The Catholic Church and I went our separate ways over half a century ago, and I never regretted that decision. I did not, however, simply trade old nonsense for new and left religion all together. Maybe if the church could bring back burning heretics and witches alive after having tortured confessions out of them they could turn this around. I have contended for a long time the staggering number of Christian tribes should be a far bigger problem for believers than it is. It speaks to a divine being who supposedly willed the universe into existence, but when it came to the most important message imaginable, . . . couldn’t make himself understood. It also speaks to the complete lack of objective evidence to support the church’s claims.
As a life-long non-believer who had 4 grandparents who didn't believe, I just never felt the need for any of it. My Mom - from a family of apostate and occult Jews - went out as a teen and joined a Methodist church and made us go to church until our teens - needed the church. Churches peddle surety about the unknown and attach it to a social structure. We are a few generations away from people in this Country being able to give up the myths.
I think it's very hard for some people who are raised Christian, specifically with a heavy emphasis on the Bible, they have an overwhelming need to believe in the Bible being the word of God, or that God is real. It is almost hard coded as part of their identity. Even if they haven't read the Bible, they sincerely treat it as truth or almost like a historical document. Plus even in a lot of western countries, being seen as religious makes people feel or seem as more moral than others. There are a lot of levels to it imo.
It would be interesting to see the statistics for Islam around the world, too. Muslim communities are surely more close-knit than Catholic ones with more pressure to stay at least nominally within the faith.
In which case, it would be interesting to know the numbers of those who LEAVE such states for countries where more religious freedom is afforded them. There is a study all by itself.
Richard Dawkins put out a version of 'The God Delusion' in PDF form as a free download in the Arab world. I don't know the statistics, but I do know it had a lot of hits.
I was lucky: I knew the bible and imaginary fiends contained therein were bullshit by the time I was 8 or 9 and I openly rejected religion by 10. I was kicked out of protestant "Sunday school" for questioning the nonsense they were trying to indoctrinate us with. My parents were both churchgoers but decided that there was no point in making me go.
For many years my mom would ask me to go to church for xmas and Oster and I would say no. Then she would say: "but I raised you to be a christian" to which I would reply: "you also raised me to be straight, how did that work out?"
One thing she knew early, that I had the same stubborn streak she did. It's why we often clashed but I was always the one that got the phone call in the middle of the night if there was a crisis as my parents aged.
I wasn't brought up particularly religious, so I never had a moment of revelation as it were. Just a gradual eroding of belief. I was a theist, then an agnostic, then an atheist – but if you asked me to tell you when I graduated from one to the other I couldn't. I was always an apatheist anyway. Told my parents I didn't want to go to Sunday school and they just said okay. Never went to church except for weddings and funerals. Religion or its lack never bothered me much at all. I feel lucky about that.
I think you are right to feel lucky. It was a lot more emotionally tumultuous for me. Since my father was my pastor for most of my pre-20 years, leaving religion overlapped with a feeling of rejecting my father, which I did not want to do.
With you there - same sort of upbringing and questioning and steady coursing to 98% atheism. I tithe that remaining two percent to a baseless hankering for the blind clockmaker
I was the same, didn’t believe any of it by second or third grade and told my mother I didn’t want to go anymore. She was not particularly devout, but had been raised Methodist and tried to go through the motions of church once or twice a month when I was young. She said I had to go through 6th grade then could make my own decisions, so I waited her out and the second I had a choice I never went to church again. The Methodist church we attended was relatively progressive, women could be reverends and that sort of thing, so I assume less of an extreme experience than Catholicism, though no version of religion was going to win me over.
I don’t think I ever really fervently believed in my Jewish faith, but I was proud of being Jewish, just as I was picked on for being Jewish. But I don’t think I ever really believed it. Just before my bar mitzvah, I had to experiences that made me question what little faith I had. One of them was asking in Sunday school why God murdered everybody at the time of the flood. That didn’t seem fair at all. I also had a run in with my canter, whom I really admired. But he made it clear it was all about his authority, not about anything else.
