Official Kiwi forums Catholic hate thread because we needed one

[Taser Confetti]

Hating Catholics for being shitlib Christfags is based.

Hating Catholics because you believe Christianity finally got it right in 1876 when your schizo protestant church in Wisconsin was founded is cringe.

 

[Mukhrani]

I'm a classical liberal in the American Revolution mold. I've wandered all over the Right but ultimately came back my roots because that is what the world seems to reward. I see no historical basis for believing the Whore of Babylon's claim to authority, their theology is laughable and often disgusting (these people invented purgatory to pimp guilt-out-of-punishment-free tickets), their Church frequently made a mockery of Christian morality through its horrific acts (especially directed against other Christians who merely disagreed with them), and in general everything about it seems to run contrary to the spirit of the New Testament and of Jesus' life. Take orders from some faggot in robes on a throne in a palace. Pray to other flawed humans because Almighty God is too busy, this omnipotent, omniscient omnibenevolent entity has secretaries. Mumble repetitive canned prayers and worship off of a script (just like Jesus told you not to). To take punishment from a priest and call him "father" as though the priest is God and the punishment is his to give!

The litany of basic Protestant complains here always seemed very ineffectual to me. It reminds of the debate within Islam over whether revealed prophecy must be taken at its literal word, or whether reason a philosophical process can be used to arrive at further conclusions starting from the basics of the faith. It seems ironic to me that most people in this mold of protestant liberalism, who often bemoan the fall of Ilm al-Kalam as a great civilizational tragedy, become mini Al-Ghazalis when it comes to Christian theology. I find their scripturalist arguments just as unconvincing as those of their Islamic counterparts.

The line of attack that I find particularly effective against Catholicism is one centered around the nature of schism and apostolic succession. I think that, taking all the Catholic claims at face value, the entire Orthodox world since the Great Schism has been 'cut off' from the Church. This, to me, is on its face absurd. I cannot believe that someone like Elizaveta Feodorovna lived her life cut off from God's grace and didn't become a saint. The woman was superhuman - forgave her husbands murderer, gave up one of the largest fortunes in Europe, lived an ascetic life caring for the poor and destitute, then face martyrdom thrown in the bottom of a mineshaft with a live grenade following the October revolution, spending her last moments tending to the wounds of those with her and singing hymns.

I can't prove on any theological or logical basis that a true religion must have good fruits, but I have something better, which is common sense. We may not be able to expect that a religion will bear fruit for a person in their worldly life, but when a religion is correct and its morals and spirit are sound, then you can very reasonably expect it to bear fruit at a society-wide level, because even if the individual's religion cannot be guaranteed to bear fruit for them, it can for those around them, and if most people adhere to it, then their interactions will bless the whole community.

It was the Protestant world, and really that means the Calvinist and Anabaptist world, that made the modern world. It was the Protestant world that created the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, so that the average person doesn't die at 35 and can spend their life doing more than endlessly toiling as a half-slave to live from day to day in a hovel eating nothing but bread. It was the Protestant world that revived republicanism so that there could be some sort of constraint on the ability of elites (faggoted, parasitical noblemen) to run roughshod over everyone else. And though it took a while for Protestantism to grow into this - it took a world war's worth of blood spilled to win their right to live unmolested - it ultimately was them that accepted that not every person may think or worship in the same way and that it is evil to force uniformity on everyone.

It is Protestant America that genuine religious sentiment is preserved in, the last line of it in the First World. It's Protestant America, the Netherlands and Britain where revolution went hand-in-hand with faith. And anywhere Catholic Third Worlders have finally been offered a choice, they have dropped Catholicism like a bad habit. It spread through war and terror. Evangelicalism/Pentecostalism spread like wildfire in Latin America, Africa and Asia on the basis of persuasion and its own powerful works.

And the more Catholics (Irish and Italians particularly) and Jews America let in, the more the country got shit up.

I don't think this is an accurate representation of history. The scientific understanding that drove the industrial revolution bridged the Catholic and the Protestant world. In figures like Savonarola - often seen as a proto-Protestant - you saw a railing against both nascent Capitalism and Renaissance values. The luddites took hold in Protestant England, the Amish are Protestants. Most of the great universities in the Western world were Catholic, and the largescale translation of ancient Greek knowledge from Arabic was done into Latin because it was carried out by the Church. It was overall an exceedingly messy time.

People also didn't die at 35, the average lifespan was skewed by higher infant morality. If you lived to 30 you would have a relatively normal lifespan. The argument of which religion spreads quickest is also facile in my opinion. If that's the standard, then the true heirs to Christ are Islam & Mormonism.

It's true that Northern Europe exploded in prosperity, but it's also true that they very rapidly, in the grand scheme of things, progressed to decadence, hedonism, and mass apostasy. Hilaire Belloc wrote a book on the Crusades that I once read, and it had a very interesting concluding chapter written at a time when Islam seemed vanquished for good. He wrote that Europe had made a Faustian bargain, selling its soul for worldly power, and that our worldviews/beliefs had very little scaffolding left to hold them up. We were just running on inertia. He made a remarkably accurate prediction that Islam would rise from the ashes because they still had an animating central civilizational belief system - that they would eventually threaten the West again and that the West would be at risk of losing not on a material basis, but due to spiritual impoverishment leading to a lack of will to resist an alien culture.

Before my hatred of Catholicism grew into what it has, back when I merely disapproved it but could still entertain it like another Christian denomination, I went to a Mass once. It was a historical cathedral, very fine decoration. I was struck by how wrong it was. That there was no spirit of God in that building. I will not say that it's true for the other people there, because I'm not so arrogant as to believe God doesn't speak to everyone, on their terms, to the extent that he can. But I could just feel in my bones that it was a bad place in a way I have never felt in any other denomination.

Distract people with bullshit like saints and the weird Virgin Mary cultism. Distract people from normal family life with bizarre, antisocial monastic orders. Disgrace the name of Christianity in its bloody purges. Collect riches to itself and build a great worldly power like Caesar, while telling its people that this world does not matter.

