@Caleb “but I think avoiding questions that are just platforms for sectarianism like that one is something we might have to take extra measures to avoid” – I am genuinely surprised now by the accusations of sectarianism being laid upon me here.
I had no idea that a simple question about Eucharist in the book of Hebrews and the following act of accepting an answer that seemed plausible and logical to me would lead to this. I had no intention to create anything that would later be interpreted as “signals of sectarianism”,
nor did I ask this question with any such intent. Perhaps, my concept of sectarianism is a bit different from what is meant by sectarianism here. To me, differences in views do not yet amount to sectarianism.
@JonEricson “Note that the comment suggests the OP is not entirely serious” – Can you, please, elaborate? Where do my comments suggest that I am not entirely serious? I don’t recall having a bout of leisurely fun while I was asking this question or writing those comments.
@brilliant I wasn't accusing you of setting out to be sectarian. However the effect of an unclear question (and as I commented to you) "combined with the accepted answer it just reads like an attack on Catholicism". Your defense of why you did that doesn't help. All that shows is that you were looking for a answer you thought was doctrinally correct (a truth question), not one that taught anything about either the book of Hebrews or about specific Christian traditions.
@brilliant That comment of Jon's wasn't even about you man. Relax, that was somebody else.
It’s April, and at least in my part of the world, the weather is finally starting to feel like Spring. Spring is a time of new beginnings; plants sprout, flowers bloom, and here on Eschewmenical we’re about to relaunch as well.
This month we’re looking back to the recently passed Easter holiday and remembering the institution that our Lord gave us right before his death. The words often spoken during this time give us the story from Paul:
In the spirit of Eschewmenicism, our authors will be giving us the lowdown on the differences between their denomination’s celebration of the communion (maybe …
I often joke that Baptists can’t agree on much. Our emphasis on the autonomy of the local Church has resulted in a surprisingly vast array of beliefs within the Baptist denomination. But there are certain Baptist distinctives that are common, even for such an unorganized, fiercely independent denomination. Among those distinctives are two ordinances that are recognized:
For a Baptist, The Lord’s Supper is not a supernatural experience. It’s remarkably ordinary. It’s not a channel of divine Grace. It’s simply a time to remember Christ’s sacrifice. …
I noticed on blogoverflow, all of the posts for the blog are filed under 'uncategorized'. Is there a reason for this? Can we categorize them? Should we categorize them?
@brilliant The main problem with that question/answer, as I understand it, is that the answer you have chosen does not answer the question. It answers a different question - a question that the community would probably have shut down very quickly. Whether or not you agree with the view that the Eucharist has no "biblical support" is irrelevant.
For example, what prevents you from asking about any other book in the Bible, including the ones Catholics take to be most supportive of the Eucharist, and then accepting exactly the same answer?
Note that (I think) something very similar is happening here: christianity.stackexchange.com/q/14953/3941 The top answer got a head start, basically said "there is no support", quoted at length and then misrepresented just one way in which people have used a passage to support the view.
I found seven entirely distinct parts of the Bible that have been more or less widely used to support the position.
The point here is that if you want to ask a question that says "why is this absent", you as the question author can't turn around and say "yes, I agree that it is absent because it confirms my views, which is exactly what I expected".
It's not so much a problem with the question as it is with an answer - someone asks for a discussion of the way in which the Bible relates to a teaching, and someone else injects an answer that says "there is no connection, because that teaching is wrong or unsupported", and people who agree with that position upvote. Your willingness to favor that sort of answer is what seems to have gotten the question shut down.
I don't think this has been mentioned, but WELCOME to the site! You have been a member for 2 days, and all five of the answers you have given so far have been clearly written, appropriate, direct, focused on the question, and have expressed a broad knowledge of Christianity. Your first answer has earned an "Enlightened" badge, which is no easy task, and the amount of agreement with your answers (expressed by upvotes) is amazing. Welcome, welcome, welcome! — Alypius18 secs ago
This new member has been giving surprisingly good answers. Both of the first answers are at 10 votes now, so that is probably 2 silver badges in the first 2 days. I have not seen anyone come near this. I wish there were a better way to roll out the welcome wagon.
