Michael,
YOu didn't hurt my feelings, but you made an impressively huge, inaccurate and extremely unfair assumption about my viewpoint re: the place of religion in history, and you didn't deal in any factual way with the issues I was addressing, but took off in a very different direction on something that I, at least, hadn't even mentioned. I know you have written quite a bit elsewhere about the church not getting credit for any of its good deeds, but it wasn't what I was discussing at all.
I challenge you to point out anywhere-ANYWHERE!-- where I have focused on "all the wrong and none of the good churches have done" "or dismissed all you have said".. I don't believe I was discussing in any way historical charitable contributions, but the indoctrination of children into a belief system, which is a well-documented reality of the Catholic faith, (what, after all, is Catechism but the teaching of specific doctrine, and if you were Catholic, in a parochial school, and under the age of seven, you were taking catechism and being indoctrinated) and suddenly you have turned it into a complete condemnation of religion by me, in the process ignoring most of what I actually said in order to advance one of your pet views. That's insulting to me- and makes for very confusing debate. You have taken our assertions about indoctrination and its results on people's behavior and turned it into a complete denial that the church has ever done anything good in its thousands of years. Dirty pool.
Some of the difference in our feelings regarding our doctrinal upbringings might lie in the difference in our ages; I was raised in the early 50s, very old school, and you are quite a bit younger than I,and were probably still pre-school when Vat II first met in 61 or 62, when the winds of change already blew strong.
The town I spent my early years in was heavily Catholic, a mill town with a large second generation immigrant population. This was still in the days of nuns in heavy black robes with huge wimples and hidden hands that could deal harshly with offenders, where a missed Mass, or a piece of meat on Friday sent you straight to hell if you managed to die before your next confession. Woe to the little girl who forgot her prayer cap. Damnation if you broke fast and still dared to take Communion. Purgatory for the lucky ones who managed to stay in the realm of venial sins. The home environment mirrored and reinforced the concepts of the Church.
OF course not all nuns and priests were evil!! That's silly. When we moved to the south, there were no Catholic schools and only a very small Catholic population (we were considered heathens) and a very sweet kind priest, who became a close family friend. He was a good man, though not at all effectual, a gentle musician who came to dinner every Sunday and got drunk with my father, who under the influence considered himself a fine Irsh tenor. HIs idea of saying blessing, which horrified my mother, was "Bless this food and us who eats it."
But it seems to me that you are taking your positive very modern day experience and trying to use it to disprove the existence of the hundreds of years of fear, guilt and domination, and the effects this had on millions.
In any faith, in any profession, in any group, any institution, you will find the good and the bad. The Church is no different. But any way you cut it, it certainly did indoctrinate its children, and it did this using a system ruled by fear and guilt. How the indoctrination takes place today, I don't know, no longer being Catholic, but I am sure it exists. It is, after all, the reason a church exists.
One of my points was that with education and economic power, women began to be able to break free form the dominance of the Church, asserting their right to control their own bodies and minds. You make the statement that people can make their own decisions. If they are lucky and strong, yes, and with education and economic power, it becomes easier. But the Church did all it could for a very long time to prevent this.
I am curious-- were your parents both Catholic, did you remain one, and are you raising your children in the Church? If I remember correctly, your children go to an excellent Montessori school. Not Catholic? |
