Why LGBT should not opt for Catholic funerals
Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people who have campaigned for LGBT
rights and died have had Catholic funerals complete with Mass.
In the case of an intrinsically unjust law... it is therefore never licit to
obey it, or to "take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or
vote for it"
Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 73
This makes it a sin for gay symbolism to be introduced into the Mass. For
example, there can be no eulogy that praises the person's activities in favour
of LGBT rights. There can be no rainbow flag draped around the coffin.
They should opt for a non-religious funeral and tell the priests to stick their
"services".
The Catholic people may be nice. But if the Catholic faith is evil then the
services must be refused. It is not about hurting people but about refusing to be
honoured by a system of evil beliefs.
Catholic funerals show more concern for doing it the Catholic way than
comforting those left behind. For many who have lost a loved one, the last thing
they want to do is honour the god that supposedly took that person away. And
particularly if that god is against homosexuality and the person was gay.
The priests only officiates at the funeral in the hope that the dead person
repented their "sin" before death. The funeral prayers are for the salvation of
the dead person. They are prayers that the person renounced homosexuality before
death and saw how bad it was. By implication the prayers condemn homosexuality.
For example to pray, "Thy will be done" in the Lord's Prayer is to pray that God
will stamp out homosexuality.
A person who is holy and who has done objective wrong without knowing it will
learn it at the judgement and have to apologise to God. Damage has still been
done and so the just God can't overlook it. The Church says that homosexuality
is still wrong even if, hypothetically, a person can engage in it without
believing that it is sinful. The homosexual will be judged by the Church as bad
regardless of his intentions.
So the Church says that homosexuality is evil. If gay people have sex and this
is wrong, the sex is wrong mainly because it is people using each other as
objects of sexual gratification. The Church has to say this for only that would
explain why the sin is so grave. So, in the Church view, gay people are only
users if they have sex. They are lying about loving one another. They deceive
themselves. It is hard to see then how the Church could approve if a bisexual
person marries a straight person. If somebody can't have sex with the same sex
without being a sweet talking manipulator then it is silly to say they are not
users if they marry the opposite sex and have sex. If you are a user then it
doesn't matter what sex you sleep with. You will be using the members of the
opposite sex and the same sex if you have sex with both. The Church should teach
that if a person has any trace of bisexuality or is gay that person must sleep
with nobody at all until he or she develops 100% heterosexuality.
If the Church knew the person was damned the Church would do nothing when she or
he dies. There would be no funeral. The funeral of a sinner and even a suicide
is only a necessary evil to the Church because they can't be sure the person is
in Hell. People who differed from the morality of the Church or who called
themselves atheists or who lapsed from the Church are degraded by having
Catholic funerals. The funerals are only based on conditional sympathy.
The Church is only a man-made organisation. Why should it matter if one has a
Catholic funeral when that is so? If the Church is not a man-made organisation
then it is God made. In that case, the funeral is declaring that the Church has
been right all along to condemn homosexuality. If one is a gay activist one is
saying that one repudiates this by agreeing to a Catholic funeral.
Christians say that to love the sinner is to hate the sin and vice versa. Hate
the sin and love the sinner means we must judge the sinner fairly and condemn
sin when we see it. To not condemn the sin and not to judge it is to hate the
sinner. Surely then the more sin we see in a person the better. Why? If hating
the sin is another way of loving the sinner as the Church says, then the more
you see a person as a sinner the more you love them. Even if you mistakenly
think they are worse than they are that is brilliant. That the Church does not
draw this conclusion is proof that it knows fine well that to hate the sin is to
want to maliciously hurt the sinner.
When somebody does wrong to you maliciously, you want to hurt that person back.
You hate the sinner and the sin. You see that the distinction between sinner and
sin is a distinction without a difference. The sinner is the sin in the sense
that sin shows what kind of person the sinner is. Christianity says you must
hate the sin but love the sinner which really means, "Hate the sinner but
pretend you don't". You feel personal about the sin. You cannot want to hurt a
sin but only a sinner.
The Christian Church holds that a person in a state of grave sin cannot do any
good work pleasing to God. That is because they won't reconcile with God meaning
they do their goodness in a spirit of independence from him. Indeed, to do good
like this hardens the heart. It is easier to reject obvious evil like hatred and
murder than to reject evil that looks caring. Christians have to believe that
they cannot praise the good works of a sinner. The eulogy of the priest at the
funeral of somebody who lived a gay lifestyle cannot be considered to be
sincere. To them the attitude of the sinner was ,"I am doing this good not
because it is good but because it suits me. If I wanted to be good I would
repent my sin of homosexuality."
