A fine example is the incredibly important Corinthians 13:13: And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
When we die, there is no need for faith. We have the answer. When we die, we have no need for hope - again, we have the answer. The Catholic church places love above all else.
The idea that you only think "specific people" can do good in the world is pretty nuts - the Catholic Church alone is the largest non-governmental provider of healthcare in the world.
I also don't understand why books are somehow bad places to get information, even if they're completely fictional. Can you not learn lessons from cartoons, even? Do you truly think every moral issue is so simply black and white that it doesn't require practice and debate?
I am not going to say religion is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but much of what you're complaining about simply is not true.
Hinduism is much older than Christianity. Specifically the Shiva sects. Shiva means compassionate one. God is seen as immanent love and transcendent reality.
Please cite your sources. Tell this to the South Indian Tamil who say Anbe Sivamayam, Satyame Parasivam (God is immanent love and transcendent reality).
The "Siva as destroyer" is imagery is perpetuated by firstly Hindus who don't worship God as Siva (e.g. Vaishnava, who worship God as Kristna), secondly by the "spiritual but non religious" people of both Hindu heritage and not, and finally by e.g. Christians.
In Saivism there is one aspect of Siva that is "destruction" but it is a synonym for "dissolution" and is not a scary aspect.
To be fair, Catholics at even rather high ranks in the heirarchy have fairly radical divergent views of Catholicism.
Thinking back to an earlier comment up the chain (from someone else) about how being nonreligious doesn't offer enough moral guidance, and I kinda think the "infinite forgiveness" thing is exponentially more fraught than even the most detached "nothing really matters" atheist.
Being able to do literally anything and not face cosmic consequences so long as you say you're sorry is mind-boggling to me. I wonder if it's partly why so many convicted murderers get born-again when they're in prison.
Genuine repentance is marked by sorrow over the harms and wrongs you have done, and sincere efforts to make amends where you can.
It's also marked by an understanding that your actions may have ramifications here and now and a willingness to bear the consequences of what you have wrought, insofar as you are able - "Take up your cross and follow Me," in the vernacular of the religion.
Forgiveness is freely given, in the sense that you cannot earn it and God extends it to you, but it's recognized that even accepting forgiveness requires admission of wrong and actively renouncing your pattern of wrongdoing.
You can't accept forgivenwas for something you think was just fine.
shrug I'm not sure how widely this perspective inn it is shared in modern Christianity.
It's where I wound up when I experienced Jesus' love and kindness firmly dragging my besetting sins in front of me to be dealt with, but since that day I've certainly noticed Christians who don't seem to share this perspective.
Many? I would say it was the central message of Christianity.
> It's where I wound up when I experienced Jesus' love and kindness firmly dragging my besetting sins in front of me to be dealt with, but since that day I've certainly noticed Christians who don't seem to share this perspective.
Sadly that happens.
I would agree, but I don't see it treated or discussed that way in practice by plenty of self-identified Christians.
Real repentance only comes through God:
John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Sadly you are right, for many reasons this is not necessarily widely understood by everyone that nominally identifies as a Christian.
Though with the important caveats that _forgiveness_ is not identical to _reconciliation_, and that extending mercy to the unrepentant is dangerous and borderline incoherent ("I assure you, he will by no means get out of there before he has paid the last penny").
I've seen those concepts misunderstood, missed, or forgotten far too often in Christian circles.
In the real world we see the consequences of feeling like you can't be forgiven with kids and teens who get labeled as "trouble makers". As soon as that label starts to become permanent and precede them, they live down to other people's expectations of them. When they start feeling like nothing they do will ever be good enough, and that no matter what they do they will be in trouble or someone will find fault with them, they stop trying to improve or stay out of trouble. See also the concept of stereotype threat.
It's not (as I understand it) about "not facing consequences" so much as it is about being possible to be forgiven at all and therefore there is a reason to try to change and to try and make amends and to try to seek forgiveness.
It also isn't enough in any interpretation I've seen to just "say you're sorry". You have to repent, and even secular definitions, let alone religious ones don't seem to interpret "repenting" as simply saying you're sorry.
