[quote:21dddlbg]would you say his sin was only venial? yet the Lord took his life! Or Adam and Eve eating the fruit – yet they and the whole world were separated from God because of that “little” sin.
Now you take James verses and see if you can make sense about venial sins. Most likely you will ignore it, simply because you can’t make sense out of your situation.[/quote:21dddlbg]
Once again Ron, you misrepresent the teachings of Christ, and His Church. The way you represent only one aspect of a teaching of the Church would be akin to selling a windshield and a set of tail lights and calling it a car.
Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of the Tree was not a simple act of eating a fruit, but a direct act against the will of God. An action that they where aware was a breach of their covenant with God. One of the conditions for a sin to be Mortal is that one knows one is offending God and one wills to do it anyway. Note I said one, as you proport to know what the Church teaches and to instruct us here (albeit usually with major errors in what you state the Church teaches) I’ll let you find other things that qualify a sin as mortal or venial.
Reaching out and Touching the Ark was another deliberate act forbidden by God.
Catholics do not deny that the wages of sin are death, the classification of sins into two categories as pointed out by Weather in the verse you wish to deflect comment from. Just as you reject what the followers of Christ have always believed because you narrow what God can do to only what is in the Bible. Even when the Bible does not support that it is the only source of God’s revelation, nor the only thing that Jesus taught, (see the final verses of St. John’s Gospel, or the mention of when Christ takes the Apostles aside after preaching to the crowd and instructs them further). Even when the abreviated Bible you use does not conform to the Scriptures taught by Christ and the Apostles, (Quotes our Lord and the Apostles make in the NT are taken from the Septuagent translation which include the books rejected by Protestants 1500 years after the fact.) You decry all history based on either it not being Scripture therefore invalid, or based on the paranoid theories of early Protestants that there is some grand plot by the same people who not only chose, (the Catholic Chruch, with the guidance of the Holy Ghost) those books that would be included in the NT out of the hundreds of writings that where circulating in the early Church, and accepted by some as Scripture and others as non-Scriptural.
Two thousand years of the Catholic Church preserving the Bible, even making copies by hand before the first Bible printed on movable type, (A Catholic Bible), two thousand years preserving the teachings of the Apostles. The Preservation of the sermons and letters of the direct deciples of the Apostles and thier deciples, telling us what the Apostles instructed them, so we can know what the early Church taught Vs. five hundred years of rejecting books of the Bible because it did not fit in with the new found religious and political ideas of the men who founded the various Protestant sects which all disagree with each other over the Bible, because a spirit, (one that teaches and moves men to dissent) tells them they are correct and two thousand years of holding fast to the traditions taught by St. Paul are false.
[quote:21dddlbg]Besides, how often am I told to keep things in context – so one should not take isolated Scriptures if they would contradict others Scriptures.[/quote:21dddlbg]
Keeping things in context includes many things when discussing the Scriptures. Included in them and rejected by most private interpretation Protestants are… Context within the original tounges that the scriptues where written. Context to the cultures and times that they where written in. Context to what the early Church taught. Based on a rejection of these concepts the scriptures do (and even moreso from the Protestant reckoning of things) contradict themselves. Protestants decry the use of images in Catholic Churches based on the Protestant numbering of the ten Commandments. Catholics putting the Commandments into the perspective of the Old Testament follow God’s commandments. Protestants by reordering what God said reject what God commanded and become iconoclasts, much like their fifth century heretical forebearers, they bring back the long dead errors.
As it is said, “Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.”