OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
Women are more likely to seek treatment, so have a consistent medical record of before their healing which can then be used to judge a healing took place. They are also more likely to seek a faith healing.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
72 cases of miraculous healings that are ruled a such by a board of doctors and other medical experts studying medical records before and after the event is much better evidence of a miraculous healing than a cell phone video. I am responding to your idea that a cell phone video would make belief and religion obsolete.
If there were evidence, anyone could believe it, and the true faithful wouldn't be doing anything very impressive or unique.
Interesting. So for you, the significant part of religion is believing without evidence, and that in and of itself is impressive and unique (and rewarded I guess?)
That's um... not my experience. My experience was basically understanding the philosophy of what is meant by "God" (contrasted against my misconceptions from being a child,) investigating the historicity of the Gospels, and seeing that the beliefs of the Catholic Church aligned the best with all the data I have seen. A skeptic is very limited and is dogmatically constrained to profess things like the Resurrection of Jesus, the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, the apparition at Zeitoun, miraculous healings, etc as Hallucinations or Hoaxes, even if those explanations do not comfortably fit the data. A believer, meanwhile, is free to believe these things are hoaxes, hallucinations, or real manifestations of a Supernatural order if the data indicates so.
And then what merit is in practicing religion is obviously to the extent you let it constrain your will and your ruinous desires. Not believing without evidence. That's not a virtue at all.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
So you say. Or it's all a trick like David Blaine. There's always room for doubt. The hundreds of miraculous healings with good medical documentation that occurred at Lourdes and at every saint canonization hasn't convinced you. https://www.lourdes-france.com/en/miraculous-healings/
Not sure what you mean by, "it wouldn't be a religion anymore." Is your definition of religion, "cannot be proven or argued for unless someone already irrationally believes it?"
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
There is a distinction between the God of the Philosophers (for example the ultimate being Aristotle or a Hindu philosopher might reason towards) and the gods that people worship on a daily basis. Hinduism is neat in that it connects the God of Philosophers with the gods. In Greek, Roman, Celtic, and other mythologies such a connection didn't really develop.
Christianity and Judaism scaffolds the European pagan gods to the God of Philosophers in a way the pagans never did in practice.
I feel comfortable saying that, just as Christians, Jews, and Muslims worship the same God (despite having different beliefs surrounding Him), Hindus worship the same God (but have even more error, emphasizing Divine Simplicity to the diminishment of His other qualities.)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
I disagree that it's a poison pill clause. It's a significant part of why the vast majority of the Cardinals present signed off on Sacrosantum Concilium. They wanted a globalized Latin rite.
Let's say the church wants to expand in a culture where showing the soles of your feet is considered horribly rude (like half the world). Even if it doesn't make it into an official document, you can imagine that in those regions, people would be careful to not show the soles of their feet at Mass. They might kick other people out for doing so.
The priest might modify the liturgy in places where they would typically have to show the soles of their feet, for example during Eucharistic Adoration they might not kneel with their back to the congregation. People might not kneel at all but adopt other postures of reverence. Churches may come up with feet hiding devices, like an altar rail for legs.
All this is to say, there are legitimate reasons why "rigid uniformity" can be bad - if you're expanding to actually different cultures and peoples.
The problem with the football example is that it's not actually rude to neglect the morning football prayer. It's not a requirement of the society. They're just normal Westeners, mixing the sacred with the banal.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
It's not a very abstract decision. It's what makes the "Liar, Lord, Lunatic" trilemma distinct about Jesus compared to the Buddha. The Buddha could simply be earnestly mistaken. He fasted and meditated, entered some weird mental/physical state, thought he understood something no one else did, passed it along. With Jesus, "earnestly mistaken" isn't an option.
If a guy like Jesus appeared in 2025, healing the sick and raising the dead and multiplying food in front of crowds of 5,000, some would call him mentally ill. But I don't think they'd be right to do so.
requires the belief in a literal fall of man by eating literal fruit in a literal garden of Eden.
