Amos

Are you sure that is not just protestant theology?

beyelzu

yes, i am sure. also i would like to point out that both cases are consistent with catholic theology. in both cases the perpetrators of the barbarity were acting to save people's souls. if the conquistadors hadnt killed the babies they would have been bound to sin sooner or later and because there was no priest where they were at they would never have been able to get to heven. and only by confession can you save your soul, so if a person has to torture you to get you to confess, well he is doing you a favor

Amos

Still sounds like protestant theology to me.

Gemma Therese

Yes. Protestant theolgy teaches that humans are innately bad; Catholic theology teaches that humans are innately good.

Gemma Therese

Thor Q. Mada

Gemma,
They are both right. There are good people and bad people, but there are much more good people than bad people. In my life, I only met a very small number of bad people. And by the way as an engineer, I would say,good an bad are judged against a certain moral standard, whatever that is. Either the catholics or the protestand are using the wrong standard.

On the subject that we cannot begin to understand god, that is correct. Since god is a creation of human imagination, and since human imagination has no bounds and continuously evolving, and depending on the individual, nobody can understand god as it is for anybody else.

Bree

How is Catholic theology teaching that humans are "innately good" if un-baptised babies automatically rot in Purgatory?

seebs

First off, they don't teach that anymore; that was an answer someone came up with, but they eventually switched to "we leave the question to God's mercy".

Secondly, "good" doesn't mean "flawless", and they believe that, without baptism (of some sort; there's special cases), you are not joined to the church, and thus to the salvation thing.

Disclaimer: Not Catholic, but I try to keep informed.

Bree

You're a better man than I, seebs .

Nevertheless, I fail to see how the above statement helps the case for a loving God. Apparently the "good doesn't mean flawless" thing applies to God, too.

seebs

I personally don't get it either, but basically, these days, the Catholic church is pretty willing to say "I dunno, God can do whatever He wants, but this is what *we* will do".

Perchance

All right.

"Won't entirely understand" or "won't understand?" Most of the arguments I've seen formulated on this are based on the latter. You seem to be arguing based on the former, which would make more sense (since the second goes back to the "If God is unknowable, how do you know this?" thing that I mentioned).

I suppose it depends on happiness. This god concept seems to fit your experiences and make you happy. It doesn't fit mine, and it wouldn't make me happy. Perhaps the distinction between this lies between "God can be known by everyone and make everyone happy" idea, and the "Many paths to the same mountain" idea. I happen to think they're many paths to happiness rather than many paths to divinity, though.

In cases where there's apparently a disjunction between what worshippers knew of the Old Testament God and what they knew of the New Testament God, do you think it was more a case of people trying to understand something they couldn't, or more a case of human concerns changing, or something else?

I wondered. I had a theist friend- well, essentially a former friend now- claim that if he had been born in India to a Hindu family, he would still have become Christian. On the other hand, he thought that I wouldn't have been a nonbeliever if I were born outside the United States. To each his own, I suppose .

I think there's a difference between "unknowable" and "unknown" at work here. Humans may not be able to stretch their brains to comprehend it at the moment, but someday science may have a working framework. And I haven't really heard anyone claim that we cannot and never will understand space. Yet God is apparently forever beyond our reach. That's one thing that somewhat puzzles me about Christian theology: if God is forever going to be unknown, what's the point?

I think we probably have different definitions of "conversion" as well. I tend to think of it as a kind of life-changing overturning of deep-rooted convictions. Of course, this might have come from only knowing converted born-againers.

Perhaps now. I think it entirely possible that the religion as created then fulfilled the goals of those times it was created in and those people who created it. A religion sculpted under modern ideals (for example, Wicca) does tend to reflect those ideals.

I think it does, in two ways:

1) It helps with conversions, reassuring people outside the religion that they aren't going to be damned forever by an accident of birth, if they convert.

2) It reassures the believers that their religion has a kind core.

And, of course, 3:

3) It functions as an undercurrent in the minds of people like Fred Phelps, reassuring them that they are acting in the name of love.
Not all Christians are like him, but the ones who are can excuse their hatred by phrases like "hate the sin, love the sinner" and think they are loving people even as they exercise hatred against them.



In that you're different from most other Christians I've met, and your position is, I think, at least more logically defensible.

-Perchance.