there is one thing i can't accept is praying through Mary, a human being, and/or other saints.

Timothy 2: 4-6 says there is only one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. If we are "appointing" other mediators, then Christ Jesus died on the cross is in vain. "It is finished" becomes half finished.

Book of Hebrew 7 and 8 also talks about Jesus as our intercessor and high priest of a new covenant.

No. Else how would I quote Scripture to you? Catholics are encouraged to read the Bible, that's for sure. But when it comes to verses which at surface sounds difficult to understand or what might seem contradictory to other verses, to consult the Church about such 'contradictions', rather than to make up our own novel teachings. Saint Jerome, who translated the Latin Vulgate under the command of Pope Damasus, said ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. So there!

Because you confuse mediator with God the Father, and mediator with God the Son. Jesus is Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, also true God and true Man. Mary intercedes for us to her Divine Son, not mediator with God the Father. It's as simple as that. Anyone else can be secondary mediator for you by praying for you to Christ.

This post has been edited by yeeck: Apr 15 2016, 10:03 PM

What if a person interpretation of a verse differs from the catholic version and that person is very convinced of his interpretation.

What if a person interpretation of a verse differs from the catholic version and that person is very convinced of his interpretation.

oh...you need another person to intercede for you....hmm...very complicated. Too bad you have layers after layers.

"And if he will not hear them: tell the church. And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and publican."

"But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."

Truth is objective. It does not matter if another person is very convinced or not. I could probably say if Hitler was convinced that what he did during the war was morally right, does it objectively means that it was moral? The atheists whom you battled in another thread holds to the same relativist concept of morals. Are you going into their line of thought now?

The more the merrier. Remember the wedding at Cana. His time not yet come but yet at His mother's request, He still performed His first public miracle. If God honours His mother, so should we. This role of Mary is also prefigured in the OT in the story of Queen Esther.

This post has been edited by yeeck: Apr 15 2016, 10:45 PM

Much attention has been given to the so-called “dark passages” of the Bible in recent years. This is largely due to the use put to these passages by the enemies of the Christian name, by which I mean the aggressive, new-fangled atheists, who lately write pompous books against God, and get further media attention in order to attack Him. The “dark passages” are those parts of Holy Scripture wherein God appears to demand, do, or allow shocking things, acts that would normally — outside of the context of a divine sanction — be forbidden by His own law.

One might categorize these passages under different headings, but the ones I am interested in now are those which testify to God commanding the slaughter of all of the inhabitants of a place, including children and sometimes even animals.

Here are some specific passages to consider:

Numbers 31, which relates the war against the Madianites, a war of God’s own vengeance against Madian (vs. 2-3). When the victorious Israelite army of 12,000 slays only the men, Moses was angered and ordered the slaying of all the male children and all the women who were not virgins, whereas the virgin women and girls are allowed to live (vs. 17-18).
Deuteronomy 7:1-2, wherein it is said concerning certain people inhabiting Canaan that “God shall have delivered them to thee, thou shalt utterly destroy them. Thou shalt make no league with them, nor shew mercy to them.”
Josue 6:16-20, which relates Josue’s command to the Israelites conquering Jericho: “And let this city be an anathema, and all things that are in it, to the Lord,” sparing only Rahab the harlot and her house. Accordingly, the Israelites, “killed all that were in it, man and woman, young and old. The oxen also and the sheep, and the asses, they slew with the edge of the sword.”
I Kings (I Samuel) 15:1-3, where God Himself commands King Saul through the Prophet Samuel to “smite Amalec, and utterly destroy all that he hath: spare him not, nor covet any thing that is his: but slay both man and woman, child and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” (Later in that same chapter, God drives the point home very dramatically when, upon Saul’s disobedience for allowing the Amalec King Agag to survive, and allowing the people to take certain animals to offer to God in sacrifice, Saul is stripped of the kingship. Samuel himself did what Saul should have done: “And Samuel hewed [Agag] in pieces before the Lord in Galgal” (v. 23).
Not an exhaustive list, but it is certainly representative of the “worst” of such sections. These passages are shocking, and I dare say that we should find them so. Better than that, we should find them challenging, and we ought to be willing to accept the challenge to our faith of reading them and discerning what it is that God wishes to teach us by means of them.

