Catholic Leadership Continues To Make Friends - Page 4

A substantial amount of recorded history would no longer exist if if weren't for Catholic monks stepping up to preserve it after the fall of Rome. In the Middle Ages, the Church was responsible for most libraries, schools, and other institutions of higher learning. Catholic monks can claim major responsibility for huge advances in metallurgy, agriculture, musical notation, and book preservation. The prosperity of the Church led to the funding of vastly influential architecture and art during the Renaissance. In South America, Jesuit priests often stood between colonialist enterprises and the natives they hoped to enslave. Jesuits also essentially invented liberal arts education by fusing Renaissance-era humanism with Catholic scholasticism. Pope Leo XIII released the Rerum Novarum, considered an important piece of pro-worker literature.

Some additional points from Wikipedia:

On science:
On economics:
There's no organization with comparable influence in the history of the West. Of course, there's going to be some bad stuff and, quite often, some corruption at the top. But the top at any given moment does not necessarily define the entirety of a body.

Let's not undervalue the role Muslim scholars had in that as well.

"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"

I don't think I did that.

Wow, what a surprise. You mean that books were kept, maintained and studied at the only places where people actually had the luxury to learn reading and writing? Damn.

That's not the point at all. Vasquez thought that the world would be a better place for the Catholic church having not been in it. Dave pointed out that, in fact, the world is a better place for it existing.

That hypothetical doesn't fall under my definition of religion either. That's not an oversight, it's the entire point of wording it how I did. What you have there is not a Christian, but someone heavily influenced by Christian ideals. And it isn't hypothetical; there are lots of people like that in the world, including many of my personal favorites. But I don't consider them truly religious without some element of faith in the supernatural.

Maybe "faith" wasn't the best word, but couch it in whatever terms you prefer. Ideas vs. Beliefs. Religion vs. Spirituality. Appreciation vs. Subscription. Believing in a story is one thing; it doesn't become religion until you actually believe it.

You asked for a simple, sweeping definition of religion. One that presumably would encompass the incredibly broad sweep of religious traditions throughout history without including absolutely anything anyone's ever happened to believe about anything ever. I did my best to oblige. It doesn't cover modes of religious-influenced thought once they reach a certain level of abstraction by design.

Not saying you did, just thought it deserved a mention.

You don't think there would have been some other learned bodies that would have maintained that knowledge?

But there wasn't... this isn't an exercise in the hypothetical -- it's a discussion on the reality of the now.

ETA - Sorry Dickson... my post came off a bit too biting for my liking. I don't mean to attack you.

Aren't we arguing a hypothetical anyway? "The world would have been better if there had been no Catholic Church" sure sounds hypothetical to me.

I didn't realize that was the discussion... I still don't think it is. My take on the thread has been that it's mainly been focused around the idea of A) Who and what to blame and B) What to do once blame has been established.

Followed by disagreements on the nature of A and how to implement B.

The entire thread isn't on that, no, but the most recent strand of conversation -- and the post I was replying to -- was.

There were no other learned bodies at that time nor do we have any idea who they might have been if there weren't religious institutions of learning. Besides that's irrelevant to the point which was that no one else did look after them so, in fact, the Catholic Church did make contributions to the world.

The Church also did, in fact, contribute to the Crusades and Inquisition in ways that no other body did. But we decided that was all base human impulse, with the religious veneer being purely incidental.

Then I guess you and Dave are pragmatic enough to thank the Nazis for your space program while you're at it, right?

(Not trying to be snarky.)

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Why they saved the knowledge/books etc is irrelevant. The fact is they saved the stuff. So, regardless of their intent, they have made a positive contribution to society. In fact, if you read Dave's post, you'd see they made huge contributions to society. Stuff that may or may not have happened if they had not existed as an organization.

Yep. Why would we waste knowledge because it was gained at the hands of brutish fucking thugs? How does that help the people destroyed by said brutish nasty thugs? I say this as someone whose Oma hid the fact that she was Jewish until her grave because of those nasty brutish thugs.

Myself, I learned a long time ago that some ethical gymnastics were going to be required to even begin to approach studying the Third Reich. This "catch" (cost of the knowledge) was among the more complicated "compromises" one has to learn to make when studying history. An understatement coming from someone who's spent the better part of ten years studying Albert Speer.

I find the back and forth on the Catholic church in this stretch of the thread putting me in that same situation. Very strong (and heartfelt!) opinions on both sides of the argument that ultimately, to my mind, have to be taken as equally valid truths.

