The Pontifical Biblical Commission issued a decision more than a century ago titled “Concerning the Historical Nature of the First Three Chapters of Genesis” (1909)

It is worth reading:

The first three chapters of Genesis contain narratives of real events, no myths, no mere allegories or symbols of religious truths and no legends.

In regard to those facts, which touch the foundations of the Christian religion, the literal historical sense is to be adhered to. Such facts are, inter alia [among other things], the creation of all things by God in the beginning of time and the special creation of humanity.

It is not necessary to understand all individual words and sentences in the literal sense.

Passages that are variously interpreted by the Fathers and by theologians may be interpreted according to one’s own judgment with the reservation, however, that one submits one’s judgment to the decision of the Church and to the dictates of the faith.

As the sacred writer had not the intention of representing with scientific accuracy the intrinsic constitution of things and the sequence of the works of creation, but of communicating knowledge in a popular way suitable to the idiom and to the pre-scientific development of his time, the account is not to be regarded or measured as if it were couched in language that is strictly scientific.

The word “day” need not be taken in the literal sense of a natural day of 24 hours, but can also be understood in the improper sense of a longer space of time.

So there it is: Genesis is real, but not a science text.

God created all things, and humans special.

We may judge carefully on our own, as long as we remain faithful to the magisterium, should a decree on evolution ever be issued — and there will no such decree as long as the answers are ambiguous.

Full article

Editor’s note: Bold and italic emphasis, mine.

Scientist: The Tower of Babel and one ancient, common human language is not just a myth.

The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.

Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as “mother,” “to pull” and “man,” which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucuses or the modern-day country of Georgia.

The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.

“We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age,” said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

Link

Finally refuting the improbable “myth”: The Grandpa Joe Delusion.

Fort Lauderdale, FL–As debate continued over whether or not it was appropriate for members of the Hamilton residence to discuss the topic of Grandpa Joe in the home, family atheist Rob Hamilton, 29, argued with family members that they had absolutely zero “rock-hard evidence” proving the existence of his so-called “grandpa.”

Hamilton told a gathering at the annual Hamilton Family Reunion that he has in fact definitively disproven the existence of his grandfather, and planned to reveal his findings in his new book, The Grandpa Joe Delusion.

“In my book, I eviscerate the major arguments for the existence of my grandpa and I demonstrate the supreme improbability that we actually have one in the family,” Hamilton told family members gathered around a picnic table. “Furthermore, I show how a belief in this supposed grandfather that many of us has never even seen or heard from has fueled turmoil in the family, causing conflicts that would never have arisen if we all accepted that there is no Grandpa Joe.

Read more

Editor’s note: This begs the question: Is it possible for a Jesuit to also be an atheist?

Postmodern liberal leaders insist that everyone should invent his own truth – yet also demand that everyone should conform to their code of political correctness.

Postmodern liberals still believe Schleiermacher’s dictum. Situational ethics, moral relativism, and the cultural relativism of truth claims are based on the idea that the truth must be discovered subjectively.

The relativism of truth claims made it possible for idealist philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1834) to invent his own cosmos. He argued that the truth changes over time in accordance with his theory of historicism. However, historicism is logically impossible.

No cosmos can exist in which every individual invents his own truth claims. Historicists believe that each generation must subjectively discover its own truth. However, a generation seeking truth subjectively could never agree on its own truth claims because the subjective search for truth requires each person to invent his own truth. Hegel could not invent his own cosmos without implicitly inviting everyone to invent their own cosmos. Any society that invites its people to do this will shatter into fragments and collapse.

Read more

Scientist: Tower of Babel and one ancient common human language not just a myth.

The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.

Now, researchers have reconstructed words, such as “mother,” “to pull” and “man,” which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucuses or the modern-day country of Georgia. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.

“We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age,” said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

Link

Revisionist (Church) History of the Far Left

Yale-educated University of Notre Dame professor of New Testament and early Christianity, Candida Moss has released a video promoting her new book, “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom.”

In the video, Moss discounts the accounts of early Christian martyrdom:

Contrary to traditional Church teaching, and popular belief, Christians were not systematically tortured and killed by the Romans merely because they refused to deny Christ.

Rather, these stories were exaggerated, revised, and forged, often centuries later, and the history of the Church was reshaped in order to combat heresy, to inspire and educate the faithful, and to fund Churches.

She describes the goals of her book as “getting the history right,” and to “expose the dangerous legacy that these misunderstandings about Christian martyrdom have had for us today.”

Text and video

Editor’s note: This professor is obviously a weak-minded follower of Joseph Campbell. Chalk up one more scandal for Notre Dame!

