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thistle
Guest
Valtiel you should really give up smoking. It is definitely not healthy.
By the way smoking is a venial sin against the Fifth Commandment.
By the way smoking is a venial sin against the Fifth Commandment.
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Valtiel
Guest
I’ve heard it all, theres not much to it, thats like saying you’re not open to anti-catholicism. I mean you have all the evdence you need to show that catholicism is correct, same with my smoking cituation…
I have come to the conclusion after weighing in both sides and putting scrutiny ont he subject, my brother is stuck on his own protestant upbringing and will not look to study anything…
Just some honesty from the antismoking authority, that would be enough…
I just told he’s unwilling to take a look aat both sides and weigh them in his own thorughts, he thinks what he’s learned is right and he’ll only look at things that prooves him right. I came to the conclusion smoking is no that bad for you from going outside my own antismoking bias and looking at both sides…
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Valtiel
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Actually it is, the nicotene actually is good for your mentality and heart, and there was another chemical in their that helps with parkinsons. I’ll grant that smoking 3 or 4 packs a day isn’t good for you, but drinking in excessses isn’t any better. Drinking in moderation is shown to have health benefits, smoking in moderation also has health benefits. And I don’t see how smoking is failing to love your self, even if it were bad for you…
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Contarini
Guest
You and your brother are both confused about history, frankly. My personal opinion is that you should quit smoking, listen to your parents more, drop out of RCIA, and focus on things like justice, temperance, and wisdom in your personal life for a few years before you even try to solve the problems of Christendom. But that’s my personal opinion. What follows is my judgment as a historian, so PAY ATTENTION or I will put you under the Greater Ban of the Grand College of Pompous Pedants.
Valtiel:
Logically, the fact that the early Catholic Church put the Bible together does not prove that an institution that plausibly claims continuity with the early Church cannot manipulate the Bible. That’s a huge leap. Early Christians repeatedly said that they were under the authority of Scripture, vice versa, and the modern Catholic Church says the same thing. The Catholic Church does believe that God will protect it from manipulating Scripture in its official dogmas, but that does not necessarily follow from the fact that the Church discerned which books were inspired.
More precisely, you gave alms as one way of satisfying the temporal punishment due to your sins, of which you had presumably already been repented and for which you had already been forgiven. This was open to serious abuse, of course.
Yes, that did happen. You could (and can–although there are more safeguards against abuse of this nowadays) earn a plenary indulgence (though that requires you to be free from all attachment to sin, among other things!) and apply it to any of the souls in Purgatory. This is one of the sillier parts of Catholic tradition and I think it’s fair game for us Protestants to criticize, although we need to be accurate in doing so.
Not before the 1520s, strictly speaking; although there were medieval dissenting movements (Waldensians, Lollards, Hussites), whose survivors in the 16th century blended into Protestantism. The Waldensians (who originated in the late 12th century) are now Presbyterians, and the Moravian Brethren are an existing denomination that goes back to John Huss in the 15th century, although they were a minority group among Hussites and have since been influenced by Lutheran Pietism in the 18th century.
You’re right of course that European settlement of the Americas began before the Reformation, but he’s right that many of the settlers (from the later 16th century, when French Huguenots settled in Brazil, right through the 19th century) were fleeing religious disputes or persecution by a state church in Europe. HOWEVER, not all of these were Protestants fleeing Catholics. Many were Catholics fleeing Protestants (English in the 17th century in Maryland; Irish and Germans especially in the 19th century), and perhaps most were Protestants fleeing other Protestants (Puritans, Quakers, Scandinavian Pietists, 19th-century German Lutherans, etc.)!
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Contarini
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How would reading the Bible show people that the Bible was all that there was? What does it mean for the Bible to be all that there is? It doesn’t make any sense.
The Church did not prevent people as a whole from reading the Bible. The Church did restrict people’s reading of the Bible.
