12 Claims Every Catholic Should Be Able to Answer; Claim 1

CERC ^ | Deal Hudson

[WVKayaker]

Christ is truth. Do you believe that?

Absolutely. BUT, what I cannot comprehend is how Mary becomes a co-Redemptrix within that Truth. It is only through the hyperbole of the Roman Catholic heretical cult that it can become so perverted from what is Truth.

I will take the Words of Scripture over the perversions of the Roman Catholic hierarchy! That is why It can easily be classified as a cult. The large numbers mean nothing, except that lots of people get indoctrinated as youths, and fail to investigate the Scriptures. The Reformation came about due to many who finally realized, "hey, that's NOT what Scripture says".

For Reference, see Luther's "95 Theses", then get back to me.

(Disclaimer: I am not Lutheran, and I do not agree with all he posited, but it is far closer to the TRUTH than the drivel and error that comes from Rome!)

[nathanbedford]

If there IS an ultimate truth, then society is obligated to enforce it by encouragement and, if necessary, by law.

I am confused and I do not understand how you can square that statement with this statement:

I also would suggest that the First Amendment is not what you think it is. It has to do with the establishment of religion as state-supported

I would suggest that the history of the 30 Years War and the subsequent wars and persecutions which succeeded it tell us that when we codify "ultimate truth" we better be damn sure that everybody agrees that it is ultimate truth. We might have a Bullshit detector on FreeRepublic but we have no Ultimate Truth Detector.

Those who would impose sharia think they have ultimate truth. They simply will not keep their religion within the walls of their mosque. I quite agree with you, they are wrong. But the problem is they will chop off both our heads to prove their point. But if there is an ultimate truth and they have it right and we have it wrong, they would be justified chopping off our heads for denying ultimate truth. But, you say, the First Amendment would prohibit that because it is an "establishment" of religion. The problem is not just the establishment of a religion but the enforcement of its morality.

The idea of the First Amendment and the Enlightenment and the exhaustion of the 30 Years War led to the modus vivendi that you keep your ultimate truth in your church and I will keep my ultimate truth in my church and we will make laws somewhere in between by compromise. When compromise goes out the window in the name of ultimate truth we burned witches and Muslims still chop off heads.

The next problem is using religion outside the four walls of the church to impose behavior in conformity with doctrine. It is not as easy as it sounds when one says that morality comes from religion. If our religion proscribes adultery and prescribes death by stoning as ours did in the Old Testament and Muslims do even today, have we drawn morality from religion? Only in the sense that morality is a reflection of culture without ethics.

And that is the problem with trying to find modern morality from ancient religions. Do you still want to gouge out an eye for an eye? I don't think so, I think you would revert to a modern ethics. I know I would.

So in a decent Western world with the experience of the Enlightenment and educated by the 30 Years War, we operate under the compromise of ultimate truth tempered by politics or ethics-whatever label you choose. We go into the marketplace of ideas to sell our version of ultimate truth and to impose our doctrine on behavior. But we recognize limits, we recognize the need to compromise. We accept that others do not accept our ultimate truth. We even accept that we do not have the moral or ethical right to impose our ultimate truth on nonbelievers. To some degree we accept that we do not have the moral or ethical right to impose our doctrines of behavior on nonbelievers. We limit those restrictions to a realm which we can justify, not by religion, but by ethics. Then we go to our churches and pray that the benighted will be brought to accept our ultimate truth.

[IronJack]

I agree largely with your stance, but as I said, I don't believe you can divorce law from morality. And if morality arises as a function of religion, then you can't separate law from religion. WHAT religion is of course the core of your contention, and a valid one. But law does not arise of its own accord, independent of religion (in most cases). I think it is not only denialist but impossible to draw an arbitrary line between the church and the statehouse. We can pretend to keep our morality confined to the pew, but if we do, it is to the detriment of society, not to its benefit. The draconian apparatus necessary to ensure that insulation is more onerous than the seepage of religion into the public sphere.

To the degree that every religion embraces certain Truths, if we can agree on those, there is no need to separate politics and religion. The rest is just dogma and ritual, and on those points we can disagree without chaos resulting.

[nathanbedford]

Here here is an essay dealing with our subject and one which I generally agree with.

If we have no absolute truth we descend inexorably into the swamps of relativism which is only a half step away from debased cynicism. The entire approach of those on the left who would pry us away from our belief in a Christian God employs all the tools of The Frankfurt School to induce a reflexive rejection of all values, not just Christian values, and to impose a habitual reflexive way of thinking, "critical thinking," which is academic jargon for nihilism.

If the left can cause us to abandon our faith we will eventually have abandoned our epistemology, our way of knowing what we know. At some point we have to make judgments about our truth and how much of it we can export to a secular world. By the same token, we have to make judgments about how much compromise we will accept from the secular world and we must, in making that judgment, not forget that there is a philosophy, a school of thinking which infests our academia, a school of thinking which wants to leave us defenseless and unable either as a child of God or as a citizen of the United States to render a wholesome judgment.

All this is another way of saying that the attack by secularists who have been armed with a new vocabulary and a new cachet by The Frankfurt School is intended to undermine our confidence in our relationship with our God. When that has been accomplished, the rest is easy and the destruction of the nation is as inevitable as the destruction of the individual.

The defense to this attack? Repair to ultimate truth and distill it to modern service. For a Christian I believe that means to repair to the cross. It is only from this place that we can confidently confront those who have matriculated at The School of Perpetual Relativism.

[IronJack]

It's interesting that the Post-post-modernist school arose directly from the Frankfurters, and recognizes the futility of nihilism as a worldview. Jurgen Habermas is one of the disillusioned po-mo's, and makes it clear that without some kind of absolutes, the world degrades into a jungle, in its civic and its philosophical dimensions.

At the heart of his argument is that rejecting absolutes is itself an absolute.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

-— At the heart of his argument is that rejecting absolutes is itself an absolute. -—

They actually figured that out? I’m impressed.

[defconw]

Are you going to post more of these or did you already? I can’t find the Claim 3. Thanks

[IronJack]

Oh, but the convoluted path they had to take to get there ...!

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

--- Oh, but the convoluted path they had to take to get there ...! ---

When you're a modern philosophy professor, you have to justify your existence by stating in a book what you could say in one sentence.

Give me St. Thomas anyday --the ultimate bottom-line philosopher.

[IronJack]

It doesn’t help that a lot of it — especially the Frankfurter stuff — is translated from the German, which makes it almost impenetrable.

[NYer]

Are you going to post more of these or did you already? I can’t find the Claim 3. Thanks

I had planned to post all 12 until claim #2 turned into a spam fest. But, since you asked, you shall receive. Heads up!

[defconw]

:) Thnaks.