Of course I have an agenda, so do you or you would not have posted your reaction to this letter (or maybe you just have nothing much to do?) What ever, I am sorry to say it looks like you may have a very mean-spirited agenda. I should not have used the term mean-spirited, however it well demonstrates what violence and even the advocacy of violence do to a culture and individuals within it—even pejoratives will anger those who use the.

Violence breeds violence and we can see this with any intentional killing of another human being. To wit, states and nations have lower violent crime rates than those that do. Thus one might wonder, why this love affair with killing others? Violence does that, it produced more.

Jesus's admonition to love one’s enemies and turn the other cheek is the way of life that really works. His new covenant that set aside the old (and eye for an eye), not only fills one with more love it also extends that love to the rest of God'children.

As for my letter being shared with others, of course--maybe you have not heard, we live in a global village, it is here and now. The Citzen is a fine newspaper that can be read throughout the world.

When you lie on your death bed, will you wish that you had been able to spend more time at the gallows? I would hope for you that you have lived a life so full of love that you only know but joy of that love in your final hours?

Untill the spread the good news. Peace and God’s love to you and yours, and may we share God’s love with the “least” of God’s children.

Amen to that!!!

Does one find comfort in the violent ways advocated by others, or do we grow in Christ by folloing His way, "What so ever you do to the least of My children, that you do unto me."

Love begets love. Anger, hate and violence beget more of the same. States and nations that execute people have fewer crimes of violence than do those that have captial punishment. Let us say amen to that which makes life better for all, 'tis love and love and more love.

The "Amen" you are referring to was addressed at the statement "we're all stocked up on special interest here". You are free to state your opinion and expect to receive criticism as I am mine. Don't judge me as I don't judge you. What would make "life better for us all" as you suggest, would be no more criminals roaming the streets committing unspeakable acts to innocent children and honest citizens. Do I hear an "Amen" to that?

But it is not offensive if someone will judge another to be put to death? Who will do the last to kill in the name of ending killing? To do away with sin we would have to do away with all humans. Love is a better patj as we all walk to own end of it all. Love and peace to you.

doowelsi,

Of course all have a right to state their views. That is called freedom.

But when you do so learn before you speak.

The death penalty was never revoked by Jesus, apostle or anyone else in the New Testamaent. In fact Christ said the soldier does not bear his sword in vain. And when Christ left he told the Apostles to take their swords with them.

And turn the other cheek? Again, CONTEXT. It is speaking of one Christian to another. Born-again Christian, not false Christians.

And lets go for cast the first tone as well. The context is they were going to stone the woman for violating Mosaic Law. Wich THEY were violating because Law required the man die along with her.

Learn the Bible before you start trying to use it as a weapon for you agenda.

Self defense is Biblical. And the self defense of a society rests in the hands of the government, be it police, courts or so on.

And as for violence breeds violence. The Bible also say killers, robers, rapists and such win and rule when good men do not stop them.

Mercy has its place. But its place is not in very case.

As Jesus admonished us, "What so ever you do to the least of MY children that you do unto ME." Would we kill our Lord Jesus again?

Jesus the Christ came and revoked the death penalty and all vengeance. Please see Math. 5:38,39 “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

And with this teaching of love Jesus told us that the old ways of killing must vanish from our ways. Jesus said, Heb.8: 13 “In that he saith, a new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.”

And our God in heaven told us before Jesus had come among us that this new covenant was coming with his Son Jesus in the days ahead. Jer. 31:31-33 “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

As people of God we know as John tells us over and over, God is love and we are of God. Thus we must give up hate and the old call for vengeance.

Let us walk with the Prince of Peace and not slide down into the darkness of hate and vengeance. As we are told in Romans 12, “vengeance is mine, sayith the Lord.”

Let us shine bright with God’s love. As Bishop Paul S. Louvered of the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia has in homily told the faithful, "... respect for life shines most brightly when we demand respect for each and every human life, including the lives of those who fail to show that respect for others."

May the love of God be with you and your and fill us all so that we know no fear.

With all respect you need to read more than selected verses taken out of context. And your verse is completely out of context. That is what I and others call 'shopping cart theology.'

Without getting into a theological debate your blanket statement of Jesus revoking the death penalty and all violence simply is not true. As demonstrated in your failure to take into account Christ beating people in the temple with a stick, destroying their tables and ordering them out. Or Christ saying by God's will soldiers do not carry their swords in vain.

Christ never revoked such laws and the death penalty and you cannot post any verses stating any such thing.

As for the New Covenant of Hebrews, that is not to the Church but to the Houses of Israel and Judah in the FUTURE when Israel is restored. Replacement Theology, which such as Catholicism embraces, is competely non-Biblical.

I realize as a Catholic you do not embrace a literal reading of Revelation and other such prophecy. But, as God used just violence and the death penalty in the Old Testament, he did not revoke it in the New Testament and it is in End Time prophecies in such as the Tribulation Period and at his Second Coming.

But this strays off topic way to much. The death penalty is very Biblical.

One needs to study the Bible in context and literally. Not taking verses out of context wrapped in man made doctrines.

The normal rules of grammar, word meaning and semantics do apply to the Bible.

