Caltrops - Motherfucking News





	[quote name="Horrible Gelatinous Blob"][quote name="NAMBLA"][quote name="Horrible Gelatinous Blob"][quote name="NAMBLA"]If you think these aren't the views and values of your average Catholic churchgoer, you haven't been to church lately.[/quote] Holy shit, do you EVEN know any Catholics under the age of 45?[/quote] Practicing ones who go to church or people who are simply Catholic by birth? The latter is meaningless. The former? Yes the majority of them still cling to the belief that birth control and homosexuality are evil. More evil than war and murder. I'm not talking about your yuppie friends who identify themselves as Catholic but are really just agnostic in practice. I'm talking Catholics who actively attend church and support the institution. Here's some events I've witnessed in various Catholic masses across various states, over the course of ten years occasionally humoring an aging religious relative: - Homosexuals are subhuman aberrations. Yes the priest used that exact phrase. In 2008. - Huge letter mailing campaigns to representatives to criminalize abortion and the recent push to exempt employer health coverage from covering abortions and birth control. Priests actually using the word "tyranny" to describe being forced to do so along with their tax dollars supporting planned parenthood. - Not one single fucking protest or effort to speak out against the war in Iraq. Not during the buildup not during the war and not during the occupation. Just sermons that the troops were "doing what must be needed" and to pray that they made it home safe. This is especially galling when compared to the political effort made over the previous point and the sudden vanishing of any protest over tax dollar use for non-fetus murder. When was the last time you went to church?[/quote] I haven't been to Mass since I moved to Los Angeles in 2010, but for a myriad of reasons that I'd rather not elaborate on, there was a period of time immediately preceding my move where I was attending Mass on a weekly basis. When I was younger, I went to Mass several times a week thanks to Catholic school and various bargains made with my parent(s). I don't really make the effort to defend the Church as an institution to Protestants; for one, the systematic and institutionalized nature of the Church's policy of concealment and reassignment of pedophiles is indefensible, and secondarily, there is such a wide gulf between what non-Catholics believe Catholicism is and what Catholics actually practice that it becomes frustrating to the point of impossibility to try to convince some Protestant who can't even pronounce catechism, much less spell it, that I know more about Catholicism that he or she does. You paint all Catholics with a brush so broad that it edges into no true Scotsman territory, but all of the (anecdotal) evidence you offer stems from the institutional Catholic Church, whose failings, shortcomings, and criminal behavior has been well documented and is not in dispute. But we're not talking about the institution of the Church; we're talking about individual Catholics here. My (anecdotal) evidence is sourced from varying amounts of one-on-one interaction with a few dozen Catholics under 40: people who are tied to the church by tradition, family, or social pressure, who embrace much of the Church's doctrine regarding service and grace, but who feel no particular compulsion or pressure to toe the line on every last piece of dogma, particularly when the more troubling parts of that doctrine directly conflict with the core messages of humanism and God's unconditional love that define Catholicism (to Catholics, at least). In any case: I'm sorry you've had such negative experiences with Catholics and Catholicism, but Catholics are more than the Church, more than the Vatican, more than any given piece of dogma, and more than your limited exposure.[/quote]