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

Yes, what Jesus supported was not the miserly accumulation of wealth but an absolutely anti- economic ( complete anti - capitalistic) system where money, economic laws, economic increase... seemed to mean absolutely nothing.
And not only nothing but a grivious obstacle to a man. Such was the ideal - lack of money and other goods. One pair of sandals, one coat.... total dependance on God instead but not on money security.

 

Point well taken. However, I know (at least) one successful rebooter who still brags about his escapades, the quality of the site he used to hookup, the beauty of his conquests etc.... without going back. So whereas I agree with you that it is unfortunate that apparently not all the inner cancer cells were wiped out through the "chemo" of rebooting, the remission is nonetheless stable, so to speak.... which is far more than we can say for many others who perhaps are more humble. So... I think we need not necessarily fear for your friend.

 

How do you know your "unity of spirit" isn't just an empty idea in your head? Because an earthly institution which has proven fallible throughout the centuries told you so? The Holy Spirit manifests itself in our lives in diverse ways. We know the Spirit dwells within us from these manifestations, not because a priest assures us it is true.

Did you really just say that? When are we supposed to think for ourselves and when are we not supposed to?

Consider the trajectory many catholic churches are on. The rituals are the only things many believe in. And are you really using the moral state of protestant churches as an argument against it? What about Catholic churches? Do I need to bring up all the scandals attached to it?

I've only been to one Baptist church and baptism, communion, and marriage are all highly regarded and essential sacraments in it. I'm not opposed to going to a Catholic church, and I may very well attend a mass and discuss with someone who knows what the requirements of being Catholic would be. My mind is open to Catholicism, and it can't hurt me to learn. If I have to believe that all other Christians outside the Catholic church are condemned to hell, I may pass.

Jesus argued with the pharisees because they were legalistic to the extent that their following the law broke with the spirit of the laws. If you want to tell me I'm going to hell because I don't believe in praying to saints or the infallibility of the pope - fine. But just consider the spirit of the teachings of Christ and then say it.

I'm not trying to be hostile here, but the nature of your statements beg this kind of response. In truth, I enjoy interacting with you and wish you all the best.

 

The right teaching of Catholic Church is that everybody can be saved provided that they have so called ,,good will,,. It's a minimum. Even atheists, communists and cyclists..... If they desire and do good or in other words if they live according to their conscience.
I know now Protestants will protest that to be saved we must have faith and baptism. But Catholics talk about faith in good as a minimum and baptism of desire ( if you try to live a good life, help people...etc. then you would desire baptism ) and faith in good can be faith in Jesus who said I am the way, truth and life.
The most secure way to be saved is faith ( living faith in Jesus expressed in good deeds) and baptism although.
But the Catholic Church strongly hopes that beside of this there is salvation too.
Additionally, all people of ,, good will,, independent from their religion or if they're atheists or agnostics, are inside the Church and not outside.
Such is the teaching of RCC on church and salvation in brief.

 

I was raised catholic and consider myself an adherent of liberation theology. It you do not understand symbolism Catholism is hard to grasp. We do not worship Mary or Saints but use them as examples of how to live our lives. That being said my personal relationship with God matters more than the church.

I see my faith as a foundation for how I live my life. If someone realizes I happen to be Christian/Catholic that's fine but I'm not a preacher of my faith I'm a doer. My foundation prayer is the beatitudes. Jesus to me is a teacher not a judge. Sex to me is appropriate within a committed monogamous relationship. Should people wait till marriage? Thats their choice. I will not be a virgin when I get married but I have had very few sexual partners. Sex without meaning is shallow to me. Do I think men need to clean the pipes periodically? Yes. If you look at the research masturbating 1-2 times a week is fine and should not impact a persons regular sex life with a partner. More and more research has established a link between porn and ED which I do suffer from medically. My reboot is about porn more than MO. Less porn will help me obtain better stronger orgasms with a partner. Less masturbation also prevents death grip. I'm a science guy with fairly conservative values but I do not believe it is my job or prerogative to force people to adopt my way of life. I don't drink smoke use drugs and I'm also trying to give up cursing and of course porn. I'm doing this for me nobody else.

 

Wow amazing yes amen so true. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being here. Glad to have you here stay blessed. Peace and love

 

What about the Great Commission?

 

You can preach through actions not just words. Words are easy actions are much harder than words.

 

It's an aesthetic and nostalgic sense* of the loss of cultural unity that drives my thoughts here. There was a whole vibrant mode of being in the past that is just a distant memory to us today. To appreciate it perhaps requires something of a paradigm shift away from our post-Copernican view of things, where all revolves around the individual.... no doubt as some psychological compensation for the recent traumatic de-centering of the Earth. Unless you can imaginatively engage with these issues, you'll never really understand them. Take a leap of imagination, and see yourself revolving providentially, historically, organically, around the way things are, or were, that is, in symbolic terms.

I know what side I would have been fighting on in the religious wars. What was at stake was a whole way of life and culture. The same way in which the US will defend itself from acts of terrorism. A pragmatic and practical reason is involved here more so than pure reason/ theory.