The funeral was homage to the Church. It is totally hypocritical of a LBGT
person to pay homage to a religion that opposes lesbian bisexual gay and
transgender rights. The funeral is declaring that the Church serves a need and
should be paid. Yet every penny given to the Church is ultimately used to
manipulate people into believing the message of the Church. Whether the Church
is easygoing or rigid, its ultimate goal is to get all its members to become
ardent and perfect servants of the pope and believers in his message, including
his claim that homosexuality is immoral.
The Church believes that if you are gay with a clear conscience you are still a
bad person. You are still a person doing wrong. You won't get a reward from God
for doing good that is really evil. The Church regards the existence of people
who are gay with a clear conscience as hypothetical and that it is impossible in
the real world. The Church holds that natural law condemns homosexuality and
that natural law is written on the heart and reason. So if anybody holds that
homosexuality is right or acceptable it is because they have managed to distort
their conscience which is a sin. So nobody in Catholic dogma can hold that
homosexuality is ever allowable or that anybody can really believe it should be
allowable. The Church and society don't make excuses for people who believe that
a killer of prostitutes did right - they class such people as evil. They say
that it is their belief in evil that it is good that precisely makes them evil.
The Church finds it impossible to hold that a person who says they hold that
homosexuality is good sometimes or all the time is a good person.
To desire a Catholic funeral to please your relatives when you are for example
gay or atheist is to refuse to be your own person. It is denying them the right
to know what kind of person you are and to let you live as being that person. It
is to fail to take a stand against the Church for the benefit and light of
others. Some LGBT people opt for a Catholic funeral only for the ceremonial or
for the pleasing of believing relatives or both. But the price they pay is their
belief and sense of self-worth degraded. Loving relatives would never expect
that of them. And besides, it is only a tradition that the Church does funerals
and funeral masses. It could have been very different. Christians could have had
a tradition that the relatives devise and perform the funeral and simply pray
for the dead after without any priest being involved.
LGBT people need to divorce the Church and plan their own funeral. It is more in
keeping with self-respect to plan your own instead of having a church coming
along with silly and irrelevant rites and simpering two-faced platitudes.
If you are gay or lesbian and if you really believe in gay and lesbian equality
with straight people you will defect from the Catholic Church. You will end your
membership. You will also plan a Catholic Church free funeral. If your folks
really want a priest there, then surely a priest would agree to do a
non-religious funeral for you?
Why divorce the Church so? Why?
Because it is silly to argue that Jesus was good therefore Jesus would have
supported gay rights. He made slight improvements to the treatment of women.
Jewish women were married as children to their men. He did nothing about that
and even banned divorce. These women were compelled and they made no vow to the
husband during the marriage ceremony.
Because, the Church is a human organisation. It is therefore nothing that
special.
Because the Church opposes equal rights for gay people and straight people.
Because the Church will not change its teaching that such equality is wrong.
Because the Church claims this teaching is God's and God knows what he is doing
even if everybody on earth thinks he doesn't.
Because the Church says that doing wrong offends God and does wrong to him. If
there were no God this problem would not exist. You would just be able to hurt
people and animals and yourself. Religion's teaching makes wrongdoing more
malicious than it need be.
Because you can't join a religion and expect it to change its teaching to suit
you - no religion can please everybody.
Because to allow yourself to be listed as a member of the Church means you
support its right to oppose gay equality. Whether you like it or not you are a
supporter of the Church and its official teaching.
Because you are plugging the Church by supporting it despite its treatment of
you - that implies that the Church is more important than you or your ideas or
beliefs. You are sanctioning its opposition to gay rights in that sense. You are
being homophobic by default if not conscious intent. You are endorsing that
default homophobia. You are paving the way for homophobia as in conscious
intent.
Because your belief in gay rights puts you outside the Church for how can you
really be a member of the Church when you reject its teaching? A Church is a
community united by doctrine and faith.
Because the Church teaches that God has set up bishops and priests to preach his
message with authority and so they must be obeyed even if wrong for the sake of
the Church.
