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Gorgias
Guest
Can one be sinfully prideful in announcing how much more pro-life one is than others?Gorgias:
Can one be prolife and want the death of the unborn in instances of rape or incest?
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Julius_Caesar
Guest
Can one make a statement free of pride in regard to another’s conduct?
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Gorgias
Guest
Can one do so when explicitly comparing his conduct to another’s in a way that attempts to discredit the other?
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Julius_Caesar
Guest
Can’t one respond to comparisons of positions in light of Church teaching? And wasn’t @JoyfulTune starting the comparison?
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Gorgias
Guest
Can one be considered to “respond to positions”, charitably, when instead, he compares persons?
C’mon, @Julius_Caesar. This was pretty blatantly a “I’m better than you” statement. Don’t we aspire to better conduct, as Christians?
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RobertAdams
Guest
I would imagine that during that entire time the wrongness of dashing infants on rocks was appreciated fully without need for further refining by those infants and their families.
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Elf01
Guest
I don’t like pro aborts pretending to be pro life, and will call them out on it when I see it.Elf01:
Is it a contest?JoyfulTune:
No you’re not.
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stpurl
Guest
With respect, Gorgias, please check out the thread “problem with the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion’ and all the posts from Joyful Tune. Then (since Julius has seen those posts and had a much more thorough understanding of Ms. Tune’s position as evidenced by many posts that you will find extremely disturbing) you will understand his responding here. It may have looked surprising since you only saw this one post from Ms. Tune but if you see all the others I think you will PM Julius with an apology.
I don’t want to hijack the thread but since it was partly my fault —I apologize—that Ms. Tune came on here, I have to be public about it. Again, please check out the above thread, but comment there and I ask only that this thread without any further reference to the other thread from now on be allowed to continue. . .again, with my apologies.
I don’t want to hijack the thread but since it was partly my fault —I apologize—that Ms. Tune came on here, I have to be public about it. Again, please check out the above thread, but comment there and I ask only that this thread without any further reference to the other thread from now on be allowed to continue. . .again, with my apologies.
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Dorothy
Guest
Thank you for posting that Everest!
Many years ago on another forum an atheist was mocking that sentence and thankfully, some one entered the thread and showed the meaning that you just shared.
Many years ago on another forum an atheist was mocking that sentence and thankfully, some one entered the thread and showed the meaning that you just shared.
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Julius_Caesar
Guest
Situation:
Arius: I’m as Christian as you.
Nicholas: No you’re not.
Is that a prideful statement by Nicholas in this situation?
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Gorgias
Guest
Address the standpoint, then, and not the person. Ad hominem attacks aren’t charitable, eh?
To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen: “Julius, you’re no St Nicholas.”
To bring this thread at least somewhat back on track…
The “dashing infants against rocks” verse is one of what I call the “horror passages” of the Bible. These are indeed problematical, in defending the Bible and the Faith against those who dislike both, because taken all by themselves, yes, they make the Judeo-Christian tradition sound pretty repugnant. (Think of all the problems devout, peaceful Muslims have with certain troubling verses from the Koran.) The other day, my son asked me about the passage from 2 Kings where young children mock Elisha for being bald, and God allows them to be mauled by bears. He asked me if that didn’t seem a bit extreme for God to do, for something as relatively innocuous as mocking a bald man. I had to do some research even to begin to answer his objection.
Bottom line, yes, there are disturbing passages here and there, and eventually, someone will call our hand on them. I’d like to find an orthodox Catholic source that deals with these passages head-on. (Neither Haydock nor Challoner had anything to say about the story of the bears. I had to resort to a Protestant source where the commentator says “they weren’t really children”. Not sure I’m buying that one. And even for adults, as insults go, mocking baldness seems pretty tame.)
The “dashing infants against rocks” verse is one of what I call the “horror passages” of the Bible. These are indeed problematical, in defending the Bible and the Faith against those who dislike both, because taken all by themselves, yes, they make the Judeo-Christian tradition sound pretty repugnant. (Think of all the problems devout, peaceful Muslims have with certain troubling verses from the Koran.) The other day, my son asked me about the passage from 2 Kings where young children mock Elisha for being bald, and God allows them to be mauled by bears. He asked me if that didn’t seem a bit extreme for God to do, for something as relatively innocuous as mocking a bald man. I had to do some research even to begin to answer his objection.
