Let's stop pretending, even amongst professed Christians, casual sex is an accepted thing.

The Church baptizes infants for the same reason for why Jewish parents had their children circumcised in order to enter into the covenant with God. Baptism is the new convenant with God, yet you want me to believe the same God who asked that infants be circumcised in the old covenant, and who was circumcised Himself as an infant in the Person of Christ, would somehow now have a problem with infants being baptized and now for some reason doesn't want them to be baptized into the new convenant like He did in the past? Does God change?

Jesus is the only mediator between God and man, but this doesn't mean there aren't mediators between us and Christ. In the Old Testament the Jews venerated the Arch. Did this veneration rob God of his Glory?

Where in the Bible does it state all believers are saints? I believe Saint Paul said he desires our sanctification, which means we're not saints yet. The Church viewes those who are in heaven as being saints. The Church acknowledges that there are saints we know of and many we don't.

Because Christ literally said that these things were His Body and Blood and because they would actually have to be in order for Christ to be the true Passover sacrifice since a condition that had to be met regarding the Passover sacrifice in the Old Law was that it had to be fully consumed. If Christ cannot be fully consumed then He could not be the Passover sacrifice. How else are we going to be able to consume Christ if not be bread and wine? Do you have a better way?

Everything in the new Church can trace itself from the Hebrews. In them they had a priesthood, sacrifice, confession, etc and all of these things are now perfected through the new Church which does them through Christ. But maybe you could answer me why Christ after his sacrifice on the cross and resurrection gave the apostles the ability to forgive and retain sins if we could all just confess to God directly? Doesn't make much sense especially since He had already paid the price for our sins. Hmmm.

I love the "where in scripture, where in spripture" defense when I can easily say "where in scripture is it spoken against?" Priest do not always give a certain amount of Hail Marys or Our Fathers. I've been told to read entire chapters of the gospels before for my penance.

Jesus did not preach against wealth. He preached against the attachment to wealth. He preached against the love of wealth. The only person recorded bitching about misplaced wealth in the Church was Judas complaining about the perfum spent on anointing Christ. Judas said it could be given to the poor. What did Christ tell him?

I can go further but I don't see a point. Best to address these one at a time anyways.

 

I endorse premarital sex. Marriage isn't for everyone.

 

The people on this forum can write about Catholic faith all that they like, even if they are Catholics.
How to understand something in faith cannot be something personal or individual like it seems to be in Protestantism. All Catholics must recognise the Cathechism of Catholic Church, and if somebody doesn't agree with the officiall teaching expressed there they exclude themselves from Catholic Church. They can remain Christians but no more Catholics.

What the Cathechism of Cath. Church says about another Christians is stated in paragraphs 819 and 820. They say something contrary to what you heard here on the forum:
,,
818 "However, one cannot charge with the sin of the separation those who at present are born into these communities [that resulted from such separation] and in them are brought up in the faith of Christ, and the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers .... All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church."272

819 "Furthermore, many elements of sanctification and of truth"273 are found outside the visible confines of the Catholic Church: "the written Word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope, and charity, with the other interior gifts of the Holy Spirit, as well as visible elements."274 Christ's Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him,275 and are in themselves calls to "Catholic unity."276 ,,

My tip is if you want to check something regarding Catholic faith look for in the Cathechism because the sad truth is that most Catholics only little know the Bible and their Cathechism. that's why many voice their personal view or simply presumptions.

As I said above in another context - look for something in sources and not in personal, often subjective or biased talks, articles, tv programms or books.

The official source obligatory for every Catholic is the Cathechism of Catholic Church.

 

Thank you - I will look into it.

 

Wow spoken so well SuperFan

Wow, spoken so well SuperFan. Like you said, doctrine is doctrine and no matter what some Christians think, the Truth of the Bible is still the truth.

 

The biased modern media loves this issue of molestation, and will exaggerate it as it's the best way to put the boot into the Church. Be careful that you don't buy into it yourself... the exaggerated aspect that is.. and the idea of the abnormality of celibacy. Priests are called to a standard of sexual purity for the reasons the Church gives.. that is the ideal. Men are perfectly capable of celibacy... to be a rational free being not at the whim of our irrational desires [a Priest symbolizes this important fact... and that there is more to life than marriage, family and women]. Think of all the single people out there. In the Protestant churches, where marriage is both the norm and ideal, a bachelor could be considered a weirdo, or in American language, a loser.