We approach this subject in the sprit of Saint Augustine, whom Ven. Pope Pius XII thus paraphrased in his 1943 encyclical on Biblical studies, Divino Afflante Spiritu (45):

“God wished difficulties to be scattered through the Sacred Books inspired by Him, in order that we might be urged to read and scrutinize them more intently, and, experiencing in a salutary manner our own limitations, we might be exercised in due submission of mind. No wonder if of one or other question no solution wholly satisfactory will ever be found, since sometimes we have to do with matters obscure in themselves and too remote from our times and our experience; and since exegesis also, like all other most important sciences, has its secrets, which, impenetrable to our minds, by no efforts whatsoever can be unraveled.”

What can we say of this supposedly “genocidal” war policy against Moabites, Madianites, Canaanites, etc.?

God is good. He is good in ways that are clear for us to understand, and He is good in ways that are difficult to understand. (This is the lesson of the Book of Job.) In the book of Wisdom, Chapter 12, Solomon the Wise takes up this very question concerning how God dealt with “those ancient inhabitants of thy holy land” (v. 3): “For who shall say to thee: What hast thou done? or who shall withstand thy judgment? or who shall come before thee to be a revenger of wicked men? or who shall accuse thee, if the nations perish, which thou hast made? For there is no other God but thou, who hast care of all, that thou shouldst shew that thou dost not give judgment unjustly. Neither shall king, nor tyrant in thy sight inquire about them whom thou hast destroyed. For so much then as thou art just, thou orderest all things justly: thinking it not agreeable to thy power, to condemn him who deserveth not to be punished” (12-15). The entirety of this chapter is worth reading and meditating on, as it directly concerns this subject.

As the author of life, who has sovereign rights concerning the death of creatures He brought into being, God can preventively or consequently will any kind of death He chooses for His creatures. He is God. We read in Father Challoner’s commentary for I Kings 15: “The great Master of life and death (who cuts off one half of all mankind whilst they are children) has been pleased sometimes to ordain that children should be put to the sword, in detestation of the crimes of their parents, and that they might not live to follow the same wicked ways. But without such ordinance of God it is not allowable, in any wars, how just soever, to kill children.”

Personally, I find Father Challoner’s explanation entirely satisfactory to “vindicate” God’s justice. Not everybody does.

In an effort to gain further understanding, we ought to put these passages in their historical context.

Canaan belonged to Abraham’s descendants because of the divine promise made in Gen. 15:18. Notably, God says in that same conversation with Abraham that his ancestors will be captives for 400 years (in Egypt, though God does not name the nation), and will then return to this land, which they cannot now inhabit, “for as yet the iniquities of the Amorrhites are not at the full until this present time” (Gen. 15:16). Four hundred years later, the iniquities of the inhabitants of that land are full, and God judges them harshly for abusing their free will.

In the meantime, at least one pagan king (Abimelech, the Philistine king of Gerara) realizes that “the Lord is with” Isaac (Gen. 26:28), and makes a covenant with him. This could well indicate that the inhabitants of those lands knew that they lived in a place promised to Isaac’s father’s people, or, alternatively, it shows that God made it so obvious that He was with His chosen ones that even these pagans could see it. (Let us recall that, later, God made it obvious to the Egyptians that He wanted Pharaoh to let His people go, but Pharaoh did not relent, so he and his people were punished severely, as God had foretold to Abraham back in Genesis 15.)

By the time Josue comes to claim the city of Jericho, the inhabitants well know that the Israelites are coming to make their claim. God has made it quite obvious to them, and has given them plenty of time to get out of the way. It is so evident that Rahab the harlot can see it (“I know that the Lord hath given this land to you: for the dread of you is fallen upon us, and all the inhabitants of the land have lost all strength” [Josue 2:9]); she therefore helps the Israelite spies. Read Josue 2:8-14 to see how obvious God made it to the inhabitants of Jericho that God had given this land to the Israelites. Some of the inhabitants of the land accepted the faith of Abraham, were incorporated into God’s people, and were spared. Rahab the harlot — who foreshadows the Gentile Church — is one such (along with her father’s household), and she enters into the human genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1:5).

Why could not the other remaining inhabitants of the land know what the harlot knew? They could, and likely did, but they had bad will, just as the Egyptians who held Israel captive did.

The participle “remaining” was purposely used to describe the denizens of Jericho just now, for some read Josue 6:1 to indicate that many had been fleeing Jericho before the city was besieged. There are indications that many, perhaps even most, of the Canaanites got the message and departed before Israel.

