Goliath

TriggerDan,

This person is not worthy of being your friend. Were I you, I would sever the relationship immediately.

Sincerely,

Goliath

Magus55

Just to answer your statement, the Catechism itself, says the Magesterium ( i.e Pope) has the sole ability to authentically interpret and teach scripture and tradition. If you'd like to have a discussion in another thread on Catholic teachings and the Catechism we can, but the ability to understand and teach scripture is given solely to the Magesterium according to Catholicism.

Asha'man

Sometimes? So God is getting lazy or apathetic?

God supposedly destroyed cities, civilizations, the entire population of the word, just to wipe out evil. And not only did he do the deed, he made damn sure everybody knew who was responsible. However, these days he lets despots and dictators ruin entire countries and plunge the whole world into war.

The world looks exactly as I would expect if no God were intervening. You have to go to great lengths, perform mental gymnastics, speculate and hypothesize, to explain why an apparently random world is actually under divine control. The simplest explanation is generally the correct one: the appearance of no intervention is explained by the actual lack of intervention.

How much evidence is needed to convince you of something you don't like? How much evidence for something you really wish for? People are generally biased, they tend to believe what they want despite evidence to the contrary. How many married people are simply unable to accept that their spouse is cheating on them, when all their friends already know? It takes true strength to confront the evidence and accept an unpleasant truth.

Do you have that strength? Do you value truth more than happy fuzzy feelings?

Again, this is why personal interpretation is a bad way to read anything. People use their biases to see what they want to see, not what is written. As our good friend Koyanasquati points out, Jesus says “I come not to bring peace, but a sword!” However, people manage to think exactly the opposite.

spin

Hey, TG!

The rule is simple. One has to deal with what the text literally says before anything else can be done. One has to justify any deviance from the literal text based only on the text, the other texts of the period, and anything else you can reclaim from the period available to the writer of the text, which might influence him (and you to understand him).

Unless it can otherwise be shown, the text attempts to say what the author (ie the scribe[s] who penned it) wanted it to say, so it cannot be a book of interpretations, though we must interpret it to attempt to extract the content that the author wanted to say. That interpretation doesn't allow for reading significance into a text.

None of the above helps you with your basic problem: your friend apparently is not disposed to dealing with the text, be it simply opening the book up or attempting to divine the author's messages.


spin

CX

The problem is the severity of the consequence in relation to the crime committed. Over and over again the Hebrew tribal god JHVH is shown to give extreme reactions to infractions of his law. The flood sort is only one extreme example. He kills no just the evil, not just the deserving, but everyone and everything save Noah, his family and a handful of animals. Now I know the story says that everyone else was wicked, but think what that means. Babies, the disabled, the senile etc. Thus even those that human morality would call innocent and incapable of even in principle being wicked gets exterminated. It's a hideous example of the human sense of vengence, not an historical account of the actions of an all powerful and all loving god.

runnerryan

Asha'man
If all evil is either eventually punished or forgiven when repentance occurs then God is certainly not getting apathetic or lazy.
And do you have the strength to face the real answers? There are a lot of times when I would like to be able to talk myself out of Christianity. I'm a Catholic seminarian, meaning I'm on the "Die a Virgin" plan. If there was anyway for me to honestly talk my way out of that I would have found it. Embracing Christ means saying to sexual temptation, to drugs, to drinking as much as I would like to, and for me a family, a big salary, and a whole lot of stuff I would like to own. I'm not doing that for warm fuzzies. I'm doing that because I can't be anything but a believing Catholic without committing intellectual suicide.

RED DAVE

From runnerryan:Let me, in all compassion, ask you a question I often ask myself about my beliefs (Marxism, atheism, etc.):

What would it mean to you if your beliefs, which I don't doubt you are sincere about, are wrong? I mean, emotional commitment is not enough for a belief system. Everyone with a serious system has an emotional commitment.

I mean, what if Jesus were not the son of god? Where would you be then?

RED DAVE

runnerryan

I'd probably do the Ernest Hemingway thing. Wine, (actually I don't like wine so whiskey and beer), women, and song, throw in some sports, travel, and adventure. Just live for the thrill of things, not worry about anybody else. And then if it got boring kill myself.

spin

I usually tell people I meet that holding a religious persuasion is like choosing to have a lobotomy. I don't want to say anything nasty at all in that -- I'm trying to to be merely descriptive --, but I do want to say that you cannot use all your intellectual potential being a committed anything. Someone who is interested in maintaining an intellectual approach to the world needs to be able to break down at the drop of a hat all intellectual structures that have been built up, because of logical necessity. One needs at all times to be able to question one's basic foundations and be willing to let go of any that do not hold.

Now, how do you see the forest for the trees, other than being able to step far enough away? I think the alternative is intellectual suicide.


spin

runnerryan

Spin
Isn't a commitment to being willing to throw away intellectual structures make you a "committed anything." I don't know your exact beliefs but obviously you are an agnostic or atheist. Would you be willing to become a deist, theist, Christian, whatever if the intellectual structures supported your current views gave way?