There is no excusing of individual priests who fell into criminal behavior.... just as there's no excusing of a teacher or a parent for abusing a child in their care. They should lose their position of authority and be prosecuted by the authorities. But also keep in mind the larger cultural atmosphere [both church and society] that has changed in the course of the past few decades. The pendulum has swung from where it was hardly mentioned and investigated, to the point where near everyone is a potential molester. In this climate, priests have been near demonized by whole communities... especially those that might hold some historical or theological grudges [I remember reading nasty little comics as a kid that prejudiced me against monasteries... the kind of thing were tunnels connected the monks through to the nuns... and where piles of baby skeletons were to be found... nasty stuff]. As for those that are adamant that sexual activity is the 'norm'.... oh dear. This just reflects a secular modern mindset, where the norm has replaced the ideal.

In the past, it was quite common for a drunken step father to abuse a child in his care, or for an underground pedaphile ring to target certain institutions such as the church, or for priests that had lost their faith to target children. It's the world we live in, but it does not tarnish the ideal. The problem is not the world, but our minds. We need to forget the underlying reality of things for a moment [that we are sexual beings, that we live with imperfect institutions] and focus on the ideal. And then work on having that ideal embodied in our institutions. Without this ideal, which the Church represents, I can not see how our society, and its institutions can improve. Rather, they will all degenerate somehow where we lose our real freedoms under the pretext of abstract ones.

 

I just simply disagree with you. Essentially you are saying one cannot believe something and act against that belief. You could be more wrong, but it would be difficult.

 

Well, you nailed it on your next post, "i don't believe it". You have to believe to be a Christian. That's why there can be bad Christians and good Christians. You can believe in Christ and still be an asshat. Also, you can be an atheist and be a wonderful person. A Christian is a follower of Christ who believes. In many ways Ghandi was a follower of Christ who didn't believe. He was well versed in Christianity and based a lot of his passive resistance movement on Jesus' life.

 

If you say for example that you believe that eating ice cream is good and even advisable when you have sore throat ( what is almost common in my country among average people), but when you have sore throat you don't eat ice cream ( I have never seen anybody eating it during strong throat infection ) then it means you only seem to believe the whole issue with healing role of ice cream is true.

As wise people say show me your actions , deeds , what you do , your life... and I'll tell you what is your faith like.
Faith is not saying something , faith is your deeds because before everything you will do you must think, decide mantaly choose an action first then comes a deed, action as a result of thinking, deciding, act of will ( believe).

Another example, if you stay clean from PMO some days and don't feel urges you believe that you can beat this addiction but after some weeks comes a very strong urge then you beginn to think - soon I'll give up. I's almost impossible to me to endure these urges ( you beginn to loose your faith in possibility to beat this addiction this time) then you loose your faith that you are able not to act out this time and your binge begins.....
So to PMO action you must first loose your faith.
Faith is acts of will and not abstract thinking.

 

But then, to read it historically, it was the other way round. A veneer of Christianity was not overlaid onto a secular worldview. Rather, Christianity first retreated from the public realm, to become a purely private affair. Religion belonged to inner experience, and outer experience was now seen in terms of politics and economics. Christendom devolved into Europe. After a while, as the secular culture grew, the inner religious experience could be ignored altogether. I think this is why orthodoxy defended itself so vigorously. For it knew that once heresy, that right to think for oneself, was recognized, not only was unity lost, but eventually all religion itself.

 

Look, i get what your saying, but i disagree. Let's take Christianity out of the equation, and look at just the logic. (IF your logic is true it should remain true for all beliefs. It should even be true for atheists who don't believe in God. If you're right it'd be equally true to say: "if an atheists truly believed porn was wrong they'd never look at porn. If they've looked at it, it proves they don't truly believe it.")

Here's your logic:
You believe porn is wrong
You watch porn
Therefore, you don't truly believe porn is wrong.

It is wrong headed because the conclusion (therefore) could be so many other things, you're not account for. It might be as simple as "therefore, you feel bad".

For the Christian, however, we don't need to merely rely on this logical progression for proof that what you are saying is incorrect. We can (and should) go to scripture. Saint Paul in Romans 7 talks about this. Let's look at it. Does he say, I behave against my beliefs therefore i never believed? Not at all!

Romans 7:18-25
18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.
19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.
20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.
21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.
22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self,
23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.
24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?
25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin

God Bless.

 

Therein lies your error [and era]. In order to believe, you must first know that you do not know. Forget Enlightenment, and think enlightened ignorance. This is the faith of a child that the scripture talks about. Your intellectual pride [the greatest of sins], places yourself at the center, where YOU decide what is and is not to be believed.

