Posts by Deborah
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@ Gareth
for me it's about opening up the institution of marriage to everyone in whatever way they see fit. So long as you sign the official bit of paper somewhere, it shouldn't matter if that's in a church, a backyard or a gang headquarters.
Nah... I see that as religions co-opting the power of the state in order to reinforce their own standing. It's not just having the ceremony in a church - it's getting the celebrant (priest, vicar, witch, whoever) to do the official work of the state as well i.e. we invest the person with that particular state power. That gives that person a particular standing within the state. That is, it gives religion a particular standing within the state. I'm agin that.
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I fear however we've left behind 'the gays' and their need to be treated like the rest of us and either have marriage, or have it done away with as a civil institution.
I think that's because for most of us, it's a no-brainer. The only issue is how to achieve it i.e. either gay New Zealanders having exactly the same access to state-administered marriage as all other New Zealanders, or no state-administered marriage at all.
I'm all in favour of anyone who wants to get married being required to have some form of civil ceremony, and then anyone who wants to go off and have their own private ceremony in some other institution is perfectly welcome to do so. But that private ceremony should not convey any civil standing; it's the civil ceremony that does that. Clergy who perform wedding ceremonies within their churches would no longer be regarded as providing the civil ceremony as well.
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Chris has an account of how it all happened: Never trust a man with a megaphone.
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@Deborah
Yes... but I can't help but think that people spouting bigotry and hatred rely on our good manners not to call them out on it. As long as everyone is polite and civilised and above all nice in their manner, you can say quite vicious and nasty things.
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But hasn't Tess simply been restating, in a thoughtful way, the tenets of a church to which you at one point subscribed? This isn't to diminish your rotten experience with the Catholic church, but it's going to be hard to have a discussion if the harsh words get thrown around all the time.I think the problem from my point of view, all along, is that that where you saw someone being nice and polite, I saw someone hiding the misogyny, homophobia and self-protecting nature of the Catholic church behind a veil of polite words. I was alerted to it by the way that Tess would say that "The Catholic church says x, but of course lots of ordinary individual Catholics say / think / do y." That's a way of lulling people into thinking that the writer knows that the Church says silly things, but of course, the writer herself or himself would never say such things. But we never heard what Tess herself thought until she was pressed on it. I had to ask twice before she said:
I accept the Church's teachings.
Lets be clear about what that means. That means she regards homosexual sex as a sin. That means she regards the conception of my children as a sin. It means that there should be no abortion, no contraception, no divorce, unless the church gets to clip the ticket. There should be no marriage unless the marriage is between a man and a woman. The Catholic church is a very, very intolerant institution, and when pressed, Tess said that she subscribed to its teachings. So all that talk about the people in the pews, the ordinary Catholics, was a massive fudge.
And there's some other bizarre argumentative techniques, like throwing big philosophy words around to try to bedazzle people. Like this:
Idiot analyses religion from a utilitarian perspective - what does belief achieve?
Well, no. I/S was analysing religion from a teleological point of view i.e. what is the purpose of religion. Utilitarianism is a particular ethical theory, in which each person counts for one and only one, and what matters in terms of counting is the consequences of an action.
and this:
From my perspective same-sex marriage is an ontological impossibility.
In other words, because marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman, it is logically impossible to have a same sex marriage. So why not just say that, in the straightforward everyday language that we all use, instead of dressing it up in big words. (This is something that I tell my philosophy students - never use one big word where five small words will do.)
And then Tess trotted out some of the rather awful defences that have been tried in respect of the Catholic priests who raped children, and the other Catholic religious (priests, brothers, nuns) who systematically abused vulnerable children.
That's why I really don't care that Tess has been nice and polite. Give me Craig's vitriol any day. At least it's honest.
I reread my way through all of this thread before writing this (please, please, compliment me on my sincerity, and my effort, because, really, those things ought to count), and having done so, this comment seemed odd to me:
We got our civil marriage solemnised in the Church because of that.
