• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

  • CF has always been a site that welcomes people from different backgrounds and beliefs to participate in discussion and even debate. That is the nature of its ministry. In view of recent events emotions are running very high. We need to remind people of some basic principles in debating on this site. We need to be civil when we express differences in opinion. No personal attacks. Avoid you, your statements. Don't characterize an entire political party with comparisons to Fascism or Communism or other extreme movements that committed atrocities. CF is not the place for broad brush or blanket statements about groups and political parties. Put the broad brushes and blankets away when you come to CF, better yet, put them in the incinerator. Debate had no place for them. We need to remember that people that commit acts of violence represent themselves or a small extreme faction.

Legal expert warns against potential issues with organ donor registries

NAPLES, Fla. (OSV News) — Organ donor registry programs typically offered during state driver’s license renewals might seem like a straight-forward and noble choice but should require greater awareness of pitfalls. They should also offer easier exits from the program.

That was a message that California-based pro-life attorney Alexandra Snyder, CEO of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, brought to her conversation Feb. 7 during the 2025 Legatus annual summit for Catholic business men and women at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples. Some 700 people attended the Feb. 6-9 gathering.

Organ and tissue donation industry was one part of a larger conversation that Snyder offered Legatus during her talk, “Death on Demand: The Current Practice of Euthanasia in the U.S.” But the donation topic is in need of greater public education, she said, given that most people on the organ donor registry do not understand that their lives may be cut short — sometimes by decades — as a result of joining the registry.

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Can a divorced person from an abusive marriage receive Communion?

Q: If someone were in an abusive marriage, if they divorced would they still lose their right to Communion?

A: The short answer is no, the simple fact of being divorced does not in any way hinder or cut off a Catholic’s access to the sacraments.

For some background, we as Catholics do believe that on a theological level, divorce as such is not truly possible. While the Church does recognize and respect the purely secular legal effects of a civil divorce (e.g., things like property divisions and child custody arrangements), at the end of the day the Church understands divorce as somewhat of a “legal fiction.” That is, a consummated marriage between two baptized adults who entered the union with the proper intention and with full knowledge and freedom cannot be ended by anything other than the death of one of the spouses. We can find a scriptural basis for this teaching in Matthew 19:1-12.

It is possible that there could have been a problem at the time of the wedding — such as a mental health issue that prevented one of the parties from being able to consent, or a party having the wrong intentions — which prevented a true marriage from occurring in the first place. This is what the church’s marriage nullity process exists to discern. Yet we should keep in mind that declaring an apparent marriage invalid is very different from holding that an actual marriage bond can be broken.

‘Danger in delay’​


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Border Patrol agent fatally shot in Vermont while stopping car with German national on alleged expired visa

And the winner is... Bay Area California death cult.

String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'death cult'

Many of the people linked to the violence are connected to a fringe online community known as the “Zizians”

Alleged leader of cultlike ‘Zizian’ group arrested in Maryland

Jack LaSota, 34, was arrested on Sunday along with Michelle Zajko, 33, of Media, Pennsylvania. They face multiple charges including trespassing, obstructing and hindering and possession of a handgun in the vehicle, police said on Monday.

LaSota, who used she/her pronouns, and in her writings says she is a transgender woman, railed against perceived enemies, including so-called rationalist groups, which operate mostly online and seek to understand human cognition through reason and knowledge.

[Oh no, I may be next!]
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Synchronicity and planes

People, can we please get back on the topic of trying to blame this tragedy on Alex Lifeson? In a country where a drunk male prostitute can successfully masquerade as a rock star, how could we not expect a plane to someday land upside down? Sinchronicity is real, even if I don't spell it right.
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Charismatics Are At War With Each Other Over Failed Prophecies Of Trump Victory

My point is that the tribulation will occur after the year 2029. I chose this date because of the Apophis asteroid.
NASA made that very easy. And Revel. chapts 6-8 confirms it. I chose the year 2029 for Shmittah cycle reasons.
Bishop Usher, even after 500 years, remains an authoritative figure on this matter. This is what AI states: "Jesus, also known as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ, was born around 6 to 4 BC and is believed to have died around AD 30 or 33."
You didn't quote Bishop Usher (which I've never heard of), but did quote from AI, (saying what I already know)...? Neither of them providing a reason why you believe that the Tribulation will start in 2029.
So why do I say 29 instead of 30? It's because of the Apophis asteroid. Given that Jesus died around Passover, seven years later the asteroid comes around again on Resurrection Sunday. The comet thus marks His death and resurrection. They say there are no coincidences in life.
Scrunching objects and events together into one so that they seem to be related when they're not, reduces believability.

