Pick and Mix Catholicism is smug disgusting hypocrisy

The word Catholic means universal which implies whole which means that it is the whole truth and makes you whole.  It is about a commitment to living Catholic rather than a label.  It means the faith has content that is right for every person on earth. 

There is no such thing as a religious or Catholic cherry picker. It is just cherry picker. A thief born Catholic is not a Catholic thief. He or she is just a thief.  So to call yourself a progressive Catholic - a euphemism for lying about your loyalty when you treat the religion as a restaurant - is making yourself a liar as well.  A Catholic liar is not a Catholic liar but just a liar.

Religious faith can never be a means to an end (eg inner peace etc) but an end in itself for it is the worship of God. Faith is not about you.  It is yours but not about you.

It doesn’t matter if a religion is from God or a religion made by man. It has to have a standard. To accuse that standard of being wrong in anything or lying is to open the door to questioning the rest. It makes it possible. It replaces faith with guesswork.  Belief is the defining or a defining part of what you must be to have the right to identify as being part of the religion.  You are not really a Catholic if you reject faith.  If the faith is wrong then the faith rejects you.  But if it might be right no matter how unlikely that is you are rejecting it.

A contradictory religion and a contradictory Bible are cherry-picking themselves and produce cherry-pickers.  A cherry-picker can decide to follow the nasty bits and often do that.  The religion as a religion and the Bible as an alleged revelation from God are responsible for making it possible for people to cherry pick them and do harm.  There is no justice without truth and the cherry-picker is no friend of truth.  You never know if a cherry-picker religion really should be called a religion or just described as something acting like a religion.

The Roman Catholic Church is based on the Magisterium. This is a body of teaching from the Bible and tradition regarded as objectively true and therefore unchangeable. Dissent from the Magisterium makes one a Protestant. The Catholic Church holds that anybody who is baptised including Protestants is baptised into the Catholic Church.  The heretical Catholic is a Protestant for it is clear that people were expelled from the Church for becoming Protestant even though they had no intention of leaving the body of the Church.  Expelling did not make them Protestant.  They were expelled because they were Protestant.  Pope Pius IX decreed, "Hence, if anyone shall dare -- which God forbid! -- to think otherwise than as has been defined by us, let him know and understand that he is condemned by his own judgment; that he has suffered shipwreck in the faith; that he has separated from the unity of the Church; and that, furthermore, by his own action he incurs the penalties established by law if he should are to express in words or writing or by any other outward means the errors he think in his heart."  This statement has never been annulled by the Church and indeed cannot be for it is logical when you think of how a Church is a commitment to a body of teaching allegedly that came from God.

A person who picks and chooses what they like out of their religion has no right to present as a believing member.  Even if the religion is a pix and mix itself it turns what it picks into a standard.  It does not imply a permission for you to do the same.  Every religion has the right to a standard of deciding what its criteria for a member is and what the member is to do and believe.  No matter how repulsive the religion is it has this right. It is up to the members to do the right thing and leave.  Though a religion can set up its standards and has the right to nothing in this implies that the standards are necessarily right or that the members have valid membership from a moral viewpoint.
 
The Catholic faith is more important than the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is about the faith which informs you what to believe and what to hope for and how to live A Church without a standard of belief and practice is only a label. To be in a religion when you think you can believe what you want about its doctrines and morals is really just turning the religion into a sectarian label. Most people want the Catholic Church but not the Catholic faith.
 
The person who rejects any aspect of the Catholic faith cannot belong to the Catholic Church properly.
 
The true Catholic refuses to deliberately reject the faith and what it teaches. Through and because of his faith he is a member of the Church. He is a member in Church law as well. Those who reject the view that the shepherds of the Church the bishops and the popes know best and can exercise infallibility are not acting as Catholics even if they are Catholics. The believing Catholics accepts that there is only a single and united and sacred and apostolic and Catholic Church through which Jesus teaches us the truth today. Even atheists must agree with that. If you want to speak as a Mormon then you must speak in line with what your religion teaches. Your religion is bigger than you.
 
If Catholicism is fundamentalist, the liberal Catholics are drawing people to it. The converts find out that the liberals are dishonestly watering down and inventing their own standards. They want to be really Catholic and they end up fundamentalist.
 
The Church teaches that freedom of conscience is a human right. But they say that real freedom of conscience means that the conscience must be informed and guided by God’s one true religion, the Catholic Church. A conscience is not free if it has no instruction and guidance and is forced to guess.

The Catholics who pick and choose what they like out of Church teaching are ultimately saying that there is no sin but merely having a bad motive. They may say you can cohabit with your partner and have a baby without a male partner being there to assist you if you wish as long as you mean well. That leads to total religious permissiveness.

Catholics say that if we cannot accept God’s teaching we must pray for understanding. In other words, we try to accept it. There is no sin in this if we are really trying.

When religion enrols you as a baby, when it conditions you as a child to believe its doctrines and obey it, you have the right to be very critical and speak your mind about religion. Those who are part of the system that got you baptised, that means all Catholics, have no right to complain if you are.

I have no sympathy for Catholics who are divorced and remarried or in gay relationships who expect the Church to change its teaching for them. Psychopaths believe they are right to be willing to kill and maim. Is the Church meant to suit them as well?