Once I had my bar mitzvah, I stopped going. I didn’t go again until I was 28, when my father asked me to go to synagogue with him and my mother. I went to please him,, but I resented going. I told him I wouldn’t do it again.
It was actually preparing for my bar mitzvah that was the final nail in the coffin, so to speak.
I learned the chanting of my Torah text from recordings that my Cantor made for me, but I learned the words from a book that he gave me. Besides the Hebrew in the book, they were these little squiggles that were not part of any Hebrew that I knew. Eventually, being a smart kid and musically inclined, I figured that these were a kind of musical notation. So one day, when I went to practice with my cantor, we reached the end of the recorded lesson. But I kept on going. My cantor stopped me and demented to know where I had learned the additional chanting and text. I said that the little squiggles were musical notation, were they not? He very angrily told me, “that’s not what they are. You will not go beyond what I record for you.” the light went on for 12 year old me, that this was all about his authority and not about anything else.
Whatever religious belief I had left, that killed it.
I presume you know this joke but others may not. There is a small shul somewhere in the old country that is served by a traveling rabbi a few times a year. One year the building is overrun by rats. Everything is tried but nothing succeeds in getting rid of the rats. The traveling rabbi shows up. The people explain the rat problem. He says, “I got this.” He goes into the shul and commands, in the name of God, that all the rats come into the sanctuary. They do. He looks over the assembled rats. Hundreds of them. The rats all look attentively at rabbi. He says, “You are all — every one of you rats — are Bar Mitzvahed!” And not a single rat ever returns to the shul.
I don’t remember how old I was — probably 8-10 — when the first brick fell out of the wall for me, but I do remember the brick. It was Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt. I asked, “Is she still there? Can we see a picture of the statue of salt?” I expected the answer to be yes. “No, it all been washed away by rain.” Which, on the one hand seemed reasonable, but on the other hand seemed mighty convenient. I got suspicious and, as time went by, I found ever more things to be suspicious of.
Simply asking the priest when something didn't add up and having him give me the "It's a mystery" answer starting me thinking they were all full of shit.
The first time I heard the story of the Binding of Isaac, my brain auto-completed a wildly different ending.
When my teacher said God interrupted to say "lol jk don't kill your son, it was a test," I immediately thought
"A ha! I get it! Obviously, this was a test to see if Abraham could recognize right from wrong. To pass the test, Abe had to realize that child sacrifice is obviously wrong and refuse to do it. Since he was willing to kill his son, Abraham failed the test."
Even as a kid, I was pretty freaked out to hear the "test" was the opposite of what I thought it was.
And I still think my version is better.
(Though my version of the story would still make Yaweh/Elohim and asshole, since he'd still be willing to inflict life-long PTSD on Isaac just to test Abraham.)
Well, as much as I like Pope Bob and his standing up to the antichrist currently infesting the Oval Office, I can't get past an organization covering up child rape for decades (probably centuries), still fighting victims about it, not recognizing that divorce is sometimes the best choice, inserting itself into the medical decisions of women and their doctors, refusing to recognize the validity of women teachers, and refusing to recognize the equality of LBGTQ people and fighting against their civil rights.
Any one of those is sort of a deal breaker for me. Not to mention the fact that misogynistic, racist assholes seem perfectly comfortable converting and sitting in the pews week after week and borrowing the church's authority to push all sorts of regressive, harmful things.
I remember Bill Maher remarking about Pope Francis, shortly after he took office, that now the glass was ⅒ full. When you’re dealing with an institution as committed to authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, greed, hubris, homophobia, pederasty, and misogyny as the Roman Catholic Church, even adding 2-3 grams of enlightenment seems amazing because it doubles what it was already working with.
Centuries. Saint Peter Damien was writing about it 1000 years ago. You can also read Karen Liebreich’s “fallen order” about similar abuse and cover-up scandals 400 years ago.
