AronRa and "Wil" Answered

Transitioning out of Catholicism
AronRa | 4.II.2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RyY2Rkp4lQ

You know the rules, I hope. My words below are not a standalone essay, they are a time signature by time signature criticism of the positions of AronRa and "Wil" as expressed in the above video.

I

4:41 I think the actual words, whether of St. Augustin or of St. Jerome, were more like "told after the manner of a popular poet".

What this means is not "it's not literal", it means "it's not detailed in a philosophically accurate way".

Like, probably both of them believed, as did Aristotle and Ptolemy, that there were solid spheres from fix stars down to Moon, and they see the Bible speaking only of one Firmament. On their view, this is bc it was not intended as a text book in astronomy or philosophy. The one firmament meant each sphere and all of them together, as far as they were concerned.

They did not doubt the "firmament" was put in place on day two, either literally shortly before or metonymically same moment as Adam was created.

The distinction could be put better if you compared your own creation account big bang or evolution described in a scientific paper or a pop or rock song (there was one made for Tiktaalik, I think).

You would hardly say a song about Tiktaalik cannot literally be taken as Tiktaalik being ancestral to land animals including us, you would just say it's not expressed the same way a scientific paper would. At utmost, you would state that for "Tiktaalik or similar". You would definitely not take this as a metaphor for Tiktaalik created on day five and the next day all land animals were created, for instance.

II

6:32 Novus Ordo Catholics are basically "enforcing" evolution belief sufficiently to silence in actual fact a Catholic who is a Creationist.

But very correct, over the field as a whole, they cannot "enforce" it, since they would go against Vatican II, and against historic reliability of Genesis 3 account.

Creation vs. Evolution : Disagreed Mr. Greenblatt!
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/02/disagreed-mr-greenblatt.html

Creation vs. Evolution : Is Dei Verbum a Young Earth Creationist Document?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2019/10/is-dei-verbum-young-earth-creationist.html

Creation vs. Evolution : How do We Know the Events of Genesis 3?
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-do-we-know-events-of-genesis-3.html

III

7:04 AronRa's example from the school reminds me of a more recent conflict.

You may have heard of Robert Sungenis (and myself) promoting Geocentrism.

One David Palm opposes him. When it comes to the Patristic part, he does his own show, or shares with Karl Keating, but when it comes to the astronomy part, he has leased out the argumentation to one Alec MacAndrew, an Atheist.

Interestingly enough, the site of David Palm used to be public, but is now restricted access.

However, here is a pdf by Alec:

“Here Comes the Sun” by Alec MacAndrew
https://www.geocentrismdebunked.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Here-Comes-the-Sun-Alec-MacAndrew.pdf

And here is my answer to it:

New blog on the kid : Answering Alec MacAndrew
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/04/answering-alec-macandrew.html

As you can see, the site name in the pdf matches the one in David Palms post, now restricted access:

https://sites.google.com/site/geocentrismdebunked/the-unanimous-consent-of-the-fathers#PrinciplesOfFaithAndScience

No, wait, the site is still up, here I am accessing it:

https://www.geocentrismdebunked.org/

And here is the page I failed to access:

Welcome to GeocentrismDebunked.org : Geocentrism and the Unanimous Consent of the Fathers
https://www.geocentrismdebunked.org/geocentrism-and-the-unanimous-consent-of-the-fathers/

IV

8:31 I must say, I never had to look to AronRa to get a basic understanding of Evolution and how it is supposed to be proven.

Details in modern very recent updates, possibly yes (I was more into rise of mammals series by a female youtuber, forget her name, was years since I watched them).

V

14:28 Immaculate conception, defined by Pius IX in 1850's, 1854, I think.
Assumption Body and Soul into Heaven, by Pius XII in 1950, exactly.

VI

20:09 As Star both Trek and Wars and other Space Opera admittedly is fiction ... I have obviously in my day met the question why, when both Lord of the Rings and the Bible are books and both contain non-mundane stuff (not sure if any event in LotR, if real, would meet Catholic criteria of a miracle), I pretend to know one of them is fact and the other fiction.