I once knew a very nice sedevacantist lady, and talking to her I was struck by the notion (which I didn't voice for obvious reasons) that she was closer in her beliefs to Martin Luther than any modern Protestant. Luther prayed the rosary diligently, believed in most of the things that modern Catholics believed in (communion of saints, apostolic succession). She just thought that the pope sucked to the point where he couldn't be the pope and was ruining the church - which was Luther's whole schtick.

I think it's a bit odd to be assblasted over the rosary, or asking saints to intercede for you, or the idea of a priesthood. These things have been present in just about every iteration of Christianity since its founding up until a few hundred years ago, and were found in even the earliest splinter groups which weren't nakedly heretical. I think that any belief in Christianity - the idea that God came to earth 2,000 years ago to pass on his teachings and die for our sins - can't be reconciled with the idea that every Church on earth has been wrong for 2,000 years. That millions/billions of souls have been living and dying in error until some people realized 'wow, actually we shouldn't believe in saints and priesthoods'. How is that reconcilable with the idea that the Holy Spirit descended to the apostles on Pentecost? That's a hell of a delayed reaction to start getting things right.

Overall I actually think that the general attitude of the Catholic Church gets this right. Look at most of the great saints, look at their actions/words. Theresa of Avila, Ignatius, Francis of Assisi, Hildegard von Bingen, Bernardino of Siena - just to name a few. They were all intensely critical of the Church. In fact I think Saint Ignatius is often quoted as saying that the road to hell is paved with the bones of priests, and the skulls of bishops are the lamps which light the way. There's this idea inherent in Catholicism that the Church is necessarily corrupt. That it's a human institution that is in the world, but not of the world. That there's a side that will always cling to temporal power, will always become despotic, hypocritical, and ugly. And there's a side that's supernatural, a side that is a wellspring of holy momentum, which when it emerges in a person that follows God's will more perfectly than most other people (a saint) is focused inwardly on the Church as fiery criticism, and outwardly on the world as evangelical fervor.

I think this is a much more realistic view of a religious institution than the utopian drive that I see in a lot of Protestant denominations - the idea that we can perfect these institutions by getting the right kind of organization, by having presbyters, congregationalism, or a Quaker meeting, or just cutting out the middle men and having the King be the head of the Church. I notice very often this idea of 'forming a more perfect union' applied to church governance - to me it smacks of atheism & utilitarianism. If you believe that humans have fallen nature, and that God is making his presence felt in your Church, I think you end up with this Catholic mentality where everyone knows that the church is corrupt in part or sometimes almost in whole, but that God still works through it and will never allow the corruption to completely destroy the Church.

And there is no spirit of liberty in it at all. It has always, will always be the faith of despots, reactionary, Communist (liberation theology in Latin America).

I disagree with this entirely. There have been several deeply Catholic historical revolts against temporal powers. The Vendée Revolt against the terror of the French Revolution, the Pilgrimage of Grace against the excesses of the Tudors, and the Cristero War against the anti-clerical laws passed by the government of Mexico.

I will say this, one aspect of Catholic social thought I am open to is distributism, because I realized that it is perhaps the closest thing to Jefferson's views. The capitalist system has a couple useful features that make it suitable for running a complex civilization:
1) Resolves the economic calculation problem through price signals
2) Superior use of incentives and personal responsibility to reward socially productive behavior
3) Competition is important in getting #1 and #2

It's a decentralized and undesigned information system. But its character can change dramatically depending on the specifics, distribution of property and rights, rules of the game, stuff like that.

I think that a lot of Catholic economic thought on usury is super informative and crucial, but it's very hard to find. I remember reading a work by Saint Bernardino of Siena I believe, and he gives a technical definition of usury which really expanded my understanding of it. Most people are just told that usury means 'charging interest' but that's not true at all. How Saint Bernardino described it was 'profit without risk or labor'. In other words, you can profit by laboring, or you can profit by owning in whole or in part an enterprise the actions of which you are personally accountable for. I think if this rule was applied it would revolutionize any economy for the better.

He was also around for the decadent decay of Florence from a productive textile powerhouse to an usury-driven warmongering Ponzi scheme. He described the death of the city's economy from usury as blood pooling in a patient's heart before they die. In a productive economy, money is blood. If flows through companies, employees, consumers, changing hands along with products to denote the exchange of value. Once usury sets in you end up with a class who can profit just by investing their money and taking no part in the productive enterprise in which they are invested, and bearing little personal risk if it fails. Instead of circulating, the blood pools at the areas with the biggest margins, which in turn attract more capital. Eventually the mills didn't have the biggest margins, so Venice turned to a juicier business: war and military financing. By the time the Medici were driven out the textile manufacturing which had originally made the city wealthy was in shambles., while several princes had called the bankers' bluff and refused to pay their enormous war debts.

The closest American equivalent to Distributism that I can think of is Georgism, which sought to deconsolidate property holdings by taxing rents. It's a philosophy that holds special appeal in light of the current housing market debacle.

 

[Str8Bustah]

I cannot believe that someone like Elizaveta Feodorovna lived her life cut off from God's grace and didn't become a saint.

I don't take anyone who says things like this seriously as a matter of principle. We venerate her at my local parish, and I've seen plenty of kids run up to her icon in the middle of the liturgy and just sit there. I personally refuse to believe that she isn't present there because someone from the RCC or a protestant denomination says she isn't a saint and doesn't belong in the church when a child can clearly recognise that she's standing right there and wants to go up and say hello to her.

 

[CAPTAIN HAPPY]

Where the Protestant retardation thread?
Now there you'll some lightspeed traffic.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The litany of basic Protestant complains here always seemed very ineffectual to me. It reminds of the debate within Islam over whether revealed prophecy must be taken at its literal word, or whether reason a philosophical process can be used to arrive at further conclusions starting from the basics of the faith. It seems ironic to me that most people in this mold of protestant liberalism, who often bemoan the fall of Ilm al-Kalam as a great civilizational tragedy, become mini Al-Ghazalis when it comes to Christian theology. I find their scripturalist arguments just as unconvincing as those of their Islamic counterparts.

