I noticed some parallels with vampirism. Some visible (overt) and some more subtle and covert.
For Instance, "Serpents" (a ref to satan as in Genesis) bites with Fangs. Vampires bite with Fangs.
Blood Drinking (vampires) a mocking contrast of Holy Communion (The Body and Blood of Christ).....also...like in Anne Rice Novels and many other vampire movies have people in the movies named "Louie" and "Lucy" (a subtle ref to Lucifer??) color symbolism (red = blood)
But aren't we encouraged to drink the blood of Christ and eat the flesh of the saviour. Are we not promised eternal life and youth through him. You have as much proof of the existence of vampires as we do for the existence of God. Both seem to me to be stories with logical appeal but no real substance embedded as they are in our ancient folklore.
The theory that the dracula myth appeals to those who want immortality is plausible. The "deep within us" we know the truth which is God is in my mind suspect and it can also be turned on its head. Having served at many funerals in my youth and been to a few funerals of my own family, I have yet to attend one where Catholics where leaping with joy that their baptised young child had immediately gone to heaven (Benedictus Deus 1336) and this is because "deep down" they don't believe it.
@zearro53 it is funny but I could say contrary to your statement. I know many catholics that find solace in the fact that their children are in heaven. what do you think of the apostles that were martyrs?
@laffiteaumusic Oh I don't disagree. There are plenty of examples from history of people who really believed in heaven. Though there is a difference between finding solace and rejoicing, I don't want to nitpick. However, I was not trying to prove that nobody believed in heaven. The good father believes that religion has been wired into us by God and that can lead us to the "truth". However, doubt of religious truths also seems very common and no doubt, doubt is wired into us through evolution.
@zearro53 it is funny my question was the center of my statement. for those that saw his death and resurrection would they not doubt it enough that at the weight of their own death they would not give up their beliefs either that or they knew the truth and were willing to die for it since not only did they know he resurrected but they also saw him go up to heaven where they would go
@laffiteaumusic I am not sure what relevance this has to the point I made which is the father claimed we are hard-wired to religion whilst I argued that one could equally argue that doubt is evidence that we are not. Actually I think neither prove what they claim.
@laffiteaumusic With regard to the apostles, if they have direct knowledge of the resurrection then they have no belief in it because they know and therefore have no belief to give up. You have belief because you have no direct knowledge. The problem with the resurrection is that the evidence conveniently disappeared into heaven. There are sincere eye witness accounts that Elvis and Michael Jackson are still alive. Remember it is better for you to believe without evidence than with John 20.29
@zearro53 ok I would like to state this plainly that I am catholic and I am defending from that position. what position would you say that you are in with you are in defence, offence, or neutrality makes no difference but is welcomed in the statement. the reason why because you make two good points but those point are only stand if you are coming from a certain position otherwise you have made atleast one really good point. I like the discussion but I want to have a talk formatted 4 ur position
@laffiteaumusic . Hi I guessed you were defending a position as a Catholic. I am an atheist though I was brought up as a Catholic. So I feel a sort of bi-lingualism - understanding - to some extent- both mind sets, atheist and Catholic. Anyway, I appreciate your approach.
@zearro53 thanks, I figured you were as well but there were two other possible positions that I thought you may have held. For your position of doubt even the you do not stand by it whole-heartedly. all people can doubt the pharoah doubted and so did the pharisees(not all but those displayed commonly). direct knowledge even when you see a miracle does not mean that you can not have belief as a choice although it is sad that have to see there own miracle to believe(Part1)if u agree then to part2
@laffiteaumusic Do you doubt that God really told Mohammed that Jesus is merely a prophet and not God and that the Christian scriptures have been corrupted?.Do you doubt that Joseph Smith was sent the Book of Mormon by God on golden tablets? Do you find it sad that people will not believe those things without evidence? To make doubt into a weakness is the unfortunate legacy of Christianity. Without doubt claims to truth would never be tested.
@zearro53 yay your reply is my part 2. yep there are a few scriptures I could give you on the matter of having evidence for your religous beliefs but there should be discerning of truth but lets be serious relativism is stupid if I accept relativism then I accept that Jesus was God and that he was not a God. relative truth is a contradictice philisophy so we must doubt in the since of developing reasons or truths for what we believe just as the bible says. if you agree then to part 3
@laffiteaumusic I never mentioned relativism and I am not a relativist. I accept the law of contradiction. By the way what has this got to do with *it is better to believe without evidence than with*, referring you back to John 20:29, If you are using someone else's several steps proof to the existence of God could you just provide me with the link because I may have watched it already. However, please understand my issue is with the demonising of doubt and the sanctification of faith.
@zearro53 my points in parts were separate issues of my own creation to breakdown your statements to parts that you either agree or disagree so that we could more easily get to the core discussion you & I would have. please explain the law of contradiction. Here is something for doubt the years it takes for officials to decided if a miracle is true or false they have openness to both possibilities. John20:29sorry to say that that deals greatly with believing in a God you have not seen.
@laffiteaumusic Well, let's just assume for the sake of argument that God exists then you don't have to go to the trouble of proving it to me - which believe me would be a long winded affair. So God exists. So why does the gospel writer claim that Jesus,(presumably an omnipotent and omniscient being), bless those who have faith without evidence over those like Thomas who seek evidence first? John 20:29. Remembering my point that you should believe Elvis is still alive on faith alone.
I think he is right on with a lot of what he is saying but the Twilight series is really just a great big epic love story where the principal characters delay sex until after marriage and there is a hunger for this type of story especially for women.
The magic ring in Lord of the Rings bestowed immortality on the bearer. So did the Deathly Hallows in Harry Potter. In Star Wars Anniken Skywalker joined the Dark side to seek immortality. Spice Malange in Dune gave immortality or at least extended life. Yup, immortality is near the top of our fantasy list..
Are these fantasies distortions of religion as Fr Barron thinks? Or is religion another immortality fantasy? Is there a parallel between vampires drinking blood and the sacramental wine?
I think the bigger travesty is that the Twilight books are poorly written and have terrible character development, especially around that girl. The movies are a total disgrace.
But yeah, people are seeking something supernatural and they don't really know it. We have a God sized hole in our souls and people are tryign to fill it with all sorts of rubbish. Enter, Twilight.
@Shenanirats Some sections of the Bible are lyrical and beautiful as with any literature. Other sections are ugly in the extreme and full of contradiction and doesn't that just prove the point that they are human in nature? Twighlight and The Bible share the same human authorship - we take the good with the bad!
Dracula is the polar opposite in character to Christ. If you compare their behavior Anne rice is a wishy washy mushead.Catholicism is just bewildering.
Yes, the vampire craze is obviously a reaction to supressed supernaturalism...or maybe its because people have been fascinated by monster stories since ancient times. The Greeks and Romans were writing them long before the emergence of Christianity and people will probably be writing them for decades to come. Seriously, why go for a complicated explanation when a simple one will do just as well?
@lewisejackson, what you call "simply explanation"? That Greeks and Romans were writing stories about supernatural being called gods? But this is not explanation at all!
This guy is a propaganda preaching machine. People like the idea that they will live forever. Not the other way around. It's called the fear of dying. That's why religion incorporated it into its belief system. People like vampires because they portray a romantic conflict. On one hand you have eternal life on the other you are damned to live of the blood of others, which is like an addiction. The Twilight saga exploits the sacrifices that a vampire makes because of love. Simple and sells well.
I've read up on the history and formation of vampires. It wasn't like I had much choice, since I consider this form of fiction as archaic, and offensive - when referring to modern vampires. There was a recent movie being made about how a vampire is off killing people and all the "old" rules simply don't apply to it. It used to be that the cross could stop a vampire, now they offend Christians by saying that it doesn't. Seriously, can't we just burn Hollywood and its dictators to hell?
Its been a great week here in Ireland. Our new priminister finally gave the pope a proper going over re: the lies, cover ups, and ongoing abuses of the catholic church in relation to innocent children. Telling him that the rule of law supercedes canon law. Not being from Ireland, you would never appreciate the control the church had on all levels of government, the police, and everyday people. The church was never questioned and we have a history of destroyed lives because of blind faith!
The principal character in 'Dracula' states that he had always regarded the notion of the eucharist and other Catholic beliefs as silly superstition but that he had come to rely on the truth of their very reality for his protection and salvation.
A very Catholic novel for a protestant. Like Salvador Dali, it was as if his intellect accepted the truth of Catholicism, but his heart denied it.
Just another example of the culture of death. Another "blood sacrifice" to devils. It's not enough that 50 million children have been executed in the womb,(in this country alone since 1973, watch 1 of the abortions on youtube, you'll get the "picture") now their siblings(that survived the abortionist) are brainwashed by popular media that there is no God & all they can hope for is to join demons (vampires) to find their eternity. Not a very hopeful message, is it?
Father, have you seen "Dracula 2000"? A complete waste of two hours of my life. However, at the climax, Dracula is revealed to be none other than Judas Iscariot! To hear "Dracula" profess the truth of Christianity was almost worth the time!
hmm if god greated the whole universe and all that is in it. why do we persume that he will pay special attention to us? ass if we are the most interresting planet. its like a tv wit a billion channels why look at ours? but we even believe he loves us! hell we nailed his son to a cross. so if he exists chanses are slim he even cares about us.
Well, God exists not as a singular, temporal being, but everywhere and at every moment. Now for your TV analogy, I've gotten cable with hundreds of channels for the sole purpose of one station that plays my favourite tv shows, everything else I need because i'm not allowed to get one channel, it''s not that I don't have the power, it's that no such thing exists. I'm interested in the other channels but I wouldn't have cable if it wasn't for that one station.
@Jim1905 your clever but still it does not answer why god as u say being everywhere knowing everything would love us and want us to worship him? of course the bible tells us to but then again it was writen by man so wat proof have we but wat the mind tells us. and wat do we know about god but what they say an wath we think might be. so then we feel like good is listing to us and guiding us to wat is best but how do we know that?
God wants us to worship him because he is the originator, like honouring your mother and father, only extreme lol. He would love us not because he has the capacity for love but because he is love itself. Our sum knowledge of God can be deduced from the world around us, ourselves and scripture. That last part is tricky though because of lot of the bible's meaning got lost in translations and that is what spawned all those ridiculous fundamentalist.
@Jim1905 honouring is understandeble every paret wants to be respected but is sounds very humain to me but then again is god excluded from emotion that we call humain? our knowledge of god is often misunderstood as you say thanks to meanig got lost in translation. but the who is right? becaus everyone seems to know they are.
@Jim1905 and for the tv anallogy god as created the univers meaning he created the channels so if he only wanted one he would not make a hundred other ones. but its maybe best to drop my silly anallogy of mine its not gonna help us.
No, I rather liked your tv analogy as it's a simple, crude model but nonetheless exposing key points of why would God care about us. The problem with God simply making earth is that he is rational and logical (we may deduce this from the fact that our world is rational and from the fact that the bible says God the Word, but originally meant Logic or Reasoning, God is logical). You couldn't devise such a world without further creating the rest of the universe as a consequence.
