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njlauren -> RE: Yes, even Atheists... (5/26/2013 4:23:17 PM)
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ORIGINAL: curious23
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ORIGINAL: njlauren
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ORIGINAL: curious23
Out of curiosity, doesn't the pope's statement undermine the whole idea of faith?
I don't see how this is a step in the right direction since it appears to only add to the hypocrisy of a religious denomination. Throughout history, concessions have been made to adjust with the times and this I feel is just one more.
Nothing hypocritical about it, it reflects that some things can and do change. The idea of belief laid in stone is kind of mind boggling, given that the religion was founded thousands of years ago by people very different than ourselves. The book of Genesis tells people to be fruitful and multiply, which to Jews almost 3000 years ago was a necessity, they often faced being wiped out, needed the population..but in a world that will soon have 8 billion people? Not so smart, the Catholics who are upset about all the illegal immigration from Mexico and South America should look to their own Popes, who went to South America preaching the message of no using birth control, have children, God wants you to have a lot of kids..and guess what, they ended up migrating cause there just isn't the basis to feed all those kids there.
The thing about religion is there are core values, things that are pretty evident, and there are things that are man made. The proscriptions against homosexuality, for example, may very well have not been what people think, given how few references either book of the Bible makes of it, the fact that the main one, Leviticus, may be referring to someone other than a blanket condemnation of gays, makes it pretty shaky. In the Bible, women are men's property, Jewish law is not exactly female friendly, and to Christians women were property, there to 'serve' their man, and the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations fought against women being given the vote, against having rights outside marriage, and many Christian churches fought against a husband being able to be charged with rape, because to them a wife's duty is to give her husband sex when he wants it, and if she doesn't, well, tough luck, he has the right to take it (don't believe me? Do some research of when the laws were changed). Marriage in biblical times would have been arranged, and many marriages were arranged until the 19th century, once we started marrying for love it changed the whole game...
The reformation likewise turned belief on its head. The Catholic Church once it consolidated power basically told people only they knew what God wanted, you only got to God through them (pretty convenient, if you ask me, nice little way to grab power and wealth for yourself...). They said that ordinary people couldn't understand scripture, and until the reformation it was illegal to have scripture in native tongues, those doing it were subject to the wonderful death of being drawn and quartered (so much for a loving church).....the reformation said that people had their own way to God, that scripture, alone or with church teachings (depending on the faith), could help them find it, and that was huge. The RC has spent the last almost 600 years trying to regain back their power, yet even most Catholics, at least in the west, have retained a personal right to believe or not believe....
I once had a discussion with this with a pretty wise priest (think I don't like the Vatican? Well, he said to him they were like the assistant principal you hate in high school, who instead of seeing himself as someone helping kids, saw them as the enemy), and he said that God doesn't change, God is God, but our understanding of him changes. Jews fundamentally understand this, the duty of every observant Jew, each day, is to ask what is God trying to tell me, and the long line of Rabbinic Jews have spent centuries puzzling this out, arguing debating, you name it. The largest group of people of faith is getting to be people who are none of the above, while protestant and Catholic Churches decline (the Southern Baptists are dwindling off, once the largest evangelical church, their baptism rate is plummeting, and that is a big deal, given that to be a member, you have to be baptized by them, they don't recognize any other baptism as real), it isn't that people are losing faith per se, it is that they don't find the answer in any one faith (which I think is a good thing; I think any church that claims to have all the answers is full of it, personally, no one church or scripture can describe God, since God is unknowable).
Actually, change kills a religion because it's followers start asking "Well if you're wrong about this than who's to say you're not wrong about any number of other things the bible says? We're talking about my life here. I've got to know that you won't change your mind about what is right and wrong tomorrow."
What happens is religion diversifies when people can't agree amongst one another.Christianity turns to Catholicism turns to baptist turns to so on and so forth. You talk about all these changes that happen but one must ask why you're changing doctrine to suite reality? Why not just abide by the rules of reality? I'm not saying that these changes weren't important. I'm saying why try so hard to sustain an institution that basically adjusts to reality (being fruitful vs using protection depending on the time) instead of just skipping straight to what reality dictates. You don't need a book to tell you to be fruitful if only take a lot around and assess that there aren't a lot of people. And you don't need to be told to stop by a pope if you, again, just stop and look. Everyone seems to be dependent on this middle man religion when it's downright unnecessary.