In the unending cycle of things, each of us grapples with ultimate reality within the context of our own lives; call it shopping-cart theology or shopping–cart perception. In The Modern Temper, Joseph Wood Krutch expands on William of Ockham's 14th century view that man knows nothing outside of particulars to be real, and that the mind of man can therefore not know the essential and inimitable being of God. Thus so, I have come to root my religious beliefs in what I know personally to be most true, the "particulars" of my life and times. Beyond these particulars, as the great Hebrew and Biblical scholar Abraham Heschel has observed, “God is ineffable.”

The Holy Scriptures are one of the particulars of my faith and are in a context far beyond any literal sense to which I might draw from my reading of them. Heschel in his study, Who is Man, says of order, "The order of things goes back to an `order' of God." Of the meaning of things, Heschel says, "Meaning insinuates itself into our existence. We cannot grab or conquer it; we can only be involved in it."

My God is insinuated into my life as Christ has lived it when among us, in LOVE and in the light of that Love that I may try to shine into the lives of others. As the Good News of John has it of the Vernal Lamb of infinite beginning is the Christ who hath come to us as LOVE. St. Hildegard von Bingen in the twelfth century said, Jesus Christ is the Life of life and Love of love." As a follower of the WAY,Christ,(or as first said at Antioch, as a Christian) my path in life will lead me to love my enemies and to only do unto others as I would have done unto me.

Though I am not and cannot even come close to the ways of Christ, I can try. Jesus did not smite his enemies, did not avenge or even stop those who would murder Him. In His time among us he went about doing good, and all of his miracles one earth, save walking on the water (which he may even have done to save the others from rowing), were acts of love. They were not grand stunts of great magnitude, they were acts of love and kindness (a good number of us Irish Catholics have always been quite fond of the water to wine trick at Cana). This is the miracle that I am to follow, the miracle of love. It is to be my way.

Not only that, it works the way of Jesus the Christ on earth. To wit, states and nations that do not execute people have lower violent crime rates that do states that do. Let us follow the life of Christ and His New Covenant of turning the other cheek. Let us draw from the shopping carts of our lives LOVE and share it with others. Like the loaves in the baskets, the more love is shared the more there is to have.

To say that God is "ineffable" is to say that God is such that no human linguistic concept applies to him. Strictly speaking, this is incoherent, since "ineffability" is itself a human linguistic concept. How could you know that God has the property of ineffability if it is impossible for you to know any of God's properties? And if you know this much about God, what principled reason is there for suggesting that no one can really comprehend anything more of God? Further, "exists," "is one being," "is the creator" and "is love" are all predicates involving human linguistic concepts. You assert the latter and, I take it, assume the others.

So you don't really mean that God is ineffable, do you?

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[Nietzsche had] the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. --G.K. Chesterton

Like a two-year old child short on words or an old man whose speech is impaired by a stroke, man qua man is also limited in his ability to converse about what lies beyond his human faculties—be this the Essence of essence, or God if you like. In point of fact, man’s lexicon includes the word “ineffable” that denotes this tongue-tied predicament. This meaning of “ineffable” is but one warp that Abraham Heschel intended in his weaving of his pronouncement, “God is ineffable.” From his Ancient Jewish heritage, Heschel also intended another meaning of “ineffable,” i.e., a thing too sacred to be spoken of.

To this point, the Ancient Jews found the TETRAGRAM so sacredly mysterious that it was uttered but once a year and only by the most select among them. Thomas Cahill (The Gift of the Jews) says of this moment of yearly worship, YHWH was softly issued as the sound of the wind, “yhhhhhhhhhhhhwhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Chesterton could have accepted these Children of Abraham as believers too humble to verbally reduce their God down to a periwinkle.

Heschel’s words of respect for the mysterious nature of God do not mean that he is willing to ignore the importance of the great gift of awareness that God has bestowed upon mankind. As Heschel observed (MAN IS NOT ALONE-a philosophy of religion), "The most incomprehensible fact is the fact that we comprehend at all." And of what there is to comprehend, his fellow Jew, Albert Einstein, said, "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."

These two men were speaking of our human nature within the natural world and not that which lies beyond the limits of our senses or capacity for inferential extrapolation. As an older believer, I now think of the beyond to be a meta-natural state ever-past the probing capacity of science, but of no mystery to my God. In my younger years, I more comfortably saw this beyond to be a supernatural realm in which I fancied God to be. Regardless, my appreciation of science and satisfaction that I find in religion are not in conflict.

Like Carl Jung, I see the supposed conflict between science and religion to be a misunderstanding of both. Jung wrote in his "Psychological Commentary," for The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation: "Scientific materialism has merely introduced a new hypostasis, and this is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed and old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence 'God', matter', 'energy', or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have simply changed the symbol."

So what for me is the Symbol of symbols at the root of my faith, and what words do I use in my expression of it? I might either hum, make a wind-like sound, or more likely speak of God as Love. But how do I know of God if it is not through words alone? In my effort to understand ultimate reality, I have been informed more by inspiration than anything else--as Heschel has suggested, in the Wisdom of Awe. To wit: unfathomable meaning that I find in a poem, the simple glow of reality that beams from a smile on a grandchild's face, an instant beyond time experienced in worship at Mass, the warm reach of affection shared with my loved one, the deep knowing encounter in a meditative moment that blots out all else, the good humor that comes in laughing at a neighbor's joke, the deep understanding draw from an obscure fragment of Scripture, the truth encounter in giving or experiencing an act of kindness, or maybe the riveting presence that taps me when I encounter the beautiful sunrise of a dawning day. It is then that I know WHY, and I believe.

