It’s actually been funny watching the right-wing Catholics having to spin more and more desperately, explaining that Francis didn’t really mean what he just said, it’s just misinterpretation by the liberal press, and he’s really just as focused as Benny was on hating gays, contraceptives and abortion…ooops.
According to Catholic theology, the pope has the keys to heaven and hell, right? That means that he didn’t just clarify a point about atheists going to heaven. By his declaration, he actually let atheists into heaven. In theory, the pope could decide to let everybody into heaven, if he wanted. (Though this might make it hard to motivate people to go to church.) Even people who have already died, before the church liberalized its policies. I mean, he DOES have the keys, right?
It seems good on the surface that the Catholic Church every once in a while will make radical revisions to be more inclusive, but really, if you can just change the core values every few decades is there any point in keeping it around at all? How long before the Catholic Church is irreconcilable with the Bible…
I actually think it is good.
If you believe that God revealed what was relevant at the day and age in which the bible was written, then certain you must at least to some extent feel that the world has changed sufficiently that we can now use the bible as a guide to change archaic policies that better fit the world we live in today. There is some difference between changing policies and opinions on things and changing core values. I don’t think they are changing core values.
Roman Catholicism as practiced in Europe has never ‘followed the Bible’: the Bible in Europe was a product of Protestantism and the invention of the printing press. As is the argument that Catholicism needs to follow the word of the Gospels. It doesn’t, having always being Marian in its focus. The primacy of Jesus the man and the written word is a Germanic patriarchal conspiracy.
Lollardy! Yahhh! Proddies everywhere!!! They’re running everything, the weirdy little lizard people with their plastic-backed books.
I am worried about the new pope. While he’s praised by people around the world, I think he’s busy making a lot of enemies by being so unconventional, the worst of which are probably living very close to him. Guess he doesn’t care much about them, putting his life in the hand of God. I like him.
[quote]Vatican City (AFP) - Pope Francis said Wednesday that it may be “morally necessary” for some families to split up, marking a change of tone in the Catholic Church’s attitude to troubled marriages.
“There are cases in which separation is inevitable,” he said during his weekly general audience, with a message hoping to encourage greater compassion in the Church ahead of a highly anticipated global meeting on family life in October.[/quote]
I guess if he was baptized as an infant, then he’ll always be Catholic by one definition, even if he sacrifices an altar boy to Satan.
There are many things to criticize this pope for. His stance on climate change is not one of them. How does even your fever swamped brain come to believe one cannot be Catholic and believe in AGW?
No, but his shit would still exist. For a while anyway. Or maybe it would harden and eventually fossilize, thus forming part of the evolutionary record for a later age.
Why is Catholicism and global warming mutually exclusive? People who deny global warming are not religious, they are just stupid. The universe is bound by the law of cause of effect, the whole 1st chapter of the Bible is pretty much about cause and effect. So how is it that our pollution of the earth, outside of this law?
The problem I think is people thinking there are only 2 extremes to take their stance on. That humans are 100% at fault for climate change, or humans are totally innocent of it. Both are equally ignorant.
No, but his shit would still exist. For a while anyway. Or maybe it would harden and eventually fossilize, thus forming part of the evolutionary record for a later age.[/quote]
That’s why I only defecate in depositional environments; it’s shitting with an eye to posterity.