you have to believe someone. a context-free “interpretation” doesn’t spring fully formed out of the Bible’s pages. i’m confident in the authority and accuracy of my guide’s interpretation. brainwashing implies we don’t think about or evaluate what we’ve been taught, which is emphatically not true.
brainwashing implies that you follow someone else’s instructions instead of following what you think is right. A catholic seeing uncatholic ideas in the bible could just be using his own powers of reasoning rather than being influenced by the protestants.
we believe that our church has the full truth but that doesn’t mean we automatically and unthinkingly swallow everything the church teaches. we are supposed to use our conscience to evaluate what we are taught and to take as much time as we need to accept it. otherwise the norm would be blind faith, which the church doesn’t want from its members.
and accept it you must, else:
What about the Priest who converts to Islam? Never truly a catholic to begin with?
my conscience tells me abortion is wrong, and so does the Church. no conflict there. i certainly don’t have a problem with the church disciplining those who defy its teachings and still call themselves catholic.
catholics are supposed to obey, and not think independently.
that true catholics can change their minds.
Funny you should bring up the story of the priest that converted to Islam. I know you consider Faithfreedom a biased site, but Ali Sina the founder of FFI has written 4 letters to the ex-priest, Mr. Idris Tawfiq, asking him to explain what he considers the “sweet and gentle” message of Islam to be. He’s only received one non-committal reply to his first letter. Here’s the link, for anyone who’s interested.
all i can say is, you’ve got this all wrong. as i said above, catholics are not supposed to blindly obey but to rationally consider the church’s teachings before accepting them into their heart. if you are having trouble with a teaching you may take all the time you need to explore what your conscience tells you, but that does not mean you may publicly reject it outright. once you do that (as did the mexican legislators who legalized abortion) you have crossed the line and become a dissident.
thats not what i learned in philippine catholic school. over there its believe first and ask questions later.
the priest WAS a true catholic right before he decided that everything he learned in Seminary was trash.
GEE THANKS! I would love to see his reply!
)ok, fair enough. but for the record i wasn’t judging her so much as taking issue with two things that her comment implied:i was just trying to make you see the folly of hastily judging the catholic (who saw uncatholicity in the bible) as being influenced by the protestants. it could be for any number of reasons.
Are you seriously suggesting that the thousands upon thousands of pages of Islamic religious texts require no interpretation whatsoever, and that your own view of what those texts say could not possibly be disputed?
“Pre-Islamic Arab Converts to Christanity in Mecca and Medina: An Investigation into the Arabic Sources”
No, you haven’t. You have come up with nonsense and falsely ascribed it to me.
Why? If we have a historical interest, sure. For that matter, if we are arguing with a Muslim, it is useful [to a limited extent] to point out divergences between the Muslim’s theology and the probable intention of Muhammad. But if our interest is in describing Islam as it exists today or as it existed historically, then sticking with the Qur’an is a really bad idea. I repeat: there is no reason a Muslim should care what you or I deduce historically from a study of the Qur’an (except insofar as it will affect our attitude to Islam).
Yes, and it showed yet again that you do not understand what I am saying. I am not saying that Muslims have some mystical charism of knowledge. Of course you can speak to what you used to think was theologically valid as a Muslim. But other Muslims may well think differently. When you were a Muslim, you could argue with them that they were wrong, because you and they accepted certain common premises. Now all you can say is that historically you think their views don’t follow from the intention of Muhammad, the human author of the Qur’an. This is irrelevant to them, more so than it would be even for Christians, since they don’t think Muhammad is the author of the Qur’an in the first place.
So have the Muslims whose views you think are “theologically invalid.”
Of course. That’s the only thing that can be said, because what you said was nonsense. You can’t explain what “theological justification” means as distinct from “I don’t think this follows logically from the text, considered as a historical document.” This latter is not a theological argument.
Of course you have the right to evaluate it–as what you and I believe it is, which is a human opinion based on a fallible human text. But you don’t have the right to evaluate it as an expression of divine revelation, when you don’t think it’s any such thing.
So if someone has no basis for doing so, and simply makes such a comparison, it must be worth reading?
Anything *can *be disputed. You argue from a truism. What you fail to realise is that certain people here offer you and other apologists interpretations from Moslems. You simply wish to miss that.
And there you go again! Re-working the evidence given as if it’s me interpreting Islam. I’m not. You seem incapable of doing other than that - given the amount of times you do it. You do it with my arguments and with Rodrigo Bivar’s!
No, I don’t miss it. I just recognize that you search for the most extreme examples you can find, and then declare that because there is one guy on the internet (or two) who agrees with your interpretation of Islam, therefore it must be correct.
Again, see above. You ignore any Muslims who contradict your claims that Islam mandates radical violence-and only cite those who agree. That is not a valid means of “observing Muslims themselves”.
Yes, but what makes either of those two groups representative of “real Islam”?
This is a ridiculous standard. There were no Christian mass protests for free speech anywhere in the world when the bin Laden/Christ picture story broke in the news either-does that prove that Christians abhor free speech?
Actually, this is not what you do. What you do is search for people who confirm your opinion of Islam as violent and evil, and then claim that all those Muslims who disagree with them are “not real Muslims.”
That’s a matter of your opinion!
Because the sites I cite aren’t Moslems attacking Moslems - at least I’ve offered no quotes from them doing so.The fact that it is my opinion does not make it anything less than demonstrably true. You have thread after thread in your post history where a Muslim poster says “No, that’s not so…” and you say “But the Quran/thiswebsite.com/etcetc say otherwise!”
Notice that I used the word “Christianity” and “The New Testament.” Does referencing Chick prove that “real followers of the NT” are not Catholic?Chick is not a good example, for he’s an outsider looking upon Catholicsm. Even here you’ve failed!
You are deliberately missing the point. You choose whatever example suits your point, not based on any indicators that the site/person/whoever actually represents something approaching a consensus in the Muslim community.
And there you go again, ignoring where I post opinion from Islamic experts. As noted, you can’t help doing this.