Honestly I don't remember those names and I haven't bothered to look them up, but are you talking about the who Mu'tazilite/Ashari thing? When Islam closed itself off to creative inquiry?

There is indeed a parallel between Protestantism/modern fundamentalism and modern Wahhabism, or older strains of Islam. That's actually a fairly troubling thing for me.

The line of attack that I find particularly effective against Catholicism is one centered around the nature of schism and apostolic succession. I think that, taking all the Catholic claims at face value, the entire Orthodox world since the Great Schism has been 'cut off' from the Church. This, to me, is on its face absurd. I cannot believe that someone like Elizaveta Feodorovna lived her life cut off from God's grace and didn't become a saint. The woman was superhuman - forgave her husbands murderer, gave up one of the largest fortunes in Europe, lived an ascetic life caring for the poor and destitute, then face martyrdom thrown in the bottom of a mineshaft with a live grenade following the October revolution, spending her last moments tending to the wounds of those with her and singing hymns.

I'm no expert on it but it seems plain to me that it was the Catholics who left the Orthodox rather than the other way around. That is, the Orthodox are the legitimate church and the Catholics are the pretenders.

I don't think this is an accurate representation of history. The scientific understanding that drove the industrial revolution bridged the Catholic and the Protestant world. In figures like Savonarola - often seen as a proto-Protestant - you saw a railing against both nascent Capitalism and Renaissance values. The luddites took hold in Protestant England, the Amish are Protestants. Most of the great universities in the Western world were Catholic, and the largescale translation of ancient Greek knowledge from Arabic was done into Latin because it was carried out by the Church. It was overall an exceedingly messy time.

I'm talking about the Industrial Revolution and Industrious/Commercial Revolution, not the Scientific Revolution. The latter spanned Catholic and Protestant Europe. The former clearly began in Northwestern Europe, initially before the Reformation but both directly contributing to the Reformation and then being driven further by it. There was a modern mindset towards how we acquire knowledge, evaluate our world, an understanding of theory, but it wasn't been applied to any useful end in many countries.

I hope you realize, although I can understand how you might have thought this, that I do not believe in the Church bad science good cliche. It's not true at all and, as you said, the Church was the main preserver and sponsor of scholarship (and some practical craftsmanship/agronomy in workshop-like monasteries) early on.

The basis for my rant is a branch of growth economics/economics of religion that's dominated by three scholars, Rubin, Kuran and Buena de Mesquita. Rubin and Kuran lay out an argument that Protestantism went hand in hand with the rise of republicanism and constitutional monarchy in Northwestern Europe which in turn leads to growth, innovation, basically the kind of political climate in which you CAN get the emergence of modern capitalism and industrialization.

The laggards (Germany, France, Russia, Japan etc) took their own path, much like Asian Tigers did in the 20th Century, being cheap imitators of British, American and Dutch (Belgium is under Dutch rule when this stuff begins) brilliance.

The Luddites weren't a religious movement. Amish didn't reject industry to my knowledge. I'm not sure about their living conditions, but Quakers - their direct equivalent in the English-speaking world - tended to become very prosperous through frugality and work ethic. The Amish opposition to technology was a sort of mutation, an unintended consequence, of a lifestyle that prioritized asceticism (within the context of family life, unlike a monk) above all else. They became spergy about it and stopped culturally evolving. Mennonites are the same basic idea, same set of values, but they didn't do that.

People also didn't die at 35, the average lifespan was skewed by higher infant morality. If you lived to 30 you would have a relatively normal lifespan.

I know. Maybe was badly worded, but it doesn't change the fact that half of everyone is dying before they even get to live.

The argument of which religion spreads quickest is also facile in my opinion. If that's the standard, then the true heirs to Christ are Islam & Mormonism.

Well, it's not one of those things where you can be all "I have PROVED your faith is wrong" off of it, but I think that the manner in which a faith dies.

Let me lay out an idea for you. Religion doesn't promise to make our lives better, right?* Your reward is internal in a happier heart and a more virtuous life, flourishing, but in the material, potentially even in the social you cannot count on anything but suffering and heartache.

But religion is also largely about us getting along more harmoniously with one another, doing the right thing for the world and for one another?

So I'd reason that we could reasonably expect a society that is dominated by a good religion to have a good society and a great deal of contentment.

It's not just the numbers that makes Protestantism stand out. It's the way in which the Catholic stranglehold on Latin America (a civilized, philosophically formidable religion) is crumbling (and then also the growth everywhere else too). That as soon (in the grand scheme of things) as Protestantism got a foothold, and was allowed to grow, it blew the door wide open to Evangelicalism.

It is people on a mass scale (in countries like Guatemala and Brazil) looking back on hundreds of years of Catholic culture and saying "fuck this" that, to me, is damning of the failure of that religion in their countries.

I have heard that part of it is a rejection of liberation theology.

*Some branches, like prosperity gospel theology or a lot of pagan thinking does, but speaking in general.

It's true that Northern Europe exploded in prosperity, but it's also true that they very rapidly, in the grand scheme of things, progressed to decadence, hedonism, and mass apostasy.

Now we'd need to get into actual data arguments (which I might lose!) or personal experience.

But one thing I swear I have seen is that Catholic countries tend to have higher rates of atheism. France had such a backwards, shitty Catholic Church that it resulted in an extreme laicist backlash that lasts to this very day. Spain was the same but the Church kept its thumb and now it has higher rates of atheism. If I'm not mistaken Scandinavia does maybe have more atheism too, but then again, the United States is far and away the most religious First World country.

Massive sluts of women, too.

The general impression I have of it is that very oppressive or hegemonic churches result in people "checking out" of religion entirely in frustration instead of finding a different denomination that fits them better. And being as you already brought up feeling uncomfortable with the idea that Orthodox are not a legitimate branch of the church, wouldn't you say a heretic is better than a heathen?

Within America, Catholics are notably more likely to get abortions than Protestants, more likely than atheists (!!!) to indulge premarital sex in college, and there's a general impression of them being, by and large, very insincere and casual in their faith.

