Sunday, March 6, 2022

Non-Catholic Christianity's Fatal Error


Also known as Protestantism's fatal error. The communication problem. But Koolaid considers it's that of Christianity as such, hence the title of his video:

Christianity's Fatal Error
25th Febr. 2022 | Holy Koolaid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5aZXXx3E6U


I will give you the solution after hearing it stated, even before the rest of the video.

St. Paul was pretty upfront on this matter in Romans 10:

[11] For the scripture saith: Whosoever believeth in him, shall not be confounded. [12] For there is no distinction of the Jew and the Greek: for the same is Lord over all, rich unto all that call upon him. [13] For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord, shall be saved. [14] How then shall they call on him, in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe him, of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear, without a preacher? [15] And how shall they preach unless they be sent, as it is written: How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, of them that bring glad tidings of good things!

Now, Luther, back in 1507 when he was ordained was sent. He was sent by his bishop, who was sent by the Pope (back then Julius II, an enemy of Luther's countrymen in Italy, but even so their superior in Church matters), who as Pope had no sending from a superior on earth, but was chosen to carry on after Sts Peter and Linus through diverse types of election. Early days, clergy and laymen of Rome, later on, cardinals, meaning clergy of "hinge" Churches, in and around Rome. Julius II had previously been a cardinal himself, a cardinal priest of the Church that commemorates St. Peter in chains. And the cardinals, as chosen by living Popes, have a sending as cardinals before they elect Popes.

This "series pastorum" in Rome (mirrored in hundreds if not thousands of other Churches since the Apostles' time, which are now Catholic, Orthodox or Coptic, within the Empire) is doubled for security by the "succession apostolica" properly speaking : you have a sending at priest ordination and at episcopal consecration, and while only bishops can ordain priests, the order of bishops started with the twelve apostles, and continued as today since back then.

Both the several churches (main one Rome) having a mostly continual series of bishops and the episcopal order getting renewed by men getting consecrated by those already bishops, are a guarantee for the "traditio apostolica" - if a thing is held by all churches, since times immemorial, it is considered as proven to be by apostolic tradition. In cases where traditions differ, you try to detect who invented a novelty and oust that one, and if it isn't settled peacefully, the judgement rests with General Council or with Pope.

This eliminates any grave doubts about what the Bible means.

I don't think there is one universal tradition on what kind of artefact the tower of Babel was, if there was, I would not be in my rights to guess Nimrod was trying to make a rocket with inadequate means of both knowledge and technology and God stopped him to make sure rocketry started in a safer way 4500 years later. There certainly isn't one universal tradition either that says each language now existing was created from scratch at Babel and never changed since then, or not dramatically. But the takeaway is, we don't really need to know for our salvation what artefact it was meant to be. We do need to know it's a bad idea not to trust God's promises (Josephus - and St. Augustine, both? - considered Nimrod wanted the Tower as a kind of Ark in advance of next Deluge) or not to obey God's commands (a recent fad in exegesis says the fault was in clustering rather than spreading out).

There is a need to know from what age you can get baptised for your salvation, and if someone else's faith can substitute if you are a small child. The Church said yes, on this one, so you can get baptised as soon as you exit the womb, and it's normal to get baptised on day 8 (like circumcision in the OT).

2:23 The Bible isn't a newspaper for the Christians.

It is there to instruct people like St. Timothy, and extracts - like Gospel stories - are portioned out to normal people as within their understanding and the priest is required to:

  • Western Church, since 813, when the Latin pronunciation changed, to hold an explanatory discourse
  • Eastern Church (current practise among Orthodox, perhaps Uniates as well) to give time for questions about the text read to the people.


But the ones the Bible is meant directly to instruct are what one could in modern words term an "expert" - a Theologian. Bishops and priests are required to be Theologians, laymen are allowed to be it. So, the question is not if the Bible can be understood by everyman, the question is if it can be understood by a Theologian who makes his thought process about a text start within and more importantly end within the tradition of the Catholic Church.

