ROFL!
But the refutation of your bolded is trivial.
Then a theological wizard like yourself should be able to do it.
Posted on 11/12/2022 7:44:47 AM PST by lowbridge
The famous Jewish actor and humorist Gad Elmaleh, beloved in France, announced his conversion to the Catholic faith, a process in which he says the Virgin Mary played a crucial role.
Elmaleh, 51, was the partner of Charlotte Casiraghi, the daughter of Princess Caroline of Monaco, with whom they have a son named Rafael.
His conversion to Catholicism is depicted in his new film, “Reste un peu,” (“Stay a while”).
The Jewish actor, who according to the Spanish newspaper El Mundo will take the name of Jean-Marie when he is baptized, has studied theology in Paris, and in 2019 he participated in a musical in London about St. Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary who saw Our Lady of Lourdes.
Elmaleh told the French newspaper Le Figaro that “the Virgin Mary is my most beautiful love” and expressed his surprise that in France the “vast majority of Catholics don’t live their faith openly.”
As a child, he recounted in the interview, he entered a church and saw an image of the Mother of God.
“It wasn’t a vision, just a simple statue, but I was petrified. I began to cry and hid for fear of being discovered by my family, for fear of curses and superstition. I kept it a secret for my entire childhood,” he recalled.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicnewsagency.com ...
Are you now criticizing the Scriptures in keeping with 21st century Western feminist norms?
You're doing the Jon Stewart Daily show "clown nose on / clown nose off" thing.
Troll.
But the refutation of your bolded is trivial.
Then a theological wizard like yourself should be able to do it.
Does a self-identified Crazy Cat Lady Man really have to try to continually redefine words?
My adopted self-portrait, borrowed from one of the crevo threads
Well, we all know that YOU do not troll or lie...
It wasn’t upsetting *me*.
Not my problem.
I think you answered it by not answering it, Grey, but I appreciate the response nonetheless.
You state that the Bible never records Mary as having sinned. I disagree. I don’t think it was necessary to call out that sweet Jewish lady as a sinner since the Bible already teaches us plainly that all of mankind is in a fallen state, i.e., sinners, since the Garden of Eden fiasco. Also, the Bible tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as you already know, I’m sure. Do you think that does not include Mary? Assuming you do believe such, which I think you do given your above response, then we would have to say blasphemously that Jesus was NOT the only person without sin. Are you willing to go that far, Grey? Could you tell God that without fear of being struck by lightning?
The RCC has made of Mary someone biblically unknown, by teaching things such as her assumption, being co-redemtrix, etc. & etc., which you could argue that the Bible doesn’t say that she wasn’t this or that, I suppose, but it, the Bible, nowhere comes even close to implying such things. Also, it took years and years to make her into what she wasn’t as according to Scripture. She’s simply unrecognizable in the RCC view of her as the Mary, mother of Jesus, in Scripture.
If you were to ask a person who simply read the Bible and never attended either Catholic or Christian churches:
1) Who helps Jesus run things and helps with handling prayers to God?
2) Who was also as sinless as Jesus?
I’m going to stop at those two, as they make the point that the person would be stumped into trying to figure out how the interrogator even got to the questions in the first place.
These things make a liar of God, and more and more I’m glad to see people open their eyes to the fact that they’re man-made doctrines designed to deceive. It took centuries to move her along and into her unbiblical position of the RCC’s opinion of today of Queen of Heaven, which, if one knows their Bible, that’s a damnation of the mother of Our Lord. She most certainly is not the Queen of Heaven and should never, ever be spoken of in such an evil and blasphemous way. There’s a Queen of Heaven all right, but to call one that is no compliment.
Re Job. It’s interesting that God returned to Job doubly what he’d lost but for his children. As Chuck Missler pointed out, it’s because he, Job that is, didn’t lose them because of their having eternal life. Praise God!
(Please forgive any errors in my typing. Problems this morning.)
Here is wisdom. Amen, m’Lady.
And there is avoidance.
—Rekt, hypocritical troll(in his best Judy Tanuda voice, “Well; it CUDDA happened!”)
Some people really stink up the religion threads. It’s shocking — as if they don’t really believe either in their religion or in the First Amendment.
Yes, the stories from Rome really do have a stench about them.!
