I won’t belabor this matter except that the article describing it, written by Thomas Reese at the National Catholic Reporter, explicitly mentions “Sophisticated Theologians™”—that rarefied group of thinkers who always provide the Best Arguments for God.
It turns out that there’s just been a Roman Catholic Synod, one of whose aims was to decide what God wanted to do with those divorced and remarried Catholics who wanted to take Communion but haven’t gotten the proper church annulment. Catholics in that situation have sinned and are not in a “state of grace,” so they’re not allowed to nom the body of Christ or drink his blood. You can see the labyrinthine rules for Catholic Communion here, and to me they show craziness rather than Sophistication.
What did the Sophisticated Catholic Theologians™ decide about this difficult issue? What did they settle on as God’s will? Well. . . nothing. They equivocated. As Reese reports (my emphasis):
To the amazement of all, Germans reached unanimous agreement on their report that included a discussion of the internal forum.
“There must be perhaps a way of going with the people in these situations, with the priest to look if and when they can come to a full reconciliation with the church,” explained Cardinal Reinhard Marx, speaking of divorced and remarried persons. “That is the proposal.”
This unanimity was significant because in the German group were theologically sophisticated cardinals representing different points of view, including Cardinals Walter Kasper, who originally proposed the idea of the “penitential path,” and Gerhard Muller, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known to oppose that path.
. . . What is remarkable about the three paragraphs dealing with divorced and remarried Catholics is that the words Communion and Eucharist never appear. Yes, that’s right, they never mention Communion as a conclusion of this internal forum process.
So what does it mean? A conservative might interpret it as closed to Communion because it was not mentioned in the text. A liberal might interpret it as including Communion since it is not explicitly excluded in the text.
I think that the truth is that Communion was not mentioned because that was the only way the paragraphs could get a two-thirds majority. Like the Second Vatican Council, the synod achieved consensus through ambiguity. This means that they are leaving Pope Francis free to do whatever he thinks best.
So here we see God’s will—after all, if you do the wrong thing, you’re not in a state of grace and will go to hell— is decided by vote, or, in this case, not decided by vote. What many people (Catholics and atheists alike) don’t realize is how much of Catholic doctrine, which supposedly represents God’s will and decides your postmortem fate, was decided by similar votes. Here’s a passage from Faith versus Fact:
It’s not widely appreciated that much religious dogma, especially in Christianity, wasn’t even derived from scripture or revelation, but from a consensus of opinion designed to quell dissent within the church. The Council of Nicaea, for instance, was convened by Emperor Constantine in 325 to settle issues about the divinity of Jesus and the reality of the Trinity. Despite some dissent, both issues were affirmed. In other words, issues of religious truth were settled by vote. The requirement for absolving sin through individual confession wasn’t adopted by Catholics until the ninth century; the doctrine of papal infallibility was adopted by the First Vatican Council as late as 1870; and the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, something debated for centuries, didn’t become Catholic dogma until Pope Pius XII declared it so in 1950. And it was only in 2007 that Pope Benedict XVI, acting on the advice of a commission convened by his predecessor, declared that the souls of unbaptized babies could now go to heaven instead of lingering in limbo. Given the absence of new information that produced these changes, how can anybody seriously see this as a rational way to decide religious “truth”?
In short, the Church just makes stuff up—stuff that’s supposed to affect you for all eternity. How can rational people buy it?
Sub
Rational people don’t buy it. Some mostly-rational ones do, but only by temporarily surpassing reason: temporary
insanityirrationality.Here is the definition of rational from Merriam-Webster:
: based on facts or reason and not on emotions or feelings
: having the ability to reason or think about things clearly
Based on this definition, it is arguable that most people are rational. I am not a psychologist, but from my observations I conclude that many, if not most, people are not rational in making important life decisions. That is, they make decisions or take actions based on emotions or feelings, not fact or reason. How they vote or their religious affiliations support this contention.