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Bible and Fantasy (quora)
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2020/02/bible-and-fantasy-quora.html

Not the first and not the last time I make this response, I think. (OK, it could theoretically be the last time if I die tonight, but ... I hope that's not the case).

VII

21:16 We actually have tradition about Gospel authorships too.

The one about St. John is ambiguous, insofar as there seem to be a very few but still Early Church Fathers who do not take the opinion of St. Irenaeus that St. John the Gospeller was the son of Zebedee, one of the 12, but not more ambiguous than tying the Gospel down to when a contemporary of Jesus earthly life was still alive. The traditional date is c. AD 100, after Apocalypse completed earlier on Patmos in AD 90.

And the tradition also states that the Synoptics were all written before St. John wrote his Gospel.

Furthermore, the way the words are chosen for Christ's enemies (not collectively called "Jews" in synoptics, but collectively called "Jews" in St. John, as narrator speaking, and again not so in Christ's words!) show there was a change in Jewish attitudes to Christians between, answered by a change in Christian attitudes about being identified as Jewish.

The idea of accepting modern scholarship for late Gospel dates, but using tradition as an alibi for transmission, is in fact not traditional.

VIII

21:24 A well organised tradition does not lend itself to a telephone game situation.

Take transmission of songs while people including fiddlers were usually analphabets.

Fiddler's Green is not likely to get garbled into Molly Malone (even if both deal with the afterlife).

Someone likely to insert Molly Malone lines into Fiddler's Green is not likely to have become an Irish Fiddler.

Can we give Catholic (or as some would say Orthodox) bishops at least as much credit as we give to Irish Fiddlers?

21:34 No, it's not an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

It's a fairly clear conclusion. Telephone game situations are not typical of tradition anywhere else, so they need to be proven, not assumed.

In cases where I see non-Christian traditions as garbled aout anything, I do not detect telephone game, I detect deliberate lying. Or at best honest mistake from the start.

Here I take fellow Creationist Georgia Purdom to task over crediting too much to telephone game situations:

Creation vs. Evolution : Babel, also to Georgia Purdom
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/01/babel-also-to-georgia-purdom.html

As to Hercules, people who believed in Zeus and believed he was a lecher may honestly have concluded he was "son of Zeus" (and you bet I believe the tradition he lived before the Trojan War and his descendants took Sparta 80 years after the Trojan War!).

As to Puduhepa getting confused with the goddesses she worshipped as a priestess, Hittite equivalents to Venus and Amaterasu, as I stated here ...:

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Bill Nye on Japanese Tradition
https://filolohika.blogspot.com/2020/01/bill-nye-on-japanese-tradition.html

... while I think there would have been continuous genealogies from Puduhepa to Aeneas and Jimmu Tenno, they crossed lines of different religious traditions, which tended to garble the idea that she was only a priestess to the love goddess, only a priestess to the sun goddess.

That situation, more closely resembling telephone game than anything else I have seen, but not very close either, there is not sufficient time for in the case of Christianity.

IX

23:05 I definitely think people who would correspond to the psychological diagnosis "homosexual" can live Catholic lives.

I do NOT think people into the LGBT agenda can do so.

Living out one's Catholicism and living out one's homosexuality, for those who have both, is mutually exclusive. As Josh Weed correctly considered about the somewhat stricter Mormonism he was into as a teen, than to what he is now.

A certain Chaput was doing the correct thing in Philadelphia on this account:

New blog on the kid : Philadelphia!
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2017/01/philadelphia.html

The horrible news is, he is being replaced by James Martin.

X

24:26 I don't know if you know a French journalist called Christine Pedotti.

As she presents what happened, very radical trads and very radical progressives made agreements on verbal content which could be ambiguously interpreted as to its real content.

