I was force-fed Catholicism from birth, and never liked the taste very much. The older I got the worse it tasted. I stopped going to church on a regular basis about six month out of high school. I went a few times in the military, mostly to get out of other details. I was in a very dark place with about three months left in Vietnam when I listened to an idiot priest give us a 'kill a commie for Christ' pep talk. According to him, we were among the chosen, defending mother church against the godless. Someone there might have bought that, but the great majority of us only wanted to survive and go home. That was the last time I ever attended a church service as any kind of a believer. I walked away, never looked back, and never regretted that decision for a second.
The army was two years of NO church. I hated Sundays cuz it meant mass in the morning and benediction in the afternoon. Between droning on for 10 minutes of monotone "tantum ergo" and some really ugly monstrance, I once ran from church and when I got outside, screamed. To a 10 year old kid it w painful. THEN I learned nobody was taking attendance, and I ran off with the donation and headed for The Sugar Bowl where I drowned my guilt in chocolate. Wonderful, glorious chocolate.
My mother never attended church, but my father would drag us out every Sunday morning. I was like you, I went along with it until I hit about 13 and I simply didn't see a point in going anymore. My father said I had to attend until I was 16, then it was my choice. I still called myself a Catholic for years afterward.
Ironically enough, my brother become a "born again Christian" when we were both attending the same university, and I'm pretty sure that's when I started questioning the actual existence of god.
My brother belonged to what is now considered a cult, Campus Crusade for Christ. Those people were whack jobs. They wouldn't associate with anyone not in their cult, and in the summers, they would send college kids out to the poorest areas of the south to sell horribly overpriced "Bible encyclopedias" to people literally living in shacks. Then, at the end of the summer, they would talk the kids into donating all the money they'd made back to the organization (not that they made that much). Terrible, horrible people.
My brother got away from the cult, fortunately and returned to almost normal in about 10 years.
This former catholic tried and tried. I was active in teen groups that were catholic. I got married and my ex and I tried to attend every week we even joined a weekly catholic version of Bible study, to no avail. The best parts was interaction with other lukewarm Catholics who seemed interested in making life around them better. I believe my faith was genuine for a long time and my progressive views have come from the social justice teachings the church had back in late 70s and 80s. In the final in the final analysis; I went because of my mom, mass was boring and related only in simplest forms to my life, miracles we can see now are really just exaggerated stories with oral aggrandizement by those who have self interest. My own child’s sexual abuse from a relative and watching airplanes fly into building nailed the religion door shut for me. Yes my life is better tho my family connection will never be the same again. The political and religious environment now confirms my leaving as the right choice.
It's a shame that religion or lack thereof is enough to muck up one's family connections. Most of my family lives at least several hours away and I've never mentioned my deconversion to them. I'm not that good at handling conflict and just figured some things are better left unsaid. I play along with saying grace at the table and have been very fortunate that religious/political topics seldom come up in conversation. If they ever do, I will probably fade into the woodwork or think of an excuse to meander out of the room. Go to the bathroom, check on the pot roast, etc.
The born-again "pro-life" ammosexual Lauren Boobert is furious that Colorado just passed 3 bills that support healthcare. The insane gun nut calls them "a total disgrace."
Uh no, darlin.' That's you. You're projecting again.
Did Madame Butthurt say anything about WHY she thinks helping people with healthcare is a disgrace? If she's "born again," surely she knows that her Jesus-godling talked about caring for the sick and the poor, but hell, it's not as if she is being required to out forth any effort personally. All she has to do is sit down and STFU. I have always had problems with religious nutters bristling at the thought of helping the less fortunate, but maybe I'm just not seeing their train of thought regarding this, because I remember a lot of Sunday School lectures about this back when I was growing up.
Those bills were about protecting gender-affirming care and abortion.
She spewed the lie about "legalizing the mutilation of young children under the guise of healthcare." Hey, Lauren Booby Prize: Wanna know what truly mutilates young children? It's those guns you love so much!"
Based on what I see on the graph above, this has been an ongoing trend for DECADES, so I suspect that this has less to do with 9/11 or the internet or even the priest child abuse scandal than it does with a slow but sure disaffection of people from a belief system that is excessively strict and a hierarchy that is largely unresponsive to its congregants. Further study is clearly necessary to understand the real mechanics behind this phenomenon.
If some people leave the catholic church for their positions on abortion and LGBTQI+ people why evangelicals gain more people (chart 2) ? Does their brand of brainwashing that better ?
The church is viewed as too progressive by a lot of extreme right wing catholics. That's probably why the decline in attendance. They're leaving a Church they deem insufficiency conservative for the evangelical churches.
I think all denominations are being distilled down to the true believers, and this makes them even less responsive to reason. The best I can say about Catholics is that most of them take their religion with a grain of salt. There are, however, Catholic fundamentalists and they are every bit as irrational as their Protestant counterparts.
The hardliner kkkatliks stay where they are surrounded by familiar sights, sounds, hatreds and smells. The more liberal ones leave rather than dare criticize the mother church., Several years ago I sent a letter to the diocese demanding my name be removed from church records. I finally had to threaten the bitchup with legal action to make him act. IF you are a recovering kkkatlik, send a letter to your bishop demanding your name be removed. This forces the reality of losing members on them. Otherwise they assume you still believe and attend.
Several years ago, my three sisters, my brother, and I all sent letters to the bishop of Oakland (Calif) as well as to the local churches we'd been baptised in. This was not intentional but we'd been batting around the idea since the 80s. Probably the letters all arrived within the same week. As far as response from the bishop--nada. None of us ever heard back. I'd been trying to get taken off the membership rolls since the early 1970s, and none of my letters ever elicited a response. Just last month, the diocese (which has already released the names of 65 clergy who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse of children) was found to have been concealing another 30+ names. One of those newly accused was--Floyd Begin, the bishop of Oakland during my and my siblings' childhoods. He was the guy who was responsible for overloading the next parish over from ours with a bunch of abusive priests. Now the diocese is planning to declare bankruptcy (probably hiding their assets in cemetery maintenance accounts as so many other dioceses who take the chapter do.) All of my siblings and I, as well as our kids, were well quit of the church long before the more recent news. We are all non-religious/atheists/agnostics (every one of us describes our non-belief differently.)
