Don't Hate Gays Enough? No Communion For You!

The obviously appropriate and proportional response to a teenager posting a "vote no" message (on the recent MN ballot measure that attempted to enshrine homophobia in the state constitution):

Tell him he can't be confirmed as an adult in the church, and when her parents ask you about it ban the lot of 'em from partaking in communion.

"Golly, all these newfangled Internets sure do get in the way of my hate preachin'!"

I just can't imagine how Christianity is having trouble attracting and retaining young believers! Obviously making sure fags know their place is a valuable part of...whateverthefuck reasons people have for getting their skybeard on on Sundays.

BONUS ROUND: You can lose your job, too!

Just to be clear, this is not a recent invention just for the gay marriage debate. Teachers are routinely fired by Catholic schools for expressing pro-choice thoughts. The Church religiously (heh) maintains the fiction that every member and employee accepts every teaching. If not, see ya.

Ask Galileo.

Very true. In fact, here's a fun little story from the time I spent in teacher's college, expecting to get a job in the Ontario separate school board.*

During one of our classes, the following example was used: Let's say that you're teaching a sociology class, and the subject of abortion comes up. During the debate, a student in your class ask you for your own opinion on the debate - are you pro-choice, or anti-abortion? In this scenario, you are in fact personally pro-choice, although you have never shared your opinion with your students.

Do you:

A) Tell the students that your own opinion should not matter because you're more interested in fostering debate between the class members, and would rather not sway anybody by expressing an opinion.

B) Tell the students you are pro-choice.

C) Lie, and tell the students you are anti-abortion.

The correct answer, of course, is C. You are supposed to lie. Technically, you're supposed to be anti-abortion in the first place, but if you are not, you are supposed to lie.

This was a pretty interesting example to use at the time, because a teacher had literally been fired just a couple of weeks before that class for choosing A instead of C. Which is exactly how I would have handled it. I, apparently, would have also been wrong.

* Ontario, for those of you who don't know, has a separate school system just for Catholics. I went to separate grade and high schools, and as I have many family members who work in the system I was a shoo-in for job. As it happens, I decided I didn't want to be a teacher - but that's another story.

A significant part of Galileo's problem was that he was, by all appearances (insofar as the people judging him were concerned), a raging dickhead.

Hmm. I seem to remember a ... something about that being, what's it called again... oh yeah, a SIN. Commandment. That's the word I was looking for.

Maybe there's a secret Catholic Catholic Bible the Vatican keeps secret from us mortals that has the otherwise publicly omitted exclusion clauses for "except when asked about abortion" and "except when covering up institutionalized pedophilia".

Jaysis that is infuriating. What an awful organization.

. . .and discussing Obamacare and birth control, and . . .

Sure, but so is going against the church's teachings. Guess which one wins?

Also, if you lie in the interest of the Jesus, you are automagically forgiven, or ?

Commandment ("engraved in stone by God's own Burning Bush™) >>> Papal ("got the most likes in secret Cardinal Facebook gathering") Bull*. Duh.

*may or may not reflect reality

To answer seriously for a moment: The Bible isn't as against lying as you might believe. There's a commandment to not bear false witness, but that's a very specific kind of lie. White lies, the things we have to do to exist as a social being around other people, isn't that big of a deal.

If you REALLY want to get into it, sin is in the heart. If you lied to somebody for their own good, is that a sin? My hazy recollections of Catholicism would say no. If you lied to hurt somebody, or for selfish reasons, that's a sin.

It's also good to remember that the Catholic God isn't an idiot. He's crazy, but he's not stupid. Too many non-Catholics think the confessional is a get-out-of-jail-free card - like I can go and jack off a million times and call my Mom some bad names or whatever but as long as I confess I'm cool, right? Wrong. God KNOWS if your confession is sincere or not. An insincere confession is a waste of time. One of the perks of being omnipotent, I suppose.

As an aside (and I'm sure I've mentioned this before), the anti-onanism thing was a huge factor in me losing my faith. Who am I possibly hurting by masturbation? How could that possibly be a sin in any sort of rational sense of the word? That's like God manifesting a Ferrari in front of me and then going "Awesome car, right? Now don't look at it or drive it."

Good stuff, madkevin. I was in it more for the lulz though. On the other hand, the outrage for the obvious hypocrisy is real.

In my mind, lying/ignoring to cover up pedophile priests and directly lying about personal beliefs to school children whom you are charged to teach both fall SQUARELY into the "false witness" category anyway.

This is how the devil gets you. Not being against abortion in the first place is the Original Sin, which leads to the sinful lies you have to then tell to keep from being fired. It's just sin on top of sin with sin syrup and whipped sin cream and a sin cherry on top.

The correct position is to not have the wrong opinion in the first place, cause then you don't have to lie about it. You sinner.

I think the Devil got me two seconds into my first co-ed gym class.

I'll take two, with an extra side of sin, crispy.*

haha! get it?!

/sadface in mirror

I was a little different, in that it just made me decide the Church was focusing on weird random shit and that if God was as loving and forgiving as they said, He wouldn't actually give the tiniest of shits about someone masturbating.

I always thought it was weird they used Onan as an example for why you shouldn't jerk off. It's more like an argument against birth control, and even that is sort of stretching it, since I think the point was more "don't be an asshole and shirk your extremely fucked up duties."

Uh.

