It’s crazy when people convert to Catholicism. How, at age 25 or whatever, do you convert to an up-to-then lifetime of guilt? On the flip side, I became an agnostic when I was 23, but I know that most, if not all, of my instincts are Catholic; I could tell you a lot, but that’s not in a gentleman’s code. So I’m sympathetic to EJ here, even if I think it’s time to cut his losses:
Recently, a group called the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) ran a full-page ad in The Washington Post cast as an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics.” Its headline commanded: “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.”
The ad included the usual criticism of Catholicism, but I was most struck by this paragraph: “If you think you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you’re deluding yourself. By remaining a ‘good Catholic,’ you are doing ‘bad’ to women’s rights. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.”
My, my. Putting aside the group’s love for unnecessary quotation marks, it was shocking to learn that I’m an “enabler” doing “bad” to women’s rights. But Catholic liberals get used to these kinds of things. Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church, but so do Catholic conservatives who want the church all to themselves.
My view is that he should quit ,that the whole caper is beyond redemption, but it’s a tough call. What do you do if you believe in an institution but feel that it’s been fatally compromised? I say you leave it, try to destroy it, and then build something better, but it’s not as easy as that, I know.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Evelyn Waugh became a Catholic at the age of 27, and he became a much meaner, nastier person after.
Fred Fnord
Perhaps, since you are hearing this over and over again, you should stop for just a second to consider whether it might be true?
(As you may have guessed, I am more or less entirely unsympathetic to EJ. If I were a member of a club that had done as much harm as the Catholic Church has in recent years, I wouldn’t just leave it, I would blow it up.)
AT
Few bad apples, look forward not back, etc.,
Hill Dweller
This about sums it up for me(h/t Charlie Pierce):
Can’t have those little boys and/or their parents suing the church.
Andy
My general rule is to avoid electing former Nazis to lead your organization. Forward-thinking, 21st century operations don’t put nazis in charge. John Paul II was good because he was like your creepy great grandma who just wants to squeeze your young flesh. Also, he’d never been a Nazi.
THE
Left it as a teenager. Good riddance. Never looked back.
Secular now.
Rebuild it?
There are bigger things to think about.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Hill Dweller: Well, if the Red Beanie Brigade were honest, they’d say that the statue of limitations for it should be zero seconds, because they’re above the law.
stickler
Good grief. Catholics who want to ditch the creepy bishops and their Omerta can get 90% of the same thing by going Episcopalian or Lutheran. Both have bishops, one has incense while the other has guilt, and both ordain women.
And both spend a lot more time feeding the hungry than they do yammering on about abortion, teh gays, and comforting the comfortable.
palolololo
Did Catholic school for 2+ years in the formative fourth and fifth grades. Bailed out when the priest said “… God only listened “when I was in church. That was at fifteen, 40+ years ago. Now its just dirty old men doing evil things,as they have been getting away with for a very long time. No thanks.
If there is a God,He/she/It and I have our own relationship.
tgp
I dont quite understand what EJ’s thinking is here when he refers to the conservatives having it all to themselves. He isnt a priest, cardinal, bishop or any member of the church’s hierarchy. He has no power to influence the church in any way except through refusing to give it money and writing articles that are uncompromisingly critical of their behavior.
MariedeGournay
I left the church about a millisecond after I was Confirmed as a teenager. I grew to hate the church for its inhuman views on sex and their crimes, but for a long time I missed the art and ritual of the masses. The smell of incense, the candles, the choirs, which I used to sing in. One day I realized what I missed wasn’t so much the ‘Christian’ element but the old pagan elements. So now I’m a pagan. Funny old world.
rb
Those who walk away from omelas aren’t heroes, either.
But they are away, hopefully safely away.
I left to save myself, my mind, and because I’ll be damned if those perfumed predators will ever lay a hand or their filthy doctrines on the bodies or minds of my own children.
I recognize that the noblest thing of all would be to clean up the mess that is my supposed birthright (even if ‘cleaning it up’ means razing it to the ground, as I feel may be the case), but I can’t be bothered.
I have a life to lead.
Those who stay could better us all by fighting for and achieving cleansing and reform, by actually achieving some measure of justice and recompense for the millions of victims of wholesale abuse and degradation.
But most who stay aren’t really fighting. They are indeed enablers, wallowing in filth they disclaim because, hey, they’re ‘liberal.’ Whatever. Bring a fire and sword if you can (best option), but if not, cut your losses and get the fuck out (second best).
Don’t stay and do nothing, but claim innocence because some of your best friends are gay, or whatever. That is worst and most self-indulgent of all.
techno
What amazes me about Catholics is that even those who quit the mother church are still Catholics in so many ways, you wonder why they even bothered to quit. Still mystical. Still think Gregorian chants are a form of music. Still believe deep down inside they were raised in the only true form of Christianity. Etc.
Of course, who am I to talk. I was raised Lutheran and even though I haven’t attended devout observances since I was 18, I am still a deep-seated “cultural” Lutheran. Love the music of Bach, think that the Lutheran countries are the most enlightened, am genuinely surprised whenever I discover a Lutheran lying, etc.
rb
am genuinely surprised whenever I discover a Lutheran lying
Ha! Awesome. Like running into a Catholic who uses birth control.
Not that Lutherans are great liars or anything. They’re just, you know, human. Not to mention Christian.
cthulhu
Though I wasn’t raised in either faith, I’ve always been struck by this one fundamental difference between Judaism and Christianity: you can be an effectively adherent Jew in maintaining a “temple” independently and within your own home; to be a good Christian requires you to go to Church. Obviously some would differ with this simplistic observation but despite whatever counter-examples there are out there, I think, in principal, this is true, no more so when it comes to certain Christian faiths like Catholicism.