Many years ago as an undergraduate I took a psychology course in which the work of B. F. Skinner, of the Skinner box fame, was discussed. As I recall, Skinner took the position that people can be conditioned to accept certain beliefs or take certain actions. This theory strikes me as having a lot of validity. In respect to religion, most people in the U.S. at least are exposed to religious doctrine at a very young age. These religious beliefs are imprinted on them, making it very difficult, although fortunately not impossible, to shake them off even when later in life they become aware how, rationally speaking, these beliefs are nonsense. When conditioned to accept religious dogma, people will accept uncritically any nonsense that supports their beliefs because these beliefs are so ingrained in them that the rejection of them would shake them to the core and destroy the essence of their being. Most people take the path of least resistance and don’t confront ideas that challenge their psychological equanimity
As Francis Xavier reputedly said:
“Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” Maybe Skinner got his inspiration from him.
Seems an odd definition to me.
Its entirely rational to do things which you, completely irrationally and emotionally, enjoy.
We used to play whiffleball in the alley, using a manhole cover for home plate. We developed a sophisticated set of rules to match the game to the terrain. A ball hit into Mrs. Murphy’s yard was a double, etc. At some point in my life, I understood that theology was like whiffleball in Apple Alley, a set of ad hoc rules that make sense only because of an original agreement that the manhole cover would make a good home plate and not exportable beyond the limited context.
I assume then that you guys did not patent the rule process or copyright the set of rules. You could have made a fortune if you had.
That’s the thing. We didn’t have the faith to go over to Plum Alley and convince them that our rules should be used there. If only.
That was the thing about my neighborhood: every block, new ground rules for Spaldeen rubber-ball and touch-football games. Curbs, sewers, parked cars, stop signs — in-play or out-of-play? Ball caught off the wall, double or out? The home-alley advantage, I guess you’d call it.
Rules of whackbat, from Fantastic Mr. Fox
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzBMv2Gr_Bw
I think this is a producer’s test version before George Clooney “voiced” it…
Those were the rules of cricket the coach was explaining?
Religion is more like Calvin Ball. (From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
,,,,who the hell cares….
The catholic church badly needs new members to keep going. An institute that lasted more than a thousand years in Northern Europe and shaped Western culture for centuries is headed for extinction and irrelevance. These squabbles over divorced couples show that the Church can’t bring itself to be more inclusive towards the few people that still want to be catholic, thereby sealing its fate. This is a major historical development in Europe.
Shaped Western culture? It destroyed any culture that existed in the Greek-Roman era during the first centuries AD and Europe regained its culture during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when it tore itself away from the Medieval religious culture that existed for more than 1000 years.
Which is a pretty big shaping of culture.
As the Chicxulub asteroid had on life.
Haha – that’s a pretty big reshaping.
Blame it on
the Bossa NovaConstantine’s mother.Blame it on Constantine who wanted a state religion cohesive enough to be followed by most people to help unite the empire. He closely monitored the voting to ensure uniform tenets of Christian faith were agreed upon in Nicaea. Unfortunately, it didn’t stick.
At no time has Christianity or Catholicism held a set of beliefs agreed upon by all Christians and Catholics. Not possible. Dissension and murders have always been part of the faith.
Sure you don’t mean the Bossy Nona?
The thing is that annulments are ridiculously easy to get. I was raised in a Catholic family, and my mother and I are the only two that were only married once. Both my father and my sister had first marriages that were annulled. The same holds for my sister’s current husband – a previous Catholic marriage, now annulled.
They are easy to get if you have money. They costs hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, to obtain.
So they question is, “How shall we treat those who have not paid for an annullment?”. Obviously they want to make it necessary to pay for it, but if people genuinely have very little money, they want to be able to extract what little they have by letting them come to church. So it’s down to money as always. Do we insist on the bigger pile or take the little pile while we can?