Because to support any beliefs of the Church is to deny that extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence - so you can't complain then if believers
irrationally oppose gay rights.
Because the Church says God comes first which contradicts our natural instinct
that the people we see should come first and indicates that we must obey the
Church and put our doubts and fears aside to do so.
Because if God comes first then our feelings do not come first. We must help the
poor not because we feel compassion but because God commands it.
Because to regard the Church as supernatural removes the right to a reality
check - the supernatural does not make sense to us from our perspective and we
cannot understand it meaning any magical doctrine or claim can be true so belief
in the supernatural indicates that it is possible that homosexuality is immoral
for it is very unlucky.
Because the Church teaches that God, like the state, may make laws that seem to
many to make little sense, because he knows things we don't and sees the long
term consequences and knows the future.
Because the Church teaches that the state should punish sin - the state can
punish what it wants, all legal systems are imperfect and may be too light on
certain crimes and harsh on others - meaning it teaches the state has the right
to enforce God's law against homosexuality.
Because the Church oversimplifies things to trick people - for example, the
instability of the family is blamed on cohabitation though it makes no sense to
say that it is simply cohabitation that is to blame.
Because he who hates your sin hates you in so far as you are to blame for the
sin - sin shows the kind of person you are so to hate the sin is to hate the
sinner. Hate and love can co-exist but religion has no right to deny that hating
sin means hating the sinner at least to a degree. The Church incites hatred
against gay people.
Because human nature would find it impossible to love gay people if their
example is leading themselves and others into danger of everlasting punishment
in Hell after death - hate is the only logical reaction for a genuine believer.
Christianity is dangerous.
Because membership and use of Church services gives out a message to ordinary
people that the Catholic organisation is good enough. It is not the pope and the
bishops you must blame for the destructive anti-gay message of the Church. It is
those who give them the money and who are listed as members of the Church. The
members need leaders. The ordinary people are those who are ultimately to blame
for the evil teaching and the vices that proceed from the leaders. They haven't
spoken with their feet.
If a religion is made up of hypocrites or of people who do not understand it
properly and so who do not believe in it but in what they think its about, then
its far worse to support it.
In a democracy, if most of the people want things done a certain way that is the
way they should be done. If a state is made up of mostly conservative Catholics,
then they have the right to see to it that the state outlaws homosexuality for
example on pain of incarceration in jail. Whoever does anything that encourages
religious belief is helping the religion to get power. That was how religion got
into a position to take away civil liberties and it can and will again.
Church cannot change to suit everybody. So why should it change to suit your
ideas of gay and lesbian rights? Do you want it to start allowing gay marriage?
Why should it do what you want and why should it not listen to gay and lesbians
who feel that marriage itself is nonsense and outmoded and do what they want?
To be listed as a member of the Church is to support the Church. You might not
support it financially or by going to Church but you are giving the Church
minimal support.
To accept any of the services provided by the Church is a betrayal of lgbt
rights. The Church today claims to be a hospital for sinners and guides them in
small steps towards its idea of the truth and it seeks to attract people to the
alleged truth rather than proselytise. That is why it is serving you. It is
tactical. You betray lgbt rights by taking anything from the Church.
Those who do not leave the Church do so because they want to be part of the
Church community. Many of them do not give a toss about the Catholic faith. To
support the Catholic community is not supporting the Catholic Church. To support
Catholics as people is not the same as supporting Catholics as Catholics. True
Catholics accept the faith. Whoever opposes or does not care about the Catholic
faith has already left the Church in his heart but is just not acting it out
because he wants to fit it. He doesn't have the integrity. His respect for the
Catholics is false and based on deception.
Followers of religion have had a religious high or they accept religion because
somebody else has had one and told them about it. The high conveys a strong
imaginative sense of god's reality and they feel sure of the presence of God and
the truth of his religion that he started. This really makes God an idol of the
imagination. Believers have a responsibility to know this and to examine
themselves. Not to bother means they are really just engaging in a fun form of
bigotry. You can be a bigot without realising it. For LGBT to support Christian
bigotry is to fan the flames of bigotry that may destroy them one day.
Family pressure is no excuse for having a Catholic funeral. You could devise
your own version of the funeral rites and have the priest participate but that
would not make it a Catholic funeral. That might be a good compromise.
LGBT who have Catholic funerals are standing up for the teaching of the Church
for the leadership decides the official teaching not the people. They are
traitors.