(Another key difference seems to be whether you are allowed to question God’s apparent behavior or not)
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
i don’t think you have to remain a catholic to practice it’s virtues. i don’t think you should be trying to “out” people either. you can convince them if they are ready, but if they aren’t you are just shitting on them.
just as some people can’t believe, some people have to believe.
techno
@rb
I know Lutherans are human and all, but the fact that that the Lutheran countries are also statistically the least corrupt is not an accident. It’s cultural. “Out of a love for the truth…”
Sly
Except liberal Catholics don’t believe that the Church is fatally compromised. “It’s my Church and not theirs, I’m more Catholic than they are, etc, etc, etc.”
If they think it’s their obligation to “redeem” the Church, then I wish them luck. I don’t think they’ll succeed, because Westerners, and especially Western liberals, aren’t really the target demographic for Catholicism’s recruitment efforts.
If they’ll piss and moan about it but ultimately do nothing, except continue to help fund the institutional sadism and criminality of the Church, then I really don’t see the point of wanting them on the “secular team.”
PeakVT
Secularists,Protestants, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church,Accurafied.
Nobody can speak for all “secularists,” since they are not a positively defined group. That said, I think what most non-religious Americans want is for the finer details of the creation myth of a bunch of semi-literate nomadic goatherds to stop getting in the way of the realities of 21st century life.
Brachiator
Quitting the Church, or any other church, is harder than getting off drugs. People used to the deity high jones big time if they try to quit it, and often cannot imagine shaking lose. They are willing, eager to overlook any evils committed by religious officials because the high they get feels so good.
It’s also hard to talk to the reliigious junkie about women’s rights if the junkie is still mainlining religious dogma, which insists that women’s rights are secondary to wherever the religious pushers are selling them.
I also wonder whether those trying to get people to leave the Chuch are fighting the wrong battle. Evangelicals ain’t Catholics. And fundamentalist religions of various brands are like the Empire fighting back, coming together and demanding their right to intrude into people’s lives, and using the power of the state to enforce conformity to religious doctrine.
Cain
The churches are all competing for the third world nations anyways. A new bunch of suckers. Especially Africa. It annoys me when I see these people trying to convert people.
jheartney
Religions generally, and Catholicism in particular, deliberately make it difficult to consider leaving, because to do so you have to reject not merely the exiting hierarchy, but also the dogma that underlies it. If you conclude that Benedict is a loathsome, corrupt monster, what does that say about the God who hired him? But once you wrap your head around the idea that the RCC isn’t a legitimate representative of the Deity, then what other organization is? Why would any human organization be entrusted by an all-powerful being?
Put another way, the RCC’s claims to legitimacy are a form of magical thinking: that the creator of the universe chose THIS BUNCH to represent him to humans on Earth. However, the evidence to support this is nonexistent. You’re just supposed to accept the institution’s assertions without investigation. But if you decide to chuck the church and its teachings, then you have no rationale for keeping any part of the religious mode of thought that the church promotes. If you question the (infallible) Pope, then you may as well dump the whole theistic project.
Many Catholics aren’t willing to take this step. A lifetime of thinking that your life is ruled by an invisible tyrant (who’s going to torture you for an infinite amount of time if you don’t say the right nice things about him on Sundays, because he loves you) isn’t easy to turn your back on. Yet that’s what “quitting the church” really means.
Citizen Alan
I think it was probably easier to turn my back on Xtianity than for a lot of people due to the circumstances under which I first joined it. When I was nine, on the first night of revival at my parents Baptist Church, I was required to watch a movie called “A Thief In The Night,” a film about the Rapture which ended with the protagonist getting her head chopped off with a guillotine because she refused to let someone tattoo 666 on her forehead. The next day, when I got home from school, my dad’s truck was home but he wasn’t (he’d ridden to town with a friend), and I totally freaked out and thought the Rapture had happened, I had been (as they say) Left Behind, and agents of the Antichrist were on their way. That night, I made my profession of faith and became a Southern Baptist. It would be nearly ten years before I fully realized how I had been emotionally manipulated into that commitment and how cruel that manipulation had been. Luckily, I was in college by then and had a convenient excuse for why I could only make it home to visit my parents’ church three or four times a year.
fuckwit
It’s not easy, because of the FEAR.
The fear that you WILL BURN FOREVER IN THE PLACE WHERE THE RED GUY WITH THE HORNS AND PITCHFORK CONDUCTS HIS BUSINESS (h/t Zappa). That, and the social fear of being considered an uncouth or evil person for not “respecting” all the bullshit associated with the religion.
This is true not only of Catholicism, but evangelical Christianity too. You MUST get over the fear of hell, and the fear of being socially “wrong”.
The only way to get out of it is to face that fear head-on and beat it senseless. Blaspheme. Do and say and think shit that you are sure will cause lightning to strike down on you immediately, or people to shun you. Make yourself afraid, then merely uncomfortable. Realize that nothing bad happens. Do it aggressively, for a short period of time, or until you really don’t give a shit anymore.
That’s really it. It’s like “the emperor (pope/god/whatever) has no clothes”! Eventually, you have no more respect for it, and only sympathy for those who are still wrapped up in it.
Spaghetti Lee
Aw, hell if I know anymore. For me it’s just coming down to the idea that some people have a religion lobe in their brains and some don’t, and I’m one of the ones that do. To put it one way, the only thing more terrifying to me than the idea of God is the idea of no God. The idea that there’s just nothing there and everything is meaningless. So I keep looking for something, I don’t know what. What I have is a bit more personal. I don’t feel obligated to follow any existing scripture or set of rules. I call myself Catholic because I was raised Catholic.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
This is what is going on in Arizona right now with this “employers have the right to demand your medical records to make sure you’re not offending the employers’ religious beliefs.”
