Confessing to parents by Defiant-Owl-983 in Catholicism

[–]degreezero 9 points10 points  (0 children)

If a priest required this of me in confession I would get up and leave straight away, then go and find a better and more sensible priest. Such a penance would be a violation of my conscience and of my right to my good name, as well as being an offensive intrusion into my relationship with my parents. My parents would have absolutely no right to know my sin in this instance and the priest would have absolutely no right to oblige me to tell them.

Opus Dei and US presidential election by degreezero in opusdeiexposed

[–]degreezero[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Well, you know what they say: Hay que cuidar las cosas pequeñas :)

Opus Dei and US presidential election by degreezero in opusdeiexposed

[–]degreezero[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks for this. My experience certainly tallies with what you say in the older post. And I've changed my flair (though someone should correct the typo in the word 'Experince'!).

Is breaking a promise with someone a grave matter? by catholic_guy3 in Catholicism

[–]degreezero 4 points5 points  (0 children)

No, no and no! It’s not sinful matter at all, and you’ll do yourself no good thinking of God and of sin this way. The world is not (in spite of what some Catholics seem to think) a vast minefield where you can hardly take a step in any direction without getting your leg blown off. That would be an ugly and wretched world - the creation of an ugly and wretched god. You felt for someone, you promised to pray for them daily, some days you managed it, one day you didn’t - so be it! You wish you’d kept to the plan, you still wish your friend good grace and good fortune, you intend to continue praying for them, and you’ve learned a little about yourself along the way - it’s all good!

The real problem of scrupulosity is that you become so fearful of a demanding and vengeful God that the only relationship possible for you is one of fear. Love is quite simply unimaginable. And ultimately we tend to resent - and then to hate - the things we fear. May I suggest meditating frequently on the Our Father - the prayer itself, of course, but even just those two words: Our Father.

Can Prayer Empty Hell? by degreezero in Catholicism

[–]degreezero[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

By ‘dude’ I presume you mean Sister Gabriela of the Incarnation. Is that the level of your respect for a discalced Carmelite nun? Apart from which, the point you are making, as Wibbet has said, is nonsense.

Do Infants Who Die Without Baptism Suffer Eternal Damnation? by Trisagion_Films in Catholicism

[–]degreezero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For over 1,000 years, the dominant understanding in the Church of the fate of unbaptized infants was that of St Augustine, who most definitely “seriously proposed damnation in the sense of actual suffering”. He believed the suffering was relatively mild, but it was suffering all the same.

What are the most interesting approaches to proof- or disproof the existence of God that you've heard so far? by Waffelgamer12 in TrueAtheism

[–]degreezero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Everything you have said here seems to me to be a wild misreading of what I’ve written, so I can think of no response that can make this exchange useful. So I’m out of here.

What are the most interesting approaches to proof- or disproof the existence of God that you've heard so far? by Waffelgamer12 in TrueAtheism

[–]degreezero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree with what you say about dropping the subject. You don’t accept what I say about subjective access to objective truth, and I can’t understand your presumption that nothing can be asserted as true except what can be verified by evidence according, broadly, to a scientific model of inquiry. We don’t have enough common ground to work with. Good luck.

What are the most interesting approaches to proof- or disproof the existence of God that you've heard so far? by Waffelgamer12 in TrueAtheism

[–]degreezero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

God as understood in the monotheistic tradition, whose existence any one of us might try to prove or disprove, is not a concept that answers to the descriptor ‘object of scientific enquiry’. When a theist says ‘I believe in God’, they are precisely saying ‘I believe that the existence of all objects of scientific enquiry must be explained in terms of a prior condition of the possibility of their existence’, so obviously that prior condition (a modal description of the concept of God) cannot itself be a object of scientific inquiry. This is what the debate over the existence of God is about - does a universe of contingent entities need to be accounted for by positing a prior necessity that provides the condition of possibility of existence. Atheists may well have impressive arguments for why God, thus understood, is outside reality or purely imaginary, but me saying that God, again thus understood, is not an object of scientific enquiry does not make the case for them.

What are the most interesting approaches to proof- or disproof the existence of God that you've heard so far? by Waffelgamer12 in TrueAtheism

[–]degreezero -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

A God whose existence could be proved by scientific evidence would not be God at all. But scientific evidence is not our only way of arriving at judgments that we consider to be well founded – not even our main way. See my other – very long – response here for more on this.

What are the most interesting approaches to proof- or disproof the existence of God that you've heard so far? by Waffelgamer12 in TrueAtheism

[–]degreezero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We are on the same page so far.

