From pacloc: Once again I am being told what my motives are.
Good morning Pacloc: I don’t believe that I have offered any opinions as to what your motives might be.
Have you read my comment earlier in the thread? I never claimed the “club” of Catholics are heavenbound and others are hellbound. I too explained that within each person is a struggle to either obey or disobey God.
Such things are struggle when we look at God’s will as a set of rules and regulations. At this point in the discussion I am offering the idea that when we are able to perceive our oneness with God and the world around us, it’s more a matter of being in harmony with it. At such a point, life is much less a struggle with things like following commandments and avoidance of sin, because your proclivities become grounded in other things. And so long as sin is what you seek, then it truly is a matter of struggling to follow a set of rules, and an enterprise such as this is doomed for failure. What you leave undone in this life is undone in the next. We navigate a course to whatever it is we fix our aim on, and so long as your desire is something other than God you will not reach God, no matter how closely we follow the rules, no matter what rituals we perform, and no matter what dogma we profess. Because the only course we can set is a course to what we aim for. Until you see God in the flesh and come to know God for what God is, it is hard to know what to aim for.
All that I am standing up for is that heresy is a serious sin that we cannot let it just be fine.
What heresy are we discussing?
Adultery is another serious sin, but I don’t see people treating that sin so lightly.
Are you sure about that? It sure seems to happen enough.
The other problem with people like you and others attacking me is your wanting to be so well received you compromise our Lord’s call to stand firm for truth.
I would offer the idea that we should take care to ensure that what we are standing firm for is in fact the truth.
You can distort the truth to fit you all day long, but that is not true Christianity.
My objective is God, not religion.
It is sad that so many Catholics are fine with the idea that people don’t need the Church.
We can make the Church a means of getting to God or an obstacle in getting to God.
As for calling that person a jerk, I suppose you never correct children when they act rude. How else do you expect for him to learn not to speak so rudely?
I would rather see a sermon than hear one any day. What does that mean? It means you can talk all you like, but what people learn from you is in how you act. It is counterintuitive to suppose that being rude to someone is a means by which to teach them how not to be rude. Unless of course you are aiming to teach others by making your life a book about how not to be. Moreover, I think our outward expressions are simply manifestations of what lies within. In truth, I think we may want to spend some time looking at what lies within.
You seem to need similar lessons calling my comment a “hell” state of being. All this liberal talk not once discussed the real topic of whether dividing the body of Christ and claiming that it became apostate is a serious sin, worthy of condemnation in a theoretical sense. If not, then what is worthy of condemnation? Nothing is then, so do whatever makes you feel good. Sure thing, tell our Lord that when you die.
We can weave whatever patterns of thought into it we like, but the Body of Christ is the very fabric into which all things are woven. You can classify it as this thing or that, pretend that you are dividing it into religions and sects, garnish it with dogma and emulate it with ritual, but in truth it is all He, and there is no dividing it in any real sense. It is in this regard that the only true power we have is the power to fool ourselves.
Thank you,
Gary
