Posts Tagged ‘religion’

An interesting parallel

Posted: June 17, 2010 by datechguy in catholic, opinion/news
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Although I cast doubt upon the veracity of Ahmed Aboul Gheit claim concerning the president. I see an interesting parallel between the tactics.

In Egypt we have this story via Pajamas Media:

The head of the Coptic Church in Egypt has rejected a court ruling that orders the church to allow divorced Copts to remarry in the church emphasis mine. In a press conference held on Tuesday June 8, Pope Shenouda [III], reading from the statement issued by the Holy Synod’s 91 Bishops, including himself, said: “The Coptic Church respects the law, but does not accept rulings which are against the Bible and against its religious freedom which is guaranteed by the Constitution.”

Mind you divorce has always been legal, this rules order the church to accept divorce in its doctrine. As PJ Media points out concerning the Coptic Pope :

he is not enforcing a totalitarian law that Copts must accept; he is simply saying that, in accordance to the Bible (e.g., Matt 5:32), and except in certain justifiable circumstances (e.g., adultery), Copts cannot remarry in the church: “Let whoever wants to remarry to do it away from us. There are many ways and churches to marry in. Whoever wants to remain within the church has to abide by its laws.”

If this still sounds a tad “non-pluralistic,” know that at least Copts have a way out: quit the church. No such way out for Muslims: Sharia law — Egypt’s “primal source of legislation” — mandates death for Muslims who wish to quit Islam.

The Coptic pope is not taking this laying down:

Pope Shenouda further threatened to defrock any priest who allows a divorced Christian to remarry, except in cases where the divorce was on the grounds of adultery. Those that have remarried after divorce will not be allowed in Church.

On the heels of regular persecution of Coptics in Egypt this ruling seems a thinly veiled attempt to divide the strongest Christian church in the area.

Meanwhile in the US we see divide and conquer in another context

The first point to understand is that Obama knows about the debate Catholics are having over him.

That’s why he usually talks only to Catholics who share his agenda. He has been careful to ensure that the terms of his debate with Catholics have always been on his terms. He sends CHA a video and gives Sr. Keehan a pen because he knows that these individuals chose to follow him instead of the bishops. So he makes a place at his table for them and rewards what he sees as their loyalty.

The Bishops however are very clear on what is what.

In April, three bishops of the USCCB ad hoc Health Care Concerns Committee, Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Kevin Vann of Fort Worth and Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, also met with Sr. Keehan to try to make her understand the bishop’s concerns and thus bring CHA back in line with Church teachings, however the meeting concluded with “the same frustrating results.”

The president of the USCCB reiterated the bishop’s fundamental opposition to the health care reform. “The bill which was passed is fundamentally flawed. The Executive Order is meaningless. Sr. Carol is mistaken in thinking that this is pro-life legislation,” Cardinal George emphatically said.

The cardinal also expressed disappointment with CHA “and other co-called Catholic groups” because, “in the end, they have weakened the moral voice of the bishops in the U.S.”

In that regard, Cardinal George highlighted that the USCCB and CHA’s positions on Obama’s health care are not just “two equally valid conclusions inspired in the same Catholic teaching,” and reiterated that what the bishops said on May 21 in their statement “Setting the record Straight” is and will remain the official position of the USCCB on the contentious issue.

The president knows and understands this. It is not possible for a faithful Catholic to support abortion in this manor, thus the attempt to divide the church is what this president and the pseudo catholic organizations. The American Papist again:

I have yet to hear a Catholic who supports the Obama agenda say, “I like Obama’s agenda, but of course I don’t believe what he thinks about or how he acts towards the Church.” It seems that the Catholics who support Obama’s agenda, or the individuals who criticize Catholics for not supporting his agenda, very often couch their support for him in political, not religious terms. But Obama has made religious claims, and overstepped religious boundaries, in pursuit of his political goals. In the ensuing mix-up, there can be no complaint that Catholics who oppose Obama are confusing politics with religion, for when Obama places himself against the authority of the bishops, he has stepped into the Catholic scene.

To provide a couple brief parallel (and purely hypothetical) examples, what if Obama sent a message to a group of orthodox jews who violate kosher laws and praised them for supporting his domestic initiative of promoting American pork consumption?

