Jazzhands
7d ago
Yes, I am aware of the official status of the Doctors of the Church. No, that doesn't mean the average person in the pews has read them, any more than the average mega-church attendee. It is just a fact that average people, Catholic or not, are not that intellectual. You're comparing a Platonic ideal on your side with a normie on the other.
Jazzhands
7d ago
How many of the people are your local mega church are reading or talking about or thinking about or even know who Saint Augustine is? Are a lot of them reading The Summa do you suppose? I can think of a Protestant friend in “seminary” right now and how he reacted when I asked him about this, and I’m going to tell you the answer is no. No, finding one example of one person at one “seminary” who referenced this one time does not matter to the general point I’m making here.
Not many! How many at your local parish are reading those? How many even follow the Church's teaching on contraception or abortion?
This is just a general problem; most people don't read old books. Those Protestants who engage intellectually with their faith, like the Catholics who do the same, will have read Augustine.
Jazzhands
7d ago
I don't know much about Prot vs Cath debaters; it's not a space I follow. I suspect it's not a very large space. Frankly, Evangelical Protestants just don't think much about Catholics at all. Their apologists usually aim at atheists.
Jazzhands
7d ago
It doesn't take fancy footwork at all. There are a thousand years between Augustine and the Reformers; all they need to is claim that the later Catholic Church added on a lot of non-Biblical stuff that would not have been accepted by the earlier church, which is already the central Protestant claim. The reformers quoted Augustine extensively, I think more than any other church father. Luther himself was an Augustinian monk. Note even BB Warfield's famous quote "The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church."
Jazzhands
7d ago
Who are the equivalent protestant "fathers"?
Martin Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, John Bunyan, Karl Barth, any number of preachers like Oswald Chambers, John Wesley, Spurgeon. Tim Keller and Os Guinness would qualify as (near) contemporary Protestant apologists. But Protestants can claim Augustine and everyone else from his era just as well as Catholics.
Jazzhands
19d ago
This is a semi-recent change. Two decades ago, hacker spaces were notoriously libertarian. The lesson of open source and the internet in general is that libertarians are utterly unable to defend against progressive take-over.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
This occurred on reddit, youtube, facebook, pre-Musk twitter, and very likely others. That is not a tiny sliver of the internet.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Social media censorship is basically the same thing, and there's been plenty of that.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
Is it un-Christian to be crass? Or are you mistaking Christianity for Churchianity?
"She lusted after lovers with members as large as a donkey’s and emissions like those of a horse." - God
"I wish that those who bother you would cut their whole penis off!" - The Apostle Paul
For the Protestants: "You say, "What comes out of our mouth must be kept!" I hear it - which mouth do you mean? The one from which the farts come?" -Martin Luther who rather liked fart humor.
Jazzhands
2mo ago
This is your regular reminder that the current administration is still working to undo the thousands of bans that Youtube did at the Biden administration's behest. I assume the OP means "modern as in the past five minutes."
Jazzhands
3mo ago
Cancel Culture has being going on for over a decade; we know that the Left is perfectly capable and willing of coming down hard on things it actually disapproves of.
Jazzhands
3mo ago
That gets into the whole "Are Jews White?" debate. Has Doug expressed a view?
Jazzhands
3mo ago
The author of Luke-Acts is trying to ground his volume in history and does his best to set the the scene but when we look at Josephus there are some contradicting details.
Can you expand on this? I don't recall Josephus mentioning Paul at all; I'm not sure what they could really contradict each other on.
Jazzhands
4mo ago
American right-wingers love to smirk knowingly about stories of the rampant “knife crime” in the U.K., safe in the assumption that this is overwhelmingly a non-white phenomenon.
This isn't why right-wingers smirk at it. "Knife control" was the right-wing reductio ad absurdum of "gun control" until the UK came along and said "yes, I am the straw man you would imagine, I don't even recognize I am saying exactly what you predicted in exactly the way that proves you right."
Jazzhands
4mo ago
I hear that if you eat them you'll gain the powers of a shrimp: having EAs actually care about you.
Jazzhands
4mo ago
This like when the governor of Massachusetts threatened to gerrymander her state. Can't threaten much when you've already fired all of your ammo.
Jazzhands
6mo ago
I would not bet on that pivot yet. I think Mamdani's success shows that the days of progressive mismanagement have come to a middle at best.
(Although I guess he could still lose.)
Jazzhands
6mo ago
For reference, the average hive supposedly has about 30,000 bees. Enough to fill half a five-gallon bucket.
Jazzhands
6mo ago
It was only 4 years ago. That's hardly an eternity. Is there some evidence he has seen the errors of his ways?
Here's what you actually said
Nit: when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down? Is anything that's not free (free-as-in-captured) market capitalism now considered socialism? The only "means of production" that Mamdani is suggesting be owned publicly are a few grocery stores, no? That's hardly a "seizure" of means.
Implication is that it's somehow unfair for people to be identifying this guy as a socialist. Given that he has called himself a socialist and he addressed a significant group dedicated to socialism where he quoted approvingly from the Communist Manifesto, seems like they got it right. At the very least, the burden of evidence is on the side that wants to claim he's seen the error of his ways.
If some people were able to determine this just from his campaign rhetoric, all the better for them! They made a correct prediction! The evidence is that their definition of socialism is accurate, not "drowned-down." You should be asking why you weren't able to see it was obvious to them.
Jazzhands
6mo ago
To be clear, you think it is unfair to apply the label "socialist" to a guy who spoke at the Democratic Socialists of America about the "end goal of seizing the means of production"?
Jazzhands
6mo ago
He was a speaker at the DSA, which stands for "Democratic Socialists of America."
Clip here: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1939657700553486380 Actual Quotes:
- "The purpose is about this entire project, it’s not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism"
- "We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism"
- "There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production"
Full long video at https://youtube.com/live/9K7HDuoJ0MQ
Jazzhands
6mo ago
The conflict between various Muslim states and Israel (which, really, is what we're talking about when talking about "Muslims and Jews" here, since there's only one Jewish state)
Because Muslims treat the Jews within Muslim states so well, right?
Jazzhands
6mo ago
Then he's not mentioned again in the New Testament where he's this unseen dark mirror of Jesus.
What?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%204%3A1-11&version=NKJV
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. 3 Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”
4 But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’ ”
5 Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written:
‘He shall give His angels charge over you,’
and,
‘In their hands they shall bear you up, Lest you dash your foot against a stone.’ ”
7 Jesus said to him, “It is written again, ‘You shall not [a]tempt the Lord your God.’ ”
8 Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”
10 Then Jesus said to him, [b]“Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’ ”
11 Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.
Jazzhands
6mo ago
It's also pretty similar to Jefferson's Deism. It's an old heresy that recurs regularly throughout history. In the past few centuries it pretty consistently tries to sell itself with language like "compatible with a scientific mindset." Check out Bishop Spong (of the famously growing Episcopal church) for a relatively recent iteration of this.
And before that, the Daily Show stood at the center of progressive culture for about a decade.
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