Because religion =/= belief. Religion is mainly about participation in a community, and participation is as much about shared practice and shared identity as shared belief.
Not so, I think. Even in the Good Old Days when the Catholic church wasn’t “hurting for members”, the number of Catholics thrown out because they didn’t believe this or that was pretty small. Clerics who taught contrary to church teaching were in trouble (and still are), but the individual Catholic in the pews who doubted or denied some article of faith was not usually the subject of any action.
Yes, but that’s because you define religion mainly in terms of belief (and perhaps of unquestioning or absolute belief). That’s fine for you, but not everybody has the same understanding that you do, and therefore they may have less problem maintaining a religious identity while questioning or doubting the associated teaching.
It doesn’t. “Immaculate Conception” doesn’t mean what you think it does, and it refers to Mary’s conception, not the baby Jesus’s. From Wikipedia:
As I understand it, the Church no longer teaches that Mary was a literal virgin, but that a state of spiritual purity has been imputed to her. Mary had a fairly small role in the early Church’s liturgy and her veneration grew in popularity during medieval times.
Well, yeah, we all do that. But here we bump against my completely-unfounded claim that Catholics and Jews have more in common than Catholics and Baptists.
Non-Catholics have this peculiar notion that a billion worldwide Catholics agree with the Pope (and each other) about everything, that they put aside any disagreements with Church doctrine on the Pope’s say-so, and – I hear this a lot – the Pope has some kind of magical hold on Catholics, a literal mystical thrall.
No. As with any other group, a fair number of Catholics think much of Church dogma is bullshit and push for reform from within the fold. The Church of Rudy Giuliani, Opus Dei, the Magdalene Sisters and the former Cardinal Ratzinger is also the Church of Catholic Workers, The Lesbian Nuns, Liberation Theology and Citizens in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. There are lots of divergent opinions within the Church. And while the Vatican officially takes a “My way or the highway” approach to dissent, the actual history of the Church is a history of brinksmanship and compromise and trying to avoid yet another major schism.
The person who doesn’t believe in any religion(even if they are raised Catholic)I would think they are not Catholic, or any religion,unless they converted to another religion,or became atheist. Just because the Church would still call you catholic doesn’t make it true. If that were so Martin Luther and all the men who started other sects of Christianity would still have been considered Catholic. Believing in a doctrine is one thing,not believing is another. Even some protestant sects say in the creed,"I believe in the holy catholic church,the word catholic meaning universal.Once a person leaves the church, that person is called an apostate!
Well, Catholics do a pretty good darn job of promoting the idea that dissent isn’t allowed. I’ve been told by Catholics that theirs is the true church by the mere fact that it hasn’t diverged from the “original”…unlike the numerous fly-by-night Protestant sects.
Individuals may disagree with certain dogmatic elements–I think everyone recognizes this with our experience with Catholics. But I’ve never gotten the impression that there is much “bottom-up” control of the church. So I guess I need to do some studying on the history.
“Bottom-up control” is kind of a misnomer for it, but all the reforms the Church has ever accepted began as conversations among dissident theologians. The Pope didn’t wake up one day and say “Mass in the vernacular? Let’s do it! And no more targeting Jews for conversions.”
I suspect in the Irish context at least it’s related to the fact that you are of course free to expunge any Catholicism from your life but the church will still count you as a member and use your so-called membership in defending the privileged role of Catholicism as regards the Irish state.
I suspect the answer depends on how much the individual in question considers their Catholicism a matter of religious doctrine, versus how much they consider their Catholicism as part of their ethnic identity.
Yep. I wouldn’t blink if someone said they were an atheist or secular Catholic. Catholicism is a worldview that, in my experience, is pretty hard to shake even if you never believed or no longer do.
Gonna be pedantic here: that belief is not sufficient, and, I think, not necessary either.
A key tenet of Islam is that Mohammed is the last of the prophets, as was Jesus; they’re both divine in a sense. Yet Muslims are not a subsect of Christianity. Plenty of neopagans believe that everyone is divine, but they are also not Christians. I have a friend who did his master’s thesis on the Mormon Church who believes that Mormons are not Christians (I disagree with him, but he marshals powerful arguments to this effect, arguments I’m not prepared to go into here). So it’s not sufficient.