Yeah I think most Christian sects agree that the motivation is more important than the act. They just don't like applying it in uncomfortable scenarios. For example the various Mosaic Law bits about marriage and sexuality that are ignored because the issue is GAY GAY GAY.

Yep, another unfortunate false thing that most Christian sects teach, in part due to poor exegesis and in part because penis/vagina is dirty.

But penis/vagina are awesome! They need to embrace the penis/vagina!

As much as I have philosophical/moral objections to various Christian (and specifically Catholic teachings - and am seriously annoyed by the stuff upthread - I'm always a bit surprised to find other people's defaithification process actually hinged on this or that doctrinal point.

For me it was all about the fundamental metaphysics of "wait why do we believe this again, why do we not believe all these other religions, what the hell does this all have to do with the big bang and physics?"

Turning back to OP... I almost wish I had enough of a paddle left in Catholicism to send an angry note to someone (who would ignore it.) Maybe I will anyway.

EDIT: Reading the story, and given the diocese's earlier action in firing that teacher I'm wondering if it's the bishop behind this, which would explain the odd phrasing of the priest and the father of the kid saying the priest was just a messenger. (Could be that the father's just overly dutiful vis a vis the church of course.)

)

To be clear, my "I was a little different" was meant to imply I didn't actually defaithify. I simply broke up with the Church. :P

Perhaps you're underestimating how much I loved masturbation.

To clarify, I don't in any way object to moral church-divorcing or disbelief-commencement. I just have this frequently falsified expectation that straight-up incredulity would be more prevalent as a reason than it seems to be.

So....wait....their position is that if you don't vocally, publicly decry how awful homosexuality is, the Catholic church won't delicately place this mouthful of delicious man on your tongue and let you slurp down his luscious love juice? I don't think I understand Catholicism.

Brian Seiler, your posts often vex and annoy me, but I wish I could like this one more than once.

Obviously y'all need a little more Jesus in ya'.

French jerkwards march against gay marriage legislation. Fox News is presumably at a loss.

Awww, she thinks women having orgasms is part of reproduction. Though the mental image of an orgasm firing an egg down the ol' Fallopian tubes is kind of cool.

I dunno, I find the idea that any man would underestimate how much a teenage boy loves masturbation to be absurd. But people do tend to forget things as they age so then again...

Your lack of understanding stems from crass ignorance. As every other devout Catholic, I always make sure to whisper NO HOMO before swallowing, which makes it all right. And even if I somehow forgot, the priest has already said it while casting the transubstantiation spell: it's somewhere in the Latin, everybody knows that.

Not only that but by saying he would perform the brotherly duty and then pulling out on purpose, he was essentially fornicating which carried the death penalty. Jews who shirked this duty by simply refusing were simply excluded from the assembly. (I'm speaking from only an Old Testament point of view, there was almost certainly further development in the Talmud and elsewhere.)

In summary: you are exactly right and this will never be repeated in a religious organization where cloistering the dirty penis is top priority. This passage of Scripture in fact is a lynchpin in the Catholic position against contraception.

Isn't that what they thought in the Victorian era? That orgasms were needed for to get babies? I can't be assed to look it up.

I like Bible chat but everyone's agreeing with each other here

I don't know about you, but I think I've just found my Thanksgiving dessert.

I think we can all agree that, as Richard Pryor famously said, "Getting some pussy beats having a war."

That was before the enlightenment, I believe. That's when they started dissecting people and learned that men and women had different insides. Before that they ("they" meaning Europe and the British Isles, I can't speak for the rest of the world) figured women were inferior versions of men, so if men had to orgasm to produce a baby, so did women.

Well, sort of, but also a bit of cart before the horse. It was solid Victorian medical science that women were prone to a lot of nervous issues which were symptomatic of hysteria. They were advanced men of science, so they no longer believed that hysteria was literally the restless womb wandering around the innards, blocking off passages and making mischief. But it was true that wombs get uppity and upset when not kept topped up with baby at regular intervals, so figuratively it was still womb madness, it was just that the ancients didn't have a clear picture of the insides of people.

A good hysterical paroxysm (it really isn't scientific to call it orgasm when that's what men have, and women aren't men. That just stands to reason. Men understand reason better than women, on account of not suffering so many nervous maladies in their life. No restless wombs, mainly, but just in general too) was always a good treatment for the symptoms, and you have to admire victorian medical science for inventing the vibrator as a time-saving measure--if you're a busy doctor, getting a patient to a proper hysterical paroxysm takes far too much time when done manually. There are many other patients to see and fees to collect. Referring them to a midwife for treatment didn't help that, because this was before healthcare networks, and a referral didn't help the doctor's pocketbook one bit, quite the contrary. Thus, medical SCIENCE stepped in. In vibrating form. Then technology took over and home versions were available. (You thought a fainting couch was for fainting? Well. "Fainting.") But that's symptomatic treatment; the unhappy unbabbied womb was still the pesky cause of all the hysteria. Now, if all the hysterical neuralgia was blocking the relevant passages (the tubes getting spastic, you might say) that could certainly interfere with conception, so a good hysterical paroxysm will only help that.

Thus concludes our lecture, gentleman. Please enjoy your laudanum, and remember to never wash your hands before you operate.

Alternate headline: Catholic Church Does Gay-Friendly Teen Favor By Denying Him Entry In Terrible Organization.

There's a specific Catholic term for this which is entirely cool with the church leadership. Mental reservation.

The Irish Times link requires a login but the article is reproduced here in its entirety.