That's a very Protestant view. Just saying... — Bitter Crank

It's the reality of the situation, in every religion. One need only spend a little time on the Catholic web and observe all the endless ideological infighting to realize there is no single unified agreed upon view of what Catholicism is.

Quite a few of these guys have had sex, and with (surprise, surprise) actual consenting adult men. Some have even managed to have sex with actual adult women. — Bitter Crank

If I wasn't so mature I would quip here, "Don't forget the kids!" Luckily I am too nice a guy to take such a cheap shot.

All of the points I have made, most from memory so forgive me if I got something incorrect, are either from the catechism, from the magisterium, or apostolic council. — Rank Amateur

I understand. To the best of my imperfect memory you are stating the doctrines correctly.

Again not saying right or wrong, but if you are catholic you are required to believe these to be the true and inspired word of God. — Rank Amateur

No Catholic is required to believe anything just because the clergy tells them to. The clergy doesn't own the Church just because they claim to, just as I wouldn't own this thread just because I declared myself to be "the Thread".

The reality is that Catholics make up their own minds on what they want to believe. There are probably as many different versions of Catholicism as there are Catholics. Even those who claim to believe the Pope in every circumstance without fail start getting upset when we get a new Pope who charts a different course.

While I understand your point on the clergy, and again you may well be right, on matters as above the faithful have 3 options, believe, not believe and leave, not believe and stay. And in the case of the last one I am not sure why one would do that, other than for non spiritual reasons. — Rank Amateur

It's simple. Millions don't believe in this or that doctrine and still stay because they don't recognize the authority of the clergy on all subjects.

I am indifferent to what you chose to believe. — Rank Amateur

Can you understand why others might not be indifferent to what you choose to believe on the homosexuality issue, given that Church teachings on the subject over the centuries has been a significant factor (not the sole cause) of a great deal of oppression and suffering involving many millions of people? Are you comfortable being a party to that?

like jake, you want to argue that the teaching is wrong, unjustified, etc. All I am saying, is that is the teaching. And all I am stating is what the church believes. — Rank Amateur

You are stating what SOME in the Church believe. To the best of my knowledge you are describing that subset of Catholicism accurately.

guys, to somewhat generalize your points. What it appears you are advocating is the church align itself more closely with the general world view on this — Rank Amateur

The homosexuality issue illustrates my perspective. I'm advocating the Church align itself more with Christian values. Generally speaking, the culture at large has already done so.

With the intent of attracting more followers. — Rank Amateur

With the intent of restoring the Church's credibility. If successful, that may lead to more followers. It doesn't concern me so much that those aligning themselves with Christian values be labeled Catholic.

While that may well be true, it would come with a theological problem. If, as the church has done, and believes these positions are based on divine revelation, then a dilemma exists. — Rank Amateur

To continue with the homosexuality example, if Jesus had wanted his church to lead a jihad against homosexuality I believe he would have said that, given that homosexuals have always been with us. If Jesus had thought the issue of homosexuality was worth even discussing, he would have likely discussed it. The dilemma is that some folks have chosen to follow the clergy instead of following the example set by Jesus, and then they're attempting to label that choice "divine revelation".

A key difference between us is that you keep referring to "the Church" as being the clergy. From my perspective, the clergy is a small group of serious influential Catholics within the Church, who don't always agree among themselves. To me, "the Church" is like this thread, a collection of people exploring issues of common interest.

Either God was wrong, or their understanding of what God said is wrong. — Rank Amateur

Where in the New Testament did Jesus suggest that a centuries long oppression of gay folks would be a good plan?

From the church point of view, like about a million other things, homosexual attraction is just a temptation. — Rank Amateur

That is a view of SOME people in the Church. I very much doubt it's even the view of all clergy.

What many homosexual Catholics want the church to do, is accept their actions as not sinful. Which it can't. — Rank Amateur

The Church you are referring to (ie. the clergy) is a bunch of old men who may have never even been in a relationship, never been married, never raised children, never had sex, and yet they consider themselves experts on family values. That's why the clergy can't remove the sin stigma from homosexuality, as a group they have no idea what they're talking about. They're just clinging stubbornly to ignorant beliefs of the past, and thus continuing to contribute to the pain and suffering such ignorant stubbornness has long inflicted on the gay community.

Please note that it's not just homosexual Catholics who want the clergy to give this nonsense up. According to data from Pew Research 67% of American Catholics support gay marriage.

http://www.pewforum.org/2018/03/06/pope-francis-still-highly-regarded-in-u-s-but-signs-of-disenchantment-emerge/pf_03-06-18-pope-00-15/

We don't have to beat the homosexuality issue to death, I'm just using it as an example. Here's perhaps a better example...

