> In other words, to the religious, the use of the building for non-religious purposes is "shrug".
This isn’t accurate except for perhaps certain parts of Protestantism. To Catholics, Orthodox, probably portions of the Church of England etc, ie a majority of Christianity church buildings are holy and specially blessed. They hold the Eucharist in the Tabernacle which these Churches believe is the body and blood of Jesus under the guise of bread which is the most holy thing for them. In order for these buildings to be used for any other purpose all the holy things would need to be removed and the building specifically deconsecrated.
Yup I'm gonna second this one. I grew up in Cologne and Christians here generally don't think the Cologne Cathedral [1] (which holds among other things, according to the Church the bones of the three magi) is "just a building" and if you wanted to argue to turn it into a mall next week you'd probably get a pretty strong reaction from members of the church
If you wanted to turn the cathedral of cologne into a mall you’d get a pretty strong reaction from _me_, who’s neither religious nor has ever been to Cologne!
same -- maybe you should look into the Quakers, they're basically a denomination that is only community and sans doctrine, is my understanding. I only haven't followed this advice for bad reasons
The Church building is only considered Holy when Christ is considered present for Eucharist. Should it be removed along with the Altar, it only becomes a building, to Catholics at least. This is why abandon Churches can be converted to other things, in Montreal there are examples of these buildings.
OP is correct here by saying that the Church is the people. It’s just that the word has two meanings, the church building and the Church of Christ.
It’s also why sometimes you hear Christians say things like “your family is also your Church”
According to canon law, a Catholic church must be desacralized (or deconsecrated) in order to be licitly used for other, though not just any, purposes[0].
Your interpretation of "people and not the building" is pretty unique to Protestantism in the Christian belief, and arguably the central tenet of Methodism. It is absent in much of the history of Christian (and most other monotheistic) beliefs.
I recommend you look at (as an example), what the Catholic Church did since around the conversion of the Romans through to Vatican II. Even when I was a kid (some decades after Vatican II), attending Catholic school and regularly attending mass, the Catholic Church building was considered an incredibly special place by the congregations.
In my school, the chapel (which held a tabernacle), was once used by some well-meaning but incredibly ill-educated pupils to hold a palm reading booth for a school fete fundraiser. When the more traditional Catholics in the faculty found out, they burst in, soaking the pupils and chapel with holy water and latin prayer (first time used in the school since Vatican II! Showed their colours that day!), claiming that to engage in the occult near a tabernacle was an incredibly offensive thing to do, because the space held a tabernacle, end of.
The whole thing about Protestantism is to remove mystery. Research the early history from Luther through the English Tudors and the King James Bible, all the way through to the Mayflower and the reason why they were fleeing Europe to the New World, and you'll see that big and plain. It doesn't mean that a sense of mystery in terms of rituals and rites held in special designated spaces died and went away though, it just means it's less present than it once was.
For many, many people (billions on Earth today), "holy spaces" remain exactly that: consecrated spaces that are in themselves holy regardless of whether a human congregation is present or not. And this is not limited to Christianity either.
As this was a Methodist Church, I suspect most people who used it would consider it "just a building", albeit one with sentimental memories (weddings, funerals, weekly worship), but sure, it's bricks and mortar and balconies and pews and a broken organ. shrug.
It's just that's actually quite an unusual viewpoint on a global scale, for most denominations.
Catholics abandon and sell church buildings all the time. Once you've removed a small handful of sacred items and done the de-consecration-ritual, it is "just a building" to them too.
There are vast numbers of repurposed churches in Catholic countries. Just walk the streets in an Italian city.
I'm not familiar with the specifics for catholics, but it is conceptually not too different from how protestants do it.
With the caveat, best repeated in every post under this article, that of course very strong sentimental feelings can be attached to a church building. You could put a religious dimension on the morality of hurting peoples feelings by destroying or changing a beautiful thing I guess. But, it is not the house itself that is holy in a holy house.