I think the evangelicals are just stepping up their self reported attendance to virtue signal. They were already that hateful, they just feel the need to prove it now.
I see Disney has decided to cancel plans for a new campus near Orlando. The plan would've netted $17 billion and created 13,000 jobs over the next decade. Looks like all that will likely go to another state.
See what you got yourself and your state into by picking a fight with a mouse, DeathSentence? And you want to do for the country what you've done for Florida?
Unfortunately, stupid people are flocking to the state. Besides hurricanes, if those aren't bad enough, we have the highest property insurance rates in the country. And it is getting worse; the time will come when insurance premiums will be higher than mortgage payments.
It will be great to watch DeSantis and Trump destroy each other...as third Floriduh nitwit Marco Rubio stands by and watches them get all the attention. Truly a Pyrrhic victory.
I think there’s some element of growth as a society at play here as well. The knowledge we are accruing as a whole really debunks a lot of the claims of Catholicism (Christianity as a whole as well), especially the unique Catholic traditions. We know that transubstatiation isn’t real, we can prove saying magic words over bread and wine doesn’t make it suddenly become flesh and blood, but the Catholic Church continues to insist it is real. While other sects do communion, they don’t cleave so tightly to the fantasy of it actually turning into Jesus. To others, it’s simply a metaphor.
Society sees a whole host of Catholic ideas as backward, a lot of what Hemant mentions in the article, and other less obvious things as well.
I do remember a lot of gore during mass and church functions from when I did attend. There’s still a culture of gruesome punishments for sins involved. The crucifix is prominently displayed with blood and pain being the focus. We were shown movies where folks were routinely decapitated by guillotine or drawn and quartered, gutted and all that. And the church doling out these punishments. Catholicism is also renown for its guilt. Folks, especially republicans, are averse to feeling guilty lately. Just look at how the right is responding to the imaginary threat from CRT, whining about making their children feel guilty over slavery is the worst. So maybe the guilt inherent in Catholicism isn’t the leverage it once was.
Or it could be the kneeling and repetitive prayer. I guess I have a bigger issue with the RCC than I thought, even though its sexual abuse problem is enough.
That didn’t stop my Catholic Church from playing movies that depicted them punishing heretics with them. I am aware of some of the history, but I vividly remember the movie.
The church was big on burning at the stake. No messy body to get rd of, no stench, etc. Plus they believed the searing flesh helped burn away sins shortening time in hell.
Er, you do realize that a burning human body - living or dead - generally smells bad enough they tend to put crematoriums well out into the countryside, right?
Also, that most of the people the RCC killed as punishment for some form of church violation weren't exactly guilty, they were being killed for political expediency or convenience. The bloodthirsty history of the RCC was never based around theology, it's pretty much always been about things like money and power so far as I can tell. Val may well be right about society waking up to that.
I think it also could be down to simply time management. People just don't have a lot of time anymore and the little time they have they don't want to be going to church. It's like a weighted anchor on them.
That's a feature. By taking up as much of your free time to indoctrinate you, you won't have enough time to see or think about how they're indoctrinating you.
When I was a nice, obedient Catholic boy, back during the Pleistocene, it was official policy that one had to be a "practicing Catholic," which meant not only attending Mass on Sundays and "holy days of obligation," but also kicking in money at each and every Mass. Each parishioner received a pack of donation envelopes at the start of every year, and each pack of envelopes were individually numbered for each Mass AND coded for each individual worshiper, so the priests could keep track who was "practicing." If you didn't cough up enough dough, and regularly enough, you were on the skids, church-wise. No church weddings, no baptisms for your kids , no funerals, no burials on "consecrated ground," no nothing from the church that purportedly loved you to bits.
To give a concrete example of this: My mother suffered with cancer for several years before she died. For the last years of her life, she simply wasn't able to leave the house for Mass (or anything else but medical stuff). The parish priests were perfectly well aware of her condition, and they made several "pastoral visits" to "comfort" her. But when she died, they checked the books, "discovered" that she hadn't been a practicing Catholic and refused to give her a Catholic funeral. Can you say scum-sucking pigs?
I don't know if that policy has changed, but if it's still in place there must be a hell of a lot of, er, non-practicing Catholics running around. I wonder how they cope when they want church recognition for some milestone or other. If, on the other hand, Holy Mother Church no longer extorts moolah from her children in that way, I guess it's no surprise that the bishops are so relentless in their pursuit of our tax dollars. Not to mention the wildly lucrative tax breaks they get.
My scumbag asshole father had a catholic funeral I can guarantee you the only time he went to Sunday brainwashing was the few months he spent in a catholic boardschool around 1960 (sent there for his musical skills because my grandparents lacked the money to send him elsewhere).
Nope, Black Hole (Trou Noir) was my late dog Aria nickname for the amount of food she could inhale in one day. She was born with a very high metabolism.
This (donate or else) policy was in place at my family's parish too. I remember when my dad was unemployed, then hospitalized for an extended period, in the early 1960s. We (my mom and 7 kids) were literally starving. I was 9, 4th grade, and I know in a visceral way what "being food insecure", as it is called today, feels to a kid. I know how it feels to try to calm one's younger siblings, who are crying because their stomachs are aching because they've had nothing to eat. I know how it feels to faint from hunger at school. I also know what it's like to find out that the church, which my parents had been funding every week for years, is nowhere to be found when the kids are starving, and everybody expects a knock on the door from the sheriffs to evict the family onto the street. I also know how it feels to find out that my mom, for years, made large donations to a parish where sexual abuse of children was an open secret, long before the "Spotlight" investigation happened. Mom and dad were guaranteed nice catholic funerals for all of this though.
My father not only was a practicing Catholic, toward the end of his life he was one of the enforcers who held that basket on a pole in front of seated people to collect their money. At his wake, my stepmother and half-sister, both of whom belong in the practicing Catholic grouping, were standing near my father's coffin with the parish priest. My sister introduced me to the priest, but since I didn't support him financially he didn't even offer me so much as a "sorry for your loss". And I was even nice enough not to ask him if he was a practicing pedophile or just helping cover up for his colleagues who are.
