Posted on 03/11/2012 4:27:55 PM PDT by Heart-Rest
Thank you. I covet your prayers. I need them to get over the pain that was caused me by Catholics.
I have a friend whose baby died before it was baptized. Their priest told them that the baby was in hell.
They’ve never been back to the Catholic church.
The material that guides me is the Holy Bible. If that concerns you, then I, too, hope you find Truth.
Not sure what you mean about Apple Pie being sliced. By adhering to John 14:6, am I slicing an apple pie?
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
Keep mocking the Bible, my friend, and you will someday answer for it.
I’ve been attacked by Catholics on this site. Would you like links? Very happy to provide them. Perhaps that has fueled my sadness about Catholicism.
The “antiCatholic” victimization makes me frustrated, too, as there is so much antiProtestantism that takes place. But the double-standard is similar to liberalism. Say what you want about Sarah Palin, but don’t you dare attack Sandra Fluke.
This is my last post on this forum.
I bid you all peace and intimacy in your relationship with Christ. May He guide us all into Truth.
I of course know you are smart enough to know he was mocking those who translate the Bible liberally to meet their personal needs at the moment, and not the Bible itself. Although I will guarantee that if the Bible did contain a recipe for Buffalo wings it would be tastier than that Ezekiel bread that’s popular now.
I sense a significant error or misconception here. I would hate for your or your friend's relationship with the Church to have been damaged by a falsehood.
There has NEVER been a time when the Church professed that an unbaptized baby would go to hell. Even the concept of "limbo", (limbus infantium) a speculative and undefined state, has never been official doctrine or dogma.
If that is what a priest told them then the priest, not the Church. was in grave error and they had an obligation to God, to themselves, and to the Church to address it to the parish pastor, the bishop or even another priest or deacon. If your friends believed that what the priest was telling them was the doctrine of the Church then they were extremely poorly catechized.
The actual doctrine of the Church is expressed in two articles of the Catechism:
1261 - As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them," allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.
1283 - With respect to children who have died without Baptism, the liturgy of the Church invites us to trust in God's mercy and to pray for their salvation.
Lastly, you said in an earlier post that you had been abused by the Church, implying that you were Catholic. Why didn't you correct your friend?
I have a friend whose baby died before it was baptized. Their priest told them that the baby was in hell.
Oh my. I don’t often cry, but you made me. That was a freaking HORRIBLE thing for the Father to say, and, if you will excuse me, total rubbish.
The Word is “Suffer the children to come unto me.” No man, woman or priest can get between God and the innocent.
That ain’t man’s law, that is THE LAW.
I asked my Priest - and he is getting annoyed about the phone calls!
Perhaps they may find instructions for building model airplanes or making Buffalo style chicken wings.” <<
. A powerful testimony to the belligerent, intransigent, and willful Biblical ignorance of catholics.
I am not the one making a habit out of getting the Faith taught by Jesus Christ and the Apostles wrong. Nor am I the one getting Scriptural content wrong. It is a powerful testimony, to be sure. Peter wrote about people getting Paul wrong. Now we have non Christians who think that their interpretation of the Bible - wildly different in places than Christians believe - is the new and correct one and that 2000 years of Christianity got it wrong.
Talk about belligerent, intransigent and willfully ignorant.
Judging from your question I take it you don’t believe in apostolic (to put it clearly for you...the belief that books were either written by the apostles or those close to them) authorship for the NT?
I do not mock the Bible, and never have. I take Scripture very seriously. I don't suppose that you have any examples of me mocking the Bible. Be careful what you accuse others of. Among other things, I also do not take the authority of self-interpretation upon myself. The Bible proscribes it. I see the children of the Reformation wallowing in it.
It is the groups who attack and mischaracterize the Faith that I mock.
Nothing like a healthy dose of mischaracterization from the antiCatholic to make the day go by!!!
Or perhaps she got the first book of the Bible mixed up with the first book of the NT. Hard to keep up with whatever it is that they believe at the moment, as opposed to what they believed before breakfast this morning.
>> “I am not the one making a habit out of getting the Faith taught by Jesus Christ and the Apostles wrong” <<
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I have to differ with you on that, its more than a habit, its a lifestyle.
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>> “Nor am I the one getting Scriptural content wrong” <<
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Ditto.
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>> “Peter wrote about people getting Paul wrong.” <<
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The catholic pagan seance club deliberately disregards Christ’s commandments in Matthew, all of them.
These are the biggies:
>o Repitive ‘prayers’
>o Calling men Father
>o Following traditions of men rather than the scriptures.
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For whatever reason, the poster to whom my question was addressed has chosen not to respond. As a former Fundamentalist Protestant, I assume he feels he has to "make up" for his past be becoming an enthusiastic evolutionist. That's what most Fundamentalist converts to Catholicism do.
I . . . have no problem with the idea of evolution.
Well, duh! That was the point of my entire post. Ever since uniformitarianism, evolutionism, and "higher criticism" were invented (ironically by Protestants) Catholic and Orthodox chrstians have seized on them and made them quasi-dogmas, on the grounds that doing so will further discredit "sola scriptura." Let me state in no uncertain terms: I do not subscribe to "sola scriptura." But one does not have to reject total inerrancy or even total literal inerrancy in order to reject sola scriptura--contrary to what Catholics and Orthodox have been Pavlovian-programmed to think.
