Reading different posts here in this group of forums, I have made a decision.
I will be looking into other religions. Our tiny parish here has lots of huge problems and is a real pain to attend. So, until our local parish has more than 60 families in it, I’m done with it, I’m done with being a Catholic. In the past 3 years it’s brought me nothing but unhappiness and angst. So when something hurts this bad, cut it off and get rid of it. That’s it, I’m done.
I thank every person here for opening my eyes and showing me what the Catholic church is truly about. And that’s something I don’t want to be a part of. I want to find something that isn’t so critical and so mean spirited.
I will begin to attend the different churches in my area this Sunday. There’s baptist, at least 2 non denominational, pentecostal, LDS and the Mennonites. I think I’ll start with the Mennonites, they are such wonderful people.
I see. You don’t like hearing that if your son doesn’t believe in the Trinity that he’s not a Christian, so you’re going to shoot yourself and blame the messenger for a murder. I gather that we’re supposed to pile heaping coals of guilt onto our heads over this?
If that is your thinking, I think you can save yourself some time and skip the non-denominationals, the Pentecostals, and most definitely the Baptists, because they all still know
and profess that the English language makes a distinction between a Christian and a person who chooses Sundays as their worship day and has manners you happen to like. I’m a little less conversant with the Mennonites, but from what I gather, they don’t seem to think the Mormons are a Christian religion, either.
Nobody said your son wasn’t a nice guy. We wouldn’t have said he wasn’t a nice guy if he never went to church at all!! We said he’s not a Christian. It is the truth. I know lots of Mormons, they’re nice people. I know lots of Jews, too, though, and they’re also nice people who aren’t Christians.
This explains it better than we can, however (boldface mine, obviously):
People ask: “Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian?”: or* “May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?”** Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every available quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it. I will try to make this clear by the history of another, and very much less important, word.
The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone “a gentleman” you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not “a gentleman” you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said - so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully - “Ah but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?” They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man “a gentleman” in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is “a gentleman” becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A ‘nice’ meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.
Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say ‘deepening’, the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to he a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity*
said in my very best mama bear voice