Concupiscence

[Keikiolu]

…continued from above:

But really that argument goes both ways. I can say that about all religions and all their beliefs about their gods. The most hubris thing to do in my opinion would say that God created us in his image, when it is in fact we created him in ours.

And that is your religion. You accept it on faith. We really don’t need to get into “battling definitions” as we can agree to disagree about those things.

Since you have no will (interest) to grant that any religion (as you define it) can possibly be “revealed” by God, there’s no sense in arguing with you about the validity of this religion versus that religion.

Back to original sin and free will. You explain it through your mystery again.

Nothing is EXPLAINED BY mystery. Mystery is simply the description of the nature OF a set of related (revealed) facts.

To call something a mystery is to be able to accept it as such, and move on to pondering the consequences OF the related (revealed) facts which the mystery describes.

This, of course, is not acceptable by you because FACTS can’t be FACTS if they are only related by a mystery. To you, these FACTS are merely unsupported conjecture.

If revelation is never a reality, then describing a related (or simply juxtaposed) set of conjectures (or partially understood descriptions/observations) as a mystery simply equates “mystery” with “fantasy”.

That is perfectly sensible, and correct. That you do so shows your intellectual honesty.

I fail to see how evil is a “teaching instrument in the future education of man.” If we disagree with an evil act, all we would learn from witnessing it is to not do it.

Evil is an act of men. I really should have said that the “consequences of evil”, which seems to be “evil inflicted on us”, is the teaching instrument. Sorry about that imprecision.

Humanity (man) should learn to “not do” evil whenever any one person does evil and it is “judged by humanity (aggregate of all men)” to be a “bad thing”.

The problem is, of course, that man (humanity) doesn’t do it’s learning that way. It takes massive repetition, and outrageous example, and enormous amounts of time, for man (humanity) to learn the consequences of evil.

That is what has been happening, and will continue to happen.

But if no one did it in the first place, there would be no need to learn.

The original sin DID happen, and the process was set in motion. You can’t “unring” a bell. You can’t rewind time. We (man) can’t not learn, since “learning” is why we’re here.

Eating the fruit of knowledge was supposed to be our learning experience anyways.

Finally,… you’ve said something that is merely a fallacy, instead of a reasoned and sensible conclusion based on your well founded beliefs…!

The fruit held no knowledge. It merely proved that the eater of it, in eating it, realized, themself, that it was possible to disobey God.

What was to be learned was not that good and evil exists, or the difference between good and evil, but that evil has it’s consequences. The learning continues…

For example you don’t teach mathematics then tell your students to never use it ever in their lives because it is “evil.”

You teach them mathematics, then advise them that they should do it correctly, otherwise “bad/evil” things happen (bridges fall down!).

If they insist on using it incorrectly, their “acts of evil” create “consequences” which they can either learn from, and be “saved” for “heaven”, or not learn from due to “idolizing their perfection” (inability to do wrong) and be “damned” to “HELL”.

Also when you said that allowing free will does not gurantee that it would be used to create evil, you sound like God is just playing dice. Again that contradicts God’s omniscient nature as he does not need to deal with statistical probabilities. It was guranteed.

God’s will is guaranteed.

God is omniscient, or more appropriately put, omnipotent.

God’s will does not “overide”, make null, man’s free will.

These are revealed facts. You either accept them or not.

You are justified in saying that since everything must comply with God’s will, man’s will is nothing more than an illusion because it has no effect on the overiding will of God (therefore I can do whatever I like because it is God’s will and I can’t be held responsible for those acts because it’s “God’s Will”),… on a human level.

That makes perfect sense logically, but makes no sense in actuality to one who believes the revealed truth.

Mahalo ke Akua…!
E pili mau na pomaikai ia oe. Aloha nui.

 

[Keikiolu]

Quote:Man is a “community creature”. God created man, not “a man”.

Before man was completely “done”, fully out of the oven as it were, he was created man and woman, in communion.

When he was finally fully created he was a community.

When he, man, not any particular man, sinned, he, man, not a man, was set on a path of learning the consequences of sin.

Man’s, not any particular man’s, trait that keeps him on the path of history (learning God’s plan) is “original sin”, which we all share in, even at our conception, as man, the community of all men.

-Keikiolu
When you say that this learning experience is meant for us to learn the consequences of sin. So these consequences are supposed to be from God and not man since no societal law existed in the first generations of man. The only consequence we of from God is hell, and hell is for eternity.

Natural law was always known by man (humanity).

That law is enough for man to not sin if he chooses to not sin.

Before Jesus, all the dead went to “the holding place”. There was no “place of rejecting God” (hell) until all the dead were given the chance to accept God as God, and His laws as such.

