1holycatholic~~"*The point was that God’s essence is existence.
The comment about dualism was simply an observation about the Aquinas’ citation. It wasn’t directed at anyone in particular.*Thank you.
*The word “Catholic” appears after Religion: in your posts.*COLOR=“blue”]Yes, it does, with a modifier(s) I am Catholic in the sense of the way of Knowledge from which Catholicism is derived, the same as is acknowledged by Augustine, Aquinas, and many earlier Church fathers before the shadow fell over it in the third century.
Do you reject Satan? I face the suggestions of Satan every day and know the core weakness of any temptation offered under that name or any other, and thus allow such suggestions to return to the nothingness from which they came.
And all his works? Satan’s “works” are personal distortions of GOD IS ALL. They have no substantial reality, only the suggestion of it. Without the Power of God as the Light to them, they could not even be perceived.
*And all his empty promises? *Knowing God, the set of “promises” attributable to Satan is a null set. Also I don’t recall personally Satan promising me or anyone else I know anything anyway, so the question is meaningless to me.
*Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth? *There is none other.
Do you believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary was crucified, died, and was buried, rose from the dead, and is now seated at the right hand of the Father? I know what that might mean to you as a practicing Catholic, I having been one for so long. Yet that thread if ideas has a meaning deeper and more profound than anyone can imagine beyond the dogmatic and Scriptural. That deeper meaning is beyond the need for belief, belief being merely a pointer, that pointer now being unconsciously used as a prophylactic to Knowledge by christainist institutions.
Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting? Yes to all, in the same sense as in the preceding paragraph[h.[/COLOR]
I would wonder if you are not attempting to make me wrong solely on the grounds that I do not concur with Catholic beliefs. That is spurious. In fact, I believe all that you do, but do not restrict the teaching about Iesus to His person. This is similar to the confession quoted above in another post of the church father who did not distinguish between what the Christians believed and the worshipers of Jove, save that the Christians now owned the truth of those myths.
We also have different understandings of the words “exist” and “Be.” Since you rely on Aquinas, I would suggest, that similarly to the Bible, the translators dictum of “Idem non idem” be copiously applied. He neither wrote in English, a fundamentally dualistic language, nor do we understand the mind set of the times that he wrote in. We believe that because we perceive and think the way we do, it has always been thus. Perhaps not. For instance, there is a notable difference in the mentality that allowed religious error to be punished both as heresy and treason, mixing theistic and political arena. These were fused, yet unseparated one from the other, as were scientific and religious areas not just mixed, but fused. It was but at the time of the Enlightenment that the I, we, and it fields of distinctions we now enjoy, appeared, yet with their own disruptive axioms. A case in point of pre 18th century modalities might be the widely accepted refutation of Galileo’s discovery of the four moons of Jupiter on the grounds that the human head had seven, not four, openings.*
So, I maintain that in the order of things as must be pericieved from a subject/object mode of awareness that the majority of Earthians enjoy today, existence is derivative of BEing.
ex- 1~~a prefix meaning “out of,” “from,” and hence “utterly,” “thoroughly,” and sometimes imparting a privative or negative force or indicating a former title, status, etc
+sistere to stand Synonyms: survive, persist, last, endure, stay, remain.
Be to be identical with; In this case SELF, or I AM THAT I AM)
*“There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head through which the air is admitted to the tabernacle of the body, to enlighten, to warm and to nourish it. What are the parts of this microcosm? Two nostrils, two eyes, and two ears, and a mouth. So in the heavens, as in a macrocosmos, there are two favorable stars, two unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury, undecided and indifferent. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc, which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven.”
You might find the story of the Cardinal who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope on the grounds of its impossibility amusing as well.