Perhaps. I think it might be appropriate to mention that he is doing a pretty good job, since he seems to be getting some grief from someone outside of Christianity over his latest answer.
I definitely would not want him to form a negative view of the site and how we are receiving his contributions on that basis.
Hi Jayarathina! I can't help noticing that this answer is little more than copy-and-paste from the source you cited. We definately appreciate good sources, we also expect some sort of value added. Also, it's not clear which bits are your own words and which are quotations. I've taken the liberty of editing your answer to make the division more clear. — Jon Ericson12 secs ago
We probably need to go through the rest of the answers and see how much is his own work and how much is (basically) plagiarized. :(
@Alypius It only became clearly marked when I edited the answer to show which bits are quoted and which are not. As it stood, the answer appeared to be in the author's own words with a helpful hint about where the material came from. But that was not so. As I mentioned in my comment, the important bit is to add value. See also:
We should decide some guidelines about copying entire answers from external sources. A lot of questions will be much easier to answer by just copying, as a lot of subjects have been handled many, many times by different writers already.
The practice seems to be popping up here and there. I'll gi...
@JonEricson No, I saw it before you made your edit. Yesterday I had planned to do the same thing he did (from bible.cc, I think), but with my own reiterations of what was in the source thrown in between parts of the quotations. The "value added" parts are there to ensure that a) the question isn't hit with copyright violation, or something (this doesn't affect the quality of the question, we don't enforce copyright via downvotes)
and b) to make answers actually fit the question. The biggest example of this is those copy-paste LDS answers that we get. This answered the question directly, though.
@narnian, @fredsbend, @Alypius - Please don't carry on discussions/debates in comments. (Especially you, Narnian.) It makes us look bad when someone steps in and says that comments are not the place for discussions/debates, and we have high-rep experienced users doing just that. If the OP is just arguing, don't reply. I know it's hard. It's hard to let up a chance to show someone on the Internet that they're wrong. Please, let's do that here in chat and not in comments.
feel free to invite the OP to this chat or a new room. If they don't have the rep, I'm willing to give write access to new users to specific rooms if I'm around and they need it to continue a discussion.
@El'endiaStarman Hmm? My (single?) comment pointed out that the answer did answer the question, despite the author's views, which were extraneous, and then cautioned the answer author to not get involved in debate. Or did I do something more and then forget about it?
@waxeagle Pretty much. Oooh, I should pull @jayarathinamadharasan into this too. Jayarathina, if you don't mind, take a look at the several comments prior to this one.
@waxeagle Yeah, my point is that I don't think I was involved (maybe I'm wrong, in which case, sorry). Saying it's a "blanket warning" doesn't change that. There have been a few cases in the past where I think I was "casually lumped in" with troublemakin', and I'd prefer not to be, if that's alright.
@Alypius Indeed, you didn't really post a comment meant to prolong the discussion, and it did have constructive elements. However, there was also a lot of fluff in there, and so it got lumped in with most of the other comments.
One thing in particular I'll note as an example: you said that the OP's incorrect assumption was corrected by Jayarathina. I said in my comment that Jayarathina had corrected the OP's assumption from the perspective of mainstream Christianity. See the difference?
I'll paste in mine as well after I paste in yours. Gimme a couple moments...
Yours:
> @RamyAlZuhouri I am very sorry that you will not yet accept that God could be so good as to become True Man and die for our salvation. But that is not part of your question, and an explanation of what the Most Holy Trinity is beyond the scope of this question, this site, and the world itself. There are 3 Persons, there are no parts. This answer has corrected your incorrect assumption that the trinity is composed of 3 parts.
> (Jayarathina, do not worry about arguing against these points in your answer or through comments; sometimes people have doubts that are too difficult to address that way.)
Mine:
> @RamyAlZuhouri: Your question asked whether your assumption was correct. Jayarathina has answered that question from the perspective of mainstream Christianity. Your subsequent comments are defending your assumption, and comments are not for discussions/debates. Hence, I have cleaned up the comment thread.
"I am sorry you don't accept this (accept what? the fact of God becoming man), but this is not part of the question; in fact what you are getting into now (1st sentence) cannot be 'answered' here at all. Here is what has been said, and this has corrected your incorrect assumption. Answer author, do not get involved with people who have these doubts using comment threads."
