Posted on 12/23/2012 3:24:52 PM PST by NYer
On second thought, why are they taking up space on FreeRepublic and posting publicly with private discussion only?
What exactly is the FR policy on closed threads?
Read the Religion Moderator’s page for a fairly detailed explanation: http://www.freerepublic.com/~religionmoderator/
it is also foundational in our belief in Her sinlessness. It was through the sins of Eve that mankind would be brought into the world in pain (Gen 3:16).
Peace be with you.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
So in other words, what I had seen in the movie, “The Nativity”, the birth of Christ scene was in error?
So is this what must be believed and accepted by all Christians or just what is taught for Catholics?
Thank-you for your answers, God Bless, and have a good and blessed Merry Christmas. :)
It's not the natural processes that we are concerned with. It is the consequences of those processes. Ask any man.
I could, but I imagine that would tend to cause me to despise him, which is hardly the Christmas spirit.
But that aside, I think the idea that Jesus was not born naturally is theologically parlous, driven by the misogyny and biological ignorance of the writers. If Jesus did not have a natural human body, from His conception until His resurrection, and if His mother did not have a natural human body, then He is not fully man and fully God, but something else.
Never having seen the movie, I have no way of knowing how they depicted the birth of Jesus. Since Hollywood is not populated with theologians, I doubt they gave much thought to the scriptural origin of this topic.
We remember that one of the sufferings inherited because of original sin is that of "child bearing pains:" The Lord God said to Eve, "I will intensify the pangs of your childbearing; in pain shall you bring forth children" (Genesis 3:16). Since Mary was free from original sin by her immaculate conception, she would consequently be free of "child bearing pain."
Thank-you, bookmarked, very helpful. Merry Christmas! :)=^..^=
This thread was posted to the Religion Forum and labeled from the start as a "Catholic Caucus", without any malicious intent towards non-catholics. If anything, I never intended to provoke controversy and limited the audience to catholics who appreciate the historical perspective of this topic.
Please accept my sincerest wishes for a Blessed Christmas.
I hope you will believe me when I say this thread also appeared on the main forum, at least for a while, before it was removed from the main forum. I do not visit the Religion Forum on Free Republic because of situations such as this.
Thank you. I’ll look into this and try to make sure I don’t post where unwanted on Free Republic in the future.
In "Eden 1.0," before sin, true human nature flourished according to God's unimpeded postive intent: Adam and Eve were humans as humans were intended to be. This is called Original Justice: in harmony with God, with Nature, between each other, and within themselves, with no injury, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual, and no strife.
It is only after sin, and the heritable consequences of sin, that painful bloody strife came to be part of the sexual and generative mix. Think ho often in the history of womankind, childbearing has been a Monomachy between life and death. Check out the curses in Genesis 3:14-20.
It follows, as fitting, that if Jesus Christ is the New Adam, and our Lady Mary the New Eve, who, through His grace and power, helps set upright what Mother Eve had put upside down, Mary would not be subject to all the physical signs and natural consequences of sin: the things which fit together in the category of "corruption," in the sense of "tendency to dissolution, deterioration, decomposition."
So it is not that Mary is super-human. It is that she is Human; she is the Standard Model; she is of an equal nature with Original Eve. It is we who are sub-human; or if that sounds too harsh, let's say we are substandard, damaged goods. We're dingy, dinged. She's in mint condition. <> The significance of "Beata Maria Semper Virgine" (written on the catacomb walls) means that we were not meant to be broken into, or broken out of. The procreation of children was meant, in the zip code of Eden (the word means "Delight"), to be pure unblemished unadulterated joy.
If human beings, from creation, were to reproduce their kind, then was "birth by teleportation" to be the default arrangement? What about all the other mammals who give birth (now) by the same general means as humans? Were all their young to emerge via a process of molecular disintegration and reassembly?
Dear old Kolokotronis would doubtless be calling me rude names in Greek at this point, and mumbling about simplistic black-and-white Calvinism.
There are fellow mammals who give birth with a lot more ease--- aren't there? Maybe the full term baby was originally designed to be smaller and, at the same time, sturdier. Like calves, who get up and totter about within hours of birth (and our babies can't walk until about a YEAR later. My Ben was 13 1/2 months before he walked!) Maybe the maternal pelvis : baby cranium ratio was supposed to be larger, the anatomical structures stretchier, and the placenta supposed to come out neat, like one of those modules in the Mars explorer.
Preternatural phenomena, by definition, perfect nature but do not carry it into the "supernatural," beyond the limits of created nature. They include three great privileges --infused knowledge, freedom from concupiscence, and bodily immortality and invulnerability --- which Adam and Eve possessed before the Fall. Like I said, I don't think "incorporeality" is dogma: but I'd LOVE to get a heapin' helpin' of those preternatural gifts.
Merry Christmas to you, dear Tax-Chick; and to Sir Rooster and all the chickadees.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.