I’ve been reading the “Pope given last rites” thread, and it pissed me off. Evidently, there’s some folks in this forum who disagree with Catholicism, and I will be the first to say that I am one of them.
HOWEVER:
The time to rag on the Pope and his policies is not in a thread started to honor his memory. So instead, I started this one to bash Catholicism and its deleterious effect on the third world, etc., so the hooligans who are polluting the other thread can stop.
Maybe crickets will chirp in this thread, or maybe not. I’ll start:
I think Catholicism as an institution has grown more and more irrelevant to the modern world since the birth control movement several decades ago. JPII did not do much in his tenure to change this. Maybe he couldn’t change the dogma for some reason. Maybe he didn’t want to. Nevertheless, that is one area that I think many of us can agree that he fell short.
I also have a serious problem with the church’s disapproval of homosexuality. Turning a blind and intolerant eye to a large and maybe even growing segment of the population is not helping them. And I find the basis of their argument against it (leviticus) is flimsy as hell, while the message of acceptance and forgiveness found pretty much everywhere else in the bible should overpower the brief negative note they always fall back on as an excuse to keep what they feel is the status quo.
Perhaps the next Pope will be more progressive. I think that there is still time to save Catholicism as an institution. Make no mistake: it is starting to crumble under the weight of itself. The message we get here is that: “Eternal damnation awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love.” How much sense does that make? What we have here is a church which claims to be the one true way of God, and yet they can’t even handle a crisis within their own ranks, let alone something as vast as the problems of the third world.
I think that a new Pope could possibly change that core message, and make it something more inclusive, more focused on what good it can do in the world. I think that a good start would be to change a few stances, like the one regarding birth control, and perhaps even accept homosexuals instead of trying to demonize them as people who are sick or perverted in some unnatural way.
Anybody care to chime in?