Hilaire Belloc wrote a book on the Crusades that I once read, and it had a very interesting concluding chapter written at a time when Islam seemed vanquished for good. He wrote that Europe had made a Faustian bargain, selling its soul for worldly power, and that our worldviews/beliefs had very little scaffolding left to hold them up. We were just running on inertia. He made a remarkably accurate prediction that Islam would rise from the ashes because they still had an animating central civilizational belief system - that they would eventually threaten the West again and that the West would be at risk of losing not on a material basis, but due to spiritual impoverishment leading to a lack of will to resist an alien culture.

I read a little Belloc once and I was very, very disappointed with it. (The Servile State)

A

I once knew a very nice sedevacantist lady, and talking to her I was struck by the notion (which I didn't voice for obvious reasons) that she was closer in her beliefs to Martin Luther than any modern Protestant. Luther prayed the rosary diligently, believed in most of the things that modern Catholics believed in (communion of saints, apostolic succession). She just thought that the pope sucked to the point where he couldn't be the pope and was ruining the church - which was Luther's whole schtick.

I mean, I don't exactly have a good opinion of Lutheranism. He was the moderate. That's kind of nice in its own way. But my problem with Big Church is it's Bigness to begin with. Reform isn't an option.

This is even where you see that when the big human takeoff takes place, it's at its most intense in the most extremely Reformed areas (Swiss Calvinist, Dutch Calvinist, New England Calvinist, Pennsylvania Anabaptist). Scotland (Calvinist) didn't do as hot materially, but it was extremely rich culturally, and England (Anglican) was an awkward Calvinist-Anabaptist-Catholic messy hybrid.

Since my story mostly revolved around historical outcomes, it is worth noting that Lutheran Scandinavia wound up doing better than the Calvinist English Channel/American peoples, but that has a lot to do with developments that happened long after religion was the driving force in politics.

What I see in Lutheran countries in that same time frame is successful nations, but less so, then the Catholic countries are kind of shitty (with bright spots, like Catholic Austria being very rich musically), then the Orthodox countries are really shitty, and the rest of the world is a dumpster fire.

I think it's a bit odd to be assblasted over the rosary, or asking saints to intercede for you, or the idea of a priesthood. These things have been present in just about every iteration of Christianity since its founding up until a few hundred years ago, and were found in even the earliest splinter groups which weren't nakedly heretical. I think that any belief in Christianity - the idea that God came to earth 2,000 years ago to pass on his teachings and die for our sins - can't be reconciled with the idea that every Church on earth has been wrong for 2,000 years. That millions/billions of souls have been living and dying in error until some people realized 'wow, actually we shouldn't believe in saints and priesthoods'. How is that reconcilable with the idea that the Holy Spirit descended to the apostles on Pentecost? That's a hell of a delayed reaction to start getting things right.

Don't know much about that. They all, all of these weird little heresies that died before canonization of the Bible, had saints?
As far as priesthood goes, depending on what you mean by that, I am certain that they did not all have that. I don't remember it real well, but Lost Christianities (Bart Ehrman) had a big part talking about fights over epistles over whether congregations were subordinate to their bishops.

Overall I actually think that the general attitude of the Catholic Church gets this right. Look at most of the great saints, look at their actions/words. Theresa of Avila, Ignatius, Francis of Assisi, Hildegard von Bingen, Bernardino of Siena - just to name a few. They were all intensely critical of the Church. In fact I think Saint Ignatius is often quoted as saying that the road to hell is paved with the bones of priests, and the skulls of bishops are the lamps which light the way. There's this idea inherent in Catholicism that the Church is necessarily corrupt. That it's a human institution that is in the world, but not of the world. That there's a side that will always cling to temporal power, will always become despotic, hypocritical, and ugly. And there's a side that's supernatural, a side that is a wellspring of holy momentum, which when it emerges in a person that follows God's will more perfectly than most other people (a saint) is focused inwardly on the Church as fiery criticism, and outwardly on the world as evangelical fervor.

I think this is a much more realistic view of a religious institution than the utopian drive that I see in a lot of Protestant denominations - the idea that we can perfect these institutions by getting the right kind of organization, by having presbyters, congregationalism, or a Quaker meeting, or just cutting out the middle men and having the King be the head of the Church. I notice very often this idea of 'forming a more perfect union' applied to church governance - to me it smacks of atheism & utilitarianism. If you believe that humans have fallen nature, and that God is making his presence felt in your Church, I think you end up with this Catholic mentality where everyone knows that the church is corrupt in part or sometimes almost in whole, but that God still works through it and will never allow the corruption to completely destroy the Church.

I don't see that being a drive in these denominations, though. These Protestant sects were either Catholic lite fighting for independence (Anglicanism, Lutheranism), had a far more sweeping plan of reform (Presbyterians) or were the various independent types that wanted to be left alone. It wasn't anything new, aside from that the idea of some of those churches (like Baptists) to not force their shit on everyone was new.

I think a big chunk of this is, how do you conceptualize the Church? Is the Church a body/community of believers or is it a specific institution like some big club that has rules and a membership list and so on? To what I call Big Church (be it Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, Mormon or anything else) it's the latter. To most of your Protestants it's the former. Of course they believe their particular interpretation is correct, that's kind of a tautology. They wouldn't believe it was true if they didn't believe it was true. But most of your Protestants fully accept that, at a minimum, other Protestants are part of The Church even if they're not part of their church.

I understand what you mean about accepting that human institutions will be corrupt. i just don't see how it follows that you owe loyalty to a specific priests orders or a specific set of regulations or whatever it is, 100% in faith and intensity, until the end of time, no matter how bad it gets. That no matter how much it may disgrace itself you can never separate from it.

It just reeks to me of bullshit. Bullshit in the same vein as Muhammad's concept of abrogation.

I disagree with this entirely. There have been several deeply Catholic historical revolts against temporal powers. The Vendée Revolt against the terror of the French Revolution, the Pilgrimage of Grace against the excesses of the Tudors, and the Cristero War against the anti-clerical laws passed by the government of Mexico.

Reactionary revolts...

And the anti-clerical movement in Mexico is another great example of what I said about France and Spain.

