if meant for me, it were many factors over time. the big one was the Eucharist as mentioned above. as a Protestant we're taught that everything in the Bible is very literal, besides this particular passage. They say, this is figurative. Jesus didn't "really" mean that, what he meant is.... (who are we to assume he meant something other than what he said..).
This passage goes on to explain how many of his followers left after he said this, saying these are hard teachings, who can accept this. So to them, who left him, they believed it was literal and they weren't about to consume human flesh because that was against the law.
Well elsewhere in the Bible, if a parable was given and the audience was confused, Jesus would give them another one. But in this instance, he doubles down with what he said saying, amen amen. also, the original translation of this text when talking about eating, is "to gnaw". again, doesn't really translate well into figuratively speaking. Not only this but for quite some time, this was just the accepted belief. It wasn't until some 500 something years ago where we're like wait... everyone was wrong up until now...
There are also many Eucharistic miracles that haven't been explained. This would be a perfect opportunity for Catholic haters to show them whats up, but these things remain miracles.
Mary was a difficult one to grasp. It's funny, I could accept this bread was Christ true body but Mary... I dunno now that's a tough one. Eventually I came around. One thing that helped me was to consider how she is the Arc of the New Covenant. Now think back the old testament, where God gave very specific instructions on what the Arc should look like, just how perfect it should be. This was to hold the word of God. Fast forward, then you have God's mother in the flesh. It stands to reason that as she is to should be perfect if she is to give birth to God in the flesh. So as God's mother she should have a large degree of reverence. It was Mary who asked Jesus to perform his first miracle which he did.
Basically the more I dug into these things, the more they made sense than didn't.
And yeah, I can appreciate how people are upset about centuries of corruption in the church. But what they've done or said, doesn't really change our focus on Jesus. And many of these events have little to do with church doctrine. It's unfortunate that people leave the church because a priest or pope did something despicable, etc etc. It's still the same church Jesus started.
“…we’ll know them by their fruits…”
I personally like Brand, he’s very charismatic and could lead many to Christ. That is supposing he stays the path.
Seeing some of the anti-Catholic responses coming from this community is a little discouraging to me. Here’s why I think that…
I think the average anon enjoys looking for the truth. Many times that leads into a real deep dive into certain historical topics. That is exactly what led me to the Catholic Church.
TL DR: convert, became Catholic while trying to prove them wrong.
First visit to a Catholic Church nearly 20 years ago. Looking back, I attended what is called a sung mass. I’m not evien a Christian at this point but thinking wow this is weird. Went a few more times but it never caught on. Few years later I’m invited to a Protestant church. The sermon really spoke to me, I left a different person. My love for Jesus and the Bible grew. Eventually this church wasn’t feeding my desire to grow deeper in my faith. Found another church… they would preach on one book of the Bible for months. Ex We studied Romans for 6+ months. We stayed here for nearly 10 years.
Along the way all I knew is anything beyond what we learned here isn’t right. And specifically Catholic are just as bad as jehovah witness. I had no reason to question it, I trust the Bible and our pastor has a doctorate, reads scripture in many languages. I basically just followed whatever was taught.
Eventually had an opportunity to send my kids to what is considered a good Catholic school in the area. My wife went there as a kid so we’re like… it’s a little weird but it’s about the education, we can combat any Catholic nonsense they bring home.
We think we’ll swat down any ridiculous Catholic stuff that comes our way. After a few months the kids start coming home telling us about Mary, etc. We tell them why it’s wrong, and move on. BUT are curious WHY, and that’s where I’d challenge many of you. So we took the time to dig into some of these topics that we blindly say that’s wrong. This led us through an interesting trip through church history.
The breaking point for me is Sola Scriptura. As someone who believes that the Bible is literal truth, I had a difficult time grappling with how a Protestant can stand behind this yet say Jesus meant something else than what he literally said. I had started to consider things like how most churches as we know them started after the reformation, and even after that many still believed in things like the Eucharist. So now we’re swimming in literally thousands of different denominations.
I’m looking for multiple sources here, I don’t want bias opinions. The more I research the more I start considering how maybe I’ve been wrong. It was a huge identity crisis for my family and also just this gigantic red pill.
