I can’t honestly believe that if you don’t go to church every sunday your sinning mortally or that if you break a few of the bibles rules your a bad person. I’m catholic and when i sit there and listen to our religous role models yell at us and have no patience i cannot believe a thing they say. Our priest has no patience with us teenagers. He yells at us and even curses at us and were supposed to use him as a religous role model. And even a bigger chaos is the head of our wednesday classes lies to us. Last week she told us 'God hurts when were late and its a sin. It is not a sin to be late to religon class especially when its an accident. How can Catholicism survive here with our role models? Especially after the molestation of children from catholic churches. It just adds to the downfall of our faith.
God’s Plan.
.
(or Inertia)
.
(or God using Inertia to carry out His Plan)
The church has always had members who failed to live up to God’s call to follow him. Despite that, (and the schisms, heresies, apostacies, abuses, hypocritical actions, and other human actions that have resulted from or contributed to those failures), the church has continued to roll along.
This may be because God considers the message that it provides to be more important than the individual failings of it members.
Or, it may be that it has simply reached a size that has become self-perpetuating as a human institution.
Or God may have relied upon it reaching a self-perpetuating size in order to ensure that it will continue to keep his message alive in the world.
Short of a direct response from God or conclusive proof that god does not exist (either as viewed by Catholics or absolutely), we can have ideas about why or how it has survived, but we cannot really know.
(Do recall that even among the disciples of Jesus there were sinners and people given over to human faults. No individual, priest, teacher, pope, or saint is fully representative of all that the church is, should be, or can be.)
You know, you could start your own religion.
Catholicism will survive for a very long time, as long as the Church continues to employ very strong symbols and mythological constructs.
Any organization with a billion members is not going to disappear soon.
By replacing the pope with a mome.
I dunno. I suppose that if the raths were really mome, that would have an effect.
Would catholic outreach programs have to be changed to outgrabing?
As tomndebb pointed out, the Church has survived a great many controversies, scandals, and general wrongdoings over the centuries. I think it is important for you to try to separate, in your mind, the Church as an institution and the Church as a concept. The fundamental principles of Christianity, as far as I am concerned, are sound and an excellent source of advice on how to live one’s life. However, as soon as you put a bunch of humans in charge, complete with their frailties, agendas, and prejudices, things tend to get muddled.
I was raised Catholic and still consider myself Catholic, although I don’t actively participate. I still get my back up every time I hear a cheap shot taken at the Church’s expense. However, I am fully aware of where this derision comes from. There have been scandals; there have been bad priests; there has been corruption of virtually every sort imaginable. Remember that these are the exceptions, not the rules. Most people in the system are there for the right reasons. And the real message is still there and every bit as valid now as it was two thousand years ago.
I think George Carlin said it best when he suggested that every religion ever has the same lesson at its core: “Love your God, love your neighbor, love yourself.” Live by that simple phrase and you’ll do alright.
And failing that, my support is all for the mome raths.