CATHOLIC LIBERALS

When you think of religious freedom you tend to think of religious liberals.  Some of these are political liberals mistaken for religious ones or who have not realised they just hold that the state should allow religious choice on humanist secular grounds.  Now, while a religion may say that the state should let people make their own choices in faith they do not act like they believe that themselves.  Children are pressured into membership of a religion just just their parents and schools want them to follow their religion.    Also, God does not do religious freedom.  If you hold that God is wrong to forbid certain things and you see that as your religious belief, Jesus will cast you into Hell.  You will not be granted citizenship of Heaven.  God allowing the state to let you choose your religion does not imply God is pro-religious freedom.  A dictator who is kind to you is still an oppressor so this God is not pro-religious freedom.

A harmful fundamentalist religion remains a force for harm and lies even if its spokespersons claim to be liberal.  A religion is a bigger thing than what anyone thinks.  There is so much that its leaders do not know.  And anybody can falsely claim to speak for something or someone.  Liberals can treat truths that are mutually exclusive as both true.  This is ambivalence and it is lip service.  If the Bible is more pro-violence than love no liberal can pretend different and remain a liberal.  He or she is a liar not a liberal and lies seek to harm your freedoms by keeping the truth from you.

Liberal religionists are saccharine and not as nice as they pretend.  They may reject the idea of any group claiming to be the one true Church or having the authority to get God's truth in a reliable fashion but are they not claiming to be the one true something themselves?  They are and lying to us.  For example, saying God is a vague kind and nondogmatic being is a dogma itself.  A loose principle is still a principle.  It excludes those who don't hide behind feel-good psychobabble.

The reason why many today feel that the idea of objective morality, the notion that love and justice are obligatory, is wrong is because they think these things are too vague and hard to get right.  You have objective greyness not objective morality.  The Bible according to some is contradictory and vague on morality.  If so it cannot ground objective morality.  To say it does and that you do that with it is to lie.  Liberals stand for and encourage the notion of a vague morality. That is hideous if they are wrong or not accurate enough.  The damage would be  beyond belief.

Let us consider Catholic liberals.

If Catholicism or any religion is a man made religion then it will have errors. In that case a progressive Catholic (or whatever) does not exist. What you have is a person using the label who is trying to mend the errors while pretending the religion is definitely from God.
 
They don't take the Church seriously when it says it cannot change. The assertion by the Church that it protects the doctrines taught by Christ and the apostles and cannot change them is a doctrine. The liberal rejects the basic Catholic doctrine that Jesus left the Church under his protection so that we would know what was his doctrine and what was not.

To apologise for hurting somebody does not mean you admit you did wrong.
 
Liberals reject that as if doctrine is bad but they make it a doctrine that it is wrong!
 
Liberals pick and choose what they want to believe out of their scriptures and they still say they are the Word of God. Why don't they edit them and issue a shortened version without the errors? If the miraculous bits are lies then why keep them in?
 
Liberals form their religious opinions without even looking at the case for Church doctrines. They would at least need to have academic qualifications that are relevant or experience. But they plod on without them. They must be infallible just like that! They don't even need to research!
 
They want to turn the Church into a society based on mere opinions. Nobody can take it seriously. If you have the right to say you are Catholic while believing unCatholic things then why stop there? Why not argue that you can set up a Catholic parish without the authorisation of the Church? If the Church authority is misguided on doctrine then how can it be trustworthy in anything else? Indeed setting up an authorised parish would show far more trust in the Church than rejecting its doctrines would.
 
They are not afraid to say they want gay marriage and women priests in the Church when they could say that the doctrine of Jesus dying for sinners and rising again for them so wonderful. This is about social and political agenda not religion.
 
They preach that we must not offend Muslims or Jews etc. But they are not afraid to offend Catholics by saying the Church should change and allow gay marriage etc.
 
They deny people the right to join a religion because it will not change with the times. A religion that changes to suit the fashions does not suit any reasonable person. It is one thing to treat man's word as God's word but it is far crazier to do this when man's word is always changing. That is shameless idolatry.
 
Suppose religious faith is good. The religious person who wants to replace it with opinions is then taking away something good from the believer.
 
The fundamentalist can go to a huge effort to give his fundamentalist system some coherence and credibility. The liberal does not worry too much about the coherence and the credibility of his own version of faith. The liberal is far more dangerous than the fundamentalist. Better to be a rabid fundamentalist who cares about truth and honesty and who will change his mind if the evidence is good enough then to be a wishy washy liberal who cares about none of these things. The liberal is more dangerous in the sense of being more irrational than the fundamentalist. The liberal does not care if he gives people encouragement in bad thinking habits that can lead to great error and damage.
 
The fundamentalist who thinks he knows his belief is true is far more rational than the liberal who thinks his opinion is knowledge. There is hope for people who try to be rational but none for those who are fans of liberal shit. They only make chaos.
 
The Catholic liberal regards his own opinions as sacred but may bitterly oppose and be intolerant of what he terms the Vatican line - what he perceives as the opinions of the Church. But this is inconsistent. Despite himself he is saying, "My opinions are sacred and so are the Vatican's worst opinions."
 
It is the height of arrogance to act as if your opinions are sacred - opinions by their nature can never be sacred. They invite others to consider them but not take them seriously unless there is solid evidence that they are right. When you are calling something your opinion you are telling others to correct it if it is wrong. A sacred opinion is a dogma. The liberals have their sacred opinions and they hypocritically abominate dogma. They are just fundamentalists who happen to be better charmers than the rabid angry and fearful fundamentalists.
 
