Proper Noun Church

In response to Lauren's post - full post found here

When you think of lip balm, adhesive strips, tissues, slow cookers, and cotton swabs, you likely think of, respectively, chapstick, band-aids, kleenex, crockpot, and Q-tips. These companies who own the brand names that we associate with products are incredibly talented and maybe slightly lucky. My point here is that sometimes it is the work of organisations to replace a general product with a brand name. The catholic church, actually, is one of those organisations. They do not object to the association of the word church with Catholicism. In fact, they often do it themselves; I would not doubt if this were completely intentionally done. You can look at the Catechism on the Vatican website and see examples of that all over the place . This part, here (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P29.HTM), mentions the Church often.

Crossan and Catholic and History

I do wonder why people chose to identify with one denomination of Christianity over another. Mostly I am concerned with Dominic Crossan's denominational choice. I wonder why he decided to call himself a Catholic. Surely there are other denominations which more closely follow or resemble his view on Jesus. The Catholic take the gospels more literally than most other denominations of Christianity, and they back their claims up with a history that is non-existent, or lean a history in their favour when clearly it was not meant in that manner.

Surely Crossan does not support having only male authorities because Jesus chose men as his followers (Catechism 1577 - Part(p) 2 Section(s)2 Chapter(c) 3 Article(a) 6). Surely he doesn't agree with the Catholics when they say that "it is through Christ's Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained" (Catechism 816 - p1s2c3a9 Paragraph3). Jesus did not, after all, think that one could only reach the Kingdom of God through a single establishment/building. Does Crossan agree that those who deliberately do not attend Sunday mass commit a grave sin (Catechism 2180-2181 p3s2c1a3) and thereby a mortal sin (catechism 1857 p3s1c1a8)? If not, then why does he call himself a Catholic? If you believe all of those things, then feel free to honestly call yourself a Catholic. If you do not honestly believe all of those things it would likely be best, to avoid confusion, if you correctly identified yourself under the correct denomination.


Most of the ideas that Crossan supports and believes about the historical Jesus, I also support. Most of these ideas however, do not line up with the catholic church's beliefs

Life and Death - Two sides of the same coin?

Is death necessary for life? In class today someone said that death and life are part of the same thing; the only way you can have death is if you have life. But is it true that in order to have life, you must have death? Does the very nature of receiving life equate to receiving death? Many religions would have us think so; there is a common place belief that death must always accompany life. The Vatican, for instance, said that "disposing of death is, in reality, the most radical way of disposing of life" (Communion and Stewardship - Paragraph 93). In the same document they say that it would be radically immoral to extend human life through production or genetic engineering. Basically, they are saying that death is a part of life and that it would be wrong to change that. I disagree with that assertion and I do not think that death necessarily has to exist due to life. With transhumanism, it could be possible to extend human life to near immortality. Though presumably with this technology it would be possible to kill yourself if you were bored. Maybe everyone would get bored with that sort of life span, making death an inevitable part of life still.