Not true. The Catholic Church sponsored translations of all or parts of the Bible throughout the Middle Ages and right through into modern times. There were something like 17 or 18 translations of the Bible into German before Luther’s, for instance. Catholics in exile in Belgium translated the Bible into English in the late 16th century (it’s called the Douay-Rheims translation).
However, the Catholic Church did at times restrict laypeople’s access to the Bible in their own language. It wasn’t that laypeople weren’t allowed to read the Bible at all, but that the Church wanted to control who read the Bible and how, because of the danger of heretical interpretations (from the point of view of the Church hierarchy). After the Reformation, the Council of Trent basically left it up to the bishop to decide who could read the Bible in the vernacular (i.e., a modern language, as opposed to Latin) and which translations they could read.
Another way of putting this is that they wanted people to interpret the Bible correctly. It all depends on your perspective. The *stories *of the Bible were very widely known in the Middle Ages, by the way. Look at the stained glass in any European cathedral, or read any work of medieval literature. They were steeped in the Bible.
No. First of all, technically the Church didn’t execute anyone, but in practice they did–they would condemn someone as a heretic and hand them over to the secular authorities for execution. People were executed for being heretics, not for translating the Bible. But one of the things that dissenting groups naturally did was translate the Bible into the vernacular to support their teaching. The Catholic Church of course believed that these translations were biased against orthodox Christianity, so they were condemned. While as I said even Catholic translations were sometimes restricted, no one was executed simply for translating the Bible, but rather for denying the teaching of the Church.
He’s right there, though there is much that is glorious and good in Catholic history as well. I recommend reading some primary sources from the Middle Ages–try Joinville’s life of St. Louis which is available from Penguin Classics as Chronicles of the Crusades (the other one is an account of the Fourth Crusade, which is one of the least creditable episodes of medieval history, actually). Froissart’s Chronicles, which you can also obtain from Penguin Classics, are less religious in their focus but also give you good insights into medieval life. John Bossy’s *Christianity in the West 1400-1700 *is a short, fairly readable account by a Catholic historian.
It’s true that a French ecclesiastical court under the domination of the British condemned her to death, but she was later rehabilitated. Again, read good historical accounts–Regine Pernoud is a respected historian who has written about St. Joan (she also wrote a book recently debunking the myths about the Middle Ages–it’s called Those Terrible Middle Ages I believe).
Well, that’s silly, although the Bible should be central.
It depends on what you mean by sola scriptura. There’s no dilemma in saying that Scripture is supreme, and that it is the only unerring source of authority. There is a dilemma in the position your brother seems to be advocating.
Is that your ancestral religion? I presume that you were raised, instead, in some form of Protestantism. Perhaps you should continue to practice this until you are a bit more mature. Sorry to sound snooty–I started being interested in Catholicism at about your age too. But at times it really got in the way of my maturing in the faith. It’s easy when you are a brash young guy to get all excited about new ideas and think that this makes you a good Christian. But in fact loving your neighbor and walking humbly with God is what counts in the end. Do that, and you will be led to the truth.
In Christ,
Edwin
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Wolseley
Guest
Which is easy to do if you let yourself get swamped. These kinds of debates are always harder on the Catholic, because the non-Catholic can throw out one-line accusations one right after the other in rapid-fire succession, and the Catholic can easily get overwhelmed, because each one of those one-line accusations takes a dense paragraph to refute.
You have to take one question at a time, and answer that one first, then go on to the next. If your opponent is unwilling to do that, then he’s not interested in listening to what you have to say anyway—he just wants to overwhelm you with the sheer volume of his accusations, and thus prove to himself that he’s right; and it’s best to just shrug and walk away.
Well, smoking isn’t good for you, but we all have our addictions, failings, and sins, including me; and I’m not going to be the first one to throw a stone.
Minor matter of semantics here, but you should try to respect your parent’s wishes, if at all possible. Smoke outside, if you have to.