The upshot of all this is these people have forgotten what it’s actually like to be religiously persecuted, so they think they can get away with this. Not content to be left alone, they think they can use the power of the state to force others to conform.
They may find this wish of theirs is their doom.
Splitting Image
@MariedeGournay:
I can relate. I also bailed out the moment I was confirmed. I had a fairly nasty attitude towards the Church until, oddly enough, I discovered Nietzsche in university.
Nietzsche was able to articulate a much more intelligently thought out argument against the church than I was able to, and it occurred to me that part of the reason for that was that he was much more knowledgeable about the Bible and church history than I was.
So I gave myself a bit of an edjumacation on the subject. It turns out there were actually a few books of the Bible that I liked (Ecclesiates, for example), and a fair number of Christian writers that I admired, so I decided to try to be a bit more fair-minded about the whole thing.
I think that we all have a slightly different idea about what it means to “leave the church”. My mother is the last member of my immediate family who still goes to church, and even she walked out after the local child-molester-in-chief read out the church’s formal apology for buggering all of those boys while claiming that anyone who advocated for gay rights or women priests was just as bad. That was a bridge too far even for her. She stayed away five months. She eventually decided to go back to help out with some of the charitable works, but doesn’t really feel at home the same way there any more.
Both of my sisters have asked her at various points why she doesn’t just up and leave, but it’s been a part of her life for so long it’s not easy for her to think about it. I don’t even think the concept of leaving the church was something she even totally understood until fairly recently.
I think the vast majority of Catholics have walked away from the church to some degree over the past few years. Nobody gives Pope Ratzinger the respect they gave John Paul II. The fact that almost no one refers to him by his title is a giveaway where he is concerned. I think a fair number are hoping that he’ll trip on a banana peel sometime in the near future and that the next guy to warm the chair will be another John XXIII.
People have always used the phrase “cafeteria Catholics”, but the phrase is becoming more common as a lot of Catholics are Catholic in name only. Not identifying as Catholic any more would feel as strange to some people as not referring to themselves as Irish or Italian any more, so they still call themselves Catholic, but when the guy at the pulpit tells them what they have to believe to be part of the group, they mentally filter out most of what he says.
Villago Delenda Est
@Splitting Image:
JP II took steps to make sure that won’t happen. During his reign, he conducted a purge, and Ratzi was his chief capo in that effort.
The ship is sinking. It’s only a matter of how long it takes.
Spaghetti Lee
@Splitting Image:
Not identifying as Catholic any more would feel as strange to some people as not referring to themselves as Irish or Italian any more, so they still call themselves Catholic
This is about what I meant to say. The part about Catholic Americans overall drifting. Watching my mother complain about how corrupt the church has gotten has been a surreal experience.
I think part of it is that all the shit that’s come down the pike has come so quickly. The bulk of revelations of child abuse are, what, a decade old? 15 years? And the capture of the church by right wing politics is not much older. It wasn’t all that long ago that the most prominent American Catholic politician was Ted Kennedy, not Rick Santorum. And the child abuse scandal is, in so many ways, an enormity that people can’t comprehend it. How could so much horribleness have happened at once? It seems almost unreal.
Joey Maloney
@cthulhu:
That’s not really true; There are lots of observances that can’t be done in the absence of a minyan, 10 Jewish adults.
The big difference between Judaism and Christianity is that the former is not a creedal religion; there is no public profession of faith required (as is part of the worship service of most every Christian flavor). While you’re expected to believe in such things as “adonai eloheinu, adonai echad” – no one would ever inquire or condition your status on it. Judaism is much more about what you do than what you believe.
What they have in common is that the more authoritarian streams of Judaism are just as rife with child abuse and corruption.
magurakurin
It’s an easy call. Become an Episcopalian.
I’m not an atheist, but neither am I a religious man. I find the divine in the sea, the waves, the mountains, in the world and beings around me. But I was born a Catholic and ended up being married in an Episcopalian church. As far as I can see the Episcopal Church offers all the “good” parts of the Catholic church (communion, redemption through Christ, a spiritual community, and a familiar type of Sunday Worship) without the gay hating, women hating, anti-liberal and progressive stances of the Holy Mother Church.
Really, it’s simple. There is an Episcopal Church near by, I’m sure. Wander in. They are really nice folks. I’ll never be a church goer, but my experiences there were very good.
as HST said “skullfuck the Pope”
Chet
@stickler: Depends what brand of Lutheranism you’re talking about. ELCA, maybe, but the synod I grew up in and escaped from (LCMS) is hidebound and reactionary as they come, though admittedly without the sanctionred underground culture of boyfucking.
Spaghetti Lee
Oh, hell. Don Ritchie died. If you don’t know who that is, read this: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/suicide-watchman-saves-scores-at-death-spot-1999360.html
What a wonderful man he was. I hope someone takes up his shield.
John
Good lord. You can ding the current pope for all kinds of things – he’s genuinely awful on almost every issue – but this is patently unfair. Ratzinger had just turned 18 when Hitler killed himself. He was never a Nazi. He was a member of the Hitler Youth, like every other non-Jewish boy in Germany, and he was drafted into the Luftwaffe during the war, but there’s absolutely no evidence he ever had any sympathy with Nazism. His father, from what I can gather, was not sympathetic to Nazism either, although he was not an active opponent of the regime.
Attack the Pope for the awful things he’s actually responsible for, not trumped up charges of being a Nazi.
Splitting Image
@Villago Delenda Est:
I don’t think you’re entirely wrong there. People waiting for a rational Pope have some similarities to people waiting for a rational Republican candidate.