2:41 God also very clearly knows one thing about language.

It changes.

In Greek the word "epi-skopos" means "on-seer" or more idiomatically "overseer". Up to when the Church starts to call the people who rule local churches and who can ordain priests "episkopoi" as well. The word is then in this latter meaning borrowed into other languages, and so we have Latin "episcopus" and English "bishop". Meanwhile, these languages also have words for what "episkopos" meant in the first place. FF to 1500 - some people start to translate the Greek "episkopos" with "overseer" instead of "bishop". It's as if contemporary Latin came to use "carrus" for "car" and someone came up with translating a text featuring cars as featuring "carts" - no doubt drawn by horses or oxen!

Inextricably linked to the changing quality of language. Which in turn is linked to our freewill.

So, what is God's solution? Make the communication depend on men with learning in Latin and Greek. And over and above learning, the grounding in the correct tradition.

See my initial comment.

3:10 Obviously, if plaques changed, there would be no guarantee they came from God who had given a message once and for all.

Some of your examples are things men can figure out for themselves, with due caution and patience. Like plague being an infection of Yersinia pestis which spreads with fleas that infest not just men but also rats, and also spreads with the exhalation of men sick with it.

3:33 There is a proper way of showing updates from God.

God choses a prophet or several prophets (I today got a page from America Needs Fatima, which refers to 1917, Fatima in the diocese of Ourem, where Our Lady came down, chosing three children for her message).

God authentifies the prophet or the prophecy by miracles. In Fatima, there was the Sun dancing over a gathering, and after that there have been healings.

But above all, the prophecy is publically authentified after inspection of the miracles, by the Church. See my comment one, no time signature.

4:03 Your solution was arguably the one applicable to Adam and Eve before they sinned.

The fact that they sinned shows it did not take away there free will (nor should it have), but it also means this spontaneous connexion to God is broken.

Cain and Abel (and later Seth) did not experience God as Adam and Eve had done in Paradise, they had to rely on tradition from their parents, and Cain's son Henoch and Seth's son Enosh had to rely on tradition from Adam and Eve as well, both through Cain and Seth and their wives, and directly.

Once Adam and Eve had died, 930 years into the human history (an Irish poem says Eve died mourning over Adam, within an hour), Jared would have to rely on people who had heard Adam and Eve, without hearing them himself (LXX chronology, with Masoretic, one would go on three generations more, making Mathusalem rather than Mahalaleel the last patrilinear ancestor of Noah to know Adam).

This exact same procedure is what apostolic tradition is about, when it comes to the turning point that reverses the sin of Genesis 3.

4:11 The chosen ones were not self-proclaimed, they were called by Christ, and Catholics up to a modern apostasy are very far from just a handfull.

4:15 Inconsistencies and contradictions with real history known from elsewhere are there in the imagination of a handfull of selfproclaimed prophets of atheism - and in their following.

That has been dealt with elsewhere, after I commented on your Babel video, did you make a part two as promised?

4:25 "Psychopaths" with a total defiance of the conscience they once had are there because of sin.

Cultures having a different view of right and wrong - than the one Catholicism has - are in existence because of a psychopathy usually more limited than that of Hannibal Lecter (but not always, see Azteks). Some came around before Christ came, or before their people heard of Him, they are called paganisms, some came from within the Catholic Church and are called heresies or apostasy.

6:37 A Cohen is hardly a goatherder and also not illiterate.

The first Bible author was brother of the first Cohen of the last OT covenant, Aaron.

He had literacy in hieroglyphics from his adoptive family.

6:44 Centuries between the events described and when they were actually written down ... not according to tradition, except for Genesis.

Now, the extant chronicles of Alexander the Great are also centuries after the events, unless you count two cuneiform tablets with info on just a smaller part of his carreer as "chronicles" and these are so recently discovered, they did not matter for our knowledge of Alexander.