As for not necessary? Here I get a lot of disagreement. But if someone believes that Jesus was, while mortal, uniquely qualified as a teacher of moral philosophy, and if they base their lives around an attempt to follow Jesus’s message, I certainly consider that person to be a Christian.
For me, that’s the definition of Christian: someone who believes that they ought to try to follow their understanding of Jesus’s message. You can be horrible at actually following through, and you can have an insane understanding of that message (I’m looking at you, Fred Phelps), and you can have doubts about Jesus’s divinity or whatever, and I’ll still think of you as a Christian if you believe you ought to be looking to Jesus as your primary moral instructor.
Good point, LHoD. I append my definition to read belief in the divinity of Christ and attempting to follow him. Professing belief is a piece of cake, doing things like loving your enemies and forgiving them seven times seventy times is not. But if you follow Christ’s teachings but don’t believe in his divinity, of course that makes you a good person but does not, in my opinion, make you Christian.
I too think that that is one valid definition of a Christian, but it isn’t a religious definition. It’s just a valid common adjective meaning “Christ-like”. Whereas if you were an atheist who believed that Jesus was one of the most important moral teachers ever and strove to be more like him, then I would have no problem describing you as “Christian” but would not say that your religion was Christian or that you followed the Christian religion.
I’d actually draw a big difference between “one of the most important” and “the most important.” If someone is in the former category, I wouldn’t call her Christian. If she’s in the latter, for want of a better word, I’d call her Christian–just like if she believed Marx was the most important moral philosopher I’d call her Marxist.
IMO one can believe that Jesus is a human being, going so far as to say that he was divinely chosen to teach as a prophet, thereby following his teachings-without considering oneself to be a Christian. Similar to not wanting to be co-opted by a group that has glommed onto the name of any great teacher. It should be the choice of the individual to apply the label, if so desired, not the group.
Fair point, and I should say that far and away my biggest criteria for considering someone a Christian is this: does they consider themselves to be a Christian? Except in extreme circumstances, I’ll agree with their own self-assessment.
Extreme circumstances:
A person worships Jesus as the Divine Savor who died for our sins and who rose from the dead after three days and who sits at the right-hand side of God, and who agrees with virtually every other tenet of mainstream Christianity, and who attends church, but who doesn’t call himself a Christian because he doesn’t like labels, man. Sorry, I’m gonna think of him as a Christian.
A person who doesn’t believe in Jesus’s divinity and who doesn’t think Jesus was anything special and who really worships the ancient Norse Gods, but who believes that Thor is really the savior prophecied in the Bible, and who uses the name “Kristos” to describe Thor’s role as savior and who therefore considers himself a Christian. Sorry, I’m not gonna think of him as a Christian.
But in non-extreme cases, I’ll certainly abide by what the person wants to be called.
I think it depends on a lot more than that. People are practicing Catholics for a wide array of reasons. Unlike most Protestant churches, it is a vast tent. Instead of moving to a more like-minded denomination (or splintering off and forming a new one), we just scoot over in the pews and make room. There are right wing fanatics, charismatics (the ones who speak in tongues – we got 'em too), those whose faith is based around works (feeding the hungry, social justice etc.), those whose faith is mystical and contemplative, intellectuals and religious scholars, people whose social network is based upon parish activities (afternoon bingo, the Altar Society, choir) . . . in fact I know people of all these persuasions exist in my own parish.
There are the folks who just come “for the children” and to be married and buried. And there are people who are Catholic because it is the ethnic air they breathe, like many of the large Mexican immigrant contingent in my own parish.
Catholics might be the most varied church population there is.
What do each of them believe in terms of dogma? Who knows.
A common notion but, so far as I can see, untrue. Firstly, you can still formally defect from the Catholic church, and get acknowledgement of the fact from the church. If the assertion is that the church is estimating its membership numbers using a methodology which disregards these defections, I have never seen any evidence of that. But, secondly, and more to the point, in any discourse I have seen about Catholicism, public policy and the state, the number quoted for Catholics in Ireland come from the census, not the church estimates. And the census records numbers of people who self-identify as Catholics.