The quote that there are no coincidences in life.. is disregarding all of them. I googled. The first gave 40 examples.
Luke 21:25-26: "There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
That verse is describing the events that will occur during the 7 year Tribulation.. Certainly not including any comet that wasn't even mentioned in any text that descibe in detail the events of Jesus' crucifixion, death, and resurrection.
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Trump task force on anti-Christian bias will review policies of FBI, DOJ, other agencies

I am not saying Democrats can't be Christians. But nonetheless, most of the atheist activist stuff comes from the left. And promoting LGBTQ lifestyles is certainly not Christian, which again comes from the left. The pro-abortion stuff also comes from the left, and a lot of hate from there is directed at Christians, especially Catholics. Trump recently had to pardon some pro-lifers because the Biden Administration used the DOJ and FACE act to go after Pro-Lifers.
I agree 100%
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Duffy blasts Buttigieg, accusing Biden-era official of 'mismanagement': 'Mayor Pete failed for four years...'

Current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy slammed former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a post on X, accusing the Biden-era official of "mismanagement."

He leveled the criticism when responding to a post in which Buttigieg wrote, "The flying public needs answers. How many FAA personnel were just fired? What positions? And why?"

Duffy responded, blasting Buttigieg.

"Mayor Pete failed for four years to address the air traffic controller shortage and upgrade our outdated, World War II-era air traffic control system. In less than four weeks, we have already begun the process and are engaging the smartest minds in the entire world," Duffy declared.

Continued below.
That’s totally justified!
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Does Jesus quote 1 Enoch?

There’s nothing heretical in 1 Enoch if one reads it according to the Alexandrian hermeneutic. It is part of the canon of the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church and the Eritrean Tewahedo Orthodox Church, which are two of the most devout and most persecuted Christian churches on the world. They are Oriental Orthodox, and were part of the Coptic Orthodox Church (which does not regard 1 Enoch as canonical, but always allowed the Ethiopians (and Eritreans, who recently became independent of Ethiopia and their church was granted autocephalous status by Alexandria) to read it as canonical, for various good reasons - the doctrine of the Ethiopian Church is the same as the Coptic Orthodox Church (and the Syriac Orthodox Church and Armenian Apostolic Church, which are in full communion with the Coptic Orthodox Church, and whose large communities in Syria are among the most critically persecuted and endangered Christians right now, and indeed have been for the past 12 years).

Additionally St. Jude the Apostle appears to quote 1 Enoch in his epistle. I don’t know that our Lord quotes it, but St. Jude does.

Lastly, the “Gospel of Thomas”, which is a slightly corrupt list of sayings showing some Gnostic tampering, was never included in the canon by any Orthodox, Catholic or mainstream Protestant church - there is only one New Testament canon. However most of the sayings in it correspond with those sayings of our Lord in the three Synoptic Gospels, suggesting it could be a Coptic translation of a Gnostic corruption of a sayings document of our Lord, one probably used in Syria (based on the specific nature of the corrupted passages, which show a link to Syrian Gnostic doctrines taught by the likes of the Ophites and Bardesanes and by Tatian and Severian), which was evangelized by St. Thomas the Apostle, who was the subject of other Gnostic apocrypha in that region such as the “Acts of Thomas” which are interesting as historic evidence of early Christian worship but are less likely to be derived from anything legitimate, and the entirely blasphemous “Infancy Gospel of Thomas” which was I believe the book referred to by an early Church Father as being written by the disciple of Mani, the Persian false prophet, the third century equivalent of Joseph Smith or Muhammed, who sent a Syriac speaker to the Fertile Crescent named Thomas (as St. Thomas the Apostle had set up the Christian church in Mesopotamia, Syria and was martyred in Kerala, India in 53 AD), to try to pass his religion off as a form of Christianity, but separately he sent to Egypt a disciple named Hermes who tried to sell the Manichaen faith to the followers of the Pagan cult of Hermes Trimegistus, and one called Buddha he sent to India and the Far East to market his faith to the Buddhists.

While the Manichees were briefly a thorn in the side of the Christian Church in the third and fourth century, with St. Augustine having been a Manichee before being baptized (importantly, his mother was a Christian, and together with St. Ambrose of Milan persuaded him to convert), over the long term, they slowly disappeared across Asia as the Church of the East expanded, and the last surviving Manichaean temple is in China and is disguised as a Buddhist temple, which is an example of the Middle Eastern religious practice of dissimulation, also engaged in by certain sects of Sufi Islam, and by adherents of the Gnostic heresy. It is rather creepy - you have an apparent Buddhist temple, which is creepy enough, in my opinion, but then certain symbols on it are unusual and the expression of the apparent idol of Buddha is not quite right - he is smiling - and these, combined with certain inscriptions on the wall which are quotes from Manichaean scriptures allow for the expert to identify the structure as being a Manichean temple disguised as a Buddhist temple.

