We Prots re-discovered the simple matters of the man from Galilee
No wonder that the most materialist society in world history to be exactly the protestant aberration. A pseudo divergence made in order to legitimize profit for the "temple merchants". If the "man of Galilee" is to return, he would kick you all out again.
You aren't confusing Catholics with Protestants, are you?
Protestants concentrates their religiosity into the obsessive reading, in a total literal interpretation, of the Bible in a way not too much different from what Muslim fundamentalists do with the Coran.
To Catholicism, the fundamental thing is the teachings, examples, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and what we can and should learn form it in order to understand God's will. The Bible is recognized as a sacred text by the Holy Mother Church but must always be read with caution as the highly parabolic text it is. And this is correct, a set of texts written thousand of years ago, for people of those times, needs today to be seen not in a literal way but by mean of a higher level of analysis that can extract what is perennial from what is merely circunstancial.
Not to speak about the Old testament, so beloved to the Protestants, that poses particular difficult problems.
The Cathecism will show you many of the philosophical postures of the Catholic Church and there's a Compendium exactly written for that. You may find the compendium not to much top philosophic but it is meant to introduce people to further reflexions. Give it a look and it will give you the general tone of the Church's philosophy in brief.
Also fundamental to understand the Catholic reasoning are the Papal encyclicals. I recommend you very much this one CARITAS IN VERITATE by Benedict XVI.
I sure hope you're wrong, 'cause that day is probably a commin' ...... sooner than you think.
I'm not too much versed in American reality, but in what concerns to Europe the problem is not the army but the police.
The army is made of people that, through the entire chain of command, were never trained nor indoctrinated to fight their own people. The Police is different, they are trained and indoctrinated to see the populations as the enemy. The more they repress effectively their own populations the more they will be promoted...
For some reason, a special force, the Eurofor, has been already created joining polices from several European countries. Their mission is not like the army, to fight an external enemy, but to repress their own people. It is made with the polices from Italy, France, Portugal and Spain. Like the Nazis, they are using local forces to do the dirty job. Interesting how laconic in information wikipedia is about such extraordinary force.
I wanted to link to their website but it seems that is not anymore available.
Well oddly Belfrager - and probably for you (!), I can go a goodly bit along with that except that I of course from my background challenge matters pertaining to the Roman Catholic Church. Generally well opinionated with that addendum!
We are what we are plus our circumstances. Ortega Y Gasset. Sometimes that makes easier to agree with enemies than to agree with friends...
No organised religion in the spiritual world? So, Jesus was inviting people away from the variegated religions of this world to the spiritual world where the distinctions cease? (This happens to be exactly how I interpret these words.)
Organized religion is organized by men. Jesus Christ never made a Church, he said to Peter go and make my Church. God doesn't organize religions, men does. God doesn't impose you to pray this way or that way or even pray at all, organized religions imposes it.
But remembering the words "You are not of this world" it doesn't seem that in the end the path should be about any particular religion shaped in any particular way or having as universal adaptability as possible.
Well... Jesus Christ told to Peter to make His Church, he didn't said to the Buddha, I like your Church... Peter made Christianity and the Pope is his direct successor. Organized religions have certain limits to the amount of questioning.
As for my knowledge, only Catholicism admits a dualism between the individual path by itself and, at the same time, the total inclusion of the individual into the Church's organized structure. There's space for it and in fact most of it's theology is the result of just that. Compare the former Pope and this new one and you have the most perfect example of two different personal quests tied by the devotion to the same doctrine, the Church and our Saints. That's the deep meaning of "human dignity", so much defended by the Catholic Church against all odds and respecting many other conceptions of dignity, as poverty, forgiveness, etc. Also a personal quest is a matter of dignity.
Or the ones who marry into one, specifically Catholicism. They may turn out to be more rabid than those who were born into it.
What do you mean with "marry" into a religion? Marrying with someone of a certain religion? Ahh, I see, those who move to or adopt a new religion. Yes, it's like that people that stops smoking they turn impossible to hear.
What do you make of Jesus' words "You are not of this world?" If they are not applicable to this context, then where?
We are making different levels of approaches and that can't be done simultaneously. Course Jesus Christ's words refers to this material world and therefore show people the way to the non material, spiritual world. But there's no organized religion at such a world, isn't it?