Twenty-five years ago, I quit identifying as Catholic, and moved to the denomination of my wife, who was a pastor herself.
My wife left the ministry shortly thereafter, but we both remained active in the liberal denomination we were part of.
Today, we practice nothing at all, and I know I believe in nothing at all. She still holds on to some element of faith, but rejects what Christianity has become in this country.
Because we have seen Christianity ally itself with the wrong side of almost every issue.
I read article after article where Christians of every variety bemoan the accelerating decline of their religion and offer their explanations and their remedies. They cite the usual hypotheses such as sex or money scandals, association with extremist politics, the promotion of every bigotry there is, the advent of the internet, the pandemic, the general decline of their version of morality as part of the approaching End Times, on and on.
While some of these things are either partial contributors and others are simply symptoms of the decline, they all seem to miss (or ignore) something so basic to religion that focusing on these things is like thinking the brown spots on the leaves of a deeply sick tree are the cause of the sickness. No, look to the roots.
I think that there has been a long and slow decline in general belief in supernaturalism. A more honest synonym would be "magic," since that sounds as childish as it really is. Magical beings with magical powers, magical people with magical abilities, and magical objects with magical influences are all childish fantasies, and there has been a general trend in civilization to, as I once read in an old book somewhere, "put away childish things."
The gradual drift away from magic is uneven in both society and in individuals. Many people eschew beliefs in astrology, Tarot, ghosts, hauntings, ESP, all sorts of "energies," "vibrations," or other woo woo whatnot, but they retain their belief in magical gods with magical powers. Other people focus their incomplete skepticism on disbelieving in gods, but they still hang on to some of the other above-mentioned magics.
For individuals and for our species as a whole, growing up is slow, difficult, and spotty. But my point is that the old wall-to-wall carpet of humanity's belief in all things magic has worn thin and has big holes in it. Eventually, after a few more generations there will be mostly clean, bare floor with just a few tattered scraps of magic left in the less trodden corners of our world.
They mock and belittle all of things as childish and immature, then demand you come to their weekly meetings to listen to them talking about an invisible all-knowing person who kicks demons out of people and then invite you to eat crackers and drink grape juice but insist that those are actually the "literal" body and blood of said invisible being's "son".
I was raised catholic, and stopped going to church sometime during high school. The only times I've stepped foot inside a church in over 45 years was for weddings and funerals. And while there, I do not play Sit, Stand, and Kneel.
We were taught to never bite as it wouold hurt jesus. Then I started wondering if it hurt to be dissolved is stomach acids and digested. and then being flushed down the toilet with the next day's bowel movement.
Oh, yes, I remember being told that ad nauseum. When I finally learned something about biology, the first experiment I did was absconding with a few communion wafers and bending, folding, spindling, and mutilating to see if blood would come out. (I'd been told that it would. Hint: it didn't.) That day, I think it was in 6th grade, I started wondering "if they are lying about *that*, what else are they lying about?"
In my church it was crumbled up saltines and Welch's grape juice. Good thing they never tried to push transubstantiation, because that would have been a really hard sell. But somehow the idea of it being a metaphor clouded the issue, and it was that much longer before I could see the absurdity inherent in the practice.
"From vampirism to Catholicism, whether literally or symbolically, the reward for eating flesh is eternal life." -- Fox Mulder.
At my church, they insisted that the body and blood was absolutely literal, no metaphor. I guess I did that experiment because I'd heard multiple stories about what they swore would happen if you messed with a communion wafer. Being a typical 11-year-old, I just wanted to see the buckets of blood, just for the "eww!" factor. My partner in crime was a Jewish kid. His verdict, as we walked back to school after doing the deed, was "You catholics are so weird."
What does Jesus think about pre-biotics? They're useless physically, but perhaps spiritually they help with absorbing Jesus in the stomach, like alcohol.
I was fortunate enough to be spared the mind-plague of Catholicism, despite both sides of my family tree being Catholic. I've been to many Catholic services because, yeah, huge Catholic family, but not once did I ever feel like I was missing out on something important. The whole affair always felt weird to me- like it belonged in another time. It was like walking through a portal to the 1300s, and nobody but me could see how ridiculously anachronistic it all was.
I mean, really- a cracker and a sip of wine turning into flesh and blood? I lied about having undergone a first communion once because I was curious about the silly little ritual... all I could think was: 𝘨𝘶𝘺𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘢 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦. 𝘞𝘦'𝘷𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘦. 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥'𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘯𝘢𝘤𝘬? And the seating! 𝘏𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘵𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴? 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘥𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘬? 𝘐 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘯𝘴!
The architecture of some of the bigger churches always struck me as really cool, though. I love Gothic architecture; the cleverness of being able to build such complicated structures out of simple materials was always impressive. Still... I could never help the feeling that the buildings would be better served as libraries. They'd be perfect for long, tall stacks with those cool rolling ladders... plenty of space overhead for a second or even a third story, some spiral staircases between the levels... and hey, they already had the great idea to make stained glass windows of the characters in the stories (maybe pick a few 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 books for inspiration next time, for an improvement)! But no. They only ever had one book in those buildings, and it was the most boring one.
I've since learned that several of my cousins walked away from Catholicism... I can't blame them. I think I probably would have found my way to the exit, too, even if I'd been raised in the religion like they were- I just got to skip a few steps. Best gift my parents ever gave me: a life without the Church.
I want to crack a joke about this, but I don't think I can come up with anything funnier than the reality: that even the RCC's 𝘧𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 has always been centuries behind the times.
I remember reading years ago when I was a student that they did a survey of English churches and found that there weren't nearly enough seats for all the people who attended. And they came to the conclusion that many people simply didn't attend. Mostly the indigent I imagine.
Libraries have better heating, better books and ask way less money. "A" library often let a homeless man stay to read and nap when it was cold since he didn't bother the staff and the readers.
Strangely I don't remember him opening his shit hole when the fbi botched the nassar case.