@Jim1905 thx : ). if i get this wright god created the world and created the universe as a consequence. then of course i reach to evolution we are not sure about every detail but its impossible to exclude it. some extremists think its all lies but in my opinion evolution does not exclude god as well. but the universe and eart is much older than us an that before us other creatures ruled this eart. and than we evolved from monkeys.
I came home from college for Thanksgiving this year and discovered that my two sisters- 18 and 16, respectively- are both fans of HBO's True Blood. I wish this didn't make me uncomfortable, but it does. While I have long been the "weird" kid in the house (i.e. A fan of all things scifi or horror) I can't help but worry about the effect such a fad will have on them.
Just a big brother worrying over nothing, perhaps.
Yes and Ann Rice has recently left the Catholic Church due to its hypocrisy and distortion of what she feels is the real christian message. Poor example really. Religions are simply beaurocracies between men and the gods they believe in helping to move their own brand of god forward. It's been said many times - they cannot all be right. Is it not safer to conclude they could all be wrong?
You should reference Chesterton with this concept: "when man stops believing in god, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything." It's a bit naughty too, isn't it, to borrow phrases like 'hard-wired' from the scientific domain? I mean you don't get scientists saying their hypotheses are true because they had a vision. If you do want to argue that we are 'hard-wired' for religion, it must seem plausible to you that the god concept is an anthropomorphic projection.
@rorshak73 By hard wired, I think he means inherent; or, that which is imprinted on us from our creation. If it is used as an analogy, I don't see any incompatibility between use of a "scientific" term and spiritual realities. After all, the soul is the animating principle of the body. In short, he's not suggesting that our desire for God is from a physiological hard wiring; he's just using the term to illustrate a spiritual "hard wiring." Much like the "stain" of sin isn't a physical stain.
vampires are a metaphor for sex. not god. twilight (while really pretty clean, as far as sex goes) is a huge metaphor for sex, and repression thereof, which teens can often relate to. anne rice's vampire chronicles are hugely sensual and sexually-charged. dont get it twisted, father. don't get it twisted.
What I find very interesting is that you see an awful lot of "vampire romance" novels. Just check the romance section at your local library, and I'm sure you're bound to find at least a few. The reason this interests me is that romance is the genre that expresses -- though often imperfectly -- man's capacity to love, the goal of which, ultimately, is to be united with God in loving unity. Somehow, the fascination with the "ersatz spirituality" you mentioned, with eternal life "vampire style"...
The vampire craze isn't a new one: Dracula, The Vampyre and Carmilla as well as Nosferatu and the the 1936 Dracula film as well as Dark Shadows on TV. It's old as a hills and goes in and out of popularity from time to time like other genres.
"the unconditioned" is one hell (lol) of a long way from the particular beliefs of individuals each claiming to know particulars of the uncondition's MIND. Seems reasonable to conclude that we humans developed imaginary minds called dieties to explain phenomena we didn't understand.There must be a cause right? Must be some sort of agent.
Dogma provides answers and group cohesion, and some comfort.Its obviously a human thing taught to children with authority as if it was true, not just a theme
@adstanra Well, hang on, friend. I can only do so much in 500 characters. Your objections are really fundamental. So I had to get at first things first. Once you've admitted that God exists, we can move onto the question of revelation.
@wordonfirevideo You know I am not going to admit that God exists. No reason to believe so. You first have to show he exists before saying anything about his character. How does your evidence for the christian God differ from the sort of evidence that exists for Shiva, Allah, mormon God. Anyone can have a revelation or personal experience.
@BloodOfRayne i think we die. end of story . Consciousness is a function of the brain. When it dies, we loose consciousness. Can you tell me how individual consciousness exists with out a brain and spacetime?
@adstanra No. And you know I can't; only through my faith in something more and the fact that science hasn't and will not provide me with the deeper answers that I seek. Let me ask you a question: you believe that death is the end for you; nothing, no more, right? No memory of anything you have ever done or said. So what is even the point of you debating these things, through science or anything else? Your view is ultimately pointless.
@BloodOfRayne I don't think the truth is pointless or that life is pointless. We return to the state we were in prior to birth. Since I became an atheist, I have not lost my sense of wonder and life has just as much meaning as it ever had.What deeper answers do you seek? How can I be happy? What is meaningful? How should I behave? How do I find love? The universe may be run by impersonal laws, but you are a person!
@adstanra Exactly! You haven't lost your sense of wonder! But in your view you have basically said yourself that there is no point to this wonder! Don't you see? You have said that this very wonder that you have about life, and of creation of it is going to die with you! Even if man carries on and discovers answers, you will never know them! So what does that make you? Just a tiny step in discovery and that to you won't mean anything! You will be gone and will never even be able to look back!
@BloodOfRayne Not to get religious on you but, I honestly beleive that you are more than that! You are a very intelligent being! I don't believe that someone with your intelligence is just going to wink out when you die! A being (whoever) put you here, and gave you your brain for a reason. You have a gift! That wasn't evolution that gave it to you! You were given it. I respect you. ; )
@BloodOfRayne I am fine when religion aspires someone to greatness.But the truth, together with honesty, is the greatest thing a human can aspire to.Evolution gave me my brain, my ability to connect with someone like yourself. This is wonderful. I am pleased with who we are as humans....even with our ability to enflict horror.We have come so far.We have Einstein, Spinosa, Jefferson, Paine.
@adstanra You have faith in evolution it seems but not in God. This is ironic since it takes more faith I think to believe that human beings evolved over millions of years by share trial and error of "nature". As though nature in and of itself is intelligent. You have no empirical proof of evolution yourself but you believe in it because that is what some scientists say is the genesis of all life. Seems sort of like religion to me :)
Hey sphynx. I don't have faith in evolution. I believe in it because of the empirical evidence. Kind of like I don't have faith that OJ Simpson killed those 2 people. I believe he did because of evidence.
It sounds like you might be using an argument of incredulity. Have you seen the genetic and molecular biology evidence for evolution. Without a doubt it shows common ancestry. the nested heirarcial pattern is consistent with a mindless process. BTW, evolutionis not about genesis of life.
@adstanra No sorry. By your belief in Darwin's theory the amoeba, the crocodile and countless other animals should have evolved millions of years ago. Why are there bones millions of years old of the vast majority of life currently inhabiting the world found everywhere and we can see that after so long non of these animals have evolved but merely adapted? It takes more "faith" to believe in evolution in my opinion as intelligent design screams back from nature every second.
@sphynxalive We have large numbers of fosils demonstrating the evolution of many species, particularily whales, humans, reptiles to mammals and horses. Some animals have not been under pressure to evolve much- like crocodiles and sharks. We know common ancestry from genetic and molecular biology, endogenous retroviruses, transposons, pseudogenes, atavisms, embriology and a consistent pattern.
@adstanra And this is the problem with this line or reasoning. Why is it that science cannot create life from non-living material? Transitionary forms still only show distinctly different organisms that show adaptation within their species. By the theory of evolution there should be an almost infinite number of transitionary forms showing the gradual change from one organism to the next. Where are all the transitionary forms in between A and B or B and C?
@sphynxalive transitional fossels have been found that document the transition from land animal to whales which is why whales have pseudogenes for smell and swim differently from fish and have tetrapod fins ( as opposed to ray-spined fins). they even have genes for hind legs and occationally a whale is born with legs-complete with all the bones of a tetrapod. evolutions does not predict that we will find fossels, this is dump luck that we sometimes do.
@adstanra Evolution is one of the few theories I know that leads to the evidence of itself rather than the evidence leading to the theory. Instead of evolution being the result of investigation we find evolution to be the stated premise to explain the complexity and genesis of life. This premise being used by its adherants to find evidence to prove it. Circular reasoning is very apparent here. I can't call evolution science because it is religion masquerading as science in reality.
@sphynxalive all scientific theories are developed to fit and explain the facts. As opposed to Dogma which fits facts to the theories which are derived in some way by revelation and personal experience and culture. Darwin came up with a theory that has never been fasified ( it can be wheras your religion cannot). The more technology we gain the more evidence for evolution piles up. Molecular and genetic evidence has shown common ancestry to be almost certain now.
@adstanra "Never been falsified" you say. You evolutionists are so convenient whenever you are good and ready. The existence of a microscopic talking pig with gills living at the bottom of the Thames cannot be falsified either but it is just about as rational as your "theory" of evolution. Stop spreading misinformation. "molecular and genetic evidence has shown common ancestry.." Is your BELIEF. That is not science.
@sphynxalive Find any whale wih ray-spinned pectoral fins, or and mammal with feathers, or any bird with mammary glands, or any plancetal shark, or any fossil animal that does not fit into the very specific nested heirarchy that evolution says must be found...and you have falsified evolution. Find any Rabbit fossil in the triassic period..any amphibian with hair and its all off. Pig with gills would do.
@adstanra OK since you want to be pedantic about it. You BELIEVE in evolution while others BELIEVE in God. You believe in the former because of what you have read about and what "seems" like evidence of evolution (fossil record, a need to explain the development of "complex" life forms). Others like myself believe in God because of what seems like evidence (intelligent creatures and the order of creation as well as personal experience when seeking God personally)
@sphynxalive yes, the difference is that evolution is guided by empirical verifyability. this is not faith. do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, in virgin births, in angels and demons, heaven and hell, souls because of "seems like evidence".We understand now how mindless laws of physics create order (gallaxies, stars,planets, continents, seas, tseunamis, smallpox virus) by acting algorythmically on energy and matter over time and space.
@adstanra So have you never wondered why the laws act consistently in this way? I have but there is no answer that science can be used to explain this. What holds the laws in place if there is no intelligence needed in creating a system? If you started digging in your back yard and unearthed a ford taurus with it's wind shield wipers and tyres to move etc. Would it be more probable that it was designed by an intelligent designer or that it evolved into what it is?
@sphynxalive there is no intelligence directing the laws of physics or biology. these are the same laws that cause smallpox, malaria, measles, earthquakes, continental drift and a nested heirarcial bush of life where 98% of all species are now extinct. (One that created a giraffe' recurrant nerve travel 15 feet just to innervate a muscle 4 inches away, and gave us pseudogenes, atavisms and genetic defects). Some mind.
@adstanra It is alarming how in the face of all the order in the world and universe that you can find a few models that are not understood fully by science to try to infer that nature is inherently chaotic and not intelligence. With all the unintelligence you speak of in the world the earth has been able to support a variety of intelligent life in such a delicate balance that if there was a slight change in so many variables life should have been snuffed out millions of years ago.
@sphynxalive the nested heirarchial bush pattern where 98.9 % of all species now extinct is consistent with a mindless stochastic process. The bibological world is driven by predation and survival of the fittest. Smallpox virus killed approx 300 million people in the 20th century. Ascaris worms infect approx 1 billion people worldwide and can only survive by latching to the gut of a human...they survive because they reproduce well. Mindless laws of biology and physics.