You are missing the entire point of my post. The first eleven chapters of Genesis (which includes, but is not limited to, the creation account) is just as much inerrant history as every other part of the Bible. Your position not only dismisses the creation account as the graspings of primitive savages, but reduces the entire first eleven chapters of Genesis to mythology: no Cain and Abel, no Noah, no Flood, no giants, no Nimrod, no Tower of Babel, no confusion of tongues. The whole thing is flushed away under the rubric of "people back then didn't know what we know now." As if anything we can possible learn about how the universe currently functions has anything whatsoever to do with how it (and its supposedly uniformitarian laws) were created in the first place.
To take the laws of the universe as we know them today and retroject them into the actual creation event is not only irrational (the laws of nature governed how the laws of nature came into being?) but is blatantly an altogether uncalled for assumption. Yes, we see how islands, volcanoes, planets, and stars come to be today, in a fully created universe. But the current formations of these things has absolutely nothing to do with the ex nihilo creation of the universe and of nature. When you see a volcanic island boiling up from the ocean floor you are not witnessing "the continued process of creation." Ditto for when you see stars being born or dying, etc.
By the very nature of things, the creation of the universe had no laws to follow because all the laws had to be created along with the matter and energy they would come to apply to only after the Sixth Day. The first three--and to an extent the first eleven--chapters of Genesis deal with a time totally outside our experience and outside the laws of nature as we know them. The fact that we know the world doesn't work that way today has nothing whatever to do with their absolute inerrant historicity.
What is it about this that you people seem incapable of understanding? Is your prejudice against rural American Protestantism that great? Those "awful" rural American Protestants vote for conservative Catholics all the time! This is a poor way to repay their support, especially at a time when the Catholic Church in America seems to be going the way of the "Patriotic Catholic Church" in China.
I could understand the objection to such a foreign world as described in Genesis 1-11 as being "real" if it were consistently applied, but it is not. Catholics believe in any number of scientifically impossible events (including Mary playing basketball with the sun in Portugal in 1917--the same sun that A-mighty G-d could supposedly only create using "natural forces!") but are allergic only to Genesis 1-11. This is nothing but an ethno-cultural sociological prejudice against the type of people associated with that belief, ie, "trailer trash."
There are one or two Catholics actually fighting a losing battle against evolutionism in the Catholic Church. Here is an article making precisely the points I have just made to you (and done a much better job of it, too) by a Catholic creationist who moreover cites magisterial Catholic documents to back up his beliefs. But as I understand it, the "unchangeable" Catholic religion has been changed so as not to be associated in the public mind with "Bible-thumping white trash."
I'm sorry to lose my temper, but I am so sick and tired of having to make these same points over and over and over and over and over again to the same two or three little phrases you people have been programmed to spout.
The Comma Johanneum and Chapter 16 of Mark's Gospel come to mind. You say Apostolic authorship. Where do you get that from?
>> “ I don’t suppose that you have any examples of me mocking the Bible.” <<
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Yes, the commandments of Christ in Matthew (see previous post)
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Misunderstanding often indicates hardness of heart.
That's what the parables were intended to do...to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. The ones that "got it" were usually the ones who had the Holy Spirit stirring them toward eternal truths.
Mark - Many who profess to be Christians see mysteries and difficulties in Scripture, Tradition, dogma and doctrine and conclude that if it does not make sense to them it must be in error. Catholics see these same mysteries and difficulties as a weakness or imperfection in themselves and work to understand and obey.
Too many divide Scripture and the writings of the Early Church Fathers using a grid fashioned by their preexisting belief system. This grid or template has three sections: those Sacred and inspired writings that support their position, those that can be interpreted such that they may support their positions, and those that are to be either removed from consideration or simply ignored.
To deny the Catholic Church, its origins, hierarchy and doctrines is to deny verifiable history.
Christian writers of the fist and second centuries wrote extensively of Church with a hierarchical structure, having power to teach, interpret, maintain orthodoxy and rule, with a bishop being in charge of each community in service to a Pope.
St. Clement, the 4th pope, wrote a long letter to the Church in Corinth about 30 years after St. Paul's death (circa A.D. 96) to settle disagreements and dissensions there arising from Gnosticism. He states: 'Our Apostles knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, that there would be dissensions over the title of bishop. In their full knowledge of this, therefore, they proceeded to appoint the ministers I spoke of. and they went on to add an instruction that if these would die, other accredited persons should succeed them in their office.
St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Church in Smyrna about A.D. 107 exhorts them: 'Follow your bishop, every one of you, as obediently as Jesus Christ followed the Father'.
St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons (circa 180 A.D.) and the great opponent of Gnosticism in the second century, insists on the need to follow the Church's bishops if we are to have the truth. 'It is necessary to obey the presbyters in the Church-those who, as I have shown, possess the succession from the Apostles; those who, together with the succession of the episcopate, have received the certain gift of truth, according to the good pleasure of the Father'. He also named all the Bishops of Rome from Peter to his own time, and says: 'In this order, and by this succession, the ecclesiastical tradition from the Apostles, and the preaching of the truth, have come down to us'.
Actually, there was not so much change over time.
The integrity of the Scriptures is remarkable.
Detractors claimed the same about the OT...and that's why the Dead Sea Scrolls are so significant. There is very, very little change over time.
I would also like to congratulate you on a exhaustive apologetics posted in support of the Catholic Church. May our Lord continue to guide you on your chosen path. May He bless you and your family.
Catholic Ping
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