Jack the Bodiless

The authors of the Bible believed that stars were little lights attached to the Firmament dome, which could be knocked off.

Apologists like to claim that the falling stars of Revelation are "meteors", but the sweep of a dragon's tail dislodges one-third of the stars in the sky in Revelation 12:4.

Sheshbazzar

Hmmm, we believe that stars are thermo-nuclear fires.

Chili

But dear people, it's got nothing to do with stars because heaven is a state of mind.
And Pete, Mary presides over the tree of life which is the unknown part of us as seen from the tree of knowledge. She therefore is the unknown part of us that we learn to recognize and adore as Catholic. This same Mary becomes our mother when we become son of man and eventually will crown her queen of heaven and earth when we become fully man. I think they refer to this with Assumption and Coronation.

Chris Weimer

Just for a minute, I thought someone was parodying Chili...

GenesisNemesis

Isn't "Virgin Mary" a mistranslation of some Hebrew word that means "young woman" ?

Chris Weimer

No. The New Testament was written in Greek, not Hebrew. You're thinking of the Septuagint mistranslation of almah as parthenos which early Christians took to mean virgin (which is parthenos' primary meaning).

Mythra

Got a feeling that the Hebrew being referred to is the Isaiah 7 "prophecy" of the virgin birth.

The Hebrew word normally talked about from Isaiah 7 is "Almah" - which can also refer to a young maiden.

"Bethulah" is the Hebrew word that might be more indicative of "virgin" in the strictest sense of the word.

Chris Weimer

I think you got a little mixed up. There is no virgin birth in Isaiah, but there is a virgin birth in the New Testament.

Yes, we've gone through this before. But virgin is still there in the New Testament. Just because the early Christians got the Hebrew wrong doesn't mean that the New Testament word "virgin" is a bad translation of the Greek.

Apples and oranges.

mountainman

Perhaps one has to understand the inner world and the outer world
as one continuum of nature.

Dear Chili, in regard to the exposition of the catholic faith, I am
convinced that the new testament is a fiction of men composed
by wickedness (Constantine and Eusebius, in the 4th CE), and
though it has in it nothing divine, by making full use of that part
of the soul which loves fable and is childish and foolish, it has
induced men to believe that the monstrous tale is truth.

Thousands of years before Mary was the understanding that that
all space -- that which is out between the stars, and that which is
between the atoms of our own body -- was a goddess called
"Akasha", in which moved the primal energy called "Prana".

Best wishes,


Pete

Chili

Perhaps, but if nature needs the inner world to manifest the outer world it is wrong to look at the outer world to get to know the inner world. I agree with the above and that is why Catholics are not bible people. They would say that it is wrong to read the NT (or at least the Gospels) until you can write your own and after the story itself becomes redundant. Reading it before that time is like adding yeast to the rising action of the soul and that would be like raping Akasha with her own Prana.

I don't even mind you calling it a monstrous tale, which doesn't say much for the wisdom of Christain religions that each built their own salvation recipe on it. Catholicsm, otoh, is a tradition wherein we are ark-builders and Mary is the sea that we float our boat on to get to the other side of life.
Thanks Pete and likewise. I would say that it has nothing to do with time because there is nothing new under the sun. I think that each mythology will have its own basin of knowledge that is created out of this same primal energy that they called Prana. We call it (Prana) the Holy Spirit that emanates from Mary (she's the queen of angels in our story) until she becomes our light by day and by night and the actual sea that we can go by and walk on in our daily lives. Kind of like: if you have Akasha, who needs Prana.