From another article about Durham report "Mr Durham noted that Mrs Clinton and others had received "defensive briefings" from the FBI aimed at "those who may be the targets of nefarious activities by foreign powers". Mr Trump had not". I find this statement disingenuous at best, as if drumpster would have agreed to listen to anyone who doesn't lick his ass.
I would suspect there are a number of influences at play on this issue, and this is a YMMV situation when examined closely.
The RCC hasn't exactly been covering itself in glory in recent years for a wide range of reasons, it's been consistently doubling down on the wrong side of virtually every modern-day social issue available. For a church that preaches compassion to practice such cruelty on a frequent basis seems like a non-sequitur, but there we have it. I would also point out that the insane number of child molestation scandals is likely making attendance far worse since even the most hard line Catholic parent might think twice about bringing their young child to church with them. All of this was more or less observed above, none of it should come as a shock.
I would, however, add one more thing. So far as I'm aware, many local congregations of Catholics are in blue collar work situations, where they may not be the ones to dictate their own schedules. Most of the jobs I've worked over the last 20ish years or so demanded weekend work, specifically Sundays, on a regular basis; getting the day off was not happening no matter the reason. (As a reminder, I couldn't get time off work at my last job despite the fact that BOTH of my parents were hospitalized and dying.) If I were a betting woman, I would guess that at least some Catholics wind up in a job that demands they work Sundays and when the sky doesn't fall on their heads, they just never bother to go back. Yes, I am saying that work is interfering with church attendance here even if I don't have the numbers to back that up at this time.
Should be interesting to see how it all plays out in any event.
YMMV applies to vehicle mpg. When car companies post a car's mpg for city and highway, they always add the acronym to prevent lawsuits if the customer doesn't get those results. It is like with computer components when they state data transfer rates, the only place anyone will get those speeds is in a laboratory.
I never understood the appeal of Catholicism. As a kid, I went once with a friend and it freaked me out. I thought it was scary. As an adult I once went to a Pentecostal church and that was even worse. Pure bedlam. I felt like people were literally insane as they screamed in tongues. Like I was in some parallel universe of Clockwork Orange.
Basic principle of economics. You don't need to appeal to anyone if you have a monopoly, because there's no competition. And that's the way the Catholic Church had it for a millennium, while they were defining — and enforcing — their dogma. They're still cruising on the policies and traditions that worked for them when they were the only game in town. They still haven't figured out how to deal with competition because they seldom had to.
Catholic church had competitors in its first millennium of existence. They just had more Kings/Emperors on their side and used them to crush it. Like Arianism in Visigothic kingdom.
I was force-fed Catholicism from birth, and never liked the taste very much. The older I got the worse it tasted. I stopped going to church on a regular basis about six month out of high school. I went a few times in the military, mostly to get out of other details. I was in a very dark place with about three months left in Vietnam when I listened to an idiot priest give us a 'kill a commie for Christ' pep talk. According to him, we were among the chosen, defending mother church against the godless. Someone there might have bought that, but the great majority of us only wanted to survive and go home. That was the last time I ever attended a church service as any kind of a believer. I walked away, never looked back, and never regretted that decision for a second.
Welcome Home.
It was over half a century ago, but thank you none the less.
32 years ago last week for me. Time flies.....
I came back from Vietnam in 1969.
The army was two years of NO church. I hated Sundays cuz it meant mass in the morning and benediction in the afternoon. Between droning on for 10 minutes of monotone "tantum ergo" and some really ugly monstrance, I once ran from church and when I got outside, screamed. To a 10 year old kid it w painful. THEN I learned nobody was taking attendance, and I ran off with the donation and headed for The Sugar Bowl where I drowned my guilt in chocolate. Wonderful, glorious chocolate.
Walking away was probably the best thing you could have done.
I'm just not wired for the kind of magical thinking religion, especially Catholicism, requires.
My mother never attended church, but my father would drag us out every Sunday morning. I was like you, I went along with it until I hit about 13 and I simply didn't see a point in going anymore. My father said I had to attend until I was 16, then it was my choice. I still called myself a Catholic for years afterward.
Ironically enough, my brother become a "born again Christian" when we were both attending the same university, and I'm pretty sure that's when I started questioning the actual existence of god.
My brother belonged to what is now considered a cult, Campus Crusade for Christ. Those people were whack jobs. They wouldn't associate with anyone not in their cult, and in the summers, they would send college kids out to the poorest areas of the south to sell horribly overpriced "Bible encyclopedias" to people literally living in shacks. Then, at the end of the summer, they would talk the kids into donating all the money they'd made back to the organization (not that they made that much). Terrible, horrible people.
My brother got away from the cult, fortunately and returned to almost normal in about 10 years.
A truly American story.
Enjoy your after-life in Hell. Merciful Jesus does not condone desertion.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Worship me or burn in hell forever" is not a sales pitch.
This former catholic tried and tried. I was active in teen groups that were catholic. I got married and my ex and I tried to attend every week we even joined a weekly catholic version of Bible study, to no avail. The best parts was interaction with other lukewarm Catholics who seemed interested in making life around them better. I believe my faith was genuine for a long time and my progressive views have come from the social justice teachings the church had back in late 70s and 80s. In the final in the final analysis; I went because of my mom, mass was boring and related only in simplest forms to my life, miracles we can see now are really just exaggerated stories with oral aggrandizement by those who have self interest. My own child’s sexual abuse from a relative and watching airplanes fly into building nailed the religion door shut for me. Yes my life is better tho my family connection will never be the same again. The political and religious environment now confirms my leaving as the right choice.
It's a shame that religion or lack thereof is enough to muck up one's family connections. Most of my family lives at least several hours away and I've never mentioned my deconversion to them. I'm not that good at handling conflict and just figured some things are better left unsaid. I play along with saying grace at the table and have been very fortunate that religious/political topics seldom come up in conversation. If they ever do, I will probably fade into the woodwork or think of an excuse to meander out of the room. Go to the bathroom, check on the pot roast, etc.
OT
The born-again "pro-life" ammosexual Lauren Boobert is furious that Colorado just passed 3 bills that support healthcare. The insane gun nut calls them "a total disgrace."
Uh no, darlin.' That's you. You're projecting again.
You could have added "pro-marriage divorcee Lauren Boobert"?