No, this is not required. A single original couple, committing a specific original sin, is what is required. Can you link to where you got the requirement for a literal fruit from? Edit: this article quotes from the authoritative documents to specify the minimum required belief.
I also would like your source on Q being infallibly condemned. Typically speaking the Church doesn't take sides in academic debates like that. Especially since the most obvious explanation of Q is that it is the original Aramaic notes of Matthew, as hinted to by Papias.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
Christianity says that our ancestors were all wrong, for thousands of years, and then a guy in the middle east figured out the truth
You're getting pretty strong pushback on this phrasing, for good reason. Most are arguing the "ancestors were wrong" angle, which is very fair. I'd like to push back on the idea that the Christian's claim is that Jesus claims he figured out the truth.
Jesus never said he figured out the truth. He said he IS the Truth. He isn't a sage in the desert who discovered something outside himself. He said that he is sent. He says that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The way to salvation isn't to learn what he has learned, it is to follow him. "No one can get to the Father except through me." Not "through my teachings." "Through me."
This is absolutely bizzare, if you have studied global religions. Jesus is unique in this regard. He doesn't claim to have brought fire from the gods, he claims to be the flame. He doesn't claim to have received divine revelation, his followers claim that he is the divine revelation.
His teaching is secondary - a nice lovely tantalizing icing - compared to his life, death, and resurrection.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
Regarding Cardinal Tagle, all I can say is that failure to generate a thriving local church doesn't mean a lack of Cardinal allies. @hydroacetylene knows more about the politics side of the equation.
The Spirit of Vatican II is characterized by the time immediately preceding and immediately following the Second Vatican Council. I'm not sure what would have gone differently if this "Spirit" wasn't a real spirit, and a demon to boot. Watch the Puppet Mass or the Clown Mass and tell me there's no demonic involvement. (I'm not sure how serious I am being here. There are many who would take this allegation more seriously.)
Rewind a bit. Why did people feel like they could have a mass with clowns and puppets? Before Vatican II, there was a very specific rubric they were supposed to follow. After Vatican II, there was a very specific rubric they were supposed to follow, one that did not recommend clowns or puppets. The rubric changed, but the adherence to it stopped. Priests either started doing their own inventions, or stepped back from their leadership role in the liturgy and allowed lay people (predominantly women who were teenagers in the 1960s) to add things to the liturgy.
The Spirit of Vatican II, most plainly put, is the attitude many took when things that seemed unchangable began to change. Many Catholics didn't (and still don't) understand the difference between small "t" traditional practices, like liturgical rites, and big "T" Traditional Doctrine, like teachings on Christology, Sacraments, and Morality. If you were alive then, and thought the mass is something the Church taught could never change, and then the Church changed it...
The conclusion a lot of people made was that anything could be changed. And if anything could be changed, it might as well be changed by themselves, in their own image and likeness.
Let's rewind a bit further. Why were people dissatisfied with the Mass of Pius V? The laity felt disconnected from the mass. There were lots of abuses. The most common mass was a low mass, without music and most of the fanfare that fans of the Mass of Pius V like today.
It was common for priests to try to rush through the mass - I have heard people say that most masses they went to were 20 minutes long. In order to get through the whole liturgy in 20 minutes, the Priest would have to be mumbling quickly in Latin. There wasn't as much call-and-response like there is in the new mass. The experience of many Catholics was: go to Church, pray quietly while listening to a priest mutter to himself for 20 minutes, sometimes receive communion, and walk out.
High masses were glorious time commitments, low masses were checking off a cosmic checklist. Good and holy priests would have good and holy low masses. But there were many priests who did not fill this category, and many priests who felt like there was no point in enunciating a mass spoken in Latin to God instead of in the vernacular to the Congregation.
What was the new mass, the Mass of Paul VI, supposed to look like? Done according to the rubrics, it looks like this. According to the Vatican II document discussing the Liturgy, Sacrosantum Concilium, Latin was still supposed to be given "Pride of Place." Here is how the actual council of Vatican II wanted things to develop:
- Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.
