Hugo Chavez, fiery Venezuelan leader, dies at 58

[Walcot]

Uhm… everything you just said… could be said about you as well. Could it not?

And, aren’t you being very intolerant of me?

After all, you approached me in here. Remember?

But let’s be honest here, you’re really just frustrated that your skepticism has been so easily diffused, and you’re upset because your pride is wounded.

Oh, and you never did answer my question: What is truth?

After all, you must know since you are voicing such strong convictions in here.

You have to deal with that somehow.

Chesterton would certainly agree that he didn’t compare to Our Lord. No doubt about that.

And how exactly does one have a “monopoly” on God?

I certainly can’t claim that, because I don’t even understand it.

Well, I would gladly respond IF I even knew what you were talking about.

So, I’m not allowed to merely ask about the influences in your life as you critique all my foibles, shortcomings, and critical defects?

Does that seem fair to you?

Does that even seem tolerant of you?

So… do you have a monopoly on the pope? Whatever that means.

And did you just judge me?

Because that doesn’t sound too tolerant.

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Otherwise it is akin to an open sewer taking in all things equally." - G.K.Chesterton

You have to admit, G.K. is good isn’t he!

Haha! CC you take the biscuit for adversarial combat I’ll give you that too! Are you a lawyer? If not you might have missed a calling…haha!
No, you don’t know my argument better than I do…for a start, I have never been an atheist. In all my life as a Christian with my formative years as a Catholic, I absorbed the teachings of Jesus and they have never gone away. I don’t recognise those teachings in your philosophy. Our stumbling block here is that I said ‘monopoly on Jesus’ not God. This is where we differ and talk at cross-purposes of course.
Whatever drove you from your nihilistic beliefs (maybe yournihilistic upbringing?) I don’t know, but to go from non-belief to the clear firm structure and rulebook of the Catholic church suggests you were unhappy with your life. No, of course you were unhappy with it…you said so…what I mean is maybe scared by the seeming emptiness of everything? Grasping the comforting framework you seem to have missed the kernel at the very centre. Charity. Love. It’s interesting that the word Love was used slightly differently in NT times, it was used in legal documents and didn’t always mean that fuzzy feeling that today’s use often has.
Of course I’m surmising here, not making statements about your upbringing as you did of mine - in a way that I think you meant to offend. (I don’t remember you ASKING me anything?)
I’m trying not to be intolerant of you, really. I fail as much as you maybe?
Now if I had the answer to ‘what is truth?’…Wow! I wonder if there is a language that could even cope with that biggy! If I had it I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to express it in words. That is precisely why I describe myself as agnostic. I should have put ‘a work in progress’…it mightn’t have incited so much personal attack. (theological attack I expected, but I don’t like personal attack)
Keats tried:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

The semantics bit was in reference to your bit about violence in words…“words aren’t violent but if they are then…”.etc. I think there’s violence in words…why do we use phrases like Tongue lashing for example? It is a violent image… but it’s semantics…
Perhaps I should have just called it a kind of bullying that you’re employing?
Yes I did say I fear you missed the pope’s point in his message…how is that judging you? OK, I judge that you missed his point… Semantics again.
I think most people would agree that he won’t be using the phrase ‘Praise God and pass the ammo’ in one of his addresses.

 

[Walcot]

I think we are wasting our breath here, because the Brit’s are still bitter that they are no
longer a empire. BTW, bringing Germans into your discussions is not helping your case
brother.

Silly jibe!

 

[Cor_Cordis]

Haha! CC you take the biscuit for adversarial combat I’ll give you that too! Are you a lawyer? If not you might have missed a calling…haha!
No, you don’t know my argument better than I do…for a start, I have never been an atheist. .

Most “atheists” aren’t really atheistic either. They are simply believers in a distorted self-serving self-centered faith of moral relativism based on their own limited understanding of what they think a “god” should be. As such, they can rarely begin to appreciated the unfathomable scope of God’s Merciful Love because they only try to view Him with their small vision. In short, their anger and disappointment at God stems largely from the internal fear they feel because they always make Him so very very small.

In all **my life as a Christian with my formative years as a Catholic, I absorbed the teachings of Jesus and they have never gone away. **I don’t recognise those teachings in your philosophy. Our stumbling block here is that I said ‘monopoly on Jesus’ not God. This is where we differ and talk at cross-purposes of course…

…Now if I had the answer to ‘what is truth?’…Wow! I wonder if there is a language that could even cope with that biggy! If I had it I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to express it in words. That is precisely why I describe myself as agnostic. I should have put ‘a work in progress’…

Uhm, the “language” that can and does “cope with that biggy” is found in all the fulfillment of Scripture within the Traditional Teachings of The Roman Catholic Church.

