What laws?
Attendance at Mass on all Sundays and other Holy Days of Obligation, firm adherence to all the dogmas and doctrines of the Faith, abstinence from meat on Fridays, especially in Lent, yearly Communion and Confession, and I have a feeling I might be forgetting one off the top of my head. But I don’t need to answer to you regarding my Catholicism.
Do you not believe that Aquinas should be regarded as Doctor of the Universal Church? Do you think he should not be patron of all Catholic universities, colleges, and schools? Do you think he should be de-canonized as a saint?
(1) Yes, he should be. That doesn’t mean he was infallible. (2) Yes, he was probably the smartest man who ever lived. Still wrong most of the time. (3) Of course not. Why would I think that?
We’re going to require, of you, some evidence for this bold assertion. Would you mind providing such as you can?
(1) Inertia, from which we must also get rid of his idea of teleology (at least when applied to moving objects). (2) Atomism, from which we conclude that his rejection of the vacuum and his idea of “motion” as continuous and simultaneous were wrong. Those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head, but it’s quite well-known that both his physics and his biology have been superseded. This is the first time I’ve ever heard that assertion called “bold” before.
Really. Wow! That’s another bold - atheist-like assertion, again, with absolutely no proof or evidence whatsoever. We’re going to require that you provide some; would you mind?
Was Aristotle divinely inspired? Was he even Christian? So how is acceptance of his philosophy an article of Faith? Has the Church ever claimed that we must accept the philosophy of Aristotle? I would recommend turning to the early Fathers where you will find some pretty harsh denunciations of pagan wisdom. Please quit the rhetoric and personal attacks; disagreeing with Aristotle is not an “atheist-like assertion”.
Except that they apparently have disowned the sainthood and teachings of Aquinas, whose Summas are the official sumations of Catholic theology, natural theology (metaphysics) and philosophy of the universal Catholic Church.
Von Balthasar was named a Cardinal, a prince of the Church, for his theological work. Are you placing yourself above the teaching authority of the Pope? Name me one place where he “disowned the sainthood”, or even the teachings, of Aquinas, before making such serious charges against a man who, being dead, can’t defend himself. Point number two: The Summas are not “official summations” of anything. If you want an official summation of Catholic theology, look at the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the (relatively) new Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has no official philosophy; if Aquinas has primacy, it does not disparage the work of the great modern philosophers, none of whom happened to be Catholic.
Who was marginally Catholic, especially during the time he worked with the Nazi’s.
Actually he had converted to Lutheranism. Your claim is an ad hominem attack, not a valid argument. For charity’s sake I will point out that he did receive the sacraments on his deathbed, which is a little-known fact (since secular histories generally do not care about such unimportant things as the eternal fate of a man’s soul). But Aristotle was not “marginally Catholic”, he was downright pagan.
Hmmm. Heidegger was also quite big on Aristotle and Aquinas, and not very big on modern science and modern technology. No wonder the confusion.
He was more of a fan of Scotus than Aquinas - whom he singled out (along with scholasticism in general, really) as having contributed to the forgetting of being in Western philosophy - and more of a fan of Parmenides than Aristotle. I am perfectly aware of my divergence from Heidegger on certain points; if a hard-core atheistic Heideggerian chooses to take up this debate with me, I will take that moment to protest Heidegger’s errors. I have no need to now. Yet if I had to choose one and only one “philosophy” book (to the exclusion of “non-philosophical” works such as Wordsworth’s Prelude, which contains more true philosophy than all the works of many other philosophers combined) to take with me on a desert island, or to survive a cataclysm as the only patrimony of the philosophical tradition left to the world, it would without a question be “Sein und Zeit”.
Please explain this: “a puppeteer God”.
If God is the prime mover, and I cannot originate any motion on my own without God moving me to do so, then I see no difference between that situation and a puppeteer pulling on strings. I would be very happy if someone could show that this is not the case, since then my autonomy and freedom would be preserved. (I know that this is not what Thomists think they are claiming - and the Church has forbidden us to accuse Thomist theology of Jansenism, in the same decree that it forbad accusations of Molinist theology (which rejects physical pre-motion) of being Pelagian. Yet it is a logical conclusion of what the Thomists are claiming; in other words, it is inconsistent to believe in physical pre-motion and human freedom at the same time. I say “Thomists” because my understanding is that this doctrine originates more with John of St. Thomas than with Aquinas himself, though I may be mistaken on this matter.
On what grounds? Please explain, don’t simply make unfounded assertions. You have made enough of them here to last us a very long time.
I tried to clarify that above.
What do you mean by this statement?
ditto.
Can you re-state this a bit more clearly? In its current form, it is the mother of all confusion.
If He predestines us to Heaven against our will, then we cannot freely choose Heaven. (Otherwise human freedom is not in fact an answer to the question “Why does God let some people go to Hell?”) If He predestines us to Heaven, but not against our will, then this predestination is not infallibly efficacious.
Please explain.
**Look at the next post because I am over the character limit. **
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