6:47 Are you aware that "game of telephone" need not be played to "prove" tradition unreliable, it can be used to train children to become reliable reporters of what they heard just once?

And obviously, there is a huge difference between the situation in a game of telephone and in several generations traditing a tradition. It can get distorted but doesn't automatically get so, and the things that get distorted tend to stay in the same genre. Miracles don't turn to military battles, and miolitary battles don't get garbled into miracles. Much likelier, two battles may get garbled into a single one - like two battles of Ravenna, mirrored as a single one in German legend, and the winners of each presented as loser and winner of a single one.

6:53 And again, no scholar doubts Caesar just because our oldest surviving manuscript is from after the Church changed Latin pronunciation.

Since the work of Karl Nipperdey in 1847, the existing manuscripts have been divided into two classes. The first (α) encompasses manuscripts containing only De Bello Gallico and characterized by colophons with allusions to late antique correctores. The oldest manuscript in this class is MS. Amsterdam 73, written at Fleury Abbey in the later ninth century. The second (β) encompasses manuscripts containing all of the related works—not only De Bello Gallico, but De Bello Civili, De Bello Alexandrino, De Bello Africo, and De Bello Hispaniensi, always in that order. The oldest manuscript in this class is MS Paris lat. 3864, written at Corbie in the last quarter of the ninth century. For De Bello Gallico, the readings of α are considered better than β.


Silvee
@SilveeYT
Gimmie proof boi 👀

Hans Georg Lundahl
@hglundahl
Look here, @SilveeYT !

In the half minute or so from 6:37 to 6:53 I was pointing out faults in the supposed proofs against Gospels being genuine.

Can you agree that giving the positive proof for a thing and answering bogus proofs against it are two different operations in logic, and you are not exactly being fair when you simply ignore the one and just ask someone to switch gear?

The positive proof for Gospels being genuine is that the Church to which they belong as Her (at least purported and believed) history has collectively recalled it as the 3 first being from exactly one candidate each, for the 4th there seem to be two candidates if you take very early tradition into account, but they are both called John, and both direct disciples of Jesus.

Zachary Chavez-levins
@zacharychavez-levins4287
Write me an essay

Hans Georg Lundahl
I'll be adding this exchange to an essay that's already here:

https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2022/03/non-catholic-christianitys-fatal-error.html


7:11 "compiled between 6th and 4th C"

Es ist unglaublich, wie viel mann glaube muss, um ungläubig zu sein.
Unbelievably much you have to believe to be an unbeliever.

Michael von Faulhaber.

Prophets of God have no respect, but prophets of unknowable reconstructions have it all, with you, just because they are most scholars in a time when scholarship is or recently has been pushing toward unbelief.

According to tradition, Moses wrote the Pentateuch. According to the Catholic martyrology for Cristmas day, the Exodus occurred in 1510 BC. Qumran : Year Written: between 2nd century BCE – 2nd century CE.

So, oldest possible is c 1350 years after the events and authorship. Comparable to Caesar between 50 BC and 850 AD. When the Caesar manuscripts start appearing.

More has been lost between 1510 and 160 BC than between 50 BC and 850 AD - but nevertheless some have more patience with losses in the latter time than others with losses in the former.

Oh, 250 BC => reduces the waiting time to 1260 years. Clearly even more comparable to the 900 years between Gaulic War and its manuscript!

Matthew 18
[10] See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven. [11] For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost. [12] What think you? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them should go astray: doth he not leave the ninety-nine in the mountains, and go to seek that which is gone astray?

Matthew 17
[20] But this kind is not cast out but by prayer and fasting. [21] And when they abode together in Galilee, Jesus said to them: The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men: [22] And they shall kill him, and the third day he shall rise again. And they were troubled exceedingly.

Verses are a subdivision added in the Renaissance, and have some differences between Catholic and Protestant Bibles, OK. So, not weird. That's what you can expect from scholarship.