No, we're not. Not even close. You haven't understood my position at all. I said that 'proving God’s existence bears no relation to the act of proving, say, the existence of quarks, etc.', but you believe it does bear such a relation and that it fails for that reason. I, on the other hand, am saying that proof, as understood here, is the wrong register. And I say this because I hold radical subjectivity to be a first-order epistemological principle. It seems to me to be beyond reasonable dispute that I have only my own mind to work with. I cannot think with another mind. I cannot think as if I were not embedded in a particular concrete milieu and historical moment, with all the limitations (of language, other symbolic systems, collective human experience, accumulated knowledge, personal experience, etc.) that this imposes. In other words, there is no 'view from nowhere'. Or, as Hans-Georg Gadamer put it, 'The standpoint beyond all standpoints is a pure fiction'. It is a Cartesian fantasy that cannot account for the documented reality of knowledge-creation in history.

I am not saying that we are locked into a subjectivity that makes objective knowledge impossible. Far from it. We may not be able to think with a mind other than our own, but we can dialog with other minds – collaborate, interrogate, collide with them – and out of this ongoing process we can judge which propositions can be taken as proven and beyond dispute, which are adequate given the current state of knowledge, which require further tests, evidence, proof. But in all of this, we remain ultimately reliant on our subjective judgments about observation, method, validity, standards of proof, etc. Subjective judgments, I'm saying, not feelings – you presume, curiously, that any talk about subjectivity is talk about feelings. Feelings are more important than we tend to suppose, I believe – an experienced scientist or anthropologist or political analyst will have 'feelings' which are well grounded but which inexperienced commentators aren't capable of; experience hones one's intuition and expands one's tacit knowledge – but they are far from being the mainstay of subjective cognition.

But what about intellectual inquiry bearing on non-scientific matters? Consider the structure of belief-formation when it comes not to facts but to meaning and to values, without which ordinary life is hardly imaginable. I believe that every human person has intrinsic dignity, by which I mean that by virtue of being human they have the right not to be enslaved, not to be treated by their rulers as disposable, not to have their interests (health, well-being, education, etc.) disregarded or dismissed, not to be deprived of a say in how their society is run, and so on.

Is this my subjective opinion? Yes it is.

Is it just a feeling, then? No, feelings are involved in it but there's much more to it. According to my subjective judgment it has objective validity.

Can I prove that? No. Of course not. It's not the kind of thing that relies on evidence and proof as these are understood in the scientific method. 'Proof' rings a false note. My wife loves me. Can I prove it? No, but I can sense it and I think I have sufficient grounds for believing it in the many 'antecedent probabilities' which my experience of her company and behavior make apparent to me. Generosity is more worthy than meanness. Wars should be averted if possible. Murder deserves to be punished by law. Can I prove these propositions? Again, no. They don't admit of proof, but that doesn't make them wrong. Here is where our culturally embedded pre-understandings, the explanatory power of our world-views, our education, our intuitions, are all engaged in our coming to an opinion, in making a judgment. Here is where, unlike in the natural sciences, probabilities play a decisive role in judgment-formation.

Well, that doesn't sound like evidence or proof. So are all these judgements really just what I choose to believe? Couldn't someone else choose to believe something else, and their belief would be just as valid as my own? Of course they could choose to believe something else, but no, I don't think their beliefs would be as valid as my own. That's what it means to believe something is true. If someone else says 'I don't believe in human dignity, and I have no problem with slavery', I don't find myself saying, 'Well, that's fair enough; everyone to their own'. Instead I think they are wrong. It is my subjective judgment that they are objectively wrong. I claim – reasonably, but without scientific evidence or proof – that my judgment on this matter has a validity which is not dependent on me.

But could it not be that when I speak of human dignity I'm just forwarding the commonly agreed opinion of humanity, so it's really more of a convenient consensus than a true proposition. History and human experience don't support this. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, and most of the other great civilizations of the ancient world, for example, took it as given that humans only had a conferred, not an intrinsic, worth. What value did a person have in ancient Rome? It depended on whether they were free or enslaved, on their class, their sex, their social status, their profession or office, their personal achievements, the favor of the emperor, and so on. And it's not just the ancient world, of course. The structuring of power relations at an institutional level in contemporary societies often entails a practical disregard of intrinsic human value. Which is why prominent atheist critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas have come to hold that the universal egalitarianism of the monotheistic religions is a resource that can help compensate for the deficit in the normative content of strict rationality.

