Who You Callin' "Christian?"

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The more I read the comments made in response to posts like this one, the more I wonder how Catholics can consider themselves to be “Christians?” It becomes obvious that the most “Catholic” among them just don’t get it.

But when the Supreme Pontiff of their church is prancing around a huge castle, encrusted in gold and laden-down with jewels, I guess this is not surprising.

It is no wonder that they regard “proof-texting” with fear and loathing.

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Reflections: The Loyal Opposition

I've been wanting to post something about the book on Martin Luther that I'm reading. The work traces the development over time of Luther's Theology of the Cross. The problem has been that Luther's been having a new insight every two or three pages, so anything I might write concerning today's reading would need to be revised tomorrow. As a result, I've decided that I'll wait until I've finished the whole thing to reflect on it.

Meanwhile I've been out roaming around the cybersphere, leaving my contrarian observations in the comment boxes of several other blogs:

I've been discussing the best way to talk to disbelievers in the comments section of the November 8th post, "My Latest for Catholic Exchange" at Catholic and Enjoying It.

At What's Wrong With the World I've been commenting sagely on the genetic basis of racism and its implications for a Brave New World scenario to come.

The owner of The Catholic Libertarian, a title which I have characterized as oxymoronic, has had to put up with my dubiety regarding his posts on the Jihad and Mother Teresa's dark night of the soul.

I've also been very briefly involved in a set of rather eclectic comments at Postmodern Papist.

Finally, I've been boycotting my former home-away-from-home Ragged Thots in a fit of pique. But you shouldn't. Go there and make yourself heard. Really. Just do it.

Why I am Here

I enjoy being a disembodied consciousness. I like to express what is in my mind, and on my mind, without having my thought-words colored and reworked by the perceptions, opinions, or preconceptions of who I am that may develop in the minds or emotions of my interlocutors, based on how I look and sound--my style, my body language, my physical beauty, or lack thereof--or upon any relationship that is on-going in the material world.

It has been my habit for some time to rise at 4:00 a.m. in order to read and think, while most of the world sleeps silently in the darkness without. Not long after instituting this practice, I began taking notes on my readings, jotting down those things which resonated, or harmonized, with something already intellectually, or spiritually, internalized, and thus perceived as partaking of Truth. I now plan to incorporate some of that material here. In this way, I will slowly sketch in the outlines of the self-portrait of a mind.

Should any other cognitive entity somehow stumble across this site and wish to visit for the purpose of discussing what is posted here, such discourse will be welcomed:

[The master of dialectic] must be able to distinguish the essential nature of Goodness, isolating it from all other Forms; he must fight his way through all criticisms, determined to examine every step by the standard, not of appearances and opinions, but of reality and truth, and win through to the end without sustaining a fall. If he cannot do this, he will know neither Goodness itself nor any good thing; if he does lay hold upon some semblance of good, it will be only a matter of belief, not of knowledge; and he will dream away his life in a sleep which has no awakening on this side of that world of Death where he will sleep at last for ever.
--The Republic of Plato, chapter XXVII