- Sacred scripture is of the greatest importance in the celebration of the liturgy. For it is from scripture that lessons are read and explained in the homily, and psalms are sung; the prayers, collects, and liturgical songs are scriptural in their inspiration and their force, and it is from the scriptures that actions and signs derive their meaning.
- It is to be stressed that whenever rites, according to their specific nature, make provision for communal celebration involving the presence and active participation of the faithful, this way of celebrating them is to be preferred, so far as possible, to a celebration that is individual and quasi-private.
-The sermon, moreover, should draw its content mainly from scriptural and liturgical sources, and its character should be that of a proclamation of God's wonderful works in the history of salvation
- the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites... But since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended. This will apply in the first place to the readings and directives, and to some of the prayers and chants, according to the regulations on this matter to be laid down separately in subsequent chapters.
-The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services. But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations, so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action
At no point do I see anything recommending deploying clowns.
And so it goes for the other Vatican II documents. Individual Catholics took minor developments in a certain direction (often a return to traditions and increased emphasis on teachings from earlier in Church History) and decided to make a complete rupture.
I focused a lot on the Liturgical side to this, but I could make similar write ups on what Vatican II teaches on interpretation of scripture, No Salvation Outside the Church, etc.
I have never had any trouble finding good parishes that mostly abide by the rubrics. Even so, I have noticed an increase in chant and Latin. Parishes have started doing the entrance antiphon - I never heard this as a kid. Our parish has two first-year priests, they seem a lot less gay and more knowledgeable than the older priests. There is a major vibe shift going on.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
Found this resource that seems pretty in depth of who is electable and where they stand:
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
Sometimes I worry that I neglect growing in prayer by focusing on theological and apologetic details, which the Imitation of Christ is pretty harsh about. But Joe Hesmeyer recently said something along the lines of "If you love your wife, you find out everything you can know about her. Same with God." which makes me feel better about all the minutia I've gotten absorbed with.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
Thanks for the correction! If it's a theology or spiritual advice question I've got The Motte covered. When it's a political question... I don't really know.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
Here is what I have heard:
Theologically Conservative Frontrunner: Cardinal Peter Erdo, Archbishop of Budapest, Hungary. Primate of Hungary.
Theologically Centrist Frontrunner: Cardinal Pierbatista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.
Theologically Liberal Frontrunner: Cardinal Tagle, ex-Archbishop of Manilla, Philippines. Currently head of Vatican Evangelization.
There will not be any top-down changes to the Spirit of Vatican II, because the Spirit of Vatican II had nothing to do with the actual documents of Vatican II, which are all fairly benign. The Spirit of Vatican II is going to be demolished over the next twenty years by the rise of young conservative priests.
Going to start following https://x.com/pope_predictor
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
A lot of what you remember about being a kid isn't going to be relevant until your kid's older. Sounds obvious, but it isn't. Even if you had younger siblings, you may have blacked out the first three months of their lives from your memory.
Reading to a baby is a way to get them exposed to the phonology of the language they are immersed in. Genuine baby books that have good rhymes are rare though. Bill Grossman is one of my favorite children's poets, then there's Seuss and Silverstein. At that age it's not really about the pictures yet.
At around 1-2 years old, it's all about the pictures. They can't follow the plot too well, but they will love to point to things and have you say what they are.
Diaper blowouts are a thing that you can't really avoid. Always have a change of clothes for the baby, and maybe a second shirt for you and mommy. If diaper blowouts get common, that is a sign to go a size up on diapers.
The first three months are just about teaching a baby to eat and sleep. Because these things are best learned at home, we don't really travel outside the house without the baby except for maybe a 10 minute walk during their most wakeful time. Doctor visits are the exception and you'll have a ton of them until the baby is 6 months old. If I have to, I'll go shopping with the baby but kids can't sit in grocery cart seats until they are 1 years old.
Lots of parents like to use baby chest carriers. I struggled with "baby wearing."
- Baby is near the boobs and can smell milk. This makes baby hungry and cranky.
- Can't lean forward, it's hard to do things. Some women claim they can do the dishes, sweep the floor, and dance like a Disney princess while baby wearing. I cannot.
