Response: Interesting story about angels and a return; but you don’t put in a filtering of those angels returning home, in the form of Judgment. Some may have truly been traitors and criminals and spies for evil.
No one should listen to you ever again. I’ve reported your post.
The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man.”
I’m suggesting that America (and all nations) as all inddividuals, are imperfect, and go through inflations, which are periods of sin, periods of empire, periods of self-worship. They also go through Tower of Babel experience, when God strikes them. This begins the dark side of their experience. The decline of the deflated Ego. And the re-approach to God again.
When we are alone we are visited by spirits. They come into our minds and into our souls as ideas, images. If we listen to them, play with them, they show us how the world works. They won’t approach us unless we are alone. The spirits want to teach us about the world and about our own nature. They also want to help us to understand why we are here.
I have not read where the Greeks of Plato’s era believed that the set of highest Principles, I assume you refer to Platonic Forms, was per se Socrates’ daimon; so, you might tell me where to go research that point. I’ve experienced the daimon, or Holy Spirit, or Guide, or Guardian Angle, Old Souls, spirits, when with others and not alone, only. Otherwise, I tend to agree with your above statement. We are assuming John the Baptist knew who Jesus was by this method, which I would call some ilk of revealed knowledge, but I wonder if there is any canonical gospel or historical account of how John knew. And, while I would tend to believe the ideas and images that come – apparently from off the wall – into our mind, I do not know if this view is coherent with experts who have experienced revealed knowledge. I wonder if William James’ book on religious experiences mentions this point.
Of course, we know that Adam and Eve were more than allegories. They were flesh and blood people. We even celebrate their feast day on December 24. Before sin, there was only love, communion with God. In disobeying God, whatever that sin consisted of, man suddenly was aware of good and evil. This contrast did not exist except in the mind of God before Eve and then Adam sinned. We should not wish to gain it, but to flee it, to seek to immerse ourselves in God’s love, to never consider evil again. God gives us that power to avoid evil, to focus our hearts and minds on him, doing his will, becoming like him, becoming love again, as we once were in Paradise. It is communion with him that we seek, the soul does not rest, as Augustine says, until it rests in him. Life is preparation for death, for only in death and the new life that follows can we come to the beatific vision, which is the final port of our seafaring souls.
No, birth does not separate us from God. We do not exist until he forms us in our mother’s womb, infusing us with a human soul at the moment of our conception. We are born in separation, but it is not by virtue of our birth, for to be born of Adam and Eve prior to their disobedience would have been birth into communion with Almighty God. It is by virtue of Adam’s sin that separation exists at our birth, not by sin that we have committed, but by sin that we have contracted. But praise be to Jesus Christ, the Light, who came into the world to save us from this unhappy plight. He came through a Virgin, who herself was without sin by dispensation according to his future merits gained on the Cross, and he himself was born with no separation between himself and his Father, God.
You know as a Catholic that it is written once to die and once to come unto judgment.
The earthly world is God’s gift to us. By our sin (I am speaking of mankind in general) we have also brought upon ourselves suffering and death.
He did come to show us the way back to the Father, and more than that, to open the gates of heaven, by his sacrificial death on our behalf, which satisfied God’s demand for justice. And guess what? He did not take away suffering and death. No, he showed us that it was our just due and that the way back through the now reopened gates of heaven was to accept that suffering and that death and to united it with his own suffering and death as part of this great offering to the Father and sign of our obedience to his divine will. It is our gift of love back to him who first loved us. It is the meaning of “take up your cross and follow me.”
Wealth, power, and success are lesser goods. They are not evil in themselves. Glorying in oneself, pride in oneself, these are sins. A humble spirit and a contrite heart God will not spurn. Glamor is but the attraction of things that sometimes turn our attention away from him. The Christian detaches himself from lesser goods to embrace greater goods, and in the end to embrace only one good, God himself.
Life is not evil. Life is God’s gift to us. And to make it more perfect, he sent his Son into the world to bring us unto life everlasting by showing us how to receive his Spirit and to live godly lives, so that we could be with him forever in heaven.
The original sin was disobeying God. Adam and Eve were already created, neither of them “born” as Adam was created from the dust of the earth and Eve was created from out of Adam. They had no choice in the matter, nor do we have a choice, but praise God that he imagined us and allowed us to be born into the world.
