Last week, the Catholic Christ-o-sphere was abuzz with news of Pope Francis punishing a cardinal (archive) for criticizing him and his plans for the ailing organization. It wasn’t that big a punishment, but it didn’t need to be. It sent a direct message. Alas, it looks like the hardliners in that organization have spent too long dealing with Pope Francis’ indirect attacks to understand exactly what’s going on here.
Situation Report: What Pope Francis did this time
Last week, the news broke that Pope Francis held a meeting (archive) with the heads of the offices of the Roman Curia at which he canceled Cardinal Raymond Burke’s subsidy for an apartment in Rome, along with his salary as a retired cardinal.
Burke is one of the leaders in the largely American hardliner Catholic faction that opposes Francis for (it seems) literally everything Francis says and does. So it’s little surprise that La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana (“The New Daily Compass”) first reported the news, according to Franciscan Media (archive).
This Rome-based newspaper is very sympathetic to the hardliners. In early October, they even sponsored a conference called “The Synodal Babel” that was sharply critical of the Pope’s current efforts to unify Catholic teachings and moral positions in meetings called synods (archive). Raymond Burke featured prominently (archive) in that conference. Given that he’s been one of the Pope’s leading critics for many years (archive), that’s not surprising either.
The writer of that article in Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, Riccardo Cascioli, even claimed that Francis called Burke “my enemy” during the meeting—a claim Francis himself later vehemently denied.
However, it is clear that Francis made his decision because of Burke’s ongoing criticism. Someone who attended the meeting summarized it:
“[Francis] didn’t see why he should continue to subsidize Burke attacking him and the church,” and the pope thought “he seemed to have plenty of money from America,” a person who spoke to Pope Francis later told Catholic News Service.
“Pope planning to withdraw Cardinal Burke’s Vatican salary, sources say.” Franciscan Media, November 30, 2023 (archive)
The matter seems simple enough. Any employee in the real world who disses their boss enough can expect to face the same treatment. And despite its religious trappings, Catholicism operates like a secular business more than anything else—just without almost any of the legal rules governing secular businesses.
(Related: Catholicism is a business, and Cardinal Wuerl knows it.)
How religious hardliners wreck literally everything
Catholicism is teetering on the brink of a schism, thanks largely to American hardliners in the organization.
These hardliners loved Pope Francis’ predecessor Pope Benedict XVI (archive) for his take-no-prisoners stances against…well, everybody who wasn’t a fervent adherent of Catholicism’s swivel-eyed, downright-insectoid level of ultra-authoritarian-but-scientific-sounding cruelty and strictness.
Benedict had been right up American hardliners’ alley. Francis, however, sounded to them like Benedict’s polar opposite. He’s entirely too kind to the people hardliners hate and consider their inferiors in every way. He’s making Catholicism entirely too palatable to those people! So they wasted little time in deciding that Francis had to go.
For these hardliners, Francis has become the proverbial bitch eatin’ crackers (BEC). At this point, anything he does, even just eating crackers, offends them to rage. And it does so on a primal, fundamental level that they really can’t help.
Not even Jesus’ direct commands matter to hardliners now—if they ever did. Francis’ continued existence as Catholicism’s currently reigning god-emperor enrages them to blithering fury each and every day that it continues.
Sidebar: Where on Earth did all these hardliner Catholics even come from?
For years, now I’ve privately suspected Catholic hardliners are either strongly influenced by or converted from American Calvinism. A 1998 source calls Calvinist Protestants the “greatest foes” of Catholic apologists (archive) and theorizes that the conversion of such Protestants has become a major goal of theirs. By then, I’d already noticed that Catholic converts tended to be the weirdest extremists I’d ever met in the religion. I didn’t know much about Calvinists back then, though!
