VATICAN CITY (CNS) – People who act shocked that a priest would bless a gay couple but have no problem with him blessing a crooked businessman are hypocrites, Pope Francis said.
“The most serious sins are those that are disguised with a more ‘angelic’ appearance. No one is scandalized if I give a blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people, which is a very serious sin. Whereas they are scandalized if I give it to a homosexual – this is hypocrisy,” he told the Italian magazine Credere.
The interview was scheduled for publication Feb. 8, but Vatican News reported on some of its content the day before when the magazine issued a press release about the interview.
I’m not a religious person, but I think some views in this thread are coming off a bit narcissistic and ignorant. Religion has been a large part of humanity for literally forever, and people can’t expect it to just go away completely. People turn to religion for comfort, often when they won’t receive it in other ways. There will always be someone in the world who needs religion, and we all need to coexist. The important thing here is he is attempting to drive his members to be empathetic and improve moral compass. Just be grateful for that at least. People expect too much.
At least 79% went away. Only 1% of my country’s population visited churches for christmas. For 20% of people who claim to belive in something other than sky fossil I have no data.
Your puny country does not represent the whole world.
Millions of people is a pretty good dataset for statistical reliability. That country can be considered a useful example of what’s possible.
No. One country is not diverse enough.
Why not? What are your assumptions about diversity in the context of the range of emotions and political tendencies?
How is this case political?
Again, one country’s population does not represent 7 billion people. That is a fact. Those who say otherwise should check their math’s grade.
Is it a fact because you want it to be, or are you some kind of statistics savant? It doesn’t represent the planet anthropologically, but it does psychologically, and whether it is possible for a population to drop organized religion is about brains not tradition.
Small part*.
Like I said, like a broken record, statistics need to be representative.
This case you brought up, is not.
“People expect too much”.
Yeha, I expect an organization that protects pedophiles to be dismantled. Sorry if that’s expecting too much.
While I’m all for phasing out modern religions over time, currently they still hold giant influence on hearts and minds of people, and, like it or not, Pope is an influential person; moreover, he’s essentially part of conservative camp, where we need change the most.
Also, let’s finally separate pedophiles and child molesters, as it’s both essential to understanding the dynamic that leads to this happening in churches (celibate warping people’s minds and children being easiest to lean to non-consential sex more often than actual pedophilia), as well as to create two distinct and effective solutions at child protection.
Actual pedophiles often need to get therapy to avoid mental traps that lead them to accept offending behavior, and those with severe lust over everything (which constitute over half of all child molestation cases) need other kind of therapy to manage their desires in a healthy way.
In case of the church, it means dismantling institute of celibacy alone can have a strong positive effect on child safety, as there would be no barriers for those “underfucked” to maintain a sexual life that would keep their minds in order. Maybe there is a point in going for that first?
Or maybe if they stopped giving them immunity for their actions they would think twice before commiting a crime and ruining a child’s life.
Better be both
But yes, everyone involved should be properly prosecuted.
I mean… I don’t know if that’s gunna be the complete answer. The Boy Scout leaders had no expectations of celebacy but they had an endemic issue with child molestation. The idea that it’s the lack of adult access to sex that creates these situations ignores a lot of the realities of predators.
Personally I think the best thing to do is to actually mandate age appropriate sex ed. They piloted that program in our district when I was a kid. For a youngster of the tender age of 1st grade all this needs to be is "Here’s the proper names of the different genital types and if someone wants to touch in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable it’s okay to tell a parent, a teacher a doctor or an adult you trust where and how you have been touched to help make it stop.
You would be quite frankly shocked how many kids in the district blew whistles on adult some right out the gate from that first briefing. Preserving some nebulous children’s “innocence” isn’t worth even one child suffering in ignorance.
Sex ed is an absolute must! It’s just that it’s one of many things that need to be done.
I encountered something similar in another Lemmy instance a couple of weeks ago with someone who believes all Christianity is bad, period.
The irony is, it’s the very same black-and-white thinking one would expect from a religious fundamentalist.
(Some Christian denominations are liberal, LGBTQ-friendly and not at all like that, such as United Church of Christ and Unity.)
Ditto. Not a particularly a religious person (spiritualist more generally) and generally pretty critical of the Church but bloody tired of people who have been religion burned taking it out on others who are just clinging to comfort to get by in a hard world. Lemmy has a rather large Christian Atheist community. You know the sort, the “I don’t believe in God but the God I very stridently don’t believe in is the Christian God” type of person. It does come across as fairly insecure at times. I am reminded of the way I used to behave as an angry teen.
I think we are seeing a historic waning of faith and a reassessment of cultural values…but looking at the cycles of things that generally means there’s a backlash which might be still building or we might be facing it right now. I think it’s far better for those traumatized atheists to build solidarity with people inside the faiths who are pushing for and building the foundations for changes as “enemy of my enemy is my friend” alliances. Sadly a lot of them seem way too busy trying to attain personal catharsis by just scalding anyone who treats religion with respect.
Religion is a reflection of humanity. A lot of people are thinking that humanity is a reflection of religion.
This is a bizarre sort of logic. If humanity is a reflection of religion, then where does religion come from? Perhaps from an omnipotent force of some sort?
If you believe religion is a creation of humans, than any issue with religion is ultimately just an issue with humans. And yeah, people suck.
Methinks lot of weird anti-religious ideas come from people who once believed religion came from an omnipotent being, then were in some way negatively affected be religion and realized that even religious people suck sometimes too. But the disappointment from discovering religion isn’t what they previously believed remains. The thought patterns about religion being a reflection of God and not being a reflection of humanity also remains. Even when someone no longer believes in God, the religious thought patterns remain.
Don’t crush my dreams like that.
Just keep pushing for a better society that doesn’t need to lean on religion for comfort, and that dream may come true. But not forcing people to abandon things. That just makes resentment.
Well spirituality will never go away but we can still try to shape our society in such a way that keeps institutions like the church from gaining massive power.
You are the dream crusher
As a baseline I’d expect the major religions to clean up their own shit, but it seems like they’re never quite able to. I’d like my ancestor worhip to be a little less rapey and a little less reliant on an unknowable higher authority that mentally ill people think they can talk to.