I have one final question. Have you ever asked yourself that maybe the reason the Atheists attack so much is because the church has encroached and overreached too far into politics,human rights(when it comes to stripping them from people), and what should be taught in school textbooks(creationism etc etc). Most Atheist I know, quiet ones and loud ones, tell me that they have no problem with the church and what people believe as long as it doesn’t involve itself within our politics and it doesn’t stripped anybody of their rights based on faith alone. And finally that it doesn’t teach our kids that the Earth is only 6000 years old for example. Now I know there are definitely Atheist out there that just want to attack no matter what or just for the fun of it, just like there are Christians holding “I hate Fags” signs at soldiers funerals, both sides have there crazies.
I’ll talk about homosexuality in a minute but regarding atheists not wanting the Church to involve itself with politics… why shouldn’t we? Thats like saying conservatives can’t involve themselves in politics because they don’t agree with what you believe. Secondly, the only ‘rights’ I see the Church ever haven’t supported are religious freedom and putting so many restrictions on Jews in its states. Let me explain:
In the middle ages, the council of Lateran (through an act which wasn’t infallible as it wasn’t a declaration of a dogma but a disciplinary action) decreed that Jews (and Muslims mind you) had to wear distinct clothing couldn’t work in certain important jobs. It was done not because the Church was anti-semitic but so that people wouldn’t involve themselves with he Jews an ruin their faith? It was excessive and unjust but it wasn’t a full fledged persecution and in fact, the Popes condemned the idea that Jews commit ritual murder, condemned the practice of killing them and force converting them. They even had them live in a special part of the city, called a Ghetto. There were rich ones like that of Venice, there were poor ones like that of Rome.
However, they could build synagogues and there was some freedom of religion for them, although Protestants couldn’t worship publicly and for good reason. Protestants wanted to destroy the Catholic Church and letting them preach without fighting against them was not going to happen. And no, the Church didn’t order them to be mass murdered. For one thing, the Roman Inquisition only killed some 1000 people and though their deaths are deplorable, it shows that it wasn’t a mass murder. It did order religious orders to preach against Protestantism which was both immoral and anarchist in the faith. It wasn’t persecution it was defending the faith.
Now on the subject of religious freedom, we don’t believe that people have a
right to embrace any religion they want which isn’t the Catholic one. To us, all religions are false and bad because there is only one God and only one religion (something which almost all religions believe!) so to say they can embrace whatever they want without fear of going to hell is absurd. They have the
freedom to embrace these religions, just as we have freedom, yes, but not the right to sin. I don’t have the right to abort my baby if I had one no matter what **** the US makes up. I have the freedom but not the right to do such a nauseatingly horrible thing. Do you get where I’m going with this?
The Church forbade public exercise of other religions not because it was a douchebag but because it wanted to prevent the morals of the nation from getting corrupted. It didn’t do it through killing them nor did it want to (as David Goldstein said, the Inquisition is no more guilty of murder than a jury is guilty of sending a man to the electric chair. While I doubted it at first, it truly was the state who killed the heretics while the Inquisition judged them and tried to make the guilty abjure their errors). Even then, people weren’t forced to become Catholic. There were forced conversions, yes, but they were never made with the consent of the Catholic Church and in fact it condemned such a practice. To go further, no one was killed for being a heretic under later Popes in the late 17th and 18th century (though laws, like those of other places of the time were still very harsh when it came to stealing and what not).
I know alot of atheists hate the Catholic Church for ‘stripping’ and ‘trampling human rights under her feet’ yet they forget that before the people they so support and look up to did the same things. The French revolution killed 40,000 and banned religion altogether. They forget to mention that people such as Rousseau and Voltaire supported anarchism and were against family bringing up the children. They forget that the very people, they look up to agreed with alot of the immoral things that were prevalent at the time such as slavery, racism and political disorder. And yet, they ignore completely the far from small good which people in the Catholic Church did. They ignore the fact that the Dominicans, Franciscans and other Bishops condemned the atrocities committed by the Spanish in America, they ignore the fact that the Catholic Church defined morality and the way we view it today and they are ignorant of what we truly believe in or twist it into something which is not.