@adstanra Can evolution sufficiently explain why a giraffe does not die when it bends down to drink water? What about the human eye (even Darwin questioned his theory then)? How about the woodpecker's ability to hammer away at a tree trunk without suffering a cracked skull or brain damage? What about bacterial flagellum and the mechanics and "evolution" of this micromachine? All these unanswered questions and some still "believe" in this religious . . . erm scientific theory :)
@sphynxalive Can you explain the pathway of the giraffes left recurrant larygeal nerve based upon intelligent design? Common ancestry and evolution can. We have models that explain the evolution of the eye and the flaggelum. Can you explain these things without reference to magic? ID people love the flaggelum . Consider the flaggelum of Vibrio cholera-it functions to allow the bacteria to burrow into the protective mucous of the stomach to torture its victim. great design.
@adstanra Interesting but we both know that medicine and science have been wrong many times in past history. The appendix for example. Doctors have been cutting body parts out, under the false sense that they had no function, only to find out how wrong we were.
The fact is that we do not fully understand many things but just because we don't understand something, doesn't make it wrong or right.
@sphynxalive Appendicitis occurs in a bout 1 in 20 young people and has a very high mortality rate. It is a remnent of the past when our diets consisted of more plant material. Now it serves a rudimentary role in that it has a bit of lymph tissue. It sucks as a design my friend. It is a vestigial organ, like wisdom teeth..in the past , before modern dentistry, people often died of their teeth!
@adstanra evolution cannot go back to the drawing board and fix design flaws that are no longer advantageous, like wisdom teeth or an appendix. DNA remembers it's past and humans have recently been able to use this to determine when and why we have certain features like a big brain, lots of cortex, no hair ,opposable thumbs...not to mention why we sometimes die in childbirth ( cephalopelvic disproportion)
@adstanra Every one of the natural biological occurences you have sited here is not fully understood. Because we have not yet found a use for an anatomical structure does not make it automatically vestigeal. This is why people say evolution is a religious movement. You say that religious people use God to explain things we do not understand but that is exactly what you are doing here in the name of evolution.
@sphynxalive We do understand that wisdom teeth and appendices are vestigial and that they have caused terrible problems for humans and are a bad design. We have vestigial genes as well that code for yolk that are reminents from when our ancestors were reptiles. We find them exactly where we expect to find them in the genome and have even sequesnced their lethal mutaions, monotremes have one surviving functional gene..because they need it.
@adstanra When you can come to terms with the fact that evolution as science is laughable today. We know too much to go back there. Even the big bang (the show is funny) is losing relevance in scientific circles. Neither evolution nor the big bang are consistent with all of modern science taken into consideration. They defy natural observed physical laws. Hence if they are true they must be supernatural ergo religious dogma. They are an atheist's grasp at straws basically right now.
@sphynxalive well, we will just have to watch as to who wins the debate in the scientific domain. Evolution doesn't break any laws at all and will continue to frustrate you creationists. Get used to it. BTW, inflationary cosmology, while not as strong as evolution, continues to be the prevailing theory with a huge amount of scientific support.
@adstanra More misinformation. When you get tired you can stop and start telling the truth. Appendicitis is not that common but appendicitis statistics reveal that an incidence of acute appendicitis (annual) occur in 25 per 10000 (aging 10-17) and 1-2 per 10000 (under 4 years). Incidence rate is about 1 in 400 or 0.25% or 680000 people in USA.
@sphynxalive quite right. It is about 1 /400 or so young people, but my point is bang on. we live very well without it despite its marginal function, which is neglegable. You are the disingenious one for not understanding the point though.
@adstanra The number of things that evotution does not explain is vast, but yet you and others willfully keep God, common sense and proven science out of the picture kneeling at the altar called evolution. Sounds to me like your looking for an excuse to reject God, and your grasping at straws. Just grasp at God instead. If He does not exist you would have lost nothing. If He does you would have gained so much more. This is not for my good but yours I am telling you this brother.
@sphynxalive Evolution has more explanatory power then any other scientific theory and unites multiple brances of science. You can make hugely accurate predictions from it and it is incredibly useful to mankind. You are the one kneeling and believing in magic at the alter of dogma. you cannot show a designer ( apparently he wants to remain hidden, or is dead), have no proposed mechanism of how he effects creation and a mind does not fit the data.
@adstanra Useful you say? No my friend that theory has contributed wothing to science. The fact is that the remarkable DNA molecule provides strong evidence of original creation (since it is far too complex to have arisen by chance) and of
conservation of that creation (since the genetic code acts to guarantee
reproduction of the same organism, not evolution of new organisms). Since all
known true mutations are harmful this contributes nothing whatever to
@sphynxalive we have been able to document many usefull mutations which have increased the genetic information in many bacteria and viruses and now even know many of the mutations that have lead to increased brain size and grey matter in humans from our common ancestor to chimps. these are called Human accelerated regions and have been well documented.
@BloodOfRayne hey my friend. did you see wordonfires latest father Barron video talking about sin as " usurping the devine life". I don't want to do that by giving my life cosmic consequence when it is not due. I am a wonderful creature...a primate struggling to make sense of reality. a sentient primate living on the edge of suffering and extinction, but who's greatness is reflected in our ability to find truth, no matter where it leads us.
Are we hard-wired for God? or are we conscious of our own mortality , which leads to imaginations about afterlife etc. I don't think it is terrible difficult to explain the emergence of religion. It comforts us, it provides answers (right or wrong) to questions that we don't understand ( like ," why are we dying from plague').What argues for the imagination as the sourse of religion is the plethora of religions!
i wonder if we humans would really like immortality...even in heaven.
i think that after a few billion trillion years ( a drop in the bucket for eternity) we would be begging for the mercy of death. My favorite show recently was battle star galactic. Some of the cylons discovered to value of death !
@adstanra You'd be right if heaven were endless time. That would indeed be unbearable. But it's not like that. Heaven is the place of eternal life, which is life outside of time.
The problem with heaven is that any conceptualisation of it ( which change all the time)is unintelligable. Paul believed that the kingdom would be a bodily kingdom in spacetime. Many Xians still do. Others imagine a soul in heaven after death.replete with a head,shoulder,personaity ( usu looking like they were in their 20s ..lol).clearly spacetime. Your view is partic. unintelligable..how do we exist as individ. in spacetimelessness? I don't think this is biblical..sounds more eastern Nirvana.
@adstanra Well, to a degree, you're right. Paul said, "Eye has not seen and ear has not heard what God has prepared for those who love him." What ultimate fulfillment is like in the realm of God remains mysterious to us. But really, would you want it otherwise? A heaven that we could get our puny minds around would get boring pretty fast. The key is always to think of heaven as greater and not less than earthly joy.
It appears to me ( whatever that's worth), that heaven is a made up concept. whatever way you look at it, it is unintelligable. clearly Paul envisioned a bodily kingdom that was imminent.Many christians, even early on, thought of it as a state of incorporal being.The evidence though suggests that mind and brain are connected and that once the brain is dead, conscious existence is gone...to the same state it was before birth.Paul and all sorts of religious gurus can talk riddles if they want..lol
@adstanra Well, not quite. Paul talked about "spiritual bodies" which will be like the body of the resurrected Jesus. Whatever this means (and it is, happily enough, unclear), it doesn't mean "an imminent bodily kingdom," or this world slightly revised. I think Paul envisions an embodied state, but in a higher dimensional system: think circles raised up to sheres, or triangles become pyramids.
I agree that he felt these bodies would be different than the corrupted bodies we have now, but it seems evident that he did envision bodies. I think he was countering the idea of bodiless souls and a spacetimeless nirvana-like kingdom. He obviously was expecting the imminent arrival of Jesus to usher in the kingdom and raise the dead to new bodies. Certainly nothing spacetimeless about his idea..JWs are the most biblical here IMO.
@adstanra Here again, you're succumbing to the genetic fallacy, the mistake that uncovering the origin of an idea is the same as refuting it. Even if religion began the way you say (which I dispute) that wouldn't tell one way or the other for its truth.
hey wordonfirevideo. I think people do understand the connection of things to their origins. i MIGHT be making a genetic fallacy...up to the listener to make that valuation. Sometimes this argument can be effective. Father barron has concluded that we are " hardwired" for God. Is this a genetic fallacy ? There may be evolutionary and social reasons why humans conceptualise God. i think origins is important in this case! F. Barron seems to think so.
I would think that my explanation ( a natural one) is always more likely than a supernatural one .And my argument applies to the present as well wrt Vampires. Why do we think about them...i have given a plausable explanation...i hope people will inderstand that death brings value to life in the way that living an immortal life ( like a vampire) would not.
@adstanra But that can't be right; otherwise God and angels wouldn't be individuals. It seems to me that the requisites for individuality are intellect and will.
Individuality implies the necessary concept of separateness. Separateness cannot locically exist in spacetimelessness..We are separate in space and time !
in spacetimelessness all will be the great ONE ( OHmmm) in Budhist philosophy.
You have concluded apriori the existence of angels so must make it fit with spacetimelessness. Good luck with that my friend..lol You are right about individ requiring a will..but arn't you supposed to submit yr will for all eternity in heaven? How does that work
@adstanra Strictly speaking, the genetic fallacy always has to do with the refutation of an idea. What I'm calling our "hardwiring for God" is God's presence to us, discernable in our desire for, and hence inchoate knowledge of, the unconditioned. So I'm not just searching out the psychological origins of an idea; I'm uncovering the metaphysical ground for an experience. This is Fr. Barron, by the way!
i am just trying to determine the psychological ground of an experience.i suppose this is what I was arguing..not so much origins but grounds. what is the grounds of religious experience? F. Barron points out that there are 30,000 protestant denominations. there are tens of thousands of other religions invented by man in history. you must admit that 99.9 % of them are wrong. Pointing out that they all have a desire for "inchoate knowledge of the unconditioned" does not mean such a thing exists.
grounds of god experience-we are conscious agents who see the effects of intelligent beings all the time-ourselves. We understand cause and effect.When we don't understand something, like a plague or earthquake, we naturally assume agency.
But science has shown that the universe is governed by impersonal laws of physics. Philosophy has shown that individual consciousness requires spacetime ( a bold statement I know ..lol) No evidence of an invisible god, lots of evidence of human imagination
@adstanra You've made things way too easy for yourself. If the only kind of "evidence" you'll accept is physical, then voila! there is no evidence for the non-physical God. This proves precisely nothing. I would press the question metaphysically and not scientifically, looking for "evidence" in the contingent structure of the cosmos.
yes, my worldview is easy, yours is difficult. you have got to make sense of heaven, hell and suffering. You have got to make of a world where choice of religion is mostly determined by culture. You have to account for why God made smallpox virus, malaria, earthquakes that preferentially torture the meek . You have to answer all the other religions,and how angels can exist spacetimelessly. you have to explain the bad passages in the bible and the bad patches of church history.
I do not have to prove the nonexistence of unseen things. Humans can have faith in all sorts of nonexistent things. This is self-evident.