Seriously after you take this deep dive you can’t go back after you know the truth. And I’ll be completely honest, life was a lot easier as a Protestant. There is a lot we miss, but it’s artificial and lacking compared to what we have now.
I could rant on for days because there is just so much. But for someone interested in really intellectual spiritual reading, look into Thomas Aquinas. Hes basically considered everything you could think of and explained it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is for non Catholics there is a lot you’re missing out on my shutting yourself out. Challenge yourself and ask are these my thoughts or do I only believe rh because someone taught me to think this way. If you haven’t taken the time to ask some hard questions you’re no better than someone who just “trusts the science “.
Here is some information on the attack she believes was used. https://www.okta.com/identity-101/gps-spoofing/
It’s funny that this particular type of attack is used for this type of thing but yet it was so quickly ruled out.
At a very high level this is what cell tower transport looks like… a local provider might have a 10G+ handoff. This could be represented in one physical switch, many or a virtual router. There is then physical links leaving the local provider to the cell site. These connect up to a NID. So up until this point you’re fiber. The NID is a handoff point between the local provider and the cellular provider. (You might have every major carrier on a tower, using this setup). Service leaves the NID to customer managed equipment. (Generally a switch the cellular carrier has access to over the previously mentioned link). From this equipment a line connects up to the radio equipment that provides the signal to your phone.
I no longer work on the provisioning/transport side of things but if I did and were troubleshooting this outage, I’d have suggested a tech test the connection from the customer side equipment behind the providers NID. (Can be done remotely or by a tech onsite).
This would allow you to determine if the issues were some type of cellular interference or the network. (If all tests run fine behind the NID you could then suspect it’s interference with the signal).
I don’t know enough about current cellular technologies to suggest what could be the issue. But no matter what is going through the air, there are registered wavelengths. I have nothing to base this on but I could imagine a scenario where a type of jammer could be used to attack certain frequencies. It’s not a reach to thing this could be coordinated in a massive scale. Also not that such jammers are relatively easy to locate should someone use one. Messing with these channels is a federal offense as far as I know.
Right now I’m not really convinced whatever happened was intentional, but am most curious about why we haven’t seen an explanation for it.
Network and Systems engineer here familiar with many things networking including cell sites. I’ve been looking all over for an explanation to this outage and have yet to find anything that makes sense.
For anyone who doesn’t have an in depth knowledge of networking, it’s easy to assume it could have only been a couple different things. It’s also probably difficult to comprehend the complexity of these networks. (I heard a YouTube interview from someone claiming to be an employee that gave what was clearly a made up explanation of what happened. Basically making it seem like everything relied on a single piece of equipment. After that I knew he had no idea).
When taking about physical networking you have numerous layers of redundancies. And that is what is weird about this. All these systems do not have a centralized provisioning system. They do not have a centralized point of presence. About the only thing remotely central for them is billing and even that is often not very central because not every AT&T is using the same backend hardware/provisioning/billing systems.
For this to have been a nationwide outage has been very interesting to me. It almost looks like a quality of service profile gone wrong but again such a profile wouldn’t affect everyone.
I didn’t personally observe the outage but heard that some people had zero bars during this and that their phones shown SOS. That more less suggests no signal could be found to a tower instead of a network wide outage.
It seems more likely that something impacted these digital frequencies more so than the network that carries them. This might be where the whole solar flare theory came into play.
my guess is in 2021 these women rushed out to get the vax either early into pregnancy of later into it and suffered a miscarriage. 2022 is likely a little of the same but perhaps less because they simply can't get pregnant now, or make it far enough into a pregnancy to record a miscarriage at the hospital.
so again, what this graph doesn't capture is all the miscarriages that could be happening early into a pregnancy.
Well perfect may not be the right word but Catholics do believe she is without sin. It’s a complex topic but the short of it is she was saved just like everyone else but it just so happened it was before she was born and that grace continued throughout her life.
When considering all these things it helps to put everything in perspective. If you’re a believer you already believe in Jesus miracles; instantly curing disease, walking on water, raising the dead, dying then coming back to life. It’s like, how could something like Mary being sinless be more difficult to accept than some of these other things.