Once Jesus “descended to the dead” He gave them the choice, and they chose as they did. At that point, they (the dead) went to either heaven, hell, or purgatory.

Hell is indeed for eternity, but since it is a personal choice of free will, God, always respectful of the free use of the gifts He’s given us, respects and will not contravene our decision to “hang onto our sins” and choose hell, or to “give all our idolatry/sin up to God for forgiveness” and choose heaven (most likely via purgatory).

Learning consequences is supposed to be constructive and influential on future decisions. But if we’re in hell for eternity, it doesn’t really matter.

The learning that we are tasked to do is to learn that sin is “not good” and to come more and more, in life, to not sinning, which is the way we confirm to God that He is who He says He is and is to be given what is His, which is everything.

The “post mortal” period is not a “time” of learning, or of “using our learning”. It is a “time” of recieving the fruits of our labors.

You are to learn during life to use that learning during life. After learning earlier in life, you are to constructively use that learning to influence your future decisions later in life to “commune more closely with God and you own community Man (the Church)”.

If you’re in hell, you’ve made your irrevocable choice to “not give authority to the only worthy authority”, and are respected in that choice of destination.

Quote:We, as man, were meant to be immortal (as we actually are though not “bodily” as we see on this planet) in “the garden”.

What (where) was the “garden”? That is yet another mystery. Let’s say that it was indeed a paradise of perfect wonderfulness where man was to commune directly with God.

When man created evil in relation to himself, by flunking the test of not doing wisdom, his “education” was commenced, instead of his destruction, by a gratuitous gift of God.

Death (as man knows it), the point at which your choices (free will) cease to be counted for or against you by God in His “disposition” of you, was instituted as a “test point” for any particular man, NOT for “man the community”, to allow for the nature of man, which is temporal and needed a beginning and ending of life to make “life” meaningful.

Heaven, as where we can once again be in communion with God (as best we’re allowed, I imagine), didn’t exist until Christ Jesus “opened” it.

Dead people existed “in waiting”, in various “states” in relation to God, which is another mystery of course, between the “heaven” of the Garden and the “heaven” that the saints presently know.

I see. I just can’t reconsile that with what we know about life, matter, and the universe.

This belief of mine doesn’t contradict anything that what we believe about life, matter and the universe. The Church holds as dogma that science CAN’T contradict the truth (Catholic belief) and the truth CAN’T contradict science.

I’d be REALLY interested in what it is in the above “box” of mine is irreconcilable with your “knowledge” about life, matter and the universe…!? Thanks in advance…!

…continued below —>

 

[Keikiolu]

…continued from above:

Quoteroof of God’s operation (effects of God in time) is the result of believing in God’s existence. It is presented to the believer in massive abundance once the required “leap of faith” is taken.

Faith must preceed reason in the realm of religion.

Your faith in the basic assumptions of your religion are accepted as axioms, which is the necessary fulfillment of the requirement of putting faith before reason to support your particular religion (materialism).

The is the irreconcilable “gap” which you refuse to accept. Your “leap” of your gap is acceptable to you. My “leap” of my gap is unacceptable to you.

Until you can take the leap I’ve taken, God’s plan is as it should be, which is that you are to deal with the world without God.

Your “lesson” is to discover the effects of putting yourself forward as the final authority.

Best to you in your education.

You’re right, this leap of the gap is unacceptable to me, for several reasons. It is apparent to me that belief in Catholicism depends on circular reasoning, and this leap of the gap is the leap into this circle.

It is indeed circular reasoning as you see reasoning.

You just don’t see the fact that your own beliefs are based on the same circular reasoning. You accept as facts things that you have no proof of, such as your belief as fact that no communication is possible with God.

Because I accept that my belief in God in a prerequisite to recieving further gifts from God, which I do in fact recieve, I have proof that my belief in God, my leap, was justified.

Your insistence in never leaping, regardless of the fact that you do actually leap elsewhere without acknowledging it AS leaping, utterly prohibits these confirming gifts from God.

You cannot arive at Catholicism from the outside with logic and reason, you have to jump a wall somewhere.

Part of reason is knowing when certain “rules” apply in the various cirumstances you find yourself.

One of the “operations” of reason is “suspension of disbelief”, a trust that holding a belief without “reason to do so” for a time to see what happens in doing so.

That is what “experiment” is all about. The willful exclusion of a legitimate tool of reason, claiming it is “unreasonable”, points to an opinion that the subject of the experiment is (on faith/belief) illegitimate.

What this says to me is that, “Anything related to God is automatically illegitimate”, which is simple unsupported dogmatic belief without proof other than “because I say so”.

People holding this belief refuse to genuinely do the experiments required simply out of dogmatic adherence to their religion.

…continued below —>

 

[Keikiolu]

…continued from above:

I do not like circular reasoning becuase it goes nowhere, just a continuous circle.

