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BreadOfLife

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So you say. But what you say is right or wrong is known, just as you are known.

A "few witnesses" is a few witnesses, but the church is not a few.
Thank you for an confused bit of gibberish, Dr. Seuss . . .
 

ScottA

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No - I'm asking YOU.
What are YOU talking about?? What "Robe of righteousness"??
"After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”'
 

Stranger

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First of all - nothing in post #925 states that the Church is the "whore".
Not really sure why you would spew that lie.

Secondly, the "whore" isn't a church.
If you understood ANYTHING about Scripture - you would know that the "whore" is Jerusalem. Isaiah 1:21 states this clearly:
Isaiah 1:21
See how the faithful city has become a prostitute! She once was full of justice; righteousness used to dwell in her-- but now murderers!


Rev. 17:6 depicts the whore as being "drunk on the blood of the prophets".
WHO killed the prophets??

Matt. 23:37

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling!

Stop quoting the Bible until you understand what it means.
Your Scriptural ignorance is astounding . . .

Again, you're the one wanting to identify Rome as the whore in Revelation. Not me. Back up and reread.

Stranger
 

BreadOfLife

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"After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”'
You're dodging the question again and I suspect it's because you realize what you said was stupid - and now you're back-pedaling.
Who puts a robe of righteousness on the Pope?

If you regret your ill-thought-out remark - just say so and move on . . .
 

BreadOfLife

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Again, you're the one wanting to identify Rome as the whore in Revelation. Not me. Back up and reread.

Stranger
Nahh - I already explained to you that the "whore" is Jerusalem - not Rome and not the Church.
Why do you keep lying??

I LOVE it when you guys get backed into a corner with your asinine anti-Catholic remarks and wind up with your feet in your mouths.
 

Stranger

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Nahh - I already explained to you that the "whore" is Jerusalem - not Rome and not the Church.
Why do you keep lying??

I LOVE it when you guys get backed into a corner with your asinine anti-Catholic remarks and wind up with your feet in your mouths.

I was the one that said Babylon in Revelation was not the Roman Church or Rome. Not you. You said Babylon in Revelation was Rome. Which makes Rome the great Whore. See your post #925.

Now you say, the whore is Jerusalem. So, which is it? Who is the whore?

Stranger
 

epostle1

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Many Protestants have been poisoned by the venom of Dave Hunt, or influenced by him.

Some anti-Catholics claim the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon of Revelation 17 and 18. Dave Hunt, in his 1994 book, A Woman Rides the Beast, presents nine arguments to try to prove this. His claims are a useful summary of those commonly used by Fundamentalists, and an examination of them shows why they don’t work.

Lie #2

Hunt notes that the Whore will be a city "known as Babylon." This is based on Revelation 17:5, which says that her name is "Babylon the Great."

The phrase "Babylon the great" (Greek: Babulon a megala) occurs five times in Revelation (14:8, 16:19, 17:5, 18:2, and 18:21). Light is shed on its meaning when one notices that Babylon is referred to as "the great city" seven times in the book (16:19, 17:18, 18:10, 16, 18, 19, 21). Other than these, there is only one reference to "the great city." That passage is 11:8, which states that the bodies of God’s two witnesses "will lie in the street of the great city, which is allegorically called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified."

"The great city" is symbolically called Sodom, a reference to Jerusalem, symbolically called "Sodom" in the Old Testament (cf. Is. 1:10; Ezek. 16:1–3, 46–56). We also know Jerusalem is the "the great city" of Revelation 11:8 because the verse says it was "where [the] Lord was crucified."
Hunting the Whore of Babylon | Catholic Answers

Revelation consistently speaks as if there were only one "great city" ("the great city"), suggesting that the great city of 11:8 is the same as the great city mentioned in the other seven texts—Babylon. Additional evidence for the identity of the two is the fact that both are symbolically named after great Old Testament enemies of the faith: Sodom, Egypt, and Babylon.

This suggests that Babylon the great may be Jerusalem, not Rome. Many Protestant and Catholic commentators have adopted this interpretation. On the other hand, early Church Fathers often referred to Rome as "Babylon," but every references was to pagan Rome, which martyred Christians.
 

Stranger

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Many Protestants have been poisoned by the venom of Dave Hunt, or influenced by him.