The piece you're missing is de-consecration. A consecrated space is holy whether the people are in it or not, within the Catholic tradition. Yes, you can deconsecrate it, and then it's just a building. However a loaded tabernacle makes it a holy space in the eyes of Catholics even if it's an empty space. It is conceptually very different to Methodism: the entire point of Methodism is to abandon such mysteries.
I'm eastern orthodox so not part of one of the groups you're talking about but we share a lot with catholics so maybe close enough.
The reaction you're talking about with the palm reading seems like it could have mostly been because of the presence of a loaded tabernacle? I mean I doubt they would have been pleased about this without it but lay catholics I know take the tabernacle extremely seriously.
I don't particularly, aesthetically, like to see churches used for secular purposes but if they've been properly desacralized I don't have any strong religious objections.
> "holy spaces" remain exactly that: consecrated spaces that are in themselves holy regardless of whether a human congregation is present or not
This is true but it implies a causality that is backwards I think. Spaces aren't holy because of the consecration, they're holy because of the people that come there to worship together regularly over many years. If they stop doing that the church doesn't immediately "lose its holiness" or whatever but it does change: it becomes a shrine or a relic or maybe just a building.
> The reaction you're talking about with the palm reading seems like it could have mostly been because of the presence of a loaded tabernacle?
Yes, I think the tabernacle was the crux of the issue here.
> Spaces aren't holy because of the consecration, they're holy because of the people that come there to worship together regularly over many years.
That's a more modern, and dare I say, Methodist view of the church. If a space has a tabernacle in it with the body of Christ in it, within the Catholic tradition, that space is holy and consecrated even when there isn't a human soul in the place, because by definition there is a belief that the soul of Christ is in that space.
You can deconsecrate that space and remove that blessed sacrament and then it's just a building, but in the eyes of most Catholics the space itself has a mystery even in the absence of worshipping congregations.
Like I said I'm orthodox and have never been much exposed to protestant theology other than it just being sort of in the air in western secular culture.
I think you'd get interesting answers if you polled lay catholics with a question like "which is more holy, a consecrated but never-used church, or a parish recently desacralized after centuries of regular use."
There's definitely one "correct" answer if you asked a bishop or a catholic theologian. But I have noticed that there is often a big difference between lay religious experience and hierarchically controlled official dogma. A poll a few years ago had less than half of american catholics believing in transubstantiation, for example.
You're kind of proving the point. The building is not the real thing, as any sense in which it is holy (which is a word that means set apart for a special purpose) can be readily undone. The church doesn't cease to exist when that happens. It moves. The same way the Tabernacle (the ancient Tabernacle) moved, which happened on a semi-regular basis. The place is less important than who is there.
It seems like this is confusing The Church with a church.
Notre Dame Cathedral is a church, but you could burn it to the ground tomorrow and it wouldn’t have hardly any impact at all on the persistence of The Church.
Such is claimed, but I suspect that this is a misleading truth. Christianity is an extremely successful religion, but if it were less popular and Notre Dame was one of only a few church buildings (even, just one of a few with that level of grandeur), then burning it to the ground would indeed have a profound impact on the persistence of The Church. For those religions with a single temple, the destruction of that building is more than merely traumatic, it is catastrophic. Christianity only avoids this by having so very many buildings, many of them as spectacular as Notre Dame.
> I think it’s Eurocentric to imply that China is morally inferior to the US.
Apart from the genocide of the Uighur, the brutal oppression of Tibet, the complete lack of even the pretense of democratic rights, the total lack of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and on and on. Last I checked not wanting your ethnicity eliminated or brutally repressed isn’t just a European thing.
This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
Maybe some people who have wasted half their life being completely unproductive say “I wish I focused on relationships more” on their deathbed. But many others might say “I wasted my whole life, I wish I got it together.” The thing is, those people don’t write books or give seminars on how to live a good life. They die alone and are quickly forgotten.
> This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
I can assure you the reaction at hand is not limited to those you suggest.