(Thanks for not taking it as snark, I was afraid you still might)

It excludes a huge number of Buddhists, among others, who are typically considered religious. I'd say that's as flawed a definition as saying a plane is "a flying vehicle that takes off from and lands on solid ground". It excludes an entire subset of similar flying vehicles that are generally assumed to be planes, but happen to land on water.

Not to mention the percentages hardly work out. As far as major accomplishments go, the Catholic Church had centuries and countless geographic areas to amass both good and bad (so much that it's patently stupid to try to quantify the good vs. the bad as is being done in this thread), and the Nazis had a brief period in a limited set of regions in which they accomplished mostly bad.

Saying that the Catholic Church is "bad," is like saying that the United States is "bad." Actually, it's even kind of harder to quantify than in the case of the U.S., since the U.S. is a new organization by comparison and its geopolitical reach is much more clearly defined.

I mentioned this before, and Dave touched on it in his last post, but Social Christianity has been a tremendous force of good in the twentieth century. It's not just Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu here, within the Catholic Church, I'd point to Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker Movement, Archbishop Oscar Romero and liberation theology in Latin America, where Romero was in fact murdered by a U.S.-supported junta in El Salvador. Romero is in fact one of many examples where priests, and even the families living with them, were murdered for daring speaking truth to power. I don't fuck around with that.

This threads in danger of 'hypothetically' disappearing up its own arse.

I'm not going to defend the institution of the Catholic Church as it exists today as I think it has a lot of big fucking issues and entrenched hierarchical problems after so many thousands of years of chugging along like it has. Five minutes with a history book will teach anyone that throughout history, this self same church has been just as much (if not more so) a political force as a religious one and like any powerful political nation state, many evils and some goods can be pointed to to defend or condemn it - I would argue that in this direction lies folly as it's a discussion with no resolution of any kind. The Catholic Church has been very powerful for a very long time. It has helped shape - for good or ill - much of western history for almost two millenia. Sitting down to tally up the historical scorecard to decide if it has been an ultimate positive or negative seems quixotic at best.

Where I came in was I saw this discussion veering off once again into a wholesale condemnation of not just organised religion, but the very concept of spirituality itself. I have no time personally for organised religion, hell I have very little time for organised anything, my essential mistrust of establishments of authority and collective groupings of people in general doesn't make me all that amenable to defending any collection of people with power over others - and I personally believe organised religion to be simply another power structure created by men to control others.

...but have no doubt, take 'religion' out of the world, and there would simply be other power structures doing the controlling in its stead.

As such I think of 'religion' and 'spirituality' as wholly separate things - religion being simply politics under a spiritual guise.

The real game of humanity throughout time is about power and always has been. The real horrors are the evils people will commit to gain or enforce that power.

Spirituality has nothing whatsoever to do with that.

You know, I understand that and it's part of why I find the "religion is just the excuse, not the cause" line to be so maddening. If you really aren't going to assign any blame to the Church for all the heinous things it was involved in, it follows that any good that it has contributed to is just people doing what they would've done anyway completely independent of any religious influence. Defending something by arguing its utter inconsequence is the weakest defense imaginable, and in its way more insulting than attacking it outright.

That's not to mention that even accepting the "it's just the excuse" line at face value doesn't change the fact that excuses are, in scheme of things, bad. I don't want people to have excuses for what they do, I want them to have reasons.

For myself I didn't take that tack as some defense of religion, as my post above outlines, I'm not that keen on religion in general. As a consequence I would completely argue that the good that people cite as having come from the religion completely falls under the same banner. It's not god doing shit - it's us, its all us and our capacity for doing evil or good, regardless of what justifications or motivations we wish to use.

Would 'justification' be a more palatable term for you then? Again, getting right back to the crux of where I was coming from, I simply don't agree with the inference that religion is some 'other' that effects the mind and heart of people to do good or evil - it's all just us people, we invented religion, we do the good and we do the evil, if we weren't doing it in the name of religion we'd be doing it in the name of something else.

It's all just us, it always has been. The good and the bad. Venerate or take issue with us, not some ideology or belief structure we've come up with to try and justify or motivate ourselves.

This is what I was getting at. And I'll cede to the preservation of knowledge that DaveB cites, but I think weighed against the numerous other atrocities, it doesn't balance out. Not to mention that while those monks might have been practicing the better parts of their faith, the institution of the Church was still living in opulence, which kind of goes against the most basic of Jesus' teachings.

Since this discussion is taking a back and forth on positive/negative influence of the church, and it was originally about the Pope, anyone care to defend that position as a positive?

