Quote:
Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Catholicism is a fucking joke - its like being a Mason or a fraternity member.
|
What is this, national trash-on-Catholics day?
I know non-Catholics like to oversimplify the religion, usually for the sake of disparaging it. I also know this is popular with any number of other religions (cf. Not Me posting on Islam). There are even Catholics who want to oversimplify for purposes of denying the tensions within the faith.
But it is possible to have a deeply felt religion that, yes, has strong tenets of faith, and still to struggle with elements of it. Faith need not be a simple matter of staring at your belly button and believing what you are told, and Catholicism is certainly very far from that.
So, for the law-and-order Catholics who have no problem with an absolutist right-to-life position, it is common to see them struggle with the fact that the Church is adamantly opposed to the death penalty. For me, the struggle is usually with the role of women in the Church - I find little rational basis for not permitting women in the priesthood, and this obviously puts me at odds with the Church's official position. But I have faith that the Church will also grow, and the time will come. And the Church is very diverse, and that does mean that it may move slowly at times because it needs to bring a lot of people along.
But I tell you what, let's not minimize the extent to which anyone feels their religion, or minimize the value or meaning of their religion, for the purposes of political debate. I won't call such behavior unAmerican, since it is more fundamentally wrong than that.
