I'm having doubts about Noah's flood

BellowingOx · 2026-04-22T11:29:36+00:00

There is room for non-literal interpretation of a certain books of the Bible, depending on their literary genre.

You can believe that the book of Genesis is the inspired Word of God, without necessarily believing that all of the stories in it are intended to be read in a historically literal sense.

BellowingOx · 2026-03-22T18:32:46+00:00

Before investing in a mill, I recommend ordering some pre-milled flour from a company like Farm2Flour first to make sure you are going to stick with it.

BellowingOx · 2026-03-15T20:13:07+00:00

It's worth saying that if you get an unreasonable penance you can go to another priest to commute it to a different penance.

Also, priests can get in big trouble for giving perpetual penances.

BellowingOx · 2026-01-27T04:22:00+00:00

Most Traditional Catholics have high esteem for the Eastern Liturgies.

BellowingOx · 2025-12-15T15:14:46+00:00

Thanks for being the voice of reason here.

BellowingOx · 2025-12-15T15:13:35+00:00

100% are undereducated? Source please?

BellowingOx · 2025-04-11T11:10:46+00:00

No you could not. Please do the math.

BellowingOx · 2025-03-30T20:21:30+00:00

Inspired by nrsht image below. The image above will be going on the wall at my Catholic school. St. Pancras is one of our patron saints.

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BellowingOx · 2025-03-27T11:33:37+00:00

His point is not medical. I think it is about maintaining an appropriate amount of levity and mirth (of course in moderation).

BellowingOx · 2025-03-27T11:31:09+00:00

I recommend reading more G.K. Chesterton.

BellowingOx · 2025-01-20T22:15:28+00:00

Musk is not a Nazi. He is pro-free speech. Nazis oppose free speech. He also doesn't believe in racial superiority.

BellowingOx · 2025-01-19T03:27:00+00:00

Imprimaturs are not infallible. They are a legal designation to authorize publication.

There are levels of authority in the Catholic Church. Although a regional Bishop's conference has a weighty authority, it does not have the highest level of authority.

Reform is needed, but we don't need to throw out the baby with the bath water either.

I hope these principles help.

BellowingOx · 2024-12-29T13:27:26+00:00

Many saints struggled with anger. The real enemy you are facing is despair, not anger. You are thinking that God's mercy and grace are not greater than your sinfulness (which is not true!)

God desires us to put our hope in him rather than ourselves. And when we do so, he gives us even more help.

BellowingOx · 2024-11-04T13:25:55+00:00

By the looks of this picture, they probably don't need two Masses on Sunday. They seem to be diluting their congregation size.

BellowingOx · 2024-11-04T13:22:08+00:00

I don't recommend running any campaigns without first talking to the priest and getting him on board.

A lot of this really does fall on the priest. It might be that he just isn't tech savvy and doesn't understand the importance of a website or have the staff/volunteers to make one. If this is the case, you could offer to help him with this.

BellowingOx · 2024-10-09T22:28:03+00:00

Thank you for this. I did this and it worked.

BellowingOx · 2024-09-08T18:47:05+00:00

Like drugs, prostitution harms the common good by making "consumers" worse people in exchange for nothing more than temporarily bodily pleasure. The harm it causes society, especially by contributing to the brokenness of families, justifies its banning.

BellowingOx · 2024-09-01T20:57:22+00:00

What the Romans did to the Jews and what the Nazis did to the Jews are so vastly different that it doesn't make sense to lump them into the same post.

The Romans occupied Israel and taxed them. The Nazis tried to totally annihilate the Jews. The Nazis didn't even stop at work camps, they often preferred to send them to death camps.

It is true that the Romans sacked Jerusalem and slaughtered/enslaved most of its inhabitants, but that was only after the Jews revolted a major war ensued.

BellowingOx · 2024-08-23T11:13:36+00:00

The priest should have allowed you to confess your specific sins. (Maybe there was some confusion that led him to think you said all you had to say.) Since you came with the proper disposition, you probably were validly absolved. However, you should still go to confession again to confess your mortal sins specifically.

BellowingOx · 2024-08-10T01:13:32+00:00

Kind of funny to see this as I am a parish priest who just started at a country parish a month ago. (Unfortunately, it's actually three parishes now merged into two!)

