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**mattyrm**

Ahtman wrote: It isn't as simple as "he drinks, he can't be muslim'.

Christians can get leathered, It aint against the tenets of the faith.

Muslim's cant.

It IS against Islamic teachings to consume anything that makes you lose your mind, sensibility, or judgement apparently.

**Rented Tritium**

halonachos wrote: It is not uncommon for a Catholic mass to include Old Testament and then follow it up with a correlating or related New Testament.

"Not uncommon" isn't the term I would use. The catholic mass and what is read and in what order is actually locked in on a schedule. This happens every single mass by design.

I'm an atheist now, but this is one of the things I really really liked about catholicity.

**Ahtman**

mattyrm wrote:
Ahtman wrote: It isn't as simple as "he drinks, he can't be muslim'.

Christians can get leathered, It aint against the tenets of the faith.

It is for some Christians. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but there are a variety of ways Christianity (hell, any religion really) expresses itself, and the same is true of Islam. There was enough Christian support at one time in the US that alcohol was outlawed.

On top of that there is the confusion of being a flawed follower (which most faiths would say all are) and being a perfect follower. A Christian shouldn't lie (well, not just Christians, obliviously), but they do, that makes them flawed and imperfect, not not a Christian.

mattyrm wrote:It IS against Islamic teachings to consume anything that makes you lose your mind, sensibility, or judgement apparently.

I've heard Christians say the same thing.

**Albatross**

mattyrm wrote:
Ahtman wrote: It isn't as simple as "he drinks, he can't be muslim'.

Christians can get leathered, It aint against the tenets of the faith.

Muslim's cant.

It IS against Islamic teachings to consume anything that makes you lose your mind, sensibility, or judgement apparently.

I'm beginning to understand why you have such a problem with them!

**halonachos**

Rented Tritium wrote:
halonachos wrote: It is not uncommon for a Catholic mass to include Old Testament and then follow it up with a correlating or related New Testament.

"Not uncommon" isn't the term I would use. The catholic mass and what is read and in what order is actually locked in on a schedule. This happens every single mass by design.

I'm an atheist now, but this is one of the things I really really liked about catholicity.

I wanted to say "not uncommon" because there are priests and then priests like this: (no he wasn't mine, but I had the pleasure of him doing a sermon with, during which time he called our parish 'damned, cheap' due to families sharing baptismal candles.)

VIRGINIA BEACH — The Rev. Thomas J. Quinlan Jr. famously loves to jar congregations with bluntly worded homilies, but he went too far when he mentioned the Virgin Mary’s birth canal during a Christmas Eve service – a Catholic bishop has banned him from performing any priestly function in public.

“Your shock content was crude, offensive and disturbing,” particularly to families, youth and visitors, Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo of the Richmond Diocese told Quinlan in a Jan. 17 letter. The bishop cited a sermon that Quinlan, known as “TQ,” gave at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Virginia Beach.

DiLorenzo said Quinlan’s record of similar behavior “engenders such anxiety and emotional upset that it interferes with the pursuit of the individual’s religious experience.”

The bishop’s censure means Quinlan cannot celebrate Mass publicly, preach, teach, perform weddings and funerals or conduct any other sacramental rituals. He can still celebrate Mass privately.

DiLorenzo declined a request for comment on Quinlan this week. The Catholic Virginian, the official newspaper of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, published a two-paragraph notice of Quinlan’s censure in its latest edition. The notice did not mention the Christmas Eve homily.

Quinlan, 77 , served South Hampton Roads parishes for 20 years before being sent into retirement last spring. B ecause of a clergy shortage in the diocese, many retired priests such as Quinlan are asked to perform Mass in local parishes.

Quinlan, who provided a copy of DiLorenzo’s letter, said Thursday that his Christmas Eve homily was an attempt to separate lore from the facts of Christ’s Nativity.

“When the baby Jesus came out ” of Mary, “he was a man, just like us,” Quinlan said. “I was knocking the traditional idea of Christmas.”

Quinlan said his sermon also tried to show that Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth were not strictly historical accounts, but rather, one of several different forms of literature in the Bible. “There was nothing wrong with my behavior,” he said.

Quinlan has long been one of the most colorful priests in the diocese. His exploits included riding a police motorcycle into the sanctuary during a Palm Sunday service at the Basilica of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Norfolk.

Over the years, his earthy language at Mass and in wedding sermons generated complaints by offended listeners who contacted the diocese’s bishop and the Vatican’s official representative to the United States.

