They are all topics of current threads in this forum. Is this really what Catholic moral issues have come to? I have never once, not ever, seen a posting here regarding moral issues surrounding the failure to folllow Jesus’ command in Matthew 25 regarding caring for the hungry, the poor, the needy, the imprisoned. But lots of concern over caffeine and gum. I truly don’t understand. As Scripture says, “Jesus wept.”
Like Aelred said, there is the fact that major social issues are settled… we don’t NEED to ask if genocide is bad or charity is good. As far as the majority of Catholics (and, I would presume, the majority of western citizens) these things are settled questions.
So what we end up with are two types of questions:
- Questions of WHY the church teaches on something that is contentious, such as standing against the HHS mandate (and that fuels a lot of political discussions on the upcoming election), or WHY abortion is a tragedy in human history.
- Questions about morality that seem simplistic or unimportant, but actually involve subtle nuances within Canon Law, which some people have not read or may not know where to look for.
And one kind of plea:
- they’ve been entrapped into some sinful lifestyle that society promotes and/or throws in their faces constantly and they want to know how to resist it (such as the ever present self-gratification question)
There’s nothing wrong with that fact, that’s what people want to know. If you want to know something or want to discuss something, then by all means post a thread about it.
I would add to that, however, that there is another factor at play: the level of moderation on CAF. That’s both good and bad.
I used to participate in a Catholic Forum which is now closed down, the Lusenet Greenspun Catholic Forum. That was a very lightly moderated forum, and all sorts of core issues were discussed… that was the good part, and why I like less moderation (plus, people had to police each other and themselves for charity issues, rather than being told by a points system). The bad part was that you had all sorts of people with an axe to grind constantly rehashing the same core issues of “why is murder wrong?” It got a bit mundane at times, and the level of rhetoric was certainly much more… aggressive. That was the bad part, and why I like more moderation.
There’s a trade-off in any sort of discussion board, and taking the moderation route necessarily expels the more radical viewpoint that wants to discuss why they think core concepts of morality are wrong, but it also eliminates some wasted bandwidth space and saves people time from rehashing the same old issues over and over again.
So, to sum up: The discussions trend this way because the type of user who survives in a heavily moderated discussion forum is the one who generally accepts as valid the core moral constructs of the discussion board and at least views rational discourse as a possibility… leaving only those few issues that are less clearly settled (in the secular mind) and those which are minor but subtle and nuanced.