Isaiah 1:11-17
Christianity is basically divided between the “smells and bells” and the “happy clappys.” Love how you all brag about poaching others while religious belief as a whole continues to decline in the west.
And also you, Songcraft! A blessed Sabbath day to you.
It's a VERY delicate topic, since there are all KINDS of heresies, (literal) evil sprits, people being led astray, people getting carried away with their own intellect, hucksters,...
But Jesus really did say, John 16:12ff --
"12I still have much to tell you, but you cannot yet bear to hear it. 13However, when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth. For He will not speak on His own, but He will speak what He hears, and He will declare to you what is to come. 14He will glorify Me by taking from what is Mine and disclosing it to you."
A number of Protestant denominations have decided that God's revelation ended with the ending of the last Scriptures. And that therefore, God has nothing more to say to us: whether by vision, prophecy, private inspiration, continuing revelations to / through the Church.
Since God does NOT contradict Himself, it is safe, and fair, to note that anything in Scripture should not be flatly contradicted: as one of the trolls on this thread has suggested, the Mormons. He kind of ignored that the Mormon started in the 1800s with the writings of Joseph Smith and some others, and that the hmm, basic, ground level, "fundamental" doctrines are utterly contradictory to basic Christian theology: e.g. Jesus and Lucifer are brothers and more or less flipped a coin to see who got to be the good guy, who got to be the bad guy.
Whereas the very definition of "canonicity" was made by the Catholics, ages before the Protestant Reformation and even hundreds of years before the separation of Catholic and Orthodox. It surprised me very much (having attended Lutheran schools) that the Apocrypha were not man-made additions to the Bible by some anonymous dead-and-buried Catholic committee somewhere, but had been removed by the Protestants; and that Luther had tried to remove James from the Bible ("Tell them Martin Luther would have it so.")
There is a science fiction author who used to be a hard-core atheist who converted to Christianity who wrote an essay on this; I read it a number of years ago, and looked for it for about three hours on his webpages maybe six months ago, without being able to track it down. It is not that he convinced me, but he laid out the logical contradictions in Sola Scriptura (given the problem of canonicity), and that the Catholic and Orthodox predated Protestantism and then Sola Scriptura in very concise way.
This leads to the progression of attitudes I posted in Post 81 this thread; I *think* that got written before you joined the thread, and before for high school cafeteria food fight really got started, so I reproduce the relevant part here:
The difficulty in discussing any such issues, is that most people who are deeply engaged in these topics have certain verbal formulations burned into their head -- both for what they believe to be true, and therefore hold fast to; and for what they consider to be the errors of others.
What can happen all too often, is that a person says "statement XYZ" then another person hears the part "X" and mentally rushes in to fill in "XAB" instead -- which isn't what the first person said at all.
The problem is that I reject the insistence on Sola Scriptura -- "If it wasn't mentioned in the Scriptures, it is not necessary for salvation" can too easily become "if it wasn't mentioned in the Scriptures, it simply is forbidden to consider that it might happen to be of God or used by God to help someone towards Salvation".
And THAT last sentence too often springs the knee-jerk counter argument that "once you go outside the Scriptures, you open yourselves up to all KINDS of errors and even demonic influence"...which then auto-catalyzes into "everything not explicitly mentioned in Scripture (especially the teachings of my specific denomination" is *perforce* demonic.
The problem is that you are insisting that anything not listed in Scripture MUST be completely false; that's a good way to eliminate a LOT of errors, but you might be throwing some Grace away too. Mary is not salvific as Jesus is, she didn't die for our sins; but by His grace, I believe He allows His Mother to be a channel of God's Grace and Power.(*)
If you wish to say "Gee it's not Scriptural; I wanna stay where I know it's safe" I won't attack you; it's not "You're going to Hell, Prottie" but "Dang it, you're missing out on many more conduits, delivery systems, for God's grace and power, why throw away ANY help from God?" (*)
(*) I just remembered, another issue often dividing Catholics and Protestants is "once saved always saved" as compared to St. Paul's writing "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" -- It's not that Mary pays for our sins or anything; but her prayers or even in some cases direct aid, may act as the method God chooses to frustrate the works of the enemy in our lives and allow God's work to continue in us without interference.