As God hath said, “It is good.” And God’s good for me extends to all of God’s creation, particularly to God’s children, be they beggar, murder or thief, and also to others easier to love—for what so ever I do to the least of His children that I do unto Him.

An odd discussion in the midst of angry debates over local politics, eh?

First, I do not see that you have answered the strictly logical point that the notion of ineffability is logically incoherent.

This point in no way precludes mystery. Nor does it preclude the sorts of experiences that you describe upon reading a poem or finding yourself carried away during a mass. It is one thing to say, "I cannot find the words to describe my full experience right now." It is another thing to say of something that it is necessarily such that it cannot be described. (Distinguish, please, between "X can be exhaustively described" and "X can be truly described." Of God, it is certainly false to suggest that we can have exhaustive knowledge. But this does not entail that it is impossible to know anything of his nature. And one of my points was that your own language and practice gives evidence to this fact.

I hope you have not misunderstood the Chesterton quote, which is really about his doctrine of "conditional joy" in the presence of the Creator and His creation.

Regards.

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[Nietzsche had] the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. --G.K. Chesterton

Your first point well defines ineffable and Heschel point in “God is ineffable.”

You wrote, “First, I do not see that you have answered the strictly logical point that the notion of ineffability is logically incoherent.”

Yes, human logic cannot know what is beyond our limited capacity. That beyond our limited ability to grasp in words of human reason lacks clarity or intelligibility (is incoherent).

If we are to play a circular word game, we might riddle how we can know something is incoherent if it really is incoherent. And to complete the word circle we could conclude that it is because it is not.

Since Essent God's is beyond the limits of understanding in words alone, I am more informed of my God through the Wisdom of Aw(another statement by Heschel that can be riddled or really riddled).

As William Blake so said in prayerful wonder in the opening lines of Auguries of Innocence, c1803:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Or since we play the circular game of reason, maybe we should come full-circle with T. S. Eliot’s verse:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

As for misunderstanding Chesterton, such would have been his joy. And though he too could pump himself up, he understood that the higher man elevated himself in relationship to the Almighty One, the more man only groveled in his insecurity.

As Chesterton said of us Americans, “The real American is all right: it is the ideal American who is all wrong.” Best we not forget that we are all sinners, and no better in the eyes of God than those we consider the least among us.

God's LOVE

Yes, God is beyond our understanding.

Which is why he gave us the Bible to clarify and give understanding to what we know about him and what he wants.

Read it and use it literally, per grammar, word definition and symantics.

While God is ineffable his will and revelation, as given in the Bible, is not.

I guess I have been lucky. I knew of and loved my God long before I even knew there was a Bible, and I still loved God after I had read the Bible (not so easy a thing for some young people who are sensitive of God’s love from family and friends who showered it upon them).

Burn all the Bible in the world and it will not affect my love for, worship of or desire to serve God.

I try not to make a graven image of anything, be it a book called the Bible or a pile of money. I also learned that from the love of my family before I had ever read any Scripture.

Do I read Scripture today? Yes and it is a part of my worship of God at Mass. But, even my most favorite passage from the Bible came into my heart after God had long been there.

My God is beyond and I do not need the Bible to tell me so. His great gift of love is always with me, even when I try to give it away to others. I even then have more of it.

As for your understanding of God, it will be your way and you will also make the most of it.

God’s love to you, of course you have always had it.

That is the key. Your god and my God.

They are not the same.

I most assuredly reject the premise all religions worship the same god. It is illogical and in contradiction to the Bible.

As I said elsewhere, we need to agree to disagree.

You wrote, “That is the key. Your god and my God. They are not the same.”

So, there is not but one God? You have found another one? For me or for you?

If God is as grand as most of us think, then God is surely grand enough to accommodate any feeble attempt that any of us make to think of God’s nature. In other words, God has let us each be wrong in our own special way--like the eight blind men, each touching a different part of the elephant and thinking that they alone know what an elephant is like. Well at least I think that "my" God is more complicated than an elephant.

But, if you really have found more than one God, I guess it would be possible to worship this other one as well as the one that existed before you found a second.

You wrote, “It is illogical and in contradiction to the Bible.”

But if some condition must be rejected on two separate grounds (illogical and non Scriptural), it is logical to postulate that a given might be either one or the other.

Or, just as logically there might be but one God of all faiths, but you just cannot find this God in your Bible. A condition I assume that would prevail due to your inadequate ability to read the Bible, or maybe you have the wrong version (by the way which one do you find to be inerrant?), or possibly Bibles in general are not good tools for playing around within mankind’s limited games of logic.

Spoken like a true Gnostic.

But at least it proves my point your pronouncements did not come from a literal Bible concerning the topic at hand.

Bye.

Robert is right about the quote at the end of your every piece - lose it!