I know because I faced my own mortality, if only for a brief moment of time, far earlier than I ever expected and earlier than most would prefer I think. And when I did, this exact realisation hit me like a freight train. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a more profound, visceral moment.
What also may have helped, is developing quite a deep and close relationship with an individual who would later go on to pass from cystic fibrosis.
Now one of this is to say I may not now have an entirely different reaction when again it comes time for my card to be punched. However I feel like this has been somewhat tested by the SCI that would follow five years later. It's also not to say that what I felt had been a waste vs what is important will be applicable to all of us, in fact I am sure that realistically, it will be deeply different, personal and particular to each of us as individuals.
When I have particularly bad days as a result of my unlucky medical outcomes, I remind myself of what I experienced that night, and how lucky I was ultimately to be able to experience something like that, and then actually have somewhat of a "second chance" at taking a look down the second fork in the road.
TL;DR
I give 100x times less of a shit about a "career/being productive/min-maxing" than I once did. Your mileage may vary.
I was briefly diagnosed with "99.9% sure it's cancer" before it turned out to be benign. Say about 2-3 weeks.
In those few weeks my main regrets were a) not having done many of the things on my bucket list, and b) not having children or not going to be live long enough to see them grow up.
I'm someone with recurring nightmare about career goals and such. However at that time, work only crossed my mind briefly and was easily dismissed.
> I was briefly diagnosed with "99.9% sure it's cancer" before it turned out to be benign. Say about 2-3 weeks.
This is similar to my situation, except I was told, “We’re 99.9% sure it’s not cancer, so relax bro, don’t even worry about it.” Apparently, my age made it incredibly unlikely. “We’d be far more concerned if you were an older gentleman.”
Imagine my surprise when I got called back and they told me the complete opposite.
It worked out in the end as apparently they caught it so early that it had only just turned into cancer. If they had found it even weeks or months earlier, it would not have been cancer yet, just precancerous apparently. This claim seems dubious to me, I mean, how do you tell that? However, I am not a doctor, so what do I know. I do worry sometimes though that perhaps they overstated it and blew up my life over nothing.
I was told to consider myself lucky it was caught when it was as apparently it almost never happens. Again, a claim...that I don't know is accurate, or just something they told me to get me to relax.
You also might think that after something like that, that if something else occurred with my body, people might pay me more heed when I raised it? Well, you would be mistaken. Because I walked right into a goddamn spinal cord injury (incomplete at least, you gotta take the small wins) because they did exactly the same thing again. "Its just stress, probably working too hard, just dont think about it."
Turns out no amount of relaxing is going to walk back severe central canal stenosis resulting in severe cervical myelopathy with significant spinal cord signal change.
That’s the conventional wisdom but I think it’s worth challenging it. Or at least, if by “productivity” you mean “work” (I think there’s an important distinction there).
There is nothing wrong with your work being the focus of your life. Many people derive great pleasure and satisfaction from, and make a positive impact on the world with, their work. Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness. (I’m aware that much work is drudgery, I refer mainly to the kind of work one can derive joy from, which I suspect many of us on HN have in our lives.)
The question “is it okay to work all the time” is explored rather well here:
>Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness.
There are plenty of people who don't work such as children, students, carers and retirees. They find meaning in all sorts of activities outside of work.
Most people on their deathbed who would counsel you would counsel you to focus on relationships. The ones who had the insight "people can fuck right off, that's the key to it all" aren't interested in telling us about it.
> the mines are going to be in China anyway, right
If you had read the article you’d know they have their own mine:
“Hardly any firms, even in China, do what MP is attempting: produce finished magnets starting with ore that the company mines itself”
Mostly China doesn’t mine materials but has concentrated the refining capacity in China for many commodities. Thankfully, we do have backup capacity so we won’t be totally screwed if China cuts us off, and the refining technology is well understood and in a conflict we or our allies can cut them off from many raw materials so their refining advantage isn’t a checkmate.