To put it simply the president understands that a strong and faithful American Catholic Church is going to be a problem for him (as does the media) and his agenda and any attempt to divide or weaken it is in his political interest.

If you wonder why pro-life forces fight so hard…

Posted: June 10, 2010 by datechguy in elections, opinion/news
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…it is because of stories like this:

A fifth of nurses interviewed by researchers admitted that they had been involved in the euthanasia of a patient based on the “assumption” they would want to die. Nearly half of the nurses – 120 of 248 – admitted they had taken part in “terminations without request or consent”.

Euthanasia has been legal in Belgium since 2002. It accounts for two per cent of all deaths annually. The law states that patient consent must be given and that doctors must carry out the procedure. But the study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal shows that the rules are routinely flouted and shows how doctors often delegate the administering of fatal drugs to nurses.

You know that old Hippocratic oath had something to it. If you work under the assumption that the job is to preserve life and always err on the side of life you don’t get this type of thing, but once the attitude changes and the idea of cost take precedence the equation changes.

This is the result of a post Christian Europe and it is on its way here. It will not take one year or even 5, but by the time many of those who supported this health care plan become old enough to need this care, they may find that they ended up voting for their own end. In fact you have candidates openly stating this type of stuff today.

And the Hymers keep fighting

Posted: June 6, 2010 by datechguy in oddities
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The Hymes clan continues to give Little Miss Attila a whole lot of attention.

Even through another member of Baptist Tabernacle, that is initiating contact, which is in general the fastest way to get me to blog about the Hymerses. (The other two things that will get me to do it are when I get heart-wrenching stories from former cultists that I’m given permission to publish [with names redacted, natch], or when Dr. R.L. Hymers gets media coverage.)

She links to and comments on the response of the “church” but shows the difference between the pair.

When one side in a dispute is willing to link to both sides and let people make up their own mind while the other runs to the FBI, tell me who is more confident in their beliefs?

Deep within this post on Cartoon Central…

Posted: June 3, 2010 by datechguy in catholic, internet/free speech
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…is a comment that should get more attention. Not so much over if Comedy Central should or should not be making their Jesus show. (Their souls their risk) or if it is an example of cowardice (it is) but a fellow named skydaddy brings up a point concerning the Gospels that every person should know:

… look at the manuscripts as any paleographer would, using the same rules:
#1: Older copies are better (since all we have are copies of copies, older copies have less chance of scribal errors)

#2: More copies are better (since you can cross-reference textual variants and suss out the likely original text)

So.

Looking at most of the Classical literature (Socrates, Aristophanes, Plato, etc.) we generally have a dozen or so copies, with an 1100 year gap from the original to the oldest copy.

With Tacitus, we have 200 copies. No serious scholar doubts that we can accurately reconstruct Tacitus’ original writings.

With Homer, we have over 600 copies, with the oldest only 500 years removed from Homer’s life.

The New Testament documents are not even in the same ballpark. We have over 5,000 ancient copies of the NT documents, not counting the citations in letters written between Church leaders in the first few centuries. (We can reconstruct almost the entire NT from those second-hand quotes.) Counting those citations there are over 15,000 ancient copies of NT texts. The oldest copy (the Rowland Fragment – a bit of John 18) dates to within 60 years of its original writing.

And it is also worth noting that many copies of ancient philosophers were copies made by, you guessed it Catholic Monks who painstakingly copied and re-copied books in the days before the printing press.

There are a lot of people who are very desperate to deny the very existence of Christ. It doesn’t surprise me. If you can remove or re-define the existence of Christ than you don’t have to consider if he is what he says he is and deal with the implications thereof.

Via The Anchoress Ross Douthat hits it out of the park on this subject:

In the event, the synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …

But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.

This is why so many people go nuts over the sight of Christian symbols. That is why they are so willing to debase the faith and the faithful, if it was just a bunch of nonsense it would be ignored. If a person’s beliefs are solid they can stand up under fire as Christianity in general and the Catholic Church in particular has done for nearly 20 centuries. Likewise if one’s disbelief is solid it can stand Christian symbolism and belief. Why such a reaction to it all? I suspect that it is that fear that instinct in the back of their minds, that it’s all true.

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