Yabby, next you’ll be quoting Dan Brown! I must admit that Opus Dei aren’t my kettle of fish, but matters of personal piety are, quite frankly, none of my business or yours.

You entirely missed my point about the burning of heretics. Burning at the stake was a standard secular punishment. Just as I wouldn’t assess today’s British justice system by its practice last century of hanging people for petty crimes, it isn't valid to assess today’s Church by a form of execution that was standard at the time and utilised by non-Catholic countries.

You also ignore the obvious implication of your discussion of varying efforts to have secular law reflect ecclesiastical law. If the Church’s activities vary so much from country to country, then one must conclude that the differences are cultural.

FYI, NFP has been shown scientifically to be more effective than barrier methods.

Your claim that Holland has a low abortion rate due to sex education simply does not stand up to the fact that Sweden has had ‘great sex education’ since 1956 and Denmark since 1971, yet they have some of the highest abortion rates in Europe.

As for suffering, of course it's noble to endure suffering without complaint – there's no lack of non-Catholics who share this belief. The idea that the Church in any way promotes suffering is obscene and defamatory. I quote from the Catechism: “The corporal works of mercy consist especially in feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, clothing the naked...”

My main issue with what you have written throughout this lengthy discussion is that you expect the Catholic Church to adopt your morality and have no respect for those Catholics who, of their own free will, adhere to the teachings of the Catholic Church. As I said before, conscience is individual. In a diverse society, you cannot expect everyone to agree on everything. The Church and Catholics must follow their conscience, just as you must follow yours. You ought to respect that if you have any sort of belief that people ought to be free to think what they want.

Mishka, why should I quote Dan Brown? Fact is that the press has
exposed some of the goings on within Opus Dei (the fanatical end
of the Catholic Church) and I've read quite a few reports of JP2
allegedly carrying his own little whip. When people of such public
influence do these things, the psychology behind it all becomes an
interesting question.

So because some non Catholic countries burnt people at the stake,
you seemingly excuse the Church for doing the same? Come on, this
is the mob apparently preaching love and kindness, but we'll just
conveniently get rid of anyone who happens to disagree with us.

I have no problem at all with Catholics believing whatever they want,
as long as they don't try to enforce their dogma on the rest of us
normal people. Like I always say, swing by your testicles from
your chandelier, as long as both the testicles and chandelier are
yours :)

So go ahead by all means. Whip yourselves, torture yourselves with
sexual guilt, suffer as much as you want, but please leave me out
of it all, for you don't have a scrap of substantiated evidence to
back up your claims.

But the Vatican refuses to do that. They want to enforce their dogma
on the rest of us, one way or another, usually by lobbying politically
in what are indeed very clever ways. They learnt something in 2000 years.

Suffer all you want on your deathbed Mishka, you will win a couple
of gold stars in heaven, I am sure. But frankly the rest of us want
to move on and I see no reason why the Vatican should want to tell
us how to live, it is none of their frigging business.

Yabby, get real! Accusing Catholics of “sexual guilt” because a tiny number of them practice mortification is like accusing all Australians of being sado-masochists because some are into S&M. Furthermore, mortification has nothing to do with sex – it’s a way of training oneself to give up bad habits. Members of Opus Dei recognise that they’re not perfect, and they practice mortification. It’s like giving up chocolate for Lent.

The Church, like any other group, has the right and duty to follow its creed and cannot be expected to go against its conscience. If you try to force it to conform, it will have no choice but to cease its institutional efforts to do good. If it isn’t allowed to provide charity, healthcare, and education in good conscience, then these things will have to be shut down (as have all its adoption agencies in the UK). Most people are happy to engage the Church’s services, and I think most people have the objectivity to appreciate that tolerance for Catholic beliefs is a small price to pay for cheap private education, etc.. I would not expect a Muslim charity to cook pork for the hungry, so why should anyone expect the Catholic Church to provide sterilisation procedures in its hospitals?!

The Church, furthermore, doesn’t force its beliefs on anyone. It has a legitimate voice, that’s all. Ultimately, democracy rules (unless you’re in a Muslim country) and the people choose whether they agree with the Church. No one is forced to elect Catholics, and it has little effect anyway. After all, Tony Abbott has promised not to interfere with the Medicare funding of abortion. How is that enforcing dogma?!

