I think after the emotions died down, Muslims could definately understand that was the context of the speech.

When the Pope said,

“”In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Quran, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion”

It made the matter even clearer. Regardless, we know the Pope is a staunch and scholarly Catholic, and I think we can see that he will respect it in the manner that is suitable for a leader of a great religion, but to think that he will not be without personal criticism is being naive. But that criticism can occur with respect and under a larger umbrella of unity of purpose.

That has to be understood by all sides, by zealous Muslims and also zealous Catholics.

I generally take the attitude which Shaykh Abdul Hakim Murad portrayed in an October article:

“It is therefore crucial for Muslim communities to forge ties with other defenders of traditional humanity, and to wish them well. The Catholic Church differs from Islam on some moral issues, such as contraception and divorce, but generally advocates the set of ethics that is normal to sacred societies and underpinned the greatest cultural achievements of medieval Europe, both Muslim and Christian. Like Islam, it is not only a matter of private faith and worship, but of rules fixed in revelation…

It is necessary to convince Muslim communities that despite the rise in Christian rhetoric in far-right circles, it is conservatives, not liberals, who are our most natural partners in the great task of guiding Europe back to God, and that Ratzinger’s criticisms are grounded in respect…”

And I am sure that in many cases, this is the source of the hangups you are noticing.

Incidentally, the focus of Benedict’s Regensburg address was not Islam. Consistent with Yursil’s point, the focus was an attack on post-modern nihilism. A review of that speech makes that very clear, but, of course, that idea was way to complicated to fit in a headline.

I’m finding the reaction among Protestant blogs to the recent restatement on Catholicism’s self-understanding to be absolutely incoherent. These are blogs that repeatedly provide off-hand observations about how the Catholic church doesn’t teach the “gospel” and that Catholics are saved despite the Church, and, yet, they get insulted when Catholicism says that Christianity subsists in the Catholic Church. It’s not like this is a new position. Moreover, Shea is right - the statement doesn’t even contend that Protestantism is even wrong, just incomplete.

Strange indeed.

First, via Mark Shea, on the recent document released by the Vatican. It clarifies, with Mr. Shea’s usual articulate skill, just what the Catholic view of Protestantism is:

What Rome means is “Where there’s no valid eucharist, there’s no Church” because the Eucharist is what makes the Church the Church. What Rome does *not* mean is “Protestants aren’t Christian. God hates Protestants. Only the Catholic Church is a true Church”.

Protestant congregations are in real, but imperfect communion with the Church. That’s because “we believe in one baptism for the forgiveness of sins”. If you are validly baptised, you are Christian. And, by the way, the Church *does* recognized non-Catholic bodies as true Churches (think “Orthodox”, for instance). It’s all about the Eucharist, baby. If you’ve got a valid one, you’re a Church. If you don’t, but you still adhere to the basics of the Creed, you’re an ecclesial body.

And then, via Michael Coren, comes another succinct summation of another point discussed above, concerning why I and others so ardently believe that all Christians should be reconciled to the Catholic Church:

Some critics, naturally, will always be offended by any sense of a hierarchy of belief and any call for conversion. Yet an exclusive truth cannot, obviously, co-exist with another exclusive truth. Otherwise that truth would not be exclusive. If there is a God, there is not an absence of God. If water is wet, it is not dry.

Any serious Catholic believes that happiness and eternal life are to be found within the Catholic Church. To refuse to pray that other people will find their way into such a place would be positively selfish and cruel.

Hmmm…no, I’m sure he meant to say it would be the furthest thing from arrogant, right?

And he is likely way too “tolerant”, “multicultural”, and “enlightened” to ever criticize a Muslim’s faith in a direct, one-to-one conversation.

But let us see what takes shape, shall we?

But thank you for the centering reminder. I’m working on phase 3 of my response to Kipp at present, and I think some of what you have said will have to be factored in more directly.

I think that the delving of this discussion into the realm of denominations is losing an important focus.

We don’t need to delve into specific denominations to determine the absolute need for an objective moral truth in this day and age. This need for rejecting the nihilistic attitudes of today is a common message of all real holy people in different faiths, including his Excellency, Pope Benedict XVI.

It is a reflection of the intelligence that we have been given, and a chance at achieving high honor in success, that we are allowed to use our reason and heart together in determining the faith which draws us the most. As we have seen, established religious traditions also offer the possibility of positive judgement even with a life led of that with a different faith.

This is not blind-pluralism, which accepts all traditions as 100% universally valid. Rather, it is acknowledging the honest belief that other paths may point us in the right general direction, but the path we have discovered is, to us, the best and most accurate approach towards God.

In those terms I see Ken and Peter as being a great examples of following their convictions with logic and reason. We don’t see eye to eye on some detailed specifics about definitions of morality, but I think we, like our teachers, recognize the much much greater threat of irreligiosity across the globe. It is this growing materialism which has fostered the true “holy war” of the dollar and power which has claimed so many lives.

