A post about sects (long and rantlicious)

I work in a part of town called Downtown Crossing, and as the name implies, it's a fairly prominent urban pedestrian area. Specifically, it's a favorite spot for pamphleteers.

I picked up a pamphlet today entitled "How Old is Your False Man-made Church?" I thought it looked pretty provocative. I wasn't disappointed. It consists primarily of bullet points of this form:

"If you are a Lutheran, Martin Luther, an ex-monk of the Roman Catholic Church, founded your religion in Germany, in the year 1517."

I suppose that's true as far as it goes, but it conspicuously omits the information that the reason he did so was because he had a real problem with the opulence of the church, especially the custom of selling indulgences-- allowing rich sinners to pay for absolution-- with money the clergy often pocketed for themselves. Is this a practice that the author of this pamphlet wants to defend?

And why mention Germany specifically, especially since the country called Germany didn't actually exist at the time? That part of Europe was a mess of little duchies and principalities until Bismarck put it all together in the 19th century.

I'll quote a couple more:

"If you belong to the Church of England (Anglican), your religion was founded by King Henry VIII in 1534, because the Pope could not grant him a divorce with the right to remarry."

Oooh, cheap shot! And I note just now that the text says "could not" instead of (as I misread it before) "would not." I suspect someone whose job description includes the word "infallible" could in fact have granted such a divorce, and chose not to for political reasons. In modern times, Bobby Kennedy, scion of a notoriously Catholic family, was granted such a divorce.

"If you are a Unitarian, John Biddle in London founded your religion in 1645."

Now this is verging on the untrue. While the congregation called the Unitarian Universalist Church owes its corporate lineage to Biddle's, the *religion* of Unitarianism is much older. Unitarians in essence are believers who find themselves unable to reconcile the mystery of the Trinity with their own experience of the Divine, and instead put their faith in One God Indivisible. There were scholarly debates on this matter among the educated in Europe well before the foundation of the London church. Arguably, in fact, the Unitarian religion dates back to the day Abram decided his father's collection of idols weren't worth praying to, and smashed them all up in favor of the One True God of Israel, and that's going a *long* way back.

The pamphlet goes on to similarly demean and dismiss the Mennonites, Presbytarians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Quakers, Methodists, Universalists, Evangelicals, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Salvation Army (that's a separate sect? news to me), Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Assembly of God, Church of the Nazarene, Evangelical Reformed, and Pentecostal Gospel, the last set in quotation marks and dismissed as "one of the hundreds of sects founded by men in the last 100 years." Which is of course the point of the whole screed. Although I note that they don't mention the other early churches: Greek and Russian Orthodox, Coptic, etc.

Then it says:

"If you belong to the Vatican II Church, the counterfeit Catholic Church of the last days, then your religion started in 1963 with the close of the Second Vatican Council."

But, get this:

"If you are a Roman Catholic, you know that your religion was founded in the year 33 by Our Lord Jesus Christ, and is the one and only true Christian Church outside of which no one at all can be saved."

Um, I'm not a Catholic myself, so I could be wrong about these fine points of doctrine. But I thought Jesus said (pointing at Peter), "Upon this rock I will build my church," and that this has been construed to mean that Jesus granted Peter the right to decide matters of faith for the whole congregation, and that this right is passed down to Peter's successor the Pope, hence papal infallibility. Now Vatican II was convened by a sitting Pope and commissioned by him to institute changes in how the Catholic Church conducted worship, under his authority. So it seems to me that if you call yourself Catholic, you've already granted the Pope license to delineate your religious observance, so you *have* to accept Vatican II. You can regret it-- a lot of people feel that mass in the vernacular lacks the majesty of the Latin-- but you don't get a say in it.

Moreover, the Catholic Church as envisioned by the pamphlet's authors (it's credited to a group called Catholics For Tradition) has about as much right to call itself "founded by Jesus" as the Unitarians have to claim to be founded by Abram. Jesus declared no one could approach God "except through me," and then laid down some of the ground rules for worship, and granted Peter that apostolic role-- and then left this plane of existence. He didn't found a church! The Apostles and their successors, notably Saul of Tarsus, did the early organizing, and the worship of Jesus was formally embraced by the Council of Nicaea a couple centuries later-- a thousand years before Luther, maybe, but still just as much a "man-made church" as any of these others.

I'm an agnostic, I don't have a dog in this fight. But what rankles my ass is when dogmatists feel they're entitled to twist the facts in order to give their particular brand an extra aura of legitimacy. It seems to me that, if God created us in His image, and gave us reason, He expects us to use it to the best of our ability-- and that means to use logic, and to winnow out historical truth from self-interested hogwash.

And don't even get me started on the shameful treatment of gays by a church that calls itself "Catholic" (i.e. universal).

Okay, I now declare myself flammable.

showing how johnny-come-lately the Catholic Church is. Not sure just what start date Jews can use, but it's a whole lot longer ago than 33AD. And someone who knows more about various non-monotheistic religions can probably supply information showing most of them to be older.

Plus, of course, for those who believe in the doctrines of whatever specific church, the starting date isn't the only thing that makes it valid.

What nonsense.

(another former Catholic, current agnostic here)

The vibe of it is like Jack Chick crossed with Opus Dei. Creepy.

then all the books by Paul aren't part of the Bible, because they were written after that.

Of course, if they only used the words of Jesus, Christianity would be a lot different than it is now.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. ATTRIBUTION: Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Makes great fun of church dogma (particularly of the Catholic church), while being quite reverent to God

sects threads.

sects threads.

n/t

you wrote:

Oooh, cheap shot! And I note just now that the text says "could not" instead of (as I misread it before) "would not." I suspect someone whose job description includes the word "infallible" could in fact have granted such a divorce, and chose not to for political reasons. In modern times, Bobby Kennedy, scion of a notoriously Catholic family, was granted such a divorce.




First, the Catholic church doesn't grant divorces. Second, I've never heard that Robert Kennedy was divorced.

I know one of his sons got an annulment.

I believe he got a civil divorce and then decided he needed an annulment so he could marry his new sweetie in the Church. Typical hypocrisy, in my book. His former wife wrote a book about it. She's understandably quite angry and cannot comprehend how he got away with getting an annulment, which does, in the eyes of the church, make their children illegitimate. Oh, the church does a lot of fancy talking around that, but in the end, the kids are bastards.

"If you are a Roman Catholic, you know that your religion was founded in the year 33 by Our Lord Jesus Christ"

You have to love churches that make claims like this... There's a Primitive Baptist Church (sort of Calvinist) down the street that claims it can trace its lineage to the Apostle Paul.

You have to ask, "Are you really under the illusion that God cares about your sanctimonius chest-beating?"

I'm not a bible-quoter per se, but even Paul himself had something to say about this:

"Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do."
-I Timothy 1:4

PRIESTS. Though we ought to hope only a minority of priests are perverted.

A radical Catholic offshoot that favours, amoung other selected agendum, a return to the Latin rite in Roman Catholic ceremony.

I'd agree rigid dogmatists are not much fun at a cocktail party, but I love a society open enough to have a place for even the zealous to have voice.

Not that you have, but as a point of observation*: It's no more fair to judge all Roman Catholics by the Rite One'rs than it is to judge all DU'ers by the most extreme tinfoil hatters.


*Inasmuchas sooner or later in such threads, someone almost always does make such broad-brush statements.