I left catholic church because i don’t believe in religion. However, in Latin America, where i have many friends, religion is so alive. But the real switch (to evangelicalism) is the result of 40 years of US evangelicals sponsoring south of the border “re-christianizing” across the region. The mega church movement took the deaf-tone catholic church in the 80s and now, in urban areas, you cannot miss it. The is a straight relationship between the US evangelical world and latin America surge. As in the US, these “new” churches are invading politics and modern societies are becoming regressive. Now, in my working suburban city, in the US, 10 years ago, we had a presbyterian and catholic churches. Today, same downtown has at least 25 different types of evangelic “churches”. All targeting immigrants and lower income people. You don’t see this phenomenon in the wealthy, whiter suburb next door. John Oliver did a piece about 10 years ago of the predator behavior of these alternative religions from Christianism. There is no coincidence between the decrease of catholics in Latam and the increase of evangelicals both in the US and south of the border.
An evangelical walks into a bar. Immediately all the Nazis, pederasts, Mafia goombas, foreign spies, imbeciles, Klansmen, drug dealers, assassins, arsonists, and pathological liars get up and leave because clearly the place is going to hell.
All of this, yes. It’s absolutely predatory behavior. It’s also gives people what they think is access to some “special class” of powerful people. White Evangelicals want to BE or replace the government completely.
I'm encouraged both by the numbers leaving religion and those switching. As many of us know from our own experience in deconverting from religion, the first step is often leaving the religion you were raised in - along with its cultural pull. That's the big step. After that, you soon realize that the same doubts you had about your natal religion also apply to your new one. Which leads to the final step of realizing the problem isn't the brand of religion, it's religion itself.
So, I say, "bravo, seekers!" You've taken the hard first step into the light.
One final note: We need to take these self-reported numbers of conversions with a giant grain of salt. Let's see how they hold up over time....
Once again, I would have to WORK to be surprised at this. The Catholic Church has become notorious for its sotto-voce sanction of child sexual abuse, never mind its dogma and doctrine, a great portion of which cannot be found in the bible, and the general tight-ass attitude it tends to project. Slowly but surely, people are waking up to that, and in so doing, they cease to be SHEEP, or at least sheep that have lost their affinity for Catholicism.
They may not be atheists ... YET. That just MIGHT come later!
I wrote this last night. Here at Lake bled in Slovenia, there is a church on an island: the church of the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is what I wrote last night:
“Although the Assumption has long been a belief of many devoted Catholics, it was only declared as official Catholic dogma in 1950. This is the belief that Mary didn’t die, but was assumed bodily into heaven, like Elijah and Enoch. It’s quite a privilege. Jesus got there under his own power, but these three got there by the grace of God.
Where they get this stuff is of course the real question. How could they possibly know? Protestants don’t believe it because it isn’t in the Bible. I can think of plenty of other reasons not to believe it, but that one will do.”
“Or maybe JD Vance’s relatively recent conversion scared them away.”
No, it was JD Vance murdering the Pope that scared them. If he can kill the Pope, imagine what he can do to the regular folks. He’s like the Chupacabra of Christianity.
One thing I noticed in visiting both Mexico and parts of South America was that older folks tended to hold onto Catholicism while younger folks if rejecting it were more likely to lean into their indigenous roots and traditions rather than embrace other type of Christianity. It isn’t surprising when you look at the differences in colonization tactics north and south. One was an extermination and the other allowed traditions to be woven into an otherwise forced Catholicism. Two very different approaches.
Education--secular education--has alot to do with it. Go to Mexico City where so many receive good education and compare that to rural areas and small cities. Like in murica, where most of the flyover states remain the most Christian.
My Catholicism...my entire belief in gods and supernatural realms...died in early childhood.
And when I finally started to see the horrors inflicted by Holy Mother Church on people over the nearly-2000 years of its existence, I am forever grateful that I escaped its clutches. May many many more Catholic children today come to the same realization I did even as I was serving Mass as an altar boy.
In the mideast, Apostasy from Islam gets the death penalty. And while I don't think dominionists have the weight to pull that off in western countries with Christianity, I have no doubt they'd love to if they had the numbers.
