If you feel so strongly about it, I encourage you to pm a mod.
I can empathize with your emotional feelings of disgust, without sympathizing with your viewpoint, since, when it comes to religion, I have a hopelessly divergent opinion from yours.
Praise Hugo.
To everyone in this thread, let me re-iterate first of all. When I used the terms Catholic and Christian, I was using them connotatively. From my experience, which I will admit, is still limited, the catholics that I know, all of them, refer to themselves as Roman Catholic and members of the catholic church. The Christians that I know, all of them, refer to themselves as Christian first, then by denomination. I have seen Catholics refer to themselves as “Catholic Christian,” but very very rarely do I see Catholics refer to themselves simply as Christian.
I never said Catholics aren’t going to Heaven, and I never meant to say that they aren’t Christians in its most basic sense. I probably angered many of you, but I did not mean to and some of your anger is based off an assumption. As I said, I did not mean for you to understand me in this way. I believe that salvation is through Jesus, and Catholics or Christians or Catholic Christians, or whatever you are called, are saved by Jesus, regardless of what they call themselves. At the same time though, I wholeheartedly believe that there are doctrinal differences between the group that calls itself “Catholic” and the group that calls itself “Christian.” (Who the Catholic church will refer to as “Protestant.”) I never purposely made any claims that catholics aren’t Christian by the original definition of the word, and the real misunderstanding came from the idea that came when someone attacked me without ever asking for clarification. Does this make sense? If you are Catholic and I offended you, I wasn’t clear enough, and I am sorry. Could you please forgive me?
After saying that, let me expand on why I still do not think that saint prayer in any form is necessary.
First, when you request a friend to intercede for you, do you need to offer prayer to them in order to get them to pray for you? If a saint were alive, simply asking them to intercede would be identical to asking a good friend or pastor to intercede on your behalf. The breakdown happens when you have to pray to a saint to get them to hear you. You use the term “sending your wishes,” which I need your definition on, because the way I see it, sending wishes and requesting help in return is the same as praying, and any prayer not directed to God or Jesus is wrong. If you proclaim yourself as a Christian and then pray to the god of another religion, what do you say about the God of Christianity? You make Him seem insufficient.
Intercession is a good thing for living believers: in 1 Timothy 2:1-2 we’re commanded to offer up supplications and intercessions.
"First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way."
Supplication (petition through prayer) and intercession (praying on behalf of someone else) are commands that we must follow. This is because intercession both helps our faith by having us pray to God for all things, and it also builds a stronger church. By interceding and requesting intercession, we are encouraging our Christ following brothers and sisters to speak with God, and we are increasing the group’s dependence on God.
After saying that though, my main point rests in 1 Timothy 2:5-6
“For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.”
1 John 2:1
"My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. "
My problem with saint prayer in any form, whether requesting intercession from the saints or asking saints to repeat miracles, you are ignoring Jesus and His role to act on your behalf.
Hebrews 7:25 says (in reference to Jesus)
“Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”
Jesus is the ultimate intercessor. The best link between the Christian and God. Why? Because He is the Son of God. He IS God. All true miracles are done under His authority and salvation is through Him alone.
I would never ask a saint to perform a miracle for me when I am able to speak with the One who granted that saint the power to perform their miracles. I would never ask a saint to intercede to God on my behalf when I am able to ask the best intercessor ever.
Does this help explain my stance on saints in general? I don’t need them. I think they’re wonderful examples of how to live a Christian life (Paul was an excellent example on how to live for Christ.) but beyond sharing news about Christ, and setting an example, they can’t do much for me.
In the words of Paul, taken from 1 Corinthians 3:5 -11 ;
For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
Do you agree/disagree?
What’s disrespectful and despicable to me are people blowing themselves up in the name of allah, sexually-repressed men believing a sky daddy is going to give them pubescent virgin girls in a fairy tale after-life, and an oppressive belief system founded by a child molester.
Hugo laughs at your ignorance.
Deeply and disrespectfully.
As well the Lord of The Weaving should.