Everything you’ve heard about the supposed Pagan origin of Christmas is false.

It is much hyperventilation over nothing really. Not only is it false, but it is based on such poor scholarship that it ought to be embarrassing to anyone who embraces it.  Sadly, it would seem the whole modern world has embraced this error, a serious error, which ought to give use some pause.

It’s time to learn some real history….

The story of the Reformation needs reforming

Protestant mythology achieved definitive form in a book that would shape the writing of Tudor history down to our own day. In 1679 Gilbert Burnet, a Scottish cleric, published the first volume of a massive History of the Reformation, an anti-Catholic narrative given scholarly credibility by the inclusion of dozens of documents gathered from public and private archives.

Burnet would be the chief propagandist for the “Glorious Revolution” which deposed James II and set the Protestant William of Orange on the throne. His history rammed home the message that Catholicism and Englishness were utterly incompatible: Catholicism was tyranny, Protestantism liberation. “They hate us,” he wrote, “because we dare to be freemen and Protestants.”

Read more

Overpopulation Is A Myth.com

Visit the site

Submitted by Jerry V.

Truth or friction?

The Catholic Church, since the time of the apostles, has preached the faith as the truth.  I have already quoted St. Peter to the effect that the apostles and their converts “were not following fictitious tales.”  Jesus Christ proved the truth of his assertions about himself by rising from the dead.  As St. Paul explains in Chapter 15 of his first epistle to the Corinthians, the resurrection of Christ was a matter that could be verified with eyewitnesses, not only the apostles, but many others, as well (cf. CCC 641-44).  In addition, the many prophecies that our Lord fulfilled by his birth, life and death, give further proof of the truth of the revelation committed by him to his Church (cf. CCC 156 and 522).  It is with arguments of this kind that we must defend the doctrines of the Catholic Church, not by seeking to prove that the Catholic religion is more useful than any other.

Read more

True or False: The U.S. Constitution Defines Blacks As Three-Fifths of a Person?

It’s a tired refrain – the Founders were racists, the Declaration didn’t really mean all men, the Constitution is pro-slavery. It’s also a gross distortion of our history – as King well knew when he invoked the promise that “all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” at the heart of the Founding.

The Constitution, contrary to what the New York Times would have you believe, does not classify people according to race. Free blacks in the North and the South were counted on par with whites for purposes of apportionment. As for enslaved blacks, it was the Southern states that wanted to count them as full persons, thereby inflating pro-slavery representation in the House. The three-fifths compromise was aimed at preventing Southern states from magnifying their own political power by holding slaves.

Yet this myth of a racist Founding has, unfortunately, become deeply entrenched in academia and among the chattering classes. It’s taught in high schools and colleges nationwide and has become unquestionable dogma for many.

Read more

Seen on the web: “If there is no God, then everything is permissible.”

Liberalism is the religion of those who relegate God to mythical status, while those who (no matter their political party affiliation or faith tradition) worship at the altar of liberalism reject God’s eternal truths in favor of the ungodly folly of “everything being permissible”.

Popular Gnostic myths

At bottom, Darwinism is a Gnostic myth, notes Dr. Wolfgang Smith, physicist and mathematics professor at Oregon State University:

“…As a scientific theory, Darwinism would have been jettisoned long ago. The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living things created themselves, which is in essence a metaphysical claim….Thus…evolutionism is a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb….it is a scientistic myth. And the myth is Gnostic, because it implicitly denies the transcendent origin of being; for indeed, only after the living creature has been speculatively reduced to an aggregate of particles does Darwinist transformism become conceivable. Darwinism, therefore, continues the ancient Gnostic practice of deprecating ‘God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth.’ It perpetuates…the venerable Gnostic tradition of ‘Jehovah bashing.'” (From Old Gnosticism to New Age I, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal Vol. 28:4-29:1, 2005, pp. 30-31)

Gnostics

Historically, Gnostics have always been notorious God-haters to the extent of consigning Him to hell. The early Church Fathers called them the “lawless ones,” as they were idolizers of their own minds, rebels against all authority, immoralists, hedonists, and builders of alternative realities (utopian fantasies) requiring the death of God, for the heart of Gnosticism is “man is god.”

While the infamous Tower of Babel was history’s first Gnostic project, the Soviet Union and Socialist Germany are modern versions. In his book “Science, Politics, & Gnosticism,” esteemed political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-85) identifies progressivism, positivism, Hegelianism, Marxism, and the “God is dead” school as modern Gnostic movements. All of these movements are firmly grounded on the Gnostic myth of Darwinism.

