B
BTNYC
Guest
At the risk of spending too much time bogging the discussion down with entertaining obfuscations, I’ll just go ahead and point out the following…
Decorative Christmas folk customs like advent wreaths are a wholly different matter than incorporating Mohammedan prayers and formulae into Catholic prayer.
The Church declaring perfectly orthodox Christian feast days to counter lingering pagan celebrations is also a completely different matter.
“There is no god but God” is not the First Commandment. It is the Islamic “Shahada,” their declaration of faith, and it is immediately followed by “and Mohammed is his prophet.” The first commandment is “I am the LORD thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.” They are not the same, despite containing a superficial similarity. As Chesterton, the “apostle of common sense” pointed out, to say a thing is “like” another thing is as much a statement of difference as it is of similarity. The mere fact you so blithely conflated the two redounds to my point - there is a danger in laymen playing with private syncretism willy-nilly, not the least of which being indifferentism.
The First Commandment is a declaration by God Almighty Himself that we are not to adore anything other than (or in addition to) Himself. The shahada is an Islamic formula required to be recited by converts to the Mohammedan religion, which was formulated by men in direct opposition of the Dogma of the Trinity, which is particularly abhorrent to Mohammedans. And this is what makes Christian use of this phrase so inadvisable - the shahada is an Islamic formulation of the uniqueness and oneness of God* in the Islamic sense* which is uttered by Mohammedans as a repudiation not only of polytheism but also of the Trinity. Why on earth would a Christian want to flirt with a formulation that is so tainted - **especially when there is nothing at all lacking in Catholic theology, mysticism, devotion and dogma that you would need to do it??? **
And where does one draw the line? Because some American and western European Catholics use Advent wreaths, should we take to quoting the Hadiths and reciting Mohammedan prayers because of some incidental, superficial truth they may express? Why stop there? The OP seems to think borrowing from the Mormons is beyond the pale because they’re polytheists. But why? Why is that error sufficient to poison the well, but not Islamic anti-Trinitarian, anti-Incarnation, and anti-Crucifixion errors? Seems awfully arbitrary to me.
And let me take it a bit further and play “devil’s advocate” in a more literal sense than I’m ordinarily comfortable with: According to their Wikipedia article, the “church of satan” condemns, among other things: pretentiousness, solipsism, and “harming little children.” That seems like good advice. Should I therefore praise the church of satan and incorporate their writings and practices into my own Catholic life because I see occasional, superficial, incidental truths in their cult?
The answer, of course, is “no.” And that is all the point I’m making here: Don’t wander off to poisonous springs when you have an endless reservoir of pure water at your disposal. I think the metaphor is very apt. The OP attempted to answer it by saying that he would filter the poison out. Of course, this fails to address why anyone with limitless access to clean water would feel the need to drink filtered poison in the first place.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Lex orandi, lex credendi.
