Ask a Catholic

[JuliaL]

[Randy Carson]

[JuliaL]

The trouble is, you think your understanding is complete and infallible while admitting it is not.

After nearly 36 years of Catholicism and nearly a decade of online apologetics, one thing I do know is that I am not infallible.  

Some things can be known with certainty even if they are not fully understood.

My bolding.

At least you know you are infallible in the things about which you are certain, right?
From whence comes the certainty that the God you worship is not a demon?

A demon COULD be deceiving someone...even me. So, knowing how demons operate, what they can and cannot do, and how to stay clear of them becomes a bit more important, doesn't it?

Now, for the baptized Catholic who frequents the sacraments and maintains a state of grace, demons do not have much sway. For the godless, demons have no real reason to bother - that battle is essentially won (unless the person is moved by grace and open to it). So, the battle is over those who are considering faith in God. (Satan also attacks God's strongholds - such as the priesthood - through sins of the flesh (think pedophilia and other carnal temptations here)). God is greater and cannot be defeated...but WE have free will and can choose to act on temptations.

If the God you worship is really demonic, and you have no way to prove the contrary, then the information you've been fed on the intentions and behaviors of demons is not only suspect, it is wrong, crafted to divert you from the true path.  You have a consistent story about grace and damnation, but consistency is not truth.

Knowing no god, I'm not sure how you feel qualified to comment on mine.

Your god and I inhabit the same reality.  The question is whether he fulfills the supernatural specifications you want him to or is simply a set of cultural conventions and agreed upon images created by a society that serve individuals in and the society itself.  In short, your imaginary friend whom you can use to threaten and manipulate others.

The Christian faith is simple enough that even a peasant may understand, believe and be saved.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."  H.L. Mencken
I won't suggest that the peasant is stupid and can't understand what the wise do.  We're back to, "What part of ineffible don't you understand?" The only possible answer is, "All of it."

[pocaracas]

Feeling ignored... not a worthwhile question, huh?

My question remains the same: How do you fit in your head the information that a writing exists, predating the canonical date of the birth of Jesus, which presents a figure whose life contains details that match very closely to the life attributed, in the canon, to Jesus?

This question is about YOU. What is your personal take on this.
Had you ever come across this detail of 1970's archeology?

Maybe it's because it doesn't address catholicism in particular... Why should the questions on this thread pertain only to catholicism?
On the other hand, catholics do claim to be the true followers of christ, so this should be quite relevant, as it may undermine some... traditions. It also casts some doubt on the legitimacy of the church founders... what did they really know?

[JuliaL]

Ah...here you are really onto something, Julia. A demon COULD be deceiving someone...even me. So, knowing how demons operate, what they can and cannot do, and how to stay clear of them becomes a bit more important, doesn't it?

Now, for the baptized Catholic who frequents the sacraments and maintains a state of grace, demons do not have much sway. For the godless, demons have no real reason to bother - that battle is essentially won (unless the person is moved by grace and open to it). So, the battle is over those who are considering faith in God. (Satan also attacks God's strongholds - such as the priesthood - through sins of the flesh (think pedophilia and other carnal temptations here)). God is greater and cannot be defeated...but WE have free will and can choose to act on temptations.

Pretty amazing that you agree a demon could cloud your mind with one breath and in the next paragraph state that you could not be deceived. 
A and not A in the same post.
Magic and logic don't go together.

[Randy Carson]

Feeling ignored... not a worthwhile question, huh?

Not really.

My question remains the same: How do you fit in your head the information that a writing exists, predating the canonical date of the birth of Jesus, which presents a figure whose life contains details that match very closely to the life attributed, in the canon, to Jesus?

This question is about YOU. What is your personal take on this.
Had you ever come across this detail of 1970's archeology?

Maybe it's because it doesn't address catholicism in particular... Why should the questions on this thread pertain only to catholicism?
On the other hand, catholics do claim to be the true followers of christ, so this should be quite relevant, as it may undermine some... traditions. It also casts some doubt on the legitimacy of the church founders... what did they really know?

But since you've brought it up like five times in this thread, I'm guessing this is your go-to argument for proving Christianity wrong, eh? This is the one that you think cannot possibly be answered by anyone stupid enough to believe the Jesus is God?

<Yawn.> 

Okay, if you want to provide a link to this figure whom you feel Jesus was copied from, I'll check it out. But you do know you could easily Google "Jesus Copycat" and find all kinds of refutations of this silliness, right? 

We both know you're not going to believe anything I post in response, so I can only conclude that you THINK you can rattle my cage by referencing some half-baked notions such as those you are promoting. Seriously? No chance.

So, I recommend you use your time more profitably by checking out the writings of Tim O'Neill, an atheist historian who knows enough to be honest about the historical Jesus. I've printed out a lot of his posts, and I'm reading them now.

If half of the members of this forum understood half of what O'Neill is saying, there would be a lot less stupidity on display.