I grew up in an atheist culture, nation, society. Should I follow the cultural matrix and stay as such? No verification of things by myself? No self-determination? And I disagree that this situation is some occasional anomaly. Most people I know are intellectually and spiritually displaced. They are seekers, in process of a quest because the current prevalent culture fails to provide support and structure to their lives. Where I live, this is so with the majority of people, not some negligible minority.
Notice that I haven't said that the search for an individual path or truth or whatever was wrong, I just said that is not what most people do and it is not compatible with organized religions. Such decisions imminently belongs to the individual sphere of action and conscience not to the collective sphere.
So, of course religions are not equal, but the inequality has many dimensions. E.g. Islam is not good *here,* but it's okay *there.* Christianity may be "true" here but the same "truth" appears totally different in e.g. South America.
And how does an organized, hierarchically structured religion as Catholicism deals with the necessity of being right regardless different cultures and places? By focusing into the adaptation to those particularities of the pureness of it's doctrinal message. It's by adopting to the reality of each population and culture and more, of each individual (to answer to he other point you make about personal evolution/age) that a religion shows how well it's message can be Universal.
And a religion to be taken seriously and just not a sect, it has to be Universal.
Parroting some talking points (such as teapot in the sky or tyrannical skydaddy) or authorities (Harris, Dawkins) is hopefully a good start that may lead to deeper knowledge eventually.
Some things can't be said but to the right audiences... You say that and you'll be immediately accused of wanting to provide opium to the masses... The problem a religion has to deal with is that for the majority of people, parroting is the best they can do.
Your insistence on "individually" raises complex problems since by religion we mean organized religion.
As for organized religions, the individual is necessarily seen as part of a whole, a whole that includes his language, culture, nation, society, class and a particular (organized) religion. Basically the individual is born whit it as non material reference. Most of people follows this cultural matrix where they were born and raised.
When we refer to the relatively few people that, by many different reasons, goes for their own way in search of a religion or running away from all of them, I see no special reason, it can be just philosophical, it can be emotive, it can be a matter of inner faith, it can be just a trend that he sees people he admires to follow or an incapacity to understand basic concepts.
What I'm interested to is in stopping the false idea that all organized religions are equal and even less, with the same quality. Because there's quality in religion and it is possible to determine those who have more and those who have less, if any. We can't compare as equal a religion with two thousand years of theological and philosophical work by the brightest minds with another that doesn't have any doctrinal structure but to parroting some text.
Of course we need Muslim posters and they are certainly welcome as everyone else. I would like to see a Taliban discussing here with the western political correctness.. Or with me...
Oh... the protestant now has images... someday they will start knocking at the Vatican door...
Anyway, where's our Muslim posters? We have a lot of work posting about them and they don't even correspond? If they think that they don't have a fair chance, they are wrong. There's many people here that respects everyone. So, please, I would like to hear from those we've been talking about.
I don't care if people thinks that SmileyFaze is wrong or not. Things are much worst than people thinks and only radical positions will grant freedom. This is not a moment for sissies but a moment for real men. We'll see who is at each side of the barricade. Because the moment of barricades is coming soon. Open your eyes.
The Northern half of Ukraine is pro Europe (they believe that they have a place there... we''l see that...), the Southern half is pro Russia and Crimea, the southerner peninsula - is simply Russia.
Europe has no military forces (and even they have they would never use it) and the US only appears against the Saddam Husseins of this world. I would bet my money that Putin has already won. He studied the adversary weaknesses and acted.
"Mother Russia" is back to the game and what a comeback.
But you are sitting in a comfortable century reading medieval romances, doing some mental time slumming, thinking you could get there what you can't get here.
There is little romantic about agrarian society, while there were exceptions life was poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Quote
Georges Duby (October 7, 1919 – December 3, 1996) was a French historian specializing in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages. He ranks among the most influential medieval historians of the twentieth century and was one of France's most prominent public intellectuals from the 1970s until his death in 1996.
Another one "sitting in a comfortable century reading medieval romances"...
The past "is a far away foreigner country" exactly as for most western people Islam countries are. Ignorance about both is total and has been used for controlling the masses.
So I am sure that these distinctions are merely nominal for Russians. There's no content or context to legal concepts for them. Might makes right and that's it.
Not surprisingly... Crimea's location lefts no doubts about who's the boss there... Naturally Putin can always evoke "preventive self defense", someone has given the example to him...
