What provokes me to answer in this thread is the respectable Mr. JD’s statement “This is a great question. I hope those who really have a handle on this will chime in.” I had, actually, written an extensive response yesterday that was incendiary, to say the least, but due to a computer glitch, it was never posted. Maybe that was well and good, as today I will take a different tack. I will note that the incendiary nature of the failed post was due to frustration at the the condition called “human” and here manifested through the filter called “Catholic.”
The question posed is “Do we really need the Church?” That question is not and cannot be a semantic depth charge only for someone taking the question at its most simplistic level without any regard for implications, assumptions, and inherent errors in form and content. Yet here it has been taken in all seriousness as an actual applicable dynamic assumed to be useful outside the imaginative structures in a few clearly otherwise intelligent minds.
I conjecture that there are two dynamics in play here. One is the theatrical definition of drama as it applies to our daily lives. That definition is “drama is the activity surrounding having something at stake.” So, for someone who has accepted the idea of an immortal soul to be “saved” (another semantic sand trap, despite an actual dynamic it might refer to) there can be no conceivable greater drama than the saving of one’s immortal soul.
That brings us to the second dynamic, the one which contains the first. That is the inescapable propensity and need of the human to tell, believe in, and live stories. These stories may or may not have a one-to-one correspondence to reality. Most have a correspondence to actuality in the exact way that cargo cults have to actuality, namely that they misinterpret the the necessary perceptions of experience due to ignorance in knowledge and specialized or educated experience.
In any case, a chief function of the story telling dynamic is the acceptance of context and the commensurate rejection of any pattern not accounted for by that context. In the case of the cargo cultists the context is that if they build a fake airplane it will attract real ones that will bring them good stuff. We see this today with duck hunters and their decoys, the only difference being that ducks will land where human pilots in charge of a cargo may not.
The rejected premise is that the decoy airplane will not bring the desired result.
This is a pattern repeated in every culture, society, institution, etc, etc, to some extent or other. But because we agree about things within certain parameters, many of the things we put up with are not as easily obvious as the drastically contrasting cargo cult phenomenon.
So, again, I’m not talking here strictly about Catholicism, I’m talking about how the mind works and why and how we accept any life story, including our religious faith. In support of my proposition here I submit that though it is explicitly known and understood to be a faith, which is a belief system as distinct from knowledge, people of faith tend to act and speak as if their faith was actual experiential knowledge. This holds true from snake handlers, through the gamut of Christadelphians, Pocomanians, 1st Southern Afro-Baptists, Muslims of every description, Shintoists, Sungoists, idolaters and pagans, you name it. So why in the name of the God you claim to be True do you feel that we as Catholics have a different brain than the rest of the world, and that it is miraculously preserved from perceptual and intellectual flaws? Why do we have this arrogance when there are vast unexamined libraries of work about human stupidity and ignorance as applied to how we make up the story of what constitutes our private world that we mistake for actuality? I submit that the greatest library of such work is between one’s own ears.
Is there not the humility present among us as Catholics and religionists in general to know that God will not change or be effected by our sincere inquiry into the foundation of our beliefs from a wider perspective than the self verifying story we have unquestioningly accepted and militate to embellish? I’m guessing that we have so been overcome by the drama of salvation that we can’t think straight, or at least not from more inclusive premises. We have come to a place where the world is totally contained and contextually explained by Catholicism and there is no room for the dramatic idea that Catholicism might be a phenomenon of historic distortion of an actual Sacred dynamic misinterpreted and misunderstood by lesser men that the Master.
To me, there is no greater enemy to knowledge than certainty. At least most of science in its method admits that there is more to learn. Belief systems, such as our Church, fail to respond to empirical evidence on the grounds of hereditary beliefs.
So, “Do we really need the Church?” Yes, if it is the sole/soul story we have bought into, having little critical ability or emotional stability in the matter, and having no interest in or motivation to examine our reasons and ways of participation. That is similar to the physicists who went to their graves denying E=MCC not for lack of proof, but for the emotional unacceptability of the new paradigm. The Church, despite its sincerity and sideways grasp of essential truths is more of a prophylactic than a propellant, and its adherants are like these recalcitrant physicists.
In this regard the answers you, CII, have received, are simple politeness. It is maybe none of your d. b. why someone doesn’t want to attend. And please don’t do them or yourself the harm of evangelizing at or praying “for” them. Why not just do good and let God appear without the distorted veil of “Catholic?”
And if it was important enough to withstand the gates of hell, don’t you think it was a pretty big deal to Him?