I have a half baked theory about organized religion. The more silly the head gear the more whack the religion. Stalin made at least two mistakes. We all know the first one but imho the second one is that he did not crush the orthodox church until it was reduced to its elemental form. Hoxha did nothing wrong. When a guy like this is a shot-caller in your culture you have already failed. I loathe all organized religion but I feel like relatively speaking the roman catholics are the least bad. I consider roman catholics the ML party of christianity and the vatican is the vanguard. Sure they did a lot of evil stuff back in the day but If I look at the last 1000 years of christians I see them making incremental improvements as opposed to the orthodox wing which has slowly rotted on the vine. The current pope is arguably the best in its history.
Made this post because I just saw this:
The State Duma of the Russian Federation unanimously adopted the law aimed at prohibiting sex change.
Citizens who have already changed sex will be prohibited from adopting children, being their guardians or trustees, and their marriages will be annulled.
The law will come into force from the date of official publication. This was reported by the press service of the lower house of parliament on Friday, July 14.
The law prohibits any medical interventions, both surgical operations and the use of drugs aimed at forming primary or secondary sexual characteristics of the other sex in a person.
Assholes
Is it some paternalistic bullshit because it's the biggest religion in Latin America
yes. please ignore the whole ass war mexico had specifically about it and all the burned churches throughout all the liberation wars and liberal revolutions
Why do people make this stupid special carve out for catholicism. Is it some paternalistic bullshit because it's the biggest religion in Latin America?
As a non american looking from the outside, I think there's a lot of different things going on at the same time.
There's the sheer numbers factor, for one. The US religious peak happened under a protestant majority, so the sheer number of people who suffered abuse or just straight up had a bad experience with their religious community were mostly protestant as well.
Then there's the distance factor. It's kinda like being an upscale american buddhist. If you leave a reactionary religious context for another church or another religion altogether, you're interacting with a diaspora or minority community, which means disconnection from traditional structures of power, or political struggles which happen both in America and in their home constituencies. There are reactionary muslims and liberal muslims. But their disputes occur far away and if you're lucky the small neighborhood mosque in Small Town USA doesn't get funding from a Saudi Arabia Wealth Fund.
On one hand the institutional and universal nature of the roman catholics should diminish this effect. It's supposed to be one singular thing. In practice it isn't. There's a trillion religious orders, tendencies, and huge gulfs of class between the ranks of the regular clergy. If the first catholics you interact with are a franciscan who studied theology, that's gonna be a completely different experience from, say, 'man who was too anti semitic to accept vatican ii and founded his own ultra-catholic cult'.
That defacto schizophrenic nature of the catholic church means that if you're a foreigner (or a diaspora community within the US) your experience of catholicism changes a lot. You can be from certain central american countries where the elitism of the catholic church is on full display, as it plays the cold war book to a t. Or you can be from Brazil, a country where the catholic church rallied against Bolsonaro, who claims to be of roman catholic denomination, because the guy is aligned with the american pentecostal political projects.
And let's not forget cognitive dissonance. The Catholic Church is resolutely against contraception. Someone can be Catholic, believe the Church is completely right, and still use condoms because, after all, they are only human. At worst this is a cynical person who loves to judge other people's failings as sinful. At most, this is just a person, filled with contradictions and little cruelties. 'Well, it's true, the poors can't afford children, so they should be less naughty. My daughter needed that abortion though, she's raised well and on her way to do much good in the world by being a doctor.'
Then there's the bergoglio effect. I remember when my teachers at uni were giddy as fuck, joking about the 'anti pope crisis of the 21st century'. One of them was slightly less informed than the others and expressed disbelief. 'They put a franciscan on the papacy?', he asked. 'No, he's a jesuit. He picked francis for optics'. 'Ah, that makes more sense'. Under Francis, the Catholic Church is triangulating towards a measure of liberal centrism. And within an american context this highlights all the contradictions of american christianity in the dumbest possible way. Here comes the a catholic higher up saying shit like 'eh homosexuality is a sin but thats probably not the worst sin you know'. So the
counter that with calling the pope a communist and all sorts of racial epithets.TL;DR reactionary religious tendencies are on the rise worldwide. The hindus are organized around explicit hindu fascism. The orthodox church in Russia fully endorses the ideological mish mash of trad larping that holds the Russian state together because, really, it's a quasi national church at the end of the day. Salafism has become so successful in the hearts and minds of people across the world that it's displaced centuries old orthodox islam and relegated it to words such as 'mysticism' and 'sufism'. Christian Dominionism has utterly succeeded in its political missionary project, and survived america's borders, reaching historic highs across Latin America and Africa. It keeps going. To be a fucking trad cath of all the options available to you is the most hipstery, dorky thing imaginable. You're basically saying the enlightened centrist pope is a step too far because he said gay people are welcome at mass or something similar politiciany.