I don't know whether that means that Tess and her partner got married in a civil ceremony, and subsequently had a separate Catholic wedding, or whether they had a Catholic wedding that happened to count as a civil ceremony too.
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An abuse too far by the Catholic church - Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian - Comment is Free
There needs to be a far more probing analysis of the structure of authority within the Catholic church, and the culture of deference and obedience expected of lay people towards priests. These bred a preoccupation with maintaining the prestige and authority of church institutions; any threat to that priority – regardless of the cost to the welfare of individuals - had to be stifled. These are the characteristics which have made the Catholic church morally bankrupt.
The CICA Report - Ophelia Benson - Butterflies and Wheels
This is the Catholic church, don't forget, which is always making a parade of its extreme compassion and sympathy and tenderness toward the fetus. These are real, thinking, feeling children who were starved, frozen, beaten, terrorized, taken away from their mothers, prevented from ever seeing their mothers, called horrible names, denied an education, made to work at slave labour, denied even the small wages they had theoretically earned - this is the compassion and tenderness of the Catholic church.
Courage - Ophelia Benson - Butterflies and Wheels
It's repulsively understandable, what the archbishop said. He was thinking about people like him - colleagues - fellow clerics. He was sympathizing with their situation. But that's just what's so repulsive. They're not the victims here, just as Himmler and Eichmann were not the victims in Nazi Germany. The archbishop shouldn't be worrying about people like him, because he should be so frantic with grief and shame at what was done to some thirty thousand children that he can't think about anything else. But he's not - he's not the least bit frantic with grief and shame - he has the presence of mind and the placid quotidian selfishness to think about the people he's familiar with.
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Warning: this link could be triggering for survivors of sexual assault and rape.
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Do you accept people having any form of sincere belief in the Divine?
You can have any number of sincere beliefs you like. That doesn't make the content of the belief true. It's just a belief. By analogy, many children have a sincere belief in Santa Claus. That doesn't make Santa Claus true.
That's a very straightforward, epistemological point. The sincerity with which a belief is held is no indicator of the truth.
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That's all fine, Tess. Whatever. But it doesn't clarify whether you follow all the church's teachings, or accept some and reject others.
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Just because I agree with Church teaching does not mean I have abdicated anything of my own free will.
Can you clarify, Tess? This is getting very confusing now. In many places in this thread, you've been at pains to stress that you individually accept the right on individuals to do whatever they like in their bedrooms (subject to the consenting adults criterion), but now you say you follow the church's teachings. And of course, the church does, loudly and conspicuously, condemn any sex other than consenting sex between a man and a woman who are married. To each other, for the pendants out there.
1. Did you mean to say, "Just because some of my views coincide with church teaching...."
(That's a problem of course, because it means that you are rejecting the church as a moral leader, and setting up yourself as the definer of morals, for yourself. NB, I'm saying "for yourself" because I realise that in this thread you have been at pains to say that you personally don't want to interfere with individuals' choices.)
2. Or did you mean to say that you consider all church teachings and then work out for yourself which ones you do and don't agree with (that's a version of 1. above, but it just reverses which one comes first, and it suffers from the same problem as 1. i.e. setting yourself up as the definer of morals for yourself).
3. Or do you mean that you follow all the church's teachings?
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I don't see that saying nasty and vicious things in a polite manner is a good thing, at all. I thoroughly dislike hearing misogyny and homophobia, no matter whether it's said politely or not.
As for tolerating different belief systems - fine, just as long as you don't try to impose your belief systems on me. And that includes co-opting the power of the state to support your own belief systems, through such things as tax exemptions, or taking your salary from the public purse but refusing to do part of the job. As I/S says, the moment you step out of your own private sky-fairy worship, and into any dealings in the public world, then you must keep your fancies to yourself. And that includes employing people, or providing services to people, where you simply are not allowed, by law, to discriminate.