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Pope Francis: I don’t bless a ‘homosexual marriage.’ I bless two people who love each other.
(www.americamagazine.org)
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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still catholic. still the pope. no matter how progressive he may seem.
I mean....yeah? Did you think progress was going to come from the outside? Someone's gotta make an effort to steer the ship the right way.
Right? Credit where credit's due
What do you think would happen if he just came out and blessed gay marriage?
They’d claim he’s possessed by a demon and disappear him.
There'd be a schism, with the people who are currently getting upset instead just up and leaving. That might seem like a good thing, at first, but if the goal is to get everyone to heaven, you're not really achieving it if half the people are leaving.
I mean, you could say that you're not achieving it either way, but that's the thinking anyhow.
heaven isn’t real. literally all he has to do is come out and say “had a chat with god, turns out it was all a big misunderstanding. i bless gay marriage because being gay is ok!” the bar is so very low for him.
Regardless, I'm fairly sure he would disagree with you, and I was discussing his motivations.
yeah because he’s a stupid, evil man. this is very easy for him.
I try to be more generous than that when considering other people's motivations, even those whose actions I find despicable.
It obviously doesn't excuse despicable actions, but it does give the opportunity to recognize when people are trying to be better.
I hold leaders to a higher standard. you should too.
Holding leaders to a higher standard doesn't mean calling them evil because they believe something different than you, it means not letting them hide behind their religion for their choices.
But given that he does believe in heaven, and the organization he leads is made out of people who also believe in heaven, the fact that he's trying to get as many people there as possible is hard to fault him for, especially when the thing he's doing (telling the church to be more welcoming and kind to lgbtq folks) is objectively good.
When the pope says he can’t bless gay marriage, is that not letting him hide behind his religion for his choices?
Unfortunately what he is doing is little better than “hate the sin love the sinner”.
homosexuality is not a sin.
No, it's him acknowledging his religion and saying people should be kind and respectful anyway.
Homosexuality is a complicated subject among Catholics to say the least. Homosexual "acts" are officially a sin in Catholicism, and without the kind of change that would cause a schism, Francis can't change that. From his perspective, if it did cause a schism anyone on the wrong side of the schism would be in jeopardy, and even if they weren't they'd just continue on calling people sinners for being gay which Francis and the official stance of the church does oppose.
So the Pope saying it's okay to bless people even if you think they might be sinning may not be the most progressive thing in the world, may not be the most progressive thing he could say, but I do understand why he would say what he's saying instead of something more concrete.
I don't have to agree with everything he says or thinks to recognize that.
Speaking as a baptized catholic myself (an apostile, appointed by god herself), since all of this is made up, and the pope is the leader, and talking to god is just making up thoughts in your head, there’s literally nothing real keeping him from coming out and blessing gay marriage. He doesn’t have to acknowledge the bigotry if he doesn’t want to, I think just blessing gay marriage himself would be enough.
I’m not kidding, I’m really catholic. And since the church counts all baptised catholics as catholic even in cases of excommunication, I’ll always be a catholic. You don’t speak for me, and I bless gay marriage!
In just the same way as the US president can just order all of the nukes to be launched at the moon, yes. But actions have consequences, so he doesn't, even if it might be the "better" course of action for humanity if he did. Because it wouldn't be the best course for his organization (at least from his perspective).
Because it’s his opinion, because he (*[via] God [or whatever]) sets the rules. You know what, I’ll write him about this. I realize he’s got other archdiocese reading and responding to him but as a catholic it’s one of my rights. I am all for meeting people where they are at, but.. it’s all but saying it, and until he does say it, he’s just giving people a way to win arguments claiming that homosexuality is a sin, making everyone their own lawyer trying to interpret what the pope is saying.
If this were a politician trying to sway congress that’s one thing, but is the vatican not functionally a dictatorship, with the pope at the top?
Wouldn't be the first time. In fact, it happens at a small scale fairly often, and it's generally perceived as a tragedy when it does.
It's not really. It's an elected office, and certainly a political one. If there's not a way to depose him once elected, it doesn't make it not political. As for his supposed despotic power, he could theoretically do basically anything, but he doesn't because the reality is that he doesn't have the political will to do it.
I don’t think catholics know what that word means. Not in this context they sure don’t.
This sounds like some “I don’t want to tell my kids about gay marriage because it’s going to make me mildly uncomfortable so I might as well demonize it”.
Yeah, I guess I have a lot more faith in the pope than you do. I know he can do it, but I also know he doesn’t care enough to do it. It’s just showing face. It’s trying to market a dying religion.
riiiiight. the pope would be insurrectioned. sure.
I’m rooting for the little guy! maybe he can work his way up to a mortal position with some leverage.
Progress won't come from any Christianity (and likely almost any religion, but I don't know others well enough to comment). They will either need to denounce the book as being bullshit and decide to progress or they will continue to hold society behind.
It's worth mentioning that during the dark ages, it was actually monks who preserved history and scientific knowledge, and advanced it. Even afterwards, Mendelian genetics was discovered by Gregor Mendel, a friar and abbot.