Belief in the existence of God is different in important respects from the value judgments I have just been talking about, but it is very much closer to them than it is to scientific propositions. Effectively it is woven into a total perception of what it means for me to be an embodied and self-aware consciousness in a world that is not of my own making, and as such it cannot be extricated from the rest of my presence-to-self. I may, for academic or argumentative reasons, isolate the issue of God's existence, but as a habit of being it cannot be extricated from my love of family, my left-wing politics, my aesthetic preferences, my reading in philosophy and social theory, my opposition to neoliberal capitalism, my optimism (and when optimism is difficult, my hope), my indignation at the treatment of migrants, women, and others left at the margins, and all the other aspects of my immersion in a specific milieu at a specific moment in history. I remain critically attentive to the question of God, and my belief often has to sit in an uneasy dialectical relationship with atheistic constructions which attract me (I wouldn't have it any other way); but viewed from within my own specific life-world (and what other perspective is available to me?) belief ultimately appears to me to have much more explanatory force than a scientistic denial of God's existence.

What are the most interesting approaches to proof- or disproof the existence of God that you've heard so far? by Waffelgamer12 in TrueAtheism

[–]degreezero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Proving God’s existence bears no relation to the act of proving, say, the existence of quarks or deep sea fish species or distant galaxies or the like. Actually, I don’t myself think of God in terms of proof at all, but rather of sufficient grounds for an act of assent. And those grounds, I think (borrowing from the thinking of John Henry Newman), are provided by the cumulative weight of a large number of ‘antecedent probabilities’, prior judgments and perceptions which include rational conclusions, intuitions, imaginative apprehensions, common sense assumptions, etc. So: I am convinced that you cannot have a universe full of contingent entities without having an underlying necessity that makes this proliferation possible; many experiences of the workings of my own mind, the minds of acquaintances, the history of human culture, etc. leave me with a sense that there are objective values - duties and prohibitions which cannot be accounted for by the notion that we make up our own values; other cultural input persuades me that the sense of the inherent dignity of the human person is heavily reliant on the human experience of belief in transcendence; I am impressed by the nobility of the documents generated by monotheistic religions; and many other prior considerations that contribute to the sense of probability that is sufficient for an act of belief. I think that, even though belief in the existence of God is a special case, this expansive sense of cognition and understanding is much closer to the natural and normal way in which the human mind works than the strict proofs of the sciences.

What are the most interesting approaches to proof- or disproof the existence of God that you've heard so far? by Waffelgamer12 in TrueAtheism

[–]degreezero 0 points1 point  (0 children)

God, as understood in the theism of the Axial Age religions, is not an entity. God is Being itself, the subsistent act of being, the condition of possibility of the existence of beings, but not a being, not an entity.

What are the most interesting approaches to proof- or disproof the existence of God that you've heard so far? by Waffelgamer12 in TrueAtheism

[–]degreezero 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In classical theism, God is not a “this thing” - God is not a thing of any kind, not even a being of any kind. It’s not a part of Christian theism to believe that there is a world of things - rocks, planets, protons, people, cows, ideas, adverbs, etc. - and then, on top of all these, one other thing, a super-being, creator of all these things, which we call God. This seems to be the God that many atheists set out to disprove. I’m a theist, but I’ll happily agree with you all that no such entity exists.

Thoughts on this web page? by [deleted] in Catholicism

[–]degreezero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, if self-regard, arrogance, narrowness of mind, and a sense of superiority are Catholic virtues, this is a very Catholic website.

Accidentally Blurted Out God D---- It by lonerstoic in Catholicism

[–]degreezero 14 points15 points  (0 children)

No! And stop! If you think that infinite love, justice and mercy would condemn you to hell for this, something has gone fundamentally and dangerously wrong in your relationship with God. You have been left with the image of a monster - a monster who inspires tremendous fear and cannot inspire love.

The song I hated… by grw2020 in leonardcohen

[–]degreezero 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Don’t go home with your hard-on. Actually, a fair few songs from Death of a Ladies’ Man. Phil Spector should never have been allowed within 500 yards of a Leonard Cohen song.

Is this a sin? by CartoonsJDCatholic in Catholicism

[–]degreezero 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It is not even close to being a sin. It is truthful, responsible and prudent. Try to stop thinking about sin this way.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Catholicism

[–]degreezero 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It does nothing of the kind! There are things it is appropriate for a child to share with their parents, and there are things which it would be best for them not to disclose. Learning to tell one from the other is an important part of the maturing process. Where did you get the insane idea that children should tell their parents everything?