7:56 "weren't in our earliest manuscripts but were added later"

One theory. Another is, they weren't in our earliest surviving manuscripts, like Sinaiticus, and they survived by not being used, arguably bc of Arian bias in the copy versions, which already then was seen as undesirable.

8:26 Yeah, we get it, you are heavily overrelying on Sinaiticus ...

8:47 Yeah, you already mentioned your in-depth videos to which I have in some cases given in-depth commentary refuting you ...

9:28 Pope Pius IX who was friends with Jefferson Davies said, there are some just titles to slavery.

This means, there are some situations in which it is just to regard and treat someone as a slave.

The normal trio would be:

  • born slave;
  • sold himself as slave to get supported;
  • committed a crime that merited reduction to slave status.


If you have heard of people condemned to penal work, this is what it refers to.

Now, there are obviously things to be said for reducing the first two categories, and they were in fact reduced.

The latter already as in OT times, namely, an Israelite who sold himself for slavery had to get released after seven years, unless he enjoyed it so much he preferred to stay (obvious example: fell in love with someone to marry among the female slaves).

However, there are also things that are not just titles to slavery, like slave traders waylaying a freeman to get slaves to sell.

This is a great reason why slavery in the commercial sense (prison labour is not private enterprise everywhere) has been abolished in Christian countries.

For starters, Queen St. Bathilde abolished slavery all over the Frankish Kingdom. This has as successor states today: France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxemburg. England got rid of slavery (first time, before colonial slavery) at the Norman Conquest. Sweden when we get for the first time a law for all of the country except the cities, like Stockholm had a different law (which already before, as Hanseatic city, didn't involve slavery). So, Christian states in Catholic Europe kept abolishing slavery, until Portugal right at the end of the Middle Ages got an exception, meant for Muslims in Africa, in retaliation for their slave hunt against Europeans. And even that exception ended 1888 when the Emperor of Brazil abolished slavery and paid former slave owners compensation - like England had done in 1830.

So, yes, I think God did communicate tolerably well, and your aversion to slavery shows you owe something to Christianity.

9:39 "as millions of people are enslaved"

Exodus 21:16 He that shall steal a man, and sell him, being convicted of guilt, shall be put to death.

11:14 The things voted on weren't so much the "stories" - Biblical history - as the meaning of life, the universe and everything according to these stories.

The votes sometimes leading to splits and these sometimes to wars was prophecied.

Samaria was offered Cohen's from Jerusalem to help interpret the Torah, and they refused. Protestants also refused, and take a look at what "major branch of Christianity" has by far more than 99 % of the different denominations (but not of the people)!

A n d who fought most religious wars against Catholics (who have mostly been the majority, sometimes perhaps surpassed by Nestorians in China, but these didn't die out or dwindle bc of Catholic attacks). Between 1200's and 1900's it was mostly a steady rise of warfare death tolls in Europe as percentages of death. Two centuries stand out as exceptions. 19th C. was a dip. But 17th C. with the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War ending and the English Revolutionary Wars in fact went so high that all before the 20th C. was lower.

11:25 In Catholicism, there were up to 382 and 397 some discrepancy as to including all and only the 27 books into the NT, but the OT had a fairly clear consensus for including books like Tobit or Maccabees already then, and the other authorities back then were often excluding Esther as well - and sometimes missing an NT book or two too.

"prayer of Manasseh" is not a book, it's a book part in Catholic but not Jewish and Protestant versions of II Chronicles 33.
Suzanna, Bel and the Dragon, the prayer of the three young men are chapters 13 and 14 and a part of chapter 3 of Daniel.

11:38 So, how come you show only Protestant contemporaries?

In Catholicism, prayer of Manasseh is basically taken for granted.