They’ll both come eventually, but opinions seem to differ on exactly how badly the institutions need to crash and burn before they do.
Anne Laurie
@MariedeGournay:
I hear you. I went through twelve years of parochial school (and I remain grateful for all the various ways the Dominican sisters educated me). I was very proud to participate in the pageantry at my first communion (even if they did make me wear white, when by age 7 I knew wasn’t my color), somewhat less impressed with the confirmation the parish rushed us through at age 8. But even before I’d started first grade, I’d had religious experiences that I knew were other-than-Catholic, and those experiences continued all through my childhood, alongside the whole Mother Church indoctrination routines. So I was aware, certainly by the time I hit puberty, that I’d be leaving “the Church”… and I suspect that the best and smartest of the nuns who taught me knew that too, not least when they’d shake their heads and say “If only you’d been born a boy, you’d be such a good Jesuit.” (Cradle Catholics will understand the sarcasm.)
Living as an animist makes me a person who tries to be thoughtful to all the other striving beings around me. Trying to live as a Catholic made me (even more) mean, judgemental & cranky. I don’t think my parents ever fully accepted that I stopped calling myself a Catholic the day I graduated, but they did agree my choice could be considered a form of public service!
Viva BrisVegas
Catholic conservatives already have the church all to themselves, at least all the parts that matter. The bits that are left over they leave to Catholic liberals to fool them into thinking that they still have a role in the church.
Anne Laurie
@Spaghetti Lee:
Agreed. The way I explain it to people like the Spousal Unit — who completely lacks the impulse — is that some unmeasured majority of the human race has a “religion” impulse. And people who don’t luck into the right society or consciously decide how they’ll honor that impulse wind up “religiousizing” something they can organize their emotions around — True Patriotism, or High Art, or The Free Market, or Militant Atheism, or Right Diet, or The-Corporation-They-Work-For. For most humans, in my experience, it’s not whether you’ll be “religious”; it’s whether you’ll deliberately live by a philosophy you can defend, or just let yourself be seized by whatever quasi-moral construct happens along at the time in your life when you’re most vulnerable. (Thus, the Saul-to-Paul “conversion”, or the tendency of overengined individuals like David Horowitz to switch from high orthodox Marxism to high orthodox American-Conservatism; they desperately need a structure, and if one structure fails them they’ll leap to another equally rigorous structure no matter how ridiculous the contradictions look to outsiders.)
On the other hand, there’s another, presumably minority, percentage of our fellow humans who just Do.Not.Get what the rest of us are banging on about. I compare it to being left-handed; in every human society I know about, there’s always a small percentage of infants born left-handed. Because it’s such a small percentage, these individuals have in many groups over many centuries been considered unfortunate anomalies — naturally left-handed children were punished for using the “wrong” hand, and so most of them to a greater or lesser degree spent their lives pretending to be “normal”. In the last couple of generations (it’s that recent, because my left-handed mother-in-law was punished when she didn’t use her right/correct hand) we’ve loosened up on the anti-sinestralism… and on the anti-irreligiousism, too. People like my husband don’t have to pretend to believe in something they don’t (really, to feel an impulse they can’t share).
The problem for a lot of these “rational” people is that it can be hard for them to remember that other people aren’t necessarily faking or deluded when they talk about their god(s) and what their understanding of those gods requires. To use another analogy, when the God Lights blink a certain pattern, some of us are going to fall down in an epileptic rapture. And most of the rest of us will make allowances for those raptures, because we know that we’re just as susceptible to other GL patterns. But the born non-religious are blind to all the lights, so it can be very difficult to understand why some of their compatriots are suddenly down on the floor twitching… and sometimes it’s hard for them to accept that we’re not making these invisible light-patterns up, just to be annoying.
chris y
@The prophet Nostradumbass: and he became a much meaner, nastier person after.
And that really took a bit of doing.
kdaug
@palolololo:
Damn straight, chief. Don’t need no damned middleman.
Probably mentioned this before (old and senile), but as an avowed Palebluedotist, let me say – We have no fucking idea what’s out there.
WereBear
@Anne Laurie: That is a most excellent way of putting it!
While I am sympathetic to the Liberal/Catholic dilemma, that is tempered by the fact that I walked out on the Southern Baptists at 14 because of their attitude that women were always to be second class citizens. And I’m sure they do not miss me. At all.
But in making the switch away, people will lose that certainty, born of innocence, that they Have It Figured Out; and in the most vulnerable, there is doubt and perhaps that Lake o’ Fire which will forever be a Chick Tract in my mind.
God/dess (for we are past May 1st and the great turning) is everywhere; I grow very weary of how he/she/it was sliced and diced and squished into Tupperware containers for the benefit of the few and the torment of the many.
Ecks
@Anne Laurie: Thoughtful stuff. William James has an essay in which he talks about whether an option is “alive” to us – whether it can seem animating and vivid. He argues that it depends a lot on the person what is alive – to some people Christianity is an alive proposition, but not Islam, and vice versa for many others.
Your idea here of general religious liveness is interesting, as it covers the radical switchers, but I suspect the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Older_Wiser
Left the Catholic church at 15. It had made me into a young woman with extreme guilt, an inferiority complex (you’re never “holy” enough) and such an absolutely nervous wreck my hands shook, so scared was I do go to confession and admit I was a human being who was maturing into a complex woman with human desires and an ambition to be more than a mother and wife, all of which I was, but without the church’s “blessing.”
Never looked back.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Same boat as you but I left at 14. My father, the devout Catholic, taught me all I needed to know to want to get as far away as I could from it as soon as possible. After he abandoned my Mom and us six kids, she got no help from the very people who said they were there to do so.
