Rules lawyering about raped 9-year-olds IS stupid. Religious doctrinal minutiae is just about the least useful reference point regarding such a thing.
Maybe you guys should be combing my posts for religious references. Gotta remember to be petty, right? I mean, shit, if my message doesn’t speak to you, ignore it. Don’t attack me. If you feel attacked, you probably are part of the problem. My message was for Bricker, mainly, or anyone who wanted to engage the issue I raised.
Jesus.
Which by definition makes it a lie. That’s what we call it when you say things you don’t mean.
And we can ignore what you say because you don’t actually believe in spirituality. You can’t lovingly correct someone about.something that you don’t believe exists. That you started with a lie only makes if worse.
Because your soul in jeopardy is between you and God, and many of the people who find themselves in those kinds of situations decide to take a modified Pascal’s bet of “I’m going to Hope that God isn’t a complete asshole”. Making that bet about their community can be harder. Also, very often the action involves a change in the social situation of the person whether they are Catholic or not: divorcing your spouse is a public act.
Traditional version: young people who stopped going to Mass when they started courting. Well, no, not when they started courting, really; once the courting started involving visits to the haystacks. Confessing something of which you don’t repent and which you plan to keep on doing doesn’t make sense, so confession would be left for the morning of the wedding; not because they were planning on not having sex any more, but because the official stamp made future sex legit. Stopping going to Mass was the unofficial social announcement that the courting was now “serious”.
Current version: people who stop going to Mass while in the first stages of a divorce from a marriage that should never have happened. As explained before, very often these people eventually come back. Others, better informed, get spiritual counseling through the divorce itself.
The fuck is up with you and your narcissism? No, I’m not going to go combing your posts for other nuggets of dumb. I’ll respond to threads when and how I see fit. IN THIS THREAD, you demonstrate an immature and thoughtless attitude toward religion that’s part of the problem.
Isn’t that a problem, though? I mean, if such a person changes their ways not because of what it may mean between them and God but between them and the community then they’re not truly acting in a faithful way. It’s a practical, worldly concern if their view is “I’m not convinced that God minds about this - but if my friends and family treat me differently, I’d better stop”.
You’re correct of course about public acts, but the thought that originally brought this thought up for me was this idea of a private, automatic excommunication - in those cases there’s not even the practical effects of the decision, only the knowledge of what they would mean (and potentially the knowledge that they’ve committed a mortal sin). In those cases it seems like it’s purely knowledge of one penalty against knowledge of another.
That** is** a lie, though. You deliberately misled in order to improve (you thought) the chances that someone would listen to what you had to say. Knowing that you need to watch yourself on this issue and that you aren’t a fan of liars doesn’t seem to be working, given that you both did it in this case and seem to feel no kind of remorse or regret or, well, anything about your lie here (who cares?).
This thread isn’t about lying. It’s about the Catholic Church. Pointing out your lie is just a part of that; it’s showing how your arguments about the Church and religious folk, and your views of people’s arguments in this thread, are problematic given that you committed the same “sin”, as it were. It isn’t unreasonable when someone makes an argument that X is wrong because Y while themselves doing Y to point that out. You seem to be holding others to a standard that you aren’t interested in meeting yourself.
Life is conflict, here’s your first slap on the ass.
The Church is a community; the word ecclesiastic comes from the Greek ἐκκλησία, meeting. It expects its members to follow certain rules; some written, some unwritten - how is that different from any other community? When people choose to perform certain acts, they break their community’s rules; depending on how large the breach are, it may place them outside the community. Which breaches are large and which are small is determined by the community, as is whether there are any ways to make amends or to get accepted back. It’s not even a religious thing, but an expression of a general property of communities, in which the community in question happens to be religion-based.
I think I wasn’t clear; the problem I was trying to point to was that excommunication seems to, in some cases, take someone who does not care about an incredible spiritual penalty and applies a necessarily lesser religious penalty. I don’t see how the purpose of that in cases of automatic excommunication, but accepting for the moment that it enjoins the person to repent and change their ways, that person would be doing so in order to take their place in the religious community again, not out of spiritual faith.
I would agree that social breaches are a community thing, not a specifically religious community thing. But the prime purpose of the religious community is the spiritual wellbeing of the adherents. Here we have a situation where it seems as though the person’s community standing is prioritised, or seen as the important part, over the spiritual aspect.
It would be like me saying to a lapsed Catholic, “I’m going to take £20 off of you every day until you repent.” Assuming that they are capable of honestly doing so in response, and they do, what value does their regained “faith” have? It didn’t arise from any epiphany as to the risk to their soul.
You see excommunication as a penalty. I see it as a situation.
Someone was in the community and is not, that someone is outside the community. Ex-communicated. In order to solve a problem, we need to begin by being conscious of its existence; in the case of excommunication, the problem is that there has been a large breach of the community’s rules.