Those who can find a Church that suits them and who want the Catholic Church to change to suit them are not Catholics. A religion cannot stand if it allows you to believe whatever you want and accepts you as a member. Such Catholics are also bigots if they think Protestant ministers should not be allowed to say mass in Catholic chapels. So they acknowledge the infallibility of the Church after all. The Church is right according to them when it bans Protestant ministers and it cannot be trusted in other things. This translates as, "The Church teaches without error only when I agree with it!"

Bad Catholic means you are less of a Catholic than a good Catholic. So this idea indicates that it is possible to be “bad” enough to cease to be a Catholic.

If you pick and choose from your Catholic religion, you cannot seriously expect your kids to go to Mass if they don’t wish to go. You can’t object if they decide they have a right to be unkind to people.
 
The Roman Catholic Church pretends to be infallible - that is able to speak without error when it intends to declare something revealed by God and intends to declare it to the whole Church for all time and forever.
 
The Church says it cannot teach error for Jesus promised that the gates of Hell would never prevail over his Church. But if the Church taught many errors that would not mean that the gates of Hell had prevailed. There could be enough truth taught to help any person get to Heaven.
 
Jesus’ promised that the apostles would be led into all truth. That does not say that the Church will enjoy this truth as well.
 
The Church replies that as there are many interpretations of the Bible, we should only accept the interpretations endorsed by God's Church. The pick and mix "Catholic" cannot object to an ordinary person deciding they are a bishop and doing confirmations without being a hypocrite. Pick and Mix religion ruins the rationale for having the Church at all.
 
The Church is said to be welcoming to all who truly want to be part of it. That is what it means to be Catholic. Even the simplest person can understand that Jesus is God and does not tell lies and speaks to us today through the pope and the bishops and the Bible and must be obeyed. And that is Catholicism in a nutshell.
 
If you are required to believe in Catholic doctrine and refuse, even if you are still Catholic you are not a believing one. You cannot expect the Church to accept you as wanting to be truly a part of it.
 
The Greatest Commandment, according to Jesus, is to love God with all ones heart and soul and mind and self. This by implication says truth comes first. It claims to be a truth. It claims to be the supreme truth. It condemns religious cherry-picking.
 
Jesus Christ said you are either for him or against him and that you must believe in what he teaches to be saved . The Catholic Church says he is with his Church today and teaches us. He left his teaching authority with the apostles. Today the Roman Catholic bishops united with the pope are the successors of the apostles. The stark choice Jesus gave shows there should be no compromise and no cherry-picking.
 
The Pick and Mix Catholic is not an honest person. He or she claims to be a real Roman Catholic when he or she as far as faith goes, is not. A religion must have standards to be a religion. People have a right to know what real Catholicism is. The Pick and Mix don’t care about that. They spread confusion and therefore upset among believers and demand to have equal rights with those who do not cherry-pick (eg they expect to be treated as Catholics in union with the faith just like those who really are in union with the faith are) and misrepresent the faith. The Pick and Mix Catholic thinks that religion should suit him rather than him suiting religion. He deserves no honour if he won’t admit that he is a hypocrite. Beliefs are not about us but are meant to be attempts to recognise the truth and grow in knowledge.
 
The honest person will always try to know and follow his religion’s teaching. He will not stay in a religion if he thinks or knows it's not true. If he is an atheist and sees that the Church is untrue he will walk.
 
You pay taxes to your country. Those taxes will be used for abortion if it is legal or for unjustifiable wars. If you regard these as extremely and intolerably immoral you will still pay. If you could easily move to a more moral country you should. You are a hypocrite if you stay. If you stay in a bad religion you are validating its badness and declaring it tolerable.
 
The Church says it is a Hell-deserving sin to corrupt Church doctrine or to misrepresent it. The theologians would agree with the teaching that the reason that people stay in the torment of Hell forever is that they won’t stop thinking they are right and that God is wrong! According to them, contradicting the Church or believing in it while refusing to join it is clear preparation for damnation.
 
The Church itself says that if you think it is not the true religion that you have a duty to leave it. Catholicism says that there is no hope of salvation for anybody unless they sincerely think they have the true religion.
 
The Church says that there is no salvation for the person who sees or suspects that the Roman Catholic Church is the one true Church of God and who will not join or investigate it. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The doctrine is: outside the Church there is no salvation. The Church says it is only people who suspect the Church might be God's one true religion and therefore the best road to Heaven and who do not unite with it or those who believe and leave the Church or corrupt their faith have to worry about the doctrine. To corrupt or abandon the faith is to abandon the Church even if the person outwardly acts like a member - the Church is based on faith in its doctrines. To keep out of the Church is to refuse to support it and its teaching properly. Being a member and staying a member is support in itself. The person who believes and stays out of the Church is banned from Heaven. Imagine what it must be like for the person who is in the Church and who cherry-picks. If you can cherry-pick then it does not matter what religion you join.
 
Suppose you are outside the Church and believe in it and won't become part of it. You are depriving yourself – and others by your example – of the chance to enjoy finding the meaning of life which is said to be only fully attainable in the true religion.
 
It is blasphemous and seriously wrong to belong to the Catholic religion unless you have very strong proof that it is from God. It is serious for it means you prefer the ways and word of men to the word to God and to honesty and to truth.