Hello Athiests!

[happilycatholic]

Oh Dude, that is Awesome!

Yeah, pretty flat coming from a Baptist. You needed to hear it from a catholic with a whole string of Apostles leading back to Peter! We LIVED the transition into the NT!

let me throw in a bouncy one… :bounce:

I’m good, I know it, uh huh, oh yeah…

 

[jam070406]

How bout if the Detroit Lions won the Super Bowl? Would that be proof enough?

 

[PennitentMan]

What WOULD be an acceptable form of proof for you? (sincere question)

Sure,
To verify that there is an actual Deity maybe proof that prayer works. I’d say something objectively verifiable, like praying an amputated limb back. It’ll have to be done twice under scientific scrutiny to make the event verifiable to be honest.

But then we’d still have to verify if it’s the Christian god, or if it’s the Muslim god or the Mormon god or Krishna, or Prince Siddhartha, or Vishnu or Thor.

 

[Nebogipfel]

I’ve read Dawkins, and nothing I’ve read made me lose faith–or even doubt my faith. I think that those who point to Dawkins as their reason for leaving a faith are just using his books as an excuse. They already gave up on faith. Dawkins is just an expert they can point to, to say, See! I was right all along.

Do you think it’s possible for someone to leave a faith because they honestly do not believe that the faith is true?

 

[happilycatholic]

How bout if the Detroit Lions won the Super Bowl? Would that be proof enough?

No, I think they’re talking more like boxing letting Mikey back in (and him actually winning…and not by biting…)

 

[PennitentMan]

Yeah, pretty flat coming from a Baptist. You needed to hear it from a catholic with a whole string of Apostles leading back to Peter! We LIVED the transition into the NT!

let me throw in a bouncy one… :bounce:

I’m good, I know it, uh huh, oh yeah…

All that it means in the catholic sense is that the folks who could read the old testament and based the new testament on that, either commanded respect or fear from their peers and hence the story was perpetuated, or they held their conspiracy meetings it in secret

 

[happilycatholic]

All that it means in the catholic sense is that the folks who could read the old testament and based the new testament on that, either commanded respect or fear from their peers and hence the story was perpetuated, or they held their conspiracy meetings it in secret

That would be a totally ineffective way to spread something so far-reaching as Christianity, would it not?

 

[PennitentMan]

That would be a totally ineffective way to spread something so far-reaching as Christianity, would it not?

You only need to mask the cover-up. (Short timeframe). As soon as the gospels were done, they could be circulated and history would look exactly the same as it does now.

Just to continue with my hypothesis, of course

 

[josie_L]

Dum Diversas, 1452, Nicholas V

We grant you by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens [Muslims] and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property … and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.

Romanus Pontifex, 1455, Nicholas V

We therefore weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso – to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.

**So, we have one pope in a span of 2000 years stating the enslavement of muslims, pagans and unbelievers? What does this mean? Is the Church or was the Pope wrong (remember, this is not doctrine we’re dealing with but a papal bull), let’s take a look at the history? **

During the 1430s, the Spanish colonized the Canary Islands and began to enslave the native population. This was not serfdom but true slavery of the sort that Christians and Moors had long practiced upon one another’s captives in Spain. When word of these actions reached Pope Eugene IV (1431 to 1447), he issued a bull, Sicut dudum. The pope did not mince words. Under threat of excommunication he gave everyone involved fifteen days from receipt of his bull "to restore to their earlier liberty all and each person of either sex who were once residents of said Canary Islands…These people are to be totally and perpetually free and are to be let go without the exaction or reception of any money. Pope Pius II (1458 to 1464) and Pope Sixtus IV (1471 to 1484) followed with additional bulls condemning enslavement of the Canary Islanders, which, obviously, had continued. What this episode displays is the weakness of papal authority at this time, not the indifference of the Church to the sin of slavery.

With the successful Spanish and Portuguese invasions of the New World, enslavement of the native peoples and the importation of Africans ensued, and some slavers offered the rationale that this was not in violation of Christian morality, as these were not “rational creatures” entitled to liberty but were a species of animals and therefore legitimately subject to human exploitation. This theological subterfuge by slave-traders was artfully used by Norman F. Cantor to indict Catholicism: “The church accepted slavery…in sixteenth-century Spain, Christians were still arguing over whether black slaves had souls or were animal creations of the Lord.” Cantor gave no hint that Rome repeatedly denounced New World slavery as grounds for excommunication.