I have read people in that movement who expressed their desire to put roughly half of the people in the United States to death. Evidently their loving Jesus would find that very pleasing.
You mean there aren’t enough pedophiles (hello Russell Brand, I see you) converting to Christianity to cover the followers leaving because of all the pedos!?! Ya don’t say.
I'm sure having Couchfucker become part of the fold probably didn't help, considering his track record... but I'd like to think it's more that a critical mass of people have finally woken up to the reality that the RCC has been, and continues to be (Pope Bob's attempts at pacifism notwithstanding) one of the most greedy, rapacious, ass-backwards cesspits of human misery and exploitation in the whole of human history.
But the versions of Protestant they're switching to is the fundies, which is no bueno. If they were going to mainstream liberal denominations, we'd be progressing... those are much easier to drop entirely. The fundies probably have more pedos than Catholics and still pretend they don't have any.
It has been with painful, glacial slowness, but humankind is slowly but surely growing out of its infancy and (I sincerely hope) its adolescence. Honestly, I think if Homo sapiens is to survive, we HAVE to, and a major part of that process is disposing of religion as the specious crutch that it is.
For some of us, that process is one-step, cut and done. For others, yours truly included, there can be multiple steps. The choice to leave Roman Catholicism, with all its strictures and bullshit, even if it is to go from that to some form of Protestantism or another belief outside of the Abrahamic religions, still strikes me as a positive one. It tells me that such people are actually bothering to LOOK at the belief system they are involved in, that they are willing to evaluate it and consider it critically.
I suspect most of us know the phrase about a journey of 1,000 miles starting with a single step. Choosing to leave the RCC, regardless of the destination, strikes me as being a pretty significant one.
Thank you. A phone update deleted some user-IDs. Took some time to get them back. And there is this the ongoing Snooker World Championship going on in Crucible, Chester, England. My favourite sport. Until the final I'll work from home.
The Catholic Church and I went our separate ways over half a century ago, and I never regretted that decision. I did not, however, simply trade old nonsense for new and left religion all together. Maybe if the church could bring back burning heretics and witches alive after having tortured confessions out of them they could turn this around. I have contended for a long time the staggering number of Christian tribes should be a far bigger problem for believers than it is. It speaks to a divine being who supposedly willed the universe into existence, but when it came to the most important message imaginable, . . . couldn’t make himself understood. It also speaks to the complete lack of objective evidence to support the church’s claims.
As a life-long non-believer who had 4 grandparents who didn't believe, I just never felt the need for any of it. My Mom - from a family of apostate and occult Jews - went out as a teen and joined a Methodist church and made us go to church until our teens - needed the church. Churches peddle surety about the unknown and attach it to a social structure. We are a few generations away from people in this Country being able to give up the myths.
The herd instinct runs deep in the human species. It's one of the things that keeps organized religion in business.
Primates are social animals. With the exception of us hermits, most people need to belong to a group of similar individuals.
I think it's very hard for some people who are raised Christian, specifically with a heavy emphasis on the Bible, they have an overwhelming need to believe in the Bible being the word of God, or that God is real. It is almost hard coded as part of their identity. Even if they haven't read the Bible, they sincerely treat it as truth or almost like a historical document. Plus even in a lot of western countries, being seen as religious makes people feel or seem as more moral than others. There are a lot of levels to it imo.
The Bible is like an end-user license agreement on software. Most Christians just scroll straight to the end and click on “I agree.”
Good analogy. I might use that some day.
Same here I left 53 years ago. I, myself didn’t go to another church. I escaped from one insanity why would I want to go to another.
It would be interesting to see the statistics for Islam around the world, too. Muslim communities are surely more close-knit than Catholic ones with more pressure to stay at least nominally within the faith.
When you live in a state where apostasy is a capital offence, you better keep quiet about leaving Islam.
In which case, it would be interesting to know the numbers of those who LEAVE such states for countries where more religious freedom is afforded them. There is a study all by itself.
