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.



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