Some anti-Catholics claim the Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon of Revelation 17 and 18. Dave Hunt, in his 1994 book, A Woman Rides the Beast, presents nine arguments to try to prove this. His claims are a useful summary of those commonly used by Fundamentalists, and an examination of them shows why they don’t work.

Lie #2

Hunt notes that the Whore will be a city "known as Babylon." This is based on Revelation 17:5, which says that her name is "Babylon the Great."

The phrase "Babylon the great" (Greek: Babulon a megala) occurs five times in Revelation (14:8, 16:19, 17:5, 18:2, and 18:21). Light is shed on its meaning when one notices that Babylon is referred to as "the great city" seven times in the book (16:19, 17:18, 18:10, 16, 18, 19, 21). Other than these, there is only one reference to "the great city." That passage is 11:8, which states that the bodies of God’s two witnesses "will lie in the street of the great city, which is allegorically called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified."

"The great city" is symbolically called Sodom, a reference to Jerusalem, symbolically called "Sodom" in the Old Testament (cf. Is. 1:10; Ezek. 16:1–3, 46–56). We also know Jerusalem is the "the great city" of Revelation 11:8 because the verse says it was "where [the] Lord was crucified."
Hunting the Whore of Babylon | Catholic Answers

Revelation consistently speaks as if there were only one "great city" ("the great city"), suggesting that the great city of 11:8 is the same as the great city mentioned in the other seven texts—Babylon. Additional evidence for the identity of the two is the fact that both are symbolically named after great Old Testament enemies of the faith: Sodom, Egypt, and Babylon.

This suggests that Babylon the great may be Jerusalem, not Rome. Many Protestant and Catholic commentators have adopted this interpretation. On the other hand, early Church Fathers often referred to Rome as "Babylon," but every references was to pagan Rome, which martyred Christians.

Sorry. See your post #1823 in the 'Catholics' thread. There you claim that Rome is the whore. Now, you want to change your story. What bs.

Stranger
 

epostle1

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...After distorting the text and history to read what they want into the Bible, and thereby obtaining God's "blessing" on their hatred of the Catholic Church, some "Christians" ignore the only texts of Scripture which tells us about the religious leanings of the Antichrist.

In St. John's letters (1 John 4, 2 John 1), he tells us that the spirit of the Antichrist denies the Incarnation (the Son of God becoming man) and thereby also the Trinity (the Father and the Spirit, too).
THIS IS THE SPIRIT OF ANTI-CHRIST.

There is not a single text in 2000 years, including the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, where the Catholic Church, her popes, her bishops, her official teachings, her saints, or her acknowledged ecclesiastical authors, deny the Word-made-flesh or the Blessed Trinity. Instead, all of Christianity owes the preservation of these Truths to the Catholic Church, whose great Councils formulated them and whose saints and popes have defended them to this day, often at the cost of martyrdom.

The Catholic Church does not have the spirit of the Antichrist but of God, since no one without the Spirit can say "Jesus is Lord" (1 Cor. 12:3), something the Church and Catholics always have done and continue to do!
 

Stranger

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...After distorting the text and history to read what they want into the Bible, and thereby obtaining God's "blessing" on their hatred of the Catholic Church, some "Christians" ignore the only texts of Scripture which tells us about the religious leanings of the Antichrist.

In St. John's letters (1 John 4, 2 John 1), he tells us that the spirit of the Antichrist denies the Incarnation (the Son of God becoming man) and thereby also the Trinity (the Father and the Spirit, too).
THIS IS THE SPIRIT OF ANTI-CHRIST.

There is not a single text in 2000 years, including the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, where the Catholic Church, her popes, her bishops, her official teachings, her saints, or her acknowledged ecclesiastical authors, deny the Word-made-flesh or the Blessed Trinity. Instead, all of Christianity owes the preservation of these Truths to the Catholic Church, whose great Councils formulated them and whose saints and popes have defended them to this day, often at the cost of martyrdom.

The Catholic Church does not have the spirit of the Antichrist but of God, since no one without the Spirit can say "Jesus is Lord" (1 Cor. 12:3), something the Church and Catholics always have done and continue to do!