My view is not terrible easy though. It requires painstaking research about things that happened billions of yrs ago. We still do not know how life began, or what started the inflation or how to fully explain love and consciousness.
I have appreciated our discussion. will be away for a week ( vacation!) but will look here for any response when i return
@adstanra But you've got to make sense of a radically contingent universe that nevertheless exists--and more to the point, is imbued with intelligibility. Good luck explaining that on materialist grounds!
Even in contingent universes it is not surprising that something exists..it may approach 100 % . We have had amazing success explaining phenomena on " materialistic grounds" including galaxies, suns, planets, continents, mountain ranges, tseunamis, plagues and the diversity of life. You have had no verifyable success explaining anything on supernatural grounds. Good luck with that?
@adstanra The material sciences can explain, to a degree, why matter takes on various forms. What they can't explain is why there is something rather than nothing, why things that don't contain within themselves the reason for their existence should be at all. To make sense of this, we have to appeal to a finally non-contingent reality, which exists through the power of its own essence.
@wordonfirevideo If people ask "Why did the tseunami occur". I will answer something about plate tectonics. You might say " God's judgement".The universe might be that " which exists through the power of it's own essence".It appears as though the universe can self exist and expand without breaking any laws of physics..ie- not supernatural agent required.
@adstanra "The universe" is just shorthand for the collectivity of contingent things. Therefore, appealing to it doesn't move us one centimeter in the direction of a real answer. If, according to the Big Bang theory, all of time and matter came into existence, then they require a cause, and by the way, that cause has to be non-material and non-temporal. Huh, I wonder who that might be?
the universe is shorthand for the set of all existent things which require spacetime. The universe is spacetime itself, so cause and effect do not apply to it.
Many physicists today will agree that time and space as we know it came into existence 13.6 billion yrs ago, but this does not mean that the universe came into existence at that time. A planck sphere, or a singularity is an entity outside of what we can comprehend in terms of spacetime, existence, cause and effect.
@wordonfirevideo actualy they have a theory that the big bang was created by 2 colliding universes. so yes, soon you propably have to start to do some serious backpedaling... which is very amusing. archeology proves that most of the stories in the bible are total bs you have to backpedal and start calling them poetry, it's ridiculous
@Darusdei The argument from contingency assumes long causal chains. If the Big Bang is the result of the collision of two "universes" (whatever that means, since the word is meant to designate all of finite existence), then we have to inquire after the reason for that collision and so on. The point is that we have to come, finally, to some non-contingent ground--and that's what I mean by "God."
Really, you mean a bible that no one really took literally has been shown to not be true?! My God, that could only mean one thing...that the bible is an mostly written in allegory, a form popular of the philosophy books of it's time. Also please oh please don't attempt to explain to others what theory we have as you haven't the slightest clue at what that is, I work in theoretical physics and I can assure you that the problem Fr. Barron talks about is completely accurate
@Jim1905 bible who no one took seriously, that's why they burned the witches right? lol...
theoretical physics? like every other youtuber here, just by saying a thing like that propably means that you don't even know what theoretical physics is...
That was after the protestant reformation, when the bible had been translated so many times some groups (what we called fundamentalist now) lost the meaning of certain passages. Also the number of "witches" burned has been hyperinflated through out the years and the staggering numbers you hear now are merely approximations and poor ones.
Also, not that I really have anything to prove to you, but I do research on the quasi-normal modes of black holes using the Poisson-Israel Metric and analyzing the stoke and anti-stoke lines. I've also done work on the reformulation of special relativity to include a Lorentz invariant discrete spacetime.
What? Looked up the metric and couldn't figure out how I knew about that without simply googling something about theoretical physics? So instead..umm..well you can't PROVE that, whatever. I know what lin of work I do.
Really, then I guess Lematre wasn't a good scientist, being a catholic priest and physicist, oh wait he was one of few ppl at that time to not let dogma blind him and take seriously the expanding universe the field equations suggested?
You see, many atheists and others too, are shackled by their dogma, completely unable to open their mind that perhaps there exists other things that are no less real then what is material. My work in physics is purely about the natural world and I know that, it cannot investigate the existence of God because it works within a framework that doesn't allow one. Therefore to investigate this idea one should use other methods of inquiry, the dialectic method and intelligible method.
You see I exposed your dogma right there, scientism. Why would my belief in anything supernatural, as you call it, make me a poor scientist? Unless of course you believe that the only method to gain knowledge and truth is from the sciences. Ah, there's that little worm of a dogma that so infects atheists to the point that it's sickening when they refer to others as dogmatic.
The christian God has never been the god of gaps. Look at the writings of Augustine, 380 AD, he explicitely writes about the God in a completely immaterial way and would never, even for a moment, entertain the idea of God explaining anything material other then the first cause, everything else follows from laws that need no God to explain. God is primarily a god of morals and the universe's originator.
@Darusdei I don't know where you got that from that no one takes the bible seriously, I do as do all the millions of Catholics around the world so where did you get this ''no one'' from?
As it's a problem that our universe is ultimately (and any other material object you may conjure to mind) contingent on something else, it's a matter of causality. I should note that this isn't some new thought that christians are dreaming up, it became apparant to many great philosophers. It originates from Plotinus who, using pure reason, deduced the existence of what he called the One, whom had the attributes of the Christian God.
@wordonfirevideo I agree. The big bang theory is based on an unknown causal event (by an unidentified agent) which initiated the explosion of an "almost" infinitesimally small amount of matter into the universe(s) which we "see" around us using our limited technology and perception. It is foolhardy to think that all reasoning can be based upon empirical "evidence" obtained in this manner to support our theories.
@adstanra No. I would never say, tout court, that they are all "wrong." I would say that all of them thematize, to varying degrees of adequacy, the experience of the unconditioned.
Twilight is sold because of hormones, not the quality of Meyer's writing. Frankly, my toothbrush could write better than she can. Anywho, Twilight is popular because of hormones (trust me on this one, I'm 13), we all know this. It's quite sad, really.
Honestly I would love to hear your opinion on the themes in the Twilight books/movies. I'm told that they supposively follow a Mormon theology, but there are many corrupt and twisted themes as well (pedophilia, abusive relationships, shaming your family, becoming a monster for lustful purposes, etc) that I think seduce many young readers into believing it is acceptable. What are your thoughts on this?
Fundamentalists are viewed as monsters. In Twilight and An interview with a vampire, the vampire feel guilt about their nature as it can be detrimental when uncontrolled but Blade is an example of its positive use. In Twilight there is traditional sexual abstinence and then Bella's pregnancy leads to her conversion- the pain she suffers resembles the initial suffering of the new believer.
But I have a feeling I'm majorly reading into everything!
hates life and sought death which is consisent with Nietzsche's claim that the 'religious disposition' is life-denying. You said immortality was the transfrmation to a higher state of being? Voila! The vampire is almost a caricature of the conflicted modern day pentecostal or radical believer. The sexual desire symbolises the lust or hunger for redemption and power through 'the blood' but they do not go out into the light and in Twilight, do not have fangs because they want to blend in.
There are anti-semetic and marxist themes where vampires are a satire of man; foreigners bring disease, the aristocracy sucking the blood of the working man. I've begun to think that vampires are actually a representation of mankind's internal conflict between good and evil; the aversion to the cross but at the same time 'the blood is the life' and gives rise to eternal life, supernatural powers, unearthly beauty, detachment from society- in an interview with a vampire he was chosen because he
I'm besides myself! I've been thinking this for MOnTHS now and been telling anyone who would listen. However I do subscribe to the 'vampire craze' even though it is quite out of character for me because of the constant buried biblical references and religious subtext in most versions of vampire lore. In dracula 2000 dracula turns out to be Judas!
Catholic theology is all about transubstantiated blood and human flesh drinking and eating(cannibalism not vampirism?). I bet the disciples at the last supper were all thinking Jesus has really lost it when he said 'eat my body and drink my blood'!
What do you think about this:
I noticed some parallels with vampirism. Some visible (overt) and some more subtle and covert.
For Instance, "Serpents" (a ref to satan as in Genesis) bites with Fangs. Vampires bite with Fangs.
Blood Drinking (vampires) a mocking contrast of Holy Communion (The Body and Blood of Christ).....also...like in Anne Rice Novels and many other vampire movies have people in the movies named "Louie" and "Lucy" (a subtle ref to Lucifer??) color symbolism (red = blood)
jofo817 2 weeks ago
But aren't we encouraged to drink the blood of Christ and eat the flesh of the saviour. Are we not promised eternal life and youth through him. You have as much proof of the existence of vampires as we do for the existence of God. Both seem to me to be stories with logical appeal but no real substance embedded as they are in our ancient folklore.
Mrmentalmadness123 2 weeks ago
The theory that the dracula myth appeals to those who want immortality is plausible. The "deep within us" we know the truth which is God is in my mind suspect and it can also be turned on its head. Having served at many funerals in my youth and been to a few funerals of my own family, I have yet to attend one where Catholics where leaping with joy that their baptised young child had immediately gone to heaven (Benedictus Deus 1336) and this is because "deep down" they don't believe it.
zearro53 3 weeks ago
@zearro53 it is funny but I could say contrary to your statement. I know many catholics that find solace in the fact that their children are in heaven. what do you think of the apostles that were martyrs?
laffiteaumusic 3 weeks ago
@laffiteaumusic Oh I don't disagree. There are plenty of examples from history of people who really believed in heaven. Though there is a difference between finding solace and rejoicing, I don't want to nitpick. However, I was not trying to prove that nobody believed in heaven. The good father believes that religion has been wired into us by God and that can lead us to the "truth". However, doubt of religious truths also seems very common and no doubt, doubt is wired into us through evolution.
zearro53 3 weeks ago
@zearro53 it is funny my question was the center of my statement. for those that saw his death and resurrection would they not doubt it enough that at the weight of their own death they would not give up their beliefs either that or they knew the truth and were willing to die for it since not only did they know he resurrected but they also saw him go up to heaven where they would go
laffiteaumusic 2 weeks ago
@laffiteaumusic I am not sure what relevance this has to the point I made which is the father claimed we are hard-wired to religion whilst I argued that one could equally argue that doubt is evidence that we are not. Actually I think neither prove what they claim.
zearro53 2 weeks ago
@laffiteaumusic With regard to the apostles, if they have direct knowledge of the resurrection then they have no belief in it because they know and therefore have no belief to give up. You have belief because you have no direct knowledge. The problem with the resurrection is that the evidence conveniently disappeared into heaven. There are sincere eye witness accounts that Elvis and Michael Jackson are still alive. Remember it is better for you to believe without evidence than with John 20.29
zearro53 2 weeks ago
@zearro53 ok I would like to state this plainly that I am catholic and I am defending from that position. what position would you say that you are in with you are in defence, offence, or neutrality makes no difference but is welcomed in the statement. the reason why because you make two good points but those point are only stand if you are coming from a certain position otherwise you have made atleast one really good point. I like the discussion but I want to have a talk formatted 4 ur position
laffiteaumusic 2 weeks ago
@laffiteaumusic . Hi I guessed you were defending a position as a Catholic. I am an atheist though I was brought up as a Catholic. So I feel a sort of bi-lingualism - understanding - to some extent- both mind sets, atheist and Catholic. Anyway, I appreciate your approach.
