Posting this on the dunk tank so I talk shit.
Like holy fuck man. Every god damn homily is
god is good because he loves us. God loves us because he is good. You need to love good because he loves us. You need to serve god because he loves us.
Repeat for 10-20 minutes.
What is wrong with these people. Do they not teach rhetoric at priest school? God damn it’s pathetic. How do you get your asses handed to you by prosperity gospel preachers despite branding yourselves as the true successors to saint peter or whatever? I’m constantly falling asleep because these monotonous fucks just repeat the same shit every week. And then people in my family have the audacity to be mad because I find someone boring. Sorry, they’re not god, they’re man, they’re allowed to be boring and bad at their jobs.
How do you spend 70-80 years of your life at this shit and think “:soypoint-1: WHOA HE’S TOTALLY GOT A PROFOUND POINT!!!”
I have a lot of problems with religion and specifically Christianity, but the most offensive thing is how boring it is. Is there any denomination that isn’t a total scam that isn’t boring as fuck? I’m willing to become a pesbestarian or Quaker or whatever as long as they don’t waste my hour spewing shit that makes me sleep
It depends. Catholic homilies come in one of five forms
-
Boring 1200 year old platitudes, but they sound pretty
-
Boring modern platitudes which sound awful
-
frothing at the mouth charismatic right wing "too monarchist to be fascist" reaction
-
Intense theological discussion using terms like "emanation of the divine logos" that goes over the congregation's heads
-
Jesuit "rich people are all damned and to a first approximation you are all rich, repent, congregation of the damned!, here's an AK47, go join the EZLN!
If you go to a wedding or funeral or baptism you'll get 1 if you're lucky or 2 if you're not.
-
Imagine thinking catholicness is going to mass
It's about drinking red wine and talking to your family
It's about looking up who is the saint of your desktop computer's specific CPU architecture every time it won't boot to POST
Grant we beseech Thee that through the intercession of Saint Isidore, bishop and doctor, during our journeys through the internet we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee, and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter. Through Christ our Lord, Amen.
That's only for IBM compatibles. Apple Processors pray to Joseph of Cupertino.
Yes, I have done tech support by invoking divine intervention. Yes, it worked. No, I will not be answering questions at this time.
it's about drinking the blood of christ and then driving because you can't let any go to waste, but you can't be hammered now because that wasn't wine it was jesus juice
that is what hearing the letters of Paul feels like. Especially if they're done one after the other.
Can't help but think Paul could have put all his points into one general letter and just sent it around
Can’t help but think Paul could have just fucked off entirely
He was also the bigtime "you have to care for the poor and also aren't allowed to racially discriminate" guy though
I think it's less to do with what they're saying and more to do with people entering into a sort of collective ritualistic trance. Monotony and repetition are used heavily in hypnosis and I don't think it's a coincidence that there are similarities.
People go to feel good, feel calm, and be soothed. The fact that it makes you feel close to falling asleep is probably a large part of the reason it is so calming and soothing to some people.
Yeah one of the few times I went to mass with my granma they said the full hail mary like 40 times and damn I grew desperate to leave that ridiculous place
because at some point, when we evolved from monkey brain to human brain, we realized we didnt want to die and death is scary. Churches are just filled with people who are scared of not existing and it makes them feel better. yea you have the crazy bigots who make it all even worse, but they all have the base core belief that actual death is scary, so therefore we live forever. they won't phrase it like that, but it's true. they can't even fathom a possibility that death is just darkness forever.
i fucking hate catholicism cause i had to live that shit.
That's how they justify it to themselves. It's one of the most insidious tricks ever played. You get a message of "the world sucks but the next one will be dope if you're a nice person" flipping to "you must accept poverty and oppression because the next world will be a paradise."
I had a priest who had interesting homilies and didn’t touch kids afaik. He only lasted about a year
I heard a pretty good homily yesterday, from a priest from Cameroon. Basically just 10-15 minutes of him attacking wealth and the wealthy, and preaching the importance of helping the poor. He also emphasized that the reason why we have poor people at all is because they are exploited by the wealthy.
Most homilies are pretty dull, but occasionally you’ll get one focused on the right things, especially if the priest is from South America or Africa.
They don't do literal magic in Protestant churches, so they have to make up for it by doing exciting sermons and raps about Jesus.
How do you spend 70-80 years of your life at this shit and think “ WHOA HE’S TOTALLY GOT A PROFOUND POINT!!!”
when your religion is psychically founded on the individual narcissism of every practitioner, it turns out you can just phone it in and they'll still just get out of it what they want.
better than most protestants at least, who have the same problems and also lamer decor
I was raised Catholic and it wasn't until I was like 25 that I started to realize that some people actually get something out of going to church. I thought people only went out of obligation, because of the threat of Hell, but then I started to realize that my mom actually liked going to church.
I don't get it at all. Going into a big room with a crowd of people, being expected to look a certain way, having to do the stand-sit-kneel routine which I never learned and just followed along with, listening to someone tell you stuff that's just not relevant to your life while not being able to ask questions or anything, and it's always the same stuff. And if that mode of engagement doesn't work for you, if you're someone who would get more out of reading stuff on your own and discussing it with a small group, then too bad because you still have to go to Mass.
Social anxiety? Fuck you. ADHD? Fuck you. Queer? Fuck you. And it just goes on being weirdly exclusionary. My sister was one of the most devout people I knew, and one time the church got a new priest, and he said, "No female alter servers," and she'd been an alter server for years, and a lot of people weren't happy with the decision, but too bad. There's so much dumb arbitrary bullshit to deal with, especially for an organization that people voluntarily go to and give money to. Like, if you impose a bunch of rules on people and offer nothing in return, I'm just gonna not?
Because according to them the perfect word of God was delivered in its entirety to a remote backwater of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. Innovation is therefore heresy.
You can go Quaker if you want but their meetings are to just sit in silence for a while so it's essentially a meditation session. Not sure if that's the pulse-pounding turbotheology you might be looking for.
”the Christian faith is not a “religion of the book.” Christianity is the religion of the “Word” of God, a word which is “not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living.” If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, “open our minds to understand the Scriptures.”
The actual Catechism of the Catholic Church says you are incorrect
I think it's mistake as an atheist to buy into Christian infighting about the extent to which the Bible is up to interpretation because it doesn't matter. You even end up doing their work for them by saying that sure, the Catholic Church is a genocidal cabal of pedophiles and rapists but you at least have to respect the fact that they believe the Bible is up to interpretation. Why? It's still fundamental to their worldview and the reason their morality has been slower to evolve than the rest of society's over the last 20 centuries.
I suppose a better and less glib way to frame my original comment would be to say that the Catholic institution's legitimacy depends on their followers believing that the Bible contains the divine blueprint of a moral life and that because the Bible itself is such an insane mass of contradiction and obscure references to a long-dead political structure that the only things that still make sense in the modern era are so banal and obvious that exegesis on them is incredibly boring.
But there isn't anything untrue about my actual comment and I don't see any reason to buy into the church's myth making that despite all the crime it is engaged in a legitimate intellectual exercise (see @REallyN's comment), nor the Protestant counterclaim that its failings aren't an indictment of Christianity as a whole. It's a testament to how effective their bullshit is that your instinctive response was to treat the accusation that they believe in the divine origins of the Bible as a slander.
That all seems like a really in-the-weeds direction to go given the original post, and I feel your original comment didn't really reflect what you're saying here but it also seems like we're in violent agreement so :shrug-outta-hecks:
