You (plural) don't believe that Jesus is fully human?
I could be wrong since my beliefs have moved somewhat away from mainstream Catholic thought, but I believe the official Catholic party line is that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, just as the eucharist is both fully bread and wine but also is fully the body and blood
(see http://www.rosary-center.org/ll49n3.htm for a good discussion of this, especially the section about "substance" vs. "accidents").
BTW, the distinction you've made in this thread between "Catholic" and "Christian," seems strange to me. It implies that Catholics don't follow Christ, yet that's most certainly not true, in my experience. Of course, most of us Protestants believe that there is one catholic church, with many expressions.
It's just a matter of semantics. The way I see it, Catholics are a subset of Christians. However, many fundamentalist Christians say that Catholics aren't really Christian at all. To further muddy matters, some Catholics use the term "Christian" as short-hand for "Fundamentalist Christian."
The important differences, IMO, have to do with abuse of authority and other
human failings. From that viewpoint, there is not much difference these
days between Catholic and Protestant, which one can view positively or
negatively. In any event, it seems useless, at best, to dwell on what the
other guys are doing wrong.
There are still Protestant groups that pass out literature that focuses on how the Catholic church is evil and that Catholics are really pantheistic pagans, etc. IIRC, Bob Jones University is one such organization. The official position of the Catholic church used to be "if you aren't Catholic, you're going to hell" but that position changed (I believe with the Vatican II council). The primary differences between Catholics and Fundamentalists, as I see it, are what one believes about whether the Bible is to be interpreted literally, and whether the Bible is the only viable source for spiritual info. (By the way, you could probably find lots of members of the Catholic church who are literalists. Within *any* church you will probably find a wide variety of beliefs.)
I also find it interesting to note that most Biblical literalists do not take "This is my body, this is my blood" literally but say that communion is just a symbol, whereas the non-literalist Catholic church says that in a very real way, the eucharist is not just a symbol but is the body and blood of Jesus. One Fundamentalist told me that every time after the Last Supper has been a symbol, but that during the Last Supper the bread and wine were literally transformed, although I don't think this is a widely held belief among Fundamentalists.
I wonder what the causality at work in this pattern is. What's the
evolutionary advantage in having more, richer communication about negatives?
Conversely, what is the advantage in keeping quiet when things are good?
Perhaps something about the nature of information, or perhaps just the
universe itself?
Apparently, there is less survival value to a population in sharing positive
information...?
Perhaps it's because often, positive info is nice to know but negative info is critical. For example, I can think of a lot of plants that are absolutely deadly to humans, but I can't think of a single one that every human has to eat in order to live. Maybe the positive information is more permissive (it's ok to eat this and this and this, but you don't necessarily have to eat all of those things) and therefore less critical than "don't eat that because it will kill you." Just a thought.
Reggie Bautista
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