stephan huller

all christians are catholic some nuttier than others

sotto voce

See what I mean. Utterly mind-boggling.

Tom Sawyer

Ya, that was a odd statement. Catholics are a subgroup of Christians, not the other way around. He may have meant that all modern sects of Christianity trace themselves back to the Catholic Church.

stephan huller

catholic is a term used by all christians from before the time of luther. we happen to live in a reactionary protestant cultural milieu. as i am jewish i continue to use the correct terminology

stephan huller

the erudite panelists here recognize that catholic is Greek right? it may have been taken over in latin but the same thing happened in aramaic.

Numbers Rabba describes the Patriarch Joseph as the "Catholicos" of Pharaoh's treasury. that doesn't mean he was baptized and believed in Mary

Tom Sawyer

And after the time of Luther, it came to mean only a subset of Christians because the rest of them split off into alternate sects. It's the same reason that it's incorrect to use the term British to refer to people who live in Canada, Australia and the US. All those places used to be correctly referred to as part of Britain, but then certain distinct events happened and that label no longer applied.

sotto voce

Nothing more amateur will ever be read.

If Herr Ratzinger is the Vicar of Christ, to reject him as such is to reject Christ. Either Catholics are Christians, and no others can make the claim, or Catholics are the most deluded people on earth.

And we all here know which it is. Though we know that the vast majority of Western Catholics well know that their outfit is a caricature. They must have to keep straight faces in the pews.

Or is that just another bit of cheap political mischief? It's either that, or grossly ignorant.

If that's what he meant, he must attend my beginners' course. Every Reformer declared the Vatican as the seat of the Antichrist, or similar. In other words, they said that the organisation led from the Vatican was not even legitimate. Whatever its origin, it was now defined by purely evil imagination.

They censoriously disowned it, tracing their own origins back to the original apostolic church. That is why every Protestant 'denomination' specifies that only a Bible of 66 books (not more, as the RCC et al. specify) is to be used as the arbiter of faith and practice, without the contradictory teachings of men who routinely, shamelessly, acted criminally. They held views that flatly contradicted the RCC on the essential teachings of soteriology, and on much else. Since the Reformation, Protestantism has moved away even further, finding every distinctive of the RCC to be manipulation of power to an invented, papal elite caste, away from their poor, duped victims. Obviously, Catholics today have to claim to have been the original church from which others 'rebelliously' broke away. They can't admit that they arrived far too late to be taken seriously.

So the interminable discussion here about Justin, Clement and Tertullian etc. has no right to be here, unless the existence of Protestantism has to be simply denied, which seems to be the astonishing truth. Blinkers are worn here, and the inconvenient fact of Constantinian criminality reaching to the present day is likewise ignored. Justin & Co. can't be taken seriously. And aren't, by anyone with any sense, not even Catholics, now so eager to try to prove everything from the Protestant Bible. Really. Look out at the real world.

Or carry on, blowing bubbles.

stephan huller

*it came to mean only a subset

only to imbeciles. people routine use the term "jew" to describe moses or the israelites even the samaritans. imbeciles should not be allowed to determine the meaning of important terminologies

sotto voce

Now you've read my posts, you know better.

But you have a lot more to read.

Tom Sawyer

Either that or people just disagree about the matter and don't let members of religions which don't share their beliefs have much of an influence on those beliefs.

The Catholics are free to say that you need to follow the Pope to be a Real Christian and the Baptists are free to say that Christ alone is the head of the church and it's blasphemous for a man to try and take that title. Since neither of them, however, speak for Christians as a whole as opposed to their own sect of Christianity, what their opinion on it may be doesn't set the standard.