In their rage against God the Father, modern Gnostics refuse to be created in His spiritual image, thus they conceptually “uncreate” themselves through reductionism, which in the words of Wolfgang Smith, means that they speculatively reduce themselves to “aggregates of particles.” Reductionism is a tenet of the philosophy of materialism.

Read more

Things the “libs” will never tell you about Muslim conquest and the Crusades

First, the historical facts: a long “train of abuses”, to borrow Jefferson’s phrase, preceded the launching of the First Crusade in 1096. Since its very inception, Islam had waged an unremitting war against Christianity.

It conquered and subjugated centuries-old Christian societies in the Middle East and North Africa. After sweeping through France, the Muslim advance was finally checked by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732.

Following this, Muslim aggression against Christians continued in southern Italy, with the conquest of Sicily in 827. Resistance to these repeated acts of aggression was not characterized as a “crusade”, but simply necessary self-defense.

Over the next centuries, the Seljuq Turks, who converted to Islam, waged war against the Eastern Christian Byzantine Empire.

At the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the Turks wiped out the Byzantine army, leaving Emperor Alexius Commenus helpless before a relentless and determined foe. Not long after this, he sent envoys to Pope Urban II pleading for military aid.

The Council of Clermont was called by the pope in 1095, in which he addressed the clergy, knights, and commoners who had assembled. To the knights especially his words were both reproving and encouraging:

You, the oppressers of children, plunderers of widows; you, guilty of homicide, of sacrilege, robbers of another’s rights; you who await the pay of thieves for the shedding of Christian blood — as vultures smell fetid corpses, so do you sense battles from afar and rush to them eagerly. Verily, this is the worst way, for it is utterly removed from God! if, forsooth, you wish to be mindful of your souls, either lay down the girdle of such knighthood, or advance boldly, as knights of Christ, and rush as quickly as you can to the defence of the Eastern Church. For she it is from whom the joys of your whole salvation have come forth, who poured into your mouths the milk of divine wisdom, who set before you the holy teachings of the Gospels.

What was at stake was nothing less than the preservation of Christianity, and the civilization which had, even if imperfectly, sought to embody its teachings in the world. This was also evidenced by the increasingly hostility to Christians still living in the Levant (the Holy Land), as well as those who went on pilgrimage; in 1009, the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the Church of the Holy Sepulcher – in an act the Catholic Encyclopedia rightly calls a “fit of madness” – razed to the ground.

This was followed by an even broader campaign against Christianity throughout the Levant, culminating in the destruction of thousands of Christian churches.

Read more by Joe Hargrave at The American Catholic

Galileo was wrong: The Bible does not teach how the Heavens go … but rather, how to go to Heaven.

Lima, Peru, Aug 25, 2010 / 10:06 pm (CNA).- In an interview this week with the Peruvian daily El Comercio, physics expert Fr. Manuel Carreira clarified numerous and often misunderstood details about the life of Galileo, also touching on the relationship between faith and science.

The priest confirmed to El Comercio that Galileo “was a believer” and that, despite assumptions to the contrary, “he did not spend one minute behind bars … nor was he excommunicated.” Fr. Carreira added that Galileo “died professing the faith under the care of a religious sister and with a papal blessing.”

Fr. Carreira, who was in Lima for the Second Congress on the Holy Shroud of Turin, said that during Galileo’s time, there was no proof  that the Earth moved around the sun. “His supposed evidence was invalid,” the physicist noted, as well as dismissed by other astronomers.

Galileo’s correct idea, he explained, was that “the Bible does not teach science.” However, the famed astronomer “also wanted theologians to change their interpretation of the text according to his theory.” Although the theologians of his day “were mistaken in thinking that the Bible teaches astronomy,” the priest added, “they were correct in saying that as long as there was no evidence, Galileo should have presented his ideas as a theory and not ask them to change their opinions.”

Read more

The legend of Pope Joan

The legend of Pope Joan can be summarized this way:

In the middle ages, there was a “Pope Joan,” a woman who hid her gender and rose through the ranks of the Church, became a cardinal and was elected pope. No one knew she was a woman until, during a papal procession through the streets of Rome, she went into labor and gave birth to a child. She and the baby were killed on the spot by the mob, enraged at her imposture.

A lot of things are said about the alleged “Pope Joan.” Depending on who is telling the story, she was a courageous feminist, a clever opportunist, a brilliant scholar who couldn’t make it as a woman in a man’s world. She is said to have been a wise ruler and an astute theologian, though, oddly, no decree or theological teaching purporting to have come from her has made its way down to our day.

In any case, the fact is, there was no Pope Joan. She exists only as pure legend, but one that makes for a sexy story.