I have had Protestants here on Free Republic literally tell me "to my face" online, when shown the following picture:
(The Divine Mercy Chaplet, based on visions of a Polish nun in the early 20th century, where she says Jesus instructed her directly to make this image and publicize it with the caption "Jesus I trust in You" -- where the red and white represent the water and blood coming from his side after being pierced by a spear on the cross)
that this picture is of a demon because it depicts Jesus as beautiful, whereas Isaiah 52:3 prophesied of Jesus that "He had no stately form or majesty to attract us, no beauty that we should desire Him. "
I suggest it would be extremely charitable to call that attitude, "Throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
It is my discovery of various visions like that, and the reading of the autobiographies and writings of a number of saints, that convinced me that the Protestant teaching that "Catholics believe in salvation by works and don't know anything of a personal relationship with Jesus" is utter hogwash. There's a difference between "a necessary and required component of the mechanism of salvation of mankind" and "God allows His Mother to act to spread God's grace to help certain individuals and by the way, since God is so merciful, and not-hung-up-on-Protestant-doctrine, that as many people want to approach Him that way, or grow in faith that way, He will accept them instead of casting them aside due to lack of ideological purity"
(*) As it turns out, there are Catholic teachings which go much further than that, based on certain Scriptures which are not emphasized by Protestants, or not interpreted by Protestants in the same way. And on the other hand, the Lutherans retained the feast of the Assumption of Mary even though it is not in Scripture, and the earliest traditions/rumblings about it we know of date bake to the 400s or 500s.
For Mary, I accept the teachings of the Catholic Church, that she was miraculously preserved from sin, by God, to be the Mother of Jesus. The Orthodox do not agree with this, but they do not believe in Original Sin in exactly the same was as is common to most western denominations; and I do not have enough confidence that I understand what I have read of their point of view, to do it justice. And yet they also honor her as the Mother of God.
Yes, I read what you and others have wrote about "hundreds of years for the teachings about Mary"...but Sola Scriptura came about around 1,000 years after *that*. Merely stating the number of years since the Apostolic Era until a teaching was first formed, or formalized, or accepted, isn't by itself enough to make it true, for a number of reasons that are beyond the scope of this thread.
If you're going to say, "That's UNScriptural"™ not quite; it's "aScriptural" -- it comes to us through the teaching authority of the Church, which I accept as legitimate, and Protestants do not. Whence comes the Protestant's authority to declare that the succession from Peter through the Church Fathers, suddenly gets made null and void? The Catholics at least quote Jesus "You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church"; the Bible literally chides those who say "I belong to Cephas; I belong to Apollos; I belong to Paul; I belong to Christ" and yet Protestants have NO problem with entire denominations named after their human (founders? bellwethers? popularizers?) such as the Wesleyans, Lutherans, and Calvinists. The common reason given for Protestantism is the corruption of the Church hierarchy (schisms leading to two rival claimants to the Papacy excommunicating each other, sexual scandals, mixing of Church and Politics, indulgences, and 'keeping the people in ignorance by withholding the Word of God' and so on. And this got mixed in with all kinds of accusations about "salvation by works" as opposed to justification by faith.
Compare Galatians 2:15-16
"15“We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles 16know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in d Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified."
and
and Ephesians 2:8-9:
"8For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9not by works, so that no one can boast."
To James 2:24:
"See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone."
What? Don't those contradict each other? (rhetorical flourish)
NO! Because they are taken out of context.
James 2:26 says, "For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead."
and on the other hand, Ephesians 2:10 says:
For we are His handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.
(which ties into the "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" which goes on to say, "For it is God who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure."
So the works-BASED religion is useless; it is vain if you are trusting in righteousness according to the written Jewish Law for Salvation; but if the works are *because* of your faith, or your works are being led by the Spirit of God, then they are not in vain ("All who are led by the Spirit of God are the sons of God" and "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.")
I hope you like Progressive Rock. The singer is Neal Morse, formerly of the band Spock's Beard, who converted to Christianity, and is not a Catholic. This is from his concept album Sola Scriptura about the life of Martin Luther.
Some of his personal testimony from another one of his concerts is here.