So that 1998 source might be right. Indeed, an awful lot of formerly-Calvinist Catholic converts seem to float around in the Christ-o-sphere:
- “Graduating Catholic from a Reformed [Calvinist] Seminary.” Called to Communion, 2011 (archive)
- “As a high school graduation gift, I was given the complete works of [big-name Calvinist] Cornelius Van Til and John Calvin.” The Coming Home Network, 2013 (archive)
- “I knew that many crosses would come my way if I ran to Mother Church, but I could not resist Her love.” Amanda Evinger, 2016 (archive)
- “Former Calvinist Theologian and Historian Set Out to Disprove the Catholic Church, and Becomes Catholic.” JoshuaCharles.com, 2022 (archive)
- “From CBN Producer to Catholic Convert.” The Coming Home Network, 2023 (archive)
Forums run by both Calvinists and Catholics also seem to see this direction of the flow of believers. Some Christians even fully acknowledge Calvinism’s indelible debt to medieval Catholic theologians (archive), even if they don’t realize that literally any Christian opinion (archive), most especially their own, can be destroyed by the work of other Christians holding competing beliefs.
That said, Calvinists’ hardliner beliefs compete with those of Catholic hardliners for sheer authoritarianism and abject cruelty. Indeed, Christians from each group talk and behave almost identically. And both hold nearly identical culture-war positions.
Since this flavor of Protestantism largely attracts evangelicals from America, Catholic hardliners will naturally be a more generally American crowd. Raymond Burke, for example, hails from Wisconsin.
Pope Francis’ ongoing but understated feud against Catholic hardliners
For years now, Francis has recognized that the hardliner contingent needs to be definitively handled. But I don’t call him “Darth Cuddlebug” for nothing. He has a distinctly understated, almost passive-aggressive way of dealing with his enemies in Catholicism.
After a hardliner bishop barred Nancy Pelosi (archive) from taking communion in June 2022, Pope Francis not only had a private meeting with her, but he also implicitly cleared her for this all-important Catholic ritual. The hardliners were not amused.
They were especially unamused because this particular fight was one they’d been staging for almost two decades by then.
Back in 2004, Raymond Burke tried the same partisan stunt (archive). At the time, Benedict was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger under a visibly declining Pope John Paul II (archive), with a year to go before he would himself be wearing the funny white hat. Being a shrewd political schemer, though, Ratzinger used Burke’s stunt to cement a permanent alliance with the newly recognized faction of Catholic hardliners.
Once bought, those hardliners stayed bought, I must say; they’ve offered Ratzinger only the most glowing of praises ever since.
They’re staging this fight for a reason.
Despite being fairly Johnny-come-lately, this faction is enduringly pissed off about the various decisions made during Vatican II (archive). And that comes as a huge cultural surprise to me, since I was raised Catholic. My family contained what I regarded until adulthood as the usual, expected, and customary heaping helping of priests and nuns—all loyal to and extremely respectful toward Pope John Paul II. For instance, my extended family generally maintained old-school Catholic year-long Friday fasts from meat, which Vatican II had declared necessary only during Lent. But they never badmouthed the decision to change that rule, nor those who observed the new one. Fasting was simply what they did on Fridays.
This hardliner faction wants Vatican II reversed. They view it (possibly correctly) as the source of the softening-up of Catholic hardliner positions. They’re already very angry about Pope Francis refusing to do what they want.
But Francis refused their demands in a really softball, behind-the-scenes way. That style of rejection only angered them more.
Pope Francis finally takes a directly confrontational position
In today’s story, Pope Francis erased Cardinal Raymond Burke’s retirement perks: Monthly pay plus a Vatican-paid apartment in Rome. That, along with describing him as someone who attacks both his own papal authority and that of the mother ship, represents the most direct attack Francis has waged on Burke.
(The apartment stipend was USD$5500/month. Here’s a breakdown of what apartments cost in Rome. This was an extremely, one might even say stupendously generous perk.)
Just a couple of weeks earlier, Francis waged a similarly direct attack on another fierce critic, Bishop Joseph Strickland. Until then, Strickland ruled over the Diocese of Tyler, Texas. This diocese comprises a huge chunk of NE Texas.
In a tweet/Xeet last May (archive), Strickland made a barely-there acknowledgment of Pope Francis’ legitimacy as Pope before directly asserting that he was “undermining the Deposit of Faith.” The “Deposit of Faith” means the entire body of Catholic “sacred tradition” (archive) along with its official doctrinal take on the Bible. So yes, Strickland attacked Francis’ legitimacy as Pope, but in the most dishonest and mealy-mouthed, cowardly way possible.