How, exactly? Part of "us" is the things, the ideologies and institutions that we have built up. And I don't think there's anything particularly myopic about looking at a human institution, be it the Roman Catholic Church, the Motion Picture Association of America, The America Civil Liberties Union, Major League Baseball, or the Ku Klux Klan, and trying to take an objective view of their contributions to humanity, good or bad.

If there was no KKK, would racism cease to exist? Of course not. Most likely, there would just be a Mu Mux Mlan full of people that dress up like Frankenberry in dead of night to go mow asterisks in minority's lawns or somesuch nonsense. That doesn't make it outrageous or irresponsible to have an opinion as to the Klan's value to society.

As I said above Schwartz, I'm the last person who's going to defend the Catholic Church as an institution throughout its long history. I was simply taking issue with the way some in this thread were then trying to conflate condemnation of the church with condemnation of organised religion as a whole and then even further into a denigration of the very concept of spirituality and many peoples need to believe in something bigger than themselves all together.

It's one of the more legit questions to ask in this thread. People seem to be after the idea that somehow there is some cosmic scale that needs balancing. The idea that because an institution or an organization has done some horrific things it cancels out the good they have done and vice versa.

It is surprisingly possible to identify good things that an organization has done without being supportive of the current bad things they are doing. It is possible to be against kiddy diddling and against the concerted conspiracy of silence all the while recognizing that in the past they did some good things.

That last sentence reads waaaaaaaay more awkward than you intended, Ryan. But it made me giggle.

You're right it doesn't balance out. That's because there is no possible way to make one-to-one comparisons between, say, rescuing all of Plato or Homer and making allowances for even a single child to be molested.

A church is not necessarily the religion... a church is not necessarily the religion... a church is not necessarily the religion... ad infinitum...

Are you suggesting that kiddy diddling and conspiracies of silence have never done anything good, Schwartz? :-)

Yeah, 'awkward wording' would be being kind to that sentence.

It is when the church sets itself up as the arbiter of what is acceptable to the religion. Go tell the pope he's not the Catholic religion and see what happens.

So you believe everything the Pope tells you?

Hold on, I'm not saying all Catholics follow the pope, but you can't say the Roman Catholic Church doesn't see itself as THE foundation of the religion. You can't say, "The church is not the religion" when the church insists it IS.

No, you can't. I'm sure they see themselves as such, although some may disagree entirely or acknowledge the RCC's foundational status, but not its ongoing authority.

This - which is the statement that Jared made - is an entirely different statement than the one you refuted above. With a religious and cultural institution as old and as thoroughly intertwined with western culture as Catholicism, the current Pope doesn't necessarily get to dictate the terms of everything "being Catholic" might mean to an individual who considers him or herself Catholic.

If you've been a Catholic all your life, and Pope Benedict suddenly decides that all Catholics should revert to a kosher diet, it's not at all clear that you're not Catholic if you refuse, just as it's not clear that you're not Catholic if you refuse to adopt an anti-birth control/anti-abortion stance or disagree about the ordination of women (although you may just consider yourself Episcopalian in this case), etc. Catholicism can and does refer to a belief system, not just a legislative body.

I think we're arguing two different things here.

How so?

Jared wrote that a church is not necessarily the religion, you responded that it is because it says it is, I asked if the Pope has the right to make that determination, you suggested that he does, and I disagreed. Sure seems like one thing we're arguing about to me.

Religious belief is more complicated than, say, membership in a country club where you're either in or you're out. If you're striving for official sainthood, then, yeah, you're going to bump against the ruling body of the Church. On the other hand, if your just a person whose beliefs fall roughly into what's traditionally been called Catholicism, but you have some reservations about some of the rules and practices of the current church hierarchy, it's not really incorrect to call yourself "Catholic." There are proudly gay people who identify as Catholics, after all, and I don't think the guy who currently calls himself Pope gets to decide whether they're allowed to.

Actually, he does. Little thing called excommunication that's at his and other Catholic higher-up's disposal. Like the one who used it on a 9-year old rape victim that had an abortion.

So those hypothetical gay guys, they might personally not believe such actions are just, but when they put their dollars in the collection plate every Sunday, that's whose pockets they're lining. At some point you have to cede that active Catholics bear some responsibility for the shit they've allowed the church to get away with.

I wasn't disagreeing that the church is not the religion, but that the Catholic Church believes it's the religion, and as long as it does, asserting that "the church is not the religion," however accurate, is sort of moot point.

Why?

Actually, he doesn't in the sense that I've been discussing the concept. If you approach Catholicism as a belief system and possibly even a cultural force that's existed over centuries (which is, hello, what I've been discussing) rather than an organization led by a governing body (which is going to be hindered by bureaucracy that might not represent core concepts of the religion as seen by many adherents), excommunication is pretty much a one-sided proposition.

