Posted on 07/22/2007 7:40:38 PM PDT by xzins
The belief in the corporeal assumption of Mary is founded on the apocryphal treatise De Obitu S. Dominae, bearing the name of St. John which belongs however to the fourth or fifth century. It is also found in the book De Transitu Virginis, falsely ascribed to St. Melito of Sardis , and in a spurious letter attributed to St. Denis the Areopagite . If we consult genuine writings in the East it is mentioned in the sermons of St. Andrew of Crete , St. John Damascene , St. Modestus of Jerusalem and others. In the West , St. Gregory of Tours (De gloria mart., I, iv) mentions it first. The sermons of St. Jerome and St. Augustine for this feast , however, are spurious. St. John of Damascus (P. G., I, 96) thus formulates the tradition of the Church of Jerusalem :
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA - THE FACT OF THE ASSUMPTION
Since History is not on your side ,it is up to you to provide proof that Mary’s body was NOT assumed into heaven.You can’t!
You have a problem with simple logic my friend.
You don't have any physical evidence of Mary's body still being on earth.
Simple logic!
Simple logic!
I knew you were going to write that before you even posted it. No lie.
Do you really want to make comparisons of Jimmy Hoffa to the Blessed Mother?
Do you think our Blessed Lord would approve?
Appeal to Ignorance (argumentum ad ignoratiam)
An appeal to ignorance proposes that we accept the truth of a proposition unless an opponent can prove otherwise. Thus, for example:
No one has conclusively proven that there is no intelligent life on the moons of Jupiter.
Therefore, there is intelligent life on the moons of Jupiter.
Your argument (Appeal To Ignorance):
1. Nobody has found Mary's body.
2. Therefore her body must be in heaven.
Is logically identical to:
1. Nobody has found Jimmy Hoffa's body.
2. Therefore his body must be in heaven.
I repeat, your argument demonstrates a complete lack of the knowledge of logic. Her body could be in heaven but it is not proven by your argument.
Do you think our Blessed Lord would approve?
Of my attempt to assist you in framing your argument? Sure!
Your love or your own intellect ignores all of it as appeal to ignorance. so you can please your own prideful mind
Now you bring the discussion to the gutter with the Hoffa Jupiter nonsense so you can please your own prideful mind.
Do you believe that Jesus physically multiplied the loaves and the fish to feed the thousands? Or do you think that is ignorant to believe as well?
Have a good Thanksgiving.
Is that how you avoid answering a question,by insult?
Perhaps you can explain how the Holy Spirit would move you to write such hate?
Unsuccessful? Europe is for all practical purposes secular (church attendance in German is 6% of Catholics and 5% for Protestants). Even in America, atheism is on the rise and, even though church attendance is vastly exaggerated, the American society in general (despite religious lip service) is profoundly secular, violent and materialistic.
Enter the Reformers, particularly John Calvin. Once you have reduced God to naked legalism, it was only a (predictable) step to naked rationalism.
But, they insisted that man was autonomous, and THAT is what destroyed their ambitions
To the contrary, FK. Man believes to this day that we can solve all our problems and unlock of the mysteries through reason, that there is a logical explanation to everything. Just because we don't have eough data doesn't mean the premise is false. In fact, most people would say that, given sufficient information, we can unlock any mystery of the world.
It is the believers who lost the motivation when they relied that diseases are not demonic possessions as the Bible teaches, when thunder turned out to be electrical energy, even something we can harness. The old adage "if God wanted man to fly He would have given him wings" went out the window when men began to fly,
Reason uncovered many a mystery that was attributed to God or to the devil, and discovered that being in the dark we see things differently. Once science shone its light on things we realized the monsters were only in our head.
Man is autonomous to a certain point, but the Church teaches (and this predates the Reformers FK) that man is dependent on God and can exist fully only in full communion with God, never as a creature separated from God; in other words, it was the Church that taught that man is not autonomous. The Reformers did not discover that.
FK: IOW, Christianity is a baseless faith
It's not baseless. It's just that our basis for our faith is no more verifiable than any other. It's a matter of personal choice. How do you "prove" that Moses encountered God on Mt. Sinai? Or that God dictated scripture to Moses and Koran to Mohammad? How do you "prove" Incarnation?
There is a basic leap of faith and from there on it all becomes very "real." If you and are convinced that there are unicorns on Jupiter and someone comes up with a "revelation" about their size and color and the shape of the horn, we could be having real discussions about them the way medieval theologicand discussed how many angels fit on a head of a pin.
Look, the city of Troy existed and its ruins have been found. Does that make Homer's Iliad a true story? Historical finds in biblical lands prove nothing either. There is simply no other way to believe the Bibe but by a leap of (blind) faith. And that is true of every other religion in the world. Muslims call it, correctly, surrender, which is what Islam means.