Even when it comes to (American) Catholics who attend Mass weekly, just 13% say contraception is morally wrong, while 45% say it is morally acceptable and 42% say it is not a moral issue. — Pew Research

http://www.pewforum.org/2016/09/28/4-very-few-americans-see-contraception-as-morally-wrong/

as stated earlier, wish i could i help it. — Rhasta1

As I stated earlier, 19 is too young to declare things impossible. Maybe you can't help it because you haven't tried. Maybe you can't help it because it takes time to learn. Maybe you can't help it because you don't want to learn it. Maybe you like the drama and don't wish to give it up. Maybe lots of things. Time can help sort through the pile.

Here's an example from Florida (now 7 times more people than when I was born). Along the coasts especially the roads are clogged and there's no way to widen many of them further without knocking down trillions of dollars worth of buildings.

Somebody beat me to it...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-best-choice-for-pope-a-nun/2013/02/15/83c8be2e-76c6-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html?utm_term=.fca1cf7b50be

From the article:

Last summer my 18-year-old daughter, Julia, worked at a Catholic-supported program for the homeless in Silver Spring. Like many women her age, Julia has a long list of problems with the church, but she loved the program and deeply admired everyone who worked there.

She came home one night and said: “Why doesn’t the church talk more about this work and less about the stuff it usually talks about?”

I have a hunch that a nun just might understand what Julia was saying better than most cardinals.

There is nothing extant without form. — Terrapin Station

What is the form of space?

If you want to foster quality, you need to enforce standards. — Baden

Agree completely. Forum culture can be strange. On many forums the mods will be absolutely hysterical about spam (no argument there) but then they let users turn the entire site in to such a trash pile that you almost wish somebody would post some spam, as it would be an improvement.

You didn't address the question of whether and why something he wrote was ensured (if it was censored). — Bitter Crank

I have no idea of course, but if the poster thinks this is a free speech issue that might be a clue.

thats not actually practical. i dont know how one can control his/her thoughts. no apologies needed, im 19 , younger than you expected. — Rhasta1

19 is kinda young to be declaring things impossible.

We could easily accommodate far more people. — Terrapin Station

But do we want to?

Relations exist but don't necessarily weigh anything. — Terrapin Station

Doesn't meet definition of existence.

Thanks for the history lesson Crank. Interesting, I didn't know most of that.

We should want continued prosperity, which depends on economic growth, and economic growth depends on population growth to provide workforce and consumption. — Relativist

Ok, so the answer is 17 billion. Thanks.

Homosexuality is, according to the church, disordered. But, it is not the inclination or tendency that is sinful, it is acting on it. Which does make those who act on their homosexuality, sinners. — Rank Amateur

My point is that it's not going to be possible to do successful brand repair while the Church clings to such gibberish. Nor will it be possible for the Church to provide credible moral leadership beyond it's walls, just as it wouldn't be if the Church said all of the above about black people. Imho, it's not in the Church's interest to cling to this 8th century stuff. Better to just admit it was wrong, apologize for the damage done, and then try to change the subject.

Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. — Rank Amateur

I'm glad to hear that the Church will be performing gay marriages from here out!

All you’re essentially saying is that he’s good at the manipulation of his base (not the sharpest tools in the shed). — praxis

All I'm saying is that he won, because he is the sharpest tool in the shed in some important respects.

How much does space weigh?

The homosexuality issue could be another example of the scale of change required to repair the brand.

Francis is trying to gradually tip toe his way towards reality, positioning the tip toeing as an act of great humility and compassion on behalf the Church etc. My point is that such self serving watered down half measures will not accomplish brand repair.

What might help with brand repair would be for the Church to simply admit that it's long been totally wrong on this issue, and then apologize repeatedly for all the harm it's wrong teaching have inflicted on so many people. You know, come clean, yank the band aid off, get it over with.

The tip toeing is not compelling news, but a full clear unequivocal admission of error would be. If brand repair is to be successful, the child rape saga has to pushed out of the news with other more positive stories.

My understanding is that Francis is attempting to change the tone...

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/world/europe/vatican-signals-more-tolerance-toward-gays-and-remarriage.html?ref=todayspaper

...but that the Church (defined here as the clergy) are not yet ready to simply say...

"There's not a darn thing wrong with homosexuality, and we were stupid to say that there was for centuries, thus needlessly harming many millions of people."

"More tolerance towards gay" is not an example of game changing leadership, imho.

Tell us what you know.

Personally, I am TOTALLY OUTRAGED that the mods refuse to publish the utterly brilliant ground breaking posts which I never submitted because I'm not smart enough to write them.

In the coming Catholic utopia, when I make a stupid crack like that a nun will whack me up side of the head with a rolled up newspaper, with a wink and a smile of course.

In the coming Catholic utopia, the nuns will finally turn to the priests and say...

"If you're going to keep preaching that homosexuality is a violation of God's law, you probably shouldn't be wearing a dress when you say that." — Nuns

Ouch!