Bottom line, yes, there are disturbing passages here and there, and eventually, someone will call our hand on them. I’d like to find an orthodox Catholic source that deals with these passages head-on. (Neither Haydock nor Challoner had anything to say about the story of the bears. I had to resort to a Protestant source where the commentator says “they weren’t really children”. Not sure I’m buying that one. And even for adults, as insults go, mocking baldness seems pretty tame.)
po18guy
Well-known member
Psalms are prayers and lamentations. Your concern and/or confusion demonstrates the problems encountered when reading the scriptures in a vacuum. They were in a context and the Church must give direction and meaning.
From the Rev. George Leo Haydock commentary (Psalm numbering differs according to manuscripts used):
“Ver. 9. Dash thy little ones, &c. In the spiritual sense, we dash the littel ones of Babylon against the rock, when we mortify our passions, and stifle the first motions of them, by a speedy recourse to the rock, which is Christ. Ch. S. Aug. S. Greg. Ps. l. W. — We do not read that Cyrus treated Babylon with this rigour; but such practices were then customary, (Ose. xiv. 1. Iliad xxii.) and Darius cruelly punished the revolted city. Herod. iii. 159. C. — God will reward those who execute his decrees (H.) against Babylon. W. — The psalmist contrasts the felicity of the conqueror, with the misery of the citizens, without approving of his conduct. Bert.”
See a difference?
From the Rev. George Leo Haydock commentary (Psalm numbering differs according to manuscripts used):
“Ver. 9. Dash thy little ones, &c. In the spiritual sense, we dash the littel ones of Babylon against the rock, when we mortify our passions, and stifle the first motions of them, by a speedy recourse to the rock, which is Christ. Ch. S. Aug. S. Greg. Ps. l. W. — We do not read that Cyrus treated Babylon with this rigour; but such practices were then customary, (Ose. xiv. 1. Iliad xxii.) and Darius cruelly punished the revolted city. Herod. iii. 159. C. — God will reward those who execute his decrees (H.) against Babylon. W. — The psalmist contrasts the felicity of the conqueror, with the misery of the citizens, without approving of his conduct. Bert.”
See a difference?
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Julius_Caesar
Guest
So correcting misinformation is wrong?
I’m not a saint, and neither.is anyone who claims to be something they are not.
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Julius_Caesar
Guest
They’re not teasing Elisha. They are mocking him and his master Elijah. What they are really saying is, “Hey, Elisha, why don’t you up go where your master is?” It’s similar to Ananias and Sapphira and Elymas. The moral of the story is God is not mocked.
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stpurl
Guest
Exactly. In today’s modern world we have become conditioned to ‘niceness’ and to all sorts of ‘tolerance’ (the word tolerance itself having been redefined to mean ‘acceptance’ rather than something which is wrong, hateful, and dangerous but whose removal would be more dangerous still) and also to a specific agenda or view regarding most Scripture (and Tradition) that takes its cue from the Jesus Seminar crowd.
We are told that the miracle of the loaves and fishes was simply the ‘opening of eyes’ of the people so that they were able to go inside themselves, be ‘the best they could be’, and SHARE.
We are told that the ‘hard passages’ were from people who simply were not as enlightened as we were.
And of course, we’re told that the Bible —and Jesus Himself- make mistakes. My former priest was notorious for sermons about how Jesus ‘mistreated’ women and had to be TAUGHT respect by them; the above noted sharing; etc.
And of course the “Go up baldy” is one of the classic atheist ‘charges’ to Christians, “You people worship some ‘god’ who sends bears to kill little children just for calling a guy bald?
Setting aside it’s one of the few passages where a prophet actually is protected by God (Jonah for example gets tossed overboard and swallowed by a whale, Jeremiah gets dumped in a well), the fact is that prophets are speaking for God. Remember the Bible passage about those who help prophets, “getting a prophet’s reward?” They weren’t just figures going out doing agitation. They were trying to give a message, not ‘from them’, but from God Himself, to the world.
Mockery and disrespect in modern society are endemic. We mock each other constantly then fall back on ‘can’t you take a joke”? “Just kidding”. And that’s to each other.
God will not be mocked. Young men (and that’s what they were, not little ones) were old enough in that society to go out and fight, get jobs, etc. They were after age 13 ‘doing a men’s job’ and in an era when many people were dead by 40 they were not the equivalent of today’s 13 year olds.
Then, as now, actions have consequences. Today for whatever reason God is allowing a lot of actions which will have very serious consequences. Maybe He realizes we’re actually a lot slower than the young men of Elisha’s time, a lot more childish, and need to grow up before we have to deal with the consequences of our actions. Maybe God let these young men deal with the results of their blasphemous actions so quickly to give us a warning. If so, it seems most of us are still ‘too blind to see.’