But that is precisely what Pope Paul III (1534 to 1549) had to say about the matter. Although a member of a Roman ecclesiastical family, and something of a libertine in his early years (he was made a cardinal at twenty-five but did not accept ordination until he was fifty), Paul turned out to be a very effective and pious pope who fully recognized the moral significance of Protestantism and initiated the Counter-Reformation. His magnificent bull against New World slavery (as well as similar bulls by other popes) was somehow “lost” from the historical record until very recently. I believe this was due to the extreme Protestant biases of historians, who may also have been scornful of the pope’s predicating his attack on the assumption that Satan was the cause of slavery:

[Satan,] the enemy of the human race, who always opposes all good men so that the race may perish, has thought up a way, unheard of before now, by which he might impede the saving word of God from being preached to the nations. He has stirred up some of his allies who, desiring to satisfy their own avarice, are presuming to assert far and wide that the Indians of the West and the South who have come to our notice in these times be reduced to our service like brute animals, under the pretext that they are lacking in the Catholic faith. And they reduce them to slavery, treating them with afflictions they would scarcely use with brute animals.

**Therefore, We…noting that the Indians themselves indeed are true men…**by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples—eventhough they are outside the faith…should not be deprived of their liberty or their other possessions…and are not to be reduced to slavery, and that whatever happens to the contrary is to be considered null and void. (My italics)

In a second bull on slavery, Paul imposed the penalty of excommunication on anyone, regardless of their “dignity, state, condition, or grade…who in any way may presume to reduce said Indians to slavery or despoil them of their goods.”

christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/julyweb-only/7-14-53.0.html?start=2

 

[josie_L]

But nothing happened. Soon, in addition to the brutal exploitation of the Indians, Spanish and Portuguese slave ships began to sail between Africa and the New World. And just as overseas Catholic missionaries had aroused Rome to condemn the enslavement of Indians, similar appeals were filed concerning imported black slaves. On April 22, 1639, Pope Urban VIII (1623 to 1644), at the request of the Jesuits of Paraguay, issued a bull Commissum nobis reaffirming the ruling by “our predecessor Paul III” that those who reduced others to slavery were subject to excommunication. Eventually, the Congregation of the Holy Office (the Roman Inquisition) even took up the matter. On March 20, 1686, it ruled in the form of questions and answers:

It is asked:

Whether it is permitted to capture by force and deceit Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one?

Answer: no.

Whether it is permitted to buy, sell or make contracts in their respect Blacks or other natives who have harmed no one and been made captives by force of deceit?

Answer: no.

Whether the possessors of Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one and been captured by force or deceit, are not held to set them free?

Answer: yes.

Whether the captors, buyers and possessors of Blacks and other natives who have harmed no one and who have been captured by force or deceit are not held to make compensation to them?

Answer: yes.

Nothing ambiguous here. The problem wasn’t that the Church failed to condemn slavery; it was that few heard and most of them did not listen. In this era, popes had little or no influence over the Spanish and the Portuguese since at that time the Spanish ruled most of Italy; in 1527, under the leadership of Charles V, they had even sacked Rome. If the pope had little influence in Spain or Portugal, he had next to none in their New World colonies, except indirectly through the work of the religious orders. In fact, it was illegal even to publish papal decrees “in the Spanish colonial possessions without royal consent,” and the king also appointed all of the bishops.

Nevertheless, Urban VIII’s bull was read in public by the Jesuits in Rio de Janeiro, with the result that rioters attacked the local Jesuit college and injured a number of priests. In Santos a mob trampled the Jesuit vicar-general when he tried to publish the bull, and the Jesuits were expelled from Sao Paulo when word spread of their involvement in obtaining the bull. Even so, knowledge of the antislavery bulls and the later ruling of the Inquisition against slavery was generally limited to the clergy, especially the religious orders, and thereby had limited public impact.

Of course, the Spanish and the Portuguese were not the only slavers in the New World. And even had they been published far and wide, papal bulls had no moral force among the British and the Dutch. Thus it must be noted that the introduction of slavery into the New World did not prompt any leading Dutch or English Protestants to denounce it.

However, even though the papal bulls against slavery were hushed up in the New World, the antislavery views of the Church did have a significantly moderating effect in the Catholic Americas by means of the Code Noir and Código Negro Español . In both cases, the Church took the lead in their formulation and enforcement, thereby demonstrating its fundamental opposition to slavery by trying to ensure “the rights of the slave and his material welfare,” and by imposing “obligations on the slave owners, limiting their control over the slave.” As Eugene Genovese put it: “Catholicism made a profound difference in the lives of the slaves. [It] imparted to Brazilian and Spanish American slave societies an ethos…of genuine spiritual power.”

christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/julyweb-only/7-14-53.0.html?start=3

 

[josie_L]

All that it means in the catholic sense is that the folks who could read the old testament and based the new testament on that, either commanded respect or fear from their peers and hence the story was perpetuated, or they held their conspiracy meetings it in secret