So, as I said above, who gives a fuck what the Pope thinks? A lot of liberal Catholics don't, and they actively oppose the Church policies and activities they don't like.

Assuming you live in the U.S., your taxes inevitably support all kinds of things that you undoubtedly oppose. Do you leave and renounce your status as an American because of disagreements about policy? Or do you continue to pay your taxes and work to change it on the basis that you think "America" is a worthy enough concept to reform to your liking?

You know what? At some point if you pick and choose which parts of a particular religion you want to adhere to enough, you stop being able to call yourself a part of it.

"I'm a Catholic but I don't believe the Pope is the ultimate authority in matters of faith." No, you're not a Catholic.

"I'm a Buddhist, but I don't believe in Karma." No, you're not a Buddhist.

"I'm an Orthodox Christian but I don't believe in Christ's divine nature." No, you're not an Orthodox Christian.

You don't get to call yourself a part of something if you only pick the parts of it that don't embarrass or inconvenience you. In some ways I have more respect for the spirituality of some farmer in Oklahoma or some fisherman in Java that respect and follow the tenets of their religion, no matter how much I disagree, than for someone going around picking at random which parts of his religion he will follow. Most of the people that call themselves religious nowadays have a belief system more nebulous and ill defined than a four year old feral kid's.

^Thank you.

And (DaveB) it's not the same thing as paying taxes vs. renouncing your citizenship. You at least get to vote on the people who then decide on taxes. At no point do Catholics cast a ballot for Pope. Which begs the question: why would you stick with the religion if you have no option in who is leading it, unless you're willing to follow them no matter what. At some point those liberal Catholics need to admit they're not really Catholics anymore. Either that, or, if they really disagree with what the church does but continue to support it anyway, are partially guilty for the corrupt and awful shit it engages in.

ETA: Besides, one has no option as to the country they're born a citizen into. Yes, they have the option to renounce their citizenship later and move away, but the inherent legal and economic factors that go into that make it a non-viable for many if not most. Not the same for religion, which you might be born into similarly, but which is far, far easier to renounce.

Me saying 'I renounce my citizenship as an American' doesn't mean I'm no longer technically an American citizen. However, me saying 'I'm no longer a Catholic', as I've done, does mean I am no longer a Catholic. On a functional level, its as simple as that.

Stelios makes the point I was so clumsily trying to get around to.

Well, I'd say we have a crisis of terminology on our hands, then. Most self-identified British Catholics disagree with the Vatican on its major stances on sexuality. Would you like to notify them of their non-Catholic-ness or shall I?

You're basically straw-manning it here, because what I'm talking about isn't feel-good, cherry-picking, free-floating spirituality. Considering the scope of what "being Catholic" has meant throughout the centuries, disagreeing with the current Pope or the Vatican's current stance on certain issues, is potentially inconsequential. There's a lot more to Catholicism than "eh, pretty much the same as any kind of Christianity, but there's a guy with a funny hat in charge."

And, as with all religions (though seldom admitted by the rabid disbelievers who insist that religion is intrinsically inflexible thus incompatible with science), stances within Catholicism are subject to change. Presumably, disagreement within the Church can effect this change. Religions aren't as lock-step as you want them to be - there's some malleability involved.

Even Britain aside, it seems very few self-identified Catholics adhere to stelios' rigorous criteria:

The U.S.
Italy and France
Gay Catholics, naturally
A Catholic nun (more on the author, who also supports the ordination of women, here)

Do you think, perhaps, that these people - long-term practicing Catholics and a nun with a doctorate - are better equipped to determine whether they're Catholics or not better than a little pack of fervent atheists on a movie message board?

Just chiming in to say that the Buddhist is still a Buddhist... kthx.

I don't have time to actually get into this right now (plus typing out longer posts on my phone is too painful), but regarding the part I highlighted: Really? You're better than this. Also, nice Appeal To Authority

I'm not "better than that," because there's nothing inaccurate in what I said.

As for the Appeal to Authority, I'm not exactly sure what the other option is in this conversation, because I'm asserting that Catholicism is a subjective designation. I think an individual steeped in Catholicism is better-suited to determining his or her own Catholic-ness than stelios is. Yup. Totally fucking insane.

Thanks for the Wiki link, though: "There is no fallacy involved in simply arguing that the assertion made by an authority is true. The fallacy only arises when it is claimed or implied that the authority is infallible in principle and can hence be exempted from criticism."

Eyeball Kid, you're better than this.