The youngest divorced grandmother in America.
Probably not by a long shot.
You're right. There are a lot of christian Republicans who really, really believe in traditional marriage.
Thought about it but it would've been unwieldy. :)
Did Madame Butthurt say anything about WHY she thinks helping people with healthcare is a disgrace? If she's "born again," surely she knows that her Jesus-godling talked about caring for the sick and the poor, but hell, it's not as if she is being required to out forth any effort personally. All she has to do is sit down and STFU. I have always had problems with religious nutters bristling at the thought of helping the less fortunate, but maybe I'm just not seeing their train of thought regarding this, because I remember a lot of Sunday School lectures about this back when I was growing up.
Those bills were about protecting gender-affirming care and abortion.
She spewed the lie about "legalizing the mutilation of young children under the guise of healthcare." Hey, Lauren Booby Prize: Wanna know what truly mutilates young children? It's those guns you love so much!"
ahhh, I guess that would explain it. I try to avoid stories about Madame Butthurt. Bad for my blood pressure.
Based on what I see on the graph above, this has been an ongoing trend for DECADES, so I suspect that this has less to do with 9/11 or the internet or even the priest child abuse scandal than it does with a slow but sure disaffection of people from a belief system that is excessively strict and a hierarchy that is largely unresponsive to its congregants. Further study is clearly necessary to understand the real mechanics behind this phenomenon.
Still ... it's damned good news.
I'll take good news anywhere I can find it.
If some people leave the catholic church for their positions on abortion and LGBTQI+ people why evangelicals gain more people (chart 2) ? Does their brand of brainwashing that better ?
The overall number isn't going up. The percent that attend weekly is. The batshit is becoming more concentrated.
I said chart 2, you are talking about chart 1 😉
Sorry about that.
No need to apologise, I just wanted to clarify we are not talking about the same thing 🙂
Industrial strength guano by now, with no signs of slowing down.
Another one I am not allowed to upvote.
I did it for you (and me).
The church is viewed as too progressive by a lot of extreme right wing catholics. That's probably why the decline in attendance. They're leaving a Church they deem insufficiency conservative for the evangelical churches.
I think all denominations are being distilled down to the true believers, and this makes them even less responsive to reason. The best I can say about Catholics is that most of them take their religion with a grain of salt. There are, however, Catholic fundamentalists and they are every bit as irrational as their Protestant counterparts.
The hardliner kkkatliks stay where they are surrounded by familiar sights, sounds, hatreds and smells. The more liberal ones leave rather than dare criticize the mother church., Several years ago I sent a letter to the diocese demanding my name be removed from church records. I finally had to threaten the bitchup with legal action to make him act. IF you are a recovering kkkatlik, send a letter to your bishop demanding your name be removed. This forces the reality of losing members on them. Otherwise they assume you still believe and attend.
Several years ago, my three sisters, my brother, and I all sent letters to the bishop of Oakland (Calif) as well as to the local churches we'd been baptised in. This was not intentional but we'd been batting around the idea since the 80s. Probably the letters all arrived within the same week. As far as response from the bishop--nada. None of us ever heard back. I'd been trying to get taken off the membership rolls since the early 1970s, and none of my letters ever elicited a response. Just last month, the diocese (which has already released the names of 65 clergy who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse of children) was found to have been concealing another 30+ names. One of those newly accused was--Floyd Begin, the bishop of Oakland during my and my siblings' childhoods. He was the guy who was responsible for overloading the next parish over from ours with a bunch of abusive priests. Now the diocese is planning to declare bankruptcy (probably hiding their assets in cemetery maintenance accounts as so many other dioceses who take the chapter do.) All of my siblings and I, as well as our kids, were well quit of the church long before the more recent news. We are all non-religious/atheists/agnostics (every one of us describes our non-belief differently.)
I think the evangelicals are just stepping up their self reported attendance to virtue signal. They were already that hateful, they just feel the need to prove it now.
There isn't much that cannot be justified in the name of Jesus.
I don't have any respect for the people who trade old nonsense for new.
I'm going to explore this in my upcoming post.
I read it.
Like I said to Larry Parker, you are talking about chart 1 while my comment was about chart 2 🙂
Mea culpa. Mea Maxima culpa.
You will have to copy the first chapter of the book of your choice to atone for your non existent sin 😋
Done and done. Chapter 1 of "the big book about absolutely nothing".
They just are real strict about who is, and who is not there. Miss church and you face a lot of questions from family and minister.
I see Disney has decided to cancel plans for a new campus near Orlando. The plan would've netted $17 billion and created 13,000 jobs over the next decade. Looks like all that will likely go to another state.
See what you got yourself and your state into by picking a fight with a mouse, DeathSentence? And you want to do for the country what you've done for Florida?
Disney also killed a $1 billion development that would have relocated 2,000 employees from Southern California to Florida.
Ron DeSantis. The man from the Party of Fiscal Responsibility.
You were 4 hours late my friend 😁
This just popped up in my YouTube feed and I thought of you. : )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc0zEgK3WmM
Bit of a niche market – he should branch out into Marmite.
For the Disney development article? It was only 3 hours old when I mentioned it and I was away from the keyboard for those 3 hours. :)
😁
Black Hole mourner
5 hr ago
OT : https://www.rawstory.com/disney-cancels-1-billion-development-project-in-orlando/
Oh, I know about your comment. I upvoted it. I'm just saying that the source I used for the same story said "3 hours ago" at the time.
Jesus, I goad you.
At times I wonder if DeSantis is too busy "owning the libs" to care.
I thinking DeDumbshit would make a good villain in the next Disney movie.
Wanna bet they'll tap a Ron DeSantis lookalike actor and cast him as a numbnuts character in a future Disney project?
I would happily ante up for an ovepriced ticket to see that.
Home Alone remake set in a library and DeDoorknob is trying to steal the books. He gets hit in the face with a hot iron.
I don't pay to see movies, but I'd pay to see that.
I'll be right behind you with the popcorn.
LIBRARIAN (to DeSanitarium): "Have you had enough? Or are you thirsty for some more?"
This should be something that Disney is actually telling him now in real life.
Librarians say: "Ook!"