If I am married and my spouse and I have agreed to be exclusive, and I lie with someone else, am I not unfaithful? Would it be easier to solve the issues in that marriage if I refuse to accept that I was unfaithful, or if I accept that I was and that this is a serious breach of trust?
I apologise; it wasn’t me originally that brought up the penalty language, but I had been running with it.
I still see the same issue, though. Yes, excommunication is a way of recognising that someone has breached the community rules to such an extent that a big change is required. But if that person has committed a mortal sin, what is excommunication against that?
To go with your analogy, it seems like in that situation what would happen if you had erred in your marriage and refused to accept that you had been unfaithful. Then I, your friend, come along, am told of your betrayal, and say that until you confess to your spouse, you don’t get to carpool with me to work anymore.
I think, in such a situation, if my actions move you to change your ways where the fact of and knowledge of your betrayal does not, then you didn’t do the right thing by going back for the right reason. And if my words change your mind where the knowledge of your betrayal does not, what worth does your loyalty have, that it matters nothing against my refusing to carpool?
Dude has issues. He tries very hard to make all discussions about him and, usually, his inability to grasp that the whole world doesn’t revolve around his feelings. Couple that with condescension and rampant stupidity and voila, you have… him.
Huh. Never noticed him before the last couple of days. I look back on my earlier ignorance with nostalgia.
Oh, he’s new to me too. A week ago, I’d never heard of him. Now I’m noticing him all the time. Yay for me.
One, someone recognizing himself as excommunicated and either consciously choosing to stay out of the community or mistakenly believing they can’t rejoin it is not akin to being told “I’m not carpooling with you any more”, it is akin to them saying “you’re my husband’s best friend as well as my carpooling partner; I’m not going to put you in a situation in which you may find yourself between us”.
The kind of excommunication that Bricker and I have been talking about isn’t an action on the part of the community, except inasmuch as the community has defined it. The community does not enforce that excommunication; the individual is the one who recognizes it.
Two, unlike some other churches, the RCC’s excommunication only excludes from very specific actions. The person can still take part in many community activities; it is some very specific ones they’re banned from. And the path to readmission is very clear. It isn’t so much refusing to carpool as saying “this car isn’t moving until you’re belted in”.
Q: what is your understanding on confession? Because I’m thinking that we seem to have an issue there. The actions that clear the sin part are the same ones that get the person readmitted.
I understand that, in terms of the automatic excommunication. My point simply is; if the individual recognises that they have committed a mortal sin, what does recognising that they are excommunicated add to that? And if it does serve a additional motivation to repent, then such a person would be repenting because of that reason, not because of the recognition of the risk to their soul.
I confess I don’t see a significant difference between the two analogies. Whether it’s refusing to carpool or not moving the car until the person buckles in, the purpose is to further repentance.
“I am genuinely sorry that I did the thing I did, which was wrong of me to do. I sincerely believe and shall do my utmost to never do that thing again.”
So I see we’re still pretending that religious doctrine has some relationship to actual spiritual reality.
From my perspective, it doesn’t, since “religious doctrine” is a real thing, whereas “spiritual reality” is practically an oxymoron.
But for them as believe “spiritual reality” means something, I have no opinion on whether religious doctrine is a more correct way to view the thing I think is nonexistent than another way. It’s like asking me which depiction of elves is more accurate, Tolkien’s or Moorcock’s.
Nobody is ever going to call me an apologist for the Roman Catholic Church, but…
As Bricker explained, in this case, the Church is not passing judgement; they are, in their own strange way, simply reporting the news.
The RCC holds itself to be the only representative of God on earth. To get to heaven, you must be in good standing (Communion) with the representative of God.
This is the Confession’s function - “hey, I screwed up - how do I fix it?” 10 Hail Marys and 5 Our Fathers.
Here, the person(s) performing the abortion willfully left the Communion - the declaration of that fact is all this “Excommunication” is.
“These people have rejected God, and we are just reporting the news”.
Who is that supposed to be addressed to, and what is the speaker supposed to believe?
Confession is the process by which a person who has recognized a fault in himself or in his situation asks an advisor for and obtains advice on how to deal with it (for sacramental confession, we’re generally talking a priest). If there has been offense given, compensation must follow (“three Hail Marys and you have to apologize to your brother for [whatever]”, in a recipe traditional for small faults between siblings). The advice must include pointers on how to avoid that fault and similar ones (“pray for help” is generally viewed as lazy advice and about as useful as a sock without a hole, it should be more specific).
There have been changes in how this was treated through time, of course. Single confession (you ever yell at your brother for breaking your toys again, you can’t confess a second time… a tad radical, that) versus repeated ones, public vs private, does it involve only God and the sinner or does it involve the Church as well (ecclesiastical dimension), etc. The current RCC view and practice is along the lines of repeatable confession, generally held in private, and that it reconciliates the person both with God and with the Church.
I don’t think I’d bother calling on him if I were you. He doesn’t want to be your friend after all you’ve said and implied about his religion and all.