zearro53 2 weeks ago
@zearro53 thanks, I figured you were as well but there were two other possible positions that I thought you may have held. For your position of doubt even the you do not stand by it whole-heartedly. all people can doubt the pharoah doubted and so did the pharisees(not all but those displayed commonly). direct knowledge even when you see a miracle does not mean that you can not have belief as a choice although it is sad that have to see there own miracle to believe(Part1)if u agree then to part2
laffiteaumusic 1 week ago
@laffiteaumusic Do you doubt that God really told Mohammed that Jesus is merely a prophet and not God and that the Christian scriptures have been corrupted?.Do you doubt that Joseph Smith was sent the Book of Mormon by God on golden tablets? Do you find it sad that people will not believe those things without evidence? To make doubt into a weakness is the unfortunate legacy of Christianity. Without doubt claims to truth would never be tested.
zearro53 1 week ago
@zearro53 yay your reply is my part 2. yep there are a few scriptures I could give you on the matter of having evidence for your religous beliefs but there should be discerning of truth but lets be serious relativism is stupid if I accept relativism then I accept that Jesus was God and that he was not a God. relative truth is a contradictice philisophy so we must doubt in the since of developing reasons or truths for what we believe just as the bible says. if you agree then to part 3
laffiteaumusic 1 week ago
@laffiteaumusic I never mentioned relativism and I am not a relativist. I accept the law of contradiction. By the way what has this got to do with *it is better to believe without evidence than with*, referring you back to John 20:29, If you are using someone else's several steps proof to the existence of God could you just provide me with the link because I may have watched it already. However, please understand my issue is with the demonising of doubt and the sanctification of faith.
zearro53 1 week ago
@zearro53 my points in parts were separate issues of my own creation to breakdown your statements to parts that you either agree or disagree so that we could more easily get to the core discussion you & I would have. please explain the law of contradiction. Here is something for doubt the years it takes for officials to decided if a miracle is true or false they have openness to both possibilities. John20:29sorry to say that that deals greatly with believing in a God you have not seen.
laffiteaumusic 1 week ago
@laffiteaumusic Well, let's just assume for the sake of argument that God exists then you don't have to go to the trouble of proving it to me - which believe me would be a long winded affair. So God exists. So why does the gospel writer claim that Jesus,(presumably an omnipotent and omniscient being), bless those who have faith without evidence over those like Thomas who seek evidence first? John 20:29. Remembering my point that you should believe Elvis is still alive on faith alone.
zearro53 1 week ago
For some reason this reminded me of what always bugged me in Buffy: why do crosses work?
Anyways, I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on why zombies are even more popular than vampires ^_^
CoryTheRaven 1 month ago
The bloodless substitute of an authentic Catholicism is a bunch of vampire stories.
A very ironic way of putting it, but oh so true.
lawwellsy 1 month ago
"....we'll settle for the thin gruel of the vampire stories." Well said Father! So true.
SunsetSix 1 month ago
I think he is right on with a lot of what he is saying but the Twilight series is really just a great big epic love story where the principal characters delay sex until after marriage and there is a hunger for this type of story especially for women.
spokaenette 1 month ago
The magic ring in Lord of the Rings bestowed immortality on the bearer. So did the Deathly Hallows in Harry Potter. In Star Wars Anniken Skywalker joined the Dark side to seek immortality. Spice Malange in Dune gave immortality or at least extended life. Yup, immortality is near the top of our fantasy list..
Are these fantasies distortions of religion as Fr Barron thinks? Or is religion another immortality fantasy? Is there a parallel between vampires drinking blood and the sacramental wine?
quantumystery 2 months ago
I think the bigger travesty is that the Twilight books are poorly written and have terrible character development, especially around that girl. The movies are a total disgrace.
But yeah, people are seeking something supernatural and they don't really know it. We have a God sized hole in our souls and people are tryign to fill it with all sorts of rubbish. Enter, Twilight.
Shenanirats 3 months ago 5
@Shenanirats Some sections of the Bible are lyrical and beautiful as with any literature. Other sections are ugly in the extreme and full of contradiction and doesn't that just prove the point that they are human in nature? Twighlight and The Bible share the same human authorship - we take the good with the bad!
Mrmentalmadness123 2 weeks ago
Dracula is the polar opposite in character to Christ. If you compare their behavior Anne rice is a wishy washy mushead.Catholicism is just bewildering.
MrNewkingjames 4 months ago
Yes, the vampire craze is obviously a reaction to supressed supernaturalism...or maybe its because people have been fascinated by monster stories since ancient times. The Greeks and Romans were writing them long before the emergence of Christianity and people will probably be writing them for decades to come. Seriously, why go for a complicated explanation when a simple one will do just as well?
lewisejackson 4 months ago
@lewisejackson, what you call "simply explanation"? That Greeks and Romans were writing stories about supernatural being called gods? But this is not explanation at all!
metal87power 2 months ago
This guy is a propaganda preaching machine. People like the idea that they will live forever. Not the other way around. It's called the fear of dying. That's why religion incorporated it into its belief system. People like vampires because they portray a romantic conflict. On one hand you have eternal life on the other you are damned to live of the blood of others, which is like an addiction. The Twilight saga exploits the sacrifices that a vampire makes because of love. Simple and sells well.
seezarorest 5 months ago
@seezarorest Why are there religions that don't believe in an afterlife, per se, such as Eastern traditions?
worldofdraculas 4 months ago
I've read up on the history and formation of vampires. It wasn't like I had much choice, since I consider this form of fiction as archaic, and offensive - when referring to modern vampires. There was a recent movie being made about how a vampire is off killing people and all the "old" rules simply don't apply to it. It used to be that the cross could stop a vampire, now they offend Christians by saying that it doesn't. Seriously, can't we just burn Hollywood and its dictators to hell?
MontChevalier 5 months ago
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Its been a great week here in Ireland. Our new priminister finally gave the pope a proper going over re: the lies, cover ups, and ongoing abuses of the catholic church in relation to innocent children. Telling him that the rule of law supercedes canon law. Not being from Ireland, you would never appreciate the control the church had on all levels of government, the police, and everyday people. The church was never questioned and we have a history of destroyed lives because of blind faith!
newfrontier01 6 months ago
The principal character in 'Dracula' states that he had always regarded the notion of the eucharist and other Catholic beliefs as silly superstition but that he had come to rely on the truth of their very reality for his protection and salvation.
A very Catholic novel for a protestant. Like Salvador Dali, it was as if his intellect accepted the truth of Catholicism, but his heart denied it.
christianpatriot125 7 months ago
Just another example of the culture of death. Another "blood sacrifice" to devils. It's not enough that 50 million children have been executed in the womb,(in this country alone since 1973, watch 1 of the abortions on youtube, you'll get the "picture") now their siblings(that survived the abortionist) are brainwashed by popular media that there is no God & all they can hope for is to join demons (vampires) to find their eternity. Not a very hopeful message, is it?
bheadh 8 months ago
Father, have you seen "Dracula 2000"? A complete waste of two hours of my life. However, at the climax, Dracula is revealed to be none other than Judas Iscariot! To hear "Dracula" profess the truth of Christianity was almost worth the time!
waspswatter 9 months ago
intresting
jorgens6 9 months ago
it used to be highschool musical now its vampires thes things come and go man
GNBcorporal 1 year ago
it used to be highscool musical now its vampires it comes and goes man.
GNBcorporal 1 year ago
hmm if god greated the whole universe and all that is in it. why do we persume that he will pay special attention to us? ass if we are the most interresting planet. its like a tv wit a billion channels why look at ours? but we even believe he loves us! hell we nailed his son to a cross. so if he exists chanses are slim he even cares about us.
GNBcorporal 1 year ago
@GNBcorporal
Well, God exists not as a singular, temporal being, but everywhere and at every moment. Now for your TV analogy, I've gotten cable with hundreds of channels for the sole purpose of one station that plays my favourite tv shows, everything else I need because i'm not allowed to get one channel, it''s not that I don't have the power, it's that no such thing exists. I'm interested in the other channels but I wouldn't have cable if it wasn't for that one station.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Jim1905 your clever but still it does not answer why god as u say being everywhere knowing everything would love us and want us to worship him? of course the bible tells us to but then again it was writen by man so wat proof have we but wat the mind tells us. and wat do we know about god but what they say an wath we think might be. so then we feel like good is listing to us and guiding us to wat is best but how do we know that?
GNBcorporal 1 year ago
@GNBcorporal
God wants us to worship him because he is the originator, like honouring your mother and father, only extreme lol. He would love us not because he has the capacity for love but because he is love itself. Our sum knowledge of God can be deduced from the world around us, ourselves and scripture. That last part is tricky though because of lot of the bible's meaning got lost in translations and that is what spawned all those ridiculous fundamentalist.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Jim1905 honouring is understandeble every paret wants to be respected but is sounds very humain to me but then again is god excluded from emotion that we call humain? our knowledge of god is often misunderstood as you say thanks to meanig got lost in translation. but the who is right? becaus everyone seems to know they are.
GNBcorporal 1 year ago
@Jim1905 and for the tv anallogy god as created the univers meaning he created the channels so if he only wanted one he would not make a hundred other ones. but its maybe best to drop my silly anallogy of mine its not gonna help us.
GNBcorporal 1 year ago
@GNBcorporal
No, I rather liked your tv analogy as it's a simple, crude model but nonetheless exposing key points of why would God care about us. The problem with God simply making earth is that he is rational and logical (we may deduce this from the fact that our world is rational and from the fact that the bible says God the Word, but originally meant Logic or Reasoning, God is logical). You couldn't devise such a world without further creating the rest of the universe as a consequence.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Jim1905 thx : ). if i get this wright god created the world and created the universe as a consequence. then of course i reach to evolution we are not sure about every detail but its impossible to exclude it. some extremists think its all lies but in my opinion evolution does not exclude god as well. but the universe and eart is much older than us an that before us other creatures ruled this eart. and than we evolved from monkeys.
GNBcorporal 1 year ago
I came home from college for Thanksgiving this year and discovered that my two sisters- 18 and 16, respectively- are both fans of HBO's True Blood. I wish this didn't make me uncomfortable, but it does. While I have long been the "weird" kid in the house (i.e. A fan of all things scifi or horror) I can't help but worry about the effect such a fad will have on them.
Just a big brother worrying over nothing, perhaps.
