At least he didn’t go for “Nazi Ratzi”.
Not anyone–Roman Catholics. Big difference.
And thanks for the answer, Bricker.
How so? It’s a very serious problem in Africa right now.
Rape isn’t a Catholic teaching.
Tell that to a person with a flat tire or a blinker that isn’t working.
Hey, Poly and Metacom, thank God for Henry VIII, eh?
Oh yeah. Tell that to Lizzie Bordon and the gecko from the GEICO commercials.
Yes, criticizing the ideology of a person in power usually means that we hate them as a human being, hate the office he holds, and hate all followers of his religion. Brilliant logic.
How does being a Catholic make it always obvious what the right thing to do is? Aren’t there still situations where you’re stuck in a limbo between two different moral goods? Unless you have a hotline-to-the-infallible-pope who is available 24 hours a day to answer your quesiton about when a white lie to avoid hurting a coworker’s feelings is right or wrong, seems to me you face the same kind of tough dilemmas every day that the rest of us do, except that there are some issues (abortion, stem cells, the death penalty) which are tough issues for the rest of us, but which are already decided for you.
A few overall thoughts about this thread:
(1) Lots of people are saying things like “what? you’re complaining? what right do you have to complain? of course the catholics are going to pick a catholic who believes in catholic things to be pope… how can that be surprising? you must all just hate catholics and whine about everything they do…” and so forth. This is just silly. As many people have pointed out, the pope influences all of our lives in various ways. And while obviously the catholic church wasn’t going to name a pope who would instantly reverse the catholic position on every possible controversial issue, the fact of the matter is that even within the church, there are more conservative people and more liberal people. Why shouldn’t someone be unhappy that a more conservative person was chosen?
(2) wrt condoms vs. celibacy, here is what I wrote in another thread, which I was really hoping to get more of a response to…
(3) another important point in the condoms vs. celibacy debate is that many of the people involved are CHILDREN. We recognize, being sensible people, that 13-year-old children do not act with total intelligence and maturity. Thus, for instance, an employment contract a 13-year-old signs in which he agrees to work for an Evil Company for 70 years for minimum wage, in exchange for an XBox, would not be legal. So, how can we hold a 13-year-old morally responsible for giving in to his bodily urges and having sex? It’s one thing to say “that 40-year-old middle class man in America who has been bombarded with sex ed and can afford to buy condoms at the corner store had unprotected sex and caught AIDS and deserves it”. It’s quite another thing to say that about a 13-year-old in Africa, with all the lack-of-education and lack-of-ability-to-acquire-condoms that that implies.
All sin is prideful; and yes, the Catholic church teaches that homosexual activity is sinful. We know that comes as a shock.
Yeah, and eating meat on Friday used to be asin, too. The Muslims want to send me to hell for drinking beer, and the Catholcis want to send me to hell for suckijg cock. William Black said it best in The Garden of Love,
“And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
and binding with briars my joys and desires.”
Feh to the whole pack of you!
No, I meant that it went against all reason. I asked, in post 72, if to save lives, the church should break it’s own rules, and you said:
I can not see a single word in this sentence which agrees with the know facts of how human beings actually work.
Also, I asked:
I suspect that the reason you have not answer, is there is no answer, but that was not the one you are responding to, anyway.
P.S.MaxTheVool, I have no good answer to you question, since I can see no hole in what you have said. It’s very well written.
And yes, the Catholic Church (and every other church) has every right to teach that X, including homosexual activity, is sinful, and to proscribe doing X for its members, on whatever penalty it decides is appropriate.
The problem comes when the Catholic Church, or the Southern Baptist Convention, or anybody else, decides that its political power is such that it can force through laws to prohibit people from doing what it considers a sin, whether or not they’re Catholics, or Baptists, or whateveritarians.
Stem cells to abortion to homosexuality to gambling to drinking, there’s somebody somewhere who’s ready to decide that because he thinks it’s a sin, they should pass a law to keep anybody from doing it.
If Benedict XVI teaches the strictest of Catholic doctrine and enforces it on the faithful to the fullest extent, I have no problem with that: they have the right to obey or go elsewhere. If he once decides that he will influence the political sphere to ban contraceptives, abortions, homosexual acts, or whatever else happens to float his Index of Faith and Morals, that’s the point at which he has crossed a line and deserves to be told firmly to butt out. That’s why I was so irate at what I understood him to have done with regard to the last election.
I hearby declare this pope to be a complete pile of shit:
Eh, I don’t think it was ever a sin, per se, just a custom. If you forgot and had a bologna sandwich for lunch, I don’t think it was something you would even have to confess.
Why are YOU permitted to try to influence the political sphere to achieve results you believe are valuable, but the Pope is not?
Because Polycarp speaks on authority of being a human being, no more or less. Not as the head of his church, commanding millions of people across the planet to act according to his decrees.
How so? There’s big problems in Jellystone Park right now.
But you’re an athiest. You and I have very different ideas about how human beings work. I believe that human beings have an immortal soul, and that their actions in this world have some bearing on the disposition of that soul. You - presumably - do not believe that.
It is thus not surprising that you believe human beings work differently than I. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he loses his soul?
That’s a generalization I don’t accept. I’m not saying that no one but a Catholic can criticize Catholics. I’m saying that if you do not accept the tenets that form the basis of Catholic belief, your criticism of Catholics is not likely to be persuasive to Catholics.