Beoran

Amos, I'm always saddened to see a person who has not shaken himself from the brainwashing of that terrible sect that Catholicism is.

True. To be a Catholic, you must "crucify" your self . Subvert it, supress it. Submit yourself. To God? Yes, that is what they teach you, but that is the great lie. You submit not to God, but to the Catholic Church. Enthralled by "intuition", you become their slave. I too suffered the abuse, the rage, the subtle supression, the mind games, the lies. I too felt the hollow bliss and the protracted cravings. But no more. The mask has fallen, and the chain is broken.

Amos

Indeed catholic means universal but is most opposite to Christian because Christian-ity is the condition of being Christian and is never a religion because it is the end of religion. Capital C Catholics are the Church Triumphant and they are Christian. To become catholic baptism into the Catholic Church is required and the transition from a small c catholic to a capital C Catholic is the transformation of mind, soul and body.

Amos

Hi Beoran, I like the tradition of Catholicism including the blind following of it teachings and participation in its mysterious practices. What I like most is that they do not crucify sinners and will never try to pound some form of salvation into your head. It is a religion for sinners and righteousness is one of their taboos.

Beoran

Tho half truths a,nd a lie. Yeah, they do not "crufify" "sinners", but the verbal abuse against them from the priests is not negligable. As for not trying to pound salvation into you... for that they are to busy trying to pound you into submission usign emotional tricks. As for righteousness, the copious numbers of self-righteous Catholic priests I have met does not really jive with your statement.

But hey, if you like blind following of these teachings, then by all means. They're always looking for new good slaves.

As for the "mysterious practices", I see what you mean. They're experts in putting up a good show. Contemporay catholic services, which are a 20th century invention, by the way, are well choreographed. To the point even where quite some utter unbelievers in my country participate in the ritual just for the sake of the show element of the ritual, especially marriages. Probably because the mandatory secular marriage at city hall is a bit short and plain.

Amos

It's so easy to be a good Catholic and it gets easier by the day. I just came back from a beautiful funeral in Holland (Alphen near Baarle Nassua) held for people that haven't been to Church for well over 20 years. No questions asked and a full service provided. It brings closure to life and ends a union that one was sanctionned by the Church.

The earnsty of the priest? Why not? If religion is a game that is played for keeps you might as well make the best of it.

I love it and if marriages are made in heaven because love is blind they deserve to be blessed in heaven (I hold here that the Catholic Church is crammed with heaven).

John Page

Oh ! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,
Half dead and half alive ! . . .

John Betjeman - 'Death in Leamington'

crocodile deathroll

The Catholic Church do not stop bragging about their 2000 year old tradition. I find there is one problem with that there something that has been around for 7 million times longer than that.

Forget all that God garbage, I call it the universe. The universe, the source of our existance in the first place. So before one considers their nature of existance after they die they should consider their nature of existance before they were conceived, and the 14 billion years of non-existance that had emerged from.

I first have to make it clear I am an atheist, but I do not necessarily disbelieve the survival of our future death. In fact I find it more plausible to think that we all emerge out of a critical phase of the universe's evolution. A phase when the universe in one of its many phase transitions reached a critical level of self organized complexity. Just enough in fact for the phenomena of consciousness to flash into existence, and its first flash point as a default consciousness. The phase when one is at one with all neural matter.

So I am of the view that when one dies they are not totally obliterated but they regress right back to the default consciousness phase before they were yet to be born for the simple reason they have forgotten they have ever been born with all their life memories of this life been destroyed irretrievably. In effect they have the potential in the universe's consciousness phase transition to be born again and become somebody else because there is no possibility of knowing or anyone to inform them that they have already lived their life.

cheers

croc

Sr. Zonules

If you are a Catholic, then you, too agree with the current pope (who's actually an alright man, except for some really conservitave views, and being terribly striken by parkinson's), who is against human embryo research. I won't even begin (but perhaps in another thread) on the pro-choice/pro-life issues. Being a good Catholic, of for that matter, a good catholic, means that you have to be subservient. You have to sacrifice your own life for the sake of one book. I would never give my life up for anything, because I am not a suicidal man. I was born and raised a Lutheran, and I hold no real grudges with the ELCA. However, I am a Humanist, a modernist, and most importantly, a free-thinker and a free-man. That means that I don't let anyone or anything or even God Almighy Himself think for me, and that makes me more powerful than God, and more ethical than some dogmatic congregation and clergy.

[ December 19, 2002: Message edited by: Sr. Zonules ]</p>

Thomas Ash

In a very real sense, Theli, I think that's true. I see the idea of 'you' as beign very much a matter of structure and accumulated memory. So you when you were 5 is in a very real sense a different person from you when you are 50. Don't most people feel this way about their (much) younger self?
Like so often, I think the idea of an essential 'you' or a soul is a rather dubious concept, and discussing it assuming that it does exist can lead to some odd assumptions. There's the question of if 'you' are trnsferred onto a computer, would it still be 'you'? If you treat the 'soul' as being an 'essence' that can be transferred from one place to another like a physical object, you have to say either yes or no, but if you think of it as being the result of structure and memories, then you can say that in a sense you at 5 and you at 50 or you in the computer is 'you', and in a sense it's a different person.

NialScorva

While this thread started out with a "is it possible to show that there is/isn't life after death via a priori logic" vibe, it has since veared off into a discussion of particular religions.

Please feel free to follow the thread further in General Religious Discussions.