This is an old myth that goes all the way back to to the 1700’s at least. What he’s talking about are Mass stipends.
Every Mass can be offered for someone; this means you can ask the priest for the next Mass to be offered for your Uncle Horace, who died last year, for example. We will assume that Uncle Horace died in a state of grace, but he might still be in purgatory. So the Mass is offered for his soul to be released from purgatory a little sooner.
Every Mass takes equipment, just like anything else. You burn candles; you use electricity and heat for the church; Holy Communion means you need to buy bread and wine. So, if you ask for a Mass to be offered for Uncle Horace, you give the church a certain dollar amount to offset expenses. This is called a “stipend”. It is for the purpose of paying for the accouterments used during the Mass, nothing more.
The anti-Catholics, however, took the idea of a Mass stipend and the idea of a Mass offered for a soul in purgatory, and they decided that obviously what’s happening here is that you are paying the priest $25.00 to get Uncle Horace out of purgatory. Not so, as I have explained.
There were no Protestants prior to 1517.
Considering that the first Europeans to come to the Western Hemisphere were Spanish and French Catholics, I think that pretty well puts paid to that one.
English Protestants showed up some time later, but they were running away from other English Protestant churches, not the Catholic Church.
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Wolseley
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Balderdash. Prior to the Reformation, there were dozens of Catholic Church-approved vernacular translations in English, Spanish, Italian, Danish, French, Norwegian, Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian.
In English alone, we have the Anglo-Saxon translation of Caedmon of Whitby in the 600’s AD, the Saxon versions of Bede of Jarrow, Eadhelm of Sherbourne, Guthlac of Peterborough, and one Egbert in the 700’s AD; then the free translations of Alfred the Great and Aelfric of Canturbury, the Book of Durham, and the Rushworth Gloss, all from well before the Norman Conquest; the Orm Paraphrase of 1150 and the Salus Animae of 1250, and the Middle English translations of William Shoreham and Richard Rolle, both from the 1300’s.
All of these, you will take note, existed centuries before William Tyndale’s flawed English translation of 1525, which was full of translational errors and was, in fact, so bad that Henry VIII (the English king, mind you, not the Pope) ordered every copy of it within the kingdom to be located, seized, and burned.
The idea that the Church kept the Bible out of the language of the people in order to keep them in the dark is a load of baloney. Were there Bibles in Latin? Sure; it was the Church’s liturgical language. Were Bibles chained to pulpits in churches? Sure they were. They were copied by hand and often decorated with precious stones and metals, and ergo represented both decades of work and extreme monetary value—they were chained up to keep thieves from stealing them—but anyone who could read was free to enter the church and read the village Bible at any time.
Which brings up the point of literacy; most common people during the Middle Ages couldn’t read anyway, so it really didn’t matter much if their Bible was in Latin, English, German, Hindustani, or Klingon, did it? If you can’t read, you can’t read.
You might want to hand him a copy of Where we Got the Bible, by Henry G. Graham; you can find it on-line here: geocities.com/militantis/biblecontents.html
He obviously hasn’t read many history books lately. (And incidentally, I have a Bachelor’s degree and a Phi Alpha Theta in history.)
Joan of Arc was not killed by the Church, nor was she killed for religious reasons; she was killed for political reasons, by people in the employ of Pierre Cauchon, the corrupt bishop of Beauvais, who was acting for the English.
Ask him if this is so, which one of the 6,000 or so Protestant interpretations of the same Bible is the correct one?
Never debate with more than one person at a time.
Oh, really? So then, because Bill Clinton or George Bush do some bad things, we should throw away the Constitution and disband the American government, right?
Of course not. And simply because some people who belong to the Church have done some pretty bad things, that doesn’t mean the Church itself is corrupt. You won’t be able to find any official documents from the Vatican saying “You should do these corrupt things:”, with a list attached.
Always remember: the truth or goodness of the Catholic Church does not depend on the individual behavior of its members.