Catholicism, like Christianity itself, has been twisted and abused to no end. This Jesus guy sounds like he was an ok guy but his followers? Forget it.
Want faith? Have faith in those you love and trust and they will do likewise with you. That’s all you need.
JGabriel
@rb:
Heh. That would be pretty much all of them. Isn’t the statistic on that something like 98%?
.
EIGRP
@Spaghetti Lee:
So… if nothing is out there, why does that make everything meaningless?
I’ve never been religious, so maybe that’s why I don’t understand that sentiment. I believe meaning is something you make yourself. It can be your wife, husband, children, job, work at a homeless shelter, gardening, writing software, dusting the bookshelves, friendship, or anything. Meaning is something you decide, not something a guy with a pointy hat says is meaning.
But, what if there really is nothing? So? Is it a legacy thing for some people? What are people going to say about me when I’m gone? I don’t think I’m going to care.
Eric
Jim Pharo
For a lot of Catholics, like many other church-ers, the Church is the people in it, not the leaders and certainly not the buildings, diocese, etc. It’s almost a pure tribal play: being a part of the group is the main reason to join and belong. For many, if it were proven beyond doubt tomorrow that god is a cruel hoax, it would not be a reason to quit. For a lot of the folks that I see in the pews, it’s about the community they get to be in, which is not readily replaced.
Older_Wiser
@Anne Laurie: I think it’s simply a matter of who’s afraid of life and who isn’t. Foxhole “conversions” and those nearing the end of life itself prove this.
How can anyone actually think there is an afterlife? Isn’t that what religion of any kind really promises? Even if they don’t believe in “heaven” they believe you’ll come back either as a toad or a king, depending on your “karma.”
In the end, people themselves determine what is doing the “right thing” and invoking religion to deny human rights is a real business.
Nate
Leave the church now?
Well, geez, if people didn’t leave because of the child fucking – and then the protection of the child fuckers, there’s no way they’ll leave just because the church is mean to gay people.
The church makes you feel good without actually having to do good. That’s way more important.
WereBear
@Jim Pharo: This is why there are so many Protestant denominations; when you get a large enough group of like-minded others, off they can go; taking their tribe with them.
Sapient
@THE: Wow. Thank you so much for this. I’m going to watch all of the Symphony of Science videos. That was amazing.
aimai
I guess my view of this doesn’t have much to do with religion but has everything to do with hurt feelings.
I mean, my fucking non belief in G-d, EJ but where the fuck do you get off giving the writers of that Advertisement the amused, indulgent, whiny, finger because they gently remind you that you are part of a massive, multi-country, criminal enterprise to rape, pillage and deceive? Your feelings are hurt? You are insulted that people who don’t believe what you believe think you are foolish and are hurting others and yourself? Well, slap my face and call me a Jewish, Atheist, Fertile, Woman, who is mother to two daughters you should walk a fucking ten feet in my shoes. I can’t move around in my own country without the Red Hat brigade lecturing me and my daughters about who we should let stick what in our vaginas—first we mustn’t, then we must, then we mustn’t again? And all on the say so of an invisble deity who alternatively loves us and chastises us in the best tradition of abusive authoritarian psycopaths? Puh-fucking-lease. If the worst thing that happens to EJ’s wedding tackle is that he holds that advertisement up to it and tries to read it, one eyed, he will be luckier than the entirety of the distaff side in this world.
You belong to a criminal conspiracy of rapists and thieves and you are no more than a beard, interchangeable with any widget that likes incense and history and is willing to look the other way.
aimai
Linda Featheringill
There is a Mystery [with a capital “M”] that exists. And it is beautiful. And as I get older, the mystery of the Mystery deepens and becomes even more enchanting.
Is that religion? Dunno.
AdamK
With the election of Ratzi they changed the rules for electing a pope. It used to require unanimity; now the majority rules. All the conservative cardinals have to do is to hold out for their guy for a number of votes, and they win. They used to have to settle on a compromise candidate to reach unanimity, which produced unexpected results (like the election of John XXIII.) The conservative pope then appoints only conservative cardinals, and there you have it.
In other word, the current pope has executed a purge of the college of cardinals, and a self-perpetuating conservative majority has taken over. The last vestige of democracy in the church is a thing of the past. It isn’t the church EJ grew up it, and it never will be again. So fuck it.
AdamK
Reference for electing a pope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_conclave
Note how Ratzi “modified” the rules.
brantl
@Spaghetti Lee: Hopefully, you don’t give them any money, any more.
currants
@aimai: YES.
Zagloba
@aimai: you know, you’re often a pill, but I think I just stood up and cheered a little at that.
kay
I actually think he’s just using it as a hook to get to this, which is what he wants to say:
Didn’t he predict there would be rank and file push-back on the attack on the nuns?
On a different note, I wish like hell he would stop using the health care law to justify everything the bishops do. It’s bullshit. It’s an excuse. They would be doing this anyway.
rb
@JGabriel: Precisely.
rb
@aimai: Right on.
Barney
Occupy The Church.
Pitch a tent outside your local bishop’s front door, and heckle him every time he pokes his head out. Make him a pariah.
Stand up in the cathedral or church every time a sermon has something bigoted in it, and shout about exactly why it’s bigoted, and why it doesn’t fit with the universal Christian commandment to love your neighbor. Don’t leave until the offender has, or they’ve had to use physical force to move you (and make sure a friend gets it all on video, and puts in on YouTube, and links to it on all sites frequented by Catholics).
Tell all Catholics that 98% of Catholic women of child-bearing age who have had sex have also used ‘banned’ forms of contraception. Throw condoms and diaphragms at the bishops, or any priest that dares to agree with them (because those are the collaborators who will be the future bishops, if the 98% don’t take control of their church).
