Pope on gays : "Who am I to judge?"

[Barrister]

Tamas, he's still not saying being gay is a good thing and it's awesome to be gay as far as the Church is concerned.

fair enough, but than any previous Catholic dignitary who wanted to condemn/prosecute them was in the wrong, or this mild Pope is. Either way, they can be wrong, and you cannot be wrong when teaching the moral guidance of divine supremacy, because to be not 100% correct means being full of shit.

You know Sheilbh writes these beautiful posts explaining why and how Churches don't claim to be 100% correct about everything, and you just ignore it.

[Caliga]

He is changing the rhetoric to fit the times, which is what the Church has been doing since Day 1 I guess, and if that`s what keeps people going, then I am fine with it. I am just pointing out that if you adopt what you teach as divine truth to fit the contemporary marketing lines, then you are by definition full of shit.

You'll get no argument from me that the Church is full of shit.

To be honest, I don't know what Benedict said about gays.  The current Pope is being sold as more gay friendly but I don't know that Benedict said things like Fred Phelps or anything like that.  I wonder if people just disliked Benedict because he looked creepy and evil.

[The Brain]

He is changing the rhetoric to fit the times, which is what the Church has been doing since Day 1 I guess, and if that`s what keeps people going, then I am fine with it. I am just pointing out that if you adopt what you teach as divine truth to fit the contemporary marketing lines, then you are by definition full of shit.

You'll get no argument from me that the Church is full of shit.

To be honest, I don't know what Benedict said about gays.  The current Pope is being sold as more gay friendly but I don't know that Benedict said things like Fred Phelps or anything like that.  I wonder if people just disliked Benedict because he looked creepy and evil.

Card-carrying Nazi may have had something to do with it.

[Tamas]

Tamas, he's still not saying being gay is a good thing and it's awesome to be gay as far as the Church is concerned.

fair enough, but than any previous Catholic dignitary who wanted to condemn/prosecute them was in the wrong, or this mild Pope is. Either way, they can be wrong, and you cannot be wrong when teaching the moral guidance of divine supremacy, because to be not 100% correct means being full of shit.

You know Sheilbh writes these beautiful posts explaining why and how Churches don't claim to be 100% correct about everything, and you just ignore it.

Because he excuses stuff that you cannot excuse with an organization that claims to be telling people how to live according to a supreme being`s rules.

[The Minsky Moment]

Tamas is just angry because after Stephen the Catholic Church stopped canonizing Hungarian holy men.  The best they could hope for was beetification.

[Barrister]

Tamas is just angry because after Stephen the Catholic Church stopped canonizing Hungarian holy men.  The best they could hope for was beetification.

Joan has sunk to beet jokes.

[Tamas]

Tamas is just angry because after Stephen the Catholic Church stopped canonizing Hungarian holy men.  The best they could hope for was beetification.

IIRC his son also got saintified, probably for dying young or whatever. The Hungarian market had to be pushed hard during those times.

[The Minsky Moment]

Tamas is just angry because after Stephen the Catholic Church stopped canonizing Hungarian holy men.  The best they could hope for was beetification.

Joan has sunk to beet jokes.

Please don't be sad.
I'm begging you.  I'm pleating with you.

[Barrister]

Tamas is just angry because after Stephen the Catholic Church stopped canonizing Hungarian holy men.  The best they could hope for was beetification.

Joan has sunk to beet jokes.

Please don't be sad.
I'm begging you.  I'm pleating with you.

[derspiess]

Okay now he redeemed himself

[grumbler]

I am not sure why Tamas feels that Marti's old role of the reflexive, intolerant, and willfully ignorant godbasher needs to be retained in light of Marti's retirement.  I am not hugely interested in what the Pope has to say about gays, but that interest is as intense as the light of a thousand suns compared to my interest in listening to what bigots have to say about what the Pope has to say about gays.

[Tamas]

I am not sure why Tamas feels that Marti's old role of the reflexive, intolerant, and willfully ignorant godbasher needs to be retained in light of Marti's retirement.  I am not hugely interested in what the Pope has to say about gays, but that interest is as intense as the light of a thousand suns compared to my interest in listening to what bigots have to say about what the Pope has to say about gays.

I am expressing my personal opinion about the topic of a thread. I know you prefer picking what you mistakenly call arguments over random shit than doing what I did, but it is my suspicion that a forum is created for what I did, not what you normally do.

[grumbler]

I am expressing my personal opinion about the topic of a thread. I know you prefer picking what you mistakenly call arguments over random shit than doing what I did, but it is my suspicion that a forum is created for what I did, not what you normally do.

  After your whopping big strawman about " how the clergy can act as the "managers" of eternal divine order, while constantly changing the eternal divine rules?" I my eyes kinda glazed over reading your posts, so if you shifted to expressing personal opinions about the topic of the thread, I missed it.

Your arguments about religion sound pretty identical to me across all of the threads (like Marti's did) - except any arguments yu made late in this thread after I had lost interest in the same-old same-old.

[The Minsky Moment]

I am not sure why Tamas feels that Marti's old role of the reflexive, intolerant, and willfully ignorant godbasher needs to be retained in light of Marti's retirement.

It's more the Viking critique than the Marti critique.  I.e. that literalism or interpretative infallibism leads to logical contradition.

Which is true but smashed right into the Sheilbh critique.
In point of fact, although there are various strands of religious belief among posters here, I don't think we have any literalists here.  So Viking and Tamas can keep making the point if they like but it is running the same battering ram through the same open gate over and over.

[Sheilbh]

You know Sheilbh writes these beautiful posts explaining why and how Churches don't claim to be 100% correct about everything, and you just ignore it.

There's no need to write those posts anymore, I can just point to this interview:

The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent.
...
In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble. Uncertainty is in every true discernment that is open to finding confirmation in spiritual consolation.

Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing ... We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us.
...
The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong. The Society of Jesus can be described only in narrative form. Only in narrative form do you discern, not in a philosophical or theological explanation, which allows you rather to discuss .
...
This is how it is with Mary: If you want to know who she is, you ask theologians; if you want to know how to love her, you have to ask the people. In turn, Mary loved Jesus with the heart of the people, as we read in the Magnificat. We should not even think, therefore, that 'thinking with the church' means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.

The stuff on 'thinking with the Church' (a very Jesuit idea) is apparently entirely new and very capacious, but it echoes Vatican II.

But his restatement of the very old view that there's a hierarchy of truth will no doubt have traditionalists reaching for the salts because for them it reeks of relativism. And I think that'll be a particular problem for conservative Catholics in the very political world of the American church:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/conservative-catholics-and-the-new-pope/?_r=0