“I’m always graphic,” Quinlan said Thursday, and he has taken glee in his reputation as an iconoclast. His retirement apartment at Church of the Ascension in Virginia Beach is decorated with mounted press clippings of his exploits. The headlines include “Fool for Christ” and “St. Mary’s Radical Priest.”

While Quinlan has many critics, he also has many supporters.

“That man has helped more converts come to the church than anyone I’ve ever known,” said George Hamilton , who attends Church of the Holy Family in Virginia Beach, Quinlan’s last full-time parish post. Hamilton said he attended the Holy Spirit service and recalled nothing particularly offensive in Quinlan’s homily.

The Rev. Thomas J. Caroluzza , a retired priest in Portsmouth, said Quinlan’s “foul mouth” and “occasional zaniness” were always intended to jar parishioners out of complacency and into a more active faith.

Quinlan said he was crushed by DiLorenzo’s censure. “They’ve sucked the lifeblood out of me,” he said.

Yet Quinlan said he has no regrets about his salty, flamboyant style. “If you believe in the truth,” he said, “you have to preach it as you see it.”

**Cannerus_The_Unbearable**

All of this is relative.

/thread

**Ahtman**

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:All of this is relative.

/thread

..then you graduate from your Freshman year of college and realize that relativism is a boring, feckless position.

**Cannerus_The_Unbearable**

Ahtman wrote:
Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:All of this is relative.

/thread

..then you graduate from your Freshman year of college and realize that relativism is a boring, feckless position.

So you should force yourself to believe something you actually don't instead?

Ultimately all I can offer is whatever you ended up doing, look at why you're doing it. Are you afraid of the afterlife? That's you being afraid of something, and that's a terrible motivator. Are you passioante about helping people? That's a great motivator as long as you draw satisfaction from it. Go with your heart on this one and banish anything you feel like is holding you back or trying to beat your face in.

**poda_t**

I could never take Christianity seriously. Then, after reading the Hiram Key and Uriel's Machine, I could only ever see it as a circus. It's not that everything in those books is true (it's easy enough to find out what can be dismissed as wild speculation and what has credibility), or that their science is sound(in most cases, it is the antithesis of sound), but in the end, the application of their argument with respect to Christianity, and the perception of "jesus the christ" is by far the most compelling and rational set of arguments I have read (I know I contradicted myself just now, but if the books are narrowed down so that you are only dealing with biblical material, and not the crackpot theories that come afterward, then there everything is sound). The application of the authors' understanding of biblical text doesn't simply strike me as a perspective, the things simply make sense. And the christian bible completely collapses when one comprehends that "Jesus" is a title applied to many men, and not given to one man only.

Don'y even get me started on A.) hypocrisy of christians, B.) the false and misinterpreted, misapropriated nature of the bible (which leads to c.) ) C.) the misguided sense that christians are one of the three faiths that believe in a single deity, Jews and Muslims being the other two, and D.) the complete miscomprehension of who Jesus the Nasorean was and what he meant.

As badly as I want to dive into this, I would rather not work myself into a rage right now because I will then have to deal with a nosebleed in the middle of my last class.

**Ahtman**

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:
Ahtman wrote:
Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:All of this is relative.

/thread

..then you graduate from your Freshman year of college and realize that relativism is a boring, feckless position.

So you should force yourself to believe something you actually don't instead?

Did you stretch before doing the mental gymnastics to come up with that off base conclusion or did you perhaps pull a muscle? Or maybe you don't really understand what relativism is and thus not fully aware of the position you posited. Either way, rejecting relativism is not an endorsement of hegemony.

**Cannerus_The_Unbearable**

Ahtman wrote:
Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:
Ahtman wrote:
Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:All of this is relative.

/thread

..then you graduate from your Freshman year of college and realize that relativism is a boring, feckless position.

So you should force yourself to believe something you actually don't instead?

Did you stretch before doing the mental gymnastics to come up with that off base conclusion or did you perhaps pull a muscle? Or maybe you don't really understand what relativism is and thus not fully aware of the position you posited. Either way, rejecting relativism is not an endorsement of hegemony.

Fancy word man, with the power to purposely make an argument when he gets what the OP meant in the first place.

I'm saying that all religious experiences, all religions and how they're interpreted are relative to each person. No two people worship "the same" Jesus as they see him slightly through their tint. I weren't "positing" nothing.

**Ahtman**

So you aren't really sure what positing is either.