> Mostly China doesn’t mine materials but has concentrated the refining capacity
Unless I'm working on old information, this is not correct. The overwhelming majority of neodymium mining capacity is currently in China.
> you’d know they have their own mine:
Sure, but to make a difference from a geopolitical perspective, we need more than that. And I don't see those kind of mines being opened on a large scale anywhere in the west. Regulations are challenging and environmental resistance is significant.
That is what Trump is doing via DOGE so the burn-it-down camp seems pretty well served, more than anytime since the post-war demobilization anyway. The impasse, if it occurs, is more likely to be with those in Congress that don’t want to reduce the size of government.
I think the burn-it-down camp is better described as true believers in free-marketism, and they genuinely expect business to be booming and things to work great when they've cut back on government functionality.
DOGE acts different. It seems to me DOGE is about crashing the US economy and/or world economy to attempt wild and radical Silicon Valley theories about alternate societies. As such, its actions are inclined to ruin the fortunes and the business of the free marketeer camp, because those folks are functioning in the real world and have businesses, employees, and pay those employees in dollars.
So I don't think the 'burn-it-down' camp should favor DOGE. It is in no way their ally and is there to ruin them, in order to rebuild a society upon somebody else and leave 'em ruined. It's pretty plain to see DOGE's opinion of those people based on its attitude to H1B visas, for instance.
> It seems to me DOGE is about crashing the US economy and/or world economy to attempt wild and radical Silicon Valley theories about alternate societies
I see absolutely no evidence that the DOGE crowd wants to crash the economy and while they do have a utopian ideology so does the left.
Additionally, the DOGE crowd would say they’re trying to dismantle an unaccountable deep state conspiracy that threatens the American economy through an accelerating accumulation of government debt and regulations and has been trying to transform society globally for decades through political, social, economic, and military intervention all to serve the progressive elites.
I think both of your views are lacking in charity and perspective, although the DOGE view in so far as I’ve accurately described it has vastly more evidence backing it up.
The quote is “markets will tumble” by which he clarifies that it will be a temporary market overreaction not “crash the economy” like it’s 1929. Those are qualitatively different things.
He intends to make the market crash (or at least is taking actions that will almost certainly crash it), but he thinks it will recover afterwards. The first part is pretty certain with what they're doing. The second part is almost impossible to predict, because no one can really say what the break points are (i.e. how much it can crash and still quickly recover afterwards). See the mortgage crisis of 2008 for what an unexpected runaway effect looks like.
The US is $36 trillion in debt with that debt growing at an accelerating rate. This is happening at the time that our technological (let alone economic) edge over most of the rest of the world is fading to completely gone, and our own growth rate is starting to decline. To many, this does not seem to have the makings of a sustainable state of affairs.
And not only that but a lot of the spending we engage is a mixture of minimally beneficial and/or outright corrupt. For instance at one point the Air Force was paying $10,000 for toilet seats. It's only after that received extensive publicity that they swapped over to simply 3D printing the seats, probably for a few bucks per seat. [1] There's about a 99.999% chance that the supplier for those $10,000 toilet seats had a rather low degree of personal separation from the person signing off on paying $10,000 for them. And now imagine how much you could save if you started wiping this nonsense out of the entire government.
Government spending, however, is accounted as part of GDP and other economic metrics. Each one of those toilet seats sent the GDP up, improved the economics of the company delivering them, and even created some jobs. So getting rid of this nonsense will obviously 'hurt' the economy in the short-run, but in turn you get a sustainable system, dramatically reduce spending, and create a more competitive economy. When it's even possible to sell toilet seats for $10,000 (easily replaceable by 3D printing), who cares about the private market? To say nothing of the fact that merit/competitiveness is obviously completely nonexistent or farcical for many government contracts.
Were you alive in the mid to late 90s? A string of balanced budgets and surpluses. There are new problems and no dot com bubble right now but most Americans were alive the last time we had balanced budgets. It is quite possible.