Paint “pro-child-rapist” on anything belonging to Cardinal Dolan.
rb
@Spaghetti Lee: The idea that there’s just nothing there and everything is meaningless.
I can relate to this impulse a little bit, but mostly I’d ask why it takes an unseen observer to give life meaning.
Especially as: when a child I knew was taken from this life, I took much greater comfort in knowing that his death was a tragedy and a shame caused by no grand being, than I could ever take from the notion this “lesson” being a “mysterious” cosmic balancing maximizing pain and suffering.
Ruviana
@techno: I wasn’t really raised anything but I do think Gregorian chant is awesome! I like Bach too FWIW.
Chyron HR
@John:
Hey, it just seems to me that God (who hand-picks the Popes without any interference from mortal agents at all) could have, in His infinite wisdom, chosen one of those nice brown guys (especially since I’m told that He wants to make inroads in those nice brown countries) rather than the one candidate who un-ironically wore a swastika.
Lee Hartmann
@aimai: Word.
I left the (presbyterian) church when I was 18, not because I didn’t feel a need for something more than materialism, but because I just didn’t think the Christian doctrine was… very likely. Plus, a large fraction of the people who attended church were clearly hypocrites. But the Catholic heirarchy has clearly become a regressive, intrusive, and criminal enterprise, and behooves Mr. EJ to stop wagging his finger and start campaigning and protesting the “clerical errors”.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Barney: “Pitch a tent outside your local bishop’s front door…”
Don’t do that, you’ll get him excited! ;)
Elizabelle
I would love to know what Stephen Colbert and other “live their faith in service to others” Catholics think about the Church.
That said, and being a lapsed Catholic, you’re in the position where you’re a Lugar or Snowe Republican, and your faith is clamoring for DeMints and Mourdocks from Indiana (shiver) and will take on any cause their funders (Kochs and any other gazillionaires) assign.
Are you more principled if you stay or go?
Not a hard one for me.
Besides, there’s a Catholic faith and a Catholic institutional church leadership, and they are in direct conflict.
Soonergrunt
@Anne Laurie: I kept getting the suggestion that I become a Jesuit.
I considered it for about 9 seconds.
low-tech cyclist
@Viva BrisVegas:
God’s truth.
The effect of moderate/liberal/nominal Catholics is to make the Catholic Church larger, which has the effect in turn of lending more weight to the words of those who speak for the Church. If there were only half or one-fourth as many Catholics, the Church would be correspondingly less influential – which means the conservatives who run the Church would be correspondingly less influential.
On the whole, I’m a big fan of E.J. Dionne. But on this one, he’s dead wrong. He and his ilk are, in fact, enablers of some pretty nasty people.
If anything, the Freedom From Religion folks made a far weaker case than they might have. They made only the briefest mention of the child molestation scandals, which in addition to the evil of the underlying crimes, involves a continuing criminal cover-up on the Catholic Church’s part that makes Watergate look trivial. (Plus they’ve concluded that fighting any extension of statutes of limitations on child sexual abuse is one of their top priorities. Doesn’t that just say it all? The ad didn’t mention that either.) And they didn’t mention at all the Vatican’s ‘investigation’ of the American nuns, or the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ joining the wingnuts’ anti-Girl Scout crusade.
Nor did they mention that while the Church still says the right words about wealth and poverty, and about workers’ rights, they never put any weight behind those words. The only issues they’re willing to fight over have to do with their attitudes about sex.
Sorry, E.J., but you’re just plain wrong. I’m sure there’s an Episcopal Church nearby waiting to welcome you and those like you with open arms. And while the Episcopalians have their own conservative-liberal disagreements, the difference is that the Episcopal Church is run by Episcopalians themselves, not by a self-perpetuating gerontocracy of conservative males. Your voice will matter; you can help take the Episcopal Church in the right direction.
Good luck with having a similar effect on the Roman Catholic Church.
WereBear
@Barney: Love the idea: but Catholicism is a very authoritarian religion. Just so stuff like that never enters the laity’s head.
Ratzinger is determined to marginalize any “liberal” tendencies; nuns and EJ Dionne be damned. And make no mistake, if it comes to that: he will.
liberal
@EIGRP:
Yep.
THE
@Sapient:
My pleasure.
This may help:
John D Boswell’s Symphony of Science website.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
@Marcellus Shale, Public Dick: “just as some people can’t believe, some people have to believe.” A great observation, something I’ve understood for a long time but never articulated. I will say, tho’, in my 16 years of “Catholic” education I’ve been a hypocritical atheistic pagan since the 4th grade. However, an old Dutch priest returning from the South American jungles on his way to a forced retirement in der Nederlands sort of renewed my faith in the people within the church, if not the “holy” dogmas it preaches. He told me that after observing the agony of believers who were divorced but remarried outside the Church, he decided to marry them inside the Church despite the prohibition, his job being to bring comfort to his flock. Same with birth control. Not a sin, he preached, just don’t tell the bishops I told you so. He spent nearly 50 years in Amazonia, a heretic after me own heart, and desperately wanted to remain there. The home order probably burned him at some Hollandisch stake after his replacement finally learned what he was up to all those years. One of the true Christians I’ve ever met in my short-lived life.
mike in dc
Unitarian Universalist. It’s like a clearing-house for people traumatized by religion, but still wanting a church community experience. Multi-racial, multi-cultural, even spiritually diverse(atheists, agnostics and theists sitting side by side, “holding hands and singing songs”). One big happy “proof of concept”.
geg6
@Sly:
This was my younger sister and her husband for a very long time. But they finally had enough this year. They had been counseling their 10-year-old daughter to lie to her CCD teacher about her and their political beliefs (yes, they’re liberals in every way) when it came up in class. They had been hoping to hold on until Caitlin (the niece) was confirmed, but the horrifying, hate-filled homilies during mass and the whole idea of making their daughter lie about her own beliefs became too much. They are now in the process of converting to an Episcopalian church.
