Just a brief word on this powerful piece from my friend @DamonLinker, on the moral ugliness of contemporary Catholicism and why he can't remain in the pews anymore:http://theweek.com/articles/792775/unbearable-ugliness-catholic-church …
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I didn't grow up Catholic, but within various kinds of Protestantism, which meant that the Old Testament loomed pretty large in my childhood religious imagination.
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One of the striking things about the Hebrew Bible is that it's the record of a people that makes extraordinary claims for itself -- that their tribal god is the Only God, that they are His chosen people, that all nations will eventually worship him, etc.
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And they buttress those claims with an extensive history in which they are ... terrible. Morally terrible, politically impotent, constantly apostasizing, ignoring their prophets, the works.
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Basically the Hebrew Bible says: "Hi, we're the true chosen people of God, and to prove it let us tell a long series of stories about how our patriarchs were sinners, our kings were even worse, and we failed God completely time and time again."
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The *best* king of Israel, the awesome all-conquering one, is a philanderer and murderer. The second-best one, the temple-builder, becomes an idol-worshiper. And about the rest, the less said the better.
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Pace certain evangelicals-for-Trump and certain RC churchmen, this is not an argument for tolerating ugliness in service of some higher good. God and His prophet deal very harshly w/David when he kills Uriah, and the attitude of the prophets throughout is horror at Israel's sins.
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But for all their horror the prophets never doubt that Israel *is* the elect, the chosen people, God's intended bride. And if the Old Testament is supposed to be a revelation with big implications for the new covenant, for the Christian church, that part is important.
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I don't expect this point to revive Damon's flagging faith, or anyone else's, in the face of so much ugliness. But all I would say is that if you're a Catholic Christian (or any other kind) who reads the Bible, you've been well-warned that it might, all too often, come to this.
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This is what I don't understand about people who "have a crisis of faith" about misdeed X or Y or Z: how could you read the bible, understand free-will, understand that men are sinners, and NOT find all of this to be perfectly compatible with what we have always known of humans?
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Replying to @MorlockP @DouthatNYT
Bcs The Church claims infallibility for the Pope&demands obedience to people who turned out2b secretly evil. Bcs the mechanisms of The Church covered the crimes. Because the rules of The Church discouraged honesty. Man alone was not the problem. The “sacred”institution failed.
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