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Valtiel
Guest
I did and had gotten him until his friends mother interupted and went on about how there are black and white issues in the bible and personal issues that have personal maening to you as you walk with God. That the sects making changes were doing so to black and white issues. And went on about how great and so forth is lost in english and we really need to go back to the greek and how there is no correct bilble version. She swamped me big time…
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Wolseley
Guest
The thing to do here is to ask, which parts of the Bible are the black and white issues, and which parts are the personal issues; ask for specific book, chapter, and verse. Then ask who said these issues are black and white as opposed to personal, and what is their authority to do so?
See? It still comes back down to somebody else’s interpretation, and what authority do they have to interpret?
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Valtiel
Guest
They asy the hholy spirit guides them to their own personal interpretation, it’s just whatever is meaningful in your life that those versus will come alive through the holy spirit…
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Lazerlike42
Guest
Also point out that several times the Bible tells us when something is a matter of personal choice. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 7 the Bible tells us that we can be married if we want, or we can stay single, it’s up to us. If it tells us this is personal choice here, why not elsewhere?
I also would phrase it “the Bible says” instead of “Paul says” because it hurts their arguement more, since their arguement is not about what Jesus said or what Paul said or Peter said to who and in context but what the Bible itself is saying to them personally.
I also would phrase it “the Bible says” instead of “Paul says” because it hurts their arguement more, since their arguement is not about what Jesus said or what Paul said or Peter said to who and in context but what the Bible itself is saying to them personally.
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paramedicgirl
Guest
Unless, of course, you poison your body so much with the toxic chemicals in cigarrettes that you end up incapacitated, dying of lung cancer or any other number of smoking-related life threatening diseases. Then it would be a mortal sin, would it not? Your body is the temple of Holy Ghost. Treat it as such.
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paramedicgirl
Guest
You should really get your habds on a copy of “Catholicism & Fundamentalism” by Karl Keating. You will be able to refute any of these attacks by bible Christians. Also recommended are Patrick Madrid’s books, probably all available on Catholic Answers website.
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Valtiel
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Absolutely not, smoking is not that dangerous, period and the anti smoking powers that be that taught you that crapola are full of just that, crapola…
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paramedicgirl
Guest
I believe you could be a poster child for the big industry tobacce companies. You spout their rhetoric.
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Lazerlike42
Guest
I checked out those websites. There’s one big problem with all of them.
They all focus on outward statistics. Remember, you can make any statistic say anything you want, and they do just that. When I say outward statistics, I mean that they all focus on the percentage distinct from the smoker that are affected in a particular way.
I could say the same thing about Christ. I could say that a large percentage of non-Christians that are involved with Christians are affected very negatively. They are judged, and proselithyzed (sp) and held to double standards because they are told not to do things that the Christians do. The statistics would seem to say that Chistianity is a very bad thing!
They all focus on outward statistics. Remember, you can make any statistic say anything you want, and they do just that. When I say outward statistics, I mean that they all focus on the percentage distinct from the smoker that are affected in a particular way.
I could say the same thing about Christ. I could say that a large percentage of non-Christians that are involved with Christians are affected very negatively. They are judged, and proselithyzed (sp) and held to double standards because they are told not to do things that the Christians do. The statistics would seem to say that Chistianity is a very bad thing!
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Valtiel
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Lol, as if the anti smoking rhetoric you cling too had any wieght to it…
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Wolseley
Guest
“Know this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation.” (2 Peter 1:20)
“There are some things in (Paul’s letters) hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” (2 Peter 3:16)
I think this indicates that privately interpreting Scripture is probably not a good idea…
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paramedicgirl
Guest
I will not get into a sparring match with you. I cling to God and God alone. The rest I leave up to common sense. Goodbye…
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SusanL
Guest
You see, that’s the problem, Valtiel. You get into a sparring match.
When the love is not in our hearts, there is no room for the Holy Spirit to move.
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