Ask a Catholic

[pocaracas]

My turn, yet?

So.. catholic, ex-protestant... I'm guessing, US born and raised, huh?

What's it like being a catholic in the US?
No old timey churches like we have here in Portugal:

I remember we exchanged a few photos.

Indeed we did.... and that was all you addressed, at the time...

It has always been my impression that the heads of the church are fully aware that they run the institution without any "outside" help... that is... no god intervenes. How else can we explain those nice things that happened a few centuries ago, like the Avignon Papacy, the crusades... and Galileo?

I didn't feel the need to comment on an impression that is based on a faulty assumption.

You don't like faulty assumptions?
Oh... I wonder why you are a "believer", then...

Since I'm going to delve into history, how about we consider the very real possibility of fabrication of the concept of Jesus? PErhaps as an amalgamation of other pre-existing deities and some other real people. I'm not even going into other gods (egyptians, greek or romans, or assyrians) who were claimed to be born of virgins, died and resurrected and other tri-parted heads of pantheons.... I'm going into my favorite simple and evidenced Teacher of Righteousness:


The story does sound familiar, does it not? The troubling bit is that it pre-dates Jesus by over 100 years. It could have been revived some time before the Council of Nicaea and found its way into some text that would later be considered a gospel.

Atheist Tim O'Neill address the problems with the mythicist view in a devastating two-part article entitled "An Atheist Historian Examines the Evidence for Jesus". Part one covers this, but you'll want to read the whole thing, I'm sure.

This is not the "mysticist view". It seems you have some reading comprehension failure there... Maybe you just skimmed through the text... .yeah, I'll go with that.
This is a figure described in the Habakkuk Pesher, one of the dead sea scrolls, "written sometime in the later half of the 1st century BC". If this is when the guy get's written about, then the events (if true) happened prior to that.
At the very least, the story is of such a man who gathers a following, confronts the established religious authority, who waste no time getting him crucified... And then he resurrects, 3 days later.

So we have two potential situations here:
- The historical Jesus is a copycat of this teacher... but I see too many extraordinary details for someone to successfully copy. Both resurrect 3 days after being crucified?
- This teacher IS the historical Jesus and year one on the catholic calendar is misplaced by, at least, 50 years. Of course, this would render some of the canonical gospels as wrong on a few key details - namely, the roman leaders of the region where things happen, both the birth (which is already wrong by a few years) and the crucifixion.

Why must I spell everything out?

That Tim O'Neil never even addresses any content from the dead sea scrolls. It's like they don't exist as a source of problems for christianity.

According to Bart Ehrman, prior to this council, there were several flavors of christianity, gnostics, trinitarians, non-trinitarians, orthodox, etc, etc.... After the council, there were catholics and orthodox... all others were persecuted. As a persecuted minority, some fled away from the Turkey/Israel/Syria area, further south, into north Africa and the arabian peninsula. There, a few centuries later, a tribal leader, knowledgeable about Moses and with this authority figure on his back, rose up and conquered other tribes. About 70 years after this guy's death, the caliphate he allegedly initiated was too big and its leaders instituted a caliphate-wide religion with schools dedicated to teaching the principles of this religion... and a book: the qur'an.
It seems unlikely that this tribal leader had direct contact with an angel who told him to conquer all the neighbors and spread the message of "believe in me, or else...", so it stands to reason that the Qur'an popped up after the flash conquest took place, as the guy gained some acclaim as a military genius, or something.... and his descendents took advantage of that awe people gained for the man and added some extra bits to the tale.
Thus Islam was born.
Taking hints from Judaism (prophet figure in Moses) and from roman-catholicism (implementation of a state-wide religion).
So, my point is catholics are responsible for islam. Thanks a lot!! -.-'

And this wasn't worth commenting upon.

"Know thy place in the comings and goings of men"... Your religion isn't the be-all and end-all of human history concerning the afterlife and the divine.
It is good to know how the gears turn... perhaps your version was just an extra cog thrown in to the huge machinery that had been built for millennia... and not the last cog at that.

Shall we go further back in history? What, no christ figure back then? awww... you poor fellow...

And since you have not Christ now, does that make you even more pathetic than me?  

I was just showing some of the earlier cogs. An attempt to show you how your own cult could have come by... by human manipulation, just like all other cults before that.

You had Moses and Abraham.... the though part is that there was a world before them... Did I mention the Assyrians? How about the Egyptians? And the chinese?
There were civilizations... great civilizations... prior to Abraham. There were religions. There were polytheist religions, shamanism, animism...
The complexity of religions seems to have evolved with time.... climaxing in the single god that takes care of everything... and does nothing - the creator god whose plan you cannot mess with, that set everything in motion prior to the big bang and whatever you do now, won't cause any change in that motion.... the deist god.
And all (perhaps except the very first - animism?) are man-made concepts that build upon the previous.

Why believe?
To me, the requirement of belief in the existence of a god only signals that the religious institution lacks a solid base... hence, it lacks credibility.

Uh...yeah. It is true that ancient religions search for God in the shadows whereas more recently God has sent His Son to be the light of the world...but I'm not sure what you're really aiming at.

So tell me, do you know that to be a fact, or are you trusting what people have been telling each other for the past ~2000 years?
Is there any way you can confirm that a "God has sent His Son to be the light of the world"?

Trusting people is just believing in them.... belief in people's stories leads to belief in those stories which leads to your faith. This is an exploit found in human brains, typically the younger generations believe most things that adults tell them... if they're not immediately falsifiable, like "I got your nose".
Can you be sure your brain wasn't exploited somehow to be accepting of a tale people have been telling each other for millennia?

TL,DR?
0- HAHA, the US has no cool churches!
1- church leaders must know that god is frightfully absent from this world.
2- Jesus as an amalgamation of other fictional or real figures.
3- Thanks a lot for Islam, catholics! Fuck you!
4- Religions evolve... it's almost like they're man-made concepts.
5- the requirement of belief removes all credibility to any religious institution.

I suggest that you think about these things when you're a bit older.

I suggest you think about them all and more as you try to find how humanity got where it is now and how geographically distinct beliefs, technology and social behaviors are.