We are told that the miracle of the loaves and fishes was simply the ‘opening of eyes’ of the people so that they were able to go inside themselves, be ‘the best they could be’, and SHARE.
We are told that the ‘hard passages’ were from people who simply were not as enlightened as we were.
And of course, we’re told that the Bible —and Jesus Himself- make mistakes. My former priest was notorious for sermons about how Jesus ‘mistreated’ women and had to be TAUGHT respect by them; the above noted sharing; etc.
And of course the “Go up baldy” is one of the classic atheist ‘charges’ to Christians, “You people worship some ‘god’ who sends bears to kill little children just for calling a guy bald?
Setting aside it’s one of the few passages where a prophet actually is protected by God (Jonah for example gets tossed overboard and swallowed by a whale, Jeremiah gets dumped in a well), the fact is that prophets are speaking for God. Remember the Bible passage about those who help prophets, “getting a prophet’s reward?” They weren’t just figures going out doing agitation. They were trying to give a message, not ‘from them’, but from God Himself, to the world.
Mockery and disrespect in modern society are endemic. We mock each other constantly then fall back on ‘can’t you take a joke”? “Just kidding”. And that’s to each other.
God will not be mocked. Young men (and that’s what they were, not little ones) were old enough in that society to go out and fight, get jobs, etc. They were after age 13 ‘doing a men’s job’ and in an era when many people were dead by 40 they were not the equivalent of today’s 13 year olds.
Then, as now, actions have consequences. Today for whatever reason God is allowing a lot of actions which will have very serious consequences. Maybe He realizes we’re actually a lot slower than the young men of Elisha’s time, a lot more childish, and need to grow up before we have to deal with the consequences of our actions. Maybe God let these young men deal with the results of their blasphemous actions so quickly to give us a warning. If so, it seems most of us are still ‘too blind to see.’
Okay, that makes sense. I wish I could recall what Protestant commentator that was, it wasn’t Strong or Spurgeon, but someone from around that time. It’ll come to me.HomeschoolDad:
They’re not teasing Elisha. They are mocking him and his master Elijah. What they are really saying is, “Hey, Elisha, why don’t you up go where your master is?” It’s similar to Ananias and Sapphira and Elymas. The moral of the story is God is not mocked.
Very well put. I would still like, though, to find some book, or essay, that tackles head-on the issue of “these passages sound horrible, and quite frankly, to human eyes, they could even make Almighty God look horrible, so how do we refute a nonbeliever’s objections?”. Maybe Josh McDowell deals with such things in Evidence That Demands A Verdict, a copy of which I have around here somewhere. I would say that evangelicals actually have more “skin in the game” on matters such as this, than we do, because their whole faith rises or falls on sola scriptura and, for many, “what the Bible plainly says”. So they may have ways to refute these passages that Catholics don’t.
I still struggle from time to time with the whole conundrum of “why did God the Father require the death of His Son to redeem mankind — why could He just not have let mercy trump justice, and just written the whole thing off, forgiven the sin of the world, just keep forgiving and forgiving for that matter, and let that be that?”. My son has done some pretty outrageous things in his day, but I have always forgiven him unconditionally, with just a mild rebuke (and sometimes I have had to let him suffer the consequences of his own bad choices, which very often serves as its own corrective), but I wouldn’t require him (or anyone else) to “pay the price”, certainly not to be separated from me for all eternity. But “His ways are not our ways” isn’t going to help me justify our Faith to a nonbeliever.
On that “crashing babies” psalm, I remember what a wise monk once told me. He said one of the functions of the psalms was what he called “evangelizing our depths” – acknowledging our basest instincts and bringing them to the light of God. He said we all have, buried more or less deep, that desire for violently asserting ourselves, and that that desire needs to be put into words before God, so that he may help us convert it. Some psalms lend their words to what would be otherwise pretty much unspeakable, and help us in that process.
po18guy
Well-known member
Are you Calvinist? Penal substitution, for those who do not know, was formulated for the first time on planet earth in Geneva, Switzerland in the 1500s by one Jean Cauvin (Calvin). It requires that God wills evil in order for one to believe it. It asserts that God punished the Innocent unto death so that the guilty might be acquitted.
Rather, out of unfathomable love God “gave” his son. But, the Son, being One with the Father, could not have submitted unless for reasons of love.
Rather, out of unfathomable love God “gave” his son. But, the Son, being One with the Father, could not have submitted unless for reasons of love.
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