When we are asking each other, “which denomination”, “which objective truth”, or “which faith”, at least we are then playing the right game, understand the rules of the match, and have acknowledged our weakness and requested guidance for finding that most accurate path.

The alternative is akin to bringing a baseball bat and ice skates in a soccer match: non-sensical chaos.

Latin and French are very different langauges - but the difference between them is small if you consider say, Chinese, Navajo, San, Hawaiian, or any African language.

That may be true, but that does not mean that the transition between them is a minor one, and only a fool would state otherwise.

Still, thanks for making me laugh today…I needed cheering up.

As for the rest of your post, it’ll have to wait until I finish configuring Active Directory on this new server.

Update: Okay, here’s more of my response. It isn’t complete yet, and I’ll get to the rest of it in a while. The nice thing about my line of work is that it has its share of downtimes in which I can scribble a couple more sentences, but the flip side of that is that every workday has its peak times, and its end points. I’ll add more, to this comment and not in a separate comment (ah, the joy of admin rights on the site!) when I get home. So if you answer any time in the next hour, Kipp, you’ll be responding to an incomplete response, and I’ll finish this one before I get to anything else you say.

There’s a lot of good writing going on here, for such a mundane article on the site. I’m thinking I should probably transcribe some of it into some actual posts on the site.

Kenneth, despite you and Peter’s protests that Catholicism and Southern Baptism are so vastly different in relation to each other, there aren’t many non-orthodox people who would agree.

Which, as Peter has pointed out, is not a function of the correctness of the non-orthodox, but a function of the arrogant assumption “that it can offer opinions about the logic or illogic of a religious system while being essentially ignorant of that system.” You maintain a cultivated ignorance about much that has to do with the various belief systems you criticize, and presume that this entitles you to pontificate at length, and to be regarded as correct and enlightened, about the essential similarity that exists between denominations and branches of the same denomination.

Which, as Peter, Yursil, and myself have pointed out, is far from the truth. The example of Sunni and Shiite Muslims is perhaps the most obvious and profound: at best, a Sunni looks on a Shia as a quasi-heretical sinner, if not an apostate. I am sure that the Shia affords his Sunni opposite an equally generous opinion. Your classification of this difference as circumscribed and as minor indicates a level of ignorance I could not hope to match (and were I somehow able to do so, I am sure the shift in reasoning would so alarm my friends that they would ensure that all of my sleeves for the next ten years would have buckles on them).

Basically, to ape a former U.S. Vice President, the disagreement of the non-orthodox isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit, and is certainly not the more enlightened intellectual position. If you truly want to pronounce the attitude as being one of arrogance, and if you truly want to demonstrate that it’s flawed, you’re going to have to go about it the long way…show, tracing from Augustine, through Aquinas, to the current Pope even, where it can be clearly demonstrated that Protestant theology has the superior grasp of Scriptural realities and provides a more accurate exegesis.

Because that’s the level of complexity and involvement, the level of reason and study, that convinces me I should remain Catholic. Next to that, what the non-orthodox “think” is at best, a frivolous non-concern of mine.

You and Peter define your life by - and obviously spend alot of time ensconsed in a world of - doctrinal precision. It isn’t a suprise that you see a vast gulf in what is actually drainage ditch between Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Church - but is isn’t a particularly clear pespective. You have particular disputes with Protestants and you disdain is cop-outs the differences these faiths see in the relation of the individual to God and Salvation.

The atheistic viewpoint that categorizes the Baptist/Catholic split as a mere drainage ditch is also not particularly clear — do you assume, perhaps, that you, Kipp, have the greater insight simply because you are viewing things from the outside? Your pronouncements certainly seem to indicate this, given their tone. But the content of your pronouncements would seem to indicate that while you may have an outside perspective on the denominations themselves, you are also impaired by what I might term an intellectual cataract of sorts.

Were we talking about, say, people from Africa, you’d be open to the charge of racism — essentially, your argument is “they all look alike to me”, and you attempt to pass this off as the higher wisdom. But it’s not the higher wisdom at all — it is the greater, and graver, ignorance.

And yes, to a certain extent, I do disdain the “cop-outs” that the different denominations engage in when discussing things like the relation of the individual to God and Salvation, because when a person calls themselves a Christian, I expect one thing in particular of that person: that their understanding of the relationship of every person to God, and their understanding of salvation, while it may not be complete, is at least consistent with a logical exegesis of Scripture. And things like sola fide and “eternal security” do not meet that not-particularly-demanding criteria.

Fundamentally, Christians all draw from the same playbook, or at least they should — the Bible. And while there is not one overarching exegetical school that is “the correct exegesis in all cases at all times”, there are certain basic principles, including the principle that any exegetical conclusion which is contradicted by another passage in Scripture is, fundamentally, incorrect. And sola fide lasts only until about the second chapter of the Epistle of James. Calvinist predestination doesn’t even last through the length of the Gospels.