I think that a lot of Catholic economic thought on usury is super informative and crucial, but it's very hard to find. I remember reading a work by Saint Bernardino of Siena I believe, and he gives a technical definition of usury which really expanded my understanding of it. Most people are just told that usury means 'charging interest' but that's not true at all. How Saint Bernardino described it was 'profit without risk or labor'. In other words, you can profit by laboring, or you can profit by owning in whole or in part an enterprise the actions of which you are personally accountable for. I think if this rule was applied it would revolutionize any economy for the better.

Okay, there may be a more complex take on it than just "charging interest," but that WAS banned, I'm pretty sure. I've read about them having to come up with absurd dodges to get around the ban.

What you're describing sounds like rent seeking, basically. But I'm skeptical that usury was intended to be the same as rent seeking. I'm willing to look into it, though.

You also hear people say it's just "unreasonably high" interest rates, "predatory" interest rates, which gets back into the age old argument about ethics and prices. Really just an extension of just price theory, right? That Aquinas garbage?

He was also around for the decadent decay of Florence from a productive textile powerhouse to an usury-driven warmongering Ponzi scheme. He described the death of the city's economy from usury as blood pooling in a patient's heart before they die. In a productive economy, money is blood. If flows through companies, employees, consumers, changing hands along with products to denote the exchange of value. Once usury sets in you end up with a class who can profit just by investing their money and taking no part in the productive enterprise in which they are invested, and bearing little personal risk if it fails.

Well, they lose if they don't ever get repaid, and much of the time a person needs a loan it's because they don't have the resources. Not always though, oftentimes they can earn their way into paying off the debt.

But I see what you mean.

The closest American equivalent to Distributism that I can think of is Georgism, which sought to deconsolidate property holdings by taxing rents. It's a philosophy that holds special appeal in light of the current housing market debacle.

I like Georgism. Consider myself Georgist and probably (only started taking it seriously recently) Austrian. Don't want people's first home/family farm taxed, but tax the hell out of the rest of it. I think it is very sound economic and ethical reasoning.

 

[Mukhrani]

Honestly I don't remember those names and I haven't bothered to look them up, but are you talking about the who Mu'tazilite/Ashari thing? When Islam closed itself off to creative inquiry?

There is indeed a parallel between Protestantism/modern fundamentalism and modern Wahhabism, or older strains of Islam. That's actually a fairly troubling thing for me.

Yeah, it's always what the whole 'sola scriptura' and arguments against the more extravagant Catholic dogmas remind me of. I like to compare different bibles, and I have a Douay-Rheims with Haydock's commentary, and the amount of backreferences to scripture and reasoning that underpins Catholic theology is quite deep, even if it's still imo and awkward translation sometimes. Things like the communion of saints, purgatory, apostolic succession are all meticulously referenced and argued not just through the Bible itself but by referencing arguments made by church fathers like Tertullian and Origen.

I'm no expert on it but it seems plain to me that it was the Catholics who left the Orthodox rather than the other way around. That is, the Orthodox are the legitimate church and the Catholics are the pretenders.

I'm talking about the Industrial Revolution and Industrious/Commercial Revolution, not the Scientific Revolution. The latter spanned Catholic and Protestant Europe. The former clearly began in Northwestern Europe, initially before the Reformation but both directly contributing to the Reformation and then being driven further by it. There was a modern mindset towards how we acquire knowledge, evaluate our world, an understanding of theory, but it wasn't been applied to any useful end in many countries.

The basis for my rant is a branch of growth economics/economics of religion that's dominated by three scholars, Rubin, Kuran and Buena de Mesquita. Rubin and Kuran lay out an argument that Protestantism went hand in hand with the rise of republicanism and constitutional monarchy in Northwestern Europe which in turn leads to growth, innovation, basically the kind of political climate in which you CAN get the emergence of modern capitalism and industrialization.

The laggards (Germany, France, Russia, Japan etc) took their own path, much like Asian Tigers did in the 20th Century, being cheap imitators of British, American and Dutch (Belgium is under Dutch rule when this stuff begins) brilliance.

Industry was also very big in Italy, and there were severe clashes between the rising bourgeoise and the church. I don't think the church 'winning' is what held them back though - I think that in Italy the economic growth was gobbled up by usury and constant internal war despite most famous Catholic preachers inveighing against these things, whereas other countries turned their industrial might outwards and expended their energy in empire-building. Spain, England, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and to some degree the French all eventually took this route, using raw materials from the colonies to fuel industrial growth at home. Italy squandered that opportunity. In this sense I see the Protestant reformation as a symptom rather than a driving force - the changing economy and the growing geopolitical realities of empire didn't fit the old feudal system in which the church was the primary unifying force anymore. All of these centrifugal forces drove those industrializing areas to break away politically from the Church piece by piece, then once the birthing pains were over those countries developed rapidly while large-scale war on the continent was suppressed post-Westphalia.

Well, it's not one of those things where you can be all "I have PROVED your faith is wrong" off of it, but I think that the manner in which a faith dies.

Let me lay out an idea for you. Relig

Think this got accidentally cut off.

Now we'd need to get into actual data arguments (which I might lose!) or personal experience.

But one thing I swear I have seen is that Catholic countries tend to have higher rates of atheism. France had such a backwards, shitty Catholic Church that it resulted in an extreme laicist backlash that lasts to this very day. Spain was the same but the Church kept its thumb and now it has higher rates of atheism. If I'm not mistaken Scandinavia does maybe have more atheism too, but then again, the United States is far and away the most religious First World country.

Massive sluts of women, too.

The general impression I have of it is that very oppressive or hegemonic churches result in people "checking out" of religion entirely in frustration instead of finding a different denomination that fits them better. And being as you already brought up feeling uncomfortable with the idea that Orthodox are not a legitimate branch of the church, wouldn't you say a heretic is better than a heathen?

The Catholic Church in France was far from the norm. The Concordat of Bologna gave the king the power to appoint bishops and to even control their communication with Rome. Because of this the French Church was very much a political animal - you even see this reflected in the whole Avignon Papacy debacle. This is part of the reason why the backlash against the Church was so intense and powerful in France that it resulted in formalized Laïcité.

