5718

Yeah, and the mid-1990s was when the GOP take-no-prisoners/ compromise is a dirty word/ K Street Project stuff really got started.

5719

Catholicism is a massive institution that has spent centuries figuring out how to get along with the real world. It has structure, tradition, a central authority. It is a plodding and meticulous bureaucracy. But Protestants can do and say whatever the fuck they want, and they don’t have to answer to anyone. They make their own rules whenever they want. There is no concept of heresy in Protestantism because there’s no one who can declare the difference between dogma and heresy.

So, you do the math and tell me where you’ll find more extremists.

Forget it, Nesrie, it’s Quarter to Three.

:)

-Tom

5720

Really?

I mean, if you look at the Democratic party, you got a lot of Democrats who are Catholics. Like Biden, or Tim Kaine, or the Kennedy’s. Or hell, look at the current Pope. The entire Jesuit group is pretty chill.

In my personal experience, which is admittedly anecdotal but reasonably extensive in that i don’t tend to mind people expressing their religion, and since I’ve always been interested in religion overall, I’ve attended services at a bunch of different sects over the years, despite not being particularly religious myself.

Catholic services tended to be very… Ritualistic? But Catholics themselves tend to be less zealous when it comes to their religion than many protestant sects, especially groups like Baptists.

5721

Right there.

5722

I just don’t see how arguing over which religion is worst is especially helpful to… anyone. I mean do we want to start talking about altar boys and rape cases, female mutilation, private religious schools… how is any of this going to be helpful when talking about SCOTUS?

And once again, a lot of that is not the religion, it’s the ones that grabbed power, politics, control that’s outside the actual teachings.

5723

What a weird conversation.

I mean, straight up, if you were to ask me which religious group inthe US was the most extreme and harmful, it is Evangelical Christianity. Full stop.

And I say this knowing them well, inside and out. It is how I grew up. this is my family, friends, and most people I knew for most of my life.

5724

You are right. I have extreme views and I often express them… extremely. I need to stop. And so I will. Sorry all.

5725

I can’t tell whether you’ve accepted my “citation” or whether you think you scored a point. So I’ll just hope for the former and depart the field for an ecumenical victory celebration in the locker room. Everyone’s invited!

-Tom

5726

Eh, but i think you need to think about it a bit more, and how it manifests itself.

In Catholicism, something like religious dogma is the result of, as Tom pointed out, ages of the church working to deal with secular society. The bureaucracy of the system kind of prevents individual loons from doing crazy stuff these days.

But protestant preachers can just make up whatever they want. Including crazy extremists views, like what you see from someone like Robert Jeffress. There’s no institutional check on his craziness.

I think one thing that you may be conflating for zealotry, is corruption. The Catholic Church certainly has it’s share of corruption, but i feel like that stems more from it’s existence as a very powerful global organization, and less from its religious nature.

5727

A lot of people have strong reactions to specific religions and experiences around various religions. It’s been discussed many times and will again. We just don’t automatically disqualify someone due to their religion and their religion alone… even if someone thinks they are extreme or not.

It’s a terrible idea to have people to start trying to claim what they think is more extreme compared to another religion. It’s like lobbing a bomb into a lobby to piss off not only the former Catholics but anyone who would call themselves Protestant. I mean… what the hell.

5728

But people here constantly talk about how bad Christians are.

5729

There is no monolithic Christian group. There are even disagreements with a few groups on whether or not to include these other groups as Christian or why the Catholic Church separates itself and then does world comparisons like it does.

Also this is well outside of what is going on with her and Praise the People.

I don’t know how we went from hey maybe the USA actually allows religious freedoms to using one religion as a weapon against another one.

5730

It just seems weird that this is off limits while we literally have a thread talking about how the Catholic church is evil.

5731

I said it’s a terrible idea, not that’s it’s off limits. I don’t moderate things around here.

Whether someone thinks Catholics or Protestants as a group are worse in some individual’s list of ways has almost nothing to do with what the people in the Supreme Court today and could be in the Supreme Court tomorrow believe and practice when it comes to the rules of law in this country and how they intend to interpret them and why they will do it that way.

5732

Apologies if this has already been posted, but it seems relevant that in a moot court ACB participated in on the upcoming SCOTUS ACA case, no one backed the Trump Admins position.

5733

Trump admin asks SCOTUS to halt Census count pending appeal.

5734

And, more to the point in this specific discussion, there is not in America an ideologically monolithic bloc of Catholics. The fact that some Jesuits are the most liberal people you’ll meet doesn’t mean there aren’t other Jesuits who make Franklin Graham look like a live-and-let-live kind of guy. The fact that there are plenty of Catholics who support Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, etc. like the majority of Americans doesn’t mean there aren’t other factions that have views well outside the mainstream … like the People of Praise. Saying that isn’t anti-Catholic: it’s pointing out that in 2020 most Americans do not support this “women should be always be subordinate to men” nonsense, and that it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask why, when there are countless possible candidates, we should appoint someone who apparently does.

5735

Very much this.

5736

It’s already been mentioned up above, but we have laws that can weed this position out. Actual documented cases and decisions made that say yes, wives can be raped by their husbands and those husbands can be charged and have been charged for that. Religion is not off limits, but it has to be tied to the job, the actual work, when you ask those kind of questions.

In addition, whether or not some branch of Catholicism is more extreme than some other branch of Protestantism has what to do with the likely nominee? We don’t have to talk about pretend blobs of religions that are not really blobs. She’s right there, and the questions can be asked without trying to take away from the fact that in the USA, we are not supposed to be disqualifying people based on religion alone.

5737

It is pretty anti-Catholic when you can see how the nominee and their spouse have treated each others careers. Judge Barrett is obviously ambitious and has a far more distinguished career than her husband. Doesn’t ring as very subservient in that aspect of their lives.

It rings very similar to when JFK was attacked because he would be under the thumb of the Catholic Pope.