@IRFRANK,
IRFRANK wrote:
Being judgmental is not part of my desired behavior, but I will do so anyway.
One observation is that many people's beliefs are very superficial. Their behavior shows this. They hear the words but do not practice what is taught.
I think of the phrase, cafeteria Catholic. Meaning, take what you want and leave what you don't. I don't see how one can expect salvation from this path. I've heard Catholic's joke about this like it was an accepted practice.
One of the world's biggest tragedies is the constant struggle between religions and the seemingly overwhelming human tendency toward violence.
Religions have been behind much violence and in countenancing injustice they make violence all the more certain.... And even violence as a word needs redefinition since much that is violent in result is slow in action... What is it to take the means of support from a person or the food out of their children's mouths and people suffer want, privation, or starvation, learn frustation and suffer their own feelings of hate and its twin, fear... What does it matter if the crimes they suffer are blessed or made legal... The inhumanity is all the same... So violence should not be a matter of speed but of result, or intent...
You know, I might well be described as a cafateria Catholic, and that might be kind... But no matter how far I stray I know my Holy Mother Church will always keep the light on for me... And I don't think they expect any different... They do what they have to do and I do what I have to do... I am not following some Hitler Youth Nazi Pope anywhere; but I do forgive... I have spent time on my knees till the floor was beating on my brain helping my mother to pray for a miracle... That is my mother's church and that will by my church till they excommunicate me, or I leave feet first... And not because they are right, but in spite of thier being wrong... Like my buddy says: The Church gave me a good education and a bad attitude... If you want to know every nun who ever taught me see the Penguin in the Blues Brothers... My home town was named after St. Ignatius de Loyala, a storm trooper of the first order...And if I ever showed signs of being educable, I would have loved a Jesuit college... But nothing what ever would make me better than the half assed catholic I am today because their feudal organization represents a feudal age of thinking, where wealth rules, and dictates to the serfs their holy will... They do not know it, but I am going to the democracy of heaven, or not...