Barbara
American Catholics simply seem not to understand that the larger society we have here keeps the would be excesses of their Church from swallowing their lives, hence, they see the Church’s unreasonable demands as optional and, for that reason, tolerable. But that isn’t the status quo in many other countries where the Church’s demands are extracted through a variety of official and semi-official vehicles, to the dismay and distress of many. The Philippines is Exhibit A, with the most mind bendingly hypocritical female president on the planet, but there are many places in Africa where contraception is effectively circumscribed because of church interventions. With all that, I left the church definitively five years ago.
dearolddad
@Anne Laurie: I am a born again atheist (I was raised catholic). I don’t think believers are faking it…I think they really believe the lies. They are not necessarily bad people.
geg6
@Spaghetti Lee:
Huh. I had the opposite reaction. I never felt free a day in my life until I admitted that I was an atheist. It’s been the most freeing thing I’ve ever experienced. Not frightening for a minute once I crossed that line. It’s good that nothing is there to be frightened of disobeying and I have found more meaning in life without invisible sky wizards and their evil henchmen to try to scare me into accepting their definition of what life means. It’s wonderful to know that your values are those you worked out for yourself and that you control your destiny and how you treat others. You don’t know how constrained religion and belief in fantasies make you until you give it all up without looking back. Don’t be afraid. Believe in yourself as a moral agent. You don’t need child molesters and bigots to tell you how to live a good life. You already know, deep down.
jheartney
@aimai: You belong to a criminal conspiracy of rapists and thieves and you are no more than a beard
Ouch. That’ll leave a mark.
Original Lee
@Splitting Image: This. We are in the same boat. My husband, long the person who stayed away from formal church services, started going regularly again when the kids were in school, but now with the changes to the service and these really nasty letters from the bishop that get sprung on us at random intervals, he’s finding it easier and easier to go in to the office instead. I am finding it easier and easier to stay home and do stuff around the house. So we maybe now go once a month, if that, and we don’t put anything in the plate anymore, either.
Barbara
@Original Lee: Not putting anything into the plate is key, in my view. When it is all said and done, the hierarchy is the mouthpiece of the Church and cares not a bit what the proclivities of adherents are, so long as they are quiet and financially supportive.
Original Lee
@Barbara: The current bishop is definitely all about the money. When the Catholic elementary schools started to be too big a drain on the diocese, he decided the schools should be financially independent. He has instituted new metrics the schools have to meet (almost all financial) and has been shutting schools down for failing to hit the benchmarks. I think about 20 schools have been shuttered in the last few years, and the remaining schools are shrinking as they raise tuition in an effort to cover expenses. Some of the parishes are chipping in to their schools, but most are not because offerings have plummeted and they have their own financial worries.
It really is all about the money.
Bruce S
“I say you leave it, try to destroy it, and then build something better”
Try to destroy it? The fucking Catholic Church? This is weird. Good luck trying to destroy the Catholic Church. There was already a Reformation and “better somethings” (from many of our non-Catholic perspectives) have existed for centuries. The Church remains very, very powerful despite my own greater enlightenment and recognition of it’s myriad faults and apparent existence as a monumental anachronism. In today’s world you’ve got liberal options ranging from the Episcopalians to the Unitarians to The League of Extraordinary Atheists led by Dawkins, et. al. You ain’t gonna “destroy” Catholicism. Frankly, I’m sympathetic to folks like Dionne who don’t share Doug J’s “Nader” approach to the
Democratic PartyCatholic Church. You’re no more going to “destroy” the Catholic Church than you’re going to destroy two-party entrenchment in the US.As someone who is “anti-Catholic” so far as the reactionary theology and institutional trappings go, I’d rather have liberal Catholics stay in the church than abandon the entire institution to the Bishops. Dionne is right. That’s what the reactionaries want. Doug J should let it go and embrace his agnosticism, while letting religious Catholics deal with the dilemma of their church in their own way – without having to also deal with the hectoring from outsiders.
The argument that they make the church conservative hierarchy stronger isn’t convincing at all, especially as it’s coming from folks who have already decided they have no stake in the church. Or from others who never did. It really does, as implied, remind me of self-righteous Naderism that’s predicated on having already given up on a fight and being invested in “no compromise” with a corrupt institution.
It’s like nobody’s ever thought of leaving the Catholic Church before as an “alternative.” If as a Catholic in 2012 you haven’t already made some other choice and are part of the church, there’s obviously some essential connection and identity in one’s Catholicism. It’s been nearly a half-century since Vatican II and most of the liberalization hopes of that era have not been realized. But that hope and faith in the potential of their church to change still springs eternal for many Catholics, and I wish them well and respect their perseverance. What’s “right” in this instance isn’t up for debate by folks whose identity and deepest faith isn’t Catholic. I have never had any affinity for the Catholic church as an institution, for their theology or for their (appalling IMHO) history – but I wouldn’t presume to lecture people who are part of that community and tradition on what their best options are. My general observation is that it’s always easier to just say fuck it than stick with a struggle that will take decades at best.
Bruce S
“You belong to a criminal conspiracy of rapists and thieves and you are no more than a beard”
The Wisdom of Glenn Greenwald!
Zagloba
That’s high praise indeed, sir.
