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To: boatbums; annalex
What I reject is your religion's assertion that only it can determine what Scripture truly means because, when they do not interpret God's word correctly…

But that is according to you, friend. Then there's according to some other Protestant who says you interpret it incorrectly as well. And on and on and on. To come along some 1,500 or 2,000 years later and claim the Church has got its own Holy Scripture wrong and now you have them and you know better what their meaning is? You must see how absurd this seems.

I can't express it any better than G.K. Chesterton, in "The Catholic Church and Coversion":

To this I owe the fact that I find it very difficult to take some of the Protestant propositions even seriously. What is any man who has been in the real outer world, for instance, to make of the everlasting cry that Catholic traditions are condemned by the Bible? It indicates a jumble of topsy-turvy tests and tail-foremost arguments, of which I never could at any time see the sense.

The ordinary sensible sceptic or pagan is standing in the street (in the supreme character of the man in the street) and he sees a procession go by of the priests of some strange cult, carrying their object of worship under a canopy, some of them wearing high head-dresses and carrying symbolical staffs, others carrying scrolls and sacred records, others carrying sacred images and lighted candles before them, others sacred relics in caskets or cases, and so on. I can understand the spectator saying, "This is all hocus-pocus"; I can even understand him, in moments of irritation, breaking up the procession, throwing down the images, tearing up the scrolls, dancing on the priests and anything else that might express that general view.

I can understand his saying, "Your croziers are bosh, your candles are bosh, your statues and scrolls and relics and all the rest of it are bosh."

But in what conceivable frame of mind does he rush in to select one particular scroll of the scriptures of this one particular group (a scroll which had always belonged to them and been a part of their hocus-pocus, if it was hocus-pocus); why in the world should the man in the street say that one particular scroll was not bosh, but was the one and only truth by which all the other things were to be condemned? Why should it not be as superstitious to worship the scrolls as the statues, of that one particular procession? Why should it not be as reasonable to preserve the statues as the scrolls, by the tenets of that particular creed?

To say to the priests, "Your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense," is sensible. To say, "Your statues are condemned by your scrolls, and we are going to worship one part of your procession and wreck the rest," is not sensible from any standpoint, least of all that of the man in the street.


6,706 posted on 01/05/2011 9:21:06 PM PST by D-fendr (Deus non alligatur sacramentis sed nos alligamur.)
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To: D-fendr
I wonder why some people are so perfectly content to just swallow whatever they are told especially when it concerns their eternal destiny. I can read God's Word and he not only made sure his truths were written down in words and concepts people could understand but he also gave us his Spirit as a teacher in our hearts. God expects us to ask, to reason with the brain he gave us, to think and to learn. he gives us pastors and teachers to lead us, but he never intended for us to relinquish our minds to see for ourselves that what we are being told is proven from his Holy Scriptures. Why else do you think he gave them to us?
6,790 posted on 01/06/2011 9:54:18 PM PST by boatbums (God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to him.)
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To: D-fendr; boatbums
"Your statues and scrolls are condemned by our common sense," is sensible. To say, "Your statues are condemned by your scrolls, and we are going to worship one part of your procession and wreck the rest," is not sensible from any standpoint (G.K. Chesterton)

Very good. To still believe the "scroll" is not exactly a breach of formal logic, but is still nonsense.

7,056 posted on 01/15/2011 1:14:46 PM PST by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
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