And I'll go back to "you don't really understand what relativism is".

**Cannerus_The_Unbearable**

If I were talking about it, if I knew what it was or not might actually be relative to the conversation, so stop dragging things OT. I used the word "relative" correctly so let's not derail the thread further. What words you think I know or not has little relevance here.

**English Assassin**

Read some Thomas Hobbes or David Hume. Learn to ask questions. Seriously, it will be vastly more improving to your life than volunteering to be brainwashed by happy-clappies.

**Phototoxin**

Thing is I've read lots of stuff. But there's still niggling in my mind. I think I've been culturally brainwashed having been raised as a catholic.

also:

A Christian shouldn't lie (well, not just Christians, obliviously), but they do, that makes them flawed and imperfect, not not a Christian.

I know in catholic thinking it is permissable to omit the truth on the justification that not everyone is entitled to it. EG Nazi SS break into your house where you're hiding some jews in your attic. It is permissible to lie as the nazis will misuse this information (to kill the jews) ergo lying is allowed as the nazi is not entitled to this information.

**Ahtman**

I can't imagine how I didn't encompass the entire range of possibilities of all ethical issues regarding the truth and religion in one sentence.

**halonachos**

poda_t wrote:

Don'y even get me started on A.) hypocrisy of christians, B.) the false and misinterpreted, misapropriated nature of the bible (which leads to c.) ) C.) the misguided sense that christians are one of the three faiths that believe in a single deity, Jews and Muslims being the other two, and D.) the complete miscomprehension of who Jesus the Nasorean was and what he meant.
.

Its Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Nazarene, Nasorean sounds like somebody has a nose that is leaking horribly(the correct term for that is Rhinorrhea though, but that sounds more fun than anything else). The "the Nazarene" part is a title that was given to this particular Jesus the same way Erik the Red is different from any other Erik, its the title.

I also don't think that someone can logically say that Christians don't understand who Jesus of Nazareth was, the scriptures and everything kind of say repeatedly that he was the son of God, born of the virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit and was man until he received his mission. The guy was Baptized by John the Baptist after all.

Also, just for giggles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Flew

There are arguments for both sides from people who are incredibly intelligent.

**poda_t**

halonachos wrote:
poda_t wrote:

Don'y even get me started on A.) hypocrisy of christians, B.) the false and misinterpreted, misapropriated nature of the bible (which leads to c.) ) C.) the misguided sense that christians are one of the three faiths that believe in a single deity, Jews and Muslims being the other two, and D.) the complete miscomprehension of who Jesus the Nasorean was and what he meant.
.

Its Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus the Nazarene, Nasorean sounds like somebody has a nose that is leaking horribly(the correct term for that is Rhinorrhea though, but that sounds more fun than anything else). The "the Nazarene" part is a title that was given to this particular Jesus the same way Erik the Red is different from any other Erik, its the title.

I also don't think that someone can logically say that Christians don't understand who Jesus of Nazareth was, the scriptures and everything kind of say repeatedly that he was the son of God, born of the virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit and was man until he received his mission. The guy was Baptized by John the Baptist after all.

Also, just for giggles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Flew

There are arguments for both sides from people who are incredibly intelligent.

If you wish to discuss this with me, then message me. I as a rule will not dive into any sort of discussion on christianity because i could go on at length and completely derail the topic.

**Cannerus_The_Unbearable**

poda_t wrote:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Flew

and his wife Winifred née Garrard

Wife who says née?

**Corpsesarefun**

After their divorce she was the ex wife who until recently said née.

**halonachos**

poda_t wrote:
If you wish to discuss this with me, then message me. I as a rule will not dive into any sort of discussion on christianity because i could go on at length and completely derail the topic.

You could, but seeing as though you use a book written by a pseudo-archaeologist and a supposed Mason... I doubt the length would contain anything truly meaningful. Now if you quoted the DaVinci Code you may have something there.

While the traditions of the Church may seem silly, their foundations are sound and its no secret that different churches either censored or just didn't use certain stories. This was big in the Reformation vs Counter-Reformation era where the Catholic Church spent vast amounts of money to create works of art the commemorated stories found only in the books used by the Catholic Church. I learned that in Art 101.

But like I said, in the end no one knows until death or until scientists make a machine capable of entering the afterlife and returning.

"Now it may look like a bullet, but this is actually a nanomachine capable of creating a death-like state for several hours or potentially forever... actually it is just a bullet. I know, I know what you're thinking, you may die, but remember that they also said that the Hadron Collider could potentially create a black hole and look how that turned out."