I would love to see this for Islam and Judaism as well!
Richard Dawkins put out a version of 'The God Delusion' in PDF form as a free download in the Arab world. I don't know the statistics, but I do know it had a lot of hits.
It's easy in Iran: nobody leaves. Otherwise you die.
Allah Snackbar!
Really? Nobody leaves? Then who are all those Iranian diaspora in the West, then?
XJC was referring to leaving the religion while staying in the country, not leaving the country while staying in the religion.
I was lucky: I knew the bible and imaginary fiends contained therein were bullshit by the time I was 8 or 9 and I openly rejected religion by 10. I was kicked out of protestant "Sunday school" for questioning the nonsense they were trying to indoctrinate us with. My parents were both churchgoers but decided that there was no point in making me go.
For many years my mom would ask me to go to church for xmas and Oster and I would say no. Then she would say: "but I raised you to be a christian" to which I would reply: "you also raised me to be straight, how did that work out?"
A good response to "I raised you to BE Christian" would be "No, you raised me to UNDERSTAND Christianity, which is why I left it."
I thought my response was pretty damn good for a 19 year old kid in the early 1980s, who had just come out to family and friends a year before.
My SIL's son came out to her ages ago. Her response was "I know." Sorted.
"you also raised me to be straight, how did that work out?"
Oh, WOOF! Bet THAT was a fun conversation!
One thing she knew early, that I had the same stubborn streak she did. It's why we often clashed but I was always the one that got the phone call in the middle of the night if there was a crisis as my parents aged.
I wasn't brought up particularly religious, so I never had a moment of revelation as it were. Just a gradual eroding of belief. I was a theist, then an agnostic, then an atheist – but if you asked me to tell you when I graduated from one to the other I couldn't. I was always an apatheist anyway. Told my parents I didn't want to go to Sunday school and they just said okay. Never went to church except for weddings and funerals. Religion or its lack never bothered me much at all. I feel lucky about that.
I think you are right to feel lucky. It was a lot more emotionally tumultuous for me. Since my father was my pastor for most of my pre-20 years, leaving religion overlapped with a feeling of rejecting my father, which I did not want to do.
With you there - same sort of upbringing and questioning and steady coursing to 98% atheism. I tithe that remaining two percent to a baseless hankering for the blind clockmaker
I was the same, didn’t believe any of it by second or third grade and told my mother I didn’t want to go anymore. She was not particularly devout, but had been raised Methodist and tried to go through the motions of church once or twice a month when I was young. She said I had to go through 6th grade then could make my own decisions, so I waited her out and the second I had a choice I never went to church again. The Methodist church we attended was relatively progressive, women could be reverends and that sort of thing, so I assume less of an extreme experience than Catholicism, though no version of religion was going to win me over.
I don’t think I ever really fervently believed in my Jewish faith, but I was proud of being Jewish, just as I was picked on for being Jewish. But I don’t think I ever really believed it. Just before my bar mitzvah, I had to experiences that made me question what little faith I had. One of them was asking in Sunday school why God murdered everybody at the time of the flood. That didn’t seem fair at all. I also had a run in with my canter, whom I really admired. But he made it clear it was all about his authority, not about anything else.
Once I had my bar mitzvah, I stopped going. I didn’t go again until I was 28, when my father asked me to go to synagogue with him and my mother. I went to please him,, but I resented going. I told him I wouldn’t do it again.
Similar experience as me, but I stopped going *before* my bar mitzvah (and so I didn't have one).
It was actually preparing for my bar mitzvah that was the final nail in the coffin, so to speak.
I learned the chanting of my Torah text from recordings that my Cantor made for me, but I learned the words from a book that he gave me. Besides the Hebrew in the book, they were these little squiggles that were not part of any Hebrew that I knew. Eventually, being a smart kid and musically inclined, I figured that these were a kind of musical notation. So one day, when I went to practice with my cantor, we reached the end of the recorded lesson. But I kept on going. My cantor stopped me and demented to know where I had learned the additional chanting and text. I said that the little squiggles were musical notation, were they not? He very angrily told me, “that’s not what they are. You will not go beyond what I record for you.” the light went on for 12 year old me, that this was all about his authority and not about anything else.