So, quite a profitable enterprise, then.
cr
Guess I saved my narcissistic ex some coin! When we were talking about getting married I attended with her some “marriage classes” conducted by a local priest. I spoke up and (POLITELY!) questioned that, if there IS a god, why should we need some saint to intercede with him for us? I said it sounded like some car dealer “checking with the manager.” After a few more similar questionings, I was eventually told to not come back. Then, 30-odd years later, after our divorce was final, with very smug email text, the ex sent me and our sons a copy some decree from a bishop or someone that stated, since I wasn’t Catholic, and didn’t complete those classes, our marriage is hereby invalid and annulled.
My oldest son replied, “WTF?” I asked him, between my eyerolls, “So, how does it feel to be a bastard?”
Ha ha!
Something similar is going on here in the States. Large percentages of nominal Catholics are lapsed or outright nonbelievers. Others are Christmas-and-Easter Catholics. Even among those who attend mass more regularly, the Church’s teachings on birth-control and divorce are ignored by huge numbers, sometimes with the implicit approval of parish priests and other local clergy.
If this keeps up, it’ll be tough to find a bingo game, or an open bar at a Knights-of-Columbus hall, or enough kids to fill out a CYO football team — or any of the other things American Catholics hold dearer than doctrine.
sub
Hahahaha, what about pizza?
or Vatican Pie?
There is a perfectly simple way to resolve this question. Let divorced catholics go to communion if they want. If doG doesn’t like it let it handle it. Who knows he may do something spectacular like sending invisible demons to destroy the offending communicant in front of the whole congregation – kind of like what he did to Abdul Alhazred!
No need for all this strain on the brains of theologians; after all we should conserve such a limited resource for the “big questions”.
But if you don’t shun/exclude the divorcees, more Catholics will get divorced! We can’t allow people to flaunt important Catholic proscriptions and then go about having communion as if they didn’t do anything wrong!
That’s why the RCC also shuns and excludes any married couple that doesn’t have approximately 1 kid per year. Oops, what do you mean they don’t do that?
Siblings born within a year of each other were known as “Irish twins” in my neighborhood.
God’s not too reliable when it comes to backing RC doctrine. Look at all those priests who performed communion when not in a state of grace. They fooled the Big G for years at a time, and there were probably tens of thousands of kids praying for His intervention at the same time.
Of course, making sure touchdowns are scored and tight rope walks across the Grand Canyon are completed is all-consuming work.
Maybe doG really doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about all this and RCC Inc. should stop pretending that they know what doG’s thinking is. If doG don’t like it let doG take care of it.
As a famous sage once asked “who died and left the pope in charge?”
It is, of course, a bit difficult to care what RCC Inc is up to when you don’t exist. 🙂
Thanks for helping me chip away at FvF – been using smartphone pictures so far, not working well.
My ST argument : the votes were determined by the gods before they voted. QED shalom frizzle frazzle.
Would not the same be true for all forms of Protestant Christian denominations. The various denominations were formed, originally, because of dissent with the sophisticated theological doctrines in place at the time. Rather than vote and go with the majority, they decided their sophisticated arguments were the true representations of God’s will, and, unable to compromise, formed their own version of the faith. Now, each has their own doctrine that codifies God’s will and determines who will go to heaven and who will go to hell.
If a protestant rejects an RCC theological point by saying “I’ve had a revelation and you’re wrong,” then they’re doing the same thing the RCC is doing – claiming some obviously human choice is divine. But if a protestant says “I, the human being, have read the text and personally think you’re wrong” then no, there’s no real lying or hypocrisy going on. All humans make belief decisions. We pretty much have to. What makes the RCC lucubration so funny is that they try to claim that’s not what they’re doing while they do it.
I could be missing a few but I haven’t heard any preacher from a protestant denomination admit that it was a human interpretation of scripture that was the doctrine one should follow. Rather it is the divine word of God as revealed in the bible that is what they preach. Although they are ready to criticize other protestant churches of human interpretation if they are preaching a “feel good” interpretation.
