Have you considered applying contextual analysis?
You basically just keep blatantly ignoring repeated answers on this. Theologically and scientific.
Okay, so I was originally a Baptist (of sorts; my old church was highly isolated and unlike other wonderful Baptist churches), but I was sheltered from all kinds of other perspectives. It was around the time my father expressed his doubts regarding our church and what it had to say about Catholicism that I too began to reconsider things; my Catholic Lola certainly helped as well. I then became Catholic a couple of years ago, but I was cocky and strangely too literal (despite what others and my Bible’s notes were telling me) and I still had alot to learn. I then had an extremely painful and embarrassing (but certainly enlightening) period of severe doubt in Christianity as a whole for about a year, that resulted in a theologically flaccid mess before finding structure again. Some of my earliest posts on this forum kind of reflect this, but by then I was reconsidering my beliefs and learning to be less sporadic in my judgement. I would call myself Catholic again, but I hold Eastern Christianity in high regard, which is why i cannot call myself Roman Catholic; The Byzantine Rite is just as valid in my eyes. Because of this, I have been contemplating Eastern Orthodoxy. I have no interest in Mormonism.
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oh ok…i didnt see the Baptist bit coming…i was suspecting a more traditional denomination with some kind of hmmm…is it fair to say, spiritualistic influences (not the evil kind…the good kind).
I was raised in a family where Catholicism was quite strong on one side of my family…my immediate family didnt go to mass, however, i have an auntie on one side who is very devout…she was actually a principal in the catholic school system for many years and her late husband a senior high school teacher for them as well.
So im really interested, why the move to Catholicism? I would have thought that Evangelicals should struggle to come to terms with the, hmm…what is the term???.. oh i know, ritualistic nature of their services and beliefs?
If you had said you were a pentecostal and returned to Catholicism…i could understand that, i tend to view Pentecostals as a little bit too entrenched in the feeling of the moment…one needs a bit more foundation than just the feeling…
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I find the ancient rituals more enriching. I also joined an old community that has some of the greatest thinkers and that does plenty of good, despite all of its flaws. I also came to appreciate the importance of The Eucharist, prayers for the dead, and the veneration of Theotokos.
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Oh you must mean the broad category of Gnosticism. I don’t care for Gnosticism.
I neither said nor implied that you read only the NWT. What is your problem?
That’s what Geocentrists believed, too. Do you still believe the Sun moves about a stationary Earth? Or do you accept the secular scientific model of Heliocentrism?
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that i know you are an intelligent person, however, are instead choosing to engage in this kind of commenting.
are you now making a statement of ancient philosophical and cultural beliefs about the heavens and the earth, or is there some biblical reference you have in mind here that supports that view?
For example, i make the claim that the center of the universe is God, that gets discounted for what reason i am yet to see referenced, then a claim is thrown out that i think the earth is the center of the universe. You are the one who disagrees with my God=center position.
EDIT
actually this leads me to a question i have not thought to ask previously…
according to TEism, is the universe expanding?
This is a question for astrophysics, not theistic evolution.
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God is maybe the center of the universe in a metaphorical teleological sense, but how can he be the center of the physical universe when he is not physical?!
“First, . . . to want to affirm that in reality the sun is at the center of the world and only turns on itself without moving from east to west, and the earth . . . revolves with great speed about the sun . . . is a very dangerous thing, likely not only to irritate all scholastic philosophers and theologians, but also to harm the Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”–Cardinal Bellarmine, 1615
I disagree that the Sun moves about the Earth.
According to the evidence, the universe is expanding.
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In a quite straightforward way actually. If somebody decides to deny knowledge that has been well-supported by science, and furthermore - make their alleged facts to be an important part of their faith, then they’ve introduced a weakness (a falsehood) into their foundation. In doing so they have probably strapped something like a “time bomb” to their faith -and for all their followers also. And by further insisting that the alleged “facts” are a vitally important part of their faith, they effectively dial up the yield of said time-bomb, making it very often fatal to the faith of those who can no longer ignore reality. This is why so many have left the faith - they couldn’t be forever kept in the bubble that desperately attempts to seal them off from the mountains of reality all around them. Bomb detonates. Faith dies because it couldn’t be separated from all the falsehood.
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