According to Old Testament scholar, Dr. Nathan Schmiedickie, “Modern archaeology supports the view that what is presented as a conquest in the Bible mostly took the form of a peaceful migration. (Note, this is often presented as being contradictory to the Biblical account, but it isn’t necessarily.). Certainly there were battles and such, and certainly there were Canaanites who did not leave, but for the most part, the Canaanites recognized the rights of Abraham and his descendants to the land and either took the hint and moved to a new location or, as in the case of Rahab’s household and the Gibeonites, made a covenant of peace with Israel. The Bible is, on the other hand, equally clear that there were many Canaanite groups that never left the land (Judges 1:19-31).”

Again Solomon the Wise helps us out here: “Yet even those [Canaanites] thou sparedst as men, and didst send wasps, forerunners of thy host, to destroy them by little and little. Not that thou wast unable to bring the wicked under the just by war, or by cruel beasts, or with one rough word to destroy them at once: But executing thy judgments by degrees thou gavest them place of repentance, not being ignorant that they were a wicked generation, and their malice natural, and that their thought could never be changed” (Wisdom 12:8-10).

The conclusion of all this is that we are not talking about a wholesale slaughter of Canaanites who rose up to defend their land against a people concerning whose just claims they were ignorant. No, it seems that the majority of Canaanites recognized either the just claims, or at least the grave threat, of the Israelites and fled, leaving behind relatively few, who were the rich and powerful (Josue 6:2) — and likely only some of them. These holders on rejected the claims of Abraham, and thus rejected the God of Abraham. They would, as is clear from Scripture, strive to destroy God’s people and deny them their God-given Land. The stern and harsh “ban” (Heb.: cherem), which called for (among other things) the annihilation of these people included their wives and children. These shared the fate of their foolish men because a father’s decisions affect the family for good or for ill. (Yes, God’s revealed religion is patriarchal.)

.....

In the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M.

Not to mention that fig tree in the verse before this incident ...

Amen, Amen ...

This post has been edited by khool: Apr 17 2016, 06:57 PM

The Divine Shepherd



The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside still waters;
He restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff -
they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
my whole life long.

- Psalm 23

You do realize that using Hitler as an example actually speaks against you.

That's the thing. Hitler was the "absolute truth" for the German people at that time. You do not even realize that using Hitler as an example makes your entire point moot. You knew what was the outcome when Hitler did not allowed that he is to be questioned.

And you exaggerate again by making a difference in interpretation of a verse a matter of "absolute morality". It shows how insecure you really are just like the atheists out there.
The proper approach towards this is if you think that the person's interpretation is totally off, then you should reason with that person to convince that person as to why he is wrong in his interpretation. But then there is also a chance that what he interprets may be something you can learn from.

Your assumption right now is that your church holds the absolute truth. Just like Hitler made the assumption that he held the absolute truth. The thing is that even though there are truth that are absolute and obvious, there are truth that are not too obvious as well. Theology is just imperfect man trying to interpret the perfect word of god. So you are pretty arrogant in trying to say that your theology is perfect and that I should just accept your interpretation just because it is from "The Church". There are things that are clearly defined in the bible like the issue on homosexuality. But there are also many other issues that are not so clearly defined as well. For example, your theology on Mary is totally unacceptable to most non catholics out there.

The thing is, just like science is not able to find all of the answers pertaining to the material what makes you think your church has found the answer from a spiritual view. But then you are probably being even more arrogant then the atheist out there as even the atheist do not hold claims that their science is perfect.

You are the one that is more likely to be going into their thought because the atheist never question their own man made philosophy as well which is science and you are the one demonstrating that you are going towards the same path by not questioning your own man made philosophy which is the church. That' how I see it.

When a man made institution is given full authority, whether it is church or science, it's always subjected to abuse.

This post has been edited by sylar111: Apr 18 2016, 05:26 PM

I've given the reasons why I think your intepretations are wrong. That's all.

I've read every single reply so far from you, and given the corresponding response. Didn't see the same thing happening the other way round. I am open to correction, but I've yet to see anything convincing to change my mind.

It is Scripture which says the Church is the pillar and bulwark of the Truth and nowhere is "Bible alone" mentioned. Zilch. If you say 'my theology' is wrong on Mary, then show your understanding lah. Like I've repeated many times, show it, prove it. Don't just claim it.

Oh now you are saying the Church is a man-made institution eh? Hmm...interesting. So we shouldn't have a Church eh? Not even the one founded by Christ Himself eh? Or maybe you are saying that Christ didn't found any Church here on earth? Which is which exactly? I'm getting more surprises from you every single time you post here.

This post has been edited by yeeck: Apr 18 2016, 05:36 PM