Quote:
Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
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 found 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 for the purposes of political debate. I won't call such behavior unAmerican, since it is more fundamentally wrong than that.
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I am Catholic, and I'm quite familiar with the Church's positions on everything. You'd do just as well to try to follow the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard.
The only church edict worth a shit is from St. Francis of Assisi -"Do onto others as you'd have them do unto you." I live that one because its practical, sensible and I believe encapsulates how people should live. As to the judgmental rubbish offered by Rome and the eidtcs handed down by the Church - those are men's rules, and you might as well wipe your ass with them as read them. You think I'm going to have "faith" in a disastrous bureaucratic mess like the Church. I'm pretty certain if Chriost were to come back, the first temples he'd demand be cleansed would be the Southern Baptists and the Catholic Church. I'll deride Catholicism all I like because its a flawed, self-perpetuating corporate monster. As to its brother in judgment dispensing industry, the SBC, well, thats a good example of what happens when uneducated white trash gets together in mass numbers. They have a right to speak all they like, but I've no obligation to respect the views of imbeciles. And yes, if you believe, like the SBC, that women should be home and subservient, and that evolution is a teaching propagated by "satan", you're an imbecile.
As to the GOP being taken over by religious nuts, there will be a reckoning soon. I believe - I have to believe - that the Rockefeller Republicans will stand up and take back what's theirs. You can't have a party where the mass quietly accepts the tyranny of idiots indefinitely.