@El'endiaStarman OOh! Me too. I was trying to get to the bottom of his misunderstanding so he can ask an on-topic question. I made a comment asking about perfect being must inherently be immortal. Thanks for leaving my comment about going to chat. I had another one that said I asked him to take it there because he is one and the others were three. Convenience.
@El'endiaStarman Really. Please quote my comment here about immortality and perfect beings. I would like the constructive criticism. I was earnestly trying to determine what his real hang up is on the trinity.
@waxeagle I remember my first time: Somebody failed to see that Tyus Edney was the best point guard in the Pac-10. (This was before 4.8 seconds, so perhaps they saw the evidence in time.)
@El'endiaStarman It's nice to point out that we expect answers to come from a Christian perspective, but I don't think that's relevant here. There are "other perspectives" on the nature of God, but not on what the Trinity is. Anyway, I agree my comment isn't as sterile as yours, but that seems to be because I was pointing out what sort of discussions were and were not appropriate, and mentioning exactly what the assumption was.
@JonEricson Haha. My first time was when someone left a nasty comment on a YouTube video about a subject that I really no little about, but I was fully compelled to refute his "There is absolutely no credible evidence for this" comment. We went back and forth about 10 times.
@fredsbend In fact, YouTube is possibly one of the worst places to have an argument.
@Alypius ...yes, there are other perspectives on what the Trinity is. Modalism, Arianism, other heresies, etc...
@fredsbend I think I've got the right comment here...
> @RamyAlZuhouri So the issue is mortality? Jesus was human, needed to eat and breathe, etc., yet Christians call him God, who by nature is perfect. Maybe in your mind and culture perfect is synonymous with immortality, but that is not well supported with the bible.
This one just continued the discussion/debate. The mortality angle would be better off in another question, but the OP didn't seem to be interested in that.
Oh, this one?
> @RamyAl It is clear that you think an perfect being must also be immortal. That can be a separate question. "According to the Bible must a perfect being also be immortal?" The answer is no. Adam and Eve were perfect in the Garden of Eden, yet they needed the tree of life for immortality. In and of themselves they were not immortal, yet they were perfect and sinless and blameless.
This had absolutely nothing to do with the original question/answer.
@El'endiaStarman Yes, and LDS think that there are three distinct persons (I think), but that's not the "trinity" that the question author was talking about. In any case, I don't think it's fair to suggest that my single comment was "participating in a discussion" like the other 20 comments were.
@Alypius I think you're missing the point. Your comment may not have been directly involved in the discussion, but it was still mostly non-constructive, and I could hardly leave that up while deleting the others. I was a bit antsy about leaving even the ones I left.
@El'endiaStarman @wax said somewhere recently that he just "nukes the whole comment thread." I'm cool with that. All perish under the might hand of thy Mod.
@fredsbend Yeah, I tend to be a bit more nuanced. I deliberated on those comment threads for like 10 minutes before making the final decision on what to say and what to delete.
@fredsbend if there is some redeeming value in a quick scan I'll be selective, but the process for that is not very efficient and so I'm far more likely to nuke the whole thread
@El'endiaStarman You think that explicitly stating which part of the answer ("there are no parts") corrected the assumption is "discussiony", I disagree. It's fine that you deleted it, but because the whole enormous stream of comments is now gone, your "don't carry on discussions" might suggest that I was "carrying on discussions", when in fact I posted a single comment. That's my only point, and there is no need for us to perform a comparative analysis.
@El'endiaStarman So I'm not missing that point, because I'm not saying you should have left it up, just that you don't need to lump everyone together. For example, you could just say "@you and @you and @you, I deleted a large discussion and nuked your comments in the process (whether they were part of the discussion or were against it). Etc."
I don't think that I have the reputation to create a new room, I see no point in saying that I should move it to chat, while there were three people with enough reputation prolonging the debate without doing it. — Ramy Al Zuhouri1 hour ago
To be honest, I pretty much just picked 1) Narnian and 2) fredsbend, then threw 3) you in as an afterthought. Forgot about real-3) Jayarathina.