Read more

Divine Truth or Cleverly Contrived Myth? How Catholics can tell the difference.

During the holy seasons of Easter and Christmas, Catholics are told that the pertinent events discussed in Sacred Scripture consist of “myth,” “mythological elements,” or “mythic roots.”

Never mind that many scholarly sources concede that it is difficult to define myth (cf. G. Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament IV, 762-795). Further, critics say this “mythic” Scripture is not limited to the empty tomb and Incarnation but to all of Holy Writ.

This alleged relationship between Scripture and “myth” requires an analysis via the Holy Bible, Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Read the article

The myth of overpopulation, exposed!

Visit the site for videos and information

Submitted by Doria2

Interview: Former Gay Youth Leader Re-Emerges to Tell His Dramatic Conversion Story

Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

The truth is “obvious,” he explained.  “Heterosexuality is normal human sexuality, while homosexuality is a deviation. These are obvious things. What is so ground-breaking is how successful activists have been at clouding out reality.”

“I think as the angry media continues to perpetuate the myth that homosexuality can’t be cured, … I want to continue to send the message of truth in opposition to that lie,” he said, “supported by the fact that I have just continued to be happier, more confident, and much, much more healthy – and much less, less gay – since 2007 and the years before.”

Read the article

More on similar matters (PDF file)

(Excerpt from the above referenced PDF document:)

The average society, according to the historian Arnold Toynbee, lasts about 200 years until it starts to decline.

He writes that, out of the 19 societies catalogued from the beginning of written history, all of them declined and fell due to moral corruption.

Only two societies did not succumb to moral corruption, and they survived indefinitely. (One of them was western Christianity, namely Catholicism, the Holy Roman Empire and beyond).

Unfortunately, the institutionalization of homosexuality (e.g., homosexual marriage; homosexual rights, etc) is, Toynbee says, the final and most devastating immorality, since shortly thereafter the society completely collapses.

No society has ever survived long after homosexuality was legally condoned and permitted.

Interesting Facts About the Spanish Inquisition

Modern historians have long known that the popular view of the Inquisition is a myth. The Inquisition was actually an attempt by the Catholic Church to stop unjust executions.

Heresy was a capital offense against the state. Rulers of the state, whose authority was believed to come from God, had no patience for heretics. Neither did common people, who saw heretics as dangerous outsiders who would bring down divine wrath.

When someone was accused of heresy in the early Middle Ages, they were brought to the local lord for judgment, just as if they had stolen a pig. It was not easy to discern whether the accused was really a heretic. The lord needed some basic theological training, very few did. The sad result is that uncounted thousands across Europe were executed by secular authorities without fair trials or a competent judge of the crime.

The Catholic Church’s response to this problem was the Inquisition, an attempt to provide fair trials for accused heretics using laws of evidence and presided over by knowledgeable judges.

From the perspective of secular authorities, heretics were traitors to God and the king and therefore deserved death. From the perspective of the Church, however, heretics were lost sheep who had strayed from the flock. As shepherds, the pope and bishops had a duty to bring them back into the fold, just as the Good Shepherd had commanded them. So, while medieval secular leaders were trying to safeguard their kingdoms, the Church was trying to save souls. The Inquisition provided a means for heretics to escape death and return to the community.

Most people tried for heresy by the Inquisition were either acquitted or had their sentences suspended. Those found guilty of grave error were allowed to confess their sin, do penance, and be restored to the Body of Christ. The underlying assumption of the Inquisition was that, like lost sheep, heretics had simply strayed.

If, however, an inquisitor determined that a particular sheep had purposely left the flock, there was nothing more that could be done. Unrepentant or obstinate heretics were excommunicated and given over to secular authorities. Despite popular myth, the Inquisition did not burn heretics. It was the secular authorities that held heresy to be a capital offense, not the Church. The simple fact is that the medieval Inquisition saved uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.

Where did this myth come from? After 1530, the Inquisition began to turn its attention to the new heresy of Lutheranism. It was the Protestant Reformation and the rivalries it spawned that would give birth to the myth. Innumerable books and pamphlets poured from the printing presses of Protestant countries at war with Spain accusing the Spanish Inquisition of inhuman depravity and horrible atrocities in the New World.

For more information, see:
The Real Inquisition, By Thomas F. Madden, National Review (2004) http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/ma…
Inquisition by Edward Peters (1988)
The Spanish Inquisition by Henry Kamen (1997)
The Spanish Inquisition: Fact Versus Fiction, By Marvin R. O’Connell (1996): http://www.catholiceducation.org/article…

As seen on Yahoo Answers. Posted by ImACatholic2.