Which makes one feel doubly sorry for the Buddhists who have historically worshipped there, for not only are they practicing a false and futile religion which has, with the spread of the Gospel to their land, gone from being a marginal source of moral instruction to being a toxic and detrimental counterfeit spirituality, which cannot fulfill any promises of salvation it offers (and what it promises is greatly inferior to what Christianity promises; indeed some forms of Buddhism literally promise nothing other than eventual non-reincarnation, and one supposes the enlightenment that adherenets of those forms of Buddhism sometimes rapidly receive is a realization of their own mortality and the falseness of the widespread Asian belief in reincarnation, which makes Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and SIkhism second-order superstitions, in that they propose to deliver one from reincarnation, which doesn’t happen to begin with. But these Buddhists intending to innocently practice their faith have been doing so alongside the last members of what was historically a non-violent but spiritually destructive cult which was known for its deliberate and systematic parallel impersonation of other religions, whose believers Manichaenism would parasitically try to influence to create a sort of syncretic faith, a counterfeit of the original religion infested with the false doctrines of Mani, such as his beliefs in dualism and certain other doctrines plagiarized from Zoroastrianism, Syrian Gnosticism and Pagan superstition, which were the sort of things Buddhists were supposed to avoid.

+

In conclusion, while the Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and different Orthodox churches have slightly different Old Testament canons or deuterocanonical books which depart from the Masoretic canon favored by Presbyterians and Baptists (although John Calvin himself would have added Baruch to it, which he regarded as protocanonical), all major Christian churches including the Ethiopians, who count 1 Enoch and Jubilees among the canonical books of the Old Testament, agree that there are only 27 books, the same 27 books first listed by St. Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 AD, in his 39th Paschal Encyclical, in the New Testament.

The additional Old Testament material has not proven, contrary to the concerns of some Protestants from churches other than the traditional liturgical Protestant denominations where these books are permitted to be read, to be disruptive on issues of doctrine or morals; indeed some of the material, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, chapter 2, is particularly beautiful Christological prophecy, similiar to the Songs of the Suffering Servant by St. Isaiah.

1 Enoch is admittedly peculiar, however, the Ethiopians do not read it using literal-historical exegesis but as Christological prophecy, and thus it has no disruptive impact on their Christology, nor do they believe any strange things about giants or fallen angels or other things which some people derive from an odd literal reading of Genesis and 1 Enoch.

I would agree that people should avoid 1 Enoch, unless, and only unless, they are members of the Ethiopian Church and hear the book read or have a pastor in the Church who can explain it to them, or if they are familiar with the Alexandrian approach to Christological-typological prophecy, which some took to an extreme (one example of this which came frighteningly close to being included in the New Testament but which was stopped by St. Athanasius was the spurious epistle attributed to Barnabus) In the same way that some people of the present take a hyper-literal reading of the Old Testament to an extreme and prioritize that over a deep understanding of the Gospels, and focus their Christianity on speculation about whether or not Genesis is referring to dinosaurs, and other related issues which are not relevant to the Good News preached by Christ our True God. The most important early Church Fathers such as St. Athanasius, St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Vincent of Lerins, St. Ephraim the Syrian and St. John of Damascus, among others, made versatile use of both the Alexandrian typological-prophetic hermeneutics and the approach taught in the rival Catechetical School of Antioch, that being literal-historical hermeneutics.
To the nutcut about the Book of Enoch, it purports that Enoch himself is the Messiah, as opposed to Jesus Christ. Heresy can be no more distinct than this. Enough reason to chunk the poison in the trash.

Here is a link that details this and a few other examples of how the book utterly contradicts canonical Scripture. A Google search on the mystical, gnostic and pagan influences on the book is available at finger's touch.


But again, for myself, denying and distorting the unique divinity of Jesus is enough to drain me of all motivation to study the book further. I don't desire my mind to be cluttered with any knowledge other than provided by the true Gospel and the Holy Spirit. Spiritual warfare is intense enough without introducing portals through which demons can influence our understanding and application of what the true God intends to communicate to us. That goes for all other extraneous writings.