And a good place to find the culmination of that “language” most completely is in the **Catechism of The Roman Catholic Church. **

So… exactly which “teachings” of Jesus did you “absorb”? :ehh: I suspect many of the wrong ones. Which is exactly why you refer to yourself as “agnostic”.

But ah yes, “agnosticism”. Perhaps the most cowardly, lazy, and by far the most hypocritical of all the contradictory belief systems.

“Our stumbling block here is that I said ‘monopoly on Jesus’ not God. This is where we differ and talk at cross-purposes of course.”

But alas! Agnosticism stems from the question “What is Truth?”

And you will find that the seed of the answer lies within its very question:

"It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it. Agnosticism (which has, I am sorry to say, almost entirely disappeared from the modern world) is always an admirable thing, so long as it admits that the thing which it does not understand may be much superior to the mind which does not understand it." - G.K.Chesterton

 

[Cor_Cordis]

No, you don’t know my argument better than I do…

…Whatever drove you from your nihilistic beliefs (maybe yournihilistic upbringing?)

There was no nihilistic upbringing as such in my life whatsoever.

In fact, it was worse than that.

I was reared a cradle Catholic. Surrounded by beige Catholicism: Catholic’s who had little depth or inclination to pursue the very basis of the beliefs and philosophies that they were born into. Christ had scarcely more relevance to their daily lives than some bronze-age fairy tale from a by-gone era of illiterate superstitions and naive simplicity. Being a “good” person to these Catholics was all well and good, but there was a living to be wrestled out of this unforgiving world in the daily drudgery of their habitual lives. And unfortunately, the unique goodness of The Living Word was lost in it’s ubiquitous nature and “common” abundance to these people who forgot how to live their lives in the simple wisdom of mystical awe and tearful realization. And the awareness that their mere existence (is in fact) a living testimony that the Author of All Things has Loved them into being - was simply lost on them.

And I thank God for each and every one of them in all their brokenness. And for their incomparable influence on my internal struggles. Without such suffering, there would have been no ashes from which The Holy Spirit could have ever arisen.

Nothing is ever wasted in Him. Especially suffering. And that is precisely why He allows us to share in His Cross.

In essence, one of the worst calamities (and also one of the most beautiful) to befall your soul is to suffer under the unfortunate accident of being born into Catholicism without ever appreciating the inherent fullness of raging against the very faith that bores and disappoints you. Only to find upon re-approaching the forest from your long away journey of self-inflicted loneliness and sorrow that the formerly nearby trees that had forever been obstructing your view, were in fact, the beautiful living elements of an even more breathtaking forest of incomparable Mercy and Life-Giving Love. Such is the folly when religion becomes boring and compartmentalized within the small confines of our internal “world”. And such is the Redemptive power of his Merciful Love when we continually surrender to His Life-Giving Truth.

Or in short (to paraphrase the idea from the great Chesterton) …to return home from whence one came, for the first time (brand new)… all over again.

 

[Cor_Cordis]

It’s true that it is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.

But how beautiful is it, when the very Love you seemed to have lost (that never really left you in the first place) is rediscovered again in a new fullness and trans-formative appreciation?

 

[Cor_Cordis]

Keats tried:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”.

Well, since beauty is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, Keats simply makes the obvious (albeit unintentional) proclamation that Moral Relativism is… relatively… relevant.

Clear as mud.

The semantics bit was in reference to your bit about violence in words…“words aren’t violent but if they are then…”.etc. I think there’s violence in words…why do we use phrases like Tongue lashing for example? It is a violent image… but it’s semantics…
Perhaps I should have just called it a kind of bullying that you’re employing?

What exactly do you perceive and interpret as “violent” in my particular words?

Yes I did say I fear you missed the pope’s point in his message…how is that judging you? OK, I judge that you missed his point… Semantics again.
I think most people would agree that he won’t be using the phrase ‘Praise God and pass the ammo’ in one of his addresses

Uhm… the Pope’s message was one made specifically from a judgment.

Tell me Walcot, if “truth” is so elusive to you, then how is it that you are so certain in the things you judge and deem to be wrong?

How can one know the fallacy of falsehoods unless one knows Truth?

 

[Cor_Cordis]

"To teach people to believe in God, may be (in its highest sense) a hard task even among Christians. But to prevent people from thinking about God will be an impossible task, even among agnostics. Or perhaps… perhaps especially among agnostics." - G.K.Chesterton

 

[october_baby]

Silly jibe!

My “silly” jibe was in response to liturgylovers silly jibe, which BTW, not only was insulting,
but uncharitable as well. Answer the post I addressed to you.