I’m sorry you have experienced such contention between yourself and members of the Ukranian Church - but your dispute between this distant “Other” in religious terms consisted of an argument about what you considered to be a similar Eucharist and ended with you pointing out you share the same Pope. It might have bee sociologically hard for you to move between the Eastern and Western Rites - but the catgorical distance in terms of the fundamental conception of self, divinity, salvation, and worldy purpose is minimal.

Actually, no, the sociological transition was the easy one. By this point, I was already essentially striking out to learn what it meant to be Catholic independent of my parents, and was immersing myself in both worlds to the maximal extent. I think my level of learning, even at the younger age I was at back then, was quite a bit higher than even this old lady’s learning was…but that is illustrative of the difference that exists between the two traditions, precisely because I had to invest myself in numerous years of study in order to reach the point I was at back then…the point where I felt, with certainty, that I could receive communion in both Eastern and Western churches, and little else. To this day, I’ve not got much more to go on than that, as the two otherwise seem to take the inverse stance to each other on any particular thing almost as a matter of course.

Even having the same Pope is not as big a similarity as you assume it to be, and this is likely because you have absolutely no knowledge about the inner workings of the Eastern Rite itself. In the Western Rite, the hierarchy is actually fairly simple: the traditional progression of priest to bishop, then to archbishop, then to cardinal, and then to the papacy itself. The College of Cardinals, in union with the Pope, forms the Magisterium, the teaching office of the Church.

On the Eastern side, the progression interjects, into the middle of that hierarchy, a second “mini-Magisterium” headed by a patriarch, who is essentially a “mini-Pope” for the Eastern half of the Church. There is thus a somewhat dualistic authority structure at work in the Eastern Rite, as opposed to the unary flow of authority in the Western Rite.

The Eastern Rite also incorporates an additional teaching text, the Prokemion (I hope I got that spelling right) into its Mass, which basically (if I understand it correctly) contains additional prayers and lessons that are within the exclusive domain of the Eastern Rite.

I am also intrigued by your “dare” for me to suggest that even moving toward Islam would not be that significant. I am afraid history, and Peter more specifically, has already supplied the justification for that very idea. Islamd, Judaism, and Christianity are all Abrahamic and already acknowledge between them that they are related religions in spiritual terms as well.

If I could etch this sentence in bronze and frame it in gold, I would do that and hang it on my wall as an example of just how wrong someone’s thinking can go when they give up on the idea of God.

You seriously are suggesting that the conversion process between Islam and Christianity, or — even more laughably — Islam and Judaism would not be anything of particularly great signifigance? Well, I’ll be buggered…if that’s what enlightenment looks like, I am so very glad I forgot to sign up for it.

Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are “related” in the sense that they share one book — the Book of Genesis — in their holy writings. That’s the sole similarity. After that point, Judaism and Christianity maintain their relationship through the length of the Old Testament. Christianity then boldly asserts that Christ was the promised Messiah of the Hebrews, the Son of God, God enfleshed, the second person of the Trinity. Christianity and Judaism are very much alike in many ways, since Christianity essentially completes Judaism.

But Islam is not particularly similar to either of those two. Oh, to be fair, it acknowledges many of the same prophets, and Mary, and even Jesus (though it has an incomplete understanding of who He was and is) as having been sent from God, but that’s about as far as the similarity really goes. On any major issue you’d care to highlight, Christianity and Judaism are vastly different from Islam, despite the fact that on the surface they are all monotheistic.

If we are really, truly honest about the exact differences between Islam on one side, and Judaism and Christianity on the other side, we cannot even say that they worship the same monotheistic deity. For wheras Judaism maintains that God is unary, but with transcendent and lordly, present and personal, and ethereal and spiritual realities about Him — and whereas Christianity understands this same truth and completes it with the notion of Trinity — Islam fiercely maintains that Allah is strictly unary. Within Islam, Trinitarian doctrine is patent blasphemy.

It cannot be illustrated more plainly than that: these religions, which you so blindly claim are so similar as to make conversion between then a minor leap at best, do not agree on even the fundamental nature of God as evidenced both in the world and through the Scriptures.

But I suppose, given your previously stated — and giggle-worthy! — opinions on languages, that sort of wild assertion is to be expected.

Peter himself mentioned the “salvific” aspects the Catholic Church recognizes in Islam and Judaism as a way to avoid his mothers problem with the fate of her Muslim coworkers.

Actually, that was me. Do try and keep up.

Update, part the second: Okay, here’s the rest of it. Except the very last paragraph because I want to address your points in order, in order to infuse them with at least some manner of organization or sequence.

(He also seemed oblivious to the fact that his mother might also be concerned with the souls of people outside the Abrahamic religions who do not share such lucky nepotism).

