Pope Francis condemned the “very strong, organised, reactionary attitude” in the US church and said Catholic doctrine allows for change over time.
Pope Francis has blasted the “backwardness” of some conservatives in the US Catholic Church, saying they have replaced faith with ideology and that a correct understanding of Catholic doctrine allows for change over time.
Francis’ comments were an acknowledgment of the divisions in the US Catholic Church, which has been split between progressives and conservatives who long found support in the doctrinaire papacies of St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, particularly on issues of abortion and same-sex marriage.
Yes. The ritual is for you (the ego) not for them (the instincts). To bring yourself into a mindstate where you aren’t so pre-occupied with everyday stuff and the external world that you’re ignoring messages from deeper inside yourself.
If you can switch channels without ritual then all the more power to you. Buddhists rightly caution against attachment to ritual, however, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use them – only that you shouldn’t get attached, lest things become performative. But attachment to “I will never sprinkle rice” (or what have you) is the same trap, easily itself an (internal) ritual.
And that’s what I’m arguing it isn’t for you. It’s for them, the entire ritual(s) were made to show your submission and how much you are a good “follower” so they will show you favor. Look at the story of job, God burned all his shit, killed his family, all on a bet with the devil job won’t still love God afterwards. And what does job do? Pray for forgiveness for what ever sin he’s committed that supposedly pissed god off when the entire thing is a pissing contest between the devil and god.
Any inner peace or heightened senses you get are just a placebo from that ritual. Similar to the sports ritual like not washing your socks or having lucky underwear.
And that’s why monotheism is a bad idea: You need to attribute everything to one single source. Now, if OTOH you understand it in the sense of “I paid too much attention to that one god while ignoring the advise of another, thus got inattentive” asking the latter god for forgiveness and calling up on a higher one with help to get those two to agree makes a lot more sense.
It’s more about the acknowledgement, as an ego, that you’re not the only one at the wheel. Gotta come to terms with your GPS and automatic shifter and respect the check engine light or things won’t end well. You may think that those are passive signals but there’s an intelligence behind lots of them, and some are perfectly capable of judging you to be the problematic car part. The crucial part is to stop fighting and dismissing and put round pegs in round holes, square ones in square holes. Use your faculties according to their nature, as the Stoics say.
And placebo effects are bad because…? I’d rather be happy because I’m well-aligned with myself than due to antidepressants. Also, peace isn’t really the goal it’s a side-effect. The mind of a sage is still not because they consider stillness to be good and therefore are still, but because the ten thousand things are insufficient to disturb them. (That’s Zhuangzi, same book as the butterfly story).
That’s not what the story of job is about even if you are entitled to your own interpretation(which goes back to my original point about why it’s all left to interpretation.) Job wasn’t punished because he didn’t pay attention to Satan. Satan was the little imp on his shoulder telling him all these things about how God isn’t righteous and he has forsaken him. It all started simply because God bragged about how devout and awesome Job was for following his teachings to Satan and Satan said “yeah well you got it all wrong, he only is so devout because you’ve rewarded him. Take away his rewards and he shall hate you.” And Job did for a while before the age old bull shit about having ‘faith’ came into play at the end where he just basically accepts he’s a Stoopid wittle hoomen who can’t understand God’s grand plan…which as we know as the person granted insight into God’s thinking, was a literal pissing contest between the devil.
As for placebo effects, I never commented on the effects being good or bad on their own, all I commented on is that just because they are a by product of participating in the ritual, they aren’t the goal of the ritual.
Yeah I’m not a fan of Christianity, the sensible interpretations are buried below layers and layers of apologetics, it’s never straight forward and the obvious interpretations are often right-out dangerous. But other religions would describe the crisis of faith motive more in the way that I described.
According to whom. The purpose of a system is what it does. If an ancient Roman had relationship trouble and went to temple and underwent some rituals and then regularly gave offerings in private to the respective gods and it helped their marriage then it doesn’t matter what they believed in, their reproductive success still increased. Darwin doesn’t care what you believe, what matters is fitness. Heck I wouldn’t be surprised if those temple rituals were overall more effective than modern-day marriage counselling.
According to the people who made the rituals, it’s clearly laid out in several different religious books what the entire purpose of the rituals within said book are for. Just because you experience a side effects doesn’t make the side effect the purpose.
The books describe how those people conceptualise things, not what the rituals are for, systemically speaking. As said: The purpose of a system is what it does. Try as hard as you might you won’t get me to blaspheme cybernetics.
Are you really comfortable claiming that those conceptual frameworks aren’t post-hoc rationalisation? “Oh I found myself doing XYZ which doesn’t have discernible physical utility, but I also connect it to things working out well recently, it must be because there’s some greater power I can reach in those ways, and this is how I imagine those powers to be”. To me that sounds like an excellent null hypothesis.
I actually think we agree this far. The point of contention is whether we should throw out the baby with the bathwater.