Like wax said, it was a blanket catch-all statement. I had already reprimanded Ramy on the site, and there was just one other person who commented (in appreciation of the video).
@El'endiaStarman No problem. Just maybe avoid doing that. And like I said, don't include anyone in a blanket statement if it might not be fair to include them. "Hey, I don't think I was really part of any long discussion" "Hmm, I guess you weren't, I guess I shouldn't have included you". Easy, right?
@fredsbend wax and I at least have a userscript that shows it on the right side of a message. You can see it if you click on the arrow on the left of the message and then click on the permalink.
@RamyAlZuhouri I wasn't following the discussion near the end, what was the issue? Perfection, or the possibility of there being three Persons who were one God?
Ah, that's right. Well, although mainstream Christianity largely believes that Jesus was fully human, I'm not so sure that it's mainstream opinion that Jesus was a "normal human".
@RamyAlZuhouri To be perfect is just to be without Sin. God does not "think" that human perfection resides in being able to hold one's breath a long time, or in being beautiful, or in being strong, but only in being perfectly obedient to God, and in doing everything for God.
@RamyAlZuhouri The issue with trying to explain the Trinity is that it is a mystery, though hard to deny without also denying Jesus's divinity. Hence your question.
@AlUmmatمجاهد Sorry. I meant it as @El'endiaStarman said: watching a spectacle, perhaps being amused by it, but not participating. Oddly, I can't find that meaning in the dictionary. That gives me to stare in a stupid way; gape, which isn't what I meant at all.
@RamyAlZuhouri This is the mystery: they are separate, but also one. They cannot contradict each other, yet The Father has knowledge that Jesus does not and the Spirit only moves at the command of the Father and Jesus.
@AlUmmatمجاهد We English-using people like to make use of our large vocabulary. (Alternatively, "We English-speaking citizens rather prefer to fully utilize our extensive reservoir of words.")
Recently I've had a few people mention that the phrase "cellar door" is beautiful. I don't see what makes this so - it's not anything ironic like "driveway" or "parkway" so what makes this so beautiful?
Like Ramy said on the answer, one person in a crowd is a part of the crowd. It's not insensible to call a Person of the Trinity a "part" of the Trinity.
@RamyAlZuhouri (Note that the triquetra is only a way of thinking about things that might have things that seem like parts, but one whole. God is not like the triquetra, the triquetra is vaguely "like" God.)
@AlUmmat "The Trinity doesn't make sense" is not, in itself, a good argument against the Trinity. Plenty of things which don't make sense are, nonetheless, true. Quantum mechanics, for a start.
@RamyAlZuhouri Yes. God the Father is the first person in the Holy Trinity. (We say He is first, not because he is in some way different, but because of convention.)
The three persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united in an undivided Trinity, in which all are equal in stature, according to orthodox trinitarian Christianity. Given that our language is linear, it is clear that there are six ways that we could list these three persons. In fact, the orde...
@El'endiaStarman Yeah, I don't think that actually happened in that way. I have heard some people explain what happened in this way, but I think it borders on heresy. It is not possible that Christ "came apart" from God the Father, because God cannot "come apart" from Himself.
@Alypius Very debatable. The Father has information that the other two don't. The Spirit only works on the Father's command. Once Jesus was given all authority on heaven and Earth He also became one who could command the Spirit.
@Alypius It's an idea that I prefer because it adds so much more weight to certain things, like Christ's sacrifice. The crucifixion is a much, MUCH more serious matter if the Son is literally separated from the Father and Spirit due to taking on the sins of the world.
@RamyAlZuhouri The only distinction between them is that God the Father is not God the Son; that God the Son is not God the Holy Spirit; that God the Holy Spirit is not God the Father. That is all.
@El'endiaStarman Ok, well, I think literal separation (even for the sake of adding greater weight) is heresy in my view. But that's another discussion. We probably don't disagree, you probably just mean something else.
I noticed on blogoverflow, all of the posts for the blog are filed under 'uncategorized'. Is there a reason for this? Can we categorize them? Should we categorize them?
Recently I've had a few people mention that the phrase "cellar door" is beautiful. I don't see what makes this so - it's not anything ironic like "driveway" or "parkway" so what makes this so beautiful?
The Upper Room
The Upper Room