More importantly, if you are going to preach religon or philosophy, get a new icon. Jesus would be too much, but maybe Yanni's mug shot or Cal in a burka would be better. No animals, please. They upset me.
meow

He seems like some kind of nancy boy, so what would be a better icon than a periwinkle - what does that quote mean anyway?

If that doesn't work - go for the Moses on the mountain image. Won't endure, but try it for a while.

An animal is fine with me, muddle has a pig in the mud connection or maybe 2 babes mud wrasslin'- Let's vote and help muddle.

Indeed one aspect of Christ and God are Love. But that is only one aspect.

The greater descriptive, which embraces and includes Love is God is Just.

To Love God and Christ is to embrace all he taught.

The same Christ you selectively embrace his Love aspect of only is the same Christ that will send his judgements against the earth in the Tribulation Period causing the deaths of millions. The same Christ who will slaughter the armies gathered against him at Armageddon at the Second Coming. The same Christ that will pronounce judgments and punishments on those who will be in the Lake of Fire for Eternity. The same God who sent the Flood and burned Sodom and Gomorrah.

God does not change. He remains just which encompasses love.

His blessings and bounty on those who repent and seek restoration with him are beyond understanding. He loves all but his love will not override his justice.

And that same justice never revoked the death and other penalities on this earth.

Do onto others was an instruction to those who followed him. Not the world for he would not have his own do unto others what the world would do unto his own.

Do not forget, Christ also said do not cast your pearls before swine because they will devour them and leave you with nothing. And that the strong man will defend his home.

The Bible is very literal.

And I don't know where you get your statistics from, but lower violent crime rates where there is no death penalty is a fantasy. Not true.

Why are homicide rates lower in the country than in the cities? Because they know they will walk right into the barrel of a shotgun or pistol to mess around there.

Fear of death is a deterent.

The Jesus the Christ you would see in the future is not the One who came and lived among God's children. You will find in the Bible what you look for.

My faith is not book bound, as Newman said, the Bible comes from the Church, the Church does not come from the Bible. The Bible was not in the upper room at the earthly inception of the Church, but this inception came eventually to be told of in Scripture. The Church of my faith is seen as the Body of Christ--all of God's children in Christ, the Life of life, and Love of love.

As for your thought that the threat of death is a deterent, states and nations that do not execute people have lower violent crime rates than those that do. Also, the rural murder rate in states that execute is higher than is the rate in rural places that do not.

If one likes the idea of killing others, they like the idea. Does that make it less or more likely that people will kill?

I understand the Christ of the Bible is not the Christ of your faith. Anyone reading the Bible literally can see that.

And no, the Bible did not come from the Roman Catholic Church. It came from God via the Apostles.

But that is a history argument not appropriate for here.

I only commented initially because it is tiring and frustrating to hear capital punishment foes quoting it so out of context to try to defend their position.

As for people liking the idea of killing, that is not the issue. The issue is those who act on it.

Odds are they will kill again. Whether in or out of prison.

And they often turn less violent criminals into more violent ones in prison.

They are a blight on society. A disease.

Being a Christian should make one more merciful and committed to bringing others to Christ and changing lives. But it does not make one a fool or prey to criminals.

The Apostles carried swords. They did not do so for whittling.

Preach to all. But the government is obligated to protect society.

In my faith there is but one God, the Christ of the Bible is the God of my faith. However my God is not book bound either.

The Bible came down to us through the Church, i.e. the catholic Church of origin that was Greek, Roman, Cyriac, Malabar … or one of the other rites of faith long forgotten.

Some would be more tired than you to hear Christ (the Love of love and Prince of Peace) used to justify our sinful urge for the blood of another.

As for odds of killing, those who want the state to do the killing for them will not be satisfied and will also want another and another and another.

As for prisons turning criminals into more violent ones, yes they do. Violence begets more violence, whether it is a prison or outside in places that practices the ultimate in violence, the deliberate killing of another via capital punishment.

Others may have carried a sword, but Jesus Christ did not. Thus, in being a follower of Christ, a Christian, I try to follow His say.

As for our Father in Heaven, I cannot delude myself into thinking that God cannot take the lives of those God so wants to take, or that He needs me to do it for Him. He only needs me to spread his greatest of all gifts, and from life at my mother’s knee and Scripture, I know that is LOVE

Yes, government is obliged to protect society, but it does not do so by creating the kind of violent means that produces more of what we need protection from.

The Roman Catholic Church did not exist until centuries after Christ and the Apostles. What the RCC claims and how it stacks up against history are two very different realities.

The Church came from the Apostles and their writings. The writings did not come from the RCC.

And the RCC did not come from the Bible, but was the creation of Roman government in union with men calling themselves church.

No one I know wants to execute to kill. They want to excecute to exact justice upon a murdered and stop them from murdering again.

Look at what your thinking has bought us. Repeat murderers, rapists and pedophiles. Not Biblical and not rational.

The Bible does not compare and equate murder and capital punishment. One is murder and one is justice Biblically.

Christ did indeed not carry a sword. He did not need it.

But Christ did say the soldier does not carry his sword to not be used. And the Centurian, who Christ praised, carry a sword and commanded a 100 swords.

And he commanded the Apostles to carry swords.

So you want to follow what he said? I don't think so.