In Dei Verbum, which deals with the Bible, you do have a paragraph 3 that is clearly Young Earth Creationist, you also have a passage a bit later on which on some views (including that of the progressives) opens very wide a back door to reinterpreting all that, if one accepts "myth" is a genre. No, "myth" only becomes a genre to those who believe no more it is true history. Like philosophies ranging from Plato to Epicure for very different reasons reject the literal truth of Homeric theology (not necessarily historicity of Iliad along with it) and they came to diverse agreements on how one could nevertheless use "hoi mythoi" (the word means "the stories") of the poets. But there is no evidence Homer intended it that way.

So it would be very problematic to assign Genesis 1 - 11 to the genre "myth" and from there on deny it literal truth - because such a treatment presupposes a break in theological world view. One which cannot be traced between Moses and Early Christians, for instance. Or a complete naiveté on how philosophers and their followers projected their own views back on a Homer who didn't share them. Hence, the passage about genre doesn't open this back door that widely, but this is unfortunately very little known.

And of course we have Catholics rejecting Vatican II, of which the most logical position as far as I am concerned is having a Pope who also rejects it. Hence, Pope Michael is my Pope.

24:54 Note, when AronRa says "you have a Pope who goes against a lot of what previous infallible Popes" etc, he is spot on about "Pope Francis". He would not be spot on about considering "Pope Francis" my Pope, however.

Creation vs. Evolution : Two "Magic Wand" quotes
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/01/two-magic-wand-quotes.html

25:16 "no, his infallible Eminence misspoke"

In fact, Popes can do that, but with Bergoglio it would be unreasonable to make that kind of assumption about his views on salvation for atheists or truth in evolution.

However, a little peeve : Eminence is not for Popes, it's for Cardinals. And Popes are called His Holiness in third person or Your Holiness in second person.

XI

30:30 Unforgivable, according to St. Thomas:

"Summa", II-II, Question 14. Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3014.htm

XII

34:11 How would he know the Mormons have a shorter story of sex abuse scandals?

He means those getting out? Possibly, since US has shown more favour to Mormons than to Catholics. And Mormons have been comparatively absent from France.

But I think the scandals start coming in the 1940's. Previous to that, there was a plan of defrocking any offending priest, but I think this is about when some totalitarian governments started to take too big an interest in defrocked priests, so the step became equivalent to handing priests over to secular justice in the hands of Catholic Church haters.

In the day of Émile Combes, a priest who was still a priest could normally not very well have been a sex abuser. At least not of a male.

How abusive the relation would be between a priest and a mistress is another question, but that was fairly well done away with back then.

XIII

35:15 AronRa should learn to distinguish between three types of Christian denominations.

Apostolic Continuity : Catholics, Orthodox, Copts, Armenians, Assyrians.
Restorationists : Mormons, JW, Restored Church of God.
Ecclesio-Imperfectionist or Branch Theory : the usual outcome of the Reformation.

Actually, one type of Baptists do make an Apostolic Continuith claim, the Ruckmanites. However, they do not seem to be very good at Medieval history.

35:18 In 1053 one can disagree on which side was wrong, but to both Catholics and Orthodox, clearly one side was wrong. Its stance was not willed by God anymore than a traffic accident killing people is so.

35:20 Unlike 1053, for 1520's, it is really easy to spot at a glance which side was new, and therefore wrong.

36:08 Now you mention it, one more type of restorationist : 7DA.

36:27 I'd think there is some difference between Jesus actually physically speaking to St. Peter and the other eleven and Joseph Smith claiming to be the one person whom God spoke to through a revelation. That latter guy seems a bit closer to Mohammed.

How I chose my Church. Not because it's me, but because as defending one can be chosen, I should be able to give an account of how.