Indeed we owe these things to the Catholic Church. But not to the Church at Rome. The Church at Rome has overstepped its boundaries. It has sought control over the Catholic or Universal Church of Jesus Christ. This we deny and resist.

Stranger
 

epostle1

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Sorry. See your post #1823 in the 'Catholics' thread. There you claim that Rome is the whore. Now, you want to change your story. What bs.

Stranger
I'll re-phrase so you understand me:
Your common tactic is when you get refuted, you wait a few days and then repeat the same nonsense. Revelation 14:8, Revelation 16:19, Revelation 17:5, Revelation 18:2,10,21, which show that "Babylon" meant (added **PAGAN**) Rome. Your "babble on" psychos looks like SDA or JW propaganda. They claim the same as you.
But pagan Rome and apostate Jerusalem do fit the description of a city drunk with the blood of saints and the martyrs of Jesus. And since they were notorious persecutors of Christians, the original audience would have automatically thought of one of these two as the city that persecutes Christians, not an undreamed-of Christian Rome that was centuries in the future.

Revelation consistently speaks as if there were only one "great city" ("the great city"), suggesting that the great city of 11:8 is the same as the great city mentioned in the other seven texts—Babylon. Additional evidence for the identity of the two is the fact that both are symbolically named after great Old Testament enemies of the faith: Sodom, Egypt, and Babylon.

This suggests that Babylon the great may be Jerusalem, not Rome. Many Protestant and Catholic commentators have adopted this interpretation. On the other hand, early Church Fathers often referred to Rome as "Babylon," but every references was to pagan Rome, which martyred Christians.
There is no point in citing the ECF with you, since they went out and killed "true believers" on their breaks while compiling the canon of the Bible.o_O
What I would like to see from you is an authoritive commentator or reference as to the identity of Babylon, since the evidence supports 2 opposing views. Dave Hunt and Jack Chick are not authoritive.

Just because I use one commentator that favors Rome over Jerusalem or vice versa does not force me to adhere to a false dichotomy of one over the other. I really don't care. But using Revelation to attack the Church is the epitome of biblical illiteracy, prejudice, ignorance and bigotry.
 

epostle1

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Indeed we owe these things to the Catholic Church. But not to the Church at Rome. The Church at Rome has overstepped its boundaries. It has sought control over the Catholic or Universal Church of Jesus Christ. This we deny and resist.
Stranger
Oh....once again, you mean the “false church” that has outlasted any other political or religious institution in history.
A “false church” that promotes life from conception to natural death. A “false church” that respects all other religions and cultures.
A “false church” that has among its adherents, intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, artists, academics as well as simpletons and the least educated in the most primitive of societies.
A “false church” that doesn't require complete knowledge and full understanding of complex doctrines.
A “false church” that has done more for the poor and needy than any other religious organization in the history of the world.
A “false church” that has not wavered in its doctrine or morals from the moment it began.
A “false church” whose message and connection with the Creator has changed the lives of billions throughout the ages.
A “false church” that has inspired its proponents to create some of the most beautiful works of art, music and literature ever produced.
A “false church” whose founder came to earth to suffer and die on a cross for all sinners and inspire untold thousands of its adherents to be martyred for their love of this founder and one another.
A “false church” that worships God and God only. But venerates his mother, The Blessed Virgin Mary. Is that the “false church” overstepping it's boundaries?


10fbd14bf6b9e8c7bc91c13b8ddececc.jpg

Stranger, you should burn some if these down,
the Church is overstepping its boundaries.​
 

Stranger

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I'll re-phrase so you understand me:
Your common tactic is when you get refuted, you wait a few days and then repeat the same nonsense. Revelation 14:8, Revelation 16:19, Revelation 17:5, Revelation 18:2,10,21, which show that "Babylon" meant (added **PAGAN**) Rome. Your "babble on" psychos looks like SDA or JW propaganda. They claim the same as you.
But pagan Rome and apostate Jerusalem do fit the description of a city drunk with the blood of saints and the martyrs of Jesus. And since they were notorious persecutors of Christians, the original audience would have automatically thought of one of these two as the city that persecutes Christians, not an undreamed-of Christian Rome that was centuries in the future.

Revelation consistently speaks as if there were only one "great city" ("the great city"), suggesting that the great city of 11:8 is the same as the great city mentioned in the other seven texts—Babylon. Additional evidence for the identity of the two is the fact that both are symbolically named after great Old Testament enemies of the faith: Sodom, Egypt, and Babylon.