It became unbalanced by choice: a recreational war in the Middle East and tax cuts. The dotcom bubble helped, but those trillions in debt were not caused by people paying less capital gains tax on pets.com sales.
It was possible. That’s not the same as saying it is still possible at this debt level with the massive shortfalls in social security and other entitlements.
I do not think it’s possible without also seriously eroding the debt burden through sustained higher inflation. That horse has left the barn.
> the current administration is asking them to resign en masse, not hiring more
While they did initially receive the resignation memo the Office of Personnel Management clarified that Air Traffic Controllers aren’t eligible for the resignation offer nor subject to the hiring freeze. [1]
> Office of Personnel Management clarified that Air Traffic Controllers aren’t eligible
I'm curious to know if this OPM policy was there was there from the beginning, or whether it's a backtrack after the 'bad optics' after the Washington, DC, crash.
> or whether it's a backtrack after the 'bad optics' after the Washington, DC, crash.
Either way you have a plan that wasn’t well thought through or thoughtfully executed. Having said that, at least they’re not (ultimately) directly tempting understaffed critical workers to quit although one wonders which functions haven’t had a plane crash moment.
I can’t speak for any religious leader but in terms of Catholic leadership: because in many matters God spoke through the Prophets and then He came down and told us directly which is preserved in Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition (2 Thessalonians 2:15-17), and the Holy Spirit guides the Church (John 14:26) and does so through the prime ministerial office of the Pope the successor of Peter (Mathew 16:13-19) and through the Bishops the successors of the Apostles (Acts 1:12-26)(Acts 15)
Granting it's been 30 years since I've considered myself Catholic, so speaking entirely from the perspective of a non-believer at this point, but to me, the central dilemma is say I buy that we and our universe have a thinking, feeling creator that watches events, possibly intervenes, and actually cares how we behave in a way we can translate into human language and moral directives, given all the thousands upon thousands of conflicting historical text claiming to be that, why should I accept what one specific council of European priests 600 years ago or whatever decided is to be considered holy canon?
Other commenters trying to compare to science seem to misunderstand the analogy. You don't have to accept the conclusions of Francis Bacon himself because he sort of formalized the scientific method as we know it today. Nor do we read the texts of Newton and consider that eternal canon. Science involves empirical investigation and all claims can be corroborated or contradicted by further investigation. They're probabilistic claims based on statistical analysis of the currently available known evidence and always subject to change.
If you don't think this works, then explain how AI is able to exist in the first place, because adjusting probability estimates based on statistical modeling of incoming evidence conditioned on past evidence is exactly what machine learning does.
I love Catholicism for all the reasons given elsewhere. It has produced a grand tradition of clear writers and erudite thinkers. The basic morality and orientation of man's purpose with respect to other men rings "true" to me even if it lies outside of empiricism. But the core dogma of "believe specific claims of fact because they were written down in one text and not another" is bad epistemology no matter how you cut it. If God himself ever spoke to me directly, I'd have no choice but to consider that (but would also have to consider that I might be insane). No priest and no prophet, however, is ever going to convince me that they speak with the mandate of God just because they believe it very strongly themselves.
> But the core dogma of "believe specific claims of fact because they were written down in one text and not another" is bad epistemology no matter how you cut it.
My understanding of Catholicism comes from outside of it, but this isn't how I understand Catholic epistemology—this sounds more like Sola Scriptura, which is a Protestant doctrine and emphatically not a Catholic one.
Since I'm not a Catholic, I'm going to link out to an explanation from people who are [0]:
> The living magisterium, therefore, makes extensive use of documents of the past, but it does so while judging and interpreting, gladly finding in them its present thought, but likewise, when needful, distinguishing its present thought from what is traditional only in appearance. It is revealed truth always living in the mind of the Church, or, if it is preferred, the present thought of the Church in continuity with her traditional thought, which is for it the final criterion, according to which the living magisterium adopts as true or rejects as false the often obscure and confused formulas which occur in the monuments of the past. Thus are explained both her respect for the writings of the Fathers of the Church and her supreme independence towards those writings; she judges them more than she is judged by them.