At one point we admit that our reason fails, that there is something much, much bigger and smarter than we are. We approach God in silence and in complete acceptance. The ineffable becomes real but not understood.
We are like dogs who have no clue why the master leaves home every day (to go to work), or why he does things. We simply trust him even if for some reason we don't understand he gets angry with us and even punishes us. We stick around, nonetheless, because we know he cares and loves us. But we understand nothing...we have no clue that our home is in a place with a name, or in a large replace called a state, or that the state is in some other place called USA, and USA is aprt of some toher place called North America, which is aprt of a big round ball called the earth, floating around in space around the sin that makes us squint, a furnace 8 light minutes away (one light second = 160,000 miles; the distance from here to the Moon! So, 8 light minutes = 160,000x60x8=76.8 million miles from us) so powerful that it burns us raw in the summer, and that this is only one of billions of stars in another place called the Milky Way Galaxy whose core can be discerned in the southern skies, and that this galaxy make sup a local group separated by millions of light years from ours (you dot he math), and is part of the visible universe which comprises 23 hexatrillion stars (more stars than all the grains of sand on all the beaches and in all the deserts on earth!), packed into more than trillions of galaxies...and we still don't know everything about it...nor have we seen all of it...
That's where the age of reason brought us, FK. To realize that we know nothing and that God's revelation to us was all we really needed to know, because all the knowledge of the world a nd beyond does not bring us closer to the ultimate answer. The west deconstructed the Mystery of God and ended up with a mystery too big for us to handle.
Different religions offer different answers, proving that religion doesn't have one answer either.
Biblically, "inspired" means "God-breathed". The words from God's breath either contain error or they do not
The words are human, not divine. If the Bible were perfect then the Bible would be God. Some people take it that way.
He doesn't lead us fallibly, He leads us according to His plan. That plan includes growth. Some will achieve higher levels of truth than others, all under the direction of the Holy Spirit. My understanding of Christianity right now is exactly what the Holy Spirit wants it to be for right now. It was a little different a year ago and it will be different next year. That doesn't mean He is leading me fallibly, it means He didn't give me all the answers at once. The plan is for me to spend the rest of my life growing in Him.
Then why not believe that God leads His Apostolic Church accoridng to His plan? And why not believe that He would make sure the Church is infallible, since it teaches the word of God? And since He specifically made it for that purpose?
We believe that God gave us the whole revealed truth through the pophest and patriarch and crowned it with His Son's ministry. God's revealed truth to man is complete and finished (should have been finished with Christ dying, as He is quoted as saying, but then someone decided to write Revelation!). And the completeness of that revealed truth is in His Apostolic Church, given that no other Church was made by Christ personally.
If one thinks the originals were infallible, like I do, then it is no leap to also think that if God went to all that trouble, that He would also protect later versions that were accepted by God's Church
He did. He created His Church, gave the keys to His Apostles and told them to carry on His work and safeguard the truth revealed in an unchanging and eternal Church that nothing will bring down. The Apostolic Church taught what it teaches to this day. And thats same Church put together the NT.
***Did man crucify Christ by free will?***
God is sitting up in heaven, enjoying himself, just hanging around. Then, suddenly, his Son appears.
God says, “Hey, I thought I sent you down there?”
Jesus replied, “Well, I guess they didn’t want me, they crucified me and tossed me in a tomb.”
God: “Great, now what are we going to do. If I left it up to them, no one would come. Boy, you plan and you plan, but hey, you can’t plan human nature.”
***Thinking and rationalizing led us to the heresy of the Reformation and all the denominations that it has spawned. ***
So, what you are saying is that your religion is irrational and stupid? Finally, something we can agree on :>)
Heresy: a religious opinion that is contrary to the orthodox doctrine OR ACCEPTED BELIEFS OF A SPECIFIC RELIGION.
Heretic: a person who holds a heresy or is guilty of heresy.
The above brought to you by the Oxford American Dictionary.
Therefore, the Pope is a heretic in my book.
***Does scripture say otherwise,or say Salvation without Mary’s fiat? NO!***
Mary had a sports car? Italian job, eh?
A fiat is an order or decree. Mary did neither. Mary did what the Lord told her to do. She had no will to do otherwise.
***Mary is the exceptional human, Noah was not.***
The whole world died except for him and his family and you say he wasn’t exceptional?
***We are just plain lucky that Mary said “yes”,***
Since it was foretold that a virgin would bear a child, maybe God had a few other virgins waiting, just in case Mary said “No.”
There’s intelligent life of Jupiter? When are they going to find some on Earth?
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