This suggests that Babylon the great may be Jerusalem, not Rome. Many Protestant and Catholic commentators have adopted this interpretation. On the other hand, early Church Fathers often referred to Rome as "Babylon," but every references was to pagan Rome, which martyred Christians.
There is no point in citing the ECF with you, since they went out and killed "true believers" on their breaks while compiling the canon of the Bible.o_O
What I would like to see from you is an authoritive commentator or reference as to the identity of Babylon, since the evidence supports 2 opposing views. Dave Hunt and Jack Chick are not authoritive.

Just because I use one commentator that favors Rome over Jerusalem or vice versa does not force me to adhere to a false dichotomy of one over the other. I really don't care. But using Revelation to attack the Church is the epitome of biblical illiteracy, prejudice, ignorance and bigotry.

You can rephrase all you like. You are now changing your story. Is Rome the whore or not. You said she was.

Stranger
 

Stranger

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Oh....once again, you mean the “false church” that has outlasted any other political or religious institution in history.
A “false church” that promotes life from conception to natural death. A “false church” that respects all other religions and cultures.
A “false church” that has among its adherents, intellectuals, philosophers, scientists, artists, academics as well as simpletons and the least educated in the most primitive of societies.
A “false church” that doesn't require complete knowledge and full understanding of complex doctrines.
A “false church” that has done more for the poor and needy than any other religious organization in the history of the world.
A “false church” that has not wavered in its doctrine or morals from the moment it began.
A “false church” whose message and connection with the Creator has changed the lives of billions throughout the ages.
A “false church” that has inspired its proponents to create some of the most beautiful works of art, music and literature ever produced.
A “false church” whose founder came to earth to suffer and die on a cross for all sinners and inspire untold thousands of its adherents to be martyred for their love of this founder and one another.
A “false church” that worships God and God only. But venerates his mother, The Blessed Virgin Mary. Is that the “false church” overstepping it's boundaries?


10fbd14bf6b9e8c7bc91c13b8ddececc.jpg

Stranger, you should burn some if these down,
the Church is overstepping its boundaries.​

Yes, that's the one.

Stranger
 

Jun2u

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BoL,

I’m surprised you knew about Mt 18:15-17. I guess I have to take it with a grain of salt that unsaved men can sometimes understand scriptures. I’ll probably get reprimanded by many by what I’ve just stated but I follow the criteria set forth in 1Jo 4:1. I was about to post with Matthew 18 but you beat me to the punch.

Also, you are correct about the authority of the church over it’s members, again beating me to the punch.

But we will NEVER be in agreement when you quote Jesus not leaving a book (Bible) but a church. A church cannot save anyone only God can. This is the reason the Jews wanted Jesus killed because they said, He claimed to be equal with God. We cannot learn anything from a church because it’s leaders are all sinners therefore, what they say or do is tainted by sin unless they are faithful to the word of God. In other words, the Bible is the Authority, for it is the word of God that carries complete obedience and never the church.

This is also why the reason so many local churches of the world have their own presuppositions so as to avoid being under the authority of the Bible, like the Catholic church.

You say the Catholic church adheres to the Lordship of Christ yet you also say your church is the ground and foundation of truth. Which is it, the Lordship of Christ Who is the truth, the way, and the life, or the Catholic church?

Have you even consider 1 Corinthians 11:3 which stipulates the chain of command? Or, Ephesians 5:22-25 where the chain of command is also stipulated, but verse 25 indicates that Jesus gave His life for His church. Has any of your popes given his life for the church? Did Benedict do something to save his church which was in trouble but instead abdicated?

I apologize if I seem a little harsh but I do believe this is what James was talking about in James 2:17-18 how to defend one’s faith.

Well tomorrow is another day to put on the boxing gloves again.

To God Be The Glory
 

epostle1

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Knowingly or not, scholars operated for two centuries under an Enlightenment prejudice that assumes all progress to come from religious skeptics, and that whatever the church touches is backward, superstitious, even barbaric.

Since the mid-20th century, this unscholarly prejudice has thankfully begun to melt away, and professors of a variety of religious backgrounds, or none at all, increasingly acknowledge the church's contributions.

