Why is religion so complicated?

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We are humans, we are individuals. For the Old Testament, the leaders of the people could take a year debating and hashing out one small verse or concept from the Old Testament, then spend 10 more years on the issues coming out of it.

I do agree that some things seem quite complicated in the Church. Even reading the Catechism can be challenging. I often say what does that mean.

Take things piece by piece and keep asking questions and clarification.

Sometimes things are misunderstood. An example, Genesis 3:11. God asks Adam where he is. Adam, hiding in the garden, answers he is naked. Adam is not naked because he and Eve made themselves figleaf loincloths.

Why does Adam then answer he is naked?
 
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AlNg said:
A couple is married for 15 years and have several children. There is never any question about the validity of the marriage. They were married by the local priest at the local Catholic church and their parents spent thousands of dollars on the wedding reception attended by over a hundred people. They were happily married for 15 years and there never was any question about their being married. Now the husband has to take a second job to support his wife and four children. Well, the wife does not like being alone and decides to join the feminist movement and engage in new and thrilling activities which include partying with a new boyfriend. The husband finds out from friends about his wife’s unfaithfulness and the wife decides to get a divorce and then apply to the Roman Catholic marriage tribunal which gives it to her. And she remarries. According to the tribunal she was never really sacramentally married in the first place although for 15 years no such question ever arose. Now according to Mark 10: 11 And He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her;
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Nothing in what you have written negates a proposed annulment cause. The validity of the marriage is based on the disposition and conditions of the couple at the time of marriage.
What happens after the marriage and in the marriage is of little consequence to the annulment.

Jesus said to Peter what you bind on earth is bound in heaven and what you loose on earth is loosed in heaven. To paraphrase Jesus
 
JimmyTolder said:
If some 13 year old girl is kidnapped and married off to a 50 year old man, is that a real marriage?
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Of the 50,000 or so marriage annulments per various years in the USA, how many were due to a 50 year old man kidnapping a 13 year old girl?
 
There’s this misperception out there that formation for the priesthood is primarily about academic coursework and learning. It’s not. It’s not “priest class” so much as it’s “priestly formation.” There are actually four pillars to priestly formation, and academic formation is only one of them. If you’d like to read up on what that program of formation entails, in the U.S., check out the “Program for Priestly Formation” on the USCCB website.
OurLadyofSorrows said:
Nothing in what you have written negates a proposed annulment cause. The validity of the marriage is based on the disposition and conditions of the couple at the time of marriage.
What happens after the marriage and in the marriage is of little consequence to the annulment.
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Unless you make the case that the spouse had no intention of fidelity from the beginning, and only exhibited that this was true until years later. Of course, that’s a whole lot more difficult to prove than simply demonstrating a single case of infidelity.

In fact, a single case of infidelity itself is insufficient for nullity (whereas some of our Protestant brethren consider it sufficient to justify divorce). So… there might be a bit of invalid conflation going on…
AlNg said:
Of the 50,000 or so marriage annulments per various years in the USA, how many were due to a 50 year old man kidnapping a 13 year old girl?
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27? 🤔

Seriously though, @AlNg, the question being posed rhetorically was “does an annulment case that takes place twenty years down the line mean that no annulment might be valid?” And then Jimmy provided a counter-example (as far-fetched as it were) to demonstrate that “length of marriage” isn’t determinative of the possibility of nullity.
 
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Legalism, for one thing, rears its head very easily in human matters, same as it did at the time of Jesus. Consider this most basic teaching of the Church though, regarding our “particular judgement”. In paragraph 1022 of the catechism St John of the Cross is quoted,
"At the evening of life we shall be judged on our love."

Keep that as the center of your focus.
 
Religion seeks to answer fundamental questions about life, human beings, the universe, existence, etc. Can you really expect it not to be complicated?
 
They didn’t ‘burn her at the stake’ for that comment, you know.

“They” also canonized her. So. . .
 
Same reason why science is complicated.

God’s creation is filled with intricate details. Some are easy to comprehend while others are not.
 
Gorgias said:
Unless you make the case that the spouse had no intention of fidelity from the beginning, and only exhibited that this was true until years later. Of course, that’s a whole lot more difficult to prove than simply demonstrating a single case of infidelity.