---

Ah...here you are really onto something, Julia. A demon COULD be deceiving someone...even me. So, knowing how demons operate, what they can and cannot do, and how to stay clear of them becomes a bit more important, doesn't it?

Now, for the baptized Catholic who frequents the sacraments and maintains a state of grace, demons do not have much sway. For the godless, demons have no real reason to bother - that battle is essentially won (unless the person is moved by grace and open to it). So, the battle is over those who are considering faith in God. (Satan also attacks God's strongholds - such as the priesthood - through sins of the flesh (think pedophilia and other carnal temptations here)). God is greater and cannot be defeated...but WE have free will and can choose to act on temptations.

Pretty amazing that you agree a demon could cloud your mind with one breath and in the next paragraph state that you could not be deceived. 
A and not A in the same post.
Magic and logic don't go together.

You have a deficient understanding of God. While I do not claim to be infallible nor to have a comprehensive understanding, what I can say is this:

In the Western Philosophical tradition, God is a being that is necessary (cannot fail to exist), eternal (not bound by time), immaterial (not bound be space), all-powerful, and all knowing. Most Western philosophers and theologians agree that God is all-good, or he is the perfect embodiment of the virtues of love, justice, and every other good we know. As St. Anselm of Canterbury said, God is the being "than which no greater can be thought."

Now, let's deal with your demons.

You suggest that I may be deceived by a demon and that if this is true, I would not even know it. Well, how is that working out? Christians believe that the greatest commandments are to love God and our neighbor. If a demon is deceiving me into thinking that I must love the Creator of all things and to care for those around me, how is this demon advancing his own agenda which, presumably, is to have Christians do something other than those two things? IOW, if Christianity is actually a demonic plot to mislead all of its adherents, the demon who devised it has done his job too well - billions of Christians have given their lives to follow NOT the demon who sought to fool us, but the God of the myth that the demon created. 

How has this demon benefited from the ruse?

And precisely who or what is the demon attempting to mislead us from? Another demon? The true God? You've not been clear on this point. If believing that Jesus is God is a deception, then what do you posit to be the truth? Who should we be worshiping instead?

Jesus said, "If Satan is divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?" (Luke 11:18) 

So, if I'm deceived by a demon into believing that there is a loving creator God who died upon the cross so that I might live with Him forever in heaven, what is the truth from which I am being diverted by this evil demon? 

And what's in it for Him? We spend a lifetime doing good as much as possible...that must be unbearable for him to watch. A purely evil God would rather see evil - not good - being done. And as has been pointed out quite forcefully in the "Why Be Good?" thread, even non-believers do good to others. Wow. That must suck for our evil demon. If he is deceiving Christians by a false gospel which tells them that they must do good, then by what mechanism has the demon also deceived atheists that they must do good, also?

Are you saying that an evil God would fool Christians into believing that there is a heaven just so he can pull the rug out from under us in the end? That seems sort of anti-climatic, doesn't it? People spend their lifetimes running soup kitchens and discovering vaccines to prevent illnesses and so forth...doing all kinds of GOOD things because of their mistaken belief that "God" wants us to do them...and then he gets to say "Gotcha" when we learn that heaven is a lie after we die? Really? He has to endure watching us do good for years so that he gets a momentary thrill? 

Sounds kinda silly, doesn't it? And truly beneath a Being who has that kind of power.

[Randy Carson]

My question remains the same: How do you fit in your head the information that a writing exists, predating the canonical date of the birth of Jesus, which presents a figure whose life contains details that match very closely to the life attributed, in the canon, to Jesus?

This question is about YOU. What is your personal take on this.

My take is that Tim O'Neill nailed this on his blog. Responding to the italicized bit below, Tim provides a pretty solid answer.

Another possible alternative take is that "Jesus" was actually the Jesus the Pharisee leader crucified by Alexander Jannaeus about 110 years ago before the alleged NT Jesus allegedly was crucified.

Lots of things are merely "possible". Historians leave writing about things that are merely "possible" to novelists and stick to what is rendered "most probable" via analysis of the evidence and cogent argument.

The "possibility" that Jesus was "really" the Yeshu executed by Alexander Jannaeus faces the same problem as many of these theories that Jesus was "really" someone else - if the Jesus in the gospels was that Jesus, why did they set their stories 130 years later? That needs an explanation that accounts for the all the elements in the later stories better than the far more parsimonious idea that there was another guy called Jesus executed in the 30s AD.

Fr. William Most wrote an article entitled, "Dead Sea Scrolls: Threat to Christiantiy" which discusses the "Teacher of Righteousness", Michael Wise and a host of related matters.
You can find it on EWTN's website.

[pocaracas]

[Randy Carson]

[FatAndFaithless]

You..do know they simply could've been wrong, right? They could've genuinely and honestly believed in this stuff, believed that what the stories they were telling and writing down later were true. I don't think the claim here is that they consciously sat down and said "Let's lie to people."

Lay off the strawmen, Randy, it's unfitting for someone as articulate as you.