**poda_t**

@halonachos

i agree, they are pseudoarcheologists which is why i dismiss most of what they say outright. Notwithstanding, it's opened up a perspective that lets me see the christian church in a wider light. Considering that it is a romanized version of judaism, and that every damn holiday lands on what was at the time was a "pagan" holiday, it's hard to treat christianty as a serious branch separating off of judaism.

And i suppose that because something is repeated by crackpots, the correlations previously made by legitimate investigators is made untrue?

flame bait away, i won't respond further.

**Squidmanlolz**

I am a Catholic, maybe I was a Catholic, not entirly sure at least not 100%. I do also beleive in Omniquantism which states that every religion is correct because an omniscient God would understand everyone's reasonings for their actions. The traditions of the Catholic church are some of my favorite parts, the correlation of the timings of holidays (yes, I know that they are based on the Pagan calender) spread things out nicely, while masses usually contain strong, continuing narratives and meaningful metaphores. There is, understandably, a lot of repetition and (unfortunatly) a decent number of Holier-Than-Thou bigots.

**halonachos**

poda_t wrote:@halonachos

i agree, they are pseudoarcheologists which is why i dismiss most of what they say outright. Notwithstanding, it's opened up a perspective that lets me see the christian church in a wider light. Considering that it is a romanized version of judaism, and that every damn holiday lands on what was at the time was a "pagan" holiday, it's hard to treat christianty as a serious branch separating off of judaism.

And i suppose that because something is repeated by crackpots, the correlations previously made by legitimate investigators is made untrue?

flame bait away, i won't respond further.

Catholics read off of the Old Testament, you do know what the Old Testament is right? Its made up of the old stories that the Jews used, Christianity then uses the teachings of Jesus to amend the Old Testament( if you had two text messages from the same person concerning the same subject that contradicted themselves would you accept the older one or the newer one?). That's why Christianity seems to contradict itself, there's the Old Testament and New Testament and they disagree with each other at times, but that's the point of the teachings; the New Testament is the new way to follow. It is a different branch from Judaism and if you cannot grasp the concept that Judaism= Jesus not son of God and Christianity= Jesus is son of God then I have no idea how I should explain that to you.

Jesus was also a rabbi, but Christians believe that he is the son of God. Judaism says he existed but say that he was a prophet and not the son of God. Its not a Romanized version of Judaism(in fact they used a lot of Greek, the fish you see representing some Christians comes from Greek) because the Christian faith was created by Jews, now the Catholic church did decide that the Basilica would be the best format for their churches but that was architecture they took from the Romans. A lot of holidays were put on pagan holidays and that's common knowledge, again, look at the Counter-reformation and the things a church does to try to stay powerful.

Now to the pagan holidays, okay cool they had holidays based off of certain seasons and its a shame that they had to establish a calender with a date to pinpoint an annual celebratory day.

In 46 BCE, Julius Caesar in his Julian calendar established December 25 as the date of the winter solstice of Europe (Latin: Bruma). Since then, the difference between the calendar year (365.2500 days) and the tropical year (~365.2421897 days) moved the day associated with the actual astronomical solstice forward approximately three days every four centuries, arriving to December 12 during the 16th century. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decided to restore the exact correspondence between seasons and civil year but, doing so, he did not make reference to the age of the Roman dictator, but to the Council of Nicea of 325, as the period of definition of major Christian feasts. So, the Pope annulled the 10-day error accumulated between the 16th and the 4th century, but not the 3-day one between the 4th AD and the 1st BC century. This change adjusted the calendar bringing the northern winter solstice to around December 22. Yearly, in the Gregorian calendar, the solstice still fluctuates a day or two but, in the long term, only about one day every 3000 years.

So at some point in time the winter solstice was actually at December 12th, but then the Pope decided to create a calender that put the winter solstice back to its original date which is the same as the Roman Winter Solstice, which is the same as Christmas Day. Changing dates and making calenders can be kind of screwy huh? Of course if you're going to try to convert people to your religion without being persecuted( and the Christians were persecuted horribly until Constantine) then you're going to try to conform to the people doing the persecuting. The metaphors for those times of year also resonate with a lot of people, spring is rebirth and December/January mark the beginning of a new year. Its all about subtext baby, all about the subtext.

Crackpots should not present material and anything concerning the Masons is always highly suspect because they tend to be a favorited scape-goat for just about anything.