There were many reasons for protestants to leave the RCC. The congregants were ripped off by local priests and the upper hierarchy of the church of money, goods and property. Bibles were not available to common people, and most couldn’t read. Interpretations of the Bible and all matters of faith had to be from the clergy only and were not to be questioned. Everything not expounded by the clergy was taught using art, music, symbolism, plays, etc. Protestants wanted to be able to read and interpret the Bible for themselves without the intercession of priests.
It is true some Christian churches believe that the Bible “… is the divine word of God…” They cherry-pick and skip over any parts of the Bible they disagree with. Not all Christian churches are so gullible as to hold this position.
Many Christians don’t know that: there are two stories about the creation, there are three sets of Ten Commandments, or that there are two different genealogies given for Jesus.
Nor do they seem to see that the stories told about the life and words of Jesus by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not consistent or coherent.
Or in the case of Henry VIII, because you want to ditch that battle-axe Catherine of Aragon and hook-up with Anne Boleyn (temporarily, at least).
That passage you quote is nearly entirely inaccurate, and is, in your words, “making stuff up.” It is simply ignorance of history.
Sorry, but you can’t say that without citing how those issues were decided not by gods but by humans. Where are your sources, for example, giving evidence that the Trinity is real and not confected by human agreement? I suspect you’re a believer, and if that’s the case you should admit that and then tell us how you know these dogmas were NOT man made.
Here’s an example of how the Pope settled the issue of the bodily assumption of Mary; this is from Munificentissimus Deus, article 44, issued by Pope Pius XII in 1950, as I said:
Whether or not I am a believer is irrelevant; I did not say that the Trinity exists or that Mary was assumed into heaven, or whatever. And I am not saying those things.
But you illustrate my point with that statement about the Assumption. Either you are deliberately engaging in deception, in calling the issue “debated for centuries” and saying that it was settled for the Church in 1950, or you are ignorant of history. Both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches universally believed the doctrine for far longer than thousand years before 1950. That is precisely why Pius XII felt justified in making his claim: he did not believe he was settling something unsettled, and he in fact was not (in terms of what was settled for Catholics, which is of course no proof of truth in itself).
Okay, you are trolling. Here’s what I said:
That is absolutely true: Pius declared it as infallible dogma only in 1950. Why did he wait so long if it was settled? And of course it was debated for centuries; Anglicans still don’t buy it universally, and neither do Protestants. It became dogma that wasn’t liable to be questioned only in 1950.
The 39 Articles of Religion which Anglicans must accept as members of the Church do not mention Mary. Article 15 (of Christ alone without sin) is regarded as a rejection of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and a warning against Marianism. Therefore Anglicans cannot accept the bodily assumption of Mary.
Articles 19 and 21 are also relevant.
Not to mention that CATHOLIC theologians St. Adamnan of lona (d. 704) and St. Bede (d. 735) and Pseudo-Jerome expressed their doubts about the Assumption after it had become a popular feast day.
The Church had an even tougher time with the doctrine of Mary’s “perpetual virginity” (though, presumably, not as tough a time as a virgin has remaining intact during child birth — Ecce homo, ouch!), especially since Scripture identifies several siblings of Jesus by name (boys at least, such as James the Just; the sisters go nameless).
Then again, without the perpetual virginity of Mary, we wouldn’t have Joseph, patron saint of blue balls.
According to my mother, who was raised a devout Catholic, before 1950 it was official doctrine that Mary died and went to heaven like anyone else. However, lots of people nevertheless believed that she was assumed into heaven. My mother was taught that she had to believe in the official Church doctrine’s or risk her eternal soul. Then in 1950 the Pope got onto the throne of St. Peter and said ‘Simon says’, and Lo! It became official doctrine that Mary was assumed into heaven, and suddenly believing that Mary had died like anyone else posed a risk to the eternal soul.
This was step 1 in my mother deciding that maybe the Universal Truth of the Catholic Church was not so universal.
