Here is why you need to rethink becoming or being a Catholic priest.
Remember innocent until proven guilty.
What right have you to say a baby does not have God in her until she is
baptised?
What right do you have to accuse a girl who uses an abortion pill of murder? And
especially when you will not really see the "child" as the same or as important
as a fully grown adult.
What right have you to accuse some human beings of being evil enough to turn
their back on their loved ones for all eternity preferring to suffer in Hell
instead?
The treatment of women by Christ and the Church violates the reasonable rule,
"Faith should enhance and risk offending and harming nobody unnecessarily. If
the faith is nonsense, there should be no harm done."
Science is based on the work of self-correcting scientists and experimenters. It
is not based on what they say but on what the tests show. There is no way that
God can be that important when it is not testable. The testable takes priority -
period. And if you are putting God first and there is no God then that is cruel
and you are passing on that cruelty to others.
The Church claims the right to tell science that its discoveries do not refute
its doctrines. It is not up to a faith system to tell a system that is based on
evidence and self-correction that it cannot contradict it. Scientifically
speaking, a pope has no right to say that science and religion can avoid
contradicting each other when he is not a scientist. Yet the pope tells that
very lie.
What right have you to undermine secularism by joining an organisation that
battles it? Secularism is a fundamental human right.
The secular state needs to see religion not as a possible revelation from God
but something man says is a revelation. God's role in revelation is irrelevant
for you are still taking man's word for it. Religious claims are not testable
which gives the religious man an advantage if he can bring his faith to the
public square. How can you refute a man who says God told him he wants the rule
he gave in the Bible for an allegedly adulterous woman to be given a potion that
will catch her out by poisoning her if she is guilty reinstated? If you want to
base your life on untestable notions then you cannot object if somebody else
does the same but with totally different notions.
Until each nation treats religious opinions as merely human opinions, the door
to blasphemy laws coming in will always be open. Blasphemy is really about
refusing to let people realise it if a religion is man-made nonsense.
If there is no God, we are telling ourselves that the suffering of others is
part of his plan and somehow justified. That is a very serious thing to get
wrong. It is not a trivial matter – it is suffering we are talking about.
The better person finds meaning in bringing good about in spite of evil instead
of thinking that evil is part of a plan and ultimately for the best. You have no
right to condone the horrendous suffering of others so that you can feel it has
a purpose. You have no right to condone divine cruelty. Doing that is really
just about how you feel. It is selfish.
If there is a choice between good and God then choose good. This principle is
insulted by the very concept of God. God does not come first and is a
contradiction in terms for God by definition is what comes first or alone
matters. Christians are not really any better than anybody else so what is the
point of emphasising God? The notion that God and morality are inseparable is
nonsense and is an immoral notion. What kind of person is more worried about how
hurting a baby offends God than about the agony the baby suffers?
And if Christ is not God the Catholic is worshiping a false God.
And if the bread and wine at communion are not Jesus then they are idols.
Catholic belief is that the Eucharist is the risen Jesus - not a single Bible
text supports this view. An unbiased reading is that if the bread and wine
become the flesh and blood of Jesus then it is the dead flesh and blood. This is
black magic. Jesus was another do-gooder false prophet and the Jews were right
that his ministry was heretical. You don't seem to care that he called a
vulnerable woman a dog just because she was Gentile and wanted help for her
daughter.
The papacy has caused untold persecution of Catholics by holding on to the papal
states and to this day refuses to admit that papal infallibility was unheard of
in the early Church.
There is extremism in attitude and extremism in outlook. Christianity is
extremist the latter way.
The Bible believer today does not stone homosexuals but he approves of the fact
that it was done in the past at God's behest in the Bible. Jesus upheld Old
Testament doctrine. He never apologised for the killings. He even said that
killing the adulteress by stoning her is fine if you are without sin. If you
praise violent scriptures as God's word, you take responsibility for the
contents and the consequences. If somebody thinks the rules about stoning are in
force today you need to take responsibility for that and the results. If you say
a baby should be allowed to suffer by God and that God should not intervene you
take responsibility in the sense that you are saying that if there is a God you
would tell him not to intervene. You would do the same thing if you were God.
You are willing to say that what absolutely should not happen should happen. You
are willing to take the chance. What does it all say about you? Never mind God.
This is about you.
When a holy book commands murder or violence, and/or agrees with murder and
violence in the past, it should be dismissed as unholy - no ifs or buts. It
should be discarded immediately. There are certain evils you must not look for
excuses or reasons for. And holy books that honour a God who commands violence
are top of the list. Even justified violence should not be made glorious by
being put into a scripture. Go and find a faith with real scriptures of peace.
The Catholic who stones homosexuals to death will not be
excommunicated but the one who says the pope is a pretender and not the real
head of the Church will be. This is still a religion that in a sense allows
murder.
What kind of person honours a book that contains all that violence as the word
of God and to be respected above all books?