It is a short step from, "My religious opinions are sacred and I follow them even if they cause misery to others" to "The Bible's opinions are sacred so I have the right to murder gay people for God said we must stone them to death." Both liberals and fundamentalists think their opinions are sacred even if they lead to suffering for themselves or those who they influence.
 
Liberals may say it is intolerant and arrogant of the pope to say he knows God exists. Or that he knows gay marriage is wrong. Or that he knows contraception does more harm than good. They say he does not know these things. But just because they don't know them does not mean he doesn't know them. What gives them the right to tell another person what that person knows and does not know? They boast what great fans of respect and tolerance and freedom they are!
 
Battered Partners need to be told that the abusive partner will do it again “because that is who he is”. You can’t say that if you believe in love the sinner and hate the sin. Both liberals and fundamentalists claim to hate sin. The only difference is that the liberal tends to hate sins that are clearly anti-social such as violence and rape. The fundamentalist will hate far more things than that. Even a person entertaining doubts about his faith will be seen as doing something hateful. A person staying away from Church services will also be seen as doing something despicable. The liberal will tend to argue that attending Church is not a big deal.
 
Moderate and liberal religion likes to pretend to believe that you can love the sinner and hate the sin. The members however complain that if their beliefs are criticised they are being offended. They take it personally when their beliefs are criticised. Yet they expect the sinner to be happy that other people hate his sins! If criticising the beliefs is criticising the believer, then how can we love the sinner and hate the sin?
 
Self-deception in religion is very common and very powerful. We deceive ourselves only so that we can deceive others. Our love is set up to border on a transformation into rabid hate. If the most rigid and inflexible fundamentalist is engaging in self-deception - that self-deception will be uncontrollable. Because it is irrational, he might easily become a self-deceiving liberal. For example, he may end up arguing that gay marriage must be taught by the Bible for it says God is love. Both liberals and fundamentalists are using the human power to lie to oneself to create their religious systems. You need to lie to yourself to be a fundamentalist so a liberal lying to herself or himself is a fundamentalist too of a different kind.
 
Some say we must not criticise religion because doing so leads to arguments and hatred and rage. That is admitting that religion is really passive-aggressive when it is peaceful. The nastiness of religion will erupt when the trigger button is pressed.
 
Liberals and atheists tend to agree that we must always work for the greatest happiness or well-being of the greatest number of people. We might disagree on how to put this into practice, but we share the principle. This is a thoroughly religion free ethic. Thus religion is necessarily fundamentalist for it disagrees that it is non-religious in itself. It may put a religious spin on it but that is actually changing the principle.
 
Moderate Christianity makes very big claims but provides weak evidence in support of them. It tries to manipulate people’s emotions so that the people will imagine they believe the doctrines are true when they merely feel that they are true. Fundamentalists do exactly the same thing. It is the reason we call them fundamentalist. Moderate Christians are only nominally moderate. They are really hypocrites.
 
Moderate Christianity is detested by those whom it calls Fundamentalist Christians. Moderate Christianity is really fundamentalist when it acts as if it has the right to exist and cause offence like that. It really should go the whole way and get itself declared extremist. Moderate Christianity is really something unnecessary and an extra excuse to cause disagreements and rancour as if we don’t have enough. Secularists are hated by Fundamentalists but as Secularists have the default position they have a right to exist and to teach.
 
True secularism is the only thing that can never be fundamentalist. Thus anything that varies from it is fundamentalism - no matter how liberal or reasonable it pretends to be.
 
If there are Christian theologians who honestly look at rational arguments against the faith (I said if - this is hypothetical) it is sometimes said that they are not dogmatic, not proud and not arrogant and not know-alls who misguidedly think they know it all. But the same cannot be said of priests and laity who are not theologians. They do not have the same knowledge and yet they insist on obedience to a revealed faith and are proud of it. They are definitely fundamentalists.
 
Liberal theologians such as Hans Kung used arguments similar to the fundamental Christians to defend belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Read his On Being a Christian. The liberal is always fundamentalist in some way.
 
"Liberal" Christians - or is it Liberal "Christians"? - pick and choose out of the Bible what they want to believe which is usually the nice and saccharine stuff. Why should anybody pick what they pick? What not take the nastier bits as inspirational? Most people believe the world is red in tooth and claw and you have to be ruthless to survive. They would be happy to be edified by the Bible tales of this blood-drinking God who commands murder and genocide. The liberals have no right to criticise those who do that. They indirectly give them permission and encouragement to do so though they would prefer to forget that. They cannot say that Christian terrorists for example are not representative of the Christian religion. The Bible advocates religious violence so they are representative.
 
Fundamentalists don't have impressive evidence for their cocksure creed being true. Liberals have even less and so are really no better. Their system makes no sense because they end up making very big claims on slender or no evidence. For example, they might say that the virgin birth is just a metaphor for Jesus having been sent by God as the supreme teacher. But because they don't take too much of the Bible that seriously they end up with the same attitude as the fundamentalists which is that reason and science must be sacrificed in the interest of faith. Liberals are just fundamentalists with more popular and fashionable beliefs than the conservatives or fundamentalists. The liberal is worse than the fundamentalist if the liberal turns his speculation into doctrine. The liberal only guesses that the virgin birth is a metaphor. The fundamentalist then is entitled to guess that Jesus is okay with him slaying heretics.