How can the Vatican justify its wealth?

And they back trump who thinks he still won an election, used foreign powers to help and starts an insurrection. Wow, what constitution do conservatives follow. The one written for the apartheid government of South Africa or the USSR.

 

Something like a central gov you hate over local and state govts ? Why wouldn’t you feel the same towards a central control in freakin Rome as you do for Wash.DC....no different. The fed does the same thing as the Vatican does according to your description. It collects money from the donor states and distributes it to the poorer red states......just like the Vatican.

 

I’m sorry. That’s not the way I remember the story line. Jesus WAS a Jew. Many who believed in him were Jews. They even called him the “king of Jews”.
His early followers had no intent of forming a different religion when many were Jews
.The Gentiles May have been a non Jewish entity, but his followers certainly had included a lot of Jews. Like, the apostles and Jesus were all Jews, they worshiped together in a Jewish temple !

 

International brainwashing fund. The church thrives and spreads fastest to those living in desperation. So here's some soup, and a Bible.

The church actually does help a lot of downtrodden folks. It is an open question if that offsets them taking advantage of the desperate.

A more extreme case using the same tactic is Isis. They do charity work too, and recruit the young and desperate.

Spreading ideology is easiest to those who are desperate and hardest to those who are comfortable.

That's why I support secular groups like doctors without borders, etc. Lift people up without the brainwashing, and they become more resistant to brainwashing from others.

 

How can you call showing love and compassion towards others brainwashing, when the sole purpose of Christianity is to save souls and to give people internal peace and eternal life?

Excuse me, wasn't Jesus tortured and killed because He wasn't the political 'this world' leader the Jews wanted to free them from Rome, but instead came to tell people how they can unite with their Creator when they die and attain eternal life?

Not just Saint Peter but all the Apostles as well as the Saints that came after them, otherwise Christianity would not have spread. Saint Francis also had a massive following as did other Saints in Italy as well as Saints like John Kronstadt in Russia.

The miracles that I posted and which I'm reposting below are just 3 of the over 12 thousands 'miraculous' cures and you're saying that they are mass hysteria or can occur with nothing more than healing drugs. And what about the X-rays of the terminally ill cancer patients? Are the X-rays also susceptible to mass hysteria and healing drugs?

You're just denying the obvious, so what do you gain from that? As for me, I think it's nice that when in desperation, a person can turn to their 'life giving' source. As for the priest, it's his faith that's curing them. He had Leukemia when young and couldn't see or even stand straight and was given no chance of survival when he was cured by a Saintly woman with a Cross.

She had mutiple sclerosis and couldn't walk.

This girl was blind and can now see.


He had terminal cancer and was cured.

 

What’s your point ? No, X-rays aren’t susceptible to mass hysteria. I don’t know what you’re trying to say, other then, all these miracles are not proven. They are not set for scrutiny or verification.

 

Wrong.

Poops and all clergy married. That is historical fact. Poop Adrian was married and had a daughter.

But, thanks for letting us know your uninformed on the subject matter.

Wrong.

The first poop was Pope John, formerly the Bishop of Rome. He was made poop in March, 533 CE, by an edict issued by Emperor Justinian which said:

"Justinian: victor, pius [sic], fortunate, ever Augustus, to John, the most holy Archbishop and patriarch of the noble city of Rome. Paying honor to the Apostolic See and to Your Holiness, as always has been and is our desire, and honoring your Blessedness as a father, we hasten to bring to the knowledge of Your Holiness all that pertains to the condition of the churches , since it has always been our great aim to safeguard the unity of your Apostolic See and the position of the holy churches of God which now prevails and abides securely without any disturbing trouble. Therefore we have been sedulous to subject and unite all the priests of the Orient throughout its whole extent to the See of Your Holiness. Whatever questions happen to be mooted at present , we have thought necessary to be brought to Your Holiness' knowledge, however clear and unquestionable they might be, and though firmly held and taught by all the clergy in accordance with the doctrine of Your Apostolic See; for we do not suffer that anything which is moored to Your Holiness, however clear and unquestionable, pertaining to the state of the churches, should fail to be known to Your Holiness, as being the head of all the churches. For as we have said before, we are zealous for the increase of the honor and authority of your See in all respects."

Emperor Justinian sends a letter a few days later to Epiphanius, which states that John the Bishop of Rome is now the "head of all Bishops and the true and effective corrector of heretics."

Prior to that, all churches were independent and there was no poop.

It was John who transformed his church into an imperial entity paralleling the titles, positions and geographic partitions of the former Western Roman Empire.

As I said, a diocese is not an Imperial Roman Catholic creation, rather it was political subdivision with the Roman Empire.

I just proved you wrong using historical documents.

Jesus didn't need to redeem anyone, since everyone who wanted to be redeemed was redeemed by the high priest on the Day of Atonement and you didn't need to be a Hebrew, or even be in Jerusalem on the Day of Atonement to be redeemed.

Your inability to understand the Hebrew texts is disturbing to say the least, but then you obviously have an aversion to historical research.

Wrong. Some x-tians have deluded themselves into believing that, but not all of them.

In plain English: The Jews who knew and understood the Hebrew texts rejected Jesus because he did not fulfill any of the prophecies while non-Jews who knew nothing about the Hebrew texts got hoodwinked into believing Jesus did fulfill the prophecies.

Do you not see a problem with your claim?

That's like someone who has orbited Earth in space flat out rejects any claim the Earth is flat while someone who lived in a cave all their life readily believes the Earth is flat.

I did not name the church as Roman Catholic. The poops did that and historical fact proves the Imperial Roman Catholic Church was modeled on the Imperial Roman Empire.

The poops said that, so are you call them liars?

Except the 10 Commandments were written by the Egyptians long, long before Abram/Abraham had sex with this half-sister Serai/Sarah.