Maybe not in those words, but I bet Mickey's lawyers have expressed that sentiment.
And they expect people to go to Floriduh?
Unfortunately, stupid people are flocking to the state. Besides hurricanes, if those aren't bad enough, we have the highest property insurance rates in the country. And it is getting worse; the time will come when insurance premiums will be higher than mortgage payments.
And what did the Floriduh legislature do about it? They made it harder to sue insurance companies.
They were too busy banning books, going after drag queens, and torturing transgender kids.
Meanwhile, Florida is ranked 46th Overall in Opportunity.
And guess who just signed a racist bill designed to limit discussion of race?
Hunter Biden's laptop ?
Sounds like a Decepticon.
Not anymore (though the incentives by Disney might have tempted some to relocate).
Ron DeSantis is standing up to Woke corporations. Can't block the text messages. Ron must have an in with God.
That anti-woke fighter wants to put the country back to sleep.
More like he wants to turn the US into the Fourth Reich.
Trump vs. DeSantis: the race to the bottom.
Maybe they'll hit the bottom at top speed. *SPLAT!*
If they did, they'd finally have the thanks of a grateful nation.
We should be reminding him of what happened to the guy who headed up the last Reich.
That guy was a practicing Catholic just like Ronnie D.
Don't you mean back to sheep ?
It will be great to watch DeSantis and Trump destroy each other...as third Floriduh nitwit Marco Rubio stands by and watches them get all the attention. Truly a Pyrrhic victory.
Foolio isn't the only one who wears "boots" to make himself look taller.
Did you watch Going Postal movie ? The scene with Charles Dance and David Suchet difference of height is hilarious.
Not yet. In anticipation, I am on pins, not needles.
I think there’s some element of growth as a society at play here as well. The knowledge we are accruing as a whole really debunks a lot of the claims of Catholicism (Christianity as a whole as well), especially the unique Catholic traditions. We know that transubstatiation isn’t real, we can prove saying magic words over bread and wine doesn’t make it suddenly become flesh and blood, but the Catholic Church continues to insist it is real. While other sects do communion, they don’t cleave so tightly to the fantasy of it actually turning into Jesus. To others, it’s simply a metaphor.
Society sees a whole host of Catholic ideas as backward, a lot of what Hemant mentions in the article, and other less obvious things as well.
I do remember a lot of gore during mass and church functions from when I did attend. There’s still a culture of gruesome punishments for sins involved. The crucifix is prominently displayed with blood and pain being the focus. We were shown movies where folks were routinely decapitated by guillotine or drawn and quartered, gutted and all that. And the church doling out these punishments. Catholicism is also renown for its guilt. Folks, especially republicans, are averse to feeling guilty lately. Just look at how the right is responding to the imaginary threat from CRT, whining about making their children feel guilty over slavery is the worst. So maybe the guilt inherent in Catholicism isn’t the leverage it once was.
Or it could be the kneeling and repetitive prayer. I guess I have a bigger issue with the RCC than I thought, even though its sexual abuse problem is enough.
*Annoying loving history French hat on*
Val, beheading by guillotine* date from 1789 and have nothing to do with catholic church 🙂
* There was similar devices before but they were called with other names.
*Hat off*
That didn’t stop my Catholic Church from playing movies that depicted them punishing heretics with them. I am aware of some of the history, but I vividly remember the movie.
I am waiting for my copy of "Holy Horrors." Looking for a book full of blood and gore about witch hunts and inquisitions.
The church was big on burning at the stake. No messy body to get rd of, no stench, etc. Plus they believed the searing flesh helped burn away sins shortening time in hell.
Er, you do realize that a burning human body - living or dead - generally smells bad enough they tend to put crematoriums well out into the countryside, right?
Also, that most of the people the RCC killed as punishment for some form of church violation weren't exactly guilty, they were being killed for political expediency or convenience. The bloodthirsty history of the RCC was never based around theology, it's pretty much always been about things like money and power so far as I can tell. Val may well be right about society waking up to that.
Plus, being burned alive was never about "burning away sins".
It was about making the victim suffer the hardest.
"Shortening time in hell"? WTF?
How do you shorten an eternity?
I think it also could be down to simply time management. People just don't have a lot of time anymore and the little time they have they don't want to be going to church. It's like a weighted anchor on them.
Especially a mass, plus the Sunday school, and socializing take almost the entire day.
That's a feature. By taking up as much of your free time to indoctrinate you, you won't have enough time to see or think about how they're indoctrinating you.
When I was a nice, obedient Catholic boy, back during the Pleistocene, it was official policy that one had to be a "practicing Catholic," which meant not only attending Mass on Sundays and "holy days of obligation," but also kicking in money at each and every Mass. Each parishioner received a pack of donation envelopes at the start of every year, and each pack of envelopes were individually numbered for each Mass AND coded for each individual worshiper, so the priests could keep track who was "practicing." If you didn't cough up enough dough, and regularly enough, you were on the skids, church-wise. No church weddings, no baptisms for your kids , no funerals, no burials on "consecrated ground," no nothing from the church that purportedly loved you to bits.
To give a concrete example of this: My mother suffered with cancer for several years before she died. For the last years of her life, she simply wasn't able to leave the house for Mass (or anything else but medical stuff). The parish priests were perfectly well aware of her condition, and they made several "pastoral visits" to "comfort" her. But when she died, they checked the books, "discovered" that she hadn't been a practicing Catholic and refused to give her a Catholic funeral. Can you say scum-sucking pigs?
I don't know if that policy has changed, but if it's still in place there must be a hell of a lot of, er, non-practicing Catholics running around. I wonder how they cope when they want church recognition for some milestone or other. If, on the other hand, Holy Mother Church no longer extorts moolah from her children in that way, I guess it's no surprise that the bishops are so relentless in their pursuit of our tax dollars. Not to mention the wildly lucrative tax breaks they get.
My scumbag asshole father had a catholic funeral I can guarantee you the only time he went to Sunday brainwashing was the few months he spent in a catholic boardschool around 1960 (sent there for his musical skills because my grandparents lacked the money to send him elsewhere).