Of course, Strickland’s done a whole lot of things to oppose Pope Francis (archive). He’s bought into COVID-19 conspiracy claims, allied with a former US Ambassador to the Vatican who was openly demanding Francis resign, and more.
But when Pope Francis’ agents, shortly before this firing, suggested that Strickland voluntarily resign his post, he refused. And he refused because while Benedict was pope, Strickland had made him a promise to stay a bishop forever an’ ever an’ EVER.
Francis clearly remembered that diss. His official reason for “relieving” Strickland of his duties turned out to be the bishop’s insistence on conducting weekly services, or “Mass,” only in Latin—a major rallying cry of the hardliners. In 2021, Francis quashed the notion for good (archive).
Direct action against bishops can be difficult to arrange
Just by way of comparison, Knoxville Bishop Richard Stika was found to have mishandled CSA in his diocese (archive) this past June. He resigned rather than face a formal firing from the Vatican.
Resignation, for upper-level Catholic leaders, represents a huge sign of defeat. It takes a lot of pressure to get them there.
And authoritarians, particularly the dysfunctional, power-obsessed kind we find in Christianity, do not ever admit defeat when they sense a potential victory—even if it exists only in the far future.
So naturally, Strickland refused to do that, forcing Pope Francis to act more directly.
And now, Cardinal Raymond Burke expresses similar defiance. One Catholic blog wrote in response to this more direct course of action:
The question most Catholics have in response to the decision of Pope Francis to remove the Vatican privileges of Cardinal Raymond Burke will not be, “why did he do this?” but “what on earth took him so long?” The Pope is an astonishingly patient man, and he loves to give people second chances.
“What Pope Francis said about Cardinal Burke.” Where Peter Is, 2023 (archive)
But that last bit rings false. The Pope’s response to the hardliners has little to do with his innate patience or his desire to “give people second chances.”
It more likely has to do with the nature of power in the Catholic Church.
A guy mishandling CSA has no hope of future victory.
Hardliners, by contrast, clearly sense that maybe someday they’ll have one. Quitting now means not being there to enjoy the spoils of victory when it finally arrives.
But Pope Francis understands the nature of his power. It boasts a centuries-long pedigree. It has withstood many, many attacks from many, many hopefuls. Its meaningful allies still number in the thousands. Heck, its largely meaningless allies still number in the many hundreds of millions. Its lifespan stretches back incomprehensibly far—and is incomprehensibly vast (archive).
This kind of power is alien to anything Catholic hardliners can imagine. Not even the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the biggest American Protestant denomination, can imagine anything like it, much less hold anything like it.
With that power at his disposal, Pope Francis can easily defeat a few thousand American whackadoos with serious delusions of right-wing grandeur. That he waited this long to act decisively only speaks volumes about how boorish and power-hungry his foes are.
Proper Catholic leaders would have realized 20 years ago that they were already defeated, rather than taxing everyone’s patience with this doomed farce for years to come.
45 Comments
ericc · 12/07/2023 at 9:21 AM
𝐷𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑙𝑦 𝐽𝑜ℎ𝑛𝑛𝑦-𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒-𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦, 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑠 𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑙𝑦 𝑝𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑓𝑓 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑑𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝑑𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑉𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝐼𝐼 (𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑣𝑒). 𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑎𝑠 𝑎 ℎ𝑢𝑔𝑒 𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑒, 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝐼 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑐.
2-generation cycles in behavior occur fairly regularly. It’s hard to predict on what subject they will occur, but it’s kinda common for one generation to live through something, decide it’s a bad idea through direct experience, they pass this decision on somewhat forcefully/directly to their kids, but by the time the grandkids grow up they’ve lost any experiential connection to why it was bad. So the grandkids try it again.
Some examples I can think of include academic support for postmodernism, hawk/dove foreign policy, the current resurgence of right wing authoritarianism, heck even segregation in US schools is something parts of the left are now re-considering.