I don’t like circular reason either. But I also don’t despise revealed truth, which is the only legitimate “cure/solution” of what is “normally” seen as circular reasoning.

I’ve learned this by talking to various catholic apologists in person. I’d ask a question, they’d explain it, ask another question based on their first explanation, they’d explain that, but then I’d be brought back to the first question I asked, and ask it again. (It’s usually more than just 2 questions, more like 4 or 5 in deep discussions).

Faith really should never preced reason. You’d be the most gullible person in the entire world.

Faith always preceeds reason, but only in ONE area is that faith to be accepted as TRUTH, and not hypothesis, and that is when the FACT to be accepted as truth is from THE (singular) source of revealed knowledge in area of “faith and morals”, which is the Magisterium of the Church.

Now,… you’ll simply laugh at that as parochial in the extreme.

But, how often, using this requirement, are facts to be accepted as facts, and not as hypotheses?

Not very often.

Taking “leaps of faith” as prescribed by The Church will in no way endanger the “true scientist” in search of true science.

One’s gullibility is checked by the stricture that ONLY the Magisterium is to be given the right to make dogmatic statements, and only in a very tight subject area.

Catholics are LESS gullible than most people, because they know they are NOT to “suspend their disbelief” for very long at all in any area that isn’t the one they know deserves that “faithful belief”.

If that’s so, what is to keep you from believing in the Celestial Teacup that floats in space, who’s power and knowledge is infinite.

The Magisterium mentions no Celestial Teacup who has any power whatsoever, so I needn’t believe it.

He is the one who created the universe, not this invisible God of yours.

Since God is the sole creator, as is true dogma from the Magisterium, and this TeaCup is “opposed” to God (“not this invisible God of yours”) this TeaCup thing is non-existant as what it claims to be.

That’s prbly a bad example, but what’s to keep you from believing that the jews are right and Jesus wasn’t the Mesaiah,

The Magisterium says that Jesus is the messiah, so that settles that.

or Islam,

The Magisterium says that all non-Catholic religions contain “some measure” of the truth, but not enough to make them the revealed Church, which is only contained in the actual Church (Catholic).

or Mormonism for that matter.

As with islam.

I’m sure if you took the leap of faith into those religions, it would all make sense to you… if you can live with the circular logic.

You misidentify “suspension of disbelief” with “circular logic”, and condemn “suspension of disbelief” for being “circular logic”. That is a dogmatic presupposition of yours.

You also condemn all dogmas as illegitimate, because there are no “endpoints” in your dogma (in your “dogmatic constitution”).

Revealed truth is an endpoint. I settles a matter conclusively.

You hold that all “facts” (regardless of subject) are hypotheses. They are NEVER endpoints.

That is our basic disagreement.

Until you see a need for “an endpoint”, an actual settled fact, which can only be true in a very very narrow area of human life (a man’s relation with God), you have no need for bridging the gap that is our basic disagreement.

Mahalo ke Akua…!
E pili mau na pomaikai ia oe. Aloha nui.

 

[Jerry-Jet]

Concupiscence points to the necessity of the Immaculate Conception and of Mary being sinless.

Jesus could only unite His humanity with the perfect pre-fall humanity of an Immaculately Conceived and sinless Mary.

Why?

Because only by doing so could the divine unite with what was perfect.

Jesus who was perfect could never be “Inclined to sin”.

And Adam and Eve being naked and not ashamed before the fall but ashamed and putting on clothes after the fall proves the effects of concupiscence.

Jesus could be truely man without concupiscence.

He could never be truely man with concupiscence.

The Catholic position is the only position that makes sense!

 

[Calvinator]

Concupiscence points to the necessity of the Immaculate Conception and of Mary being sinless.

Jesus could only unite His humanity with the perfect pre-fall humanity of an Immaculately Conceived and sinless Mary.

Why?

Because only by doing so could the divine unite with what was perfect.

Jesus who was perfect could never be “Inclined to sin”.

And Adam and Eve being naked and not ashamed before the fall but ashamed and putting on clothes after the fall proves the effects opf concupiscence.

Jesus could be truely man without concupiscence.

He could never be truely man with concupiscence.

The Catholic position is the only piosition that makes sense!

The catholic position may make sense but your explanation certainly doesn’t.

You say “Jesus could only unite His humanity with the perfect pre-fall humanity of an Immaculately Conceived and sinless Mary.”

Where do you get this from? If God could preserve Mary from sin even though her parents were sinful, couldn’t God have done the same for Jesus?

 

[Keikiolu]

The catholic position may make sense but your explanation certainly doesn’t.

You say “Jesus could only unite His humanity with the perfect pre-fall humanity of an Immaculately Conceived and sinless Mary.”