God bless!
Joseph

biblegateway.com
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'Unemploying our own members': Black megachurch cuts ties with Kennedy Center after Trump takeover

Not surprising. Black Protestant churches have very different perspectives on the culture war issues, and Christian nationalism, than white evangelicals, and their priorities and pain points don't necessarily align.
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Religious leaders back NYC Mayor Eric Adams as Gov. Kathy Hochul considers removing him

An interfaith group of religious leaders have called for “four more years” in office for Mayor Eric Adams as Gov. Kathy Hochul considers using her executive power to remove him from office after being pressed to do so by fellow Democrats.

“I recognize the immense responsibility I hold as governor and the constitutional powers granted to this office. In the 235 years of New York state history, these powers have never been utilized to remove a duly-elected mayor; overturning the will of the voters is a serious step that should not be taken lightly,” Hochul said in a statementMonday.

“That said, the alleged conduct at City Hall that has been reported over the past two weeks is troubling and cannot be ignored. Tomorrow, I have asked key leaders to meet me at my Manhattan office for a conversation about the path forward, with the goal of ensuring stability for the city of New York,” she said while stating that her most urgent concern is for the “well-being of my 8.3 million constituents who live in New York City.”

Continued below.
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Democrats introduce bill to stop ICE raids at churches, schools

Democrats in Congress and several advocacy groups are backing a bill to prevent immigration enforcement measures in houses of worship and schools.

Rep. Jesús García of Illinois, Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut have re-introduced the Protecting Sensitive Locations Act.

Previously introduced in 2023, the proposed legislation bars immigration enforcement within 1,000 feet of a "sensitive location" save for "exigent circumstances," such as "the targeted arrest of a terrorist suspect, an individual who poses a clear threat to national security, or an individual who poses an extraordinary danger to public safety."

Continued below.

Any tips for cleaning the egg of my face? Trump just won the Ukraine war.

We need to bring back the idea of a champion fighting in the stead of his king - two kings champions fight, and who ever wins the fight wins the war for their country...

Haha .. boom! David and Goliath 2.0!!

Save a lot of lives .. .

We chose Trump as our Kings champion... It's 2025... Lol
Even if he is a good fighter, I mean, did you watch the latest Tyson fight. The old man was chewing on his bedtime pillow, forgot to throw punches.
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Theological debate and the mind of Christ

Ditto. You are not the only one hurting

I would add to that, love is not defined by humans. God is love.

There is a lot to be said for stop concentrating on ourselves and put our eyes on the Lord and how He would use us to be his hands and feet in a broken world.

Look to the answer.
But I'm done because, as I said before, i personally feel some things should be said more privately.

But one more thing before I go, and not saying you are doing this, but in case. Some people diagnosed with mental issues appear to believe it is s license to behave however they want without any responsibility. That may be the case in some cases, but overall I don't buy it. Each case as the Lord reveals.

And these people (mental issues) have contributed to serious hurts and damage to others, but we can't play the blame game. God doesn't ignore contributors, but He does expect us to be reliant on Him foremost. People aren't perfect and are dealing with their own issues and the sooner you learn that, it will help
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Is the existence of Christianity better for this world

I like how you said washing of the word. I think this is tru. We have to be washed in Gods word, keep washing in it lol. Its like cognitive therapy. The more we put it in our heads the more we are restored to sanity and Christ.

Its a reminder, it reprientates us, it gives us a way out and strengthens us when we keep washing ourselves in GOds word.

Its especially sad considering when we see how fathers and sons were in the bible. How great fathers made great sons who went on to make great sons who carried Gods truth.

Even Obama acknowledged the fatherhood issue as one of the biggest problems facing modern society. Modern society has explicitely worked to undermine marriage, the family and parenthood. Making males useless and having no identity, weak and disillusioned. Replacing fathers with mothers, interchanging sex and gender.

Any society where the family is undermined then the society is undermined.
But when people won't or refuse to a knowledge their brokeness they are infact refusing their healing. Choosing Pharmiqea/ pharmaceutics Over truth and Healing. JESUS'S SALVATION , HIS LOVE DOESNT LEAVE US ABANDONED TO THAT USURPING YOU SPEAK OF. IT HAS BEEN AWESOME TALKING TO YOU.
Ps actually praise and worship heals the emotional parts of our brain specificly best because it is a truer relationship than what killed the brain and emotions in The first. That is one reason God keeps likening his Church as a bride. Because it's as true a relationship as a best marriage.. because we are in fact as our brain feels it " married" to Christ. So He asks us to praise Him even mak8ng sacrifices of praise not for his sake but for our sake. Because that connection to him is real love, and a love that heals an emotionally and spiritually dead brain.
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