In fact, a single case of infidelity itself is insufficient for nullity (whereas some of our Protestant brethren consider it sufficient to justify divorce). So… there might be a bit of invalid conflation going on…
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That goes right back to the condition of the person at the time of marriage.
 
Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself.

Pretty simple.
 
Gorgias said:
as far-fetched as it were
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I don’t believe that you are going to find many of the far fetched cases in the 50,000 annulments granted per year in the USA. Jesus said: Mark 10: 11 “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her." Do not many if not most of the US tribunal annulments go against the spirit of what Jesus taught ?
JimmyTolder said:
If some 13 year old girl is kidnapped and married off to a 50 year old man, is that a real marriage?
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I agree that kidnapping a 13 year old and forcing her to marry you would not be a real marriage. However, I don’t think that this is the case for too many of the 50,000 annulments per year.
In many cases, the couple is getting along just fine for several years and then later on decides to get out of the marriage. They were married civilly if not sacramentally, and they get a civil divorce as demanded by the tribunal. And they want the right to remarry so they apply for the annulment. In many cases to an outsider this can seem to be like a charade to get around the spirit of what Jesus said: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her."
 
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stpurl said:
They didn’t ‘burn her at the stake’ for that comment, you know.
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But why not take her comments into consideration to grant her some leniency? Burning a person alive at the stake is not very pleasant. And then later on they say, Oh Well, We made an unfortunate mistake?
 
Marriage is a simple binary state. You either are married or you are not married.

Simply going through a wedding ceremony does not mean you are married. Simply having children, living together for decades, sharing a mortgage, none of these things make two people to be married.
AlNg said:
According to the tribunal she was never really sacramentally married in the first place although for 15 years no such question ever arose.
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Technically, the Tribunal seeks to find out if a marriage was valid. All valid marriages between two baptized persons are Sacramental, however, a marriage does not have to be Sacramental to be valid.

To the marriage for 15 years. My neighbor and her husband were married for more than 20 years when they discovered that something was not done according to the law on their marriage license. They found out that all of those years, kids, pets, tears and celebrations took place between two people who were not validly married according to the State.

They planned a big party for the day they were officially married, and now they celebrate two anniversaries.

No loopholes, the Tribunal is trained to see the things that can make a fancy, expensive wedding not actually result in a marriage.
 
So, just as people may find out they were never legally married, they can find out they were never validly married.
 
TheLittleLady said:
So, just as people may find out they were never legally married, they can find out they were never validly married.
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I read a report from a lawyer specializing in preparing annulment papers for the tribunal and he says that if you dig deep enough you can almost always find some reason or another to show that you were never “validly” married. But is this in the spirit of what Jesus meant when he said: “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her."?
 
Differing interpretations of the bible are all to common but only relevant if one bases their authority on the bible, as per Protestantism via the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. That method assures disagreement because each reader is interpreting privately, becoming their own authority for all practical purposes… Catholics don’t-or shouldn’t- do that. And we certainly don’t need to since the Church received and taught the gospel before a word of the New Testament was written.
 
AlNg said:
I read a report from a lawyer specializing in preparing annulment papers for the tribunal and he says that if you dig deep enough you can almost always find some reason or another to show that you were never “validly” married.
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There are some people who criticize their boss, the company they work for, that become jaded or discouraged in their work. I can find someone specializing in anything who is unhappy with the work they do.

Granted, many parents do not teach their children about marriage, about the permanence of marriage or the ends of marriage. Too often our views about marriage are formed by RomComs and “Say Yes To The Dress”. I do not doubt that many enter marriage without understanding it to be anything more than the next step in a romance.
 
I would say the Trinity is a complicated concept; hence, so many heresies, and so many books trying to explain the trinitarian G-d by means of analogies. Most Christians even today probably don’t really understand what it means. Another complicated notion is the seeming disparity between the G-d of the Old Testament and the G-d of the New Testament. Lots of Christians have trouble with this. They also have difficulty understanding how an all-loving G-d can create a hell for some people to spend eternity. In Catholicism, what differentiates mortal sin from venial sin is not such an easy distinction for many. And these are just some of the challenges of Christianity…other religions, such as Judaism, have their complexities as well.
 
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