I think that the US is religious on paper but I meet way less deeply religious people in America than I did when in parts of Catholic Europe. To me it seems like for most Americans religion is like a hobby or a reflex, not something that people actually believe in. It wasn't that way for many of my grandparent's generation, but it seems to move more and more in that direction, until eventually faith atrophies entirely. It may be different in the south maybe.

I read a little Belloc once and I was very, very disappointed with it. (The Servile State)

What didn't you like about it? I always preferred his history books - Chesterton was always the better polemicist.

Don't know much about that. They all, all of these weird little heresies that died before canonization of the Bible, had saints?
As far as priesthood goes, depending on what you mean by that, I am certain that they did not all have that. I don't remember it real well, but Lost Christianities (Bart Ehrman) had a big part talking about fights over epistles over whether congregations were subordinate to their bishops.

I don't see that being a drive in these denominations, though. These Protestant sects were either Catholic lite fighting for independence (Anglicanism, Lutheranism), had a far more sweeping plan of reform (Presbyterians) or were the various independent types that wanted to be left alone. It wasn't anything new, aside from that the idea of some of those churches (like Baptists) to not force their shit on everyone was new.

I think a big chunk of this is, how do you conceptualize the Church? Is the Church a body/community of believers or is it a specific institution like some big club that has rules and a membership list and so on? To what I call Big Church (be it Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, Mormon or anything else) it's the latter. To most of your Protestants it's the former. Of course they believe their particular interpretation is correct, that's kind of a tautology. They wouldn't believe it was true if they didn't believe it was true. But most of your Protestants fully accept that, at a minimum, other Protestants are part of The Church even if they're not part of their church.

I understand what you mean about accepting that human institutions will be corrupt. i just don't see how it follows that you owe loyalty to a specific priests orders or a specific set of regulations or whatever it is, 100% in faith and intensity, until the end of time, no matter how bad it gets. That no matter how much it may disgrace itself you can never separate from it.

It just reeks to me of bullshit. Bullshit in the same vein as Muhammad's concept of abrogation.

I think the best way Church as sort of like a vine - it started in antiquity, when twelve apostles were infused with the Holy Spirit, and that sap has nourished the vine as it grew. I think it's clear that parts of the vine can be severed and die, but I do think that God guaranteed that total failure is not possible. Apostolic succession is a big art of that because I don't think it makes sense that there was some kind of 'gap' where the true church was lost - I basically think that if the church originated with the Apostles and their original students (one of the earliest confirmable ones is Polycarp iirc) then the holy spirit wouldn't have 'flickered' in the outset and let some fake priesthood take over- if you believe the Bible, the early apostles performed great miracles as their flocks grew - I basically can't see them 'dropping the ball' in the first act. If the argument that certain branches of the church grew corrupt and severed themselves and another branch is the true church I could see that - but the idea that there's no apostolic succession at all just seems to break completely with the foundational mythos of Christian religion.

It's less that I think that people HAVE to remain loyal to one particular bishop or church, and more that I am DEEPLY suspicious of utopianism or the idea that we can tweak our way out of fundamental human weaknesses and come up with a perfect society. I respect that deep acknowledgement of human weakness that is woven into the church. It's kind of like marriage in a way: you accept someone warts and all, you don't keep trying to float around trying to find the perfect person, or to mold someone into your idea of perfection. You work with what you have. I may not agree with every aspect of that, but I respect the wisdom in that mentality more than I do trying to discover the lost political formula on which the apocryphal first century AD churches were founded.

Reactionary revolts...

And the anti-clerical movement in Mexico is another great example of what I said about France and Spain.

I don't really buy the concept of 'reactionary' anything because I don't believe that history has a particular direction. People fight for their idea of liberty - for the members of the Pilgrimage of Grace for example, that didn't including the King and his toadies looting the monasteries. They saw it as tyranny, as a broach of a King's proper powers and their restraints and that's how it was framed by the rebels themselves. I don't think the fact that the king won in the end makes their act of rebellion somehow invalid.

Okay, there may be a more complex take on it than just "charging interest," but that WAS banned, I'm pretty sure. I've read about them having to come up with absurd dodges to get around the ban.

What you're describing sounds like rent seeking, basically. But I'm skeptical that usury was intended to be the same as rent seeking. I'm willing to look into it, though.

You also hear people say it's just "unreasonably high" interest rates, "predatory" interest rates, which gets back into the age old argument about ethics and prices. Really just an extension of just price theory, right? That Aquinas garbage?

Well, they lose if they don't ever get repaid, and much of the time a person needs a loan it's because they don't have the resources. Not always though, oftentimes they can earn their way into paying off the debt.

But I see what you mean.

I like Georgism. Consider myself Georgist and probably (only started taking it seriously recently) Austrian. Don't want people's first home/family farm taxed, but tax the hell out of the rest of it. I think it is very sound economic and ethical reasoning.

I believe it was a group of Spanish Catholic thinkers who came up with Bankruptcy law. A lot of this thought really centered around risk - the idea is that if profit without risk exists, all capital will flood to it, it will fuck everything up, and disrupt actual production. Before bankruptcy it's important to remember that you often had indentured servitude - if the debtor defaulted, the creditor received the debtor himself in recompense. The idea behind bankruptcy law was to introduce serious risk to creditors. There's a lot of interesting history surrounding the subject, particularly in Florence. Usury was banned, but one book I read talked about how Jews were used to get around this. The wealthy Christian Florentines would allow Jews in as moneylenders. They would devalue the currency that wages were paid in and let the Jews lend to the tradesmen so they could make ends meet. Eventually, when the debt became unsustainable, the Jews would be attacked, their loan records burned, and then they would be run out of town only for them to return later with readily available funds. The author speculated that the source of their seed capital was the wealthy elite of the city, and that the Jews were essentially a way for them to engage in usury without being caught before being scapegoated.

 

[mindlessobserver]

OP is just mad the Protestants and Catholics in the Ukraine Thread united themselves in the universal opinion that the Russian Orthodox Church is a den of infidels run by Literal Russian Glowniggers who psyop the credulous faithful into believing a war on another Christian nation backed up by literal muhmaddans is totally not an act of sublime heresy.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

For some reason I get spammed Catholic content on social media. I don’t know why, because I don’t really even interact with it.