12:04 It so happens, back when Medieval paintings of Hell were a thing, what you got scared of doing wasn't going Atheist - nearly no one got tempted - but joining an illegal gang of slave hunters, treating your serfs badly, making a woman pregnant and not marrying her, making another woman than your wife pregnant and not giving her compensation, using diverse forms of contraceptive practises (see what's happening to old age pensions in Europe, if you think contraceptives are OK!) and being greedy, horny and overeating, and for that matter getting drunk and gambling too.

These "emotional trauma" didn't substantially contribute to either converting people to Christianity or keeping them from apostasy. Except in an indirect way, when a sinner, who had money and didn't see all of it as needed by his children, gave lots to the Church, so She could finance preachers, missionaries and catechists.

12:11 "spread at the tip of the sword"

I think the painting depicts Saxons submitting to Charlemagne.

Saxons were robbers, committed pillage and slave hunt on Christian neighbours the 100 years preceding this, and also were so much into slavery that their introduction momentarily reversed the anti-slavery trend of the Frankish Empire.

Most European nations, starting with all the successor states of Roman Empire that still are Christian and all that were so before the Muslim invasion of North Africa and Middle East, but that's not Europe, became Christian by voluntarily agreeing within the state. Iceland, Sweden, Norway around AD 1000, Denmark had joined a century earlier, Lithuania became Christian when their Grand Duke became Polish King, but it already had Christian possessions reaching down to Kyiv, which had become Christian in 988.

Only in modern colonial times did spread by the sword for some time become more standard. And not even that. The Portuguese certainly did punish Suttee and Kali worshipping Thuggees, and certainly did introduce Christian missionaries to India, but they didn't attempt to wipe out Hinduism by force.

12:17 It is a fairly normal procedure that parents educate their children in their own beliefs.

You are using Soviet style demonisation of parental education, when it has one specific type of content, an ideology which was used in the East block but also Sweden, West Germany, even England, to rob away children of their parents.

This is a modern type of slave hunt, and you pretend you are superior to Biblical very partial and conditional endorsements of slavery?

12:31 Denmark before Christianity was already a very religious country.

All pre-Christian societies, with very few exceptions, were so.

Georgia, whose flag was shown before the Danish one, became Christian around the time when the Roman Empire and Armenia became so.

There is nothing to suggest that any of the pre-Christian rulers of either Scandinavia or Romans, Armenians, Georgians would have been easily swayed by terror propaganda, they were arguably as good as all cases looking for a more rational religion than they had.

Christianity becoming a part of the cultural identity of a land is not a fault at all, the Old Covenant had been cultural identity of Ancient Israel, of Jews and partially also Samaritans and Galilaeans, and Christ had clearly requested this should be done, see the terms of Matthew 28:19 f. Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.

Were you formerly a JW? It's some time since I saw your deconversion video, but the New World translation is pretty unique and faulty in "men from among all nations" - Christ didn't ask for the founding of small clubs of select individuals who just stood by when the majority of their countrymen went to Hell.

12:52 Your painting of the situation of "unbelievers" or "non-believers" as "for centuries" is simply egregiously false about historic facts.

Probably you did hear a few things like that from JW's.

When Catholics by inquisition did persecute some non-Catholics, these weren't non-believers, in the modern sense, these were people believing a different version of what Christianity meant.

Most of them would have had very little room for your points of view, except this one, for an obvious reason.

Spain and Portugal weren't flooded with atheists who wanted less slavery, the guys who went against the Church in 18th C. expulsion of Jesuits actually wanted more slavery - like, they wanted to treat Guaranis as slaves, rather than as subjects with a different type of Christian culture.

13:29 It was never meant to be instruction for "most believers" - see my initial comment.

13:46 No, I don't find your ideas very novel, I have been fighting against them since probably before you were born.

I came back to Sweden from Vienna in 1980 and within two years I had got myself (in my early teens) into a vendetta with the newer religious identity of sweden, that being secularism.

I am glad you can't threaten Hell to those who are stingy to you ...

No comments: