We re discussing pedophile priests, church cover ups and women being treated as second class citizens. How is it possible to discuss those without appearing to bash the church? They have been historically and presently on the wrong side for a long time. Lets not bash them. Lets say it is a private club and that makes such actions justified.
It does not work for me. I was raised catholic but they accidently gave me real values. I think the church should not cover up pedophile priests and should allow women to have equal status in the church. Those positions are the thread. Defend them if you can.
Right, I get that. I’m just saying that given the general effect of giving in to temptation, the effect of being removed from a club is rather less of a serious thing than is excommunication. Basically that it’s a weak analogy; excommunication is a much stronger potential negative than is being kicked out out of a club.
You’re not ejected physically, but you are ejected spiritually, as I understand it. You may still sit in a church, surrounded by fellow believers, but you no longer belong to that community.
Thanks for clearing it up.
Read the flipping thread. How many posts have even mentioned ordination of women? How many posts have addressed the issue of whether the RCC is evil?
Rather than simply change the title (that was already misleading* because the RCC is clearly not intending to ordain women), so that posters looking for the ongoing discussion could not find the thread, I added the subtext that indicated the actual discussion.
I am not sure what bias you perceive. The discussion is clearly whether the RCC is evil and the limits on the length of titles precluded adding a subtitle such as: “Resolved: The Roman Catholic Church is Evil as demonstrated by their equation of priestly pedophilia to the ordination of women” (which would also have been inaccurate, but I am not dictating the positions to be taken by posters).
- The title was not deliberately misleading and was probably an appropriate lead-in to the thread as it was posted in MPSIMS.
I replied in this thread.
So what?
If I get a chain letter warning me that I will have seven years bad luck unless I forward it to ten of my friends, I am not under any obligation, spiritual or otherwise, to comply. I don’t believe in bad luck. So I ignore it.
That doesn’t mean everyone who got the stupid thing is a member of a religion and can’t leave.
Either what a church teaches is correct, or it isn’t. If it’s ocrrect, it would be stupid to leave. If what it teaches isn’t correct, it would be stupid not to, and all the empty threats in the world don’t change that.
Regards,
Shodan
Several have, Tom. Why did you steer the thread in a pitworthy direction, when with a bit of effort, you could have reinforced, the women/ordination aspect? Your “RCC=evil” labelling degraded the thread rather than improved it. IMHO, that’s not a proper use of moderatorial power, especially when it’s done anonymously.
So you moved the goalposts from divorce=Hell to divorce plus remarriage is akin to adultery which could be a mortal sin (of which the Church teaches you may be completely absolved), and by the way, in practice, annulments are available to just about anyone who wants one. Believe me, the most hardcore of Catholics aren’t happy (at the grassroots level) with how the institutional Church is “soft” on divorce when various Kennedys get an annulment (which is a declaration that no sacramental marriage ever existed) to guys who had 30 year marriages with five kids. Also, once again, all the harsh adjectives are coming out of your mouth – “disgusting sinners” was not what I got from the actual text you quoted.
Yeah, this convinces me that you and others taking your tack have spent very little time in actual Catholic churches or schools in recent decades. It would be entirely possible to be a weekly communicant for the past twenty years without hearing a single reference from the pulpit or elsewhere to masturbation, contraception, divorce, or homosexuality. Parochial priests exert little to no effort to involve themselves in anything controversial or to run their parishoners’ personal lives. Depending on the priest, you’d have gotten, maybe, one or two homilies each year touching on abortion. Seriously, this is reality as opposed to your stereotyped, outdated, or imaginary version of how life is lived by contemporary Catholics.
Ah, you contend, but the institutional Church is trying to force the hellfire and damnation down everyone’s throats (they’re just really ineffectual at it). But, not really. I’ve already mentioned how little stomach most parochial priests have for taking a hard line on these issues. The bishops aren’t much more active. For all that some have threatened to deny communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion, I’m not aware that this has ever happened (it may have, but not on any widespread basis). And if the Church is really interested in conveying a message of damnation sin and Hellfire, you’d think they’d be really active in pursuing apostates, masturbators, divorcees, sodomites – after all, they have the perfect ready made tool in excommunication, which is the formal separation from the supposed saving grace of the one true Church. How come these firebreathing evildoers, then, resort to excommunication to get their in terrorerm message across on a . . . almost nonexistent basis?
I mentioned the topics you would have to try very hard to hear the average parish priest or educator mention or dwell on at length today. More broadly, I could have said that the words “sin” and certainly “Hell” or “going to Hell” would be orders of magnitude less commonly heard in 99% of churches, cathedrals, basilicas in the West than your strawman movie version of Catholicism posits. The Catechism and other stuff coming out of the Vatican post V II is much more apt to speak regretfully of people who misuse their free will so as to separate themselves from God’s love, and the door is always left open to repentence. Homilies are much more likely to speak of “sin” rather than “sins,” with the implication that we all, as a people, could always try harder to do the right thing (rather than enumerating individual peccadillos and singling individuals out for some form of damnation).
So, no official doctrine uses the hellfire language (disgusting, garbage, sinners) that you imported; on-the-ground Catholics are not quaking in their boots over these (non-existent) threats that the priests and bishops (aren’t) delivering. I’m not seeing the evil, other than in your adjective strewn caricature of the Church as it actually exists and operates.
The only two points I can join on are:
–I think the Church is overly-aspirational on abstinence-only issues, and it does have implications that aren’t uniformly helpful when abstinence fails.
–While the New York Times and others who hate the Church’s social policies have taken an unholy glee in attacking the Church over the abuse scandal, I don’t think the Church has any leg to stand on in counter-attacking and I think the inquiry needs to be merciless and swift. Benedict made a start by booting that Mexican pervert Maciel, but I’d be happy with them rooting out the lavendar mafia and other miscreants root and branch. Does it mean kicking out 10% or 15% of priests? So be it, and no whining from the institutional Church or its defenders.
Nothing has moved this thread toward the Pit and if you have any more complaints about Moderation, take it to ATMB.
[ /Modding ]
I didn’t move the goalposts. I suggest that most if not all people who get divorces intend to pursue additional relationships afterwards. As for what you get from the text, it sounded to me like someone being polite to a guest that’s just shit himself.
Again, the fact that some people are ignoring what the Church’s tenets are doesn’t mean that the RCC as an organization isn’t doing evil things. It means that most people are good, and will ignore monstrous gibberish that the Church wants to impose.
They don’t sell hellfire nowadays because there is less of a market for it. I would assume that they don’t excommunicate often because it’s not worth the trouble unless the person is high-profile.
Again, the Church is a (the) path to salvation. Like a salesman they create the problem (the need for salvation) and want to sell you the solution. To someone who actually believes (not the Cafeteria-Catholic type) the teachings are vital to achieving salvation. And if someone does actually get an abortion or whatever, they often have horrible guilt. The guilt is also the fault of the RCC.
I do agree with that. I don’t have problem with Catholics, I know quite a few, I just think of them as victims of the RCC’s insane policies.
Okydoke.
I just don’t want to participate in a stupid “RCC=evil” thread.
Had it been labelled as such from the start, I’d’ve stayed out.
Now that it is labelled that way, I’ll stay out. But I want it clear that that’s not the way this thread began its life.
Yeah, those guys screwing prostitutes and having multiple non-spouse sexual partners refrain from using condoms because they want to follow the Pope.
I can come with scenarios galore, it doens’t invalidate my point.
I’m sure that not being able to kill an innocent human being can cause suffering.
Handing out condoms by the miilions doesn’t work and hasn’t worked. If you wanted to decrease the prevalence of AIDS by the increase of condom use, you must do several things before and after the handing of rubbers.
ATMB Discussion of thread rechristening may be found here:
OK, let’s see, you’ve got this woman in priest’s vestments, and she’s lubing a host with vaseline and there’s a 9-year-old boy lying facedown naked on the altar – have I got the whole picture here?