So basically what your saying is that people martyred themselves for a lie, including those that perpetuated it? Do you think that at a certain point in time when the earliest christians who knew Jesus were being slowly tortured and/or waiting to be killed (like being fed to the lions, or boiled in oil, crucified, skinned alive, stoned to death, thrown off cliffs, or more excruciating, witnessing the death of their loved ones . . . . etc.) that they would recant this lie they perpetrated in order to save their themselves as well as their families? One would have to be completely demented, beyond human recognition to willingly be tortured and die for a lie, unless of course, it wasn’t a lie, and they truly did see the resurrected Christ? I assume people in that century knew the difference between the living and the dead. And that the eyes of those in the first century functioned just as well as those of the 21st?

 

[PennitentMan]

So basically what your saying is that people martyred themselves for a lie, including those that perpetuated it?

No, I’m not. I’m saying that it’s a possibility.
Many people have died for things they believe in , even though it wasn’t true.

Do you think that at a certain point in time when the earliest christians who knew Jesus were being slowly tortured and/or waiting to be killed (like being fed to the lions, or boiled in oil, crucified, skinned alive, stoned to death, thrown off cliffs, or more excruciating, witnessing the death of their loved ones . . . . etc.) that they would recant this lie they perpetrated in order to save their themselves as well as their families? One would have to be completely demented, beyond human recognition to willingly be tortured and die for a lie, unless of course, it wasn’t a lie, and they truly did see the resurrected Christ? I assume people in that century knew the difference between the living and the dead. And that the eyes of those in the first century functioned just as well as those of the 21st?

How do you know they say it first hand? Many people who died could have only heard about it. It’s all speculation. That’s the point I was making…kinda in jest, I might add.

 

[josie_L]

No, I’m not. I’m saying that it’s a possibility.
Many people have died for things they believe in , even though it wasn’t true.

Excuse me, but you forgot to add “believe because they saw”.

How do you know they saw it first hand? Many people who died could have only heard about it. It’s all speculation. That’s the point I was making…kinda in jest, I might add.

Well, did you look into the matter? And if not, I will provide you with the information.

 

[josie_L]

Fine, I will.

I answered this another post.

I call shenanigans. If there were any other institution on earth that from the top instituted such policies toward the Jews and had the establishment institute them, you would call it antisemitic. You simply are making a special pleading for the RCC.

No I’m not for I’ve already stated that she has not lived up to her own standards. Her teachings on faith and morals are clear and concise, that certain church members chose to disregard them only reinforces what the Bible states:

“But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away.”

Not now she’s not. Why the need to read the book? You have not explained why second hand sources are better than first hand sources. Please explain.

Because that second hand source contains many first hand sources put into context.

Using your standards of evidence, I can say that about communism but not Nazism. In any case, so what? Does the fact that other entities have persecuted Jews mean that the RCC persecution of Jews didn’t happen and wouldn’t happen today – showing a change in moral outlook?

No change in moral outlook, just better at walking the talk. In other words, faith and actions working in tandem.

No, those were her standards. People didn’t think they were doing anything wrong with these actions. Quite the contrary. They thought they were doing God’s will.

“The Church. . . does have a written record of its beliefs—Scripture and Tradition—so we know exactly its views about women and Jews. Appropriately, the Church also tells people how they should act: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).”

It’s simple really. A universal claim can be invalidated by a single counter example. When I provide not only a single counter example, but a systematic set of counter examples, you go on about how they can be counterbalanced by opposing events. It doesn’t work that way. Your universal claim is invalidated.

The CC was given infalliblity to discern and preach on faith and morals (our doctrines and/or theology), not that she herself would never sin or do wrong. So, no the universal claim is not invalidated.

 

[josie_L]

You’re being duplicitous with this gigantic special pleading. You made specific accusations against atheism because of actions by individuals. You refuse to allow your own argument when concerning your member group.

Moral relativism is at the root of Atheism. No God equals no uniform moral standard to uphold humanity. Thus, monsters like Mao Tse Dung, Stalin, Pol Pot … etc. who viciously clung to the atheistic ideology of Communism did so under no threat of everlasting reprisal, in other words, they were their own “gods”, they issued their own standards. And if you want to put this in religious terms, their faith (ideology) complied with their actions (standards). THAT is what happens when God is taken completely out of the picture.

By the way, more than 70% of Christians (in the last two millenia) were martyred in the 20th century by atheistic ideologies.