Are you claiming your god-thing created the Jews to adopt the morality of the Egyptians?

The two groups on this Earth who did the most irreparable harm to Humanity were the Imperial Roman Catholic Church and the Greeks in that order.

The single most important thing that anyone could do that would have the most lasting positive impact and benefit to Humanity would be to time travel back to 800 CE and genocide the Greek race.

Once you wipe out the Greeks, then there is no one to concoct Hell, or a soul, and no Flat-Earth nonsense and no Earth is the center of the Universe with the Sun orbiting Earth nonsense and none of the other idiotic nonsense that originated with the Greeks.

 

The obvious to you is word of mouth. We’ll accept , magic healing miracles when they pass the scrutiny of the scientific method. My life giving source was mom and dad, not the Catholic Church.

 

The sole purpose of Islam is the same. The sole purpose of most cults is the same. That does not mean they don't brainwash. That doesn't mean they don't do harm.

I do find it admirable that the church helps the downtrodden. I find it even more admirable when they do it with no strings attached and don't seek any credit for it. The downtrodden are vulnerable, and too often religious groups take advantage of that to gain converts. The Catholic Church has often been on the better end of the spectrum of people abusing this (Isis on the other extreme end of it), but also often not.

So goes the story, along with pushing the concept of vicarious redemption, the concept of original sin, sexual shaming, and on and on it goes.

I thought faith healing was more of a protestant thing.

Next will it be crying statues? Stigmata? Jesus appearing on toast?

 

ha ha, I hear you.
I want to see a series of 100s of these healings take place on demand hundreds of times in front of MDs who performed exams both before and after…….at John’s Hopkins or Mass General or UCLA med or wtf, how about the waiting room of the FDA head quarters in DC.

 

I don't need hundreds of healings. Just show me one well documented case of an amputee growing back a limb. That's a pretty own bar for a God, given that there are animals who can do exactly that without any miracle.

 

Shrines and miraculous cures and Saints/Prophets always existed in Christianity. They still do in the non Protestant world, especially in the Orthodox world - and they always will for God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

But if there weren't any Greeks, then there wouldn't have been a renaissance - or anything else in this world for that matter. Anyway your hatred towards my ethnicity and the insults towards the Pope is quite disturbing, so I'm putting you on ignore because of it.

Oh, and here I thought that Pythagoras was teaching that the earth was round in 500BC, and since the Greek Byzantines only wrote in classical Greek I'm sure they would have known that - after all where did Christopher Columbus (alias Andrea Paleologus, heir to the Byzantine throne), get his map?
But look, thanks for enlightening me.

The Hebrew texts were all translated into Greek in Alexandria in the third century BC by 72 Jewish scholars. It's called the Septuagint and this is the one they were following. That the translations from Hebrew into Greek were all the same was considered miraculous.

This is the OT we follow since we consider it to be the most accurate. All the Jewish texts that are extant today, are of a later date since the originals were destroyed with Jerusalem.

 

All these miracles are proven by the testimonies and the names of doctors and hospitals in Athens, so they're not a deception.

Anyway I want to say that I'm not proslytizing, I mean how could I be when the Orthodox faith, and especially the Greek one is much too culturally alien to the Western world. But it is part of me as much as the American Protestant culture I was raised in.

I just think it would be nice if people, and especially Protestants would start learning their history and the foundation of the Christian world they live it, and that Christianity did not start with Luther and the printing press. It started and took root with the miracles and martyrdom of the Saints.

 

Testimonials ? Ligit evidence for medical “ cures” has nothing to do with testimonials. A testimonial is a
more a character reference. Every known illness has markers using advanced technology before and after any successful treatment. It can be shared thousands of miles away instantaneously.

If there was a ligit cure, they would publish the data for everyone of the markers and send them to every major medical facility world wide for evaluation instantaneously. This isn’t the 12 th century yet you’re talking to us about miracles like it was.

 

Maybe some priests should go on the road. This one missed his calling ?

 

Good to see you Wolverine.....

The Vatican depends on AUTHORITY... and a governmental structure that resembles that of the Roman Empire......
and is by definition a Constitutional Monarchy......
and functions a lot like other constitutional monarchies.....

There is a theory that the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the fledgling Roman Catholic Church of the second and third centuries were terrified of what they saw within the Messianic Jewish movement......
churches taking place within houses......
Jewish women pretty much controlled the houses and so.....
if the wife of the house did not like somebody who wanted to attend church in her house.....
then that person would soon NOT be there.....

In order to put a stop to this they decided to exaggerate certain statements by Paul and ignore lots of statements by or about Cephas Peter and have a celibate priesthood that could be controlled..... and a supposedly celibate groups of women fitted perfectly into the formula that gave the Papacy essentially unchecked POWER........ so...... whatever excuse the Pope would give for great wealth had to be accepted.......

I attempted to write up something on this back over a decade ago......


http://greendesertstoreducecarbon.blogspot.com/

 

So I suppose dogmatic people are addicted to dogs?

 

Indeed. I slam Islam and Atheists are at heists.

 

Any other institution that had been found to exploit minors on such a massive scale would have been dismantled and the officers in jail.

 

Well put!

 

And Protestants are those ants or aunts, that are in favour of tests, namely pro test!

 

The ants go marching one by one hurrah hurrah
The ants to marching one by one hurrah hurrah
Who do they march? Because they are protesting. They are protest ants.

 

And what about those anti-test ants?
What religion do they adhere to?
I hope they are not Anti-Christ ants.

 

Holy ****, do you derail EVERY thread to make it about attacking Jews?

talk about bigoted OCD!!!

 

What "wealth"?
The "wealth" is in the buildings, which are "dead capital" and only cost money.
Who would buy the Vatican buildings?

Step forward!