- Baby overheats.
- If baby naps in the carrier, they only take a short nap and then are cranky. I've never had a baby nap 1.5 hours in a chest carrier the way they do in their proper bed. (A baby will happily nap in a car seat carrier for hours if you let them.)
- If you get two kids, and the older one needs to be picked up, you can't. A stroller keeps my arms free.
I recommend getting a stroller system that works with your car seat. Baby falls asleep in the car and then you can transfer the car seat to a stroller. Baby stays asleep up until the doctor's testing reflexes.
Books I read and stuck with me:
Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct by Abigail Tucker. Talks about the changes that will happen with your wife. It's almost as significant as a second puberty and comes with many challenges and benefits.
Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman. What sets this apart from a lot of baby books is that it suggests relaxing and not trying to deliver the perfect experience to your children is how to raise the happiest children.
Babywise - the most controversial book ever and you can probably get a lot of the good advice elsewhere, but here are the good things I got from it:
- Sometimes we wake a baby if the time is appropriate.
- Babies are just like humans in that they will get hungry and sleepy at around the same times every day, if you are consistent in feeding them and getting them sleep at around the same times every day. Not so much in the <3 months age range, but 4 months and older for sure.
- Nursing should take 20 ish minutes, switch sides and interact with the baby to keep the baby awake, don't let the baby snack on foremilk and never get hind milk.
- Burping works by consolidating little bubbles into bigger bubbles. I feel like my technique improved once I understood that.
- The schedules in the book were helpful guides.
In the end, the baby year is the hardest, and the first baby is the hardest. But babies are pretty simple. The complicated stuff comes when you try to figure out what "Authoritative" parenting means.
The only thing I can recommend for the Toddler years is to repeat back what you think the kid is saying before responding to it. A lot of preschool/toddler conversations go:
"I Want X"
"We need to do Y instead."
"I want X!!!"
"We need to do Y instead. Don't you want Y?"
"I Want X!!!"
"I know you want X. X is really great. I'm sorry we can't do X right now."
"OK."
With and adult, they would understand that when you bring up Y you're also addressing X. But a toddler doesn't make that connection, especially when they're emotional. Sometimes just addressing X directly, even if you're not adding anything of value, is what they need. They just need to know that you understand them.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
Specifically here, Melito is explicitly talking about Jews. There may be some devotional aspect intended, that recalls to us our sins and their consequences, but look at the context:
O Israel, what have you done?
Is it not written for you: "You shall not spill innocent blood"
so that you might not die the death of the wicked?
"I" said Israel. "I killed the Lord."
Why? "Because he had to die"
You have erred, O Israel, to reason so
about the slaughter of the Lord.
He had to suffer, but not through you.
He had to be dishonored, but not by you.
He had to be judged, but not by you.
He had to be hung up, but not by you and by your right hand.
This, O Israel, is the cry with which you should have called to God:
"O master, if your son should suffer,
and this is your will,
let him suffer indeed, but not by me.
Let him suffer through foreigners,
let him be judged by the uncircumcised,
let him be nailed in place by a tyrannical right hand,
not mine."
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
7d ago
He had to suffer, but not through you.
He had to be dishonored, but not by you.
He had to be judged, but not by you.
He had to be hung up, but not by you and by your right hand.
Melito of Sardis, "On Pascha," writing sometime between 120-160.
It's important to remember that Christianity rejects Consequentialism - even if God can bring good from evil, it's still bad to be the one whose hands are in the cookie jar. It was God's role to save, not humanity's role to pin Him down into a specific method of salvation.
Indeed: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5364502/trump-bukele-el-salvador-deportation
"The question is preposterous: how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?" Bukele said.
And video, the quote goes longer: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1911845751606423938
"We're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. You want us to go back to releasing criminals, so we go back to being the murder capitol of the world?"
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
For future's sake, I lost the bet and paid up. Never been happier to lose a bet.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
I was referring to European countries making it almost impossible to fire an employee without a solid record of misbehavior and prior notice.
America decides, "We will only have free trade with countries that maintains worker accidents under a certain threshold and has solid enforcement against slave labor on exports."