What right have you to join a dogmatic organisation when the story of Jesus is
so controversial in the scholarly world? The Church knows no more about Jesus
than anybody else and is dogmatic and refuses to change its mind when new
evidence arises that contradicts its beliefs. It still goes on about Adam and
Eve though their existence has been disproved. It lies that the story in the
Bible about them is symbolic though there is no evidence and such stories were
meant literally in the context of the times.
Remember by joining the Church and if it is unnecessarily harmful or in error
and if it is putting forward man's doctrines as those of God then you are guilty
by association. Man cannot claim to be God for he will be caught out so it is
less pressure and more effective if he pretends to have the word of God.
The Christian's faith is principally founded on the
notion that no evil is permitted to happen by God for a purpose. God then does
not let evil go out of control and you would see that if you see the big
picture.
This teaching insults non-religious people who find meaning in life by trying to bring good about IN SPITE of evil. They get meaning FROM SEEING how devoid of purpose and use evil is.
The better person finds meaning in bringing good about in spite of evil instead of thinking that evil is part of a plan and ultimately for the best. You have no right to condone the horrendous suffering of others so that you can feel it has a purpose. You have no right to condone divine cruelty. Doing that is really just about how you feel. It is selfish.
Evil people give the evil they do meaning. The verbally abusive person feels good about it or okay about it by saying, "I am being me. At least I am not being fake." Giving meaning to evil is not something to boast about.
If there is no God, you are giving people false hope for
if there is no supernatural power to help them then they are at the mercy of
cruel ruthless nature. To worship a God who does not exist is to worship nature
and mistake it for God. It is bad for the reason idolatry is bad. It would
horrendous to worship the cause of a baby's horrendous suffering if that cause
is random cold nature. It would show a lack of rapport and failure to understand
how terrible it is.
If there is no God, then the suffering of a baby that is inflicted by nature is inexcusable in every sense of the word. To say it is part of a plan or to imagine it is worth it in the end is making yourself excuse what you have no right to excuse. It's disgraceful. The believer who helps the baby can be said to be showing how contradictory human nature is rather than the innate goodness of religion. Not that there is such a thing as innately good religion!
So what about this divine purpose for evil stuff?
Do you assume there is a purpose?
Do you look at how good resulted from some evil and conclude that it will ultimately result from all evil?
It is too serious of a matter to merely assume it.
Society trivialises the question but we must not. And some good will follow
after some evil regardless of whether there is a God or not. The believer then
who points to some examples is really still assuming. If some good comes after
evil it does not follow that good will ultimately triumph or win for long.
If there is a big overall good purpose, it does not
follow that if you lose ten dollars and go to look for it but instead discover
five thousand dollars that you are allowed to keep, that this good "result" was
intended by God. If there is a big ultimate plan, the good you have experienced
may be a side-effect. Medicine has good and bad side effects.
Religion will answer that no matter how terrible the
universe and life get, we are judging it as bad by some standard. We are saying
it should be good. This is what some term the problem of good.
The problem of good merely gives you a reason to judge not a reason to feel great about living. It is not helpful to good at all and shows that we should see good when we see it instead of using evil to make us see it.
If Adam and Eve had brought a Hell of extreme torment on
the universe, believers would still be saying there is a problem of good. The
problem of good is deployed by those who deny that no matter what evil happens
or how much it is has nothing to do with refuting the existence and love of God.
This shows that God is about the principle that moral principles matter and
feelings do not matter at all in comparison. Happiness is down to luck.
Is morality morality because God says so or is morality a standard that does not depend on God? In practice, the believer acts as if morality is created by God. The danger with that is that it opens the door to people who give evil commands in the name of God. If moral rules are merely invented by God then a prophet can command genocide in the name of God. Indeed Moses and Joshua did just that in the Bible. Jesus himself gave out to the Jews for not obeying God's law to kill people who cursed their parents.
Is doing right right because God commands it or is it
right whether there is a God to command it or not?
This question worries Christians for it asks: "Should we care if we obey God or not as long as we are good?" A God who is not important is not a God at all. Christianity says that the answer to the dilemma is that morality is grounded in God's nature. God is not the kind of God who would command you to do gratuitous evil for fun. But then we have to ask, "Is God's nature is good just because it is God's or if there is some independent standard that says it is good?" The answer solves nothing. It is a cheat. To use the answer is in fact immoral!
If there are problems saying that goodness is a standard that exists irrespective of there being a God or not, they are nothing compared to the problems of trying to make God and morality somehow one and the same. Good is not a person though a person can be good. God the "person" is not goodness in itself.
Religion says that good is not arbitrary but just a duty
because God by nature is just and loving.
Moral codes claim to be right regardless of who sanctions and commands them. So goodness is independent of God. We should in theory at least, hold that if God commanded evil we would disobey. So it is not true that we regard it as an absolute duty to follow God with all your heart. God is only a block to real morality. He offers only a simulation of morality.
I do not admire your ignorant(?) decision to stay Catholic or become a priest and there is simply no excuse. Religious people are famous for being told the truth and ignoring it. Whoever stays in a religion that cannot show it is the truth is guilty of hindering the truth or enabling lies to be told.
