Albert Cipriani

Terry,
You claim:
Your words prove that you have no working philosophical understanding of these terms you use so loosely. And your conceptual lacuna can’t be filled in by any dictionary definition to which you may appeal. The dictionary is the last refuge of scoundrels.

Magic and sorcery are quid pro quo deals with the devil. For example, I sacrifice the lives of virgins and children, and I’ll be assured of good crops next year. Even so-called white magic is similarly selfish. I say these magic words, perform a stupid ritual, and I get what I want. Catholicism, Christianity, even Judaism have no corollary.

Even Catholic sacraments are performed with no notion of I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine. Our adherence to the sacraments is out of obedience to Divine Law just as our adherence to the decalogue is out of obedience to Natural Law and Divine Law.

In other words, we perform sacraments and do what’s right because because. We do what we do not out of our own will but out of our own design, like how birds fly and fish swim not because they think they decide to but because they are equipped to. Thus, Catholic morality and sacraments should be seen as the embodiment of man’s natural and supernatural nature, not as some sort of external magic hula-hoop. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

Luiseach

What happened to the concept of free will?

TerryTryon

Albert: Two words: "special pleading."

Albert Cipriani

Dear d,
You ask,
If by this, you mean, can animals go to heaven? the Church is mum. So we are free to speculate. St. Thomas didn’t think so. I do. But this speculation hinges upon a binary conception of God as a being that either can or cannot be apprehended.

Where St. Thomas conceived of man as the only animal whose soul was capable of apprehending God, I conceive of all living things, as a function of their living (“God… breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7), to be participating in God’s life and thereby apprehending God. Life itself is actually the apprehending of the infinite God Himself to greater or lesser finite degrees.

St. Thomas believed animals had souls in the same clunky sense that Aristotle did, that is, that animals had an animal soul, vegetables had a vegetable soul, and humans had a rational soul. By soul they meant “form” or “essence,” the organizing principal whereby the animal, vegetable, or human “matter” expressed its animal-ness, vegetable-ness or humanness. In other words, the carbon that is me that was vegetable before it was animal before it was my hamburger is the matter that my soul expresses as Albert... until the souls of worms express my matter in the form of worms.

The question of whether or not any soul or form can exist independently of its body or matter is answered in the affirmative. But can our soul exist independently of God? You atheists answer that question every day of your lives. Yes our souls can live independently of God, but such lives are a living hell.

It’s hard to appreciate hell here and now, cuz there’s so many distractions from it here on earth and in time. But when the artifices of time and the material world are stripped away from the soul, when it is left with it’s naked hunger for God, then its life will be a living hell. That’s how Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost described himself: “I myself am hell.”

A somewhat over-wrought expression of my view of it follows (This really isn’t the forum for it, but, what the hell!):

space, emptied of itself,
rupturing full of nothing:
a solid pressing nothingness,
a blackness so black it's not seen,
a pressing so pressing it's not felt
but is incorporating;
no motion, no breath, no sensation
nor thought; just my blind will to will,
without the Light or the Way to:
the sole me, my soul's free will,
striped of its means and its mediums,
doomed to its boundless freedom,
non-plastic eternity shackles
-- locks out of time into the present --
frozen in endless being;
an outrageous misfortune: to be…
to be tortured, be dead,
to be anything but this nothing
which makes I myself hell

You say:
A scientific theory is said to “work” when it successfully predicts empirical data. For example, if our theory of gravity conceives of it as a distortion of space instead of a force operating through space, then light should be deflected by gravity even tho, as a waveform, light is without mass. Thus, when the deflection of starlight by our sun was verified during a total eclipse, we had empirical data for the theory of gravity as being a distortion of space rather than a force. And that theory could then be said to “work.”

In exactly the same way, cave paintings can be said to “work” in that they illustrated (literally!) the sacrificial nature of all true and all false religions since those prehistoric times. They illustrate the debt man has always known he owes to Nature or to God for his life. They illustrate the guilt man has always felt in reference to the fact that his life is predicated upon the taking of life. They illustrate our first feeble attempts to balance the scales of temporal injustice with eternal hopes.

By their attempt to permanently recreate the matter and thereby the forms of the animals whose lives they took, those cavemen were attempting to redeem themselves for what they had done. That sentiment “works” in that we’ve been doing what they did ever since. In all these ways, the cave paintings stand as the seminal religious idea, a kind of Holy Grail for “The Lamb of God… Who taketh away the sins of the world.” [Tridentine Mass] – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

Albert Cipriani

Dear Lui,
You ask,
Nothing. Choosing to do something mindlessly, or because because, is still a choice and does not abrogate the concept of free will.

To the contrary, drug addictions as all other sins, by their very nature erode not only the concept of free will but eviscerate its functionality. Indeed, what is wrong with sins are not so much that they are wrong, or the wrong that thet do others, but how they wrong our metaphysical core as free agents, how they wrong our very capacity for freedom.

Terry says:
Albert says:
– Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic
Albert's Rants

diana

In reply to a string of vague comments that descended from Mr. Albert Cipriani's assertion that it's intelligent to base belief on emotions, he offers the following:

Oh. I get it. Argument from antiquity.

Thanks for clearing that up.

d

Albert Cipriani

Dear D,
I only got a C in high school geometry. But guess what, the geometry they failed so miserably to teach me was Euclidean Geometry, geometry devised by an old dead Greek guy. Ergo, that course was one long extended "argument from antiquity," one I didn’t fully buy. Shows what a smart young man I was. – Insincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

P.S. Hey, the water’s fine in the evolution/creation forum where you dumped my post. Like Brier Rabbit, I’m liking that brier patch you threw me into. Come join me in that mixed metaphor.

orac

"Scoundrel" is not usually intended to mean "person who engages in rational debate" but at least now we know what you mean when you call someone a scoundrel.

Does it bother you when people redefine your words to mean something different to your intended meaning? It should bother you.

Unless you agree on the meaning of a word, you can not use it in a debate. Even if you use the same word as another person, if you think it means something different, then how can you understand the other person?

Dictionaries aren't tools of satan.

Roller

This might be little of topic but I guess it has something to do with the worst argument.

I'm debating with this theist and she's talking about how God is love and all that stuff. Then I quoted a couple of Old Testament passages. What absolute stunned me is next: she said how she belives in God Jesus Christ, not the Old Testament God. :banghead: :banghead: :banghead: :notworthy

diana

Considering the title of this thread, that sounds on-topic enough to me.

Talk about pigeonholing. Sheesh.

d