The very ones to whom Christ was speaking had searched the Scriptures in the sincere belief that by such means they would learn all that was necessary for eternal life. Christ acknowledged that they really thought in such a way. And yet they had not arrived at the truth!
Hi CA,
Surely you are not suggesting the fanciful teachings of catholicism represent in any way the truth of God?
The Holy Spirit guides individuals not a monstrosity like Rome.“Bible its own interpreter”
A way out of the difficulties of Sola Scriptura and Private Interpretation was thought to be found in the contention that the Bible, as no other book can boast, is its own interpreter. After all, it was urged, since the Bible contains the inspired Word of the infinite God, no interpretation of it by any finite mind could possibly do it justice. We must therefore hold that the Word of God interprets itself to each sincere reader of the Bible.
It is really impossible, though, to maintain such a position. Although sacred Scripture is inspired by the “infinite God,” we cannot escape accepting the interpretation placed upon it by finite minds. After all, Scripture must mean something. To declare that meaning is to interpret it. And as human beings have only finite minds, they must either rely on meanings derived from it by their finite minds or refuse to attribute any meaning to Scripture at all.
No book, even one inspired by God, can be its own interpreter, and the very suggestion that the Bible is self-interpreting is opposed to its own teaching. For not only does the Bible nowhere claim to be “its own interpreter,” it declares the very opposite. Thus we read in the Acts of the Apostles that, when Philip found the Ethiopian reading the Bible, he said to him, “Thinkest thou that thou understandest what thou readest?” The man replied, “And how can I, unless some man show me?” Then Philip, in the name of the Church, interpreted the Scriptures for him (Acts 8:27-39).
Writing to Timothy, St. Paul tells him that it is the Church of the living God which is “the pillar and the ground of truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). Again, he tells him, as a bishop of that Church, to “keep the good thing committed to thy trust by the Holy Ghost…Preach the word…reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine” (2 Tim. 1:14, 3:2). What does that mean but to interpret Scripture correctly and insist on the acceptance of the true interpretation declared in the name of the Church wherever it is a question of such doctrines as are contained in the Bible? The choice, then, is between interpretations proposed by unauthorized and fallible human minds and those of an authorized and infallible teacher in this world if such exists. The Bible contains the truth, but not everyone, even with the best of good will, is able to discern the truth it contains.
The Bible needs an authoritative teacher to explain its meaning in innumerable passages if misunder-standings are to be avoided. If a teacher is needed in schools to explain the text-books dealing with the mysteries of nature itself, how much more necessary is a teacher to explain the mysteries of divine revelation contained in Holy Scripture! The Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church alone, claims to be the divinely-appointed and infallible teacher at hand for this purpose, and hers is the only truly biblical position.
“Holy Spirit speaks”
Lacking faith in the Catholic Church and not finding her claims acceptable, Protestants go on to declare that even if the Bible as a book cannot be its own interpreter, at least the Holy Spirit is infallible, and he can render each reader infallible in his interpretations provided he has faith in Christ and is prepared to rely entirely upon the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But if each sincere reader of the Bible is rendered infallible by the Holy Spirit in discerning the meaning God intended to reveal, what is this but to claim for each believer an infallibility before which the much more modest claims of Catholics to one infallible pope pale into insignificance!
But descending from the ideal plane to that of the real, is it not astonishing that millions of would-be infallible readers of the Bible are not dismayed by the fact that they arrive at a multitude of mutually-exclusive conclusions? Results in practice make it almost a blasphemy to say that the Holy Spirit has anything to do with such a host of contradictory interpretations.
Just consider the multitude of different Protestant churches which have been established in accordance with the immense variety of opinions arising from the private interpretation of Holy Scripture! Thus we have Lutherans and Calvinists, Anglicans and Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, and the host of more recent sects, such as the Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Christian Scientists, Witnesses of Jehovah, and an almost unending list of others, each claiming to be based upon the Bible.
The height of absurdity is reached by such extravagances as those of the Kentucky snake cults whose members believe they can be bitten at will by poisonous reptiles without any ill-effects, thinking their practice to be justified by a passage in St. Mark's Gospel: “They shall take up serpents…and it shall not hurt them” (Mark 16:18).
In reality, they base their practice on their own wrong interpretation of those words. Christ did not say that the miraculous sign he promised would be always operative for everybody. Among the signs shown by his followers sometimes even such things as being unharmed by serpents could be expected. But always it would be a miracle wrought by God when God willed, not a kind of magic within the power of deluded people when they willed. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that St. Paul was bitten by a viper and that God preserved him from harm (Acts 28:5). But St. Paul was not guilty of presumption, deliberately allowing himself to be bitten and then challenging God to protect him–a form of presumption which our Lord expressly condemned (Luke 4:12).
When the devil told Christ to cast himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, quoting Scripture to show that no harm would come to him, our Lord replied, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (Matt. 4:7). Men have not the right to dare God to do even what they think, rightly or wrongly, that God has promised to do.
Even in the earliest years of the Protestant Reformation, during the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare made Bassanio say, “In religion, what damned error, but some sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text” (Merchant of Venice, III:2). But it is doubtful whether Shakespeare himself foresaw such grotesque outbreaks resulting from the so-called principle of private judgment as those of the Kentucky snake cults!
What has to be noticed, however, is that such fantastic cults are the effect of the same principle as that claimed for themselves by the more sedate and respectable Protestant denominations which reject the authority of the Catholic Church and declare that they have the right to be guided by their own individual interpretations of Holy Scripture.
Hi CA,
Would it not have been great if catholicism had been faithful to the revelation of God instead of trumpeting her own follies?
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