I really hate how almost all of it is just attacks on Protestants/Orthodox groups and then shit like this:

View attachment 6330232

They spend all day dishing it out, but they can’t take it. Should’ve taken your own advice and not picked fights against other Christians for no reason.

The Catholic Church is a glorified money laundering scheme do you wanna know who's bringing non whites into your neighborhood it's probably some Catholic group the Catholic should be driven from our lands and driven off the face of the planet the Catholics invented Islam to attack Protestants

 

[Mukhrani]

OP is just mad the Protestants and Catholics in the Ukraine Thread united themselves in the universal opinion that the Russian Orthodox Church is a den of infidels run by Literal Russian Glowniggers who psyop the credulous faithful into believing a war on another Christian nation backed up by literal muhmaddans is totally not an act of sublime heresy.

If Christian on Christian war is heresy than just about every Christian to ever live is a heretic. If siding with Muslims against Chrisitians is sublime heresy, that still covers about half of them. Especially the British.

 

[Buttigieg2020]

The Catholic Church is a glorified money laundering scheme

Not really laundering when you have your own state. It’s just regular corruption.

do you wanna know who's bringing non whites into your neighborhood it's probably some Catholic group the Catholic
should be driven from our lands

True, Catholic Charities love moving Latinx around. It’s what the Pope wants.

and driven off the face of the planet the Catholics invented Islam to attack Protestants

Good on the Catholics for working on a plan that wouldn’t pay off for 900 years.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

This, to me, is on its face absurd. I cannot believe that someone like Elizaveta Feodorovna lived her life cut off from God's grace and didn't become a saint. The woman was superhuman - forgave her husbands murderer, gave up one of the largest fortunes in Europe, lived an ascetic life caring for the poor and destitute, then face martyrdom thrown in the bottom of a mineshaft with a live grenade following the October revolution, spending her last moments tending to the wounds of those with her and singing hymns.

The Catholic Church doesn't believe the Orthodox are cut off from God's grace, that's theologically impossible. You have valid apostolic succession and sacraments, which is why in serious circumstances such as danger of death, Catholics can receive the Eucharist and receive absolution from an Orthodox priest.

That being said, there are some who were cut off from the Church and God's grace who achieved sainthood through martyrdom. St. Mark Tianxiang was a severe opium addict whose priest refused him further absolution and receiving the Eucharist as a result. He never broke his addiction or received absolution for his sins, but died a martyr for the faith, which forgives all sins.

Good on the Catholics for working on a plan that wouldn’t pay off for 900 years.

I imagine the Visigoths would have also appreciated a heads up from the Pope before sacrificing the Iberian Peninsula for 600 years.

 

[mindlessobserver]

If Christian on Christian war is heresy than just about every Christian to ever live is a heretic. If siding with Muslims against Chrisitians is sublime heresy, that still covers about half of them. Especially the British.

Christian on Christian war is not per se Heretical. What is heretical however is the Church taking an Authoritative position of the conflict. Which is something the Russian Orthodox Church has done with its unilateral Excommunication of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and exhortations to the faithful to fight on behalf of God in Ukraine. Archbishop Kiril can only excommunicate the Ukrainian Church if he calls a council of his Brother Bishops and has the order of Anathematization ratified. Something he has not done, because he knows it would not be approved.

Which leads to OP's cope about all the other Orthodox Bishops besides the Greek and Serbian ones being CIA assets. Which is hilarious since Kiril works for the FSB. Which incidentally has way, WAY more to do with the Bishop of Constantinople and his faction deciding to push back against Moscow then any sort of hypothetical "CIA" influence. Which is only hypothetical. Kiril being an FSB Agent is will documented, as he was quite literally on the FSB payroll in the 70's. Along with pretty much every other member of the Moscow Church. It was after all the only way anyone could be a Christian theologian in the "heir to Byzantium" in the 20th century. Anyone who didn't agree with this went to Gulag. And was shot.

 

[Mukhrani]

The Catholic Church doesn't believe the Orthodox are cut off from God's grace, that's theologically impossible. You have valid apostolic succession and sacraments, which is why in serious circumstances such as danger of death, Catholics can receive the Eucharist and receive absolution from an Orthodox priest.

That being said, there are some who were cut off from the Church and God's grace who achieved sainthood through martyrdom. St. Mark Tianxiang was a severe opium addict whose priest refused him further absolution and receiving the Eucharist as a result. He never broke his addiction or received absolution for his sins, but died a martyr for the faith, which forgives all sins.

That's the element that I just find unfeasible. If the Orthodox sacraments are valid enough to accept in an emergency, then why is there even a schism? The idea of Schrodinger's apostolic legitimacy just seems bizarre to me - like the souls of millions are balanced on the tip of a Curia bureaucrat's pen.

Christian on Christian war is not per se Heretical. What is heretical however is the Church taking an Authoritative position of the conflict. Which is something the Russian Orthodox Church has done with its unilateral Excommunication of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and exhortations to the faithful to fight on behalf of God in Ukraine. Archbishop Kiril can only excommunicate the Ukrainian Church if he calls a council of his Brother Bishops and has the order of Anathematization ratified. Something he has not done, because he knows it would not be approved.

Which leads to OP's cope about all the other Orthodox Bishops besides the Greek and Serbian ones being CIA assets. Which is hilarious since Kiril works for the FSB. Which incidentally has way, WAY more to do with the Bishop of Constantinople and his faction deciding to push back against Moscow then any sort of hypothetical "CIA" influence. Which is only hypothetical. Kiril being an FSB Agent is will documented, as he was quite literally on the FSB payroll in the 70's. Along with pretty much every other member of the Moscow Church. It was after all the only way anyone could be a Christian theologian in the "heir to Byzantium" in the 20th century. Anyone who didn't agree with this went to Gulag. And was shot.