CarcharodonMeg 1 year ago
In the end, anyone who believes in God is either a pleasant, gullible person or a loony. What the hell, good luck to you all :-)
rorshak73 1 year ago
@rorshak73 Anyone who does'nt believe in God is the same, except for the pleasant part of course..Good luck to you too
STHFGDBY 1 year ago
Yes and Ann Rice has recently left the Catholic Church due to its hypocrisy and distortion of what she feels is the real christian message. Poor example really. Religions are simply beaurocracies between men and the gods they believe in helping to move their own brand of god forward. It's been said many times - they cannot all be right. Is it not safer to conclude they could all be wrong?
bigguitar22 1 year ago
You should reference Chesterton with this concept: "when man stops believing in god, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything." It's a bit naughty too, isn't it, to borrow phrases like 'hard-wired' from the scientific domain? I mean you don't get scientists saying their hypotheses are true because they had a vision. If you do want to argue that we are 'hard-wired' for religion, it must seem plausible to you that the god concept is an anthropomorphic projection.
rorshak73 1 year ago
@rorshak73 By hard wired, I think he means inherent; or, that which is imprinted on us from our creation. If it is used as an analogy, I don't see any incompatibility between use of a "scientific" term and spiritual realities. After all, the soul is the animating principle of the body. In short, he's not suggesting that our desire for God is from a physiological hard wiring; he's just using the term to illustrate a spiritual "hard wiring." Much like the "stain" of sin isn't a physical stain.
ClarkKasheta 1 year ago
Twilight has a number of Mormon themes throughout, though that might not ease the heart of a Catholic ;)
Bluehawk2008 1 year ago
bringyou.to/apologetics/p20.htm
ryanmactattoo 1 year ago
vampires are a metaphor for sex. not god. twilight (while really pretty clean, as far as sex goes) is a huge metaphor for sex, and repression thereof, which teens can often relate to. anne rice's vampire chronicles are hugely sensual and sexually-charged. dont get it twisted, father. don't get it twisted.
theXotherXjunkies 1 year ago
@theXotherXjunkies
Well Ann-Rice also write 'erotica'... it's not surprising.
Entropy3ko 1 year ago
Hasn't Ann Rice left the Catholic church?
LovesTrueSoul 1 year ago
@LovesTrueSoul Fr. Barron actually just came out with a video on her leaving. Funny how impermanent things are! God bless you.
richgr1123 1 year ago
@LovesTrueSoul yeah she did. It's sad, her secular beliefs trumped her belief in God.
mojothemigo 1 year ago
@LovesTrueSoul
Yes Fr. Barron commented on that to in a latter video.
Entropy3ko 1 year ago
What I find very interesting is that you see an awful lot of "vampire romance" novels. Just check the romance section at your local library, and I'm sure you're bound to find at least a few. The reason this interests me is that romance is the genre that expresses -- though often imperfectly -- man's capacity to love, the goal of which, ultimately, is to be united with God in loving unity. Somehow, the fascination with the "ersatz spirituality" you mentioned, with eternal life "vampire style"...
1r1shCath0l1c 1 year ago
...has become yoked with contemporary narrative expressions of human love. I wonder what the connection might be. Any thoughts, anyone?
1r1shCath0l1c 1 year ago
Great point, Father! Longing for the supernatural/transcendent!
helraphaelfsp 1 year ago
The vampire craze isn't a new one: Dracula, The Vampyre and Carmilla as well as Nosferatu and the the 1936 Dracula film as well as Dark Shadows on TV. It's old as a hills and goes in and out of popularity from time to time like other genres.
sirmercutio99 1 year ago
This guy is super smart.
UCSDHomie 1 year ago
I just love his distortion of the vampire craze.
matthewtaylorbrown 1 year ago
As usual great talk padre.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
"the unconditioned" is one hell (lol) of a long way from the particular beliefs of individuals each claiming to know particulars of the uncondition's MIND. Seems reasonable to conclude that we humans developed imaginary minds called dieties to explain phenomena we didn't understand.There must be a cause right? Must be some sort of agent.
Dogma provides answers and group cohesion, and some comfort.Its obviously a human thing taught to children with authority as if it was true, not just a theme
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Well, hang on, friend. I can only do so much in 500 characters. Your objections are really fundamental. So I had to get at first things first. Once you've admitted that God exists, we can move onto the question of revelation.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago 4
@wordonfirevideo You know I am not going to admit that God exists. No reason to believe so. You first have to show he exists before saying anything about his character. How does your evidence for the christian God differ from the sort of evidence that exists for Shiva, Allah, mormon God. Anyone can have a revelation or personal experience.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra What do you believe? Take away arguments of religion, dogma, God... ect... What do YOU believe happens after death? Just mindless oblivion?
BloodOfRayne 1 year ago
@BloodOfRayne i think we die. end of story . Consciousness is a function of the brain. When it dies, we loose consciousness. Can you tell me how individual consciousness exists with out a brain and spacetime?
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra No. And you know I can't; only through my faith in something more and the fact that science hasn't and will not provide me with the deeper answers that I seek. Let me ask you a question: you believe that death is the end for you; nothing, no more, right? No memory of anything you have ever done or said. So what is even the point of you debating these things, through science or anything else? Your view is ultimately pointless.
BloodOfRayne 1 year ago
@BloodOfRayne I don't think the truth is pointless or that life is pointless. We return to the state we were in prior to birth. Since I became an atheist, I have not lost my sense of wonder and life has just as much meaning as it ever had.What deeper answers do you seek? How can I be happy? What is meaningful? How should I behave? How do I find love? The universe may be run by impersonal laws, but you are a person!
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Exactly! You haven't lost your sense of wonder! But in your view you have basically said yourself that there is no point to this wonder! Don't you see? You have said that this very wonder that you have about life, and of creation of it is going to die with you! Even if man carries on and discovers answers, you will never know them! So what does that make you? Just a tiny step in discovery and that to you won't mean anything! You will be gone and will never even be able to look back!
BloodOfRayne 1 year ago
@BloodOfRayne Don't you see why believers see the pointlessness in that? As a person even of science, you MUST do!
BloodOfRayne 1 year ago
@BloodOfRayne Not to get religious on you but, I honestly beleive that you are more than that! You are a very intelligent being! I don't believe that someone with your intelligence is just going to wink out when you die! A being (whoever) put you here, and gave you your brain for a reason. You have a gift! That wasn't evolution that gave it to you! You were given it. I respect you. ; )
BloodOfRayne 1 year ago
@BloodOfRayne I am fine when religion aspires someone to greatness.But the truth, together with honesty, is the greatest thing a human can aspire to.Evolution gave me my brain, my ability to connect with someone like yourself. This is wonderful. I am pleased with who we are as humans....even with our ability to enflict horror.We have come so far.We have Einstein, Spinosa, Jefferson, Paine.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra You have faith in evolution it seems but not in God. This is ironic since it takes more faith I think to believe that human beings evolved over millions of years by share trial and error of "nature". As though nature in and of itself is intelligent. You have no empirical proof of evolution yourself but you believe in it because that is what some scientists say is the genesis of all life. Seems sort of like religion to me :)
sphynxalive 1 year ago
Hey sphynx. I don't have faith in evolution. I believe in it because of the empirical evidence. Kind of like I don't have faith that OJ Simpson killed those 2 people. I believe he did because of evidence.
It sounds like you might be using an argument of incredulity. Have you seen the genetic and molecular biology evidence for evolution. Without a doubt it shows common ancestry. the nested heirarcial pattern is consistent with a mindless process. BTW, evolutionis not about genesis of life.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra No sorry. By your belief in Darwin's theory the amoeba, the crocodile and countless other animals should have evolved millions of years ago. Why are there bones millions of years old of the vast majority of life currently inhabiting the world found everywhere and we can see that after so long non of these animals have evolved but merely adapted? It takes more "faith" to believe in evolution in my opinion as intelligent design screams back from nature every second.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive We have large numbers of fosils demonstrating the evolution of many species, particularily whales, humans, reptiles to mammals and horses. Some animals have not been under pressure to evolve much- like crocodiles and sharks. We know common ancestry from genetic and molecular biology, endogenous retroviruses, transposons, pseudogenes, atavisms, embriology and a consistent pattern.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra And this is the problem with this line or reasoning. Why is it that science cannot create life from non-living material? Transitionary forms still only show distinctly different organisms that show adaptation within their species. By the theory of evolution there should be an almost infinite number of transitionary forms showing the gradual change from one organism to the next. Where are all the transitionary forms in between A and B or B and C?
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive transitional fossels have been found that document the transition from land animal to whales which is why whales have pseudogenes for smell and swim differently from fish and have tetrapod fins ( as opposed to ray-spined fins). they even have genes for hind legs and occationally a whale is born with legs-complete with all the bones of a tetrapod. evolutions does not predict that we will find fossels, this is dump luck that we sometimes do.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Evolution is one of the few theories I know that leads to the evidence of itself rather than the evidence leading to the theory. Instead of evolution being the result of investigation we find evolution to be the stated premise to explain the complexity and genesis of life. This premise being used by its adherants to find evidence to prove it. Circular reasoning is very apparent here. I can't call evolution science because it is religion masquerading as science in reality.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive all scientific theories are developed to fit and explain the facts. As opposed to Dogma which fits facts to the theories which are derived in some way by revelation and personal experience and culture. Darwin came up with a theory that has never been fasified ( it can be wheras your religion cannot). The more technology we gain the more evidence for evolution piles up. Molecular and genetic evidence has shown common ancestry to be almost certain now.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra "Never been falsified" you say. You evolutionists are so convenient whenever you are good and ready. The existence of a microscopic talking pig with gills living at the bottom of the Thames cannot be falsified either but it is just about as rational as your "theory" of evolution. Stop spreading misinformation. "molecular and genetic evidence has shown common ancestry.." Is your BELIEF. That is not science.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive Find any whale wih ray-spinned pectoral fins, or and mammal with feathers, or any bird with mammary glands, or any plancetal shark, or any fossil animal that does not fit into the very specific nested heirarchy that evolution says must be found...and you have falsified evolution. Find any Rabbit fossil in the triassic period..any amphibian with hair and its all off. Pig with gills would do.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra OK since you want to be pedantic about it. You BELIEVE in evolution while others BELIEVE in God. You believe in the former because of what you have read about and what "seems" like evidence of evolution (fossil record, a need to explain the development of "complex" life forms). Others like myself believe in God because of what seems like evidence (intelligent creatures and the order of creation as well as personal experience when seeking God personally)
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive yes, the difference is that evolution is guided by empirical verifyability. this is not faith. do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, in virgin births, in angels and demons, heaven and hell, souls because of "seems like evidence".We understand now how mindless laws of physics create order (gallaxies, stars,planets, continents, seas, tseunamis, smallpox virus) by acting algorythmically on energy and matter over time and space.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra So have you never wondered why the laws act consistently in this way? I have but there is no answer that science can be used to explain this. What holds the laws in place if there is no intelligence needed in creating a system? If you started digging in your back yard and unearthed a ford taurus with it's wind shield wipers and tyres to move etc. Would it be more probable that it was designed by an intelligent designer or that it evolved into what it is?
