Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.
~Alain de Benoist
pjohns (11-19-2017)
The South is over run with churches that came from feuds of church members. This is why you have the Holy Church of the Seven Deadly Sins and a half block away, The Holy Church of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Call To Baptism, and then another half block The Holy Church of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Call to Baptism of the Believers"
A slight exaggeration but there are a number of off springs in any community in the deep south. To be fair there are also a large number of small churches because of transportation issues when the area was first settled. In a two mile radius of my house I can count at least 10 small congregations. However if you look at the effort that was required to get from your home to to your church 75 80 years ago when these churches first formed you can see most people had to walk over very rough terrain. Churches tended to become family churches close at hand.
I still like the Traditional Catholic Mass because before Vatican II you could go to Mass in any church in any country and other than the Sermon every service was exactly the same.
Ann Fann (12-10-2017)
The greatest number of such divisions and breakaways have no doubt come from some (what to most folks would be) relatively minor doctrinal point that one group or another decided was so important that they could not bring themselves to fellowship with those who held a different view of it. The human ego also plays its part in such dvisions, I believe; the urge to be seen as a learned and authoritative teacher of the Faith is strong in those places, and what better way to establish yourself in that position than to start your own church body?
Before I had ever set foot in a Catholic church, I learned about the Faith by reading an old Catholic high school Religion text from the '40s that I'd picked up somewhere. So when I actually began going to Mass and taking instruction - this was in the late '70s - I was surprised, and occasionally dismayed, at the differences between the practices I'd read about and the reality I was experiencing. There were times, however, when an older, tradition-minded priest would seem to "forget" to call for certain parts of the new liturgy. When I was living in San Jose, the nearest church had a congregation made up almost entirely of Portuguese speakers, so of course that's the language Mass was conducted in. Not speaking or understanding a word of either Latin or Portuguese, it was all the same to me, and I was free to imagine that I was worshipping in an earlier time in Church history.
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
What dichotomy? In liturgical churches, anyway, the clergy and laity have different functions, the laity to spread the Gospel, the clergy to spread the Gospel and administer the sacraments, which is what clergy are trained to do. Don't believe me? Try running a church service yourself and see how easy it is.
Humans have a need for detailed, authoritative knowledge and instruction about whatever it is they happen to be doing. Religious worship is no exception. The longer a church exists, the more detailed the instruction tends to become, in order to answer all of the questions that arise.
In that Catholic high school Religion text from the '40s I mentioned earlier, I remember one of the questions involved the requirement to, as I recall, fast before receiving the Eucharist for a certain time period - from midnight the night before, I think it was - and the question was, does it break the fast if you chew and swallow your fingernails. That sounds very silly to most of us, I'm sure, but to someone who is vitally, seriously interested in following the Church's (and therefore God's) instructions to the letter, it might be a real concern. (The answer, by the way, was (paraphrasing) that it's okay as long as the bits are chewed up very finely and mixed with saliva.)
“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” - Robert E. Howard
"Only a rank degenerate would drive 1,500 miles across Texas and not eat a chicken fried steak." - Larry McMurtry
Not always the case.
Time passing does not always yield to more minute instructions. The LDS church is a prime example of that.
There are several topics - such as fasting, paying tithes and such that are left to the individual via personal revelation to fulfill on there own.
The church knows that it need not issue edicts for every aspect of life and it acts accordingly. Sure there are some hard and fast rules on specific topics, but there are many topics where the individual needs to pray and figure it out themselves via revelation.
Sent from my evil cell phone.
"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
Ephesians 6:12