• 1) Apostolic Continuity holds (as against Restorationism or Ecclesio-Fallibility) and it needs to be verifiable (as against Ruckmanites).
• 2) Exeunt Copts and Armenians as Monophysites and Assyrians as Nestorians, two diametrically opposed errors against Chalcedonian Orthodoxy.
• 3) Chosing between Catholic and Orthodox was kind of the tricky part. I have been on both sides (though not very exclusively on one of them while Orthodox), and with the Orthodox, I was ticked off by Modernism here and Anticatholicism there (you don't often find a corresponding degree of Anto-Orthodoxy in even very traddy Catholics!) or even both overlapping. Plus dishonesty in hagiography. I don't believe in the account usually given of "St. Peter the Aleut" and I don't believe in Theophan the Recluse' account on how St. Ephrem foiled Appollinaris, and I don't believe in how Paul Ballaster describes his conversion from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, specifically on account of how he describes the text of St. Robert Bellarmine in De Papatu (part of De Controversiis).

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Was Peter the Aleut a Martyr?
https://filolohika.blogspot.com/2012/09/was-peter-aleut-martyr.html

Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Do Not Trust "Saint" Theophan the Recluse on Hagiography
https://filolohika.blogspot.com/2020/02/do-not-trust-saint-theophan-recluse-on.html

On Paul Ballaster:

deretour : Mystagogy posts certainly false allegation on St Robert Bellarmine
https://hglundahlsblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/mystagogy-posts-certainly-false.html

deretour : Pseudoquote identified. What De Romano Pontifice, book IV, chapter V really says (quote)
https://hglundahlsblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/pseudoquote-identified-what-de-romano.html

deretour : Further faults of fact in the Mystagogy post
https://hglundahlsblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/further-faults-of-fact-in-mystagogy.html

37:51 Centre positions over left and right deviations seems reasonable - if correctly applied.

My point against Monophysites and Nestorians as said.

To apply this about people living today is however to forget today's positions are very extreme in certain directions that are very marginal historically, like Atheism, like "anything goes-ism" about procreative and non-procreative sex, like Epicurean metaphysics and Stoic morality.

XIV

38:30 No, Catholicism does NOT claim being with the Church is enough to be forgiven.

38:47 Am preferring Catholicism over some real "totally binary" things I second hand experienced, not through my mother, but through some Non-Conformists (Freikirchen, Evangelicals, Holiness Churches) she was at times hanging around with.

First, Catholicism does state Catholics can go to Hell, over mortal sins against other commandments and virtues than the Faith, second, in order to avoid Hell, you can do like a minimum thing, keeping commandments, avoiding mortal sins, receiving sacraments other than Holy Orders, or you can do at least two more holy types of living.

In other words, just because there is a very holy Catholic who abstains from reading novels, it doesn't mean every Catholic is required to not read novels.

The amount of beer you can licitly take varies (apart from resources needed for your family, it is a mortal sin to deprive children of food so you can have beer, I think most beer loving gentlemen would agree) on your state.

Can you go for getting a bit tipsy? In the first category yes. If you are a monk, no.

St. Benedict even goes so far as to say "today it is difficult to persuade monks to totally abstain from wine" and hence he declares that a portion of a bit more than a pint is an acceptable daily ration (to be divided between lunch, supper and smaller sips as energy drinks, probably). In other words, he is encouraging the third and highest order of perfection (but not requiring it to do so) to abstain from wine.

I have seen "churches" that say "if you want wine, you don't have all your joy in God, and if you don't have all your joy in God, you are not accepting Him as your Lord" meaning they would consider one as "not saved" and "bound for Hell" over liking beer with one's meal.

THAT'S binary for you!

XV

39:46 What would "white nationalists" mean "historically" if I may ask?

I mean, Franco was certainly a nationalist, but I can't see how he made whiteness a very specific point in it, and Salazar even provided for some colonials of non-white colours gaining Portuguese citizenship. Sure they would need to be good at Portuguese and not be non-plussed over eating bacalhao or someone else at least reciting Camoes, but if these requirements were met, being racially very indigenous in Moçambique or Angola was not a problem. Or dito for the somewhat more light brown shade of Goa.