 

Oh dear, get yourself to a seminary quickly.

In Christianity, a symbol is the most real of all things. And perhaps we can only even begin to understand the nature of reality symbolically. It is not something merely symbolic... as something less than literally or factually true [a symbolist will interrogate these so-called truths in the name of a higher more metaphysical and meaningful order, where empirical truths just become appearances]. To think this way is not to have a religious mindset at all, but a secular one. This is why I keep saying Protestants lack a religious culture/ education.

Consider that from a symbolist's point of view, everything is symbolic... not only words, but even the world itself. This is also where the poetic sense of the world comes from.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing..... and a lot of it is positively fatal.

 

You seem a man of logic, so let me try to make this as clear as possible to you.

The Protestant principle is that it is every man's right to interpret the Bible how they see fit.... that they can break with the authority of an established church. Once you allow this right, then the rot has already set in [which is why Protestant churches kept splintering]. For how can you criticize someone from interpreting the scripture their own particular way? One person will focus on that, another this, another will historicize it, another will contextualize it to a culture, another will try to look for the bare minimal fundamentals of it... and discard what is inessential.

And so you have churches ranging through the gamut from those ordaining women priests to those warehouses popping up on the outskirts of town blasting their version of Christian rock... until people drop out because it becomes mere noise.

You are either for order, authority, history, art and Providence, or freedom and anarchy.

 

Then I guess Jesus messed up when he told us to be "wise as serpents." I'm not sure about you, but God gave me a sound mind to discern truth from falsehood. It's a sin for me not to use it. You seem to be of the opinion that faith only comes through ignorance.

When I came to believe, I accepted that there was a higher truth that I had been unaware of. But now, I know it. Now, I'm not ignorant. The truth has been revealed to me, and I have embraced it. There's nothing sinful or prideful about knowing that I have the truth--God himself intended for me to know the truth.

You're invoking a Protestant principle that I've never seen. Sola scriptura does not mean "interpret it however you want."

Lovely straw man you've created there.

 

@noonoon, I don't think there's any room in this thread for your common-sense, intelligent responses.

 

Here's my advice (that will be ignored).

Join the year 2017, embrace reality instead of shunning it. Ditch your archaic religion that was created by uneducated goat herders who thought they were the center of existence. Everything they thought to be was/is wrong so how about we embrace common sense, intelligence and curiosity?

I promise you as soon as you unshackle yourself from that book of nonsense you will immediately have a better, more healthy outlook on sex in general. Porn is a battle we all face but when it comes to viewing sex itself with shame, that seems to only be a Christian/Muslim problem.

So what do you say? Let's live in the 21st century and begin acting like it.

 

So we have two laws within us and they are contradictory, at war.
1. The law of our mind, conscience, God's law, the law of Gospel, love...
2. The law of our flesh, of sin, the law of our desires, of our pride, the law of selfishness and pleasure..
The above two laws have two contrary wills, desires, wishes and two different logics, ways of thinking, beliefs...

So now to the above example.
It's not that we addicts have only one belief that porn is wrong and only one desire to quit PMO.

This war is within us, so experiencing a temptation to do PMO we have:
1. we think and believe that PMO is very wrong, we wish, want to and desire not to give up..
2. we think and believe that porn and masturb. is sooo pleasant , soooo interesting and relaxing, we wish, want to and desire to experience the biggest extasy we know...

So we have two beliefs ( ways of thinking) in the same time at war.
If you act out your wrong sinful belief ( way of thinking), wish and desire win over your good belief ( way of thinking), wish, desire...
In other words you loose your good belief, wish and desire at the moment you decide to act out. Your wrong belief killed your good one and you do what your wrong belief, desire makes you do ( PMO).
So long you fight you have two laws - beliefs in you but at the moment of your decision to act out and when you wallow in the pleasures of PMO your good belief and desire are dead, lost, non existent....

Only after ejaculation when the cause of your wrong desire, faith finishes you can start to experience the good faith and desire to regret, ask God for forgiveness and try to fight ( provided God gives you this good faith and desire because these are His graces which we cannot produce with our will power).

 

Good point, I never noticed that.
So it's every man's right to interpret the Bible how they see fit provided you are not a Catholic. Catholics are excluded.
So why they say - every man?
They should say - some have right to interpret the Bible how they see fit. If they still state that every man ...then it's an ill-consindered contradiction.

The complete and true principle should be - it is every Protestant's right to interpret the Bible how they see fit.