I watched THIS video on FB the other night with Stephen Fry giving his reasoning as to why the catholic church is not a force for good. I agree with everything he says and openly challenge anyone to find fault in his reasoning.
Im not only putting this here as a challenge, its here so people can see it, so people might start to think past that which they blindly worship and so people can perhaps learn from this. Please only comment after having seen the whole video. I will watch the other speakers asap but I have washing to do
I'm starting to think this topic has morphed into a flaming rant thread....
Samy made some good points.
If an employee at your work did something wrong does that make the entire work force there wrong as well?
a similar topic is like saying all Muslims are terrorists thanks to the actions of a few. A few priests are evil, doesn't mean the entire Church is evil..
a similar topic is like saying all Muslims are terrorists thanks to the actions of a few. A few priests are evil, doesn't mean the entire Church is evil..
This is as closer equivalent to an employee murdering someone, then having the rest of the company help bury the guy and cover the evidence. When someone finds out, they simply move that man to a different division of there work. They never go outside for assistance and don't do anything about the ones they find out. The actions of the CEO also killed millions. That would be the closer equivalent...
A lot of people are saying "the church is bad, but the people aren't." A lot of the child abuse, homophobia, taking advantage of third world country ignorance, etc. comes from (for lack of a better word at this moment) fact that the Catholic Church drills ideas into the skulls of their believers, using them as the tools.
In my opinion, the only reason the Catholic Church has not been questioned in a large scale until the last 50 years or so is because of it immense power and influence. I think we can all agree upon that, whether we are for or against Catholicism as a whole.
What I'm trying to say is, even if the Catholic Church mellowed or even collapsed, there would still be people who took old ideas literally. There would still be tools hacking away at the wood, even though the carpenter is absent.
As for HIV/AIDS, birth control, and abortion, the same would go: people taught in the old ways of the Catholic Church would teach their children, thus, for several generations we would still have the post-Catholicism hoo-hah floating around.
If an employee at your work did something wrong does that make the entire work force there wrong as well?
a similar topic is like saying all Muslims are terrorists thanks to the actions of a few. A few priests are evil, doesn't mean the entire Church is evil..
A lot of people are saying "the church is bad, but the people aren't." A lot of the child abuse, homophobia, taking advantage of third world country ignorance, etc. comes from (for lack of a better word at this moment) fact that the Catholic Church drills ideas into the skulls of their believers, using them as the tools.
It has been said several times now that we are not singling out specific catholic's and nor should we. They are people and are as much a tool as anyone else including stupid people who dont believe in god yet run around drinking coca-cola and eating their McDonalds as if they are morally superior because they dont believe. Stephen Fry's point was to seperate the person who does good from the evils that are done in the name of good. His point was well made and clearly stated at the start of the video.
I'm gonna cut right in the middle of the discussion and post this article. I didn't start a new topic on it, because I can envision the responses. So, I decided to post it here because I think it holds some merit to this discuss as to why we attribute these notions to Catholics and other religions.
A new survey of Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths. Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn't know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ. More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history, was Jewish.
The survey released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life aimed to test a broad range of religious knowledge, including understanding of the Bible, core teachings of different faiths and major figures in religious history. The U.S. is one of the most religious countries in the developed world, especially compared to largely secular Western Europe, but faith leaders and educators have long lamented that Americans still know relatively little about religion. Respondents to the survey were asked 32 questions with a range of difficulty, including whether they could name the Islamic holy book and the first book of the Bible, or say what century the Mormon religion was founded. On average, participants in the survey answered correctly overall for half of the survey questions. Atheists and agnostics scored highest, with an average of 21 correct answers, while Jews and Mormons followed with about 20 accurate responses. Protestants overall averaged 16 correct answers, while Catholics followed with a score of about 15. Not surprisingly, those who said they attended worship at least once a week and considered religion important in their lives often performed better on the overall survey. However, level of education was the best predictor of religious knowledge. The top-performing groups on the survey still came out ahead even when controlling for how much schooling they had completed.
On questions about Christianity, Mormons scored the highest, with an average of about eight correct answers out of 12, followed by white evangelicals, with an average of just over seven correct answers. Jews, along with atheists and agnostics, knew the most about other faiths, such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. Less than half of Americans know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, and less than four in 10 know that Vishnu and Shiva are part of Hinduism. The study also found that many Americans don't understand constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools. While a majority know that public school teachers cannot lead classes in prayer, less than a quarter know that the U.S. Supreme Court has clearly stated that teachers can read from the Bible as an example of literature. "Many Americans think the constitutional restrictions on religion in public schools are tighter than they really are," Pew researchers wrote. The survey of 3,412 people, conducted between May and June of this year, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, while the margins of error for individual religious groups was higher
Truly a fascinating survey. I bet this survey, if carried out in the middle east would hold some great wealth of info. I think the Muslims would know their faith inside out, and know the offshoots like Christianity quite well too.
Just to nitpick - Christianity isn't an offshoot of Islam. Islam is the most recent of the 3 main Abrahamic religions - the first was Judaism, then Christianity and finally Islam.
If we've decided that the pope is corrupt/evil then the whole thing must be too - if the Pope is the Catholics leader and chief dude in contact with your God, then he must speak for Catholics as a whole and so must his actions.
Really? The president doesn't know everything you do, he hasn't shared all your experiences, and yet he speaks for you at an international level. Same goes for the Pope - he hasn't experienced everything you have but he speaks for you on a religious level.
Yes he does - he's your democratically elected leader. And if you think you're clever with the Osama/Obama thing - then you must be some dumbass redneck who spends his days sniffin' glue and sittin' with the good ol' boys on the farm with your goshderned guns. Oh wait, I'm talking to a Christian - of course you're a dumbass.
