Almost enough to make me become Catholic again

[Scooter]

Well ok, not really, but I don't think those cardinals had a fucking clue what they were getting when they elected this guy:

Pope Francis has struck a surprisingly conciliatory tone towards atheists and agnostics, saying that God will “forgive” them as long as they behave morally and live according to their consciences.

The unprecedented gesture came as his incoming number two, the Vatican’s newly nominated secretary of state, said the rule that priests should be celibate was not “a dogma of the Church” and could be open for discussion.

Francis, who has won praise for spontaneous and unusual moves during his six-month papacy, wrote a lengthy letter to a newspaper, La Repubblica, which the Italian daily printed over four pages.

“God forgives those who obey their conscience,” he wrote in the letter, the latest example of the markedly different tone and style from his predecessors that he has set since being elected in March.

The 76-year-old pontiff was responding to editorials written in July and August by Eugenio Scalfari, an agnostic and the paper’s founder, in which he was asked whether “the Christian God forgives those who do not believe and do not seek faith”.

Mr Scalfari said he had not expected the Pope to answer “so extensively and so affectionately, with such fraternal spirit”.

The Pope wrote: “The question for those who do not believe in God is to follow their own conscience. Sin, even for a non-believer, is when one goes against one’s conscience.

“To listen and to follow your conscience means that you understand the difference between good and evil.”

[Gob]

Sounds like he's making a play for more bums on pews to me.

[Econoline]

Hey, at least he's not making a play for more bums on, um...other things.




As for the OP... Francis!

(I get your point, Scooter; if I had any belief in a god, I might conclude that the cardinals' choice was indeed divinely inspired.)

[MajGenl.Meade]

Sin, even for a non-believer, is when one goes against one’s conscience.

And the age old question does now have another meaning - is the Pope Catholic?

Sin is (as a cursory review of the instruction manual reveals) to go against God. After all the years of Protestant suspicion that Rome is indeed the whore and beast of Babylon and the seat of anti-Christ, Franco seems determined to prove it.

Now I'm not saying it's impossible that he's correct about the God's forgiveness thing.......... I don't know who else, other than true believers, God may choose to forgive - that's His prerogative. But in this utterance about the nature of sin, the Pope is utterly contradicting the Christian faith and espousing the exact opposite of what it actually is.

When he recently stated that it is not up to him to "judge" homosexuals, he was quite right. Along with all other judgement of the kind it is up to God. And for Rome to wake up and realise that there is absolutely no biblical reason, Godly warrant or dogmatic rule of faith for priests to be unmarried - that's something that may be for the good.

Interesting times
Meade

[rubato]

If he had the military and police assets of an Ayatollah he would be acting just like an Ayatollah.

2,000 years of history says so.

yrs,
rubato

[Lord Jim]

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome once again to:

GREAT MOMENTS IN STUPIDITY!

If he had the military and police assets of an Ayatollah he would be acting just like an Ayatollah.

2,000 years of history says so.

yrs,
rubato

[Scooter]

Sounds like he's making a play for more bums on pews to me.

I really don't think so. I'm sure he wishes there were more bums in the pews, but none of the remarks he has made since becoming pope have struck me as being calculated in any way, he really does seem (to me) as being genuinely forthright about what he believes.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I agree with scooter.

[Joe Guy]

The Pope wrote: “The question for those who do not believe in God is to follow their own conscience. Sin, even for a non-believer, is when one goes against one’s conscience.

He is consistent because I'm sure he believes that God installed a conscience in those non-believers.

[Big RR]

the Pope is utterly contradicting the Christian faith and espousing the exact opposite of what it actually is

The exact opposite? How so?

[MajGenl.Meade]

Sin is not definable in Christian terms as "when one goes against one's own conscience".

Sin is (as a cursory review of the instruction manual reveals) to go against God.

Quoting my own above post, Big RR.

I do agree that conscience may be defined as a person’s inner awareness of conforming to the will of God or departing from it, resulting in either a sense of approval or condemnation and that may perhaps be what the Pope alluded to.

For instance, God to an unbeliever:

Gen 20:6 Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me; therefore I did not let you touch her" (RSV) My emphasis. Here God recognises that Abimelech did indeed follow his own conscience and credits him for that - but reminds him that sin is against God, not is conscience. In this case, God enabled Abimelech's conscience. Could He do that for others? Certainly. I'm not denying that conscience is a gift of God to all, believers and otherwise.

Again, in a similar vein:
1Jn 3:119-23 "By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.  Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God;  and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.  And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us"

John writes, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that "our heart" (I take this to mean conscience among other things) can and does condemn us, requiring our reassurance from God. Christian confidence comes from God by doing that which pleases Him - which is to keep His commandments, to believe in Christ and to love one another. To not believe is therefore itself a sin. But this probably does not trouble an unbeliever's conscience - not until the conviction of sin is truly felt.

