TO THE CHURCH, A LIST OF COMPLAINTS

You disapprove of child sexual abuse yes but when you teach lies and evil doctrines this disapproval counts for nothing. People are not going to take it seriously. You wouldn't have the right to expect your disapproval to dissuade any priest from indulging any sexual desires towards children that he might have.

The person who does a lot of good for others and who does it because he or she enjoys it and not for the others sake is an egoist - he or she is only doing it for herself though others benefit. But if we are honest, this does not bother us. We don't like people helping us when they take no pleasure in it. Also, one can be flattered if one's lover has a fit of jealousy though jealousy is egoistic and a vice. Your faith says a person being egoistic should trouble us for he or she is really loving himself or herself only and not loving the neighbour. Your faith sees it as the sin of pride or independence from God. The people are deceived when they think that belief in God is important and needed for human welfare.

Psychology says the healthy person is a mixture of selflessness and selfishness. On the contrary, Christianity urges us to believe that we must put God before ourselves and sacrifice for him and be wholly unselfish.

Psychology says that we must love ourselves first of all. This sound commonsense. If I don't know how to respect myself I can't respect other people. If I don't respect myself, I can't think I am of value to others so I won't help them. Christianity says it should start with loving God with all your heart. It doesn't start with you or other people but only God. This clearly is putting faith before people. The big ingredient of fanaticism is there.

If you do something for another that means you do it for them and not yourself at all. For example, you must not do it to honour yourself by doing altruistic acts.

To always treat others as I would like them to treat me means I have to put how I like to be treated first and treat them accordingly. Behind this is the thought: I like people to do such and such to me or for me. I must support this principle and help others because it helped me."

You speak of how human life is so valuable that an abortion should not be performed even to save the mother to be's life. Yet you kiss and caress Old Testament scriptures in which stoning homosexuals and adulterers to death is commanded by God. Jesus said that the Old Testament was written by God though he wrote it through men. Jesus himself said in John 6 that the only reason the adulteress he saved from stoning should not be stoned was that her accusers were adulterous themselves. The New Testament speaks of sinners being handed over to Satan by the apostles in the name of Jesus for sickness and destruction meaning they were being put to death supernaturally.

You believe like the Muslims that God's people have the right to take up arms when a nation tries to destroy God's religion by destroying his people. If you fail to hate your enemy you will not make a good soldier. You would need to feel good that you are killing for God. You would need to be patted on the back for killing. You would need to deny the value of human life by failing to be devastated when you have to kill someone.

Hate sin and love sinner means you have to be devastated when you do it.

The Church waged wars in the past in the belief that false religion had to be eradicated to stop it leading people into Hell.

You say your commandments are meant to guide and help us to live happily. If so, then why do they need to be commandments? Why not guidelines?

You cannot tell us why it is God's business how we behave. He is perfect and happy and so he has no needs. He cannot have any rights for rights are based on needs. He has no need and therefore no right to command us. Your religion with its rules and laws is man-made.

You teach that a wafer blessed by a priest is really a human person, Jesus Christ. Thus the wafer is more precious and important than a baby in a cot. Faith before people.

You say that by being baptised and confirmed in the Roman faith that I have taken upon myself the legal obligation to believe and obey the Church. I would renounce those obligations by an act of formal defection. If I don't then I am a wicked disobedient person. So I will honour myself by making them cease to apply to me. I will do the decent thing.

I am obligated by the Commandments of the Church to pay for the support of the Church and its pastors. I am threatened by your God with Hell should I wilfully fail to cough up. I will not be intimidated. I am not under that obligation as I am not a Catholic. My parents had no right to impose that sinister obligation on me by taking me for baptism which allegedly confers it.

The apostle said that if you don't love people you see you can't love the God you cannot see (1 John). He meant that if you sense other beings you should love them and if you don't, then by implication you are giving even less love to God for you cannot see or sense him.

To make such serious claims to a child such as that there is a God looking after them, that Jesus saves them from sin and Hell and that a wafer is really Jesus is a form of abuse - plain and simple.

Idolatry is degrading because it is somebody worshipping a thing. The idol worshippers when they were told that said, "But these images are somehow gods. It is not the images we worship but the gods in them." Catholics say, "We worship the communion wafer. This is not idolatry because it really is God." This is just a dishonest attempt to avoid the truth.

Your command that we love God above all things and even above the lives of our loved ones is cruel and it can only appeal to a heart that at least secretly nurtures violent thoughts and attractions. It is the heart that exalts belief above people.

All religion is man-made. Catholics worship the creations of men. They worship the idols men invent. Even if you follow the utterances of Jesus to some visionary you are really listening to the visionary not her. It is the visionary you exalt. If apparitions really happen, then some unknown faculty of the human mind is causing them. The vision is caused by something inside the person.

You say that God made all things out of nothing. There are two more options. Maybe everything always existed? Maybe it popped out of nothing?

God cannot make anything out of nothing for nothing is nothing. It is not a material from which things can be made. There is no making. So either all things always existed or they popped out of nothing. Something popping out of nothing sounds silly enough but it is worse to pretend that this is making. So there is no room for God in this. Whether creation came from nothing or always existed there is no need for a creator.

You make the apparition of Knock optional for belief though it is more credible than the New Testament testimony to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. At least with Knock we have the detailed accounts of eyewitnesses.

The evidence is not perfect but it is a damn sight better than what the New Testament has to offer as evidence for Jesus coming alive after the crucifixion.

You have the dishonesty to claim that most apparitions of the Virgin Mary should not be recognised as really from God yet you say that in most cases the visionaries are really seeing something.

