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MiserereNobis

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Everything posted by MiserereNobis

  1. This certainly doesn’t sound like a very Christian approach to our fellow man. Also, why are you so focused on people being your servants in the afterlife? You’ve brought it up multiple times. It’s kinda weird.
  2. Neither is the Catholic Church, but it is still the world’s largest non-governmental provider of both healthcare and education. Being primarily a Christian Church and providing healthcare and education are not mutually exclusive.
  3. Just give it to the Catholics. We’ll take care of it for you! Joking aside, and I’ve said this before, I and other Catholics I know who are involved in humanitarian efforts have always been pleased with the partnership with your church. This both on a global and local scale. On the local scale, your church’s donations to our food and homelessness programs increased quite a bit during the pandemic and as far as I can tell, have not decreased since then. It’s nice to work together. In the context of the OP, what is meant by “the church“? Is that the central headquarters? Individual stakes and wards? Individual members? A combo?
  4. I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe, but at least I'm enjoying the ride:
  5. I imagine he was already planning the baptisms for the dead. Quite the missionary, he. Get ’em in this life or the next.
  6. So there’s no difference between LDS women and the Relief Society? I mean, is it possible to be an LDS woman and not be in the Relief Society?
  7. From the article in the OP: “The Relief Society — one of the world’s oldest and largest service organizations” Can I CFR this? I don’t see the Relief Society on any list I’ve googled, including top 100 lists.
  8. And you get even worse. Non LDS ritual is for show and outward appearance and doesn’t have spiritual meaning or purpose? Who are you to judge what non LDS ritual means to those who participate in it? You must have liked that “playing church” comment guy.
  9. This is quite the judgement of the heart and intentions of people who attend high church services. I’m calling you out on it.
  10. They should have followed the tried-and-true rural conservative good ol' boy American tradition of leaving the kids in the truck in the bar parking lot while they drank inside with their friends
  11. And there's a lot of caricature and urban myth that grew up around the Galileo/Catholic Church issue that distorts what really happened.
  12. Cloistered monastics talk about this all the time. Living in a monastery in close proximity to other monks for the rest of your life teaches you much about yourself and others and creates a situation where working on improving virtues is almost necessary for survival.
  13. My understanding of LDS doctrine is that the Word of Wisdom is just for this dispensation and particularly for those after Brigham Young (or whichever prophet made it a commandment). So that would mean it's not for temporal salvation, since all other dispensations could drink alcohol and be saved, right?
  14. The Dude appeared to only drink milk in public: (of course, there's also vodka and kahlua in there, but it kinda looks like milk, right? )
  15. At 7:30 in the morning for daily mass no less! Every morning every day! What a lush! 😁
  16. Long ago when I was a waiter in college, a couple of women asked me to serve them wine in mugs. It was lunch time and they didn’t want people seeing them day drink. Does this count? 😁
  17. That's the one! Welcome back to the board! You're still theologically incorrect since you're not Catholic but I'm still happy to see you again
  18. I looked for awhile, too, and didn't see what I remember. My memory was asking the poster what the picture was and he/she saying it was the inside of the Kirtland Temple. My memory's probably off, though. It was cool seeing those long missing posters.
  19. As I recall, there used to be an RLDS/Community of Christ poster here. Didn't he have the inside of the Kirtland Temple as his avatar picture? Someone help me out here, it's driving me crazy. I've been here too long, ha. And I'm mad posting today because I'm the test coordinator for the SAT and the new digital SAT has made my job basically meaningless. I sit and do absolutely nothing. But hey, that means they're paying me to make all these posts!
  20. I'm not questioning you personally on this, but using your statement as a starting point for this idea. One possible issue/problem, as I see it, with the "spiritual but not religious" is that organized religion offers ritual, and humans seem to be hard-wired to ritual. Now it is true that someone could create their own spiritual rituals and perhaps that would satisfy the seemingly innate need for ritual. I look at ritual as a way of approaching the divine that is beyond words and rests only in symbols. Language is a wonderful paradox in that it is both broadening and limiting. It broadens our world because we can name and identify and convey. But it limits because that which we cannot name and identify and convey is beyond our grasp, our understanding, our reality (cue @mfbukowski and some Wittgenstein quote he'll find for us). God is beyond language. An infinite Being, the source of be-ing, the ground of reality, cannot be constrained within the circle of language. Every word creates a duality: this/not-this. God is underneath that duality or in that duality or however limited way we can describe it, and therefore unreachable by language. Cue, therefore symbolism, which speaks to us beyond language. Cue the poets! Remember that scene from the film Contact where Jodi Foster's character, the logic-loving scientist, sees the beauty of the universe and says, "no words to describe it. They should have sent a poet!" Poets can bend language, play with language, take language out of itself and try to convey what cannot be conveyed. There's a reason why St. John of the Cross, the Mystical Doctor of the Church, wrote poems to describe his mystical experiences of unity with God. And ritual, especially ritual steeped in the symbols of the culture that gave us our worldview, can use those symbols to go right past language and zap us in our souls. Ritual is symbolism in action. It takes us past language, past conception, and allows the opportunity for that which is beyond words to reach down to us and us to reach up to that. God's finger reaching towards Adam's finger (an image that is itself a symbol). It seems to me that spiritual but not religious is missing this important aspect of spirituality: symbolism and ritual. (on the other hand, a dose of LSD could take you right there )
  21. It's been years (10+?) since I've been to a testimony meeting. I was struck by the sheer number of "I know" statements -- it actually became quite distracting because once I noticed it I couldn't un-notice it. This was especially true when some children were saying "I know." I didn't feel like I was being critical of your faith when the voice in my head kept saying "no, you don't know, you just believe." I was being critical of the presentation. Has the style of testimonies changed at all in the past few years?
  22. This is how I feel about some of the bad popes. They did some despicable things, but then I read a papal bull (I love the term) or encyclical they wrote and I think, "wow, that was awesome." The bad behavior of Catholic leaders doesn't affect my faith. I can roundly and soundly condemn it. I can apologize for it, for as a Catholic I am connected to it. I can do my part to help the Church and her leaders and me do better. I look back to St. Peter, the first pope (from our belief). In the literal presence of Christ, he denied Him three times. Then there's St. Paul, who was at the martyrdom of St. Stephen. And yet under the leadership of these two, Christianity spread. I agree that we can condemn the bad and praise the good. We are all bad and good and everything in between.
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