Vatican II was in the 1960s. The generation of adults who had direct experience as to why the reforms were a good idea are 80+. Their kids who went along with the reforms because mom and dad mostly know what they are talking about are 60+. The grandkids who say “what the frak is this rule and who decided it? I dismiss their doom and gloom predictions because I personally have no evidence of what they’re talking about” are in their 40s and becoming the leadership/policymakers of their societies. In this case, RCCdom.
Chris Peterson · 12/07/2023 at 11:07 AM
Boring. What happened to the good old days when the Grand Inquisitor got to use the Iron Maiden and red hot irons? Canceled his apartment allowance? Yawn. Burke’s head on a stick in St. Peter’s Square… now that would send a message!
BensNewLogIn · 12/07/2023 at 12:41 PM
Who said, “give away all that you have and follow me.”? Who said “do not store up treasures on earth.” Who said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven .”?
Certainly, no one important money changes in the temple. $5500 per month for an apartment in Rome? Who knew that it would cost so much money to help Burke maintain his vow of poverty?
if I have some time later, I will post some bits about money, Rome, and the church from my Roman travelogue of 2015.
Chris Peterson · 12/07/2023 at 12:57 PM
Who said, “give away all that you have and follow me.”? Who said “do not store up treasures on earth.” Who said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven .”?
Some guy in CE 70 or 80 who was busy inventing a new religion?
ericc · 12/07/2023 at 1:38 PM
According to the “how rich am I” calculator, 5,089 euro/month puts him in the top 29% of richest people on earth, and 2.1x wealthier than the global median.
Keeping in mind that this was just his housing allowance and not his whole income, he’s going to have some trouble fitting through that needle. 😉
BensNewLogIn · 12/07/2023 at 3:56 PM
he can always pray to have less money.
BensNewLogIn · 12/07/2023 at 3:54 PM
I don’t know how I missed my iPad deleting something I wrote. The upgrades to the new OS have totally screwed up dictating, and since I totally screw up typing, it’s very easy for me to miss stuff.
The second paragraph, first sentence, should have read “certainly, no one important to modern Christianity, or the money changers in the temple.”
Jesus and I regret the error.
Houndentenor · 12/07/2023 at 1:38 PM
Are we conveniently forgetting that in the last century one of the USA’s most vocal antisemitic media personalities was a priest named Father Charles Caughlin? His hate got him taken off the radio (eventually) but he remained a parish priest until his retirement in 1966. Hardliners, even openly fascist ones, aren’t an aberration for the church. It’s the liberal ones from the 60s and 70s that are the aberration.
Omnicrom · 12/07/2023 at 3:48 PM
Apropos of very little, that link to apartment costs in Rome doesn’t work, it takes me to a paywall and demands I pay them money for the privilege of looking at a scrap of data. The URL makes it seem like its 1200 Euros a month on Average?
Captain Cassidy · 12/07/2023 at 9:13 PM
Ouch, my ad blocker must have stopped that paywall cold. I try not to link stuff that’ll turn out like that, so I’m sorry! And yes: Really nice 4-bedroom places in fancy neighborhoods in Rome run about 1200 Euros/mo. You can get a little one-bedroom place for about 700 Euros. They were giving this guy USD$5500 a month for an apartment. That has got to be one nice place he had for free.
Omnicrom · 12/08/2023 at 1:46 PM
I also have an adblocker, and that got me curious. Looking further I did finally find the summary text, but the graph and literally every single other option on the page and demanded money. Only a tiny fragment of the page was viewable <_<.
Astrin Ymris · 12/07/2023 at 7:01 PM
Let me get this straight: Trad Cath bishops are really PO’d because Francis hosted a big meeting to talk to the world’s Catholic bishops and hear that they had to say about issues facing the Catholic Church. So they complained and bitched about this to their followers, undermining Francis’s authority as pope. So Francis inflicted some real world consequences on them, and now they’re complaining that Francis is misusing his power to punish hardliner bishops, and is being authoritarian.
This is very inconsistent. Do they want the pope to rule the entire Catholic church like an autocrat without holding synods, or do they believe that bishops should be allowed to contribute their opinions to the process? You can’t have it both ways. They need to decide whether they believe in conciliarism or ultramontanism, and stick to it.
