Inter religious Dialogue

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Spyridon said:
if God is above time and outside of spacetime, how was He born of a virgin teenager?
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Yes. That is a question that bothers me about whether or not God is always 100% outside of spacetime. I don’t understand how it is possible if God was observed to be walking in a garden on earth.
 
AlNg said:
don’t understand how it is possible if God was observed to be walking in a garden on earth.
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Think of it like the ocean analogy.

You can take a bottle and fill it with the ocean water, then bring it home. When someone sees the bottle and asks what’s in it, you can truthfully tell them “the ocean is in that bottle.”

Likewise, God who is infinite, can enter into his physical creation, and when someone sees him walking in a garden, they can say “God is walking in that garden.”
 
Too literal. God was present and Adam and Eve were ashamed to be in God’s presence. Their fall was alienation from their unity with God.
 
The problem with learning about other religions is that unless you are some kind of a theology major specializing in world religions or comparative religion, you’re not going to have time to get deep enough into every religion to really “get” it. At most, you’ll be dabbling, especially if you’re looking at a whole bunch of religions and not getting in-depth with one (such as you might if you had a close friend who was a strong Buddhist or Muslim).

Also, I do not believe I can find revelation in something like the I Ching that God didn’t already reveal to us, probably better, through Jesus.
Do I still find the I Ching interesting and possibly useful in some ways? Yes.
Do I think of it as divine revelation? No.
Do I want to spend a lot of time “exploring” it? Probably not.

Same for the Koran, the Vedas etc.
 
Yes, i think if one had the interest it would be in a specific religion for any number of reasons. Often it is family or environment. Sometimes thoug it is purely academic or part of one’s own search.
 
I went through a phase years ago of reading about Buddhism and Alice Bailey and stuff like that, because the concepts were cropping up in various popular media I was watching and listening to at the time.

I didn’t have any plans to become a Buddhist or a Bailey-type New Age person. I tend to think meditation as practiced by Buddhists is boring and outside my cultural tradition, so I wouldn’t be doing that even if it wasn’t contrary to Catholicism. I just wanted to understand what the songs, TV show, etc was getting at. My reading pretty much just scratched the surface of knowledge in these areas so I do not consider myself any kind of expert or having any big understanding of Buddhism, but I got the level of understanding I was looking for.

At one of the local Adoration chapels, there is a big window of Jesus with rays coming from his Sacred Heart to various saints who were devoted to Him in some way including St. Gertrude, St. Margaret Mary etc. The first time I saw it I noted there were seven rays and I thought of Alice Bailey and her teaching about the “Seven Rays” (which is actually some old occult thing and was incorporated into a Utopia song some decades ago) and I thought, “This is the TRUE Seven Rays”. Other times I’ve thought of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit as being the “real” Seven Rays (which is actually consistent with some Church teaching).

Seven rays - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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Yes, the Church refers to these as “seeds of truth” or “seeds (spermata) of the Word” sown in man on account of him being made in the image of God. One of the Early Church Fathers, St. Justin Martyr, discusses this below:
For each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word, seeing what was related to it. But they who contradict themselves on the more important points appear not to have possessed the heavenly wisdom, and the knowledge which cannot be spoken against. Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. For next to God, we worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation impacted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the thing itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.
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http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0127.htm
 
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Shakuhachi said:
Truth is truth no matter what culture or langauge or symbols are used to express it.
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What is good or bad changes with the times and the culture. For example, about 500 years ago torture was accepted by the Catholic Inquisition, but it is now ruled out and today it is taught that torture is unacceptable.
 
Shakuhachi said:
Truth hasn’t changes, only our recognition of it.
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Take the example of capital punishment.
It is wrong today, but it was right before.
Charging interest on a loan was wrong before, but it is right today.
 
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The morality of both of those acts depends heavily on the situations and social context. The social context of both acts has changed dramatically today, at least in developed countries.

Plenty of laws now to protect consumers from usurious lenders. And plenty of ways to keep criminals confined for natural life terms, as well as more recognition of the ways in which capital punishment can be unfairly applied.
 
AlNg said:
So morality is relative to social context and is not absolute.
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To some degree it is and has always been.
A dad stealing bread to feed his children who are starving is viewed differently from a moral standpoint, than a professional thief who robs a bank, or a warlord who would go to the poor dad’s house and steal all his family’s food.
All of them are stealing.
The social context is different.

A soldier defending his country from invaders and shooting members of the other side dead in a war is viewed differently from a man who gets in an argument with his next door neighbor over loud music and shoots his neighbor dead in the driveway.
Both of them are shooting someone else to death.
The social context is different.

And so on.
 
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