Zed wrote:Although I agree with Simon Jester on the difficulties of determining whether or not an action was intended or foreseen, whether something is moral or not depends upon the moral system one ascribes to. Clearly, for a Catholic, not committing a grave sin is more important than maximizing the amount of life saved.
It's worse than that. The problem isn't just that they define avoiding sin as a more important goal than saving lives. The problem is with their absurd, sophistry-based system for deciding what is and is not a sin. They're saying:
This act is not a sin because you did X in order to accomplish Y and Z was a predictable consequence.
That act is a sin because you did X in order to accomplish Z as a preliminary step to accomplishing Y.
What's the difference? In both cases you did X. In both cases the primary intent was Y. In both cases you knew damn well Z was going to happen, and were almost certainly planning on it.
If the Catholic church thinks that this is an acceptable system for deciding what is and isn't grounds for excommunication, given the enormous spiritual implications they think that excommunication has... they're doing it wrong. Whether or not you can be excommunicated for performing an action should not depend on such a tiny shade of meaning, because something that petty can so easily be interpreted one way or the other by a biased judge. All they have to do is get up on the wrong side of the bed in the morning and assume your intentions were evil instead of good, and
bang! You're going to Hell.
Which is stark nonsense from any theological perspective I can imagine a decent person holding with a straight face.
So I say again, assuming for the sake of argument that the broad framework of Christianity is correct, then the Catholic church abdicates any claim to be a spiritual authority by acting this way. If they ever had the authority to excommunicate people with the predictable consequence that doing so would send them to Hell... they've lost the right to that authority.
Seggybop wrote:You guys who are complaining about them following the rules are missing the point. This is what it means to be Catholic. You should be angry that Catholicism exists as an institution at all.
I'm not angry that Catholicism exists as an institution. I'm angry that its theologians have wandered into a blind alley of stupidity and are trying to force their congregation to obey them even as they blunder into walls.
The essential idea propagated by the Catholic church (and its parent, the Eastern Orthodox church) is "Trust us, we're experts on what to do in order to put yourself right with God." When the experts have gone so far astray that even I can see what they're doing wrong, they have betrayed that trust. Even assuming the basic, broad tenets of Christianity are true, that's still profoundly wrong, and it still destroys any claim they have to moral authority.
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- PeZook