You know, it’s a uniquely Protestant affectation these days to categorically assert that all those “outside the fold” will be damned to hell. Within Catholicism, no such pronouncements are made, because it is understood that such is not within the scope of the knowledge that is revealed to humanity. Only on rare occasions is the Church given any formal insight into who has found salvation; we call such people “saints”.

This leads me to another topic entirely, which I’ll touch on in brief: most people I’ve met who have, for one reason or another, apostasized from the Church have not done so solely because of the grievance they state, which in most cases is not a sufficient grounds for the apostasy in the first place. So my mother is worried about the salvation of her co-workers; good for her, because that is a concern that all Christians ought to have for all people. But her attending Mass in a church that does not explicitly deny the salvation status of her co-workers does not undermine their salvation status, as she full-well knows.

Her actual reason for the apostasy is wholly different — the issue of extra-Christian salvation is just a straw man she throws out to cover the fact.

There are major differences in the notions of original sin, the role of human life on earth, the nature of heaven and how one gains entry, etc - but all these religions trace their earliest ideas to the same holy books and thus, presumably, the same divinity who inspired their authorship.

True…and I have not been denying that. What my assertion has always been, which also upsets you it seems, is that only one denomination has remained truthfully connected, by the bonds of doctrine and tradition, with the earliest elements of Christianity. All other denominations share in that same basis, but have diverged from it in key ways. That has been my contention all along, a contention which you have denied emphatically, and yet are making here.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to start commenting on the lack of internal consistency in your argument, but that seems to be the direction we’re moving in here. At this point, it stands as revealed that any thought pattern of a believer is subject to your criticism, be he of a universalist bent or an orthodox bent. This chaotic misfire of logic is, unfortunately, to be expected, as Yursil notes below.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are amazingly similar when one considers Buddhist or Hindu religions where so much of what the Abrahamic religions take as “basic” building blocks of religious ideas do not exist. I know you want to present yourself as having conducted a thorough analysis of these other faiths - but you couldn’t possibly have in the 10 or so years you been exploring your faith. You’ve been a pretty committed Catholic all during that time and inter-doniminational disputes have obviously taken up a significant portion of your time.

I have an immense passion for study, and believe me…ten years is a very lengthy time when you’ve successfully debated against hundreds of Protestants and fewer, but substantially more zealous, atheists. I have had to learn much as much out of necessity as out of desire, and in either case it has profited me immensely.

There’s no need to be ageist, basically.

Again, your characterization of the relative level of difference, using categories so broad as to be laughable, is ignorant, and the conclusion you draw from it is arrogant. Your dubious assertion that all the Abrahamic religions are “amazingly similar” because they take the same “basic” building blocks into consideration is both not entirely accurate, and entirely too broadly categorized to mean anything.

You’re essentially that apples and oranges aren’t really too different at all, because at a basic level they’re both fruit, and they both have an outer skin or “peel” that many people prefer to remove prior to eating. While the conclusion is technically accurate within the scope of the context that you have defined by the over-broad categorical definition that you’re using (”X is/is not a fruit”), that same technically accurate conclusion is also meaningless and, ultimately, incorrect. Apples and oranges are not much alike at all, apart from the fact that both are fruit, and the same is true even among the Abrahamic religions.

That a Christian might find a greater quantity of theological differences between herself and a Hindu is beside the point; it is the nature of the differences that is the more important issue. And the nature of the differences between even the three monotheistic religions is such that the religions themselves are separated by distances that are not so minor to cross.

Your vast journey of spirit was primarily made long not by metaphysical distance but sociological ones.

Wrong again, as explained above.

The disdain you pour upon all SoBaps and other Protestants is just you passing along the contempt you’ve encountered from mean spirited Christians who share you doctrinaire pretentions but have slightly less manners. You nitpick about fairly minor differences in a vastly similar belief system and attribute laziness and petulance as the motivations for the doctrinal differences between you and your closely related Christian cohorts.

It takes either an incredibly lazy, or an incredibly intellectually dishonest mind to classify Protestant/Catholic differences as minor quibbles in an otherwise vastly similar belief system. Read some Jack Chick and then come back and say that.

Your family members who have problems with the church because of non-Christian salvation or homosexuality are simply trying to take the “easy” way out as compared to you and Peter who are tough enough to stick with it.

Well, nobody ever said that truth was easy. But what does that say about your own philosophical standpoint? By that same definition, then, are you not even lazier, and looking for the even bigger cop-out, by simply denying the aforementioned issues even exist owing to the non-existence of the deity at the head of the faith in question?

You have apparently never grasped that these people may have an insight of conscience that you lack.

The inherent assumption that dissidents from orthodoxy must necessarily have the insight of conscience and the more enlightened/correct view is unsupported by any hard evidence, and is indefensible in the light of rationality and reason, as both Peter and I (among many others) have given ample demonstration of.

It isn’t a suprise that the Catholic Church would deny sexism and issue lengthy rebuttals to that notion - you don’t seem to understand that just because your Church claims to have settled an issue in its favor (and, as a male, your favor) does not mean it actually has.

