871–875 of 875 posts
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The last three popes have all died during the Octave of Easter or Christmas.
One of the last three popes is not yet dead ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI>
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Ricky is smart, but not smart enough.
Maybe not, but dismissing this quote outright is to dismiss something fundamental to our psychology, and our history.
That is, I don't find it fundamental to our psychology nor history. To address your perspective.
It's an atheists view, sure. It assumes that if one god is real, then all gods must be real. Because in the mind of the atheist, all are equal in that they are imaginary or, at best, avatars of psychological phenomena.
It necessarily assumes the inverse logic that if 1,999 gods are fake, then 2,000 gods must be fake.
Again, because they are all fundamentally equal. And therefore it is the Christians that are illogical because they have dismissed 1999 gods as fake but couldn't quite get there for the Last God Standing.
I believe that's the sum of it.
Which is a statement that about illustrates the intellectual limit for atheism. I will give Ricky credit for that much.
Where Ricky's quip stops and Christian logic starts is that Christians know that their singular God is not imaginary nor an avatar, but is a living being. With the figurative 1999 additional gods indeed being either imaginary, psychological avatars, or worse.
Which is clear to the Christian, because he understands something singularly fundamental about Christianity's God that others may not. This fundamental characteristic, at minimum, is the difference between real and fake.
At which point the atheist would quip that there is no logic to see the Christian God as different from the other 1999 Gods, and as concrete.
The Christian would finish up with telling the atheist that their failure to see the difference is a failure in being able to interpret the Bible, a failure in being able to interpret the Christian religion, and a failure to understand their own nature including from where they come.
Some of this lack of understanding on the part of atheists is rooted in a lack of perspective that is otherwise glaringly true, and a lack of logical rigor. In other words, they take too many lies on faith.
The conversation frequently continues with a debate over supposed proofs rooted in belief (faith) for atheists.
With the Christian making more general appeals to their own faith that is rooted in Biblical and religious interpretation, ideally combined with their own verifying observations about the nature of the World.
Or, for those who have blindly committed based on instinct, then just appeals to faith alone. Which is also acceptable, because it is a correct instinct. Being a Christian doesn't hinge on knowledge alone. It hinges on faith. There are good reasons for this state of affairs.
What both sides will agree on is that he who believes in the least lies "wins" so to speak. The process of parsing being roughly parallel to discovering the rules of a game. The disagreement is over the substance of the lies. What Judeo-Christianity does is attempt to convey those rules in clear-enough language, even if the motivation to follow them is solely based on faith. With deeper Bible reading often being revelatory for greater insight.
Whereas the atheist dismisses the traditional rules out of lack of faith and lack of understanding, and often then devolves into inventing his own rules. Which is specifically against the rules, but does align with the atheist's chaos theory of his own existence.
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> including rightfully limiting the Latin mass Why is that a political thing though? The mass of the roman church was for centuries (almost all it’s history?) in latin.
It's complicated. Few people in the church, including the priests themselves, are fluent in Latin (there's a story told, I think by Francis himself, about an diocese in England that required priests to pass an exam to give a Traditional Latin Mass, and almost none of the requesting priests could pass). The TLM obscures what the mass is about, which creates space for practitioners to substitute in their own things, wh…
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If Israel wasn’t an ethnostate that treated Palestinians as second-class citizens (especially in the West Bank, especially in Gaza) would violent Palestinian factions have a political basis? No.
And if Hamas tactics didn't make every Palestinians into possible threat, the Israel ethno state wouldn't be as repressive. In many The big issue was world powers of WW2 deciding to just bequeath land to Israel.
The Israel ethnostate predates Hamas.
You even call it an ethnostate.
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I don't think TLM is intended to obscure anything; I claim instead that it is used as a tool of obscurantism for a fringe movement within the church. Everything you're saying that's good about TLM, I agree with. I'm the weirdo on the thread that actually took Latin, and, thanks to a work experience with a Latin scholar (hey Jon!) currently reads a little bit of Latin for fun. I would claim as well that most people wh…
> I claim instead that it is used as a tool of obscurantism for a fringe movement within the church When I read your use of "obscurantism" previously, I mentally substituted something like "anachronistic, deliberately so, with the effect of obscuring [what the Mass is about, etc.]" . Wikipedia tells us "obscurantism has been defined as opposition to the dissemination of knowledge and as writing characterized by delib…