So the epistemological problem to resolve is not why these particular documents, it's why this particular organization? Not why do I trust what's written here but not there—the answer to that is because the Church says so—but why do I trust this Church?
Not being a Catholic, I can't really answer that question, but I do think it's important to approach the Catholic question on its own terms rather than Protestant terms.
> why should I accept what one specific council of European priests 600 years ago or whatever decided is to be considered holy canon?
Well, firstly the canon doesn't just come from the decisions of Europeans and bringing race into it is a non-sequitur. The canon of Scripture comes from the Sacred Tradition, preserved by the Church and lead by the Pope and the Bishops (who FWIW weren't and aren't just white guys), and then sealed by the authority given by Christ to the Pope and the Bishops on issues of faith and morals. The Sacred Tradition and the authority of the Pope and Bishops comes from Christ, so why should you trust the canon of Scripture? Because Jesus Christ is God and you should believe in Him and be apart of His Church because the canon comes from the Church which comes from Christ. If you don't believe in Jesus Christ or that He was God then worrying about the canon of Scripture and trying to criticize medieval ecumenical council decisions is just foolishness.
> But the core dogma of "believe specific claims of fact because they were written down in one text and not another" is bad epistemology
This is closer to Protestant dogma which tends to assert that the Church and all our beliefs come from Scripture. To slightly rephrase and expand on what I already said above, Catholic dogma is that the canon of Scripture comes from the Church not the other way around, that is to say Christ gave us the Sacred Tradition and the Apostles and their successors are what determined the canon of Scripture.
So now I've distilled a vague distrust you have in medieval and ancient sources down to a historical and empirical question. Did Jesus Christ die and rise again, and did He found a Church that has kept his Tradition alive through the centuries and alive fundamentally unchanged. These questions have been ignored and then ridiculed by empiricists but I've noticed more and more people starting to take them seriously, I suggest you do too.
That's a lot of talking around the actual question
>that has kept his Tradition alive through the centuries and alive fundamentally unchanged
the answer to which is an emphatic, "No." Which is why Protestantism exists in the first place.
The fundamental conundrum is whether or not you believe god is operating through people who are clearly behaving in self-serving ways, as many Catholic officials have in the past. There's nothing empirical about such a question and no use becoming indignant over some taking the perfectly sentimental (if not also reasonable, though that's beside the point) stance that they simply don't trust those dudes. The appeal to being the Church which is Jesus who is God, and therefore you can't question anything a church official says, is, like... the whole point of tension.
> the answer to which is an emphatic, "No." Which is why Protestantism exists in the first place.
Early Church scholarship makes it impossible to maintain the Protestant contention that the teachings have changed in their essence, obviously vocabulary has changed. Some recommended reading on the topic that is a mix of popular and scholarly works:
* The Fathers Know Best by Jimmy Akin
* Upon This Rock by Steve Ray
* Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett
* The Faith of the Early Fathers Volumes 1 to 3 by William Jurgens
* The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451 by Adrian Fortescue
The medium is the message, as it were. Changing vocabulary changes the essence, since the minds and souls that would provide consistency across shifting intonation aren't still here to speak/bare them, respectively.
I think you overestimate my interest in soil-testing when I'm removed enough from the scene to see the mountain for myself. I suppose it could be a mirage; that's the best you can hope for.
Is it a no? Many archeological finds since the reformation have shown that the early church was indeed very much alike to what the Catholic Church later claimed.
What differences in doctrine or practice do you know of?
OP is giving the correct answer for the Catholic worldview.
You and the Catholic Church are operating under completely different axioms, so there's no point in responding to someone's explanation of Catholic axioms by just repeating your own axioms more forcefully.
I think it's a more interesting approach to disregard the metaphysical claims, which are inherently unfalsifiable and thus irrelevant to life in this universe, and look at religious texts as constitutions governing human behavior and morality. The metaphysical bits are just a side note to help sell that social contract and give it a theoretical enforcement mechanism.
