QUITTING CATHOLICISM? PROBABLY YOU HAVE DONE THAT ALREADY

A lot of atheists seek ways to be seen as free from membership of the Catholic Church.  They were forced as babies or misled to join the Church.  Now they want their identities as free persons who just happen to be atheists affirmed.

Even those who stick the label on all who were baptised as Catholic no matter what they do later, even if they become Muslims, hold that membership is not a thing but a collective.  If you are a Catholic in bad standing or an unbeliever, you lose any right to speak for the Church or represent it.  Membership as in true belonging is gone.  Membership as some kind of technicality is another conversation.  A family member can be hated and cursed by the family and be an outsider despite being a member by DNA.

If you are not friendly with most Catholics in your community and don't bond with them then you have left the community in many respects.  Those who say they are in the community - any community - are not as "in" it as much as they say.  You don't know even 1% of Catholics so the community thing is mostly in your head.  Community membership is a more low level thing that you will be led to think.  You can be your father's daughter and yet be something other than that to a bigger level.  You are not a daughter in so far as you neglect him and steal his money.  Community is lied about to get you to rage and take it personally if somebody condemns Catholicism.  Its scope is exaggerated by manipulators who seek to control and divide in the name of cohesion.

If you don't believe required Catholic teachings and you know they are essential for a Catholic identity you have left the Catholic believer community. Some say you are still Catholic. Then what does that mean?  What is left?  The label?   A label is not a Church, a faith or a community.

Labelling is bad unless it really describes the truth about who you are. 

If baptism does not have power and authority from God to unite you to him and his church as a member then Christian and Catholic are just human constructs.  You don't have to go along with them.

And if it had such power, it cannot apply it unless you make an informed choice to be part of the Church.  That informed choice will not exist if the religion is lying to you or peddling untruths while thinking they are in fact true.

Canon Law states that baptism enters one as a member of the Roman Catholic Church. You can't be a Catholic unless you are recognised as one in Church law. Protestants then are baptised Catholics. Logically then as children when they start to embrace the Protestant faith they cease to be Catholics. This implies that if a person is merely a nominal Roman Catholic, he or she is only treated as Catholic for legal purposes but this does not imply he is really a Catholic. It is the same way the Church and state have to assume a marriage that was in reality was null and void was real.

A person who becomes a non-Christian or Humanist is forfeiting the right to be called Roman Catholic even more than the person who becomes Protestant in the way described has.

If you do not willingly practice as a Catholic and if you if do not believe this religion is really revealed by God then you are no longer Catholic. The Catholic Church carries four marks. Oneness of faith or at least trying to believe and avoiding any influence that attacks Church teaching.

If you lose these marks, even one, you are not part of the Church.  Take the mark of apostolic.  It refers to support for and commitment to the apostles teaching.  However it is pointed out that a Church cannot remain for all people - Catholic, holy, or one if you start cherry-picking teachings.  So to lose one mark is to implicitly lose them all.

The Church says it got its doctrine from the apostles. It can only improve in understand this doctrine but it cannot change it. Catholics who want the Church to start accepting gay sex, allowing gay marriage and divorce and abortion are really just asking for it to betray its standards. All bodies are entitled to have standards that many will disagree with but if you have a problem with those standards

Every major Catholic teaching is nonsense. People who won’t stop peddling serious nonsense are bigots deep down and they are anti-truth. Be their friend but don’t be their collaborator. Leave the Church. It is not a trivial matter.

Most Catholics under Church law are not real Catholics at all. Yet because they are listed as members the power of the clergy is enhanced as the list is massive. The main way to support the Church is to be on this list. That is why there are whole dioceses in which the Catholic faith has disappeared and nobody believes in it but the Church structure exists there and there are priests and there is a bishop. To get rid of the Catholic organisation or to diminish it is necessary to leave so that the structure may vanish. The structure not the faith or the good works is what gives the Church its awesome power.  Faith is too easily faked.

Finally, who says the label of the Church should be the word Catholic?  Why not Romanist or something?