[Quix]

It's like saying . . .

WE OF THE VATICAN MAGICSTERICAL ELITE CHOOSE TO BE STUCK BACK IN 1600 YEAR OLD VOCABULARY. IF you wish to rise to our lofty levels, you'll familiarize yourselves with our DAFFYNITIONARY and use it faithfully . . . or be considered the smelly unwashed outside the fold and certainly uninitiated in the finer, loftier levels and practices of the truly truest truly true truly magicsterical levels of the holiest of holies.

What a stench. Go ahead and fling your special vocabulary far and wide. Go ahead and cheekily--in typical RC !!!DEMANDING!!! style and attitude, !!!DEMAND!!! that Proddys, pagans and all the ships at sea comply with or at least instantly understand such exclusionist vocabulary.

It CERTAINLY does !NOT! come across as a fruit of Holy Spirit. It comes across as a very arrogant and very deliberate tool to maintain the boundaries of just who is in the IN-GROUP vs who is unwashed and outside the Vatican Mary-Ishtar-Goddess fold.

I think using it shoots y'all's system in the foot all the time.

Oh, sure, there are groveling sheeple who'll aspire to be SOOOOO RIGHTEOUS as to be able to use such exclusionist vocabulary. There always are.

Most just see it as haughty and prissy and walk on by shaking their heads.

. . . .Catholic teaching has developed a vocabulary which may seem opaque or arbitrary . . .

Nope. It comes across much MORE as hugely PRISSY, sanctimoniously, exclusionistly, BRAZENLY ARROGANT, mostly.

[Cronos]

The good thing about Quix's incoherent ramblings is that both lurkers and readers now know that his group thinks that Jesse the con-man Duplantis is 1000% preaching from scripture and that Quix's alien-loving group is so way out there from Christianity it is no reason that some were kicked out from the conservative WELS church

In fact, the presence of Quix's group and its typical incoherent ramblings makes anything they support instantly not regarded as sane!

good job QUixo! your posts are pushing people away from your group's philosophies!

[Cronos]

And here's another great quote from Quixo about people who go and visit the other side:

I'm not greatly interested in arguing about whether such are authentic, Biblical, accurate etc.

interesting -- so when it comes to your group's alien philosophies, one shouldn't be interested in whether they are authentic or biblical!

[Cronos]

And here's another great quote :

Christ said lots of things that were NOT EnScripturated and not intended to be—2,000 years ago AND SINCE.

interesting isn't it -- and quite contradictory to other posts

[Mad Dawg]

Well, I like to complain about a lot of Catholic texts that sound like lousy translations from the French.

The way it SOUNDS (or READS) is a problem . But it arises from our reading texts not originally written in English. And since the modern notion of "dynamic equivalence" just can't apply to technical works, what you're reading is almost a kind of learned creole or a pidgin.

My fave example is "consolation", which in its Latin form (consolatio) has been a big part of our thought for at least 1,000 years.

In English it sounds all icky and weak tea. I had to read some other texts and check some dictionaries before I realized it meant something like "strengthening".

By using words with those Latin roots, though, we end up making it easier for Catholic scholars all over the world. If we were writing for an strictly English audience (but I think we're always aware that we're a world-wide body) we might do better to use "strengthen", but it would complicate things.

After all, jargons evolve because they are useful; they serve a purpose.

And frankly, it takes somebody for whom communication is a pre-occupation to point out how icky some of these things sound.

It's exacerbated by there being two ghettos. There's the academic ghetto and there's the legacy, still powerful, of the Catholic neighborhoods in the US. The school, the culture was all "Catholic" so lifelong Catholics use "consolation" because they remember Sr. Mary Sadistica using it in kindergarten prayers AND mother and father using it at home.

And then I use all the Scholastic stuff -- Quaeritur, Utinam, Videtur, Sed Contra, Respondeo -- because I think Aquinas is cool and I enjoy it. (I do try to explain it every once in a while, though.)

And there's the "tribal identification" factor, to be sure.

Apologists and evangelists need to free themselves from the jargon. But it's no small matter. It's like when a Charismatic says "a blessing". There's a whole host of meaning and thought and even a kind of systematic thing lying behind that one word.

Personally, I think a good satire, BY a learned Catholic, of Catholic theological and spiritual jargon would be a big help. "How to talk Catholic."