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Author Topic: Shooting stars and satellites  (Read 1695 times)

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Offline Ladislaus

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Re: Shooting stars and satellites
« Reply #30 on: May 07, 2024, 11:45:54 PM »
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  • No it is not.
    Nevertheless, the better question is: why was Enoch disqualified? Some non-canonical books ("Apocrypha") are completely trustworthy, but the Catholic Church never ruled that they were "inspired by the Holy Ghost AND were always part of Scripture".

    Let's just say "not chosen for the Canon of Scripture" doesn't mean "burn it with fire!". Think of all the non-Canonical books written by man (not the Holy Ghost) are praiseworthy to read: The Imitation of Christ, Intro to the Devout Life, the Summa Theologica, etc.

    There is a huge variety among the Apocrypha: Some of the books are erroneous and filled with heresies. Others just didn't quite make the cut. Maybe they appeared too late, and the Church erred on the side of caution. Or maybe there was an issue with translations, and the Church couldn't de-tangle the mess. There are 99 reasons why a given book could have been excluded from the Canon. Heretical content is only one of them.

    Indeed.  I think that people misread a false dichtomy between being in Sacred Scripture and being fake or garbage.  For inclusion in Sacred Scripture, something has to be inspired and have as its author the Holy Ghost.  It's very possible that St. Paul, for instance, over his many years, wrote a TON of material, and many letters, outside of that which became Sacred Scripture.  But not everything he ever wrote was inspired.  If some such writing were found, it wouldn't mean that it was fake or that it was filled with errors.  Nor would it mean that it was inspired, just because he wrote it.  It simply means that he wasn't being inspired every single time he took pen to paper.  Some early Fathers considered the First Epistle of Pope St. Clement I to have been inspired, part of Scripture.  It didn't make the cut, the Church's decision under the influence of the Holy Ghost.  But it is most certainly genuine and most certainly filled with truth.  Just wasn't inspired, aka written, by the Holy Ghost.  Book of Enoch is in a very similar position.  Many Church Fathers believed that it should have been part of the Sacred Scriptures, and it was even directly quoted in the New Testament.  It just didn't make the cut into Sacred Scripture because the Church did not discern that it was written or inspired by the Holy Ghost.  But it could very possibly go back to Enoch (at least as an oral tradition), and could contain a lot of solid information derived from "primitive revelation", the first fullness of knowledge about the natural world in the possession of Adam and Eve.  Certainly the Church Fathers held it to have some authority, even if it wasn't the direct authority of God inspiring.  Lest you think oral tradition is unreliable, the Greek Epic Poem, The Iliad, was passed on for centuries between "bards" by oral tradition.  It consisted of nearly 200,000 words, or about 12,000 pages (give or take, given page size), and The Odyseey was about 135,000 words.  Both these were memorized at least by a bard (public perfomer / singer / story-teller) named Homer, though much of it likely predates him by centuries.  Even in recent days they have found formerly-undiscovered tribes who had similar story-tellers who memorized stuff almost of the same magnitude.  And for centuries and millennia, since there was no historical record about the city of Troy around which The Iliad revolved, it was dismissed as fiction ... until it was discovered by archaeologists.  There's a lot of actual and real history there.  Literacy has actually militated against our capacity to commit things to memory, and these Epic Poems used their meter and rhyme as mneumonic devices to help the bards remember them.  So whenever I see modern "scholars" claim that, ah, this book wasn't written by Moses but rather centuries later, I find that to be a complete joke.  Just because the first known MANUSCRIPTS they can find date to centuries later absolutely does not mean that there weren't either lost manuscripts or a reliable / memorized oral tradition.  Pontifical Biblical Commission held that Catholics must accept the Tradition that the Pentateuch was writtten by Moses ... despite the scoffing of modern so-called / pseudo- scholars, who are just thinly-veiled atheists.  By now, there are probably only a small handful of early-printed Douay Bibles floating around, but tons of copies, from those printed by TAN Books and many others.  Let's say another few hundred years go by, and none of the early copies remain, for whatever reason, but archeologists uncover pages from a TAN books edition ... and claim that the Douy Rheims was written by some guy named Thomas Nelson in the 20th century.  That's a perfect analogy with what these clowns are doing.


    Offline SimpleMan

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    Re: Shooting stars and satellites
    « Reply #31 on: May 08, 2024, 12:32:04 AM »
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  • No it is not.
    Nevertheless, the better question is: why was Enoch disqualified? Some non-canonical books ("Apocrypha") are completely trustworthy, but the Catholic Church never ruled that they were "inspired by the Holy Ghost AND were always part of Scripture".

    Let's just say "not chosen for the Canon of Scripture" doesn't mean "burn it with fire!". Think of all the non-Canonical books written by man (not the Holy Ghost) are praiseworthy to read: The Imitation of Christ, Intro to the Devout Life, the Summa Theologica, etc.

    There is a huge variety among the Apocrypha: Some of the books are erroneous and filled with heresies. Others just didn't quite make the cut. Maybe they appeared too late, and the Church erred on the side of caution. Or maybe there was an issue with translations, and the Church couldn't de-tangle the mess. There are 99 reasons why a given book could have been excluded from the Canon. Heretical content is only one of them.

    Exactly.  If I'm understanding matters correctly, the Church does not say that books outside the Canon were definitely not "the inspired Word of God", just that she was, at the end of the day, unable to proclaim infallibly that they were.  

    As I always say, Scripture is really just part of Tradition, the part that was canonized as being the true Word of God.  Other books can be read with profit, and weighed against the analogia fidei.  If they do agree with the analogia fidei, then they could have been inspired, but the Holy Ghost did not give the Church enough evidence to make that call.  The Orthodox, and especially the Ethiopians, have extra books in their canons, and those books probably don't contain anything contrary to the Faith, again, the Catholic Church erred on the side of caution by not declaring them to be Sacred Scripture.