The Bible does not agree with your position on how government protects society. No how we are to view murders and such.

Yes, do all to bring them to Christ. But such does not negate justice nor the God commanded responsibility to execute justice at all forms and levels of society.

Mercy has a place, but when mercy becomes the rule instead of the exception we are casting our pearls before swine, meaning or families, friends and neighbors before murderers, rapists and pedophiles.

The punishment needs to fit the crime. And the punishment must ensure they never can harm and destroy the lives of others again.

Your thinking is a revolving door. They 'pay' for their crimes with time in prison and then are released to strike again. And while in prison create more of their kind.

We need to rethink how we handle these people and who else is exposed to them.

I do not make light of or want to shake anyone’s faith in God, or in the church or private way that they commune with the God of their faith.

As Count Leo Tolstoy wrote, “If one takes any twig of a spreading bush it will be quite correct to say that from twig to branch, and from branch to limb, and from limb to trunk, every part is derived from the root, but none of them is exclusively so derived. To say of any particular twig that it is the only true twig would be absurd. Yet that is just what is said by the Churches.”

If you can see a path back through the history of religion from which came the twig of faith on which you or your church sit in truth, it is God’s truth to you. Or, if like the Mormons you think there has come a Joseph Smith who has rediscovered the taproot of the lost true Church that is God’s truth to them, so be it.

However, to claim that there are no roots of tradition down through which the Church has come, is much like a person’s denial an incident from their personal past that tells some truth that they cannot now accept. The Church is perfect; its institutional representations on earth are not. Be it Irish Catholic, Islamic or Southern Baptist.

At the Church's inception there was no Bible in the upper room, but the upper room of inception found its way into the Bible. All that was before, during, in and after, the upper room is the Tradition from which the Church draws its canon of Sacred Scripture, takes its works, assembles its community, and administers its sacraments.

As for the Bible, both canonical Scripture and the canon itself descend to us from and in Tradition. In risk of misinterpreting Herman N. Ridderbos in his book, REDEMPTIVE HISTORY AND THE NEW TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES, it appears that Ridderbos makes such a point in words if not intent. Ridderbos writes: “Obviously, the Bible is not a heavenly gift that arrived all at once as a finished divine, revelatory entity. Scripture has a history.”

The Church came from Jesus the Christ and not the Apostles. However, the
institutional church was the work of the Apostles. There is no indication
that all of them were literate. Paul, who was not an original follower of
Christ and converted after Jesus had been crucified, wrote a good portion
of what we know respect as the New Testament.

This which became Scripture, Paul wrote as letters to members of various early churches, usually through their bishops (chairs). Paul wrote to these churches, they were mainly Roman or Greek, in the favored language of what became the New Testament, koine.

This tongue had come down from the Hellenistic Greeks, and became main the written language of both the Empire of Rome and then the early church. Learned Latin existed in the Western parts of the Empire but was not used for the entire Bible until St. Jerome’s Vulgate in 380 AD. There were earlier vulgar Latin Scriptures (c. 160 AD) in Roman parts of Africa and other Latin speaking places, but it was not official and eventually led to Jerome’s Roman recognized translation.

As you likely know, the canon of what became accepted as the New Testament in
the Occident was and still is the same for Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and mainline Protestants (we all accept the same 27 books).

Some of the Oriental Christian Churches never include second Peter, two and three John, Jude, and Revelation in their Holy Scriptures.

Consideration of the content of what came to be known as the Old Testament goes clear back to an early Church member, St. Justin Martyr (c. 100-165 AD). He recognized that there was a difference between the Greek and Jewish versions of the early religious writings (mainly in the intertestament scripts).

Today the Roman Church accepts some intertesatment books; the Greeks accept all
of these and two more, and the Slavic Bible even two more than this. The Protestants churches tent to either exclude the
intertestament books or have them in their Bibles the Apocrypha.

The old Scripture of early Christianity in the Occident was the Septuagint and the
followers of Christ who could read were reading it and not the Hebrew
texts. This difference is what Justin recognized.

So, we can see that there is a history of how the Bible comes down to us and it
comes down through the Church, However if some folks like it, they are free to think
that their Bibles come right to them from God via Zondervan Publishing House. God probably sent Moses, John, Paul, etc. to work right there in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

As for violence being of my making, as God has told us we are all sinners, however it is not God's love in us that has given us repeat murderers, rapists and pedophiles. Cultures that have very low levels of violence do not use their governments as instruments of violence.

As for holding in check the most violent people, lock them up for life where they
can do no more harm. States and nations are free to do this and many do. It is in states that have capital punishment that you typically see sentences that let violent people back out. People need to find out what their states do and have the right laws. However, poor sentencing laws become and excuse for those who like to see such people executed. Their failure in having life in prison becomes and excuse.

The Church is perfect; its institutional representations on earth are not. Be it Irish Catholic, Islamic or Southern Baptist.

Well, no wonder you quote everyone but the Bible.

Islam is Church?

We share nothing in common as regards what the Bible, Church and such means or is. Or historical reality.

As for just keeping all of the murderers, what solution is that? It is a burden on all, a threat to all and no solution at all.

But, I believe we have made our positions clear. And our thoughts.

