"having their conscience seared with a hot iron; forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth."
Not that anyone has done such a thing * co"celibate"priesthoodugh * nor any harm by it * coglobalpedophileconspiracyugh *. None would dare, since restricting priesthood to sexually repressed people and calling them deviants for indulging ANY sexual desire would produces a priesthood experienced at depravity and its concealment. That may be why neither Christ nor ANY Apostle ever said anything about marriage except to 1) forbid divorce for any reason but adultery, 2) forbid bigamists as deacons and all higher positions, and 3) reference the first Popes in-laws. Oh, and "it is better to marry than to burn;" good advice.
Catholics do NOT selectively abstain from thing that are evil. We UNIVERSALLY abstain from them. Sex is good (anyone who does not believe we think that is welcome to offer an explanation for the stereotype of Catholic family sizes). Meat is good. SOMETIMES, in some circumstances, we refrain from partaking of those things out of self-discipline and in honor of the infinitely greater sacrifices made for us by our God. Priest don't abstain from marriage because sex is icky or ladyparts are corrupting, they offer it up out of love for God, devoting themselves entirely to Him and His service. They refrain from having sex for the exact same reason a married person refrains from having sex with all but one of the world's population. A priest has sex with one fewer person than a married man, and with the exact same number of partners as any other virtuous single men. In times and places where monogamy has generally only been honored in the breech, so too was the case with clerical chastity. All the lukewarm endorsements of marriage from a lifelong bachelor will not change that.
Secondly, just because the Bible doesn't say something doesn't mean it's not true. I have never remotely taken a position of sola scriptura, and rarely even cite the Bible in my arguments, so why don't you stop dragging it out. Check your fundamentalist religious beliefs at the door, please. You don't see me citing the teachings of the Church in anything BUT discussions of Catholic doctrine, do you? So why bring the Bible into non-Biblical discussions?
Former. He is literally out of the House now, so it is hardly an urgent problem. As for his behavior, find me a significant Republican who defended his behavior the way Democrats contended Clinton's behavior was private and personal. Find me a conservative activist who said "I'd let him cornhole my kid to thank him for keeping taxes low" as a Clinton defender said regarding oral sex and abortion.
Why do you cite heretics as condemnations of my own beliefs?
Which is absolutely absurd. Thermodynamics asserts that things can be changed. No one eats wheat, it's gross. But no one pretends they are genuinely CREATING bread. According to your perversion of science for political purposes, a baker should not be paid, because he did not do anything! His money comes exclusively from taking it from people who are desperately hungry for a basic staple of life. As for your absurdly infantile qualifier of "more than he puts in" who is to say that the money he collects for selling the bread is more or less than the effort he put into making the bread? Everything has different relative worth to different people, even people in the same transaction. The baker sells his loaf of bread for a dollar, because he would rather have that dollar than the loaf, and because his customer would rather have the bread than the dollar. You cannot objectively assert the value of material things, since commerce depends on such varied priorities, much less abstract things like the time, effort and knowledge applied to transforming wheat and fuel and water and space into bread.
Christ only threw the moneychangers out of the temple. He had no problem with them elsewhere, and He rebuked His disciple when the disciple suggested taking money that would be spent on luxuries and giving it to the poor.
Tax evasion IS patriotic. Patriotic means you love the country, not the government, and when your country was founded on suspicion of government power, keeping money (which =power) out of their hands IS patriotic. Or at least as patriotic as rooting for the other side during a war. As for the others, just because Republicans do these things does not make them conservative, except the people who oppose such policies are exactly the ones you rip into the hardest, and in this very thread sneered at for condemning fellow Republicans for not being sufficiently conservative.
Thank you, Ron Paul.
"Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people in a rich country and giving it to rich people in a poor country."
Charity forbids casting stones. It does not forbid calling a spade a spade. Show me one punishment or even policy I prescribed regarding genital mutilators, and I will apologize. All I did was call for liberals to stop posturing as champions of science, while ignoring the genetic reality in favor of the plastic surgery illusion.
Oh, and since you brought up the Duggar kid, how does that reflect on family values? Did the parents encourage or permit it? My understanding is that they took steps to stop it, and only fell short of turning him into the police. If they were a couple of ghetto dirtbags who hid their drug-dealing or cop-killing teenager from the police, people would be defending their choice to do so, as understandable at the least. What, in the secular, left-wing worldview would have prevented this misbehavior? Handing him a condom and letting him use a female classmate as a glorified wad of Kleenex? If it's okay to explore your body and feelings with virtual strangers, in empty and fruitless couplings, how is a teenager supposed to distinguish between doing the same thing with a sister, especially if they don't get pregnant? No matter how restrictive the family might be (and having only seen a couple of episodes while trapped in a beach house last summer with TV junkies, I can't even say I got any such impression that they totally curtail their children's exposure to popular culture), they cannot keep their kids from being exposed to all the ways sex is glorified and trivialized in this culture. They were not raised on isolated compounds, where the only information they got would have been their parents' teachings, so you cannot definitively say that is the only possible source of the kid's misbehavior.
Not that it matters. Had they thrown him out of the house and called the police, you and yours would be sneering at them for being cold and unloving and unnatural parents, whose concern for their child was diluted by overbreeding dispersing their affections. Just as you would have had Sarah Palin kicked her daughter to the curb. Because somehow, a pro-life advocate is a hypocrite if her daughter does not have an abortion? An abstinence advocate is proven wrong, when refusal to abstain has adverse consequences? Just because someone chooses not to listen to your teaching does not mean you are wrong to teach it.
The Duggars, as with so many others before them are only criticized on the principle of "four legs good, two legs bad."
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.” GK Chesteron
Inde muagdhe Aes Sedai misain ye!
Deus Vult!
*MySmiley*