Hardly. These were not individual actions but the prevailing tendency. You are making the implied assumption, without evidence to support it, that they were isolated individual acts. Even a moment’s reflection sends that one up in flames. These weren’t any old Catholics. They were from the Pope. It took many, many other Catholics to go along with and implement his ideas. It took generations of Catholics to allow them to stand in place without repudiation.

The Pope is not impeccable, meaning without sin, thus popes could and did make mistakes. However, the Church is infallible when it comes to espousing doctrines on faith and morals.

 

[josie_L]

**Why, oh why did you copy over a previous thread’s argument/debate into this one? **You hijacked your own thread and it makes following this one like pulling teeth.

Because I’m an inept “terrorist”.

 

[josie_L]

I think you missed the point of the essay.

Not quite. For me it would be more accurate to say that as a sceptic, I recognise that claims without objective evidence are merely anecdotes, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to substantiate them.

I’m certainly open to the possibilty of extraordinary events. I have seen men walking on the Moon, and my physical body has flown across oceans at hundreds of miles per hour. These are certainly extraordinary events; 500 years ago, such feats would certainly have been regarded as “miracles” (or possibly “witchcraft”). The fact that today, they’re regarded as “engineering” does not make them any less extraordinary.

The problem with supernatural explanations for extraordinary claims is that the world is full of people who claim that they can perform extraordinary feats by supernatural means; clairvoyants, psychics, faith-healers, prognosticators, speakers-to-the-dead; you can see them just about every week on TV. The evidence that any of these people can really do what they claim to be able to do, is nil, while the evidence that they are mistaken, or deluded, or out-and-out charlatans is considerable. So for the next apparently inexplicable event - whether it’s an account of alien abduction, or the appearance of a religious figure in a pot of marmite - the odds that this time it’s the real deal are very long indeed.

With regards to Guadalupe - I hadn’t heard of that one. From Wikipaedia, I understand that the cloth had been analysed in the 1930’s or so, and it was concluded that the image consisted of “no known pigment”. This begs a whole load of questions - how was the investigation controlled? Was it reproducible? Were the results peer-reviewed and replicated? And - something that seems to indicate an astonishing lack of curiosity in a scientist - having discovered a substance which was"no known pigment", didn’t anyone think it worthwhile trying to find out what it actually was? Materials science has moved on a bit since the 1930’s. Isn’t any one now curious to find out about it now?

There might be a supernatural explanation for how the image was formed, but there are so many natural explanations which are so much more likely.

Oh please do tell us what these more likely natural explanations are?

 

[anon234]

Dawkins obviously wrote this book for an audience that is already biased against the belief in a God, hence the very shrill, caustic way the book is written. While some of his conclusions are witty, they are certainly not novel in any way. The church has dealt with these accusations in the past, and many are admittedly true. I find his previous works to be much more intellectually stimulating, although somewhat antiquated. His biological and evolutionary evidence is very well refuted in Darwin’s Black Box, though Dawkins is certainly no evolutionary biologist so much as a cynic who capitalizes on his reader’s bias towards his belief-system.

 

[aileron]

So, we have one pope in a span of 2000 years stating the enslavement of muslims, pagans and unbelievers?

How long did it take for the Church to instruct Spain and Portugal that the rights granted under those Papal Bulls were fully rescinded (not restricted or partially limited as some Catholic writers seem only able to see)? How hard would it have been to say in another Papal Bull, “no slavery”? To be sure, there were many subsequent Papal Bulls that placed *restrictions *on who could be enslaved, which was good news for natives of the Americas, but when did the first communication come out and with an unqualified abolitionist position? 1839. So in 1452 the Church allowed chattel slavery, and in various forms it limited or regulated it, but not until 1839 did it forbid all slavery. Nearly 400 years. By 1839 most governments in Europe had already abolished slavery and even the US had abolished slave importation for decades.

So if that’s from the top, what about the clergy and lay Catholics? Until 1839, let’s just take the US for example. The highest concentration of Catholics in antebellum US was in Maryland – the colony more or less set up by Catholics, named for a Catholic Queen, and initially populated mostly by Catholics. So was Maryland an abolitionists state? No. In fact, even a Jesuit plantation in Maryland held hundreds of slaves. What about the only other state at the time primarily populated by Roman Catholics? Was Louisiana an abolitionist state?

This is not even to mention antisemitism, which was even more systematic. There are a whole series of Bulls dealing with persecution and protection of Jews. Now we have no Bulls calling for persecution of Jews, nor Bulls requiring protection of them. What has changed?

 

[aileron]

His biological and evolutionary evidence is very well refuted in Darwin’s Black Box

Behe? It didn’t even take a scientific panel to trash his work. Lawyers with no scientific training at all humiliated him during cross examination in Kitzmiller v. Dover.

Seen or heard much of him since the trial?