I personally do not think that the world's largest pedophile ring (the Catholic Church) should be compared to an ML vanguardist party.
Also religious persecution is bad, but I don't think I'll get anywhere on that one.
Apparently my comment got 1984'd for "sectarianism" but yeah a couple parties here have had some pretty bad sexual harassment stuff come out in the last few years which had been covered up by the leadership, it really sucks
Involving children? I hate Maupin as much as the next guy (and he belongs in a reeducation facility), but there's no comparison to actually molesting kids and then just being transferred to a new church.
This isn't about Maupin and I don't consider him or any of the other pazis to be MLs
I loathe all organized religion but I feel like relatively speaking the roman catholics are the least bad. I consider roman catholics the ML party of christianity and the vatican is the vanguard.
Its a very american viewpoint, since thats the only place where the catholism is considered a progressive force, I swear I only hear this take from usians lol
It also makes no sense because we have Unitarians, Quakers, and Congregationalists
unnatural sexual frustration like with catholic priests so the rate of sex crimes in the church is probably comparable to the general population
they're authority figures in the community who get to decree when/which people get to have 'sanctioned' sex. sex abuse among priests is not due to unfulfilled libido (they literally can just fuck adults) it's their high community positions and lack of public accountability that attracts predators
You gonna tell me that if catholic priests were allowed to marry there would be less sexual abuse? Fuck off.
literally said the exact opposite but ok
orthodox church is "against" pedophilia
yeah okay sure i'm sure if this guy's colleagues had gotten wind of him adopting dozens of kids to abuse they'd have turned him in!
sorry but if you want to talk about a church with actual structural limits on abuse you're going to have to talk about not having ordained clergy, congregational elections & independence--you know, fucking protestants
Yeah, cuz catholics love trans people. Just like how they support gay rights
There's a contingent in basically every sect that supports Trans rights. In America; Unitarian, Quaker, and Congregationalist chrches are very progressive. In the UK and elsewhere, individual parishes can be progressive (see the priests marching with community defense groups a few weeks ago).
The Vatican is a bastion of reaction though and most national and international religious orgs are the same way (with the exception of maybe Unitarians, Quakers, and Congregationalists).
As others have mentioned, this is a little generous to the Catholic Church. The Lib Theo Catholics have a lot of work to do before the church can be considered even moving towards a socially beneficial role.
re : catholicism
they're just politically savvy. the vatican is not in any way progressive or "ahead of the curve", they just position themselves where they can better evade criticism from progressives/revolutionaries & not (actually) upset the reactionary parts of the church. have these 'hip' popes ever fucking excommunicated or tried to reign in any of their
congregations/officials?it has been a grave, grave, mistake for secular governments to scale down anticlericalism in deference to "left-wing" (completely inconsequential) statements from the Vatican as the dioceses of the countries in question are
As a (left wing) Catholic I agree. Pope Francis is centrist as a pope and on the Far Right of the Jesuits, to the extent that he was ostracised from the order.
Do not trust the fucking church, it needs major reform and the abolition of Vatican I and similar 19th century reactionary councils.
Trotsky wrote an essay where he compared jesuits to marxists in their stance towards moralism.
I hadn't thought about that but I like it. Maybe then the Protestants are trots? Trotestansts.
It's funny because that's also how tradcaths see the Jesuits (as communists).
The southern baptists are that one party who gave critical support to ISIS
yes, the first estate and the second estate must be eradicated with constant, unyielding red terror. any organization that encourages people to throw away life in this world for life in the next should be prohibited from having any power in this world. if they're not frauds then this won't be a problem for them.
Pretty sure it's real. But part of the reason it tests his faith is because America is so d-word (with lgbt people)
Edit: I guess the d-word (the word that means to decline generationally) is a slur now (since it's widely used by reactionaries)? Got auto filtered so I changed it from removed to "d-word"
I think that "crushing" the Orthodox Church would have been the wrong move, but the Bolsheviks should have recognized its cultural sway and instead of clashing with it directly the way they did they should have sought to overwrite it. Imagine if all of the church leaders were communist party members, priests at seminary were required to read Marx alongside the Bible, and every other religion in the Soviet Union similarly integrated into the Party, rather than made into natural collaborators with the capitalists.
it might be possible to co-opt it back from what Constantine did to it, focusing on ante-nicene anti-imperialism, but I still think participation in the first estate should limit your advancement in the party
hope all my peeps in st petersburg get out