In other words, the relevant question isn't how some pastor "knows" that God says to do XYZ. Obviously they don't. The relevant question is whether and to what extent there's value to be extracted from the collective wisdom of generations of members of an institution whose history stretches back thousands of years.
Whether or not a literal god may have been involved at any point is irrelevant. Right now, we're very far removed from any such claimed involvement, looking at documents that have been written, cherry-picked, translated, rewritten, and reinterpreted many times by many different fallible humans. If the only meaning someone sees in religious guidance is its connection to a literal physical deity, they're in for an exercise in frustration from what is at best the world's longest game of telephone. I think it makes more sense to just accept a religion and its culture and teachings for what they are, and try to be the best person you can be without worrying about how the guy controlling the simulation we live in may choose to mete out rewards and punishments.
> Whether or not a literal god may have been involved at any point is irrelevant. Right now, we're very far removed from any such claimed involvement, looking at documents that have been written, cherry-picked, translated, rewritten, and reinterpreted many times by many different fallible humans.
This is only true from the Protestant Sola Scriptura perspective. The Catholic and Orthodox traditions hold that God still directs the Church through the Holy Spirit, which makes the documents that you identify only some elements of that direction—an output of the authority granted to the Church—not its final form. So, no, it's not accurate to say that we are far removed from any claims of direct involvement from Deity—several branches of Christianity hold that He is still actively involved.
> If the only meaning someone sees in religious guidance is its connection to a literal physical deity, they're in for an exercise in frustration from what is at best the world's longest game of telephone.
Again, it's not a long game of telephone if God is actually still directing the Church today. If you accept that He guides leadership right now through the Pope and the Bishops, which is the stance articulated by OP, you're at most a few steps removed from His regular guidance.
Which gets back to my original point, which is that this really all comes down to which axioms you want to accept. All religion is unfalsifiable, as you observe, but falsifiability cuts both ways and you can't logic your way out of that to logically conclude the absence or irrelevance of a God. What you can do is decide which axioms you're going to start from and work from there.
That's fair. It isn't outside the realm of possibility that the Pope and every previous Pope is and was a true agent of God (despite how historical issues around papal succession and legitimacy may complicate that story), and there's no way to logic your way into an answer on that one way or another.
Nevertheless, whether or not someone's particular doctrine agrees with the "long game of telephone" stance, I would suggest that a mindset which finds meaning in the teachings and institutions of one's religion independent of their divinity is a more straightforward path to prosocial behavior and inner peace. The idea that anyone should ever suffer genuine anguish or question their personal morals based on doubts of their assumptions about the metaphysical nature of the universe just seems alien and like a non sequitur to me, but from what I understand it's a very real struggle for some people.
This is also true from a Catholic point of view (I am).
At the very least, that’s debatable or less absolute than that.
Because evidence (schisms, actual errors from the Church institution throughout time, not the least sex scandals we are not done with yet) shows that if God was actively directing the Church in the past and today, oh boy… not sure you would be sane to want to follow such a “peculiar” guidance.
> Because evidence (schisms, actual errors from the Church institution throughout time, not the least sex scandals we are not done with yet) shows that if God was actively directing the Church in the past and today, oh boy…
Except all the scandals and anti-Popes are empirical evidence of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church. Despite all that the teachings of the Church are fundamentally unchanged. I can read St Justin Martyr and recognize the teaching of the Eucharist from the second century that itself is in continuity with John 6. Go through all Catholic teachings and you’ll find continuity from the beginning despite all the forces that wanted to change it for thousands of years.
The religion founded by the man betrayed by His own Apostle and then disowned or abandoned by the rest, executed brutally and sadistically by the Romans, that religion went on to conquer the Roman world within a few centuries and then make its way through the whole world for thousands of years. Why? Because Jesus rose from the dead and against His Church the gates of hell won’t prevail.