Entirelyuseless: “Both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches universally believed the doctrine for far longer than thousand years before 1950. That is precisely why Pius XII felt justified in making his claim: he did not believe he was settling something unsettled…”
Actual Pius XII, in a letter he wrote to all RCC bishops: “We earnestly beg you to inform us about the devotion of your clergy and people (taking into account their faith and piety) toward the Assumption of the most Blessed Virgin Mary. More especially We wish to know if you, Venerable Brethren, with your learning and prudence consider that the bodily Assumption of the Immaculate Blessed Virgin can be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith, and whether in addition to your own wishes this is desired by your clergy and people.” Deiparae Virginis Mariae, May 1, 1946.
Universally believed for over a thousand years, or informally voted on by the bishopric in the 1940s-50s? I merely report, you decide.
The only assumption I ever make about Mary, is that she was lying so in so and the virgin birth is a myth.
This is another illustration how humans will offer explanations for rules of the afterlife.
It is self-promoting idea that Christians not only want to think about what heaven is like but they want to make rules for who can join them. Christians will impose huge time constraints on their lives thinking about these questions. Not because they care about god. I contend no one actually cares about what god thinks, but what they do want is heaven to be real and heaven to have the friends of their choice.
…but what they do want is heaven to be real and heaven to have the friends of their choice.
And don’t forget their favorite pets!
…and favorite flavor of ice cream (rum raisin) ad nauseam.
“Sophisticated Theologians™”—that rarefied group of irrational thinkers who always provide the Best Arguments for God.
I fixed that sentence.
These days, yes.
Historically, though, folks like Aquinas *were* rational – just terribly uninformed. I’ve always found that reading them is an exercise in pity, almost.
Wouldn’t a better word be “logical”? Logic, after all, doesn’t care about what you’re talking about so long as you don’t flout any of its construction rules. I thought “rational” did care about that, and therefore was more comprehensive.
Logicial is just part of what I see in folks like Aquinas – they also have mastered all matter of subject matter material, for example But again, shame that it was such a non-field.
This “communion” squabble is simply a continuation of the very same process that created the entirety of Christian theology. It took hundreds of years following the death of Jesus (if he existed) for the Christian leadership to begin the process of deciding which of the various conflicting Christian texts and precepts were supposedly “true” (how they were somehow able to do that centuries after these texts were actually written is apparently one of the most obvious of Christian “mysteries”). The first significant step finally occurred in 325 A.D. when Emperor Constantine I convened the Council of Nicaea, at which time the leading Christian bishops of the day met and simply VOTED on the major precepts of Christianity, including such things as whether Christ was co-equal with the “Father”.
The New Testament canon as we now know it (consisting of 4 Gospels, the “Acts of the Apostles,” 21 epistles, and the book of “Revelation”) was first described by St. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in 367 A.D., in a letter written to his churches in Egypt. However, disagreements as to the appropriate composition of the New Testament continued for over a thousand years after St. Athanasius’ letter, such that the 27 books he listed were not formally approved as the “official” canon of the Roman Catholic Church until a PLURALITY vote of the Council of Trent in 1546 (24 yea, 15 nay and 16 abstaining – so much for divine inspiration).
No, no, it’s the Magisterium of the Church! The just found some sources of revelation in another pocket.
Sophisticated — aware of and able to interpret complex issues; subtle — is a misuse of the term. Theologians suffering terminal mental petrification seems more accureat.
Ah, takes me back to the mental gymnastics of the theology classes at my Catholic high school …
Why are sophisticated theologians called sophisticated? They seem to be layering more non-sense on mere nonsense. Could it have some reference to sophistry?
Imagine the sheer time and words wasted on endless discussions which have been going on for centuries and which are unrelated to anything of real import.
Jerry you certainly put a nail on that one.
It’s just amazing that it never seems to occur to them how bizarre their situation is.
A God purportedly showed up and interacted with humans giving all sorts of instructions 2,000 years ago and then “poof” disappeared.
These theologians are left to debate decade after decade, century after century, what the hell God was trying to say. Meanwhile this very God is supposed to be right there looking over their shoulders (being omnipresent), but not helping a wit, remaining silent.