Sin is not defined by us. It is defined by God. It is in comparison to His holiness that ours is to be measured. As Paul says in 1 Cor 4:4, he's not aware of any strikes against himself but he is not the judge - God is.

Meade

[Joe Guy]

So, according to God, a non believer who goes against his own conscience is guilty of a sin against God.

What's wrong with the pope's statement?

[Lord Jim]

I'm sure he believes that God installed a conscience in those non-believers.

I think that nails it.

[MajGenl.Meade]

So, according to God, a non believer who goes against his own conscience is guilty of a sin against God.

What's wrong with the pope's statement?

(Sigh). The standard by which sin is measured is NOT my conscience (or yours).

On the one hand, I may be a terrible sinner and unconscious of it. I may be an outright atheist and find all manner of things that God would call "sin" to be totally unbothering to MY conscience. I may be a Christian, think that my conscience is clear and all the time I've been doing some thing(s) wrong in God's sight. The nutters of that awful Westboro thing surely do not violate their own consciences when they clearly do sin against God. So too a non-believer who says "I think I will do X" and then says "That isn't against my conscience, so doing X must not be a sin" is a very deluded person.

On the other hand, it may be that a non-believer who violates his or her own conscience is sinning against God - but only where that consciousness of sin is identical to (i.e. originates in) an awareness that the "sin" is against God - not against their own conscience. That's what God told Abimelech.

What is wrong with the Pope's statement is that he (carelessly in my view, rather than maliciously) indicates that a person's own conscience is itself the measure by which sin is to be determined. In making an incomplete statement, a false theology of sin is put forward, giving comfort to the enemy (that would be the S word guy).

That it leads to error is evidenced by the very existence of this thread. Scooter says rather lightly (and tongue in cheeks) that such statements are "almost enough to make me become Catholic". He understands very well that his conscience is clear on certain things and THEREFORE he is NOT sinning against God, according to a very natural (and correct) understanding of the logical outworking of the Pope's imperfect statement about sin. His interpretation is sound

Meade

[Joe Guy]

What is wrong with the Pope's statement is that he (carelessly in my view, rather than maliciously) indicates that a person's own conscience is itself the measure by which sin is to be determined. In making an incomplete statement, a false theology of sin is put forward, giving comfort to the enemy (that would be the S word guy).

Sigh... Pope Frank didn't say that that a person's own conscience is itself the measure by which sin is to be determined. You did.

I mean, you said that is what El Pope meant.

He also said "God forgives those who obey their conscience'. So with that statement he's only talking about non-believers who have a conscience. He's not making conscience the determining factor for all sins.

Scooter says rather lightly (and tongue in cheeks) that such statements are....

I'm pretty sure that the Pope still believes that tongue in cheeks is a sin...

[Sue U]

What a delightful and highly appropriate topic for Yom Kippur, beginning this evening (already upon you Down Under). In my (Jewish) tradition, there are a variety of views on the nature and meaning of sin. Here are two, one from the Masorti (Conservative egalitarian) movement and one from the Orthodox/Hasidic (Lubavitcher) school of thought. (I couldn't readily find anything appropriate from my particular denomination; draw from that whatever conclusions you may ):

The Jewish View of Sin

By Rabbi Dr. Reuven Hammer

Judaism teaches that human beings are not basically sinful. We come into the world neither carrying the burden of sin committed by our ancestors nor tainted by it. Rather, sin, het, is the result of our human inclinations, the yetzer, which must be properly channeled.

Het literally means something that goes astray. It is a term used in archery to indicate that the arrow has missed its target. This concept of sin suggests a straying from the correct ways, from what is good and straight. Can humans be absolved of their failure and rid themselves of their guilt? The ideology of Yom Kippur answers: Yes.

These concepts are already found in biblical stories, including those at the beginning of the Torah, those concerning Israel and its sins in the wilderness, and in the teachings of the prophets. These writings contemplate the nature of human beings, the meaning of sin, and the possibility of forgiveness. The early stories in Genesis teach that the "devisings [yetzer] of man's mind are evil from his youth" (Gen. 8:21). This is the source of the rabbinic concept of the yetzer, human instincts, similar to the Freudian id. Later, the rabbis spoke of the yetzer ha‑tov, the good inclination, and the yetzer ha‑ra, the evil inclination.

The word "forgiveness" or "pardon" (in Hebrew, s‑l‑h) appears for the first time in the story of the golden calf: "Pardon our iniquity and our sin" (Exod. 34:9).The story of the spies contains a similar idea: "Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to Your great kindness, as You have tolerated [carried] this people ever since Egypt" (Num. 13:5). This text is followed by the verse that is central to the Yom Kippur liturgy: "And the Lord said, 'I pardon, as you have asked'" (Num. 14:37).