No it isn't, there is a whole spectrum between "forgiving everything" and "forgiving nothing".
He murdered an assistant professor because she had second thoughts about divorcing her husband when she was going to get a fat divorce check and it ruined his (the murderer's) dreams of training to become a pro golfer. He shot her, threw her body in a hole at a wildlife management area (they found her body after the police interviewed his father and discovered he had a life-long fascination with said hole), drove her car back to her apartment, and then took her credit card and ordered thousands of dollars worth of golf gear before driving to his parents' house 7 hours away.
This was a Catholic altar boy growing up. But Catholicism doesn't like mortal sins too much, so low and behold, his redemption streak began by becoming magically "born again" so that it would be rude for people to ask him questions about his obvious guilt. He's now a luthier and prayer leader at Angola State Penn in Louisiana... and as I've known the guy since I was in diapers, I know that he is categorically full of shit from the interviews I've seen.
I am friends with his sisters and didn't even realize he had a daughter who must have been a toddler at the time that he murdered that woman until I saw her in some of her LSU graduation photos. Didn't look like her aunts, and then I realized the child was the spitting image of her daddy. Sad that he robbed her of a dad over some childish bullshit.
If it truly was like that, wouldn't everyone be doing it? There is, however, a bit more to it:
Acts 3:19 - Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord,
Turn to God.
> I wonder if it's partly why so many convicted murderers get born-again when they're in prison.
Convicted murderers get a very real chance to see just how evil people can be.
The worse the symptoms you have, the easier it is to find out you have an illness.
Sadly not everyone wants to acknowledge the illness and accept the remedy.
Turn to God.
You need to constantly be on the look out for Satan and his temptations. There's a laundry list of things you shouldn't do or think about. If you do, you should feel guilty and repent. God is always watching, so be good.
Every individual church is different, and your mileage will vary, but I found them to be similar to office spaces in the level of bickering and gossip as their best, and deeply dysfunctional institutions at worse.
I would also disagree that Christianity was the first major religion of purely love when Buddhism had been around for centuries and had the practice of forsaking one's own enlightenment in order to save all being from suffering.
But: just because that Catholic Church deviated from its own teachings doesn't mean that at least some of those teachings weren't correct. Teachings like "love one another" resonate in any language.
Which is perfectly consistent. The idea is that love is better than fear, but fear is still better than lack of contrition. Accepting this fear as an intermediate step, instead of immediately expecting perfection, is an important psychological step.
Catholicism absolutely has sins that are unforgivable.
how many religions do you know and have experience with, in order to make such a claim? don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I guess I don't see why control is necessarily a bad thing. Most people would say that something like self-control is (in moderation like all things) a virtue. Certainly I see a lot more people that could use more control than I see people that are so controlled (by either themselves or others) that they could use less.
You're talking about "man consciously accepting his obligation to G-d". That is very positive and in fact to chose to live this way is the highest exercise of free will.
Because if they aren't, then they're about control.
Very few of my Catholic friends and family seem to be motivated by fear, and even at my most annoying and confrontational no one ever tried to “scare” me back into believing.
ymmv, of course.
Is not limited to Catholicism but religion in general, but the stereotype is there for a reason. Maybe the teachings? Maybe anecdotally your group were outliers?
All trying to buy that time away from hell and purgatory and flooding the living crap out of my social media feeds with nonsensical prayers to saints and statues. And they are utterly hypocritical with their proselytizing too. They want to be free to spam that nonsense but post something critical or contradictory and they lose their fucking minds.
Can I ask an earnest question, out of curiosity? What do you think is the role of government in people's lives? Do you believe we should have UBI?
I suspect it is an American, and possibly Irish thing - the guilt thing is a stereotype in the UK too (but not true in practice).
I won't deny that some churches (as in, specific people, not the system as a whole) can do good in the world; one church I attended with my parents as a kid had some great community outreach programs that helped a lot of people who had fallen through the cracks. And some clergy members are good people who are trying to help.
But overall, religion is about control (for the religious leadership, and politicians who use religion to gain power), and about belonging and feeling less lost and alone (for practicioners) in an uncertain world.