Proposed Rules for good behavior and consequences for misbehavior

Yes

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Well of course. Who equates a harmless, useful and fun device to a shitbag like Bill Donohue? I’d have flagged it too.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Is there a chance of a mod splitting this thread?
It’s gone off on a bit of a tangent.

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Nah. @teknocholer was just pointing out that you are being mean to sex toys.

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I’m not sure what tangent it was supposed to be on in the first place.

“Respect other people’s beliefs” gets confusing real fast. I was raised Catholic but switched to neo-Paganism when I realised all the things I liked about Catholicism were holdovers from the paganism it crushed and supplanted.

But neo-Paganism has a lot of crap in it. I know of at least one local group that’s run more like a cult. There are a lot of followers who are anti-science and especially anti-medicine.

Then there’s a lot more crap in the media, like that Midsommar film that was recently released.

So if people want to criticise that stuff, I’ll join right in. If someone says Pagans are the same as Satanists, I’ll set them straight.

But “respect”… that only gives through education, the kind of specific education that tells you exactly who you’re talking to and what they believe.

And NO religion automatically deserves “respect”, not any set of religious beliefs. Sorry, if your religion makes it okay to crush other religions, or to kill people of different religions, or to let pregnant women die because her heart is pushing blood through the veins of her already-dead fetus – and I deliberately chose all those examples because they were done in the name of Catholicism – you don’t get a pass from criticism.

Interacting with people of other religions means having to self-interrogate. If someone isn’t willing to do that, that’s not on the non-Catholics.

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Sorry, I’ll stand down. I’m just trying to figure out what I did wrong here to get flagged, so I don’t repeat the mistake.

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I think he means that this is the “Proposed rules for misbehavior” thread. Somehow the original split merged into here, and should have been a separate thread.

@ChickieD or @tinoesroho?

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I never thought for a minute that @mindysan33 was prejudiced against the good people of Dildo, Newfoundland.

Sorry for any confusion.

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In the absence of clarification, I imagine it has to be the result of misinterpreting what you said. “Catholics are all dildos” would be broadly insulting people for their religious background. Referring to “Catholic dildos” may or may not be singling out some subset. Referring to “Catholic League dildos” is definitely singling out a particular organization, and one that has worked hard to deserve it; just because it is named for a religion should not earn it special respect.

I can’t think of why else what you said would be a concern. That’s presumably why, though you’re concerned by what you might have done wrong, tekno has thought it light enough to joke. There’s nothing anyone can do to avoid being flagged no matter how they are read; you can only act in such a way that the flags will not hold up on consideration.

I would say you have. I’m sure there could be a discussion about how much we need to respect beliefs in order to respect the people who hold them, but it’s confusing to base it around your remark, which really looks like a simple case of misinterpretation.

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Yes, you got flagged

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Who are the Catholic League? I’ve never heard of them?

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Nope, I don’t think you’re a bigot.

But considering I chose to excommunicate myself from the Catholic Church due to disagreement with certain points of doctrine and the pedophile priests scandal, I don’t have a 100% favorable view of it anyway and am not entirely objective on the topic. >shrug.<

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Flippancy has always been my Achilles heel, but in my defense I also said this:

@mindysan33, I hope you didn’t think I was dismissing your understandable reaction to being flagged. If so, the fault is mine.

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