I don’t buy this so much as this is the perfect excuse for evil in humanity to continue to govern, wherever it is (“yeah it’s bad, but there’s a Plan behind all this” - very similar to how Qanon tried to operate).
You see continuity and consistence while others see that it’s not only the religion that conquered the Roman world, but the Roman Empire that also conquered the religion to secure its existence.
So much of the Church extension starting from the XIth century, comes, shouts even, more from its Roman heritage than from its Christian’s (one thread being that it mixed temporal and spiritual concerns instead of making them obviously distinct).
But “we” take it for some divine inspiration and spiritual guidance while it’s merely equivalent to humans laws: contextual, biased and open to critique and upgrades down the line.
What’s remarkable is the totally opposed, considerations we can have on the Church (and it seems, the concepts of hell & heaven), while having the same fidelity to the Christ’s teaching (which, in the end, matters most), and both seeing how the institution both sabotages and helps its mission.
> one thread being that it mixed temporal and spiritual concerns instead of making them obviously distinct
That's really, really, not something Christianity gained from Rome. Judaism is, and always has been, a religion of the practical world. It prescripts how to live, from the very beginning. The Torah is very concerned with the answering of how to live, as well as the why to live that way.
Good point, yes, Christianity came with its own judaic heritage.
But without the centralised, territorial organization, administrative structures, cultural tools (especially Latin) and normative legal framework from Rome, the Church wouldn't have had the means to influence consistently so much the society of its time and the ability to support and control a spread that extensive through Europe and further.
By choosing Christianity, Constantin found a way for the Empire to survive into something different. And Christianity gained a tremendous powerhouse to use and adapt for its own growth.
And my point is that this hybrid huge "thing" is more driven today by its institutional heritage than spiritual's (otherwise, it would act vehemently more about its power abuses, sexual abuses, and terrible understanding of marital life, if only for pastoral care). And that's because it's much more a man-made (and male-made) organisation rather than one guided by God.
> this is the perfect excuse for evil in humanity to continue to govern
Historical facts, like the Church and her teaching being invincible to the attacks against her over the millennia, has no relation to what ought to happen. Facts are facts not excuses and attempting to bring in that into the issue is a non-sequitur.
1/ I don't see how the Church's teachings have been "invincible" over millennia. It evolved, if only by synods, that debated and settled dogmas (and what was true at one point, became not at some later one... so go figure). And outside of its sphere of influence, it's been shown (not always, but enough to question its whole authority) to be wrong or irrelevant - sexual and power abuse scandals are the most prominent and recent fruits of evil I can quote.
2/ claiming that God's is behind you, without any relevant and factual proof of it (and any verifiable claim from God saying that you indeed are acting in His Name), is the perfect excuse to do whatever you want, as no one would think of critiquing you. "Tradition" is of no help either here. That's the Achille's heel of hierarchical religions.
I think this is a bad direction to argue from. Science is humans all the way down and we want to have confidence in the scientific process. That is, it is fundamental to our understanding of science that we can trust the collective output of numerous humans working together to uncover "Truth".
You wouldn't accept the counter argument: "Science is wrong because it is the work of humans; religion is right because it is the word of God".
We have to assume, no matter what side of the argument we take, that humans are at least in principle capable of discerning "Truth". We should focus on how humans discern truth rather than on whether or not they can.
A major problem it seems is that people get caught up and forget that philosophy can exist without religion can just get trapped in the arguments religious philosophy presents.
Being visible in a positive way to the right people is 100% necessary for career advancement inside companies. The fact that this is abused by otherwise incompetent people is unfortunate, but good people need to understand and use this knowledge to advance also.
This isn’t accurate except for perhaps certain parts of Protestantism. To Catholics, Orthodox, probably portions of the Church of England etc, ie a majority of Christianity church buildings are holy and specially blessed. They hold the Eucharist in the Tabernacle which these Churches believe is the body and blood of Jesus under the guise of bread which is the most holy thing for them. In order for these buildings to be used for any other purpose all the holy things would need to be removed and the building specifically deconsecrated.