*Nostalgia is the sense of the loss of a spiritual home.

 

How one defines hell, and who is to enter, and who is to abandon all hope, is well beyond me.

All I would say is that if you want to experience the fullness of Christianity that experience is mediated to you by the Church. Of course, Christ sits at the center as the Mediator, but there radiates from him a series of concentric circles, further media and mediums if you will... the sacraments, and the Church etc. Christianity is a very historical and physical religion that's incarnated in bodily form.... why not allow that this also involves the institutional Church? I think it's because our thoughts have been prejudiced against power and institutions, and in favor of individual freedom, since the Reformation. If this is so, the task is to free your mind [from an ideology].

I think it's also appropriate to consider where this excess of freedom and privacy has taken us in terms of the development of our culture. Human nature, devoid of social constraints, public morality, and institutions, is hardly equipped to handle its own freedom. You have seen all sorts of libidinal instincts released required to fuel 'economies'. The old culture functioned to sublimate such energies. What is there now in the more modern and secularized kind of churches that can perform the same function for earnest young men [and women]? Not a lot. Hype and puritanism just does not cut it, and you'll see unequipped Christians continue to tragically struggle with their basic urges.

 

How do you know this? Could your sense of this loss of a spiritual home be the result of something other than the current states of the church(es)? Is this something that is lacking in your faith? Not an accusation, a well-meaning question. I appreciate your points about the self-centered nature of individual theology, but I am still unsure how you can be sure that there really was some "vibrant mode of being in the past". This leap of imagination - I feel as though I have gone through it when I came to Christ and I revolved around Him and no longer myself.

I have a problem with this analogy. Of course the US should defend itself against terrorism, because that is the nature of nations. Of course the Catholic Church should have defended itself against the reformation, because such is the nature of political/ religious institutions. Here lies my problem - putting my faith in a political/ religious institution, as you stated in your second post. I suppose the reason it's difficult for me to accept that the Catholic church is the exclusive incarnation of the faith on earth is that, unlike the bodily incarnation of God, it is so very imperfect. Also, I feel as though the scripture indicates , as I said before, the church may be manifest in all believers rather than one specific institution. This is something I am continuing to think about.

So... do you truly follow all the Catholic rules? All the sex and birth control ones? I've got no problem with the sex ones... but I've had a vasectomy and, reading about it, I would technically be expected to seriously look into a reversal. I'm married and one can't simply confess away a mortal sin that one continues to enjoy the fruits of.

It is at this point that I wonder about the legalism involved in being a Catholic.

I understand that I ought to submit my ideas of right and wrong/ convenience to those of God, but do I really believe that the morals of the Catholic church are God-breathed? I have no problem with any of the morality in the scriptures (is that due to my ability to interpret them as I like? I don't think so...), but I look at my life and consider having twelve healthy children due to the wonders of modern medicine and I am not so sure that this is essential to being a Christian. Is there no room at all for handling our freedom and the changes that come through technology, etc?

So the question I face is... is it better to become part of the Catholic club, get the shirt, and break the rules, or to simply be an honest Christian?

I appreciate this and apologize if I over simplified your views in an attempt to make my own.

 

Well, I think it is the poet and artist in me, the ideal part, that recognizes an ideal in the Church... a Church that is both ideal and real in the sense that Augustine describes in his 'City of God'. Like anything earthly, it will be fallible/ corruptible/ imperfect... just as the body of Christ's was until it was glorified.

The 'real' part of me I guess would be the 'rational' part, but as I've outlined in previous threads, I'm skeptical of what we would here call the ego. It's really quite a modern phenomenon envisaged in the Reformer's 'Here I stand', and solidified in philosophy's 'the rational is the real'. From the earlier perspective it is simply heresy [which means to think for oneself] as opposed to orthodoxy [to think with the tradition/ community].

From the artistic and poetic perspective, which I think is better aligned instinctively to matters of faith and religion, the ideal is the real. And this is how I suspect we see things in symbolic terms, where the universal, so to speak, is embodied in the particular; God in Christ, and the church in the Church, and so on.

Well, I don't even go to church at the moment [in a foreign country], and am probably not a very good Christian. But I do have a passion for it as an ideal, and find myself funnily enough communicating its values to the listeners of my poetry. I am definitely not a puritan, but I am a believer in virtue. Human nature is a complicated thing, and the Church is big enough to accommodate all types. We certainly don't all have to be the same.

 

Is it virtuous to accept the authority of the Catholic church but not follow it's rules? I know we can't follow Christ's rules - but we confess and he continually forgives us, if He is our high priest and I can pray directly to Him.

But if my intermediary is Monsignor Charles M. Mangan (whose article I read about vasectomies) I am not allowed forgiveness unless I honestly repent which involves reversing my vasectomy. Do I just shop around for the right parish and a liberal priest who will look the other way, or do I lie to the conservative priest so I can remain in the fold? Is the liberal priest virtuous if he does not follow the rules of the Catholic church?