On top of that though, a lot of scientific knowledge and mathematics was preserved and cultivated by Islamic empires concurrent to the dark ages. They were in the middle of a golden age and progressed those fields further.
The problem isn't so much religion in itself, but evangelicals and literalists who put it above everything else. Zealots ruin it all.
Yeah, the Catholic Church guarded access to education, preventing the rest of the commoners from learning how poorly they translated the Bible to maintain control of the people. It's too bad the Protestant movement didn't destroy the Catholic Church.
Fucks sake im so tired of you jaded militant shitbirds. It is constantly 120% with you fucks. Its always "agree with my personal breakdown of reality and morality or you are all complete garbage" nonsense. Progress doesnt happen on your schedule you shithead.
Nuance and context motherfucker. Do you understand it?
Man, I thought I was on crazy pills with the lack of nuance here. Everything is black and white with no room for gray or context…
I’m digging the past few days. There have been a number of posts and comments calling it out. The fact that your comment has positive upvotes is a good sign and surprising.
There's no progressive religion (I am not including Buddhism). They all say that their religion promotes peace and tolerance but they still believe in what written in their sacred book and won't change a thing.
Even the Buddhists are committing a genocide against Muslims in Myanmar.
Im pretty sure even fighting in a war at gunpoint is not a Buddhist to thing to do. Genocide definitely disqualified you. Though culturally and religious Buddhist are two different things. The Buddha basically told everyone not to worship him and make him a religious figure and every sect of Buddhism just kind of turned around and did it anyway. Their justification is "lol". So like. I dunno. Buddhism kind of accepts that everything anyone can or will do is something they've done. And existence is suffering. Freeing yourself from attachment and embracing the moment with love and kindness is a person thing, and sure genociders may be cenociding other people but ultimately through a Buddhist lens they're harming themselves and straying further from enlightenment in the here and now.
Nothing really like MATTERS for a Buddhist in the big picture sense. We live, we do things, we die, ultimately none of it comes to anything. There's no one watching over you to punish you or praise you, and nothing for you after you die but more of this through a different lens or to finally be done with the bullshit and leave it all behind..
It's a doctrine for being happy NOW. Follow it, don't, ultimately you're the only person it matters to.
Buddhism is absolutely not “a doctrine for being happy now”. This statement makes it sound like you don’t even have a cursory understanding of Buddhism. Likewise with “nothing really matters for a Buddhist in the big picture sense”.
Sounds like the Satanic Temple don't it?
While the general idea of Buddhism is pretty nice, there are some highly questionable aspects like women being impure by birth, and not being able to achieve Nirvana (eternal peace/heaven) either through rough tribulations or doing enough good to be born as a man.
Of course it's impossible to check if it was Buddha who said it, or it was added later by his people, but the above is something that isn't discussed much imo.
https://thesatanictemple.com/blogs/the-satanic-temple-tenets/there-are-seven-fundamental-tenets
Yer name is not checkin out here tbh
You’ve misunderstood me. I enjoyed your reply and was saying your name doesn’t describe you.
My mistake.
Faith is actually a mechanism to ensure change keeps happening. It suspends the “sealing off” of the mind that replaces sensory input with projected theory.
Buddhism uses presence for the same function abrahamic religions use faith. It’s a source of noise to keep the conceptual structure from gaslighting the adherent into being unable to see what’s in front of them.
Motherfucker. What do you think religious doctrine is and faith in it does.
Buddhism, if you drill down into the monastic core, is introspective psychology. It has much more in common at that level with what's considered philosophy in the western tradition, in particular Stoicism. It arrived at that knowledge during an initially productive scientific phase, meaning theorising and experimenting, later on alas it fell away from that and various groups fell back into that exact sealing off you mentioned, not investigating any more but accepting the map of the territory they read in monastery school as the territory. Religious innovation generally follows that kind of repeating pattern over quite long time-spans.
You could also, you know, just be sceptical. Heck, even be a capital-S Sceptic them and the Stoics disagreed on like exactly one point which from a certain POV is semantics.
...not to mention that that's not how the mind works. It's not how life works. If you want entropy then it's going to come from the outside, everything about life itself is geared towards minimising entropy on the inside, at the expense of accelerating its progression on the outside. (Yes the purpose of life is to hasten the heat-death of the universe, different topic). What may seem like internal randomness to you is merely your degrees of freedom doing their thing, the capacity to react to the same external stimulus in different ways depending on your internal state. It's a chaotic system (and overall you are) but it's definitely not noise, not from the POV of the organism itself: It is not subject to it, but is employing it.
If, OTOH, all you wanted to say is "hey I found a way to stop walking into lamp posts and I describe it like..." then first off congratulations, keep up the good work, but also I don't care about your half-arsed theory. Maybe if you didn't connect it up with the concept of noise it would've at least ended up being internally consistent. Keep not having theories if you want to see actual freedom from that conceptual stuff. Maybe investigate why you felt the need to to explain the experience instead of taking it at face value.
Don't you think a progressive pope can do a lot of good though especially compared to a traditionalist pope?
how hard is it to bless something, really? wake me up when he’s an ally.
Yup. If you’re a Catholic and find yourself disagreeing with the Pope that’s a good moment to practice a little humility.