Whatever religious belief I had left, that killed it.
I presume you know this joke but others may not. There is a small shul somewhere in the old country that is served by a traveling rabbi a few times a year. One year the building is overrun by rats. Everything is tried but nothing succeeds in getting rid of the rats. The traveling rabbi shows up. The people explain the rat problem. He says, “I got this.” He goes into the shul and commands, in the name of God, that all the rats come into the sanctuary. They do. He looks over the assembled rats. Hundreds of them. The rats all look attentively at rabbi. He says, “You are all — every one of you rats — are Bar Mitzvahed!” And not a single rat ever returns to the shul.
But did the rats get a lot of presents from aunts and uncles that they never saw otherwise?
I don’t remember how old I was — probably 8-10 — when the first brick fell out of the wall for me, but I do remember the brick. It was Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt. I asked, “Is she still there? Can we see a picture of the statue of salt?” I expected the answer to be yes. “No, it all been washed away by rain.” Which, on the one hand seemed reasonable, but on the other hand seemed mighty convenient. I got suspicious and, as time went by, I found ever more things to be suspicious of.
Simply asking the priest when something didn't add up and having him give me the "It's a mystery" answer starting me thinking they were all full of shit.
The first time I heard the story of the Binding of Isaac, my brain auto-completed a wildly different ending.
When my teacher said God interrupted to say "lol jk don't kill your son, it was a test," I immediately thought
"A ha! I get it! Obviously, this was a test to see if Abraham could recognize right from wrong. To pass the test, Abe had to realize that child sacrifice is obviously wrong and refuse to do it. Since he was willing to kill his son, Abraham failed the test."
Even as a kid, I was pretty freaked out to hear the "test" was the opposite of what I thought it was.
And I still think my version is better.
(Though my version of the story would still make Yaweh/Elohim and asshole, since he'd still be willing to inflict life-long PTSD on Isaac just to test Abraham.)
"lifelong PTSD" Interesting take eon that foundational story. Looked at one way, it could likely account for lifelong neurotic behavior.
Well, as much as I like Pope Bob and his standing up to the antichrist currently infesting the Oval Office, I can't get past an organization covering up child rape for decades (probably centuries), still fighting victims about it, not recognizing that divorce is sometimes the best choice, inserting itself into the medical decisions of women and their doctors, refusing to recognize the validity of women teachers, and refusing to recognize the equality of LBGTQ people and fighting against their civil rights.
Any one of those is sort of a deal breaker for me. Not to mention the fact that misogynistic, racist assholes seem perfectly comfortable converting and sitting in the pews week after week and borrowing the church's authority to push all sorts of regressive, harmful things.
I remember Bill Maher remarking about Pope Francis, shortly after he took office, that now the glass was ⅒ full. When you’re dealing with an institution as committed to authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, greed, hubris, homophobia, pederasty, and misogyny as the Roman Catholic Church, even adding 2-3 grams of enlightenment seems amazing because it doubles what it was already working with.
New pope, same as the old pope ... same as the old pope ... same as the old pope ...
Slightly different than that one time they had two popes...
So that's where 'does the pope shit in the woods' started. The one bathroom was occupied.
Centuries. Saint Peter Damien was writing about it 1000 years ago. You can also read Karen Liebreich’s “fallen order” about similar abuse and cover-up scandals 400 years ago.