We are going to have to agree to strongly disagree. Neither of us are going to change, I believe.

An interesting discussion. Later.

You wrote, “Well, no wonder you quote everyone but the Bible.”
Sorry, I quoted scripture before and you did not quote much, so I thought you were not into Bible BINGO (John 3:16 being a winner.

As for the words of others, if these words of learned and very religious men are of no import, I am not sure why your words should be of much value, or mine to you. I guess we should each be reading our Scripture.

You ask if Islam is Church. I do not think you mean, is it temple or synagogue. Rather, is it a faith in the One God (monotheistic)?

Yes and it is an older Bible rooted faith in God than is your brand of Protestantism (if that is what you do not mind being called). And the people of Islam that I have known were very reverent toward Allah (that is the word for God in Arabic—other than Egyptian Copts, most Arabic Christian rites speak of and pray to Allah).

As for what we share in common, so your faith does not trace back to Jesus the Christ? Mine does and I suspect that yours does as well.

As for bigger burdens on society--violent executions do that. Violence breeds violence. Also, our burdens have been carried by Jesus the Christ—no harm in us doing a bit of heavy lifting. As for an ultimate solution--that was tried and the Jews do not have much good to say about it.

Well Jesus the Christ has made His position clear, best we read and follow the beatitudes, they are in the Bible you know.

As for our changing--sure we will. Best we do it before we lie on our deathbed and realize that our belief in doing to others what we would not do to Christ will have not meaning at all.

Actually Islam is not older than Christianity. It dates from about 600 AD.

And as you revealed in your other posts, your pronouncements are really based in Gnosis. Which is not Christian.

So, rather than beat this to death, I think it is time to say 'bye' on this subject.

Not being disrespectful, but discussing the Bible from with one into Gnosticism is better reserved for a theological forum. Not here.

Islam dates itself from Abraham of Scriptural account, for them the seventh century marks the coming of another and most important prophet (as you may know they think of Jesus as a prophet, as do some Jewish sects). You can reject this if you like--it makes no difference to them or God of their faith.

As for the Bible oriented church of your faith, it can only be traced, at greatest, a few hundred years back. And, if it is one of the "born again” America sects, it is less than one hundred years old. You will find the roots of this faith in some little books published by Moody Bible Inst., c. 1912-15. These texts were called "The Fundamentals," and gave rise to the term Fundamentalist (a term rejected by some adherents today--it does not market well).

Claim what root for your faith that you like, but you will not be able to give a decade by decade tracing back to the times of Christ. You will need to pick up your Bible, written in English, and pretend a history that does not exist.

You are certainly free to do this, and it makes little difference. The legitimacy of your faith will rest on how you live in and with Christ.

If you like, you can take any of my posts apart step-by-step and inform me of their Gnostic basis. Since the Gnostics were concerned with evil as expressed in worldly nature, I am not sure what you find as Gnostic.

I reject in my faith the finite evil of the Gnostics. To, wit: God sustains us in our struggle over the self inflicted woe that we have come to call evil—evil being a lacking of good as cold is of heat, and darkness is of light.

Though you seem to reject the thoughts of any faithful followers of Christ but yourself, I should be hesitant to quote any learned ones, however I will. The limits of this lacking (of evil) are described by Karl Rahner in his commentary on Evil and the Devil: “There is not absolute evil. All evil is finite; it is not a positive reality in itself but a want of good in an entity that remains good in its substance as coming from God and indestructible.”

The only devils to be encountered in life are the misdeeds that appear as the dark side of any of us. With mankind being a part of and not apart from the universe, the dark side of any of us is but a collecting point for bits of folly and futility that seem momentarily to impede the inherent progress of existence, life and awareness. As a St. Pogo would say if he existed, "We have met Satan and he is us."

But since you are more attune to Scripture, as Mark 7:15 has Jesus teaching, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.”

To paraphrase Mike Bryan from his book, Chapter and Verse, weal and woe would not exist on the planet Mars until God's children had arrived. Or as Shakespeare has Hamlet saying of the world in general and Denmark in particular, "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."

As for your form of what you claim to be “true” Christianity, your religious position comes off as something that might better be called Biblianity. As you likely know, Jesus never even picked up a Bible, nor did those who wrote in the New Testament.

As for a discussion of the Bible from you, sorry, I have not heard one.

But none of this makes any difference; your faith in God is your own and is between you and your God.

My faith in God and my religion have nothing to do with another person being wrong in their faith.

If you need to disparage another’s faith, be it Islam or Irish Catholic, that is also your way and you are welcome to it.

One final set of comments.

Though undoubtedly a person of integrity, you are a "cheat"."

You cheat in a way that is quite common to people who embrace the mishmash of religious ideas that you hold. You use logic just long enough to make statements about religion that you take to be true, but then deny the application of logic when it would stand in the way of what you wish to say and believe.

Aristotle suggested that when encountering someone who doubts that the law of non-contradiction applies universally, the best strategy is to give them their turn to make an assertion--any assertion. Perhaps the assertion is "God transcends human logic." Then point out that "God transcends human logic" is meaningful only if it is intended to preclude its contradictory, "It is not the case that God transcends human logic." In which case, it appears that logic applies after all.