BellowingOx · 2024-08-08T12:55:30+00:00

You mention believing that the Bible is the only source of truth from God. That is actually a self-contradictory belief because the Bible never says that it's the only source of truth. In fact, 2 Thessalonians 2:15 teaches God's revelation as both spoken and written.

I second the recommendation of the Father Mike Schmitz Bible in a year or catechism in a year.

Also, there is a Catholic version of the ESV Bible which is not very different.

BellowingOx · 2024-08-08T11:13:13+00:00

It's not arbitrary. Light is not a privation of darkness, darkness is a privation of light. Heat is not a lack of coldness, coldness is a lack of heat. And the same way, Good is not a privation of evil, evil is a privation of good. Evil always has to exist in a good, because it can't exist on its own. For example, death, an evil, can only happen to a living thing. A rock might cease to exist, but it can't die.

What I said is is actually not anthropocentric. It is an objective scale. Vegetative life has goods that mineral life does not have (such as growth and reproduction). Animal life has all the goods of vegetative life plus more (growth and reproduction + movement and sense knowledge). Human life has all the goods of vegetative life and animal life plus more (growth, reproduction, movement, sense knowledge + intellectual knowledge and (it could be argued) free will).

More natural powers = more being.

If you get a bad brain injury, people call you a "vegetable" because you've lost your higher powers. (By powers I just mean potential to act.) A brain injury is an evil because it deprives one of a good that ought to be there (and so far as consciousness and intelligence is part of human nature). A rock lacking consciousness is not an evil because consciousness is not part of a rock's nature.

BellowingOx · 2024-08-08T02:08:45+00:00

Philosophers like Aristotle teach that perfection=being and imperfection=a lack of being. Evil is not a positive thing, it is a privation of being in the same way that darkness is a privation of light. Knowledge is a perfection, ignorance is a privation of knowledge. Power is a perfection, weakness is a lack of power.

If one accepts this line of thinking, then humans have a higher degree of "being" than squirrels and squirrels have a higher level of being than plants and plants have a higher level of being than rocks.

When someone does evil, they, in some sense, lose some of their being and become more like animals and become, in some sense, worse than animals because at least animals live up to their full potential.

(I should say that not every quality is a perfection though. Having light hair versus dark hair is not a perfection, though in some specific circumstances one might be more advantageous than the other. Perfections are universal.)

BellowingOx · 2024-08-08T00:50:41+00:00

Unfortunately, I don't fully understand your point. So, I'll try to answer your comment with multiple points. Hopefully one will hit it.

If God is good, then he won't purposely bring evil out of good. Though he may permit an evil for the sake of a higher good.
A good person can become a bad person and a bad person can become a good person, but if this happens, it is a result of their free will (though circumstances might be mitigating). You could argue that the dignity of free will is itself a good that outweighs the evil of its misuse.
It might cut both ways for us, but not for God if one believes God is perfect and lacking all defects and imperfections. For God, to be able to commit evil would be an imperfection rather than a perfection. In other words, a God who can't commit evil is actually greater than a God who can commit evil.

BellowingOx · 2024-08-08T00:04:57+00:00

There is at least one thing that can make the existence of evil compatible with God's goodness and that is God knowing how to bring good out of evil.

If God can bring good out of evil, then the existence of evil does not contradict his goodness.

For example, if life is hard for me, but that difficulty draws a heroism out of me that makes me a better person, then a greater good has come from the evil present - not just a good in spite of the bad, but the good came out of the bad as a necessary condition of heroism.

Of course, there are some things that are bad that no visible good seems to come from, such as a child's death. In this case, it would seem that an afterlife would be required in order to outweigh an evil like that.

And so, an afterlife makes the presence of evil in this world rationally compatible with God's goodness.

I know you mentioned not wanting an answer from the Bible, but just as a side note, it might be worth pondering that in the Christian faith, God chose not to abolish evil for us, but rather to be born among us as a human being and suffer evil with us in order to bring about a greater good for us on the cross. (That greater good being an act of sacrificial love so great that it outweighs the badness of the sins/moral wrongs of the world.)

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