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive there is no intelligence directing the laws of physics or biology. these are the same laws that cause smallpox, malaria, measles, earthquakes, continental drift and a nested heirarcial bush of life where 98% of all species are now extinct. (One that created a giraffe' recurrant nerve travel 15 feet just to innervate a muscle 4 inches away, and gave us pseudogenes, atavisms and genetic defects). Some mind.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra It is alarming how in the face of all the order in the world and universe that you can find a few models that are not understood fully by science to try to infer that nature is inherently chaotic and not intelligence. With all the unintelligence you speak of in the world the earth has been able to support a variety of intelligent life in such a delicate balance that if there was a slight change in so many variables life should have been snuffed out millions of years ago.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive the nested heirarchial bush pattern where 98.9 % of all species now extinct is consistent with a mindless stochastic process. The bibological world is driven by predation and survival of the fittest. Smallpox virus killed approx 300 million people in the 20th century. Ascaris worms infect approx 1 billion people worldwide and can only survive by latching to the gut of a human...they survive because they reproduce well. Mindless laws of biology and physics.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Can evolution sufficiently explain why a giraffe does not die when it bends down to drink water? What about the human eye (even Darwin questioned his theory then)? How about the woodpecker's ability to hammer away at a tree trunk without suffering a cracked skull or brain damage? What about bacterial flagellum and the mechanics and "evolution" of this micromachine? All these unanswered questions and some still "believe" in this religious . . . erm scientific theory :)
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive Can you explain the pathway of the giraffes left recurrant larygeal nerve based upon intelligent design? Common ancestry and evolution can. We have models that explain the evolution of the eye and the flaggelum. Can you explain these things without reference to magic? ID people love the flaggelum . Consider the flaggelum of Vibrio cholera-it functions to allow the bacteria to burrow into the protective mucous of the stomach to torture its victim. great design.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Interesting but we both know that medicine and science have been wrong many times in past history. The appendix for example. Doctors have been cutting body parts out, under the false sense that they had no function, only to find out how wrong we were.
The fact is that we do not fully understand many things but just because we don't understand something, doesn't make it wrong or right.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive Appendicitis occurs in a bout 1 in 20 young people and has a very high mortality rate. It is a remnent of the past when our diets consisted of more plant material. Now it serves a rudimentary role in that it has a bit of lymph tissue. It sucks as a design my friend. It is a vestigial organ, like wisdom teeth..in the past , before modern dentistry, people often died of their teeth!
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra evolution cannot go back to the drawing board and fix design flaws that are no longer advantageous, like wisdom teeth or an appendix. DNA remembers it's past and humans have recently been able to use this to determine when and why we have certain features like a big brain, lots of cortex, no hair ,opposable thumbs...not to mention why we sometimes die in childbirth ( cephalopelvic disproportion)
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Every one of the natural biological occurences you have sited here is not fully understood. Because we have not yet found a use for an anatomical structure does not make it automatically vestigeal. This is why people say evolution is a religious movement. You say that religious people use God to explain things we do not understand but that is exactly what you are doing here in the name of evolution.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive We do understand that wisdom teeth and appendices are vestigial and that they have caused terrible problems for humans and are a bad design. We have vestigial genes as well that code for yolk that are reminents from when our ancestors were reptiles. We find them exactly where we expect to find them in the genome and have even sequesnced their lethal mutaions, monotremes have one surviving functional gene..because they need it.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra When you can come to terms with the fact that evolution as science is laughable today. We know too much to go back there. Even the big bang (the show is funny) is losing relevance in scientific circles. Neither evolution nor the big bang are consistent with all of modern science taken into consideration. They defy natural observed physical laws. Hence if they are true they must be supernatural ergo religious dogma. They are an atheist's grasp at straws basically right now.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive well, we will just have to watch as to who wins the debate in the scientific domain. Evolution doesn't break any laws at all and will continue to frustrate you creationists. Get used to it. BTW, inflationary cosmology, while not as strong as evolution, continues to be the prevailing theory with a huge amount of scientific support.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra More misinformation. When you get tired you can stop and start telling the truth. Appendicitis is not that common but appendicitis statistics reveal that an incidence of acute appendicitis (annual) occur in 25 per 10000 (aging 10-17) and 1-2 per 10000 (under 4 years). Incidence rate is about 1 in 400 or 0.25% or 680000 people in USA.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive quite right. It is about 1 /400 or so young people, but my point is bang on. we live very well without it despite its marginal function, which is neglegable. You are the disingenious one for not understanding the point though.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra The number of things that evotution does not explain is vast, but yet you and others willfully keep God, common sense and proven science out of the picture kneeling at the altar called evolution. Sounds to me like your looking for an excuse to reject God, and your grasping at straws. Just grasp at God instead. If He does not exist you would have lost nothing. If He does you would have gained so much more. This is not for my good but yours I am telling you this brother.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive Evolution has more explanatory power then any other scientific theory and unites multiple brances of science. You can make hugely accurate predictions from it and it is incredibly useful to mankind. You are the one kneeling and believing in magic at the alter of dogma. you cannot show a designer ( apparently he wants to remain hidden, or is dead), have no proposed mechanism of how he effects creation and a mind does not fit the data.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Useful you say? No my friend that theory has contributed wothing to science. The fact is that the remarkable DNA molecule provides strong evidence of original creation (since it is far too complex to have arisen by chance) and of
conservation of that creation (since the genetic code acts to guarantee
reproduction of the same organism, not evolution of new organisms). Since all
known true mutations are harmful this contributes nothing whatever to
the proof of evolution.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@sphynxalive we have been able to document many usefull mutations which have increased the genetic information in many bacteria and viruses and now even know many of the mutations that have lead to increased brain size and grey matter in humans from our common ancestor to chimps. these are called Human accelerated regions and have been well documented.
adstanra 1 year ago
@BloodOfRayne hey my friend. did you see wordonfires latest father Barron video talking about sin as " usurping the devine life". I don't want to do that by giving my life cosmic consequence when it is not due. I am a wonderful creature...a primate struggling to make sense of reality. a sentient primate living on the edge of suffering and extinction, but who's greatness is reflected in our ability to find truth, no matter where it leads us.
adstanra 1 year ago
Are we hard-wired for God? or are we conscious of our own mortality , which leads to imaginations about afterlife etc. I don't think it is terrible difficult to explain the emergence of religion. It comforts us, it provides answers (right or wrong) to questions that we don't understand ( like ," why are we dying from plague').What argues for the imagination as the sourse of religion is the plethora of religions!
i wonder if we humans would really like immortality...even in heaven.
adstanra 1 year ago
i think that after a few billion trillion years ( a drop in the bucket for eternity) we would be begging for the mercy of death. My favorite show recently was battle star galactic. Some of the cylons discovered to value of death !
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra You'd be right if heaven were endless time. That would indeed be unbearable. But it's not like that. Heaven is the place of eternal life, which is life outside of time.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
The problem with heaven is that any conceptualisation of it ( which change all the time)is unintelligable. Paul believed that the kingdom would be a bodily kingdom in spacetime. Many Xians still do. Others imagine a soul in heaven after death.replete with a head,shoulder,personaity ( usu looking like they were in their 20s ..lol).clearly spacetime. Your view is partic. unintelligable..how do we exist as individ. in spacetimelessness? I don't think this is biblical..sounds more eastern Nirvana.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Well, to a degree, you're right. Paul said, "Eye has not seen and ear has not heard what God has prepared for those who love him." What ultimate fulfillment is like in the realm of God remains mysterious to us. But really, would you want it otherwise? A heaven that we could get our puny minds around would get boring pretty fast. The key is always to think of heaven as greater and not less than earthly joy.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
It appears to me ( whatever that's worth), that heaven is a made up concept. whatever way you look at it, it is unintelligable. clearly Paul envisioned a bodily kingdom that was imminent.Many christians, even early on, thought of it as a state of incorporal being.The evidence though suggests that mind and brain are connected and that once the brain is dead, conscious existence is gone...to the same state it was before birth.Paul and all sorts of religious gurus can talk riddles if they want..lol
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Well, not quite. Paul talked about "spiritual bodies" which will be like the body of the resurrected Jesus. Whatever this means (and it is, happily enough, unclear), it doesn't mean "an imminent bodily kingdom," or this world slightly revised. I think Paul envisions an embodied state, but in a higher dimensional system: think circles raised up to sheres, or triangles become pyramids.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
I agree that he felt these bodies would be different than the corrupted bodies we have now, but it seems evident that he did envision bodies. I think he was countering the idea of bodiless souls and a spacetimeless nirvana-like kingdom. He obviously was expecting the imminent arrival of Jesus to usher in the kingdom and raise the dead to new bodies. Certainly nothing spacetimeless about his idea..JWs are the most biblical here IMO.
How do bodies exist spacetimelessly- incoherant!
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Here again, you're succumbing to the genetic fallacy, the mistake that uncovering the origin of an idea is the same as refuting it. Even if religion began the way you say (which I dispute) that wouldn't tell one way or the other for its truth.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
hey wordonfirevideo. I think people do understand the connection of things to their origins. i MIGHT be making a genetic fallacy...up to the listener to make that valuation. Sometimes this argument can be effective. Father barron has concluded that we are " hardwired" for God. Is this a genetic fallacy ? There may be evolutionary and social reasons why humans conceptualise God. i think origins is important in this case! F. Barron seems to think so.
adstanra 1 year ago
I would think that my explanation ( a natural one) is always more likely than a supernatural one .And my argument applies to the present as well wrt Vampires. Why do we think about them...i have given a plausable explanation...i hope people will inderstand that death brings value to life in the way that living an immortal life ( like a vampire) would not.
adstanra 1 year ago
also that individuality logically requires spacetime.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra But that can't be right; otherwise God and angels wouldn't be individuals. It seems to me that the requisites for individuality are intellect and will.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
Individuality implies the necessary concept of separateness. Separateness cannot locically exist in spacetimelessness..We are separate in space and time !
in spacetimelessness all will be the great ONE ( OHmmm) in Budhist philosophy.
You have concluded apriori the existence of angels so must make it fit with spacetimelessness. Good luck with that my friend..lol You are right about individ requiring a will..but arn't you supposed to submit yr will for all eternity in heaven? How does that work
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra Strictly speaking, the genetic fallacy always has to do with the refutation of an idea. What I'm calling our "hardwiring for God" is God's presence to us, discernable in our desire for, and hence inchoate knowledge of, the unconditioned. So I'm not just searching out the psychological origins of an idea; I'm uncovering the metaphysical ground for an experience. This is Fr. Barron, by the way!
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
i am just trying to determine the psychological ground of an experience.i suppose this is what I was arguing..not so much origins but grounds. what is the grounds of religious experience? F. Barron points out that there are 30,000 protestant denominations. there are tens of thousands of other religions invented by man in history. you must admit that 99.9 % of them are wrong. Pointing out that they all have a desire for "inchoate knowledge of the unconditioned" does not mean such a thing exists.
adstanra 1 year ago
grounds of god experience-we are conscious agents who see the effects of intelligent beings all the time-ourselves. We understand cause and effect.When we don't understand something, like a plague or earthquake, we naturally assume agency.
