19 Comments
User's avatar
Brady Putzke's avatar

“When you confer spiritual authority on another person, you must realize that you are allowing them to pick your pocket and sell you your own watch.” - Alan Watts

Thaddeus Kozinski's avatar

Ok apostate Catholic

glof's avatar

Thank you LSD man, very cool

Yoshi Matsumoto's avatar

Watts wasn’t an LSD man

glof's avatar

Yes he was, you are wrong

Yoshi Matsumoto's avatar

Do you mean that he used LSD or that he was a proponent of it? I agree he tried LSD, he wasn’t going around preaching it’s virtues

glof's avatar

He was the king of it

Yoshi Matsumoto's avatar

That’s not true lol

Gojiramon's avatar

Interesting read. I think the leading authority soon will be Grok/Chat GPT :D Be your own AI pope :P

glof's avatar

Well yeah, that's kinda what "will" means as (uh oh... I'm gonna go there, to your chagrin) has been noted patristically

Also, if you think the Fathers are referenced because we think they're smarter than us, or because they're great scientists or whatever, you are woefully missing the point (per usual with you).

Many of them were intelligent, many weren't. Kinda like us moderns. You can view them like you'd few OT Israel, and how we view ourselves. We reference them not because they're smarter, but because they're probably about the same as us.

Just as they are not inherently better by being born before, the opposite is also true: we are not inherently better by nature of us being born later. That one needs to be smacked in people's heads a bit more, I think.

They also have a significant recency bias that we wish we had, being, y'know, pretty damn close to the time of Christ. That accounts for something, right?

You're free to shit in the woods then roll in it and then proceed to eat the shit covered leaves. Nobody is disputing that. Might not be in your best interest though. That's kind of closer to the true nature of "authority". Plato got this, certainly, except he's old and therefore dumb.

Yoshi Matsumoto's avatar

I think you might be arguing with a point that I’m not making.

Thaddeus Kozinski's avatar

The Catholic Church has infallible authority over the truth about salvation. It’s called the Magisterium. Jesus gave it to her. Anything else is just my opinion vs yours. Become Catholic.

Bryce Lingle's avatar

I’d be genuinely curious your reaction to testing your hypothesis that authority is based vaporous and based on nothing by affronting legal authority. I think we would find it is very real and binding. Interpreted into an intelligible case law corpus through time and enforced today.

Yoshi Matsumoto's avatar

Most every conviction is self inflicted.

Bryce Lingle's avatar

I don’t know what that means. Maybe to my own detriment. I’d like your thoughts though on Christ’s authority, appearing in the passage you gave, coming from the Father. Would you imply that the Father’s authority, for example by which Christ judges the world in the last day, to be the only authority? Or would you still maintain that authority is written on water and unbinding?

Yoshi Matsumoto's avatar

I am using “authority” specifically the way that most do when using authority as what I call “a liability shield”, for agency laundering.

There is a real authority only sort of related to that though. Authority as in author, the one who authors a thing. The author of a thing does have a spiritual claim to ownership of it, and therefore authority over it. In the example you give, the US government has authority over legally recognizable entities, which it has created, but less so over that which it has not created (eg men and women).

glof's avatar

Reluctant LSD King... birds of a feather

glof's avatar

Tl;dr "do what thou wilt"

Yoshi Matsumoto's avatar

On the contrary, tl;dr, "Accept that what you do is always what you will."