Then Europe says, "We'll make our own free trade organization with countries that have a good enough social safety net and do not allow companies to fire their employees willy nilly." And the US gets kicked out of the global trade anyways.
Except that would never happen, because they would love to sell to us. It's mostly a thought experiment to try to assess where the line is that we wouldn't' allow countries to cross. China at one end, Canada at the other, where is the line drawn?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
Thank you for hearing me out, I was worried I came across as too harsh, but it looks like I'm only medium harshness comparatively.
If you ever want to talk with someone about your doubts, philosophy, the Bible, etc, feel free to DM me. I also highly recommend Jimmy Akin for a rational (though he was doing it before the Rationalists, he's just likely autistic) explanation of Catholic teaching. And I have Joe Heshmeyer and Dr. Brant Pitre to thank for making the Bible seem coherent and reasonable. All three are all over Youtube and have books out.
One of the biggest difficulties smart people run into with Catholicism is that a lot of what you find in books and online is classified as "acceptable theological opinion." It's a small "t" tradition and hasn't been made dogma. Even a Nihil Obistat on a book doesn't mean that everything in it is 100% dogmatically true, it simply means "nothing (currently) obstructs," there's no outright heresy in it. That doesn't stop people from acting like their particular theological hobby horse is 100% set in stone and disagreeing with it is tantamount to leaving the Catholic faith.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
Yes, this is true. I would be for a kind of trade union that where the main requirement for entry is not exploiting their workers or environments (and maybe combined with a military pact.) Of course, the EU might have a different understanding of what that means than the US...
I don't know if this is because you're a convert, but it seems like your problems are not with the Catholic Faith, it's with the people in the pews next to you. Ultimately, I only really need from the Church access to the Sacraments. 99% of my spiritual development has happened at home. How often do you go to Confession and receive Communion in a state of Grace?
I recommend reading Fire Within to see what the end result of spiritual progress would look like. Having an idea of the goal in mind can help a lot. If you already have a goal, what is it? From what you wrote, it seems like your biggest goal of becoming Catholic was to flee an Atheistic Identity while still holding Atheistic Suppositions about the world.
There have been times and parishes where I don't interact with anyone at all, pray silently instead of paying attention to the homily, receive the sacraments, and walk away. It's wonderful when the Church can also provide social opportunities, but it's not often that this happens.
Augustine and Aquinas are not infallible and their philosophy isn't infallible. The Church has not committed herself to their philosophy, even in cases where she uses the phrase "Transubstantiation" there is no commitment to the Accidents/Substance distinction of Aquinas.
If you really need a change of scenery (and a church that doesn't treat Aquinas like Scripture) see if there are any Eastern Catholic churches near you. A benefit of finding an Eastern Catholic Church over converting to Orthodoxy is that Orthodoxy will make you go through initiation again, while you'll be able to just go to an Eastern Catholic Church without a fuss. But I would rather you try Orthodoxy than disappear.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
11d ago
- Comparative advantage. The essential idea is that each country produces things it is good at and exchanges them for things it isn’t good at. If you reduce trade by creating tariffs, that makes everyone poorer. I won’t dwell on this because there are many good explanations of comparative advantage on the web.
The thing I haven't seen anyone really address is that usually, the Comparative Advantage in question is lax safety and environmental laws. Sure, we have less land well-suited for Cocoa plants than South America. But the reason why it's cheaper to build a factory in China than the US is because China has no qualms with forced labor, unsafe conditions, and pollution. The government of China is able to force people to produce things that there is no demand for, including brand new ghost cities.
Are people just ok with this, morally and ethically? Is there any concern that this is a strategy that China has been employing to explicitly hollow out the American Industrial Capability which won WWII for the Allies?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
16d ago
I don't know if it makes it better. "At the time I had no idea I'd cancel the reciprocal tariffs a couple hours later!" But of course, it's also all according to plan.
If you would like something more like a newspaper article, this is a good summary of several cases: https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/A_Protestant_Looks_at_Lourdes.pdf
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