The Church isn’t even in the business of issuing rebuttals — the entire basis for that Mark Shea article are doctrines and teachings that have been on the books for over a thousand years. So either the early Church anticipated the rise of the modern radical feminist movement and decided to shore up its defences back then, or else the Church has, from its early days, had decidedly non-sexist, divinely inspired reasons for limiting the role of priests to just men.

You are apparently unable to see that a Southern Baptist has a fundamentally individualistic idea of each person’s relationship to god. Your Catholic Bueraucracy seems fundamentally suspect in their eyes. God is, after all, all powerful and of infinite means - why couldn’t he have a direct, intimate relationship with each person that need not me mediated by priests, clergy (or books)?

The thing is, Catholics don’t deny that each believer must form a personal relationship with God — that too is a cornerstone of Catholic teaching. But it’s only a part of the truth, and the example of Jesus Himself (whom all Christians should emulate first and foremost) teaches that we must also experience God and salvation in the context of community, and that salvation itself comes from faith in Christ experienced both in the individual and the community context. Once again, this is not an either-or situation, but a both-and situation.

And when one considers the checkered past of the church (I not think it all good or all bad - but it is certainly mixed) it isn’t hard to see why some people might think God would never create such a vast and potentially dangerous entity to direct something as personal as individual salvation.

God works, at all times in history, through His people, and it should come as no surprise that He would ordain the creation of a church on Earth as a part of His plan for the salvation of humanity. Does that church make mistakes? Yes, because it is both human and divine, and the human component is as prone to error as any other human institution, or any other individual human being. Is there a potential danger inherent in the creation of such an entity? Yes, there is…just as there was a danger when God gave humanity the ability to choose whether to acknowledge and return His love, or to deny it.

But God takes chances on humanity because He views humanity to be worth it. And He accepts the consequences of human sinfulness, because it’s better that we are free to choose to love or hate Him than that we are given no choice but to love Him.

This isn’t wanting something easy - it’s wanting something that makes sense to one’s conscience and it is the very thing you claim to seek yourself while disdaining the different choices other people make on that same basis.

Except that you just said that people who express those problems are looking for the easy way out. So which is it…is it the easy way out or is it the hard way out. Or are only those people who remain nominally Christian, while rejecting orthodoxy, that are taking the easy way out, while atheists and those who reject faith entirely are taking the hard road? But in that case, how do you justify your earlier statement that the people who apparently are taking the easy way out by shedding orthodoxy in favour of nominal Christianity have the superior insight of conscience?

You’ve stopped making sense, Kipp, and you’ve lost what internal consistency your earlier arguments may have had.

You claim to find other non-Christian religions “incomplete” (to which I would add a rhetorical point that 10 or so years of study devoted to these religions, as you have Catholicism, might change your mind*). Apparently you save the disparaging remarks of “weakness” and “easy” faiths for your closer Christian bretheren. But if you think a fellow Christian is lazy, what could you possible think of a Hindu - especially a Hindu who has heard about and rejected the Highest Truth of the Christian God’s #1 Catholic Church?

I think his faith is incomplete in its understanding of the divine, as I have already said. Pay attention, man!

* you forget, I’ve been researching those other religions almost as much, and as fervently, as I have been my own Catholic faith. And while I love finding commonalities between my faith and other faiths, I’m less and less inclined at every turn to say that those same other faiths are anywhere near as complete as Catholicism is, on any number of fronts. Make it a numbers game, a science game, a logic game, a theology game, a life-applicability game, and Catholicism consistently comes out ahead when you look at things objectively.

When the only reason you have to believe your faith is superior to those that are nominally different (Catholiciam and Protestantism) and to those that are utterly unlike it (Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Native American religions) is a claim to superiority by its proponents - which is exactly what you would expect in a competition for minds and souls - how can you be so credulous? And so confident that a spiritual journey that never abandoned a single book (with many chapters I grant) really got it all as right as it can be?

Precisely because that single book was complemented, at all stages of that journey, by a second “book”. I’m what you might call a “Two Books” theologian, in the tradition of Francis Bacon: there is, for me, the Book of God’s Words, and the “Book” of God’s Works. The first book is, of course, the Bible and the revelation of Christ and Scripture. The second “book” is things like science and other studies and experiences of the real world and its processes and interactions. And fundamentally, I find it ludicrously easy, in the light of Catholic teaching, to fully reconcile the two in mind. Jesus living and dying for my sins? No problem with it. Evolution? No problem with it. It just all makes sense.

Interestingly, I take the implication from your last sentence that you believe that any complete spiritual journey necessarily encompasses a rejection of the Bible. Can you clarify this point, because I may be reading you wrong?

At least part of that credulity is clearly motivated by your smug confidence that you are toiling on God’s true path and that all those lazy non-orthodox and non-religious people will not seem so happy in the end.