You know…exactly like one would expect if the the God of their ancient book were fictional.
But such smack-you-in-the-face-obviousness conclusions are off the table for the *sophisticated theologians.*
Oh oh! We may be in need of a safe zone here. Some may find “putting a nail on that one” a disturbing and anxiety inducing statement.
Oooh we definitely need a safe zone. I stood on a nail at the age of five. Subsequent events and why I have a phobia about sharp pointy things, I won’t distress the folks here with…
😉
Maybe that nail was a sign of your calling for the stigmata.
Even more remarkable is that such an amazingly knowledgable and capable God (some say all-knowing, all-capable) gave such ambiguous and difficult to parse instructions to begin with.
Almost any nine year old can tell you whether or not Harry Potter was a Death Eater, whether Hermione was muggle born, and even the subtle plot point of whether Snape was good or bad in the end. Yet on such basic questions of faith as “Was Jesus co-equal to God?” or, “Under what conditions may a person re-marry and still get into Heaven?”, the brightest readers of the Bible are left to scratch their head. Whatever else one might think about the God character of the Bible, clarity is not one of his hallmarks, which is strange for such a supposedly amazing character. If we were presented with the Harry Potter series and the Bible and asked to judge, based solely on clarity, which of these seem more likely to be divinely inspired, I think any observer anywhere would be forced to conclude that it was Harry Potter.
Well put!
It always cracks me up to see one Christian telling another “Well, that’s were you are wrong, because the bible clearly states….”
And you will have over 30,000 different Christian sects based on competing interpretations, blithely telling you the bible is clear on their doctrine.
You’d think the Son of God would have jotted a few key concepts down on a scroll while He was here — or at least picked up, as a thirteenth disciple, a scribe from among the Pharisees or Sadducees to act as His amanuensis.
“Take this down; it’s gonna be huge.”
The more you claim to know about God the more you get to judge the lives of others. “Knowing” God has always been about controlling the lives of others.
I, Matt, could not agree more.
As former USA – President Mr Jimmy Carter recently stated, “The TRUTH is that male religious leaders have had — and still have — an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world.”
The declarations of the Oldest Old Men passing themselves off as just the Messengers From Back When (of those invisible fictions) give today’s abusers more than enough of all of the power and control over the World’s female human beings that any particular day’s worth of subjugating could possibly require.
Blue
Hear hear.
And the religion of peace followed suit even more enthusiastically only giving women a half vote.
“Knowing” God has always been about controlling the lives of others.
“CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor…”
Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary.
“The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.”
Susan B. Anthony
Next you’re going to say that a Ouija board or watery nymphs heaving about scimitars are not valid ways to establish governance!
I’d be inclined to hear out any scimitar heaving nymphs I encounter.
Well, if they’re good enough for Republicans to use in picking from among presidential candidates …
Votes & synods! You’d think the will of god would be communicated through a burning bush, the appearance of an apparition, a plague or a loud, booming voice from the sky!
That voice in the sky you hear is just the PA announcer at the hockey rink, Diana.
See Tom Paine re theology .
Here’s a short video where a high-ranking Mormon “Apostle” named Boyd K. Packer tells a cute story about school children who wondered whether a kitten was a boy kitty or a girl kitty:
https://youtu.be/wDceBHOgm6A?t=107
The punch line was that one of the children suggested that they should vote on it, and this brought laughs from the audience.
Of course Packer’s point in telling this story is deeply flawed and beneath contempt, but it’s still a clever story that illustrates the very important principle that you can’t establish truth by majority vote.
The starting time in my link didn’t work, so please jump to 1:47 where he begins with “Years ago…”
It’s a good story (which deserves better telling). But I’d re-cast the moral as ‘You can’t decide physical facts by majority vote’.**
On the other hand, laws and other implicit statements of what ‘should be’, being determined by humans, can certainly be decided by vote. Contra Mr Packer.