Life is a test. Because of concupiscence that we acquired due to original sin, we are inclined to sin. Sin leads us to the death of the soul. You might say that the world conspires to keep us in sin, but praise God, Jesus came to show us the way back to God, the way to overcome sin, the way to pass the tests that our lives are strewn with, the way to love, which is to say, follow his example, follow in his footsteps, and unite ourselves to him who has overcome the world.
What a hopeless hellish thought that is! But of course resurrection is permanent. There is no question in the minds of those who follow Jesus Christ with all their hearts and believe in his words, and believe in God’s sacred scriptures. It is given to us to die once and then to come unto judgment, and us Catholics who live godly lives, led by the Spirit, who eat the Body of Christ and drink the Blood of Christ as he offers to us in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, we are assured of acquittal at that last day.
[Whit, I cut out a lot of what you wrote to conserve space.]
Peace.You said, “Jesus came to restore faith in God, ultimately to effect communion with Him, where order and man’s justice are realized- the only way they can be realized”
I don’t know where to start. I’ll try backing up a bit.* Of course* faith is a choice-one man isn’t forced to make. However God makes us the offer, via the Incarnation, in which Jesus reveals the face of the Father as never before. He demonstrates the existence of God, the power of God, His trustworthiness in spite of man’s mistrust (trust having died in man’s heart with his first sin according to the Catechism), His forgiveness, His mercy, most importantly His unconditional boundless love for man despite man’s hatred for Him. When we see Jesus we see the Father. But man doesn’t have to even admit that he has a father besides his natural one. Man is lost whether he knows it or not, born separated from his Creator, without even faith in, let alone love for God-a prodigal in need of being woken to the fact that he’s living in a pigsty so he can run back to the open arms of his Father. And this separation constitutes an injustice, a disorder in God’s universe-something which was not meant to be. It constitutes a death, what theologians sometimes call the ‘death of the soul’, and is the principle characteristic of the Original Sin which all men inherit. And this is why man must be ‘born again’, or ‘born from above’. When communion with God is restored, justice is restored. IOW this relationship with God is the source of man’s righteousness- the only source of it.
John the Baptist came to baptize the faithful with water. Water is the element of Faith. But he told his followers to await Jesus’ baptism, which would be greater still, with Fire.
I am not Jewish, so what they believe or do not believe has no bearing on what I believe. I believe the Holy Spirit enlightens the Catholic Church in its interpretation of the sacred texts, something I do not attribute to Judaism. If Jewish Rabbis could properly discern the Bible texts, they would accept Jesus as the messiah, which they do not.
The ark floating upon the waters of the deep is a symbol to be found in the traditional wisdom of peoples all over the world. The marks of great floods are embedded in the stratigraphic records of buried cities in all lands, and their elements have been combined in myriad ways with ancient seed ideas handed down like the flame in the ark from the earliest days of the human race.
In ancient Sumeria, Xisuthrus escaped the destruction of a great deluge in an ark. After seven days and nights during which the flood raged over the land and the huge boat was tossed on the waters, the Sun-God arose, shedding light on heaven and earth. Seeing this, Xisuthrus made an opening in the side of the great ship and let in the light. In ancient Greek mythology, Deucalion, son of Prometheus, built a chest or ark in which he floated for nine days during a flood sent by Zeus to destroy the men of the Bronze Age. The Biblical flood describes Noah building an ark in which he placed animals two by two, the progenitors of future animal life. After unceasing rain for forty days and forty nights, the ark came to rest on Mount Ararat.
Different elements are stressed in these myths: the idea of the ark transporting the Sun-God, Deucalion's flood referring to the fall of Atlantis, and the Biblical tradition conveying the concept of preserving life. Taken singly, these accounts focus attention upon the drama of the hero and the great flood. But in examining the meaning of the ark as a symbol and as a word, a deeper meaning emerges.
In Egyptian mythology, Isis set her son Osiris afloat in an ark or chest which was called argo. The cyclic pattern of birth, death and revivification is symbolized by Osiris floating within the ark upon the abyss of the world - the Nile. Osiris represents the soul or sun cyclically manifesting to the world. The Nile, flooding and subsiding every year, symbolized the cyclic pattern of the emergence of the earth between periods of submersion into non-manifestation or night. Argo is also the name of a constellation which signified for the ancient Egyptians the infant Osiris floating in the Ocean of Space.