Captain Cassidy · 12/07/2023 at 9:14 PM
You got it straight! That’s exactly what’s going on. These hardliners seem to be hardline about everything but showing only deference and respect to the Pope and following his orders. So it works exactly like fundagelicalism, but in Catholicism: Everything they don’t like is optional, but everything they like is mandatory and a divine command.
Astrin Ymris · 12/09/2023 at 11:20 PM
My totally informal and non-scientific observation is that a lot of Trad Cath YouTubers seem to be converts from Protestantism. My theory is that they got spooked by the drift toward Progressivism in Mainline denoms and even some groups that identify as Evangelical, so they jumped ship for the Catholic church, which they considered to be eternal and unchanging.
But to their dismay, they discovered that there was a liberalizing current in the RCC, same as in the larger world. This angered them, and though they’d presumably been through RCIA classes, they reacted in classic fundagelical fashion by attacking those who weren’t jesusing correctly. Only in this case, it was the supposedly-infallible autocratic leader of their new denomination they were accusing of insufficient holiness.
IOW, they are literally claiming to be more Catholic than the pope! Oh, the irony… ;-D
Captain Cassidy · 12/07/2023 at 9:16 PM
BTW: I didn’t include this in the post, but the Jesuits at America Magazine very quickly consulted a Vatican legal expert (who is probably Jesuit himself; they tend to be the smart ones in the family, and I’ve noticed very few of them are hardliners. Sticklers, but not hardliners). The legal expert declared that everything Francis is doing is completely legit by Catholic rules.
Robert C · 12/07/2023 at 9:23 PM
As unpopular as it is and as hard as it may be to sell, Christianity is dying. Full stop. More here:
deadbelief.com
Chris Peterson · 12/07/2023 at 10:16 PM
Half true. It’s dying in high income, free countries. But it’s thriving and growing in many impoverished parts of the world, especially in Africa. Which isn’t surprising, because it’s a religion designed for the downtrodden.
Astrin Ymris · 12/09/2023 at 11:27 PM
There are some questions about how sincere some of these “conversions” are. Some are these desperately poor people are apparently in it for the free goodies missionaries offer as incentives for signing up. They’re called Rice Christians.
Zaqqum · 12/07/2023 at 9:34 PM
I dunno–some folks in India might take issue with the Cuddlebug part but agree with the Sith Lord characterization.
There’s an old denomination there, based in Kerala State, called the Syro-Malabar church, an Eastern Catholic church that has traditionally had its own liturgical style but is in communion with Rome as part of the greater global Catholic Church; however, it usually governs itself separately from the Vatican. That is, until the Vatican steps in to order a change, in this case a change in the liturgy to conform the old rites with the changes introduced by Vatican II.
For a church that claims to have been founded by Doubting Thomas himself (although their hierarchy is ‘only’ a century old), that turned out to be a hard pill to swallow. Lots of clergy and laity rebelled, leading, among other things, to street brawls, burned effigies, and hunger strikes.* There’s also a parallel scandal involving a former bishop and fraudulent land purchases, which Pope Francis used to good effect to obtain the anti-reform bishop’s resignation and install someone more friendly to his reforms (after he previously installed an apostolic administration to oversee the church’s affairs). Not that any of this went over well with the pew-warmers.
The reforms in question? Having the priest face the congregation during the beginning and end of the Mass, instead of facing east the for the whole ceremony like the old way (the priest still faces east while performing the eucharistic spell to turn the food into Jesus).
Last year, Francis “asked nicely” to have the liturgical dispute resolved by Easter. It wasn’t. So now he’s sent the church a video message that comes down to, “nice Eastern Catholic church you have there, be a shame if you were found out of communion for not fixing this issue by Xmas”. I suspect the people in Kerala State are happy the Vatican hasn’t completed its superlaser yet. But the whole story is a great example of the metaphor of the iron fist in the velvet glove. The USian hierarchy should pay attention, but probably won’t, unless the GOP lets them.