You claim that God is ineffable and are cheerful about the fact that this does not appear to be logical. And by way of fending off the objection, you quote--boy, do you quote--lots of other people who seem to think the same thing. Finding ten people who talk damned nonsense simply constitutes a chorus of damned nonsense rather than a solo performance.

If God is such that no property that we can ascribe to him applies, then how is God distinguishable from Nirguna Brahman or the Uncarved Block of the Tao? ("The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" begins the Tao Te Ching.) Or shall we say that such are "equal manifestations of the divine"? But, of course, saying this, which sounds so inclusive, is every bit as exclusive as the most extreme fundamentalism. And this is because saying such a thing entails that the exclusive doctrines of the world's religions are mistaken. "Pluralism" is just as much a competing idea about truth in religion as Methodism or Sufiism. The divine cannot be both personal and non-personal, have defining attributes and be propertyless. Denying this is a sure sign that one has stopped thinking if not breathing.

Also, note that believing some proposition P just is taking P to be true. And taking P to be true entails taking not-P to be false. What follows is that if you believe anything at all then you must believe that other things, including things that other people hold dear, are false. Think not? Then what do you make of my belief in what I just said?

Finally, for the cat and the hamster, here's a different GKC quote. The icon stays.

---

The philosophical case against theism is rather easliy dealt with. There is no philosophical case against theism.
--G.K. Chesterton

I find it a bit amusing that you end your posts with a quotation from a devout fellow Roman Catholic, G. K. Chesterton. As you likely know, Chesterton converted from the Anglican Church (a take on Christianity that I admire greatly) to the Roman Catholic Church. Good news for me I think; if your God is going to banish some of us Catholics to hell, we will enjoy amusing company. Mark Twain said he would prefer to be in hell because he feared there would be too many Presbyterians in Heaven. Do you suppose that you Bible literalists would also have had Twain thinking even more appreciative of its inviting fires?

But to keep things more merry this side of Heaven or hell, we might remember another of Chesterton’s observations, “Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.” So let us do as Scripture tells us in Isaiah 22:13, “And behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating flesh, and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die.” If I have taken this literally out of context, I do apologize, but would you please pass me Uncle Paddy the jar.

My youngest son would be more than happy to exchange thoughts about Chesterton. He is as devout a Catholic as Chesterton and has gone through GK’s works many times. A few years back when Ignatius Press (a good Catholic publisher name in honor of St. Ignatius Loyola) printed their concluding volume of “THE COLLECTED WORKS OF G.K. CHESTERON,’” my son gave me the entire paperback set.

But maybe you are not all that wild about Chesterton; he was not big into the kind of logic that you are bent on warping around. Chesterton said, “Facts as facts do not always create a sprit of reality, because reality is a spirit.” This is much in the same vane as Abraham Heschel’s suggestion that we can best dance around ultimate reality via “The Wisdom of Awe.”

By the way, are you Bible literalists ever struck by awe? I imagine you would prefer to keep you noses stuck in a book--the Good One for sure.

I do appreciate your accusing me of being into mishmash. It sounds much better than what some of us Irish Catholic members of the Church could get accused of. Of having our gobs stuck in the mash (with luck, some of that Jamison's Irish Whiskey).

Your quote of Lao Tzu, “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao," well captures Heschel’s statement, “God is ineffable.” Another passage from the Tao Te Ching is also of interest to me. It is entry 42. It foreshadows the Trinity by close to 600 years, “Tao generates the One, The One generates the Two, The Two generates the Three, The Three generates all things. All things have darkness at their back and strive towards the light, and the flowing power gives them harmony. …”

However, if you are a Bible literalist you may not think of One God in terms of a Trinity. Sorry if the Tradition sent revelation of the Holy Trinity spooks you as much as Lao Tzu’s words of wisdom seem to.

Speaking of Bible literalism, how does a bibliolater derive word-for-word positions from Scripture if the Bible does not contain some of your preferred words? For example, if one is to have a personal relationship with God, wouldn’t one only know that if the word “personal” could be found in Scripture? Or are literalists free to extrapolate such meaning from non-biblical sources, and we lessers are not.

In addition, some rather brilliant children of God do not think of God in a personal sense. Albert Einstein was one of these. He gave a talk at the Jewish Theological Seminary and upset a few Ultra-Orthodox Jews when he said that he believe in God but he could not reduce the God of his faith down to a personal one—God and the universe were just too grand to him. We can all see things differently.

If a botanist walks through some woodland he is going to experience it differently than is a civil engineer. The same will be true as each of us walks through life and down our own path of faith.

Our sense of ourselves influences what we sense. My sense of my personal existence appears to be much the same as that which Levi-Strauss described for himself in Myth and Meaning:

“I never had, and still do not have, the perception of feeling my personal identity. I appear to myself as the place where something is going on, but there is no "I," no "me." Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen. The crossroads is purely passive; something happens there. A different thing, equally valid, happens elsewhere. ... I don't pretend at all that, because I think that way, I am entitled to conclude that mankind thinks that way too. But, I believe that, for each scholar and each writer, the particular way he or she thinks and writes opens a new outlook on mankind.”