As I have said numerous times now, who is and is not happy “in the end” is not my call to make, but is the Lord’s call. I don’t even assume that I will find happiness “in the end”, in that I do not assume that my salvation is assured or certain. It is my hope, but whether I achieve it or not is left up to the Lord to know and to judge.

And to be fair, I’ve no problem believing that, in His mercy, Christ accepts some people into His arms who rejected Him in their lifetime. But if that is the case, then such people are an exception to an otherwise very reasonable rule, and I see no reason why the possibility that an atheist might enjoy salvation as well should deter me in the least from the beautiful truths of the Church. If Christ is more merciful than anyone’s wildest dreams (which is likely) then the Catholic faith is justified, not undermined.

And it at least some must also motivated by your privelege as men to just happen to site, along with your male Pope and masculine diety, atop the hierarchy of creation - at least when it comes to calling the shots and writing the rules.

You know what the best part of this sentence is? Mary, an admitted woman, is regarded as the first among the faithful in the Catholic Church. More than any merely human man who has lived, she is venerated and respected above all save the blessed persons of the Trinity. In the Eastern Rite, they’re even more specific: she is said to be higher than the cherubim and more radiant than the seraphim.

Pretty intense praise for a female in such a patriarchal, male-dominated, woman-oppressing Church, now, isn’t it?

Women have consistently played pivotal roles in the Catholic faith — St. Catherine of Sienna recently had her feast day, for example — and are called, as Peter has noted, the highest and best of God’s many creatures. But I’m sure that’s all just so much bullshit, right? Kipp’s anecdotal mumblings clearly carry the greater weight and authority.

It isn’t a suprise that I an athiest and you as theist should have an insurmountable difference of opinion along these lines.

Truth be told, if you accept the theory of evolution to be true and accept things like the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes as reasonable guidelines for moral living, I have more in common with you than I do with some Christians, with many people from other monotheistic religions, and than you think.

I am just as arrogant, as far as it goes, to believe that all religions are false as you are to believe that the creator of the universe actually cares about you uniquely. But the course of the interaction has revealed how much you are obsessed with the superiority of your own particular Christian faith and the disparagement of other Christians who disagree with minor bits of your club’s rules.

It’s like anything else…what would you rather hope for people? That they get things partly right, or as completely correct as is possible? I prefer to hope for the best for people, although I can certainly be polemical in how I go about challenging those things that are not the best.

But then, I’ve already admitted as much, as you may recall.

Update, part the third: I can’t resist commentating on this one, because it’s so very precious:

You simultaneously claim that the Eatern and Western right are utterful different and yet you also claim that all Christianities are so similar that you can speak for even Protestants - and judge the ones the you don’t believe as easy and incomplete. You have alluded more than once to the general superiority of your Catholic friends to people of other faiths and you apparently believe your particular brand of Christianity has the unique ability to make its orthodox followers better than any other version.

Yes, there I go being paradoxical again…seems to me I may have mentioned that previously. Notice, though, that it’s a paradox as opposed to a contradiction.

Firstly, don’t put words in my mouth: I never said that the Eastern and Western rites are utterly different; I said that they were essentially reciprocals, and categorized their relationship as that of a stabilized schism. I realize that you seem to have difficulty understanding subtlety in word use, but please do try and follow along. If you need to, there are numerous online dictionaries and thesauruses that you might consult.

I’ve disclaimed, when discussing my Catholic friends, that I may just know a large crop of truly incredible, essentially superhuman people. But at the same time, it’s highly unlikely that I found the one Catholic community where all the overachievers ended up. These are people who live their faith and follow its teachings, rather than making it up as they go or breaking the rules they personally feel don’t fit them well — that’s what makes them incredible, and also what makes them exceedingly normal.

And while I have not said much about other Christians in terms of their behaviour, I can say with a high degree of certainty that the Christians whom I know who follow their faith and its teachings in their life, even the teachings with which they might prefer to disagree, are all amazing people as well…and yet exceedingly normal at the same time. Do they have everything right? For the most part, on a moral level, there’s nothing wrong (although I’ve been asked by over a dozen evangelicals to provide theological justification for why cybersex, of all things, does constitute infidelity, but that is another matter — evidently, I seem to attract certain sorts of people) with how they live and what they believe (Anglicans and divorce nonwithstanding). In some other ways, yes, I do take issue.

But it’s not a question of “better” — it’s a question of completeness. Ultimately, what is “better” is faith in Christ and His promise of salvation. That faith can only ever be incomplete, and the real question here is one of degree. And the simple facts of the matter are that the Catholic Church’s degree of completeness is verifiably higher than that of other denominations, both in terms of consistency between teachings and Scripture, and in terms of practical application of teaching and Scripture to daily life in the faith. That’s a rational conclusion drawn from the evidence of lived experience and research, not because mommy/daddy/the priest told me that’s the way it was.