Link to a better telling of this story than mine, from a fairly conservative Catholic site–
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/pope-francis-accepts-syro-malabar
Darth Cuddlebug indeed.
*The Syro-Malabar church has thus attained the dream beloved by Protestants, of recreating Original Christianty, with all that this implies.
BensNewLogIn · 12/08/2023 at 12:28 PM
Wow! A half an hour ago, I came across a reference to the syro-Malabar church. I have never heard of it before, and I thought it was something to do with the video game. Maybe the matrix is real.
Zaqqum · 12/08/2023 at 5:09 PM
Truth will always be stranger than fiction.
Astrin Ymris · 12/09/2023 at 11:36 PM
It’s the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. When we learn a new word or concept we suddenly seem to encounter it frequently. It shows how much info we filter out because we don’t have a mental file folder for it.
Wandering Spider · 12/08/2023 at 8:28 AM
How is this playing out as far as other places where the Catholic Church has a lot of members, in particular in Central and South America and African countries, are concerned? I think I read a while back that they skewed towards the more conservative factions but it doesn’t seem like any of the leaders there are really siding with American hardliners here?
M L Clark · 12/08/2023 at 1:02 PM
Great question, Wandering Spider.
I can’t speak to Africa, but in many South American cultures, US Evangelical Catholicism is regarded with bemusement, if not treated as a gross distortion of the Vatican’s teachings into a cult of nationalist fervour. However, local church groups also don’t *care* much about what’s happening in the US. When this story broke in Colombian papers, it was pretty much a carbon copy translation of the news disseminated elsewhere, with no personalized regional commentary about its overall impact. A quick look at Chile and Argentina shows similar indifference – no reactions from local religious leaders included, readily available, or seemingly expected.
In general, South Americans are busy with their own affairs, so a lot of what the West thinks is “big news” is but a ripple in the waters here – but this example is also an interesting reminder that part of the staying power of major religious groups is their regionalism. If one group of Catholics isn’t as well informed about what’s happening with Catholics elsewhere, there’s less reason for them to doubt the institution as a whole.
Chris Peterson · 12/08/2023 at 1:23 PM
Yeah, interesting how much Catholicism in Latin America is a hybrid of “traditional” Catholicism and earlier religions and spiritual practices. I think the Catholic Church caught on quite early not to push too hard against all that paganism!
It’s not clear that Catholicism is doing very well anywhere in the world. But in poor countries, in damaged cultures, evangelical Christianity is often doing very well indeed.
Traveller · 12/10/2023 at 5:02 AM
For what I know, Evangelical Christianity is expanding there at the expense of Catholicism jumping from there to Europe (at the very least Spain and Portugal, where most Evangelicals are South American migrants who target others like them), including groups as Edir Macedo’s one in Brazil.
baileycheryl84 · 12/08/2023 at 9:15 AM
Atheists cheering on any fight that involves the orthodox against the religious rest is always good for a laugh. I mean one would imagine them to be cold and indifferent at best over this internal matter but no go. Their zeal is a diabolical thing to behold.
Which only goes to show they really do have a dog in this fight.
Chris Peterson · 12/08/2023 at 10:25 AM
This has nothing to do with atheists or atheism. Again, you demonstrate that you don’t understand the word.
BensNewLogIn · 12/08/2023 at 12:40 PM
Of course, we have a dog in this fight. What would make you think that we don’t? It’s just that the dog that you think is in the fight is out in the backyard taking a crap.
Here’s the nature of the dog, whose name is legion: every single religion X claims to be the true word of God, and every single religion not X provides the evidence against that claim. Every single denomination Y of every religion X contradicts the true word of every denomination not Y…
that it, and it alone has the true understanding and interpretation of every religion X.
In short, we have the evidence of every religion X that every religion not X is wrong. This should be a huge problem for every religion, but more importantly, it should be an absolutely gigantic problem for every denomination of Christianity. But it’s not. You simply pretend that. Canons are cannons.