Seems like the Wars of Religion, or the Albigensian Crusade, or the Fourth Crusade, the Aragonese Crusade, or even the ancient Arian controversy. Religion mobilized in ultimately political conflicts on both sides to gain legitimacy for war.

 

[Absolutego]

Can you assholes please just stop mass-importing the third world because the Irish and Italians got too secularized for your tastes?
Please. It isn't good for the people you're importing either, on the other 6 days of the week most of them are either getting sexually trafficked or put to glorified slave labor.
At least Protestant zealots do the proper thing and get their dumb asses murdered in a 3rd world country instead of bringing them here.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Seems like the Wars of Religion, or the Albigensian Crusade, or the Fourth Crusade, the Aragonese Crusade, or even the ancient Arian controversy. Religion mobilized in ultimately political conflicts on both sides to gain legitimacy for war.

Quite true. But you need to complete your theory to make the argument valid. Your position with this is that the Russian Church is now so far outside the communion of Christ it must resort to unilateral force of Arms against its brother Churches. If the Anathematization of Ukraine is to be considered Valid under the sole and solitary orders of the Patriarch of Moscow, then the Patriarchate of Moscow is separated from the communion of its brother Churches. In which case the Moscow Church is no better then the Presbyterian, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist or Methodist churches. It is its own thing acting outside communion with any other Church and can be treated as such.

For example, the Bishop of Kiev, Epiphanius I of Kiev has ALSO excommunicated The Russian Orthodox Church, Kiril and anyone who holds adherence to him. Now, this excommunication is equally invalid as it is indicative of the Schismatic nature of the war. So Ukraine is certainly not blameless here entirely. It should be noted however that even in the Kievan Excommunication of the Moscow Church, it was reactive to the invasion and the Moscow Churches excommunication of the Kievan Church beforehand.

It is a lamentable situation. Arguing that the wars of religion are somehow justifiable precedent here is also not acceptable, since both the Catholics and the Protestants look back on them with shame. The Dream of all the Churches remains, that the communion of Christ, the bride of the lamb can be brought back together into one whole body. So no. Schismatic Wars are not acceptable under Christian theology. In ANY denomination. And any prelate, Bishop or jumped up Priest who exhorts the faithful to war against their fellow Christians is, in truth, a heretic. Kiril is a Heretic. And the Moscow Church of the Orthodox Communion stands outside the body of Christ and is Anathema. Its simply now a question of canonical law as to the nature of the Moscow Churches Sin.

Its quite possible a Council may have to be called in the aftermath of this war, and hold the synagogue of Satan to temporal justice.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

That's the element that I just find unfeasible. If the Orthodox sacraments are valid enough to accept in an emergency, then why is there even a schism? The idea of Schrodinger's apostolic legitimacy just seems bizarre to me - like the souls of millions are balanced on the tip of a Curia bureaucrat's pen.

Honestly, it's Papal supremacy, that's it. There are literally no other theological differences after the Eastern Catholic Churches joined us. For anybody wondering about the Cross of St. Peter (inverted cross) - it's a beautiful symbol of martyrdom by Christ's Rock, St. Peter, who was crucified upside down.

The inverted Western crucifix or its equivalent Icon representation, however, is extremely blasphemous among both Catholic and Orthodox. It genuinely makes me furious, despite being a POS sinner who hasn't had a Confession in four years.

 

[eDove]

Catholics will write a whole book on why their rituals and man worship aren't anti-biblical.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Honestly, it's Papal supremacy, that's it. There are literally no other theological differences after the Eastern Catholic Churches joined us. For anybody wondering about the Cross of St. Peter (inverted cross) - it's a beautiful symbol of martyrdom by Christ's Rock, St. Peter, who was crucified upside down.

No, its Council Supremacy. Its the one thing the Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox agree on. The Bishop of Rome is a jumped up Prelate who thinks he can speak for God on Earth, when in fact the only agent for God on Earth is the Church itself in Communion. The Problem is there is now a three way death battle over doctrine, so another Council is out of the question. Especially since there is no longer a definitional standard for who actually gets to sit anymore. Is that Faggot who sits in Canterbury at the pleasure of the retards running Westminster truly the Archbishop responsible for the UK? Or is he just a faggot? Questions like this are a huge problem. Not just for the Bishop of Rome, but also the Bishop of Alexandria who has had the misfortune of presiding over an occupied flock surrounded by Infidels. Never mind the Bishop of Constantinople and Antioch. And lets not even get started on the USA. who could possibly be in charge of that mess? One of the most devout and evangelizing christian offshoots in the USA literally believe Jesus was a space god and their founder read divine messages off golden plates dug out of a corn field in Ohio.

 

[analrapist]

I don't know how people can seriously read the gospels and get the notion that what they teach is that there needs to be more Earthly religious authority. The religious authorities of Jesus' day killed him, and the near universal corruption across all religious authorities today really underscores this reality. At the end of days sits the Great Judge. No others compete.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.

Too many folks in this thread are making a human institution from earth their master, not our Father in heaven, and will reap the accursed tares they sow.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

No, its Council Supremacy. Its the one thing the Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox agree on. The Bishop of Rome is a jumped up Prelate who thinks he can speak for God on Earth, when in fact the only agent for God on Earth is the Church itself in Communion. The Problem is there is now a three way death battle over doctrine, so another Council is out of the question. Especially since there is no longer a definitional standard for who actually gets to sit anymore. Is that Faggot who sits in Canterbury at the pleasure of the retards running Westminster truly the Archbishop responsible for the UK? Or is he just a faggot? Questions like this are a huge problem. Not just for the Bishop of Rome, but also the Bishop of Alexandria who has had the misfortune of presiding over an occupied flock surrounded by Infidels. Never mind the Bishop of Constantinople and Antioch. And lets not even get started on the USA. who could possibly be in charge of that mess? One of the most devout and evangelizing christian offshoots in the USA literally believe Jesus was a space god and their founder read divine messages off golden plates dug out of a corn field in Ohio.

Nobody else has the resources to fight against these evils like the Catholic Church. The Orthodox churches were almost destroyed under the nightmare of Communism and some were lost, but we survived, thrived and have grown spread the Sacraments worldwide.