Just catching up on last week's stream. Re: the use of "father" in the Catholic Church - understand the context in which that prohibition is made. There was no church and no priests outside of Christ and those who followed Him at that time. The people who were illegitimately receiving that accolade were not of Christ. The prohibition was directed at the leaders of the temple who were spiritually dead and represented only themselves (at best) and not the Lord, and at other spiritualists who would purport to offer occult wisdom outside of God's Law. In the New Testament St. Paul has no compunctions about referring to Abraham as the "father" of all true believers, and no biblical scholar seriously holds that we are to disregard honoring our own earthly fathers (as we are commanded to do). It is strictly in the sense of giving undue deference to unlawful authority that this prohibition is made; the modern day equivalent of this would be a Christian giving any deference to the claims of holiness of Jewish, Hindu, or Muslim spiritual leaders as though they had any legitimacy. By contrast, the legitimate use of the term "father" is a recognition that the priest, graced by the Holy Spirit, validly performing his ordained duties, is acting in persona Christi, and in offering the Holy Mass, unites himself to Christ in the same way that Christ is united to the Father. The priest is still just a man; it is in his office as priest, and in the faithful performance of that role, that he attains to the title of "father."
Edit: should have listened for a couple more minutes, one of the superchats beat me to it. Divorced from its context, any passage of the Bible can be read to mean anything. The fedora-tipper's favorite part of the Bible (aside from Old Testament prohibitions against eating shellfish) is when Jesus destroyed a fig tree "for no reason." They say that it demonstrates pique and distemper and proves that Jesus was not perfect, because any reasonable person wouldn't expect a fig tree to produce fruit of season, when the purpose of the passage is to condemn those who put on the appearance of goodliness and lack all the substance of it (the fig tree *was* out of season, but was in leaf as a fig tree in season would be. It was "trying" to look like it was fruitful when it was barren). You simply can't read the Bible in the 21st century without some kind of guidance - we're too far removed from the common understanding that believers would have been operating under 2000 years ago. It's the same species of error as 21st century libshits who choose to read the 2nd Amendment as providing for a militia and not for the general right of the people (aka the militia) to bear arms uninfringed. The document was written with the assumption that the plain reading of the text could not be misinterpreted.
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