(** Or as I used to think of it when contemplating fluid flow, the water will do what it damn well wants, regardless of what our formulae say it should do. Our equations are just an attempt to second-guess it.
There’s also the point that, in deciding new scientific facts, analysis of sometimes complex experimental results may well depend on a number of supporting experiments – analogous to a ‘vote’. So my statement up there was, as in so many cases, an approximation).
cr
“Boyd K. Packer” — Wow, did that 19th century name come pre-installed at the Salt Lake factory, or was it an after-market add-on?
What I find most interesting about this synod is that the book of Mark has Jesus Christ Himself saying quite clearly that a divorced man or woman who remarries is committing adultery. Adultery is a Big Deal, since by being in the Ten Commandments is highlighted as one of the top ten most important laws of God to NOT violate.
And yet, Protestants, Kim Davis of Kentucky, and now even the Catholic Church are all either soft or going soft on adultery. Breaking one of the 10 most important laws of God is no big deal!
At the same time, they all believe fervently gay people shouldn’t marry, and this is not even a commandment. It’s just one of the 600-odd rules, like don’t forget to add a wall around your roof.
So much for using the Bible as a source of morality. Clearly, it is a document used to support whatever it is that you *want* to believe in.
See what removing the 10 commandments from public buildings does!
Although though this scrumfest has been all over the media, even the participants are tiptoeing around what actually went on, and what if anything it means.
The Vatican’s head honcho in the UK, Vincent Nichols, was questioned on this issue for about 8 minutes on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme the other day, and still could not bring himself to say whether most of the frocks were for or against relaxing the roolz, or what the Pope, or anyone else, might do if they were (or weren’t). In other words they are waiting, as usual, to be told what to think and say by a celibate septuagenarian who is not yet sure what the voices in his head are telling him.
The entire notion of a “state of grace” based on a ledger-account entails a confused notion of morality. If “grace” has any meaning, it is an ongoing pattern of relating to the world, people, and God (if any.)
“It’s not widely appreciated that much religious dogma, especially in Christianity, wasn’t even derived from scripture or revelation, but from a consensus of opinion designed to quell dissent within the church.”
The Council of Constance in 1414 is my favorite example of “managing consensus of opinion.” Jan Huss agreed to attend in the name of “quelling dissent within the church.” When he arrived, safe conduct from Sigismund, “King of the Romans,” in hand, he was seized and burnt at the stake. I understand that his vote didn’t count.
“Council of Constance” — great name for a girl-band.
Or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode
I like “just making shit up” as a definition for “theology.”
That was Bill Maher’s definition of religion, in Religulous.
Well, I’ve seen two-year-olds squabble over toys, which are things of tangible value, but never over whether Catholics should get communion.
Does that mean 2-year-olds are more sensible than theologians?
cr
Flogging a dead horse and giving up (I wish) and walking off in a humph. What’s for lunch? Leave it to the head guy to sort, he is good at passing this stuff off and looking like change. Hurrah!
Dilema solved.
I wonder if the PRIEST giving the communion also has to be in a state of grace for all the incantations to work their transubstantive magic.
Also, what about a priest performing a baptism, or a wedding? What if these priests have raped young children and have not gotten a divine “annulment” for rape?
Is the wafer not now the body of Christ; is the newly sin-scrubbed (baptized) baby not really baptized; and is the marriage the priest performed not valid in the eyes of god?
Are there rules for this?
Inquiring minds want to know!
If you are an inquiring mind, you don’t want to waste your time with ideas that are blatantly ridiculous, you just ridicule them, just like the Nobel Laureate Dario Fo did with the Catholic hierarchy. Ridicule is the strongest weapon against ridiculous ideas, something we are observing increasingly in recent years.
My entire comment WAS ridicule.
Within the last few years, Marcus Borg wrote a book titled “Evolution of the Word: The New Testament in the Order the Books Were Written”. He talks about having tried (once only) to teach a university New Testament class positioning the books in sequence by when they were written. Totally befuddled his students.