In christian friendship, I asked a very simple question (What is your understanding of the word pray?). In return, you delivered a sarcastic response. Sarcasm is cloaked aggression. It is intended to mock or convey contempt. I can only conclude that like other non-Catholic freepers in this forum, you are not serious in your questions but use them only to attack Catholic beliefs. I'm truly sorry to learn this. Apologies if I offended you in any way.
I can only imagine catholics have a different definition of prayer as y’all do worship. The parsing y’all have to do amazes me.
In Christian friendship I ask, do you recognize this "cloaked aggression" among the Catholic freepers in this forum who regularly deliver sarcasm, snark, ridicule and contempt to attack the beliefs of Christians who are not Catholic or do you only see it in non-Catholic freepers?
There is plenty of ill-will to go around here, including by Catholics.
But that is a relevant question.
You must know it refers to Bill Clinton’s weasly disingenuous reply on whether or not he had sexual relations with an intern around half his age, young enough to be his daughter, and in a subordinate position to him, while also married to someone else, and causing this woman to commit adultery too. “It depends upon what your definition of ‘is’ is.”
Do you think it is (still) a serious matter to God what he did?
And the Catholic position on prayer to Mary and those deemed Catholic saints is just as convoluted, illogical and disingenuous, playing word games with “pray.” That’s what it is. You do pray but deny it. You call it just “asking,” as that’s what you say “pray” means literally, but that means if you ask someone here to pass you the salt or help you out in some way,you are therefore “praying” to them. Come on. Prayer as commonly understood by four year-olds means to communicate with superior beings in the spiritual world in a certain way, usually to make requests of them. And the Catholic prayers to the saints, and especially Mary, go beyond mere intercession, asking them to pray, but to actively do things for the person praying, such as to provide protection. In at least one prayer to Mary, the person pledges to devote themselves fully and completely to *her*, and others express similar sentiments and give her attributes of God.
And did you ever consider, too, that there are differences between saints here and in Heaven, so it is not the same thing to ask a saint here to pray for you than it is to ask a saint in Heaven to pray for you? Our prayers for each other here help build each other’s faith and demonstrate our love for each other, and that is not merely incidental. The Bible talks about how our trials are for the purpose of growing our faith, and our prayers are part of that. They bring us together, and it takes faith to put aside our own trials to pray to God for someone else. That selfless love and concern for each other encourages us, and part of it comes from knowing that other people here, like ourselves, are undergoing trials just as we are, and are living by faith too.
I should have pinged you to 429 too.
And on the subject of Mary, there are a few questions or issues regarding the Catholic beliefs on her that have come up for me lately. They both involve the relationship between Joseph and Mary.
The first two have to do with their relationship. As Mary is above the Catholic saints (those Christians whom the Catholic Church recognizes as such), and Joseph is one of them, and Mary is also said to be the mother of all in the Catholic Church, then that would appear to place Mary, the wife, above Joseph, the husband, and begs the question if Joseph would also regard his wife as his mother. I have done a limited amount of looking into these questions, but so far haven’t turned up anything addressing them.
Then, second, in the course of searching on the first questions, I turned up a Catholic web page that states that Jesus got His whole human nature, genetically, from Mary.
http://www.catholic.com/tracts/mary-mother-of-god
It sounds so authoritative and definite, and I’ve heard that elsewhere from another Catholic source, but I’ve also heard from still another Catholic source, stated just as authoritatively and definitively, that Jesus miraculously received the genes of both Joseph and Mary (a possibility I was already aware of and has seemed very likely).
Since, according to the flesh, Jesus was and is male and Mary was female, then by genetics Jesus would have X and Y chromosomes, while Mary would have only X, so that eliminates Him getting His whole human nature from her.
The possibility that Jesus was given the genes of both Joseph and Mary, as I said, seems possible as well as quite likely, but the thing about it is, we just don’t know for sure because God hasn’t definitely revealed that to us. There are too many unanswered questions. As God in human form, Jesus might not have had exactly the same genes and been subject to genetic mutations and disease, for one thing. But while there is no basis for definite conclusions, Roman Catholicism seems to jump to making them anyway.
In the same way, I heard a Catholic radio host (I believe a priest) tell a caller that pets and all animals for that matter don’t go to Heaven as they don’t have souls. Again, this seems to be an area where we don’t know enough to say either way, and a Protestant radio host I heard replying to the question too on a evangelical station seemed to have a better answer - that he didn’t know, but that there seemed to be animals of a sort in Heaven, and whether or not there were, including our pets, we would not feel the loss of anything or feel we’re missing out on anything there.