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[annwfyn]

An interesting article on the Catholic church.

I found this and quite liked it. It struck me as interesting and has a lot of things in it worth saying.

In other news, I shall not tell anyone how to vote today. So far three different people on my flist have posted very articulate, persuasive and heartfelt LJ entries telling me to not vote Labour/Conservative/Lib Dem, and all of them have contained the subtext (possibly unintentionally) of 'I will think you a bad person if you do vote this way'.

This strikes me as mildly awkward.

I shall, instead, cast my vote in the silence of the polling booth later on and probably never tell anyone which way I voted.

Comments

[ginasketch.livejournal.com]

There are nice people in all religions, I just wish people would speak out more against the bad side of it instead of getting upset whenever anyone criticizes it.

Reason 89798289423 why I left I suppose.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think it really depends on the social circles you move in.

I was raised in a pretty academic, atheist environment. Then I hung out with left wing, earnest students who were very anti-organised religion. I've met way more Richard Dawkins types in my real life than I've ever met crazy religious types, and all the crazy religious types I've met have been hard core protestants, who were often very critical of the Catholic church whilst being really insane on a lot of the same subjects themselves.

I can totally see how from your perspective - you grew up in a Catholic country, didn't you? - it could seem really different and needs criticising lots more.

Not that you're wrong. You may well be right. It's just that I've never been in that environment.

[ginasketch.livejournal.com]

I've seen it in all social circles unfortunately. Granted, most of them were back in Belize, where Catholicism was beaten into my skull at church, school and society in general. Even though I stopped going to church at the age of 12, It wasn't until I was 15 or 16 that I rejected it completely. Now and then I do still run across extremists like that girl who lived in Rachel's house and thought I was evil because I wore a lot of black!

Still, the extremists are now avoidable for me, and though they aggravate me, I can give them a wide berth.

Lately I've been more concerned with seeing some Catholics that seem moderate and insist they aren't like the extremists, but get very upset if anything bad is said about the pope. I have a girl on my f list who always got upset whenever the Pope or his lackeys were criticized, but would insist that she was a "liberal catholic." I was worried she was going to blow up in one of my recent posts, hence my aggressive disclaimer, but thankfully there was silence.

I guess the best analogy I can think of is it's like privilege: Being white doesn't make you a bad person, but denying that slavery ever happened, or saying that we don't live in a system that has been founded on oppression is pretty disingenius.

And that's pretty much my problem with some (but not all) Catholics today.

And yeah I've met atheist jerks too* and I can't stand them, but I will say that even though people like Dawkins are insufferable twats, at least they aren't in charge of large power systems that advocate homophobia etc.

*One of the dumbest arguments I've ever had with someone: "If there was no religion there would be no more wars." ahahhahahahahahah!