The best a non-Catholic can do for the OP, in context of her question and questions like it, is pray for her or (if nonreligious) wish her luck in defending and upholding that which she genuinely finds to be true and important…not try to talk her right out of her (fully Catholic) Faith. If she is Catholic, the odds are that she simply disagrees with propositions that say Catholic Dogma is irreconcilably illogical or akin to “flat earth” beliefs, even if she acknowledges that she may not have the arguments. She also would probably disagree, as a Catholic, that Jesus wouldn’t teach our Dogmas if He were around in humanoid bodily form today. Yes, He might go about it differently (infallibility only means the Church’s teachings are safeguarded, not Her methods), but He would be able, in His brilliance, to do so without betraying one “jot or tittle” of Catholic theology or Dogma, and I think it does Him an injustice to think that the only way He Himself could make our religion relevant to the world would be by abandoning significant parts of our beliefs. To use your own analogy, it would be like saying that Vince Lombardi, if he were alive today, would only be talented enough to win because he was willing to break the very rules of football (which would be, of course, cheating, and not respectable at all), analogous to Jesus abandoning Catholic Dogma. It does his memory no honor.
My post was not my best work. I should have gone to bed an hour before I found it, but was compelled to reply to it at the cost of three hours of sleep. I’ll do my best to defend my meaning, with apologies for faults in expression. I do not write well when emotionally engaged, and this subject is, for me, more powerful than I’d have realized without addressing it.
Let’s follow my analogy. Neither Vince Lombardi nor Jesus Christ, reprised, would cheat to achieve their goals. No way. Lombardi had no use for dirty players or cheap tricks. He didn’t keep his practices or his playbooks secret. Like Christ’s teachings were upfront, every team Lombardi played knew exactly which plays would be run. But they did not know when, or in what circumstances. Lombardi, like Christ, did not call his plays. Lombardi taught football, and expected his quarterback to talk with his teammates and choose plays. Christ taught morals, and you get to be the quarterback.
Neither Christ nor Lombardi would compromise their fundamental beliefs about the game they’d chosen to play.
Your comment suggests that you did not understand what I intended to say. Let me draw the analogy more clearly.
If you study the teachings of Jesus Christ as described in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, you will not find any dogma. Everything in those books is about blocking and tackling, running hard and playing straight up. There are some sections in which it is pointed out that our personal concepts of fairness are unrelated to the game we’re playing.
Christ does not teach any dogma. He and Lombardi both taught fundamentals, and a player who understood those fundamentals did not need dogma or plays.
Sure, Lombardi taught some plays. So did J.C. But, how often is it that you’ll show up at a dinner and strategically sit at the end of a table, in hopes of being called up to park your silly butt at the host’s right hand side? If you do that, you are a phony. If you play “samaritan” in New York city, you’ll end up a dead samaritan unless you went to the game heeled, and ditched your expensive gun, knowing that you’d get 10 years in jail simply for using it to defend an innocent.
We live in a goofy, confused world. The wise person adapts. Adherence to dogma is a maladaptation.
For example, the Green Bay power sweep was a favorite Lombardi play. Very effective dogma. He could run that play with fast, pulling guards who could be fast because they (only) weighed 240 pounds. Today, guards are bigger, and their extra 30-40 pounds of mass means that they are not going to be able to move fast enough to make that old Lombardi sweep work. It’s been tried, and it fails in the modern NFL. That dogma is dead.
So if Lombardi resurrected, he’d not be teaching that old dogma. But he would be teaching the same old fundamentals. Block hard, tackle hard, practice until you want to die, then play your hearts out for 30 minutes one day a week.
Curiously, the Church’s current body of dogma has nothing to do with Christ. It was all made up long after he died, by guys wearing tall hats, who came to power because a lot of linemen were willing to get eaten by lions without whining overmuch, until the Roman rabble became bored, and the Roman intelligentsia became sickened by their brains’ built in sensibilities.
I posted originally to the OP. If she is one of those wonderful, empathetic people who wants to do some good, but does not know how to reply to posts like mine, perhaps you should PM her and get a job as designated hitter. (Yep. Analogy switch.) Seems not a bad idea, but only if you represent her ideas, rather than your own.
She’s in the trenches, and she really, really cares. That counts for more than our combined b.s piles multiplied 100x.
