Indiana...Religious Freedom eh? *sigh*

Commander Vimeseh_sl said:

Sorry for the derail from the current discussion, but i've been thinking about the whole idea of religious people refusing to provide services for homosexuals because of things like this RFA. Originally I was for them having the option for a number of reasons, not all faith based. However I've come to really think that the problem with them doing so or even being able to do so is a matter of moral consistency. Or rather their lack of it. Are they refusing to make goods or provide services for those who are divorced? Are they refusing to fix a car for someone they may know who is cheating on their spouse? Are they going to refuse to take wedding pictures if they find out that one of the newlyweds is addicted to porn or steals from their place of business? Most likely not, and that hypocrisy kills me. So how is it any different from the tacit approval you would be giving to a gay couple of you performed the service for them?

The acts I used as examples might not always be major when viewed through a secular lense. But for a Christian all of those things are serious problems. So act with consistency if you want to use your faith as an excuse. Otherwise your just using it to be bigoted against something you personally dislike. Which is disgusting no matter what way you look at it. It's even more disgusting that you are tarnishing something supposedly as important as your faith just to act out your prejudice.

At this point I thing things like the original Indiana RFA which spawned this thread are more a hindrance then a help to anyone who is trying to act in a moral fashion whether from a secular or a faith based viewpoint. Still not sure how much government of any level should be able to dictate who a non essential service provider deals with, but that's a topic for another day.

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Its called playing Big Book of Multiple Choice with the Bible.

Catholics aren't any less crazy than fundamentalist protestants though. The crazy just takes different forms. Instead of handling snakes and believing in young earth creationism, you guys got transubstantiation, exorcism, child rape and old earth creationism, all of which are just as batshit as believing in the planet kolob and faith healing.

You can lie to yourselves about it all day, but so long as you're jamming a magic sky man in there anywhere without evidence you don't believe in science, you believe in your special snowflake interpretation of the scientific evidences.

Sure, I guess the reason I lump it in is because, anecdotally speaking, when you bring up the history of child rape in the Catholic Church to many Catholics, their first response is to try and underplay its influence, like they'll say shit like "Well the incidences of child rape in the Church are lower than the rate for child rape in schools, or in the public, or in X other institution"

I really don't think they've fully grasped that their claim is that the Catholic Church, and the Pope, are the Right Hand of God on Earth, and that therefore the instances of child rape in God's Own Organization should be exactly and precisely nil.

But yeah I mean we could take out child rape and replace it with all sorts of bollocks. Stigmata. The belief that objects can hold powers of good and evil. Statues bleeding from their eyes and anuses. The Miracle of the Sun.

The broader point being, Catholics are just as batshit cray cray as the Protestants, they're just better at hiding it.

You talk to a broad enough spectrum of Catholics, you'll find the sort of sentiment Vimeseh put forward is really quite common. They sort of stick their noses in the air, claim "Well we believe in Evolution! (God Did It (tm)) and Science! (God Did That Too (tm)) We're so much more erudite and respectable and reasonable and "common sensical" than those snake handling tongues speaking lunatic Protestants. Martin Luther was such a turd!"

Its pure bollocks. We're talking about the people who promoted the Crusades (almost justified at first as a response to Muslim aggression), who engaged in the Inquisition, burned witches and heretics regularly, excommunicated vast swaths of heretical viewpoints, spent centuries promoting the belief that the Jews Killed Jesus (tm) until Vatican 2, where suddenly The Jews Didn't Kill Jesus After All (tm), so forth and so on.

I think the thing that irks me about it most is that Catholics don't see that, and they don't get that the Protestants are sitting in their pews on Sundays condemning the Catholics for beliefs like the Saints (Paganism and Idolatry) in the exact same way, and they believe they're better than the Catholics for the exact same reasons (we're really centrists, we follow God's word more accurately, its just "common sense", so forth). Its literal pot meet kettle behavior, and both sides have their heads up their own asses so far neither of them realize it. It takes someone sitting on the outside to see it.

Yeah I'll agree politically Catholics are less crazy than the snake handlers, for the most part.