Hugo loves all - even the faithless.
They make passable energy for The Matrix.
Someday, given enough of them, Hugo might choose to expend enough of that energy to make a true sequel.
Praise Hugo, my brother - praise The Weaving.
Indeed.
Our Lord Hugo would not partake of the Not-a-virgin before she was of age.
Not even Jean The Frenchman - he who did usher in the age of Portman before she was of age - stooped so low as that.
Sorry if this blows your mind. [media=youtube]wVC0FcSRxL8[/media]
(don’t be discouraged by the 2012 date, it isn’t relevant)
But even Lord Hugo is just a product of a particular nervous system constructing a reality tunnel in which the subject is led to believe that one set of appearances is more objective than another.
Predestination?
Oh, and <3 Robert Anton Wilson.
Leon the Professional (or the Professional, or Leon, or whatever iteration you saw) was an awesome movie. Just throwing that out there.
Oh noes! Your imaginary friend is supposed to be omniscient…do you know what that means? All powerful. I think he can take care of own fictionally hurt feelings. And since he’s omnipresent, no matter which direction Judas (or any willing god fucker for that matter) thrust his manhood into the air, miraculously god would be right there, bent over, to take it up his pooper.
Seriously get the stick out of your ass, we live in a world…YOU live in a country with the first amendment as our crowning achievement. That means you LITERALLY have the right to be offended.
And you defined “academics” as:
So what “academics” (aka “facts”) convinced CS Lewis?
So we can already establish that he didn’t receive the same standards of evidence that the original apostles were supposed to have (resurrection and miracles of that kind)…
So my philosophical queries regarding the concepts of God and religion are just “points of view”. But yours are “academics”.
Well, one of these “academics” you’ve been flinging around in this thread is the martyrdom of the apostles. This, and correct me if I’m wrong, is saying that “the apostles died horrible deaths because of their commitment to Jesus. They could not have been mistaken.”
As we’ve already established, a) the apostles were regular human beings, and b) human beings are fallible in their judgements and motivations. So to accept the martyrdom argument as 100% proof of Jesus’ divine nature is to completely ignore a very simple (but sometimes hard to accept) truth about human beings. It makes no sense, and if that’s what you hold up as “academics”, as being factual, then that’s embarrasing to your position.
Let’s hear another academic argument. Just one for now, if you don’t mind.
Wow, so that guy who abducted, tortured, raped and killed a child was God’s work? I question that.
I DO DENY IT!
The Bible had NOTHING to do with me deciding I believed in God. I realised the hard problem of consciousness, and from there I went to God. NO BIBLE.
Didn’t Jesus kill a tree that wouldn’t give him fruit or something, a fig tree or somethin? Maybe he was having a bad day.
I’ll allow the Theist to reach around. Sure.
No.
Do you not believe in rigorous, formal logic? Because that article I linked to has exhaustive displays of it, from a centre of Higher Learning.
Because those natural powers can often SUCK. If he’s behind physics and biology, why did that terminally ill cancer baby fall off the cliff?
This is a general theistic argument, and one I would be wiling to entertain (probably by saying “a theory that explains everything explains nothing”)
But it STILL can’t get you from God to the Bible! There’s no path there for you!
The fact that you are using a whole heap of rhetorical questions should suggest to you that your argument is a bit flimsy.
No, it is solid evidence. As in, directly observable evidence.
A lot better than “some guys believed in him thousands of years ago”
I’d accept it. If he washes my feet it had better come with a big “no-homo”, though.
That’s all you’ve got then? That some guys, they believed it, and then they died for it.
And that’s your evidence for the BIGGEST truth claim it is possible to make.
As Jesus himself said, “Laughable, man… HA!” [media=youtube]IONyLZn0pLI[/media]
Sometimes… in my darker moments… I can… empathise with them…
oh just joking, chill out. The Dude does not abide ethnic cleansing.
Honestly, I think martyrdom is a subject better approached from the academic discipline of psychology, rather than philosophy or religion.
And it all went downhill.