Cast Out Your Nets For A Catch

Went over to The Anchoress as my first stop today. A veritable Sea of Galilee full of interesting links. Here are two. First, an excellent observation:

Do they have any idea how hypocritical they look?

These are the same newspapers that have spent the last four years losing their minds over the evil “neocons” who believe that we ought to be aggressively spreading democracy around the world. These are the same newspapers that nearly faint when one of our diplomats is openly critical of another government’s laws. My guess is that you woulnd’t have to look very far back in the archives of any of these papers before you’ll find an article critical of “McCapitalism” or explaining how bad we are for acting like we rule the world.

Yet here they are acting like the world must listen to them and that it is somehow backwards and oppressive if it doesn’t. Moreover, they didn’t even wait a day into the new Pope’s term (reign? admininstration?) before they launched their criticisms. Would they have treated any other leader of a sovereign nation that way (did you forget that the Pope is also a Head of State?)? The hypocrisy, when you think about it, is staggering.

What these folks fail to understand, for many of the reasons Hewitt cites in his post, is that the Catholic Church is made up of billions of people, the vast majority of whom are quite happy with the Church’s doctrines and traditions and who have no desire to see them changed. In fact, I’d wager that they’d be quite angry if the Church decided to flip on issues like gay and female priests, contraceptives, and gay marriage. They’re much less interested in arguing with the Church than they are in making sure they have a good relationship with their Heavenly Father. I’m sure they’d be less than amused to know that we here in America think that the Church needs to change to suit us and that we weren’t very interested at all in what they thought of it.

But who cares about the Catholics in Latin America and Africa who have joined in huge numbers in the past few years? Sure, we use them as a prop when we need to bash the Church on its teachings about contraceptives (yet we ignore the fact that if people followed the church’s teachings on abstinence and sex, we wouldn’t have an AIDS epidemic anywhere), but aside from that they are well advised to shut up and do what we say. because we’re Americans and we know best, right?

Secondly, we have this nice capsule summary of a blogger's conversion from atheism to theism. In part of his essay he mentions the usual strikes against Christianity: The Crusades, The Inquisition, Galileo, and also mentions that these are greatly exaggerated and caricatured. I had a thought the other day. Most people would be hard pressed to come up with even ten "historical outrages" perpetrated by Christianity. Christianity has existed for 2000 years. So, less than 1 outrage per every 200 years? The people who hate Christianity the most seem to be able to point the finger at 10 "monumental outrages" in the secular world in any given year!