Nowhere has the revision of what we thought we knew been more dramatic than in the study of the history of science. We all remember what we learned in fourth grade: While scientists were bravely trying to uncover truths about the universe and improve our quality of life, stupid churchmen who hated reason and simply wanted the faithful to shut up and obey placed a ceaseless stream of obstacles in their path.

That was where the conventional wisdom stood just over a century ago, with the publication of Andrew Dickson White's book, "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom," in 1896. And that's where most Americans (and Europeans, for that matter) believe it still stands.

But there is scarcely a historian of science in America who would endorse this comic-book version of events today. To the contrary, modern historians of science freely acknowledge the church's contributions — both theoretical and material — to the Scientific Revolution. It was the church's worldview that insisted the universe was orderly and operated according to certain fixed laws. Only buoyed with that confidence would it have made sense to bother investigating the physical world in the first place, or even to develop the scientific method (which can work only in an orderly world). It's likewise a little tricky to claim the church has been an implacable foe of the sciences when so many priests were accomplished scientists.

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher. Father Roger Boscovich, who has been described as "the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced," has often been called the father of modern atomic theory. In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

By the 18th century, writes historian Jonathan Wright, the Jesuits "had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes, and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics, and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter's surface, the Andromeda nebula, and Saturn's rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon affected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light."

Their achievements likewise included "star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics."

These were the great opponents of human progress?

Seismology, the study of earthquakes, has been so dominated by Jesuits that it has become known as "the Jesuit science." It was a Jesuit, Father J.B. Macelwane, who wrote the first seismology textbook in America in 1936. To this day, the American Geophysical Union, which Macelwane once headed, gives an annual medal named after this brilliant priest to a promising young geophysicist.

The Jesuits were also the first to introduce Western science into such far-off places as China and India. In 17th-century China in particular, Jesuits introduced a substantial body of scientific knowledge and a vast array of mental tools for understanding the physical universe, including the Euclidean geometry that made planetary motion comprehensible.

Jesuits made important contributions to the scientific knowledge and infrastructure of other less developed nations not only in Asia but also in Africa and Central and South America. Beginning in the 19th century, these continents saw the opening of Jesuit observatories that studied such fields as astronomy, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology and solar physics. Such observatories provided these places with accurate time keeping, weather forecasts (particularly important in the cases of hurricanes and typhoons), earthquake risk assessments and cartography.

The early church also institutionalized the care of widows, orphans, the sick and the poor in ways unseen in classical Greece or Rome. Even her harshest critics, from the fourth-century emperor Julian the Apostate all the way to Martin Luther and Voltaire, conceded the church's enormous contributions to the relief of human misery.

The spirit of Catholic charity — that we help those in need not out of any expectation of reciprocity, but as a pure gift, and that we even help those who might not like us — finds no analogue in classical Greece and Rome, but it is this idea of charity that we continue to embrace today.

The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations and degrees, as well as the familiar distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, come to us directly from the medieval world.

It is no surprise that the church should have done so much to foster and protect the nascent university system, since the church, according to historian Lowrie Daly, "was the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge."

Until the mid-20th century, the history of economic thought started, more or less, with the 18th century and Adam Smith. But beginning with Joseph Schumpeter, the great economist and historian of his field, scholars have begun to point instead to the 16th-century Catholic theologians at Spain's University of Salamanca as the originators of modern economics.

And the list goes on.
By the time of the Reformation, no secular government had chartered more universities than the church. Edward Grant, who has written on medieval science for Cambridge University Press, points out that intellectual life was robust and debate was vigorous at these universities — the very opposite of the popular presumption.

I can already hear the complaint: What about these awful things the church did that I heard about in school? For one thing, isn't it a little odd that we never heard any of the material I've presented here in school? Doesn't that seem a trifle unfair?

But although an episode like the medieval Inquisition has been dramatically scaled back in scope and cruelty by recent scholarship — the University of California at Berkeley, not exactly a bastion of traditional Catholicism, published a book substantially revising popular view — it is not my subject here. My aim is to point out, as I do in my book "How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization," how indebted we are, without realizing it, to an institution popular culture teaches us to despise.
Commentary: History shows contributions of Catholic Church to Western civilization


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