Equivocation is using a word in two different senses as if you're NOT changing senses, and it's particularly a problem when you're presenting an argument as if a sense of a term is consistent rather than referring to two different things. — Terrapin Station

Except that reality doesn't seem to care all that much about all this little human reason stuff. The overwhelming vast majority of reality is space, which can not definitively be said to exist or not exist, one or the other. Whatever space is, it doesn't seem to fit neatly in to the tidy little categories our minds create.

Jake there is absolutely no doubt at all that the Church is a flawed organization. As I said above there is no way it could not be. — Rank Amateur

I agree of course. True of any group of humans. I'm not demanding perfection, just wondering if improvements are possible. I don't know the answer, but apparently I'm still interested enough to find the question interesting.

The compulsion and presumption to create a pure Church, whether that be pure in holiness or pure in teaching or pure in justice – however and by whomever any of those is defined – is rooted in either pride or impatience (or both). If we continually expect and demand that the Church stride through history like a hero-saint we will continually be frustrated by its actual plodding through history like a Whiskey Priest. — Rank Amateur

Not pure, just improved.

That said, I plead guilty to impatience and frustration. Impatience and frustration are the price tags of progress. Would you not prefer that lapsed Catholics experience impatience and frustration with the Church rather than boredom and utter disengagement?

As a result, he ends up exhibiting those basic gospel virtues, humility and charity — Rank Amateur

My point throughout the thread has been that, fairly or not, Catholic sermons on virtue, humility and charity are no longer credible or persuasive to those outside the Church. The sermons sound like empty sanctimonious platitudes now. At the first mention of the word "Catholic" the first image to come to mind in many or most people's minds is now the scandals. The brand has been burned.

In my comments above I've tried to offer examples of possible remedies. The specific suggestions I've offered are of course debatable, but I hope they at least serve the purpose of illustrating the scale of change I believe is necessary to reverse the brand damage.

The challenge as I see it is to implement dramatic change without violating core Catholic values, and that's what I've aimed for in my suggestions.

While I agree with your even handed analysis of President Dumpster :smile: there is another side to the story, sorta.

Trump understands the media, and consumers of media, better than any politician in my lifetime. My theory is that this is due to

1) natural talent

2) living in NYC arguably the corporate media capital of the world

3) his business career

Trump gets that corporate media is not a public service, but a business whose function is to make money.

Trump gets that the business model for corporate media is to use drama to build audience and thus ad revenue.

Trump gets that consumers of media are more interested in being entertained by drama than they are in complex public policy issues.

Trump gets that super intelligent huge brained philosophers like us who claim that they are somehow different than other consumers of media are largely self delusional. :smile:

The proof of the above is of course that Trump beat every professional politician on all sides of aisle, and did what the media said for years he could never do, win the highest office on Earth.

Is Trump an asshole? Yes, of course. But he's also an intelligent REALIST, and that is his great power.

Politicians are a mirror image of the public they serve, and when we don't like what the mirror reveals, we yell at the mirror.

Except for us of course. :smile:

It means "fart" in the UK. — Michael

It means fart here now too.

One did. He still won. — Michael

I know, I know, I heard that story on NPR. Hilarious! I felt so sorry for the Dem though, whooped by a dead man, how embarrassing!

In the coming Catholic utopia the endlessly repetitive argumentative ideological squabbling which has afflicted Christianity for 20 centuries will finally come to an end because the nuns will have us too busy building houses for poor people to have time for such hobbies.

So it's an illusion that the cliff has a boundary and if he walks past it he'll fall and be injured? — Terrapin Station

Things require boundaries.

Here's a little experiment to illustrate. Drink a glass of water. When does the water become you? The boundary can be reasonably drawn in a number of places, revealing that whatever boundary you wish to choose is arbitrary.

Here's another little experiment to explore the boundary between you and reality. Hold your breath for one minute.

Physics is experiencing increasing difficulty in finding hard boundaries. No boundaries = no things.

Food for thought, that's all.

sounds more like the start of the God debate than the end of the God debate. — Rank Amateur

Sounds to me more like the God debate would finally be getting somewhere. That is, folks would finally be inspecting and challenging some of the "taken to be an obvious given" assumptions that have had the God debate going endlessly round and round in a small circle to nowhere.

In the coming Catholic utopia, somewhat pompous hardly humble wannabe clergy such as myself found burping long winded sanctimonious sermons will suddenly find a nun at their shoulder, who will grab them firmly by the ear (ouch!), and drag them in to the soup kitchen where they will be instructed to wash the dishes of the homeless, and then mop the dining room. And I mean right now mister!

If the above posters are mostly young folk, the following might help...

You've been up since dawn, running around all day doing all kinds of things. You've had some fun, some hassles, some victories, and some regrets. And now it's 11pm, the end of a long day, and what you really want to do next with your life is turn the light out, pull the covers up, and drift off in to nothing.