Your argument is basically the same one the RC makes, that you need uniformity of belief otherwise the faith will die, that if people question church teaching, if they question what the leaders say, or God forbid, the leadership admits they were wrong, that people will go away in droves. It is why the RC didn't officially drop the earth centered solar system and universe until 1922, and why they prosecuted Galileo in the first place, it was strong arm politics.
Change doesn't kill religions, what kills religions is when they stop being relevant in people's lives, which is what has happened with religion in Europe and is starting to happen here. In South America, the church is starting to decline, either people are turning to the Pentacostal churches, which they find more personable, or they are moving away from faith the way they used to. Several countries in South America have gay marriage and attitudes towards gays are changing rapidly, the current Pope put a full court press to stop same sex marriage from passing there, and it failed. Part of the answer is that the RC has grown away from its core values of helping the poor and powerless, and it didn't help that in the days of the Juntas and such, the church was on the side of the dictators, and banned liberation theology, arguing it 'politicized' the church (this at a time when JPII was using priests in Poland as an informal information gathering network for the CIA and NATO intelligence, and where he was actively involved behind the scenes supporting Solidarity and such). When your church supports the well off and the dictators, people aren't going to feel too enamored of it.
The real threat is to religion that preaches universal truths. In reality. the Catholic Church is not what the leadership thinks, 80% of Catholics decide for themselves what they follow and don't, and the leaders pretend that isn't so. The problem isn't change, it is that churches can't adjust to it, not that it ruins the faith. People don't turn away from the church that says "ya know, nothing wrong with gays", it turns away when the church can't seem to find what is relevant. I belonged to a very liberal church, one that in some ways was more like the UU than Christian (and a bit over the top in other ways, sorry, but god rest ye merry gentlepersons is just too granola headed for me)....the problem it had was that it had a church full of people who wanted to believe, who were questioning, who wanted something but couldn't find it, had been hurt horribly by the RC and protestant churches (gays, trans people, liberal people, thinkers), wanted someplace where they didn't have to check their brains at the door, as with the RC, and the church should have worked..but for many, it didn't, including me, because what I was looking for was community, a place to bond with people, and that is huge.....fellowship is why the evangelical churches work, there is meaning in them, Redeemer Presbytyrian in NYC is like that.....the head of the church was into causes, which is great, but he forgot about human beings. When I was faced with one of the hardest decisions in my life, a crossroads of real significance, about whether to keep going with transition and looking at the consequences, the church did absolutely nothing for me (and it was horrible, because I had to make this decision with the pressure of being unemployed..), it was like it didn't matter, or worse, not understanding my decision....
Churches fail because they don't mean anything. Young people brought up evangelical start realizing that a church that supports the GOP over their hatred of abortion and gays but then sits quiet (or worse supports) the idea that the poor are poor because they are defective, that the rich have no duty to the poor, or are busy changing theology to argue that as stewards of the earth, man is supposed to exploit it for their use and environmentalism is against that, the whole religious right did that to accede to the demands of the GOP, and young people picked up on that, and thought that helping the poor and the planet was a lot more important then gays or abortion for that matter. Hypocrisy isn't about admitting a change in how your view something (after all, in the 1970's the church for the first time put out an encyclical that said that sex was an important part of marriage, after for years preaching it was primarily to produce children, that post menopausal couples should stay away from sex because they no longer could have kids, they admitted it was part of a healthy marriage) or clarifying teaching, it is when you preach something that is so far out of people's experience it becomes evident it is stupid. The idead that you have to believe everything to be a 'true Catholic" is not scriptural, nowhere in scripture does it say there is a specific way to believe in God. The trinity is not in scripture, for example, that was church teaching born out of Nicea, lots of things, and if so, then doctrinal purity is meaningless.
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