And that’s why the paradox you highlight works. There are vast theological differences between Christian denominations, as should be apparent to any observer inside or outside the Christian paradigm…but these differences emerge because of issues, in the ultimate sense, of completeness. And so while there is a vast theological gulf between Catholicism and, say, Lutheranism that would make any denominational jump by a guy like me impossible, the Catholic Church can, in general, speak with the authority of all Christendom precisely because it is the most complete, in addition to being the church which is the direct successor of Peter, and thus of Christ Himself.

Update, part the second, concluded:

You are entitled to this arrogance and to the alienation it causes between yourself and your family (both the consanguinous and metaphorical variety). Call it your burden and chalk me up to just another person who will “hate you” because of the cross the carry.

I certainly believe that you are, as is the case with most atheists whom I have met (especially in this online realm), intolerant of religion and of religious believers. I believe you subject them, in your mind, to a reductionism and regard them as, at best, intellectual infants, which I do not count to be a credit to you.

But do I think you hate me? Well, as yet, you’ve not come out and said it explicitly, so until such time as you do, I’m keen to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you do not.

I don’t hate you because of the cross - I am exasperated by your because of the shit-eating grin you are pridefully sure that cross entitles you to.

I take no sense of entitlement from the Cross (referencing your earlier comments about clarity of word use, it would be best to capitalize that ‘c’ at the beginning of ‘cross’ in order to be clear which cross you’re referring to), save in the sense that I believe that taking on the Cross “entitles” me to be scorned by family and friends who disagree with the tenets of the Church. If you think I have a “shit-eating grin” about such things, that is of course your prerogative…but that of course does not make it a correct thought in any sense of the word.

Latin and French are very different langauges - but the difference between them is small if you consider say, Chinese, Navajo, San, Hawaiian, or any African language.

And that’s where your understanding really fails, because your categories are too narrow and limited to draw reasonable conclusions out of. The same categories you could apply to declare that my jump toward the SoBap tradition would be a small one (remember: we both believe in a “patriarchal, monotheistic deity”, as you put it) could be used to state that a jump between Catholicism and Islam is a small, circumscribed one…ditch that Pope guy, and keep the patriarchal deity, and there you go. Easy, right? It isn’t, though.

Kenneth, despite you and Peter’s protests that Catholicism and Southern Baptism are so vastly different in relation to eachother, there aren’t many non-orthodox people who would agree. You and Peter define your life by - and obviously spend alot of time ensconsed in a world of - doctrinal precision. It isn’t a suprise that you see a vast gulf in what is actually drainage ditch between Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Church - but is isn’t a particularly clear pespective. You have particular disputes with Protestants and you disdain is cop-outs the differences these faiths see in the relation of the individual to God and Salvation.

I’m sorry you have experienced such contention between yourself and members of the Ukranian Church - but your dispute between this distant “Other” in religious terms consisted of an argument about what you considered to be a similar Eucharist and ended with you pointing out you share the same Pope. It might have bee sociologically hard for you to move between the Eastern and Western Rites - but the catgorical distance in terms of the fundamental conception of self, divinity, salvation, and worldy purpose is minimal.

I am also intrigued by your “dare” for me to suggest that even moving toward Islam would not be that significant. I am afraid history, and Peter more specifically, has already supplied the justification for that very idea. Islamd, Judaism, and Christianity are all Abrahamic and already acknowledge between them that they are related religions in spiritual terms as well. Peter himself mentioned the “salvific” aspects the Catholic Church recognizes in Islam and Judaism as a way to avoid his mothers problem with the fate of her Muslim coworkers. (He also seemed oblivious to the fact that his mother might also be concerned with the souls of people outside the Abrahamic religions who do not share such lucky nepotism). There are major differences in the notions of original sin, the role of human life on earth, the nature of heaven and how one gains entry, etc - but all these religions trace their earliest ideas to the same holy books and thus, presumably, the same divinity who inspired their authorship.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are amazingly similar when one considers Buddhist or Hindu religions where so much of what the Abrahamic religions take as “basic” building blocks of religious ideas do not exist. I know you want to present yourself as having conducted a thorough analysis of these other faiths - but you couldn’t possibly have in the 10 or so years you been exploring your faith. You’ve been a pretty committed Catholic all during that time and inter-doniminational disputes have obviously taken up a significant portion of your time.

You’re welcome to categorize such things as minor differences, and the transition as “easy”…but the plain fact of the matter is that you have no idea just how vast the journey actually is, because of the two of us it is not you that has made the crossing. Personally, I’d get off the “minor transition” hobby horse before it completely undermines your point — you speak of it only in total ignorance.

Your vast journey of spirit was primarily made long not by metaphysical distance but sociological ones. The disdain you pour upon all SoBaps and other Protestants is just you passing along the contempt you’ve encountered from mean spirited Christians who share you doctrinaire pretentions but have slightly less manners. You nitpick about fairly minor differences in a vastly similar belief system and attribute laziness and petulance as the motivations for the doctrinal differences between you and your closely related Christian cohorts. Your family members who have problems with the church because of non-Christian salvation or homosexuality are simply trying to take the “easy” way out as compared to you and Peter who are tough enough to stick with it.