True, but even if we have the power to not suffer, we still need to be aware of how what we do impact what others feel — leo

Ok, I'm not against such awareness, but I would also emphasize that we typically are not in a position to make anybody feel anything. This is especially true on the Internet, the new social environment. I will read your words, and I will decide how to experience them, just as is true for everyone else.

I think that as long as we want to live and not want to die — leo

That is our relationship with the situation of our existence. Of course this relationship is hard wired in to the organism so I'm not proposing we have full control over it.

It seems more useful to me to focus on the ordinary day to day situations, as that's where most of the suffering unfolds.

The Church not only takes into account the spiritual dimension of believers but also the needs that can't be meet by dysfunctional international politics. With Pope Francis, it keeps displaying that image, taking care of those who most need it (this is basically the Catholic church in Latin America). — CarlosDiaz

It's indisputably true that the Church does a lot of good work. It also seems true that these good works are good for the reputation of the Church, which increases it's credibility, and thus ability to influence the larger world. Increasing such influence seems an important point of leverage because ideally the Church would not just be doing good works itself, but also inspiring others to do good works, thus multiplying the impact of the Church's good works.

So if good works are good for the Church, would doing more good works be better for the Church? A larger issue would be, is the Church in a position to ask this question? Is the Church capable of using the processes of reason to analyze it's charitable operations so as to dramatically boost their impact? Can the Church both adapt to the crisis of the modern world, and the crisis of confidence within the Church, while remaining true to it's core values?

Here's one example of how such a fully and truly Catholic rethinking might unfold to the benefit of all, including the Church.

I live in the American south, where one comes upon a fancy multi-million dollar Christian church building on every fourth corner. The Catholic Church alone owns billions to trillions of dollars worth of expensive church buildings, which sit empty most of the time. What if this vast investment was redirected out of real estate and in to people in need?

We know what the clergy would say, because they've had 2,000 years to make such a decision and have declined to do so. Their perspective on such a matter is firmly on the record for all to see.

So we arrive at the question of what Jesus would do. What we know from the gospels is that Jesus the carpenter never led a church construction fund drive. To my knowledge, Jesus the carpenter never showed the slightest bit of interest in church building construction. When Jesus talked about building his church, he was referring to people, not stained glass.

But, but, but the sleeping faithful will demand, without a fancy building where would we celebrate Mass??? How about in the same place that Jesus did, in a park, an open field, a hill, the town square, anywhere that people would gather. If that was good enough for Jesus, why is it not good enough for you?

Some people, with the best of sincere intentions, will tell us that they are very faithful Catholics, while they ignore the clear example set by Jesus and take food out of the mouths of hungry children so as to construct elaborate expensive buildings which typically get used only one day a week.

Ok, so that's the human condition, and none of us are perfect including this writer. The goal here is not to poke anyone in the eye, because we all live in glass houses. The goal is instead to challenge the Church to rise to the example set by it's founder, and by doing so dramatically improve it's reputation, influence and impact upon the world. That is a very Catholic goal.

But of course, as is always true in life, there is a price tag. And that would be to let go of the tradition of blindly following the clergy as they lose entire continents, drag the Church's reputation through the mud, create a crisis of confidence in the congregation, squabble endlessly among themselves etc.

Can the Church rethink it's future while maintaining it's core values? As a wannabe person of reason I would have to vote no upon examining the evidence. But I could be wrong, and it would be cool if I was.

To stop that circle of suffering we need to take into account the feelings of others as well as our own feelings. — leo

The majority of the time, other people don't make us suffer. We choose to suffer. The majority of the time, suffering is not a situation, but rather our relationship with a situation. This is actually very good news, but such good news is typically not welcomed, such is the complexity of the human condition.

some live good lives even though they know that life is ultimately pointless. — Rhasta1

The first thing to come to mind is that nobody actually knows whether life is pointless or not. There are opinions on all sides of that issues, but nobody KNOWS. And so perhaps the question becomes, how practically useful is a particular opinion?

so what keeps you alive, and why? do u have any tips on how to get past nihilism? — Rhasta1

The best I can offer for the moment is to ignore such questions until at least age 50. Stop reading books about nihilism, stop trying to come to a decision, stop thinking about it. Put it down and walk away. Until age 50 just assume that life is meaningful and preferable to the alternative, even though there is no way to prove that.

Apologies, but most such questions on philosophy forums are being asked by young men in their twenties. Through no fault of their own such folks simply don't have enough experience to usefully grind their gears on such questions. Maybe nobody does, but certainly not a 23 year old, no offense intended.

How is Catholicism going to change the world if Catholics can't handle dialog with people who don't share their views?

Are Catholics who dialog almost exclusively with other Catholics honoring the mission of the Church to change the world? That is, are they actually Catholics?