The sun in Egyptian symbolism was depicted as sailing upon a solar barque called the 'Barque of Millions of Years' or the Boat of Ra. Ra arose from the East each morning and began his journey through the watery abyss of the sky. This Manjet-Boat was manned by a number of gods who acted as crew, the personifications of various aspects of the sun's power. On his night voyage, Ra sailed in another barque, the Mesektet-Boat, which was a serpent with a head at either end. He was again accompanied by a crew of gods and confronted always by the hostile serpent Apep who lived in the celestial waters. During the night Ra would pass the barque through twelve dangerous provinces where the souls of the dead were tried on their journey to a new life. The night of the soul is the night of death between light, lives and worlds. The 'Barque of Millions of Years' is the vehicle of the daily sun, but also the ark which carries soul-wisdom across the waters of cyclic manifestation and non-manifestation.
The ark also represents the moon, the argha or symbol of Diana. In the Hebrew Kabbalah it is in the crescent argha that "the germ of nature and of mankind floats or broods on the great abyss during the intervals which take place after every great mundane cycle." The name given to the city of Thebes or Th-aba is another word for the ark as a vessel of mankind. Kartha or Tyre, Astu or Athens, Urbs or Rome, are all names of cities reflecting this same idea. In more mystical language, arghya in Sanskrit refers to the libation cup, and Arghya Varsha is the Land of Libations or the place of the gods which stretches from Mount Kailas to the Schamo Desert. This sacred place is the birthplace of lo, the mother of physical humanity. It is the same place that is indicated by the Greek Argos which, in its deepest sense, does not refer to a place in Greece but to the birthplace of a Kingly Race, presumably that from which the tenth or Kalki Avatar will issue. The word also refers to arg or arca, the female generative power symbolized in the moon. lo, which also means moon, indicates the Divine Androgyne symbolized by the number 10. Ark is the mystic name of the divine spirit of life which broods over chaos; the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant.
In ancient Egypt the ark was a beautiful and chaste sarcophagus, the symbol of the matrix of nature and resurrection. During initiation in the King's Chamber of the Pyramid of Cheops, the Candidate, representing the Solar God, descended into the sarcophagus, re-enacting the entry of the Life Ray into the womb of nature. The Candidate emerged on the third morning as the resurrection of life after death. This magnificent mystery was intimated in the Sumerian myth where the Sun-God penetrated into the ark.
In Isis Unveiled the ark is related to the survival of life and the supremacy of spirit over matter through the conflict of the opposing forces in nature. The name Noah or Nuah, The Secret Doctrine tells us, indicates spirit falling into matter. The flood itself represents the Old Serpent or the Great Deep of matter over which the ark passes on its way to the Mount of Salvation. Often the flood is called the Dragon over which the Lunar Goddesses reign. The water is the feminine principle, and as the deluge is chaotic, unsettled matter. The word 'ark' also refers to the navel, the umbilicus connected with the receptacle in which are fructified the germs of the race. The mountain is the sacred place of new birth where the ark finds refuge at the center of the world. In Hindu tradition it is known as Mount Meru, the navel of the world. Clearly the cycle of the ark indicates the process of transmission of life and wisdom.You are putting words in my mouth, sir or madam. I never said I cannot learn from the Jews; my wife is Jewish, and I have learned plenty from her. The Jewish scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit, but the Jewish interpreters are not as reliable in my opinion with regards to the Scriptures as evidenced by their complete ignorance that their Scriptures prefigure the life of Jesus Christ, his birth, his ministry, and his passion and death, Mary and her role in salvation, and the Catholic Church. The Church may get it wrong on matters not related to faith and morals, but I still trust their scholarship over that of the Jews, especially because it correctly gets the meaning of the “inspired” message contained in the texts.
If that’s all it does, it is completely devalued. Either it is the Word of God, or it simply makes a good moral tale-- which is it?
I agree that truth can be taught by actual events as well as by stories, such as the parables of Jesus. Where I differ from you is where you draw the line between fact and fiction. You seem to favor a near wholesale reduction of the Bible to fiction and myth, albeit that reveals eternal truths. I, and the Catholic Church, disagree with that premise. And, BTW, I don’t have trouble understanding the difference between dreams and freight trains, or how they are both real. I don’t think that will present a problem past the age of seven.
I studied the ancient myths and stories years ago in college. How do you know they have anything at all to do with patterns in the human unconscious? At the bottom I have an excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia regarding the ancient flood stories.
What you just said is that cycles occur. The rest appears to be superstition, charlatanry and gobbledygook. Christians believe that societies misbehave and either reform/repent or God sends chastisement. Is that just a Christian myth?
Every culture attempts to explain cataclysmic events with its own superstitions or religious beliefs.