"My scumbag asshole father "
ouch! Not quite the legacy a father wants to give to his son.
Good thing he never had one.
Is that where the 'black hole' came from?
Nope, Black Hole (Trou Noir) was my late dog Aria nickname for the amount of food she could inhale in one day. She was born with a very high metabolism.
This (donate or else) policy was in place at my family's parish too. I remember when my dad was unemployed, then hospitalized for an extended period, in the early 1960s. We (my mom and 7 kids) were literally starving. I was 9, 4th grade, and I know in a visceral way what "being food insecure", as it is called today, feels to a kid. I know how it feels to try to calm one's younger siblings, who are crying because their stomachs are aching because they've had nothing to eat. I know how it feels to faint from hunger at school. I also know what it's like to find out that the church, which my parents had been funding every week for years, is nowhere to be found when the kids are starving, and everybody expects a knock on the door from the sheriffs to evict the family onto the street. I also know how it feels to find out that my mom, for years, made large donations to a parish where sexual abuse of children was an open secret, long before the "Spotlight" investigation happened. Mom and dad were guaranteed nice catholic funerals for all of this though.
My father not only was a practicing Catholic, toward the end of his life he was one of the enforcers who held that basket on a pole in front of seated people to collect their money. At his wake, my stepmother and half-sister, both of whom belong in the practicing Catholic grouping, were standing near my father's coffin with the parish priest. My sister introduced me to the priest, but since I didn't support him financially he didn't even offer me so much as a "sorry for your loss". And I was even nice enough not to ask him if he was a practicing pedophile or just helping cover up for his colleagues who are.
Obviously did not have enough for a "donation" to do a funeral mass.
Thirty years ago, I was a Catholic seminarian.
Twenty-five years ago, I quit identifying as Catholic, and moved to the denomination of my wife, who was a pastor herself.
My wife left the ministry shortly thereafter, but we both remained active in the liberal denomination we were part of.
Today, we practice nothing at all, and I know I believe in nothing at all. She still holds on to some element of faith, but rejects what Christianity has become in this country.
Because we have seen Christianity ally itself with the wrong side of almost every issue.
Welcome home to reality.
I read article after article where Christians of every variety bemoan the accelerating decline of their religion and offer their explanations and their remedies. They cite the usual hypotheses such as sex or money scandals, association with extremist politics, the promotion of every bigotry there is, the advent of the internet, the pandemic, the general decline of their version of morality as part of the approaching End Times, on and on.
While some of these things are either partial contributors and others are simply symptoms of the decline, they all seem to miss (or ignore) something so basic to religion that focusing on these things is like thinking the brown spots on the leaves of a deeply sick tree are the cause of the sickness. No, look to the roots.
I think that there has been a long and slow decline in general belief in supernaturalism. A more honest synonym would be "magic," since that sounds as childish as it really is. Magical beings with magical powers, magical people with magical abilities, and magical objects with magical influences are all childish fantasies, and there has been a general trend in civilization to, as I once read in an old book somewhere, "put away childish things."
The gradual drift away from magic is uneven in both society and in individuals. Many people eschew beliefs in astrology, Tarot, ghosts, hauntings, ESP, all sorts of "energies," "vibrations," or other woo woo whatnot, but they retain their belief in magical gods with magical powers. Other people focus their incomplete skepticism on disbelieving in gods, but they still hang on to some of the other above-mentioned magics.
For individuals and for our species as a whole, growing up is slow, difficult, and spotty. But my point is that the old wall-to-wall carpet of humanity's belief in all things magic has worn thin and has big holes in it. Eventually, after a few more generations there will be mostly clean, bare floor with just a few tattered scraps of magic left in the less trodden corners of our world.
They mock and belittle all of things as childish and immature, then demand you come to their weekly meetings to listen to them talking about an invisible all-knowing person who kicks demons out of people and then invite you to eat crackers and drink grape juice but insist that those are actually the "literal" body and blood of said invisible being's "son".
Grape juice (which my dictation software decided was great Jews)? I thought it was proper wine? Albeit not Château Margaux..
I was raised catholic, and stopped going to church sometime during high school. The only times I've stepped foot inside a church in over 45 years was for weddings and funerals. And while there, I do not play Sit, Stand, and Kneel.
But you nibble at the wafers, right?
We were taught to never bite as it wouold hurt jesus. Then I started wondering if it hurt to be dissolved is stomach acids and digested. and then being flushed down the toilet with the next day's bowel movement.
Oh, yes, I remember being told that ad nauseum. When I finally learned something about biology, the first experiment I did was absconding with a few communion wafers and bending, folding, spindling, and mutilating to see if blood would come out. (I'd been told that it would. Hint: it didn't.) That day, I think it was in 6th grade, I started wondering "if they are lying about *that*, what else are they lying about?"
In my church it was crumbled up saltines and Welch's grape juice. Good thing they never tried to push transubstantiation, because that would have been a really hard sell. But somehow the idea of it being a metaphor clouded the issue, and it was that much longer before I could see the absurdity inherent in the practice.
"From vampirism to Catholicism, whether literally or symbolically, the reward for eating flesh is eternal life." -- Fox Mulder.
At my church, they insisted that the body and blood was absolutely literal, no metaphor. I guess I did that experiment because I'd heard multiple stories about what they swore would happen if you messed with a communion wafer. Being a typical 11-year-old, I just wanted to see the buckets of blood, just for the "eww!" factor. My partner in crime was a Jewish kid. His verdict, as we walked back to school after doing the deed, was "You catholics are so weird."
Hannibal Lecter would be pleased. Eat Jeeb's body and blood with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
I remember getting a good laugh when I realized that if what the Catholic church taught me was true, then every Monday I took a holy shit.
LOL!!!!
There you go again! THINKING!!! ;)
What does Jesus think about pre-biotics? They're useless physically, but perhaps spiritually they help with absorbing Jesus in the stomach, like alcohol.
If McDonalds had to stop using styrofoam, why does the RCC get to continue using it and calling it communion hosts?
Because thay end up in different landfills.
You really never want to be downwind of what is referred to as "dewatered sludge".
Unlike styrofoam, communion wafers have spiritual value.