The Christians have always been told to renounce the world and the flesh and the devil. I embrace the world. I am a secularist.

I was taken advantage of as a child because my parents feared the teaching of the Church. You gave them a God who threatened them with damnation or ill-luck should they neglect to get me baptised.

The Church says that babies that die after being baptised are guaranteed to go to Heaven. If so, would it not be wiser to kill them than to let them live so that there is no chance of them ever going to Hell? Could you not say that though killing is a sin, you have no choice for death is better than damnation. So it's not a sin when you have no choice. My parents did not genuinely love me - they only thought they did - when they let me live after getting me baptised.

The Church cannot deny that if killing was not a sin, it would be a great thing to slay all baptised infants. Their teaching implies that it is a pity killing is a sin.

Your scriptures forbid praying for one who you see committing mortal sin (1 John). This sin is taken to be final impenitence and it contradicts the lie you now tell that if somebody dies cursing God their soul might not have gone yet so they might still repent. You don't want psychiatrists and the police after you for destroying the relatives of suicide victims by damning their loved ones to Hell.

You say that sinners must be encouraged to see their own goodness and rise above the sin. This contradicts the apostle who wrote that he who hates does not have the love of God in his heart. This is very black and white. It denies that the person who hates another can really love God and would indicate that if the person prays and fasts and preaches regularly he or she is still a fake. He or she would no doubt believe in his or her virtue and thinking that he or she is a good enough though imperfect person despite the hating.

Your insistence that people must frequently pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" is horrible. The doctrine of your Jesus that God will not forgive you unless you forgive all offences against you is simply a sanctification of bullying of the worst sort. It is not failure to forgive that hurts people significantly but failure to forgive when the pressure of holding grudges gets too much, failure to forgive people you need and love. If you have too many people you are against you need to forgive some of them. We all bear our own imperfections. A little bit of unforgiving can keep life interesting. Jesus' doctrine is not about concern for you but for God. It is bullying.

I am not going to be a hypocrite and start focusing on what people call the best side of the religion and ignore the dark side. A religion that has an evil side is not from a loving God and it is mocking God and supporting man-made religion to keep the focus on the good side. The Nazis had a good side too and to ignore the bad side and to dwell on the good is to deride their victims. Evil cannot thrive or function unless it does some good. The good is to be criticised as manipulation and mouse-baiting. It is not to be praised.

Your faith makes a laughing stock of morality. Thus you cannot blame the child abuse scandal on a few bad eggs. The whole system is polluted.

Extraordinary claims demand not extraordinary evidence so much as clear hard evidence. Where is the evidence that God loves the baby that dies screaming after a slow and agonising illness? Where is the evidence that babies come into the world without God in their hearts for they have original sin? Where is the evidence that sinners go to Hell forever? Where is the evidence that miracles are not magic? Where is the unbiased evidence that miracles happen?

You pretend that no matter how much evil engulfs the world that people should still believe God loves them and believe he cares and pray. Why think of God that way? Why can't one not think of one's abusive husband that way? Like it or not, you are trying to exploit the vulnerable.

If you believe God loves you despite the seemingly cruel way he treats you, and you don't have sensible evidence for this belief, then you are practicing self-delusion. The gospel preachers are trying to make you sick. Christianity is a religion that gives its victims the minds of battered wives who can't see they must leave the brutes they call their husbands.

You condone and fail to correct those who argue that if a devout Catholic pro-life activist goes and shoots an abortion doctor dead that the killer should get away with it or at least be able to build a defence of voluntary manslaughter. A voluntary manslaughter would be when you have an unreasonable but honest belief that deadly force to stop someone is justified. The secularist can say that it is unreasonable to believe that you are saving babies lives by killing the doctors because the embryos are not babies yet. The religionist will have to say that it would be reasonable. If the religionist says it is unreasonable then it will have to be for other reasons.

It is kinder to believe that death is the end than to believe that anybody could go to Hell forever. If you live a harmless life but don't believe in morality as such you would be amoral. You cannot go to Hell if you don't believe in morality or in sin. Whoever teaches about sin is populating Hell.

You do not have to be a sinner to be an evil person. The person who really believes that it is right to murder say Presbyterians does not sin but is still evil. The Catholic Church is still objectively bad even if its intentions are for the best.

You have a bad influence on civil law.

You can have a family without marriage. The state protecting the family does not necessarily imply the state should care about marriage.

You declare the family based on marriage to be the unit of society. You don't believe any such thing for if men died after having sex five times you would still be teaching that they should marry though they will be leaving wives with children. Marriage is not your business or the states. It is solely between the husband and wife. It is only the contract element which involves property rights that may be the concern of the courts. The state knows marriage is none of its affair when it lets husbands and wives separate at will and get new partners and practice open marriage.

You are liberal with declarations of nullity to annul marriages. When are you going to declare that many priests are not ordained in reality even though they went through the ordination ceremony? Where are their decrees of nullity relating to their "ordinations"?

Men who become priests because they want to help others or because they like the idea of enjoying a relationship with God are breaking the law of God that we must choose to love God whether we feel like it or not and be willing to love him if it meant committing some awful eternal sacrifice. They are out of sync with authentic Catholicism.

You have the arrogance to believe that even when you die, you will live on for God loves you too much to let you go out of existence. But if God destroys a person to replace that person with another one then this argument is incorrect. You really mean that you are too great to be put out of existence.

There is no excuse for a priest teaching a gospel that is untrue for access to the truth has never been better thanks to the Internet etc. There is less excuse for him misleading others. The points in this communication are well-known particularly among scholars and atheists and sceptics and yet you listen to them and ignore them. You oppose the truth by closing your hearts and minds.

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