Smedley the uncertain
@jheartney: As I’ve often said: If it weren’t for religions, god might have turned out to be a pretty decent chap.
cthulhu
@Joey Maloney: True, but a minyan doesn’t require a rabbi either, so maybe it is more accurate to say that is doesn’t necessarily require a top down organization. Of course, some of these differences are the result of practicalities during when these religions arose and not necessarily as egalitarian intentions (er, among the men).
And clearly you are correct about the potential for abuse.
Bruce S
@Zagloba:
High praise? Wasn’t intended as such! More a measure of terminal self-righteousness.
LanceThruster
Raised casual Catholic (Catholic Grammar School), but eventually fell into reason ad unbelief.
I now sum up the gist of xian mytholgy as – “God sent god to die for god so that god could forgive god’s creations according to god’s unbending rules.”
Too Rube Goldberg for me.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est: RE: demanding their right to intrude into people’s lives, and using the power of the state to enforce conformity to religious doctrine.
It’s obviously not just Arizona. Lots of red states are jumping in the boat to wage a war on women’s reproductive rights.
Rachel Maddow has done great work detailing how Virginia governor Bob McDonnell unleashed a slew of legislation to restrict abortion.
This is clearly a long thought out Republican strategy. It also appears to have been accelerated by health care reform. Government health care assumes that the citizen has the right to make his or her health care decisions based on what is recommended by medical science. This presumably would apply without regard to a person’s religion.
And so, you have an insane escalation by conservatives and religious authorities to take away an idividual’s right, using ludicrous claims of an employer’s right to exercise his or her religious freedom.
And it’s weird to see some men so blandly neutral about this, laughing it off with jokes about no prescriptions needed to buy condoms.
But imagine if an employer said to a male employee, “Unless you assure me that you are not going to go fornicating this weekend, I’m going to withhold your paycheck.”
@cthulhu:
Yep. Yep. I recall an episode of the old tv show Northern Exposure, where the “fish out of water doctor” tries to organize a minyan. A lot of good commentaries about this episode noted that
shano
Every dollar you spend is a “vote’ for how you want the world to be.
I do not give money to any church except for Rev. Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping.
And I absolutely refuse to give Monsanto any money at all.
Lihtox
There are 1 million African Americans in Alabama, about 26% of the population. Why are they still there? Economic reasons play a big role, I suppose… but maybe because it’s home, it’s where their families have lived for a century, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to let the racists chase them out?
I left the Catholic church in 2008, but before I did I spent some time with a group of liberal Catholics in Dallas (“The Open Window” to be precise), and I have a lot of respect for them for sticking it out, for trying to change the church from the inside, being the stone in the shoe of the bishop and maybe convincing some of their fellow Catholics that their faith is more than just listening to the Pope. They are fueled by memories of Vatican II, where the Church was defined as “The People of God”…not the pope, not the Vatican, but the people.
For every liberal Catholic there are several moderate Catholics who are willing to just go along with what the church tells them to do. The Church still has a huge membership, after all. And when the American nuns or Catholic scholars speak out against the Vatican, while proudly professing their Catholic identity, then their words are going to have a lot more power than if I say them. In the history of the church, Benedict’s papacy is a blip; if the insiders push hard enough, perhaps the spirit of Vatican II will return.
Froley
For a couple of reasons, I was thinking about Catholicism this weekend. First, I realized that soon I will have spent more years as an atheist than as a Catholic. Second, I recognized how much more work I have to do on my mind to get rid of the Catholic worldview I learned as a kid. A few weeks ago I switched to a vegetarian diet. It’s going well, but I did have some bacon last week. Not a big deal (or it shouldn’t be), but all those Catholic feelings came back — now that I’m vegetarian, eating meat is a sin and I need to somehow atone. It’s so ridiculous, but that worldview (seeing everything in terms of sin) was so ingrained in me in 13 years of Catholic school and hundreds of masses. It’s like the song says — how can I miss you when you won’t go away?
Heliopause
This rhetoric would apply to reforms in the RCC, not its reactionary tendencies. I think what you’re trying to ask is, what if you like the general institutional and ritual framework of the RCC but are tired of the reactionary bullshit? Well, you could quit religion altogether or you could switch to a more liberal denomination. If you don’t like either of those choices you could stay and try to reform it from within, but an institution run by reactionary patriarchs won’t be the easiest target in the world, as the FFRF suggests.
Why bother? There must be a couple dozen liberalish churches in my hometown and I don’t live in a huge city. Try the Methodists, they’re advertising like hell and could use a return on their investment. Or just quit religion altogether.
burnspbesq
@low-tech cyclist:
I have issues with those proposals as a litigator, not as a Catholic. I’m all for sexual predators being punished, but opening up the courts to ever-more-stale-and-therefore-less-reliable evidence isn’t the right way to go about it.
burnspbesq
@Lihtox:
Yup. Thanks for pointing that out.
b-psycho
Great. Now laugh some more at the Occupy types that aren’t solid Dem votes…
28 Percent
I look at EJ and I see someone who was a young man when Vatican II came out – and that was a fine, fine Vatican, that Vatican II – and for the rest of his life he will believe, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary, that John XXIII was the rule, and not the aberration.
lless
Your last paragraph succinctly states my reason for leaving the Democratic Party. Now how to blow it up?
Randommentality
My husband tells me: “Well, we survived the Borgias so I guess we will outlast the right-wingers.” That’s the only thing keeping me trying.
serge
Your grandfather was an icon to me, and I’m certain he would echo your sentiments.@aimai:
marindenver
@Spaghetti Lee: But it didn’t just happen in the last 10 or 15 years, at least the abuse of children (You’re probably right about the right wing takeover). But the abuse has been happening for centuries. The Church has just gone to enormous pains to keep it under wraps. And if finally exploded on them.