If you religionists we’re not constantly claiming that, you have special rights and privileges, not available to the rest of us – tax, free fundraising, regulation, free, interfering in politics, the right to discriminate on the basis of religious belief, if you re extra special religious, – I can assure you, we atheist would be sitting on the sidelines laughing at you.
but you were not sitting on the sidelines, and we are not laughing.
baileycheryl84 · 12/09/2023 at 5:10 AM
At least you admit you are all in for the fight which is something I suppose. All the more curious as you HAVE NO EVIDENCE to the contrary which is why diabolical is such a handy word and so apt.
Houndentenor · 12/10/2023 at 10:04 AM
Evidence of what? If you had any evidence of god there wouldn’t be thousands of kinds of Christianity and thousands more other religions and subsects. You reject all but your own. We just go one step further and reject them all. And again, if this had no effect outside of your own religious observances, we wouldn’t care. I don’t collect stamps and have no interest in whatever controversies exist among collectors. It doesn’t affect me at all. But religion is the tool of the American fascists who are waging war on many of us in the US (and elsewhere). We care very much.
Astrin Ymris · 12/09/2023 at 11:41 PM
The Religious Right is actively fighting to restrict Reproductive Rights and LGBT+ equality. Of course we take an acute interest in what you do; it’s basic self-preservation.
baileycheryl84 · 12/10/2023 at 3:23 AM
Don’t know about that but aren’t you conflating the sacred with the seccular they not one and the same thing.
Houndentenor · 12/10/2023 at 10:01 AM
If they were truly separate I wouldn’t care. There are all manner of internal disputes that don’t concern me at all. I live in the USA and religious hypocrites dominate our politics. I am very concerned at the actions of many states. We have a big dog in this fight and for many of us our lived depend on the outcome.Your dismissive attitude is disgusting.
Chris Peterson · 12/10/2023 at 10:03 AM
“Secular” has a concrete meaning. “Sacred” is nothing but a matter of opinion, and has no meaning beyond what an individual might choose to give it. The two can’t be conflated.
Our government is secular, which means it is prohibited from basing law on religious opinions.
raven · 12/10/2023 at 5:38 PM
This is a lie.
What zeal?
We have a minor interest in a religious fight between the Catholic church and a group of far right wingnuts intent on taking the church back a century or two.
It’s on the level of what is for dinner or who will win the next football game or what stupid thing will Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene say next.
Not zero but not all that great.
We or at least I am rooting for the less wrong or less evil faction.
I was a xian for 50 years.
I left the religion because I wanted to contribute to making the world a better place to live.
The Catholic hardliners want to take the world back to the days of the witch hunts and Inquisitions, when the Catholic church slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people for no real reason.
That isn’t the world I want to live in.
Chris Peterson · 12/10/2023 at 5:53 PM
The important point is that it has nothing to do with atheism. We can view the RCC as a harmful social institution in the same way we view the KKK that way, and oppose it regardless of our religious views, or lack of them.
raven · 12/10/2023 at 5:50 PM
This is stupid and a trivial insult.
No, we are not satanists or satanic.
Your gods don’t exist and satan doesn’t exist either.
Being a satanist would be a step up for you.
You are a not very bright troll dropping off stupid lies and trivial insults.
OldManShadow · 12/11/2023 at 3:07 PM
I have to imagine that somedays the Pope really misses the days when you could just poison your enemies and be rid of them.
Chris Peterson · 12/11/2023 at 3:13 PM
Or when some Cardinals could just poison the Pope to get rid of him!
kennypo65 · 12/18/2023 at 1:42 PM
These hardliner cardinals and bishops should be grateful that this Pope is Francis and not Alexander VI. Otherwise they would all have died under suspicious circumstances
Robert C · 12/07/2023 at 9:25 PM
Well done! One hundred thousand up votes.
deadbelief.com
BensNewLogIn · 12/08/2023 at 12:25 PM
Thanks. I do like writing my travelogues.
EXCOMMUNICATED: Ex-Archbishop Carlo Viganò FAFO with Pope Francis - Roll to Disbelieve · 10/17/2024 at 8:32 PM
[…] that Mel Gibson is 100% behind Viganò (archive). Their piece also reports that Joseph Strickland, who got fired from his bishop position in Texas this past November, thought Francis was getting completely out of hand. As well, their […]