An Ironic Quote from C.S. Lewis

I think it's ironic that this Lewis quote is often used by conservative posters to warn us against a large centralized government that imposes a great deal of regulation, however it seems like a perfect verbalization of a warning against theocracy, which the same posters will gently support.

 

I see it as both. I'm against theocracy and over-regulation.

 

I understand that the government is a servant of the people, but I simply do not care to be a servant to a deity.

 

I guestion the notion of this justice. What justice can there be when the god in question set everything into motion knowing beforehand what injustices would occur as a result?

If we are to believe that God is all-knowing, then all that happens is nothing more than a reflection of what he planned out. Free will is thus, an illusion, and justice is nothing more than a game.

 

Catholicism would seem to go against the idea that Christ is the key to salvation. Catholicism places a rather heavy emphasis on being part of the church. The amount of authority and importance invested in clergy seems more extrabiblical than biblical. Also, this whole matter of saints would seem to be a vestige of pagan beliefs.

Much of the structure of Catholic traditions would seem to involve the subsuming of pagan traditions so as to better assimilate pre-Christian cultures.

For example, it doesn't make much sense to believe that Christ was born in December, however, holding Christmas around the same time as the old Saturnalia was convenient in assimilating the old religions.

Granted, Protestantism seems to be closer to Catholicism than it often likes to admit.

 

The Christian response to this is an interesting one.
God exists outside of time, so he can observe all time at once. Free will exists, but God knows what we will do simply because he can see the entire timeline of time itself at once. He can already see the choices we will make.
That would make watching a movie for the first time rather boring, don't you think?

 

That's because you don't understand the basics of Catholicism. It is all scriptural.

When overdone, yes.

And it combines those pagan traditions with the Bible. Believe it or not, nothing the Catholic Church does isn't rooted in the Bible (which they wrote and kept alive). If it weren't for the Catholic Church, there would be no Bible.

Minor issue. It was a case of survival.

 

So this was NOT biblically based, correct?

 

A large portion of Catholicism is based on the ideas of people that came after the Bible, like St. Augustine.

They added their own spin to a lot of things. For example, the Bible itself speaks very little about the afterlife. Most of the modern conceptions of heaven and hell stem from St. Augustine's writings. That's outside of the Bible.

To a degree, but then again, they also took it upon themselves to decide what was apocryphal and what wasn't. They also weren't particularly kind to Gnostics -- their "competition" so to speak.

 

The vast majority of people couldn't read before the invention of the printing press. The Bible was given to the people in a way they could understand--through Bible readings, stained glass windows, etc. You make assumptions that books were never worth much more than their weight in gold, and that people always had almost universal literacy like we do now.

The Catholic Church is what kept the Bible alive. It is what wrote the Bible. No revisionist history can deny those facts.

 

I don't dismiss those facts. All true. It is also true that the church did not want the Bible translated, as Latin was obscure and not widely understood. Bible reading was not encouraged so that understanding it was dependent on the clergy.
Fundamental to the faith is the idea that the priest is the intercessor between congregation and God, that they are fundamentally different in their relationship to the deity and the relationship of the laity and the deity. Jesus, of course, stated it very differently.
Do you believe Paul was a Catholic? The writers of the Bible were not Catholic or any other denomination you want to ascribe to them. All that came later and bastardized the teachings of Christ himself. No revisionist history there. That they trace their roots to Peter doesn't make the faith as it evolved the direct descendent of those who initially were overwhelmed by Christ.
I have no animosity toward Catholicism, but no respect for it as a unique and inspired denomination, either. It is simply another failed attempt to codify and harness and minimize the greatest mystery man can encounter. The true nature of God.

 

The Bible is read at every Mass and one of the most widely spread myths about the middle ages is how ignorant common people were about the Holy Scriptures. Though entire Bibles were costly and difficult to produce, often taking 50 years before the printing press, individual pages of scripture, Psalms, parables, etc were bought, sold, and traded regularly with the imprimatur of the bishop. It wasn't a matter of the Church restricting the Bible, it was the means by which scripture could be owned by common people that was difficult.

It's a mistake to say that the priesthood is somehow supplanting the intercessorship of Christ. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the Church from the beginning, has been led by the priesthood of the New Covenant, the priesthood according to the order of Melchizadek, of which Jesus is high and chief priest forever.

Paul believed in and reinforced the command structure of the church (2Thess 2:15) and saw the Church as the very foundation of Christian truth (1Tim 3:15) Paul was an apostle and identified himself as such, being part of a distinct guild that was directly commissioned by Jesus Christ to preach the gospel throughout the world.

It was Justin Martyr that first called the Church "catholic" to describe the universal church with synods in every part of the known world. The need for a unifying title for the many bishops didn't arise until then. There's no scandal here.

Jesus taught about the seat of Moses that defined the Old Covenant. Because the Old Covenant finds in the New Covenant a mirror and fulfillment in every detail, it makes sense that there would be a new seat of authority in the New Covenant, and Jesus himself defined that during his earthly ministry. (Matt 16:1

Huh? The apostles themselves appointed Matthias to replace Judas, the first incident of apostolic succession and proof positive that Judas held an office that was vacated by his death. There was no "invisible church" not even at the beginning.

It's not a denomination.

2000 years of Catholic theologians who have done just that, plumb the depths of the mystery of God, might disagree. Having structure, official doctrine, and a visible representation of Christianity is not in conflict with the deep questions of God.

 

No, every priest (and there was one in every town) knew Latin. Also, did you know that before Martin Luther, there were over 40 translations of the Bible into German. The Venerable Bede translated the Gospel of John into Old English in the 7th century. The Wessex Bible (4 gospels) was translated into English in about 990.

Books couldn't be given to just anybody. They were hand-copied and worth a lot of money. The above is just Reformation era propaganda.

Of course they were Catholic. The Catholic church has unbroken succession since Peter.