The other reason I am ready to accept the Immaculate Conception, is the Old Testament figures Enoch and Elijah. Both of them were taken from Earth to heaven: before the Resurrection. And yet Scripture teaches us "All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God" and that "The Wages of Sin is Death." How then did anyone before the Resurrection get to go to Heaven (the Shunammite's son in 2 Kings 4, the man thrown into Elisha's burial place in 2 Kings 13, and even good old Lazarus, brother of Martha in the Gospels, were Resurrected, but didn't go straight to Heaven). I thus conclude that
a) the Resurrection power of Jesus can be applied retroactively to save from sin and death
b) people being taken up to Heaven, other than Jesus has happened: hence the Assumption of Mary isn't automatically rumor.
Incidentally, I find it quite ironic that the finding of the Mary's tomb empty, and only lilies there, was ascribed to...Doubting Thomas.
(Another point. There was on some other thread on Free Republic, an article talking about how various cells from the baby growing before birth, leave the womb and become incorporated into the Mother's body. The article mentioned for example that if the mother has a heart attack, stem cells from the baby will leave the baby in the womb and repair the mother's heart. Have you considered the implications for Mary, bearing the divine and immortal Son of God ("for it was impossible that the chains of death should hold him"), for some of His divine cells to be in Mary's body? All of the sudden her not being subject to death seems...yeah, inevitable.
As far as "Queen of Heaven" -- that bothered me some as a Protestant, especially considering Jeremiah 44. There are a number of Pagan goddesses who are suggested by scholars as the Queen of Heaven: who come from pagan cultures long predating the time of Jesus; so to suggest that Mary is a pagan goddess is more than a little odd.
But as far as an honorific, I think it corresponds to Queen Mother (mother of the King), as Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist said, when Mary visited her: "Who am I that the Mother of My Lord should come to me?" (And yes, you guessed it, "Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb." You can find some historical foreshadowing / parallel in the Old Testament, during a palace intrigue following the death of King David, when one of Solomon's brothers asks Bathsheba, mother of Solomon, to ask Solomon for a favor -- that is, to grant him Abishag the Shunammite, who used to sleep with (not have sex with) King David in his old age to keep David warm, as his wife. Bathsheba goes to King Solomon and says she has a favor to ask: and Solomon says, "What is it Mother, I shall not refuse you."
The Catholic teaching I have heard of Mary, is that she was wholly consumed with the love of God ("Be it done to your handmaid according to your word" and that she is exalted in the sight of God because of her suffering ("And your own soul a sword shall pierce" ; which I personally would also follow up with, "whoever humbles himself shall be exalted" -- as Mary emptied herself and submitted to God to the point of bearing His Son, and then relinquishing her Son to death on a Cross. (Unlike Peter, she did not say, "God forbid, Lord, this shall never happen to you. " And unlike Peter, she did not deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed; and unlike Peter, she was at the Cross watching her Son die. She, like Jesus, submitted herself to the will of God at unimaginable cost.)
You quoted, “And your own soul a sword shall pierce”. Have you ever put that together with Heb 4:12? The soul is not the physical body. The word of God is likened to sharper than any two-edged sword, able to separate SOUL and SPIRIT. The Mother of Jesus was among the first to whom the Holy Spirit came on the Day of Pentecost, even before Peter began his sermon which produced the Holy Spirit work of conversion of the three thousand listeners. Think about it ...
Saturday?
Nice picture. Loved the red, white and blue theme.
14 They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
15 In those days Peter stood up among the believers (a group numbering about a hundred and twenty) 16 and said, “Brothers and sisters,[d] the Scripture had to be fulfilled in which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through David concerning Judas, who served as guide for those who arrested Jesus. 17 He was one of our number and shared in our ministry.”
18 (With the payment he received for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out. 19 Everyone in Jerusalem heard about this, so they called that field in their language Akeldama, that is, Field of Blood.)
20 “For,” said Peter, “it is written in the Book of Psalms:
“‘May his place be deserted;
let there be no one to dwell in it,’[e]
and,
“‘May another take his place of leadership.’[f]
21 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, 22 beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.”
23 So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. 24 Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen 25 to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” 26 Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles.
1 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues[a] as the Spirit enabled them.
No need to, as I KNOW what the TRUE church teaches!
--Catholic_Wannabe_Dude(Hail Mary!)
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