I was fortunate enough to be spared the mind-plague of Catholicism, despite both sides of my family tree being Catholic. I've been to many Catholic services because, yeah, huge Catholic family, but not once did I ever feel like I was missing out on something important. The whole affair always felt weird to me- like it belonged in another time. It was like walking through a portal to the 1300s, and nobody but me could see how ridiculously anachronistic it all was.
I mean, really- a cracker and a sip of wine turning into flesh and blood? I lied about having undergone a first communion once because I was curious about the silly little ritual... all I could think was: 𝘨𝘶𝘺𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘢 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦. 𝘞𝘦'𝘷𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘵 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘦. 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥'𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘯𝘢𝘤𝘬? And the seating! 𝘏𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘰𝘵𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴? 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘥𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘬? 𝘐 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘯𝘴!
The architecture of some of the bigger churches always struck me as really cool, though. I love Gothic architecture; the cleverness of being able to build such complicated structures out of simple materials was always impressive. Still... I could never help the feeling that the buildings would be better served as libraries. They'd be perfect for long, tall stacks with those cool rolling ladders... plenty of space overhead for a second or even a third story, some spiral staircases between the levels... and hey, they already had the great idea to make stained glass windows of the characters in the stories (maybe pick a few 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 books for inspiration next time, for an improvement)! But no. They only ever had one book in those buildings, and it was the most boring one.
I've since learned that several of my cousins walked away from Catholicism... I can't blame them. I think I probably would have found my way to the exit, too, even if I'd been raised in the religion like they were- I just got to skip a few steps. Best gift my parents ever gave me: a life without the Church.
You would have hated the 14th century even more https://icsfurniture.com/the-evolution-of-church-seating/
I want to crack a joke about this, but I don't think I can come up with anything funnier than the reality: that even the RCC's 𝘧𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 has always been centuries behind the times.
You stool stand your ground and try anyway.
Maybe you should post that in French.
Doesn't work.
Not chair ismatic enough?
I remember reading years ago when I was a student that they did a survey of English churches and found that there weren't nearly enough seats for all the people who attended. And they came to the conclusion that many people simply didn't attend. Mostly the indigent I imagine.
Libraries have better heating, better books and ask way less money. "A" library often let a homeless man stay to read and nap when it was cold since he didn't bother the staff and the readers.
I should have said – early modern English churches. 17th-century I think. My bad.
O/T: Graham: "The FBI Disobeyed God’s Command On Lying"
*Facepalm*
https://www.joemygod.com/2023/05/graham-the-fbi-disobeyed-gods-command-on-lying/
Strangely I don't remember him opening his shit hole when the fbi botched the nassar case.
From another article about Durham report "Mr Durham noted that Mrs Clinton and others had received "defensive briefings" from the FBI aimed at "those who may be the targets of nefarious activities by foreign powers". Mr Trump had not". I find this statement disingenuous at best, as if drumpster would have agreed to listen to anyone who doesn't lick his ass.
Why does this pile of brain dead feces feel the need to weigh in on literally EVERYTHING?
Graham Crackers' whole religion is based on lies. He lies to people constantly.
I would suspect there are a number of influences at play on this issue, and this is a YMMV situation when examined closely.
The RCC hasn't exactly been covering itself in glory in recent years for a wide range of reasons, it's been consistently doubling down on the wrong side of virtually every modern-day social issue available. For a church that preaches compassion to practice such cruelty on a frequent basis seems like a non-sequitur, but there we have it. I would also point out that the insane number of child molestation scandals is likely making attendance far worse since even the most hard line Catholic parent might think twice about bringing their young child to church with them. All of this was more or less observed above, none of it should come as a shock.
I would, however, add one more thing. So far as I'm aware, many local congregations of Catholics are in blue collar work situations, where they may not be the ones to dictate their own schedules. Most of the jobs I've worked over the last 20ish years or so demanded weekend work, specifically Sundays, on a regular basis; getting the day off was not happening no matter the reason. (As a reminder, I couldn't get time off work at my last job despite the fact that BOTH of my parents were hospitalized and dying.) If I were a betting woman, I would guess that at least some Catholics wind up in a job that demands they work Sundays and when the sky doesn't fall on their heads, they just never bother to go back. Yes, I am saying that work is interfering with church attendance here even if I don't have the numbers to back that up at this time.
Should be interesting to see how it all plays out in any event.
YMMV ?
Your Milage May Vary
You Mangled My Vacation.
Yellow Man Made Violet
You Make Me Vomit.
I hope it was consensual and Violet didn't object.
This one makes more sense than your answer to me 😁
YMMV applies to vehicle mpg. When car companies post a car's mpg for city and highway, they always add the acronym to prevent lawsuits if the customer doesn't get those results. It is like with computer components when they state data transfer rates, the only place anyone will get those speeds is in a laboratory.
Cardinal Glick tried to make changes. He really did try...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FigprdcBGA
(love the fact that a catholic clergyman is being played by an atheist) :)
Bowman christ strike again.
Carlin - He gets us!
Why am I blocked from liking this?
Because the block and mute functions don't actually block or mute. It's the best I can do.
Next time you get blocked from liking a comment, type *Bagen Onuts liked this*
That'll show 'em.
I'm not blocked from liking you. 😉
Is that where that meme comes from? Or did he borrow it from somewhere else?
If it wasn't from a parody I would have said from a country in Central or South America
I never understood the appeal of Catholicism. As a kid, I went once with a friend and it freaked me out. I thought it was scary. As an adult I once went to a Pentecostal church and that was even worse. Pure bedlam. I felt like people were literally insane as they screamed in tongues. Like I was in some parallel universe of Clockwork Orange.
Basic principle of economics. You don't need to appeal to anyone if you have a monopoly, because there's no competition. And that's the way the Catholic Church had it for a millennium, while they were defining — and enforcing — their dogma. They're still cruising on the policies and traditions that worked for them when they were the only game in town. They still haven't figured out how to deal with competition because they seldom had to.
Catholic church had competitors in its first millennium of existence. They just had more Kings/Emperors on their side and used them to crush it. Like Arianism in Visigothic kingdom.
No "real" competitors until Martin Luther. There was always heretics.