You have apparently never grasped that these people may have an insight of conscience that you lack. It isn’t a suprise that the Catholic Church would deny sexism and issue lengthy rebuttals to that notion - you don’t seem to understand that just because your Church claims to have settled an issue in its favor (and, as a male, your favor) does not mean it actually has.

You are apparently unable to see that a Southern Baptist has a fundamentally individualistic idea of each person’s relationship to god. Your Catholic Bueraucracy seems fundamentally suspect in their eyes. God is, after all, all powerful and of infinite means - why couldn’t he have a direct, intimate relationship with each person that need not me mediated by priests, clergy (or books)? And when one considers the checkered past of the church (I not think it all good or all bad - but it is certainly mixed) it isn’t hard to see why some people might think God would never create such a vast and potentially dangerous entity to direct something as personal as individual salvation. This isn’t wanting something easy - it’s wanting something that makes sense to one’s conscience and it is the very thing you claim to seek yourself while disdaining the different choices other people make on that same basis.

You claim to find other non-Christian religions “incomplete” (to which I would add a rhetorical point that 10 or so years of study devoted to these religions, as you have Catholicism, might change your mind). Apparently you save the disparaging remarks of “weakness” and “easy” faiths for your closer Christian bretheren. But if you think a fellow Christian is lazy, what could you possible think of a Hindu - especially a Hindu who has heard about and rejected the Highest Truth of the Christian God’s #1 Catholic Church?

When the only reason you have to believe your faith is superior to those that are nominally different (Catholiciam and Protestantism) and to those that are utterly unlike it (Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Native American religions) is a claim to superiority by its proponents - which is exactly what you would expect in a competition for minds and souls - how can you be so credulous? And so confident that a spiritual journey that never abandoned a single book (with many chapters I grant) really got it all as right as it can be?

At least part of that credulity is clearly motivated by your smug confidence that you are toiling on God’s true path and that all those lazy non-orthodox and non-religious people will not seem so happy in the end. And it at least some must also motivated by your privelege as men to just happen to site, along with your male Pope and masculine diety, atop the hierarchy of creation - at least when it comes to calling the shots and writing the rules.

It isn’t a suprise that I an athiest and you as theist should have an insurmountable difference of opinion along these lines. I am just as arrogant, as far as it goes, to believe that all religions are false as you are to believe that the creator of the universe actually cares about you uniquely. But the course of the interaction has revealed how much you are obsessed with the superiority of your own particular Christian faith and the disparagement of other Christians who disagree with minor bits of your club’s rules.

You simultaneously claim that the Eatern and Western right are utterful different and yet you also claim that all Christianities are so similar that you can speak for even Protestants - and judge the ones the you don’t believe as easy and incomplete. You have alluded more than once to the general superiority of your Catholic friends to people of other faiths and you apparently believe your particular brand of Christianity has the unique ability to make its orthodox followers better than any other version.

You are entitled to this arrogance and to the alienation it causes between yourself and your family (both the consanguinous and metaphorical variety). Call it your burden and chalk me up to just another person who will “hate you” because of the cross the carry. I don’t hate you because of the cross - I am exasperated by your because of the shit-eating grin you are pridefully sure that cross entitles you to.

Yursil: thanks for the additional information; you are, as always, very knowledgeable and able to articulate ideas with clarity.

Peter again: yes, it really is sometimes.

Isn’t the internet great.

I am a Sunni Muslim, in the traditional sense. To help clarify the Sunni and Shia began largely as a political difference. Obviously, they are (at the roots) related in a very real and deep way. However, as Ken states the differences are quite large.

Sunni Muslims treat Shia’s as two types:
1) Those who hold positions of disbelief (kufr), which contradict fundamental orthodoxy established in the Quran. This includes beliefs such as believing Ali (R) the cousin of the Prophet (S) was God, or Gabriel disguised, etc. Sunni’s consider those who fall into this category as non-Muslims.

2) Those who hold only deviant beliefs but none of #1. Such beliefs include slandering the companions of the Prophet (S), or that Ali (R) deserved to be the first Caliph. This type of belief is not enough to take them outside of the fold of Islam (from a Sunni perspective), however it indeed makes them grave sinners.

Ken is accurate when he states:

What this fundamentally translates out into is a case where both sides of the spectrum mutually reject many hadith (laws) from the other side, and in many cases that rejection expands to include the other side’s theological traditions as well.

While the legal differences are real, the theological traditions for group #2 (if we are discussing doctrine) are actually not so different.

Yet, the reality is a Sunni will still not perform his group ritual prayer behind a Shia (who is at best, an announced sinner in belief).

I hope that helps!

-Yursil

I didn’t vet the link in my prior post to make sure that it worked.

I hope this one does.