Same here! I think you’re a valuable member of our community, and I’d hate to see you leave us. I don’t believe you meant to hurt anyone.
I hope we can find ways to discuss language and expressions without making people uncomfortable. I feel like I learn better ways to communicate from talks like this.
Thank you, thank you.
Like buttons are one thing, but this has been overwhelming(ly good). I really appreciate it. I do feel a lot better about elsewhere now.
Internet relationships are still so really weird for someone who didn’t have them for the first ██ decades.
Good points about it being open. And thanks.
When I suggested a PM, I guess I was thinking of people who are reasonable but see a possible problem. Humor, gentleness, asking what was meant first? But I can see that some might do it that way.
I just found the whole episode painful.
Holy shit, did I miss a lot.
I think it’s mostly the catholic league dildos, and the priests/bishops that are more conservative leaning… the ones who took up with the right wing protestants who hate them, and will turn on them next once the other groups they hate are safely put into their “proper” place…
A flag was thrown on this post and I asked the flagger if we could start a conversation about discussing religion in a way that is respectful of each others’ faiths. They agreed. I’ll edit this post to link the whole thread.
Added:
The concern as I understand it about this post is the ad hominem attack on Catholics instead of discussing specific policies and practices.
As this issue hasn’t come up in a public conversation before, I thought it was a good time to have it.
The Catholic League is a specific activist group, not a synonym for the church or its followers.
Guess what it has to say about LGBT rights, reproductive freedom, abuse by priests, etc.
I don’t understand what I did wrong? did I get flagged for this comment?
I’m going to go ahead and speculate the “dildos” part set people off. Not everyone knows that the bishop and papal miters have been compared to the heads of penises for decades, if not centuries (The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross is my main reference on this, as problematic as it is).
On September 8, 2007, Kathy Griffin won her first Emmy for season two of reality show Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List . Griffin stirred up controversy with her acceptance speech, saying that “a lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. He didn’t help me a bit.” She went on to hold up her Emmy and say, “Suck it, Jesus, this award is my god now!”[36]
Her remarks were quickly condemned by Donohue, who urged the TV academy to “denounce Griffin’s obscene and blasphemous comment.”[37] After the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences decided to censor Griffin’s remark, Donohue said, “The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences reacted responsibly to our criticism of Kathy Griffin’s verbal assault on 85 percent of the U.S. population. The ball is now in Griffin’s court. The self-described ‘complete militant atheist’ needs to make a swift and unequivocal apology to Christians. If she does, she will get this issue behind her. If she does not, she will be remembered as a foul-mouthed bigot for the rest of her life.”[38]
0 voters
Seriously? People dunk on catholics all the time. I was speaking of a specific, right wing organization that (as @smulder noted and agreed with) carries water for the more conservative elements in the church.
Look, I was not raised catholic, for complicated reasons, which is something I actually deeply regret, because I feel like I was cut off from my heritage. But half my family is catholic, and had to put up with years of bigotry from my non-catholic side. My methodist grandmother resented that my mother married my father, and she always looked down on my father’s side of the family. My father actually thought about becoming and priest as a kid, and my lesbian aunt was a committed catholic, despite the contradictions. Her priest gave her a beautiful service and it was clear that she was a beloved and respected member of her community, including her church, whatever the mother church and the catholic league, had to say about her and her decades long partner ship. I grew up in the south with catholic family members, and in the more rural deep south too, not just in a city or somewhere that was more traditionally catholic. My family left ireland during the lesser famine, from a situation that was full on colonialism. Plus, plenty of people here will dunk on the church endlessly - often for entirely sensible reasons - the lack of rooting out predators from the church is a stain as black as black can be. I often hold back on defending catholics because of that, because I know any large-scale organization is going to be shot through with corruption and vice.
I still would argue that the organization known as the catholic league (led by that jack ass Bill Donahue) is full of dildos, who don’t give a shit about Christ, and the good works that many catholics regularly engage with (including my grandfather, who spent the last few years of his life, visiting and given communion to prisoners in my home town). But sure. I’m the real anti-catholic bigot, I guess. why not.
Yes
Well of course. Who equates a harmless, useful and fun device to a shitbag like Bill Donohue? I’d have flagged it too.
I find it interesting that Mindy’s post got flagged and mine didn’t, despite hers being more discriminating about who it targeted, and less insulting. She used a fairly generic insult to target the most conservative of the American Catholic leadership; I basically targeted the entire American Catholic priesthood and accused them of heresy.
But not Catholicism as a whole. I’m guessing the flagger missed the Catholic League reference in @mindysan33’s post, or is someone who makes no distinction between the League and the church, and got in a huff, real or disingenuous.
This is something that came up in my high school religion classes a lot (those unreconstructed hippie teachers accomplished so much): that the practice of Catholicism by the lay people, even the very devout ones, is often at odds with the establishment dogma.
I admit my views on this are also influenced by family, as my mum is a Catholic with a Protestant mother; we’ve never been very establishmentarian, especially since emigrating to Canada.
Yes to what? I don’t understand what you’ve just said yes to.
I guess I am a bigot then.
I’ve said that before, and gotten told I’m wrong. I have very often made vigorous defenses of catholics in recent years (mainly, over at the other place), and have been told that I’m wrong to do so.
I’ve had that too. Yet when I question these defenders on what points of dogma and theology I remember from school, they often are less than 100% with the establishment Church, especially if I throw in some items the Church has changed positions on (the pentagram being used to represent the Virgin Mary in medieval times is always an interesting one).
I’ve had Catholics insist they believe in transubstantiation, yet when asked to describe it they describe Protestant symbolism. I’ve had Catholics say the priest is not required as an intermediary for the sacrament of confession. I’ve had Catholics claim you can’t become a priest and have previously been married, when you can if you’re a widower.
Partly this discord is built into the church itself and its history, since it subsumed so many local Pagan practices along the way. Partly this shows gaps in Catholic education. But partly it shows things are not as “just so” as some people want them to be.
I also wonder if, in colonial countries at least, this isn’t partly from “frozen” beliefs. I went to school with a lot of first-generation Canadians (er, and I am one), where the parents’idea of what was religiously correct was frozen into whatever was current in the old country when the emigrated – the 1950s for my cohort.
There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance involved in being a person of conscience and being a member of the Catholic Church. My mom is a catholic and went to a catholic school raised by very strict nuns. So she instinctively defers to the church. But when it comes to where her priorities lie versus the church’s, she’s always found some way to justify her priorities over the church. That seems to be true for a lot of the laity (they’d rather feed the poor and build the church community rather than attend anti-choice rallies or stump for Conservative policies and positions, for instance).
I try not to think to hard about how the whole thing holds together, because it doesn’t seem like it should work, but my mum and many others somehow get spiritual sustenance from it, so yay?
This may be the way Catholic doctrine has evolved over the centuries, from the ground up, as the hierarchy has been forced to accept that some aspects just aren’t palatable to the majority of the members.
Quebec would be an example, where the power and influence of the priesthood echoed that of pre-revolutionary France up until the 1960s, when the Quiet Revolution swept it all away.