But science has shown that the universe is governed by impersonal laws of physics. Philosophy has shown that individual consciousness requires spacetime ( a bold statement I know ..lol) No evidence of an invisible god, lots of evidence of human imagination
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra You've made things way too easy for yourself. If the only kind of "evidence" you'll accept is physical, then voila! there is no evidence for the non-physical God. This proves precisely nothing. I would press the question metaphysically and not scientifically, looking for "evidence" in the contingent structure of the cosmos.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
yes, my worldview is easy, yours is difficult. you have got to make sense of heaven, hell and suffering. You have got to make of a world where choice of religion is mostly determined by culture. You have to account for why God made smallpox virus, malaria, earthquakes that preferentially torture the meek . You have to answer all the other religions,and how angels can exist spacetimelessly. you have to explain the bad passages in the bible and the bad patches of church history.
adstanra 1 year ago
I do not have to prove the nonexistence of unseen things. Humans can have faith in all sorts of nonexistent things. This is self-evident.
My view is not terrible easy though. It requires painstaking research about things that happened billions of yrs ago. We still do not know how life began, or what started the inflation or how to fully explain love and consciousness.
I have appreciated our discussion. will be away for a week ( vacation!) but will look here for any response when i return
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra But you've got to make sense of a radically contingent universe that nevertheless exists--and more to the point, is imbued with intelligibility. Good luck explaining that on materialist grounds!
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
Even in contingent universes it is not surprising that something exists..it may approach 100 % . We have had amazing success explaining phenomena on " materialistic grounds" including galaxies, suns, planets, continents, mountain ranges, tseunamis, plagues and the diversity of life. You have had no verifyable success explaining anything on supernatural grounds. Good luck with that?
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra The material sciences can explain, to a degree, why matter takes on various forms. What they can't explain is why there is something rather than nothing, why things that don't contain within themselves the reason for their existence should be at all. To make sense of this, we have to appeal to a finally non-contingent reality, which exists through the power of its own essence.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago 10
@wordonfirevideo If people ask "Why did the tseunami occur". I will answer something about plate tectonics. You might say " God's judgement".The universe might be that " which exists through the power of it's own essence".It appears as though the universe can self exist and expand without breaking any laws of physics..ie- not supernatural agent required.
adstanra 1 year ago
@adstanra "The universe" is just shorthand for the collectivity of contingent things. Therefore, appealing to it doesn't move us one centimeter in the direction of a real answer. If, according to the Big Bang theory, all of time and matter came into existence, then they require a cause, and by the way, that cause has to be non-material and non-temporal. Huh, I wonder who that might be?
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago 24
the universe is shorthand for the set of all existent things which require spacetime. The universe is spacetime itself, so cause and effect do not apply to it.
Many physicists today will agree that time and space as we know it came into existence 13.6 billion yrs ago, but this does not mean that the universe came into existence at that time. A planck sphere, or a singularity is an entity outside of what we can comprehend in terms of spacetime, existence, cause and effect.
adstanra 1 year ago
@wordonfirevideo actualy they have a theory that the big bang was created by 2 colliding universes. so yes, soon you propably have to start to do some serious backpedaling... which is very amusing. archeology proves that most of the stories in the bible are total bs you have to backpedal and start calling them poetry, it's ridiculous
Darusdei 1 year ago
@Darusdei The argument from contingency assumes long causal chains. If the Big Bang is the result of the collision of two "universes" (whatever that means, since the word is meant to designate all of finite existence), then we have to inquire after the reason for that collision and so on. The point is that we have to come, finally, to some non-contingent ground--and that's what I mean by "God."
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
@Darusdei
Really, you mean a bible that no one really took literally has been shown to not be true?! My God, that could only mean one thing...that the bible is an mostly written in allegory, a form popular of the philosophy books of it's time. Also please oh please don't attempt to explain to others what theory we have as you haven't the slightest clue at what that is, I work in theoretical physics and I can assure you that the problem Fr. Barron talks about is completely accurate
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Jim1905 bible who no one took seriously, that's why they burned the witches right? lol...
theoretical physics? like every other youtuber here, just by saying a thing like that propably means that you don't even know what theoretical physics is...
Darusdei 1 year ago
@Darusdei
That was after the protestant reformation, when the bible had been translated so many times some groups (what we called fundamentalist now) lost the meaning of certain passages. Also the number of "witches" burned has been hyperinflated through out the years and the staggering numbers you hear now are merely approximations and poor ones.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Darusdei
Also, not that I really have anything to prove to you, but I do research on the quasi-normal modes of black holes using the Poisson-Israel Metric and analyzing the stoke and anti-stoke lines. I've also done work on the reformulation of special relativity to include a Lorentz invariant discrete spacetime.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Jim1905 The thing is... you can't prove it and that's the whole point.
besides a scientist of anykind who has strong beliefs of the supernatural aren't really a good scientists at all...
Darusdei 1 year ago
@Darusdei
What? Looked up the metric and couldn't figure out how I knew about that without simply googling something about theoretical physics? So instead..umm..well you can't PROVE that, whatever. I know what lin of work I do.
Really, then I guess Lematre wasn't a good scientist, being a catholic priest and physicist, oh wait he was one of few ppl at that time to not let dogma blind him and take seriously the expanding universe the field equations suggested?
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Jim1905 exception for every rule...
Darusdei 1 year ago
@Darusdei
You see, many atheists and others too, are shackled by their dogma, completely unable to open their mind that perhaps there exists other things that are no less real then what is material. My work in physics is purely about the natural world and I know that, it cannot investigate the existence of God because it works within a framework that doesn't allow one. Therefore to investigate this idea one should use other methods of inquiry, the dialectic method and intelligible method.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Darusdei
You see I exposed your dogma right there, scientism. Why would my belief in anything supernatural, as you call it, make me a poor scientist? Unless of course you believe that the only method to gain knowledge and truth is from the sciences. Ah, there's that little worm of a dogma that so infects atheists to the point that it's sickening when they refer to others as dogmatic.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Jim1905 Ofcourse, because god is only god of the gaps where one grabs the minute one sees something he cant immediately explain...
if you havent noticed christianity for example has had to backpedal miles when new evidence is found.
Darusdei 1 year ago
@Darusdei
The christian God has never been the god of gaps. Look at the writings of Augustine, 380 AD, he explicitely writes about the God in a completely immaterial way and would never, even for a moment, entertain the idea of God explaining anything material other then the first cause, everything else follows from laws that need no God to explain. God is primarily a god of morals and the universe's originator.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@Darusdei I don't know where you got that from that no one takes the bible seriously, I do as do all the millions of Catholics around the world so where did you get this ''no one'' from?
STHFGDBY 1 year ago
@STHFGDBY yeah i noticed "seriously" should've been "literally" but it doesn't change the premise...
Darusdei 1 year ago
@Darusdei Oh but it does..
STHFGDBY 1 year ago
@STHFGDBY so i guess you're taking it seriously but not literally?
doesn't sound very sharp now does it?
Darusdei 1 year ago
@Darusdei Well it's a serious subject..
STHFGDBY 1 year ago
@Darusdei
As it's a problem that our universe is ultimately (and any other material object you may conjure to mind) contingent on something else, it's a matter of causality. I should note that this isn't some new thought that christians are dreaming up, it became apparant to many great philosophers. It originates from Plotinus who, using pure reason, deduced the existence of what he called the One, whom had the attributes of the Christian God.
Jim1905 1 year ago
@wordonfirevideo I agree. The big bang theory is based on an unknown causal event (by an unidentified agent) which initiated the explosion of an "almost" infinitesimally small amount of matter into the universe(s) which we "see" around us using our limited technology and perception. It is foolhardy to think that all reasoning can be based upon empirical "evidence" obtained in this manner to support our theories.
sphynxalive 1 year ago
@adstanra No. I would never say, tout court, that they are all "wrong." I would say that all of them thematize, to varying degrees of adequacy, the experience of the unconditioned.
wordonfirevideo 1 year ago
Twilight is sold because of hormones, not the quality of Meyer's writing. Frankly, my toothbrush could write better than she can. Anywho, Twilight is popular because of hormones (trust me on this one, I'm 13), we all know this. It's quite sad, really.
lilrowyravenclaw 1 year ago
Honestly I would love to hear your opinion on the themes in the Twilight books/movies. I'm told that they supposively follow a Mormon theology, but there are many corrupt and twisted themes as well (pedophilia, abusive relationships, shaming your family, becoming a monster for lustful purposes, etc) that I think seduce many young readers into believing it is acceptable. What are your thoughts on this?
ASmilingMalice 2 years ago
@ASmilingMalice
I hear you about the writing quality. But somehow even though I experienced a bit of self loathing at first, it somehow sucked me in...
I see all vampire novels (well the ones I've read) as responses to the culture that they are conceived in.
Shh... I'm a closet marxist ;)
blameitontheblues 1 year ago
Fundamentalists are viewed as monsters. In Twilight and An interview with a vampire, the vampire feel guilt about their nature as it can be detrimental when uncontrolled but Blade is an example of its positive use. In Twilight there is traditional sexual abstinence and then Bella's pregnancy leads to her conversion- the pain she suffers resembles the initial suffering of the new believer.
But I have a feeling I'm majorly reading into everything!
blameitontheblues 2 years ago
hates life and sought death which is consisent with Nietzsche's claim that the 'religious disposition' is life-denying. You said immortality was the transfrmation to a higher state of being? Voila! The vampire is almost a caricature of the conflicted modern day pentecostal or radical believer. The sexual desire symbolises the lust or hunger for redemption and power through 'the blood' but they do not go out into the light and in Twilight, do not have fangs because they want to blend in.
blameitontheblues 2 years ago
There are anti-semetic and marxist themes where vampires are a satire of man; foreigners bring disease, the aristocracy sucking the blood of the working man. I've begun to think that vampires are actually a representation of mankind's internal conflict between good and evil; the aversion to the cross but at the same time 'the blood is the life' and gives rise to eternal life, supernatural powers, unearthly beauty, detachment from society- in an interview with a vampire he was chosen because he
blameitontheblues 2 years ago
I'm besides myself! I've been thinking this for MOnTHS now and been telling anyone who would listen. However I do subscribe to the 'vampire craze' even though it is quite out of character for me because of the constant buried biblical references and religious subtext in most versions of vampire lore. In dracula 2000 dracula turns out to be Judas!
blameitontheblues 2 years ago
Hmm what do they see in vamiers, fashion sence and good bodies, great hair and makup. lol
scryerofold 2 years ago
tbh not really sure about the fashion sense except from Alice's and Edward's in Twilight and An Interview with a vampire
blameitontheblues 2 years ago
If someone asks me to eat his body and drink his blood it sounds like an invitation to cannibalism to me too!
Maskellnotonfire 2 years ago
Catholic theology is all about transubstantiated blood and human flesh drinking and eating(cannibalism not vampirism?). I bet the disciples at the last supper were all thinking Jesus has really lost it when he said 'eat my body and drink my blood'!
MarkB1ngham 2 years ago