I left catholic church because i don’t believe in religion. However, in Latin America, where i have many friends, religion is so alive. But the real switch (to evangelicalism) is the result of 40 years of US evangelicals sponsoring south of the border “re-christianizing” across the region. The mega church movement took the deaf-tone catholic church in the 80s and now, in urban areas, you cannot miss it. The is a straight relationship between the US evangelical world and latin America surge. As in the US, these “new” churches are invading politics and modern societies are becoming regressive. Now, in my working suburban city, in the US, 10 years ago, we had a presbyterian and catholic churches. Today, same downtown has at least 25 different types of evangelic “churches”. All targeting immigrants and lower income people. You don’t see this phenomenon in the wealthy, whiter suburb next door. John Oliver did a piece about 10 years ago of the predator behavior of these alternative religions from Christianism. There is no coincidence between the decrease of catholics in Latam and the increase of evangelicals both in the US and south of the border.
An evangelical walks into a bar. Immediately all the Nazis, pederasts, Mafia goombas, foreign spies, imbeciles, Klansmen, drug dealers, assassins, arsonists, and pathological liars get up and leave because clearly the place is going to hell.
ROFL !!
All of this, yes. It’s absolutely predatory behavior. It’s also gives people what they think is access to some “special class” of powerful people. White Evangelicals want to BE or replace the government completely.
I'm encouraged both by the numbers leaving religion and those switching. As many of us know from our own experience in deconverting from religion, the first step is often leaving the religion you were raised in - along with its cultural pull. That's the big step. After that, you soon realize that the same doubts you had about your natal religion also apply to your new one. Which leads to the final step of realizing the problem isn't the brand of religion, it's religion itself.
So, I say, "bravo, seekers!" You've taken the hard first step into the light.
One final note: We need to take these self-reported numbers of conversions with a giant grain of salt. Let's see how they hold up over time....
Once again, I would have to WORK to be surprised at this. The Catholic Church has become notorious for its sotto-voce sanction of child sexual abuse, never mind its dogma and doctrine, a great portion of which cannot be found in the bible, and the general tight-ass attitude it tends to project. Slowly but surely, people are waking up to that, and in so doing, they cease to be SHEEP, or at least sheep that have lost their affinity for Catholicism.
They may not be atheists ... YET. That just MIGHT come later!
I wrote this last night. Here at Lake bled in Slovenia, there is a church on an island: the church of the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is what I wrote last night:
“Although the Assumption has long been a belief of many devoted Catholics, it was only declared as official Catholic dogma in 1950. This is the belief that Mary didn’t die, but was assumed bodily into heaven, like Elijah and Enoch. It’s quite a privilege. Jesus got there under his own power, but these three got there by the grace of God.
Where they get this stuff is of course the real question. How could they possibly know? Protestants don’t believe it because it isn’t in the Bible. I can think of plenty of other reasons not to believe it, but that one will do.”
"Where they get this stuff?" As James Bond once said, "Alimentary, my dear Felix!"
I believe the proper punctuation is not a comma.
As James Bond once said:
Aaaah, Po-TAY-to, Po-TAH-to! 😁
“Or maybe JD Vance’s relatively recent conversion scared them away.”
No, it was JD Vance murdering the Pope that scared them. If he can kill the Pope, imagine what he can do to the regular folks. He’s like the Chupacabra of Christianity.
And his unholy relationships with furniture.
One thing I noticed in visiting both Mexico and parts of South America was that older folks tended to hold onto Catholicism while younger folks if rejecting it were more likely to lean into their indigenous roots and traditions rather than embrace other type of Christianity. It isn’t surprising when you look at the differences in colonization tactics north and south. One was an extermination and the other allowed traditions to be woven into an otherwise forced Catholicism. Two very different approaches.
Education--secular education--has alot to do with it. Go to Mexico City where so many receive good education and compare that to rural areas and small cities. Like in murica, where most of the flyover states remain the most Christian.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DGlZi2UtTYA/?igsh=aW9nN2R5bjg5dnNv
😭
Definitely
My Catholicism...my entire belief in gods and supernatural realms...died in early childhood.
And when I finally started to see the horrors inflicted by Holy Mother Church on people over the nearly-2000 years of its existence, I am forever grateful that I escaped its clutches. May many many more Catholic children today come to the same realization I did even as I was serving Mass as an altar boy.
𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑛𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟 𝑏𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑣𝑒 𝑖𝑛...
For now. In the west.
In the mideast, Apostasy from Islam gets the death penalty. And while I don't think dominionists have the weight to pull that off in western countries with Christianity, I have no doubt they'd love to if they had the numbers.
I have read people in that movement who expressed their desire to put roughly half of the people in the United States to death. Evidently their loving Jesus would find that very pleasing.
The towel heads know how to run their mafia. Allah Snackbar!
Opposing religious nonsense is not the same as the racist filth that you display.
At least he's not a pedophile-apologist.
You mean there aren’t enough pedophiles (hello Russell Brand, I see you) converting to Christianity to cover the followers leaving because of all the pedos!?! Ya don’t say.
I'm sure having Couchfucker become part of the fold probably didn't help, considering his track record... but I'd like to think it's more that a critical mass of people have finally woken up to the reality that the RCC has been, and continues to be (Pope Bob's attempts at pacifism notwithstanding) one of the most greedy, rapacious, ass-backwards cesspits of human misery and exploitation in the whole of human history.
Couchfucker killing the last pope didn't help.
If we gotta have a pope, it's good to have Bob.
But the versions of Protestant they're switching to is the fundies, which is no bueno. If they were going to mainstream liberal denominations, we'd be progressing... those are much easier to drop entirely. The fundies probably have more pedos than Catholics and still pretend they don't have any.
Further Thought:
𝐼𝑓 𝑤𝑒’𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑤 𝑢𝑝 𝑎𝑠 𝑎 𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑠, 𝑤𝑒 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑑𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑦𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑚𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑛𝑓𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑒 𝑢𝑠.
-- TheraminTrees
It has been with painful, glacial slowness, but humankind is slowly but surely growing out of its infancy and (I sincerely hope) its adolescence. Honestly, I think if Homo sapiens is to survive, we HAVE to, and a major part of that process is disposing of religion as the specious crutch that it is.
For some of us, that process is one-step, cut and done. For others, yours truly included, there can be multiple steps. The choice to leave Roman Catholicism, with all its strictures and bullshit, even if it is to go from that to some form of Protestantism or another belief outside of the Abrahamic religions, still strikes me as a positive one. It tells me that such people are actually bothering to LOOK at the belief system they are involved in, that they are willing to evaluate it and consider it critically.
I suspect most of us know the phrase about a journey of 1,000 miles starting with a single step. Choosing to leave the RCC, regardless of the destination, strikes me as being a pretty significant one.
“Oh, do you think he was referring to you?”
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8cd4a5f4bf4f740c518f579611bd9c8be0c0f1a32fe58cc72de7e618224a1363.jpg
Apparently, Trump doesn't know the meaning of the word "exonerated"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_Jean_Carroll#Sexual_abuse_and_defamation_lawsuit_against_Donald_Trump
Exonerated is a synonym of guilty. - Trump Dictionary
I blame Reagan. He shut down the mental health sector and that’s why there were 77 million votes for Trump.
Reagan’s actions concerning the mental health sector also created the first class of permanent homeless people. Another part of his “legacy.”
The amount of words that Trump doesn’t know won’t just fit into a dictionary, it *IS* the dictionary.
Held liable not for rape, but for sexual abuse. Heck of an "exoneration."
It's semantics.
In Iowa, there is nothing in our laws that address "rape"....the word. It's identified by other terminology. It appears NY is similar.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/07/donald-trump-rape-language-e-jean-carroll
That’s hilarious!
A poisinous religious society is loosing believers and members. What took the members so long? Anyway, it is worth a (small) celebration.
I haven’t seen you around in a while. Have I just not noticed you were here or were you otherwise occupied? Good to see you.
And agree with your comment.
Thank you. A phone update deleted some user-IDs. Took some time to get them back. And there is this the ongoing Snooker World Championship going on in Crucible, Chester, England. My favourite sport. Until the final I'll work from home.
Err, I thought it was Sheffield, not Chester...
Of course, I was only testing your knowledge, right?