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Come on chaps, let's keep it impersonal. :) My guess - I stand to be corrected by the Moderators - is that one is free to say what one likes about religion in general on a forum like this, though of course if someone makes the assertion that "religion is mostly used as a bludgeon to batter the...

Yeah, I know (I live in Africa BTW). The Church's official, definitive teaching, known as the Magisterium (no connection with The Golden Compass) remains crystal clear and internally consistent, however it has been about 50 years since it was enforced at ground level. The church has become like...

True enough. One could incorporate aspects of Catholicism, Buddhism and other belief systems in one's own syncretic religion. My point then is that Catholicism is not a supermarket Faith. 'Nuff said!

By 'know' I mean answers to the important questions that determine what we see to be the purpose of our lives and how we are meant to live them.

OK, time to wheel out the official stuff. Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, p96: Man consists of two essential parts - a material body and a spiritual soul. (de fide.) The 4th Lateran Council and the [first] Vatican Council teach this doctrine : deinde (condidit creaturam) humanam quasi...

I'm curious. Is religion still viewed as a source of information about God or is it just an expression of one's personal opinions or feelings on the subject? Given the diversity of religious opinion and our exposure to other religious traditions in our hypercommunicative society the question...

Yup that one. I try to explain 'aberrant' in the thread.

Well... It is an all too harmless picture of death if we think that the body dies but the soul lives. Is there really an independent soul over against a body with its own independent existence? [....] This is why eminent Christian theologians today can dispense with the notion of an immortal...

Howdy Thomas :) So David Standl-Rast doesn't hold with an immortal soul but does hold with reincarnation. In which case it would much more honest if he stopped calling himself Catholic/Christian and just admitted he is a straight Bhuddist. The woman with 7 husbands... we get our bodies back in...

What do you make of Hebrews 9:27? Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.

Remember Boo Radley from Mockingbird? He was a scarred and stunted recluse who calmly stuck a fork in his father. But he is the hero of the book. I think the kind of maturity of the human soul Solzhenitsyn talks about is not necessarily synonymous with the psychologist's ideal of the balanced...

Exactly. But there's more to it than that. The problem today is that in our consumerist, convenient and comfortable society we have lost sight of the fact that suffering is not necessarily bad. Solzhenitsyn spent seven years in the Gulag where he nearly died. Yet after it he wrote this: “Bless...

The point is, he will. Christian eschatology is clear on the subject. Which means he didn't set up the present dispensation out of cruelty or incompetence, but for a very specific reason alluded to in the first post. Humans as a rule are not made miserable by the conditions of this present...

This pretty much fits in with St Paul (quoted in the first post), St John and others on the fact that the present creation is a temporary and imperfect construct destined to be made perfect and permanent in the last day. Its present imperfection is perfectly suited to help us prepare for the...

'Evil' in this context does not mean sin. Animals do not sin. Evil means dysfunctionality, a way of being and acting that does not correspond to the fundamental notion of good. Goodness is the perfecting of one's nature or the nature of others. Evil, in this context, is the harming of one's own...

Creation was never created perfect. The first lion immediately started hunting the first lamb, even before Adam and Eve sinned. Bacteria and viruses were there from day one. Question is why?

Let me repeat this line from the first post: Animals are not morally culpable - they are just a biological mirror for the wickedness of men. It makes as much sense to pass judgment on animals as on a rock that rolls down a mountainside and kills a hiker below. Animals obviously cannot be held...

OK, started a thread. I wrote the first post in a hurry as I'm actually at work supposedly earning my keep. Till later. ;)

There is definitely a problem with the natural world. Lyall Watson put his finger on it in Dark Nature: there are things in nature that can only be qualified as evil. Animals behaving in destructive ways that benefit neither their own nor any other species - cannibalism for example has been...

Let me find the time and energy. It's a big subject. :eek: How does tagging work?