Where is the virtue in all this?

Thank you for responding to my posts.

 

To be virtuous is to be manly [from the Latin vir... virile]. Now having a vasectomy is both unnatural and unmanly... You are not an animal to be spade. So yes, you are going to have trouble with any Catholic in this regard because I think Catholics see sexuality as closely tied to the sacred. Actually, I suspect you may know more about Catholicism than I do. I am a recent convert of just a few years... and converted for essentially aesthetic reasons.

 

I though virtuous meant having high moral standards, not performing the basic reproductive functions of the male gender. I decided to get a vasectomy so that my wife could stop using a copper IUD, which we realized could potentially be an abortifacient.

Unmanly because I can not create more children... are priests manly then? Unnatural because it is surgical - what about any other surgery? Is it unnatural to have a heart valve replacement? If so, is this necessarily wrong?

Or was this just a way of telling me to shut up? If you stop responding I'll leave you alone.

 

Being virtuous is following the will of God.


In Catholic teaching sex must be 1. open to life, 2. unitive, 3. done within marriage. To deliberately exclude one or either of these conditions is to use sex incorrectly.

The Catholic position is not that every sexual act is sinful if it doesn’t produce a baby, but that it is sinful to deliberately use an artificial means to eliminate procreation from sex. Or, in other words, to seek the joy of sex while eliminating the corresponding responsibility.


Consider the words written by Pope Paul VI in 1968:


Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the Church in this field is based, if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificial birth control. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men--especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point--have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.


Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy.


Consequently, if the mission of generating life is not to be exposed to the arbitrary will of men, one must necessarily recognize insurmountable limits to the possibility of man's domination over his own body and its functions; limits which no man, whether a private individual or one invested with authority, may licitly surpass. And such limits cannot be determined otherwise than by the respect due to the integrity of the human organism and its functions, according to the principles recalled earlier, and also according to the correct understanding of the "principle of totality" illustrated by our predecessor Pope Pius XII.


Paul VI, Humanae Vitae #17


John Paul II:


The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, if every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful. This teaching is to be held as definitive and irreformable. Contraception is gravely opposed to marital chastity; it is contrary to the good of the transmission of life (the procreative aspect of matrimony) and to the reciprocal self-giving of the spouses (the unitive aspect of matrimony); it harms true love and denies the sovereign role of God in the transmission of life.


John Paul II, Vade Mecum for Confessors Concerning Some Aspects of the Morality of Conjugal Life (n.2.4).

Source:http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resources/life-and-family/sexuality-contraception/birth-control/

Archbishop also talks about contraception in this video.

 

The whole tenor of your language is Protestant and puritanical [bear with me]. It's like we are talking two different languages, but the reality is we are operating from within two different cultures [or paradigms].

Take 'virtue' for example. Coming from the Greco-Roman culture, of which Roman Catholicism owes much of its culture [a continuation of classical antiquity as seen in Augustine], virtue is more than 'having high moral standards'. Virtue involves having a certain nobility of soul, a spirit of self-determination, and a rational desire to over-come an otherwise fatalistic nature. The Church 'baptized' the best of pagan culture, and the Priesthood is essentially the culmination of this ideal... an ideal which was originally all about sublimating eros into art [civilization is not the repression of eros -read negative, but the sublimation of eros - read positive]. This is a very manly and heroic enterprise... only a modern and naturalistic perspective would question the manliness of priests because of their vow of celibacy.

Does this mean the Church is pagan? Not at all. Christians all agree that there is a providence to history, where history is a dialogue between God and man. Now just as the divine revelatory aspects of this were developed in the course of Jewish history, a human cultural development was also required... in order for the revelation to make sense... that is for the communication of the Jewish tradition to the Gentile one.

And so you had the development of abstract ideas first with the Greeks, and then the more practical ideas of the Romans, in a word, Western civilization. Only then was the time opportune for the full revelation of Christ, and this came into dialogue with the pagan achievement as provided by Providence. Though Rome was ruined, the foundations were still there for the Church to build anew.

 

I applaud you if you have been able to keep all the Roman Catholic rules about sexual morality.

I would argue that I have been faithful to my wife (besides porn), that our marital relations are mutually caring, and that no government is forcing birth control on me, so maybe Pope Paul the 6th's reasoning doesn't apply. Maybe if the bible said something about it... (There's the Protestant in me!)

I guess all this broken sinner can do, a bible reader trapped in his cultural paradigm, is kneel and beg his creator for mercy.

Thanks for the discussion - I find your perspective challenging and enlightening.

 

Your hatred is for those who do not practice what they preach. Notice none of your examples included practicing Catholics. The truth is you can't find one problem with the infallibility of the doctrine, so you attack the lack of impeccablilty of the clergy, yet the Church never claims impeccability in its clergy. This has been a problem from day one with Judas, Peter, and the other 9 who abandon Christ during His passion. Then the Church put one of its persecutors as a Bishop, St. Paul, and yet I don't see you protesting the Gospesl and Epistles which were written by such sinners of their time. Hypocrite.