These narratives establish the concept of the God of Israel as a God of mercy and forgiveness. In revealing His nature to Moses, God indicates His forgiving nature much more fully than He did in the Ten Commandments. God emphasizes mercy, "carrying sin" and extending lovingkindness far beyond the extent of punishment. Thus, Moses learns that God's essence is not only His absolute Being and His absolute freedom, but His fundamental mercy. It is not surprising that the passage in which these attributes of God are detailed (Exod. 34:6‑7) became the cornerstone of the liturgy of forgiveness during the High Holy Day season.

In rabbinic Judaism, these ideas evolved into the concept of the two attributes of God, the attribute of justice and the attribute of mercy, the latter being the dominant mode of God's activity. The Mesillat Yesharim [an 18th century work of ethical literature] suggested that the attribute of mercy means that God gives respite to the sinner, not meting out His full punishment at once, but granting the sinner the opportunity to repent and thus be rid of the power of the evil inclination.

Source.

What Is Sin?

By Yanki Tauber

Like almost everything else, it depends on who you ask.

The Midrash (Yalkut Shimoni on Psalms 25) describes a sort of "panel discussion" in which this question is posed to four different authorities -- Wisdom, Prophecy, Torah and G-d -- each of whom gives a different definition of sin.

According to Wisdom sin is a harmful deed. According to Prophecy it is death. Torah sees it as folly. And G-d sees it as an opportunity.

The philosophical view of sin is that it is a bad idea, like walking barefoot in the snow or eating too many fatty foods. If you do bad things, bad things will happen to you.

Does this mean that Someone sits up there, tabulating sins and dispensing punishments? Well, yes, though it is not as simplistic as a vengeful G-d getting even with His little earth creatures for daring to defy His instructions. Is frostbite G-d's punishment for that barefooted walk in the snow? Is heart disease G-d's revenge for a high cholesterol diet? Ultimately it is, if you accept that everything that happens, happens because G-d wants it to happen. But what it really means is that G-d has established certain "laws of nature" that describe the patterns of His actions upon our existence. There are physical laws of nature -- the ones that scientists measure and hypothesize. There are also spiritual laws of nature, which dictate that spiritually beneficial deeds bring spiritual benefit, and spiritually detrimental deeds cause spiritual harm. And since our physical existence derives from and mirrors the spiritual reality, a person's spiritual and moral behavior ultimately affects his physical life as well.

Thus King Solomon (who is the source of the "Wisdom" perspective in the above Midrash) states in the book of Proverbs: "Evil pursues iniquity."

"Prophecy" takes this a step further. Sin is not only a harmful deed -- it is the ultimately harmful deed. Prophecy (which represents the apogee of man's endeavor to commune with G-d) defines "life" as connection with G-d. Sin--man's turning away from G-d--is a disruption of this connection. Hence, sin is death.

Torah agrees that sin is a harmful deed. It also agrees that it's a disruption of the flow of life from Creator to creation. Indeed, Torah is the source of both Wisdom's perspective and Prophesy's perspective on sin. But Torah also goes beyond them both in recognizing that the soul of man would never willingly and consciously do such a stupid thing.

Sin, says Torah, is an act of folly. The soul loses its head, and in a moment of irrationality and cognitive confusion does something that is contrary to its own true desire. So sin can be transcended, when the soul recognizes and acknowledges the folly of its transgressions and reasserts its true will. Then the true self of the soul comes to light, revealing that the sin was in fact committed only by the soul's most external, malleable self, while its inner self was never involved in the first place.

And what does G-d say? G-d, of course, invented the laws of nature (both physical and spiritual) and the Wisdom that recognizes how they operate. G-d is the source of life, and it is He who decreed that it should flow to the human soul via a channel constructed (or disrupted) by the deeds of man. And G-d gave us the Torah and its formulae for spiritual sanity, self-discovery and transcendence. So G-d is the source of the first three perspectives on sin.

But there is a fourth perspective that is G-d's alone: sin as the opportunity for "return" (teshuvah).

Teshuvah is a process that, in its ultimate form, empowers us to not only transcend our failings but to also redeem them: to literally travel back in time and redefine the essential nature of a past deed, transforming it from evil to good.

To achieve this, we first have to experience the act of transgression as a negative thing. We have to agonize over the utter devastation it has wrecked on our soul. We have to recognize, disavow and renounce its folly. Only then can we can go back and change what we did.

So is sin a bad, harmful deed? Is it the very face of death? Is it mere stupidity, to be shrugged off by an inherently wise and pristine soul? Is it a potent opportunity for conquest and growth? Turns out, it's all four. But it can only be the fourth if it's also the first three.

Source.

[Gob]

What a delightful and highly appropriate topic for Yom Kippur, beginning this evening (already upon you Down Under).

Oh bugger, should I be wearing a hat or something?

[Sue U]

Why, is your head cold?

[Joe Guy]

Oh bugger, should I be wearing a hat or something?

Yes-a you shoulda wear a hat-a

But it-a musta be-a two-a tone.

[RayThom]

The Pope Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It. Galilei 2:15-64

Now let's move on to more important religious matters. Do dogs go to heaven... and will they need a crate and pooper-scooper?