The Church didn’t burn people at the stake for merely having a different opinion, by the way, and it never said Galileo was incorrect in the first place, but I don’t think you’re interested in the truth, so I won’t bother you with facts that you’ll just distort and disregard. You say I excuse burning people at the stake when I actually called it “abhorrent”. You’re clearly incapable of having a sensible conversation.

Mishka, as we have established, the Church considers masturbation a
grave sin, and as we know that just about all males and a whole lot
of females do it or have, clearly many Catholics suffer from a guilty
conscience! Let them suffer.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0029.html

Even the Church acknowledges that 3000-5000 were err regretably burnt
at the stake and many tortured.

Look up Giordano Bruno and the charges against him, they are listed
in Wiki as the documents were found some years ago. Nearly all
of them are for "holding opinions contrary to the Catholic faith"
of one kind or another.

The church holds far more power then just as a "legitimate voice".
After all the church controls the alleged ticket to heaven which many
a Catholic politician would have been promised, so it holds huge
influence, unlike the rest of us.

So does it threaten politicians?

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/141973.php

They seemingly certainly try, as the above article reveals. Fortunately
some politicians are " no longer scared by the Church's
threats". I can only deduce that the chruch does indeed threaten
politicians and that some are indeed scared, hardly just a
"legitimate voice".

Interesting defence-in-the-form-of-attack, Mishka Gora.

>>The Church didn’t burn people at the stake for merely having a different opinion<<

Somewhat revisionist, though? Or perhaps... slippery is a better word.

"The Church" may not have themselves burned unbelievers at the stake. However, when they found them guilty of "heresy", they handed them over to the State for burning (Jan Hus, Giordano Bruno etc.) An early form of rendition, I guess. Good for keeping one's hands clean.

But were they really all that clean?

Here's a bit from Emperor Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis, issued in the sixth century:

"We order all those who follow this law to assume the name of Catholic Christians, and considering others as demented and insane, We order that they shall bear the infamy of heresy; and when the Divine vengeance which they merit has been appeased, they shall afterwards be punished in accordance with Our resentment, which we have acquired from the judgment of Heaven."

"Punished in accordance with Our resentment" meant burning at the stake.

Nice.

Closer to home, Mary's attempts to turn England Catholic by force deserves some attention.

http://www.elizabethi.org/us/elizabethanchurch/marian.html

"Those who refused to adhere to the Catholic form of worship were to be burnt to death as heretics... Some three hundred people were burnt to death between 1555 and 1558."

I suppose that if you look at it sideways, it is "the State", rather than "the Church" that burned them. But was the Church a) for or b) against such action, I wonder.

And then, this:

>>[the Church] never said Galileo was incorrect in the first place<<

No. He was merely stating facts that were "formally heretical, for being explicitly contrary to Holy Scripture;"

http://web.archive.org/web/20040829092858/http://www.msu.edu/course/lbs/492/stillwell/galileo_trial_docs.html#sentence

Hair-splitting, par excellence.

Yabby/Pericles, I have tried to keep this discussion on the topic of conscience, but it has turned into a have-a-go-at-Catholics thread. I made my view of burning at the stake clear – “abhorrent” – and yet you continue to bring it up. Am I supposed to defend every single Catholic throughout history?! Should Catholics be held solely responsible for wrongdoing that was standard practice for Catholics and non-Catholics alike? Have you any sense of balance and relevance?! You have no respect for the consciences of Catholics, and your bigoted attacks on the Church of the past are irrational. You clearly have no respect for my opinion or historical truth, so I will not continue the discussion.

I will, however, clarify the matter of Galileo, to give you just one example of how you prefer bigotry to the truth. Galileo’s heliocentric theory was never declared incorrect by the Church. The heresy for which he was convicted was that he claimed his theory to be fact, without scientific proof. What you have entirely missed is that his theory was only partially correct and that the scientific consensus of the day (which the Church supported) was also partially correct. If the Church had sanctioned Galileo’s theory, it would have sanctioned something that has been disproven by modern science. (Galileo believed that the sun was the FIXED centre of the universe. We now know that the sun is NOT the centre of the universe and that it DOES move.) Despite all this, the Church has formally apologised for his mistreatment (denunciation and comfortable house arrest), but it did not take “400 years to concede that Gallileo was right all along” because a) he was NOT right all along; and b) the ban on his works was lifted in 1718. According to the scientific philosopher Feyerabend, “The church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just…” (Oh, and they didn’t burn him at the stake, funnily enough!)