Where can I discuss Christianity? aka the find-a-Catholic thread

Arts & Sciences Religion & Spirituality
21

I think part of the problem is that a lot of the people who call themselves Christians don’t believe anything in particular. They may have never read the Bible properly, or even the NT. Most Catholics have never read the Catechism. By your argument Muslims are no different to Jews because they both worship the One True God.

The flipside of this is that the average “faithful” Catholic typically is a Christian, precisely because he/she doesn’t understand what Catholicism is or doesn’t care to follow the details too closely. They’ve taken the good bits - and that often means the bits that are congruent with Christianity - and rejected some of the random stuff that was added by The Church.

22

Most of them can’t really read anymore. Not beyond fifth grade level.

23

Uh… I wasn’t going to comment on it, but you kept on repeating it. I think it’s more like Protestants rejected parts of the Bible, which except for the translations, didn’t change much since 1240 when chapter divisions were added to it.

The biggest difference is that the Catholic version has the Deuterocanonical books. The Council of Rome listed the Deuterocanonical books as canonical in 382 CE. Martin Luther only got to move them into an intertestamental section 1200 some years later.

24

I did allude to this possibility earlier, and @Taiwan_Luthiers (correctly) pointed out that “Catholic” originally meant something like “all-inclusive”, bringing all Christians, regardless of cultural/national differences or difference of opinion, into one big family. A lot of Paul’s writings were trying to boil Christianity down to its essentials so that this could happen.

Modern Catholicism, though, is not that. The word changed its meaning when Christianity was co-opted as a tool of political control, way back around 800AD. It wasn’t just the “Catholics” who did this, of course - Henry VIII famously attempted to set up a competing version of the same religious-political structure, and was fairly successful in doing so. But there’s never been anyone quite as successful at blending Church and State as the Catholics.

The additions that I’m claiming to be “improper” are those that ascribe deity-like powers to human beings, something which Jesus (and Judaic tradition) rejected outright.

25

You mean you don’t like the veneration of canonized Saints?

Or things like Ezekiel raising an army out of dry bones?

26

The word catholic means universal or all embracing.

The word Protestant means to protest. In this case to protest against the Catholic Church.

For a good part of church history, to be Christian was to be catholic as that’s what catholic means.

As a Protestant, I do consider Catholics Christians but Catholics and Protestants obviously distinguish themselves differently.

27

When a saint is canonized, are they cannoned out of a cannon?

28

I mean when the Catholic church decides to recognize someone as a saint.

29

Are you kidding ? There have been countless wars between protestants and Catholics in Europe with literally millions of deaths.

30

You should read the chick tract “Is the Roman Catholic Church Christian”?

There’s quite a bit of animosity between protestants and catholic, it just hasn’t resulted in war, for now.

All over little differences too.

31

No. Because Christians believe that Jesus was the son of God. Muslims and Jews do not.

32

Only when there’s no auto-correct.

33

I read from Jews that they actually respect Muslims more than they do Christians. They basically consider Christians polytheists, and that our free use of God’s name is something they find very distasteful (it seems). It’s funny because many Muslims hate Jewish people more than anything else…

I think people just want to murder and kill, because no matter what we will always fight each other over smaller and smaller differences. It seems we simply can’t work together at all in units of more than 150 people, without stuff like religion and nations.

34

I didn’t say Christians and Jews and Muslims were all the same (or could be construed as such). I was comparing Jews and Muslims, who on the basis of superficial observation could be considered “the same”.

My point was that little details matter. Veneration of the saints, for example, completely “breaks” what Christianity is; I’ll explain why when I have a proper keyboard.

35

When the Jesuits first entered China, they sought to convert the higher officials, and tried to identify Heaven with Tian. ( They also tried to convince the Vatican that ancestor worship was just a cultural form of “honour thy father and mother”. The Pope eventually ruled against them,and ordered them to leave China and be replaced by the Franciscans.)
The Chinese higher ups didn’t like the idea of worshipping a rebel who was tortured and executed for trying to overthrow an emperor, so the Jesuits downplayed crucified Jesus in favour of Madonna and child- nothing more appealing to the Chinese than a mother and a plump (by Chinese standards) baby boy.
So the Jesuits referred to Catholicism as Tianzhu jiao, and after the Protestant missionaries started arriving, they called it JIdu jiao (Jesus teaching) because they talked about this fellow Jesus so much.

36

The attempted division between the two by some American Evangelicals is just an attempt to claim that they have the ‘original’ Christianity, preserved all these years in the True Faith, not like all those corrupt Catholics. A silly notion, since from it’s beginning Christianity has been torn into many denominations- half the letters of Paul are filled with warnings to adhere to his teachings and not listen to all those other guys.

37

I mean three very specific things:

  • Praying to Saints
  • Confessing to priests
  • Accepting the judgement of the Vatican as to the precise meaning of some aspect of the faith.

None of these appear in Jesus’s teachings (or in the teachings of the apostles, IIRC). Jesus made it pretty clear what he thought about “wise men” who set themselves up as spokesmen or intermediaries for God. As for praying to Saints, there are a whole bunch of injunctions in the Old Testament against speaking to the dead, but if you want to stick with the NT, all you need is this:

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”.

This is a core belief in Christianity. I’ve heard Catholics make light of the “praying to saints” thing, suggesting something along the lines of “oh, we’re just asking them to be intermediaries for us”. There are two problems with this: firstly, as above, Jesus said that there are no intermediaries. You talk to Him, particularly on the matter of Confession. The reason for his existence was to be the intermediary you are looking for. And secondly, who or what is it do you think you are praying to? Do you think the Saints somehow have access to this world simply on the say-so of the Pope? It’s far more likely, I suspect, that whatever-it-is that listens to those prayers - if there’s anybody at all on the receiving end - they are not well-intentioned. And they’re certainly not the Saints.

Arguing the toss over abstruse theological points is one thing, but IMO the proof is in the pudding:

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Majority-Catholic countries are almost always dysfunctional shitholes. There is quite obviously something amiss with their beliefs - my observation is that the problem is directly traceable to the idea of going to the priest for forgiveness. The implication is that you can behave as badly as you like during the week as long as you attend mass and do penance on Sunday. It’s a childish, perverted form of Christianity that completely misses the point.

The intriguing exception is Poland, and I would argue there’s something very specific about their “implementation” of Catholicism that more accurately captures core Christian beliefs and minimizes the influence of those problematic ones I’ve mentioned.

The ‘By their fruits’ test applies also to countries or societies that call themselves Christian. The US pretty much fell at the first hurdle in 2020, although there were pockets of true Christianity where people kept the faith in the face of persecution. The Amish, despite their rather strange ways, were a notable example of how things should have gone.

38

That’s a Taiwan thing, not a US thing.

39

I’m Catholic and every bit as much a Christian as a Southern Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian etc.

40

This may not mean anything, but it’s interesting that for all the moaning in the US about unchecked Latin American immigration, I don’t recall hearing anything about an influx of Catholics (something which has occurred at other times in US history).