Levi-Strauss, you, I and others know ourselves from the inside out. And, the differing ways that each of us thinks of ourselves ensures that mankind's faith and communion with God, if it is to be, will be as infinitely variant as are all the elsewhere crossroads of existence, life and awareness.

In addition we best remember that our words are not what we word about. Nor do word affect what they word about, even if a statement attempts the precision of Einstein’s e=mc2. As Glibert Ryle reminds us in THE CONCEPT OF MIND, even well stated laws of science do not affect what they are laws about, “… they do not ordain anything that happens. Laws of nature are not fiats.”

Preliterate children on a playground and illiterate drunks in a bar do not grasp this fact. If called a name, they will insist that the name-caller take the words back. Most of us mature and come to understand that there is no open-sesame or abracadabra, and that a name hurled at us (by email or face to face) says more about the person who calls the name than it does about the words so used.

Blessed be Heschel for his sense of humility that allowed him to understand that man, regardless of how much he aggrandized himself with his own words is lowly in comparison to God, even thought God holds all of his children in such great esteem

Though Heschel would have none of it, the President to Notre Dame University, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, onetime called this brilliant, but humble child of God, the Rabbi’s rabbi.

To wit, “One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
G.K. Chesterton

Well... THIS is my final installment. The final paragraph was deleted somehow.

By the way, your assertion that neither Jesus nor the writers of the NT ever picked up a Bible is what is technically called a "howler." If what you mean is that neither Jesus nor the NT writers ever held in their hands a completed, compiled (perhaps leather bound with a Thomas Kinkade embroidered bible cover) bible containing both the old and new testaments, then this is fairly certain. Did Lincoln ever pick up a copy of Carl Sandburg's biography? Was Jesus a Christian--a follower of Christ? Certainly not, for this would be the religious counterpart to a dog chasing its tail.

But did Jesus and the NT authors study the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms and quote from them as though they were absolute authority? Even a passing familiarity with the NT makes this abundantly clear. On many occasions Jesus is found refuting the views of the religious leaders, telling them that they were in error precisely because "you do not know the Scriptures." Indeed, Jesus' own attitude regarding the authority of Scripture looks an awful lot like the "biblianity" that you attribute to the other blogger and nothing at all like your own position. Moreover,in at least one instance, Paul refers to Peter's letters--which made their way into the NT canon--as "scripture." Adherents of "biblianity" all, it seems.

My point in noting this is not to defend the view of biblical authority that the other blogger holds (though I suspect that I would agree with much of what he says), but to note that your saying otherwise is rather indicting. You play fast and loose with the facts here as you do with reason and religious ideas elsewhere.

Ineffable? As G. K. Chesterton asked, "Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them?"

So, ‘tis it possible to say that one thing is “unreasonable” and another “ineffable?” And what of that which is ineffable, is it unreasonable in a different sense? Ah, possibly beyond the capacity to know through reason, and a matter of “faith?” Maybe it is something of which I know through awe and wonder. Yes I do wonder.

Muddle, I most assuredly agree Islewood's statements are a mish mash of competing religious beliefs that at one point deny we can understand while at the same time claiming we can understand in greater depth than God's revealed word, the Bible.

Odds are, from things said, we would agree on at least a great number of religious issues.

Islewood, my reluctance to go in depth here is not a sign of lack of study on my part. Nor a lack of understanding. It is a recognition this is a news forum, not a theological debate forum.

If you wish to go in-depth over these issues, we can do so. But do so at an appropriate forum. Just join and add your topic starter on the forum.

http://www.christiantalkzone.net/

I guarantee you will get the depth you desire. And maybe more than you can handle.

And, you can go as deep in your way as you desire. Only real big rule is to answer questions and expect to have your questions answered in return.

See you there if you so choose. As well as anyone else who wishes to chime in.

???

Did not see that this was a post to another, sorry I am.

Dear TCP Guy,

A quick look at your post had me thinking it was not to me, I see that it is.

It is a very thoughtful comment. And thought your particular faith may not believe in good works as an essential Christian task (or maybe you do) your comment reflects that you are one who does try to follow in Christ’s footsteps. God bless you and obviously God already has.

As for your comment to Muddle, “Islewood's statements are a mish mash of competing religious beliefs that at one point deny we can understand while at the same time claiming we can understand in greater depth than God's revealed word, the Bible.”

I think it is a pretty fair reflection of my faith in and wonderment over the God of my faith. Others may find such a journey nonsensical or in grievous error, but I do not. This may also seem delusional—so be it.

The expressions of faith that I have written are an intended fit for only me, for only now. As I circle and circle within the limits of my life and its particulars, my concern for meaning and its expression must remain a work in progress.

Of this rendering and the offerings of others, I pray that we all grant and receive for our efforts the tolerance that St. Justin Martyr requested in concluding his First Apology in Rome c. 150 AD:

“And if these things seem to you to be reasonable and true, honor them; but if they seem nonsensical, despise them as nonsense, and do not decree death against those who have done no wrong, as you would against enemies.”

As always, to those who have shared their faith with me, voiced criticism, expressed disagreement, raised doubt, recommended a book to be read or a poem to be enjoyed, I give thanks. I include you among such people. I hope you do not mind.

God's speed, maybe that of light and may we make the most of it, your friend in Christ,

Islewood