Some nationalisms were white by default, as in didn't have any non-European colonies. Long the case with all Germanies, for instance.

Hence, Dollfuß and Schuschnigg had no non-whites in Austria to be fair or unfair to.

XVI

40:59 Batman I had read long before becoming Catholic and even before becoming Christian.

On Harry Potter, I have taken a stricter stance, and I would presume even apart from magic in it being very like witchcraft (debateable) it is bad in other ways.

I begin for instance to suspect Ron, Hermione and Harry were having a fairly unsound "love triangle" ... part of the tragedy being, modern school systems make a lot of them hard to avoid in real life as well.

I interceded for Narnia and LotR with Pope Michael (whether necessarily or not) and it seems he is not banning Harry Potter either.

New blog on the kid : Could Da Vinci Code be read by Mature Catholics? And what about Potter?
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2020/01/could-da-vinci-code-be-read-by-mature.html

XVII

43:52 The one para-Christian denomination you forget to point at here is Western Atheism.

44:30 "Wil" - did you seriously call JP-II a good philosopher?

But, this is also a selling point another denomination, specifically the one you forget to mention as such, has in common with Catholicism.

I don't consider Russell good, but he can be passed off as that before an un-experienced Atheist who has learned to play language games and other games of excluding himself from information while young.

45:06 "psychology, sociology, anthropology"

Did you just call those things "fields"? I mean, Latin is a field, Greek is a field, Classic Antiquities comprising both is a field, and so is ASNaC. There really are hard facts and undisputable facts to learn in them.

Edward the Confessor was not grandfather of Horse and Hengist and Arthur was a Roman Brit, not an English or Angle, or Saxon or Jute. Anglo-Saxon, also known as Old English, has four cases in nouns and five in adjectives and certain pronouns. While Greek has five (not the same five) and Latin has the Greek cases, except some uses of Greek dative or genitive are instead served by Ablative, a sixth case.

That's facts. It's harder facts, better known, than "electrons circle around a nucleus".

The named so called fields are nearly as non-secure as us descending from Tiktaalik or Earth rotating around the Sun. In other words, factoids, that should be called out as such.

45:50 Relying on condoms is not an adequate solution to AIDS.

I don't relish Antipope Ratzinger on some other accounts, but as far as I have heard, he said nothing which is wrong.

More like you are racist (or serving racists without realising it) since you want Africans to use condoms and have fewer children.

46:17 The only book by AronRa I find on Amazon is Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism.

If that is what you said, one reason more to say automated subtitles show computers don't really do language understanding.

Amazon : Aron Ra
https://www.amazon.com/Aron-Ra/e/B01JM0AP8U%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Some of those, while they were videos and transscripts (a format probably still extant), I have refuted.

Here is number one of my series:

Creation vs. Evolution : A Man not at all prejudiced against God is criticising Creationism (not me, we'll get back to who it is)
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2012/02/man-not-at-all-prejudiced-against-god.html

46:58 Specifically, lots of Old Earthers are owned by the Fossil Fuel industry ...

XVIII

two guys were asking if I had "conversations with myself" with the many comments, so I had to answer them no:

under 46:58

that is, under XVII

Mallory Worlton

@Hans-Georg Lundahl What exactly is your object in emitting all this sputum?

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Mallory Worlton Writing is not prone to accidental emission of saliva as talking is.

@Mallory Worlton But as to the question, my object is a time signature after time signature criticism of the positions expressed in the video.

Here it is as a finished piece:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : AronRa and "Wil" Answered
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2020/02/aronra-and-wil-answered.html

under 37:51

that is under XIII

John Bull

Are you having a conversation with yourself or someone else?

@John Bull I am not having a conversation at all, I am having a detailed criticism at the video in the time signatures.

Btw, it is now finished and available on a blog post:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : AronRa and "Wil" Answered
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2020/02/aronra-and-wil-answered.html