Where do you get this from?

If God could preserve Mary from sin even though her parents were sinful, couldn’t God have done the same for Jesus?

God COULD have,… but He didn’t. Why do you suppose that is?

For some odd reason, God created The Son’s mother as an immaculate (perfectly clean) place for Him (the Son) to take on human form.

Gee,… why would He do that? Are you actually going to argue that God did something unnecessary and “wrong”…?

New (perfect) wine should be put in new (clean) skins, not old. The skin needs not be perfect as we don’t “imbibe” the skin. We imbibe the wine. The skin merely, but importantly, only makes the wine available to us. It carries it to us.

Mother Mary needed to be “clean”, not perfect. “Full of Grace”, not “Divine”. Jesus needed to be perfect, not only “clean”.

The perfection was Jesus. The immaculate was our Mother Mary.

Mahalo ke Akua…!
E pili mau na pomaikai ia oe. Aloha nui.

 

[Calvinator]

God COULD have,… but He didn’t. Why do you suppose that is?

For some odd reason, God created The Son’s mother as an immaculate (perfectly clean) place for Him (the Son) to take on human form.

Gee,… why would He do that? Are you actually going to argue that God did something unnecessary and “wrong”…?

New (perfect) wine should be put in new (clean) skins, not old. The skin needs not be perfect as we don’t “imbibe” the skin. We imbibe the wine. The skin merely, but importantly, only makes the wine available to us. It carries it to us.

Mother Mary needed to be “clean”, not perfect. “Full of Grace”, not “Divine”. Jesus needed to be perfect, not only “clean”.

The perfection was Jesus. The immaculate was our Mother Mary.

Mahalo ke Akua…!
E pili mau na pomaikai ia oe. Aloha nui.

You need to go back and re-read my post.

Jerry Jet said “Jesus could only unite His humanity with the perfect pre-fall humanity of an Immaculately Conceived and sinless Mary.” This simply isn’t true.

 

[Calvinator]

Gee,… why would He do that? Are you actually going to argue that God did something unnecessary and “wrong”…?

First, I never hinted that god would do something “wrong”, I’m not sure why you chose to even post that. I guess polemics are important to you.

Secondly, how do you define necessary and unnecessary?

In the absolute sense, Mary being immaculately conceived was not necessary. In fact, if I remember correctly, when the rcc chose to define the immaculate conception, they said something along the lines of “it is fitting” when describing the act. They didn’t say it was required or necessary.

 

[Keikiolu]

You need to go back and re-read my post.

Jerry Jet said “Jesus could only unite His humanity with the perfect pre-fall humanity of an Immaculately Conceived and sinless Mary.” This simply isn’t true.

God doesn’t “put new (perfect) wine in old (concupiscent) skins”.

That is a pretty clear statement.

Your opinion is what it is, but given the choice, and indications from the deposit of faith, why would God choose to put new wine in an old skin?

I grant it may not be necessary, but why would it be prefereable?

 

[Keikiolu]

First, I never hinted that god would do something “wrong”, I’m not sure why you chose to even post that. I guess polemics are important to you.

Secondly, how do you define necessary and unnecessary?

In the absolute sense, Mary being immaculately conceived was not necessary. In fact, if I remember correctly, when the rcc chose to define the immaculate conception, they said something along the lines of “it is fitting” when describing the act. They didn’t say it was required or necessary.

It wasn’t “demanded”, which is what I mean by necessary, but as I said above, given that God gets to choose, why would “putting new wine in old skins” be a good idea?

You simply don’t like the idea of the immaculate conception because it’s a dogma of the Church (Catholic) and something to get annoyed about because it’s not “invented here” (refering to your denomination).

 

[Jerry-Jet]

Could Jesus have united with the Post fall Fully Depraved and Inclined to sin humanity of the Protestant teaching of Mary with all those things filtered out from Jesus so He would not be effected in anyway?

Of course. With God all things are possible.

But would it give God more glory if He shielded Jesus from all those effects are if He created Mary Immaculately conceived and free from sin and then preserved her free from sin by making her Full of Grace?

Which brings more glory to God?

Which brings a greater defeat to Satan–merely preserving Jesus from the effects of original sin–or making Mary free from all sin?

Of course making Mary freee from all sin brings greater glory to God because it shows that not only can God defeat Satan–everyone knows that

But it also proves that God can totally defeat Satan in a human being such as Mary with free choice!

That is a much taller order to fill and brings much more glory to God!

Why is it that Protestants can’t stand God glorifying Himself that much?

Why does it tare them up that God favors Mary that much?

Are they so filled with pride that they can’t stand to allow for God to favor one human being over all others?

Who do they think they are limiting the Soveriegn Power of Almighty God?!