Re:Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time
by AuthorizedCust on Monday March 29, 2021 @10:44AM
(#26622440)
> I left the Catholic church in my teens and was angry for the experiences I'd had.
I know of too many Catholics who say the same. Not growing up Catholic, it's hard to relate. Their stories often involve excessively strict dogma or scriptural interpretation that denies or vilifies innocent human nature. E.g., taking your girlfriend to mass to hear an incendiary anti-abortion sermon, then losing said girlfriend due to that mass, then later ending your relationship with the church out of frustration.
In any moral community there will be outliers and some of those outliers can take hold of a message. You can see this in modern day with secular moral communities as well. My main takeaway, after 20-some years of evaluating this is that morals are something okay to evaluate your group on, but they are not ethics. They cannot apply widely, make their way into law, or try to shape society because by their very definition they are intrinsic to small groups. That doesn't mean these groups can't teach us something, but the foundation of their ideas requires subscription and often holistically.