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Is pope Francis attempting to bring in gay marriage by the back door?
Kind of a long story, so bear with me for the background(https://www.ncregister.com/news/cardinals-send-dubia-to-pope-ahead-of-synod-on-synodality):
Submitting dubia is not a particularly uncommon occurrence and does not have a strong partisan(for lack of a better term) valence. The summary of these particular dubia later on in the same article is fairly accurate, but you can read them in their entirety, along with Cardinal Burke's statement on resubmitting them, here: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2023/10/full-text-of-new-dubia-sent-to-francis.html
What is unusual is resubmitting dubia after being dissatisfied with the response received, which is what happened here:
Interestingly, the pope's(in reality Cardinal Fernandez's[head of the DDF, the Vatican's doctrine branch, occupying the position that in recent pontificates has been a de facto #2 spot]) responses were leaked anyways, by the Vatican(https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/255539/read-pope-francis-response-to-the-dubia-presented-to-him-by-5-cardinals). As that link demonstrates, the responses are indeed not the customary yes or no replies. I'm not quoting the whole thing, because they're lengthy word salad, but the most interesting, and controversial, part, is below, the response to the second dubia:
That's a lot of words to come full circle, but the middle part- about blessing same sex non-weddings- is what has hair on fire. If you take the position that any of those paragraphs are not meaningless argle-bargle, paragraph g about the need to ensure blessings of same sex couples doesn't become a norm would not be among them. Again from the first article:
I am inclined to believe Cardinal Fernandez here, because A) responsa ad dubium are normally approved by the pope himself, so the middle paragraphs about blessing same sex non-weddings were approved by pope Francis B) firing Cardinal Fernandez over a previous screw up and disowning his comments would be trivially easy due to his atrocious record on handling sex abuse cases, yet he was appointed personally by Pope Francis rather than as a compromise(as Ladaria, the previous occupant of the office- and the issuer of the 2021 clarification against blessing same sex unions which it is rumored played a part in Francis' decision not to appoint him to a second term) or a holdover from Benedict XVI(as was Muller, the predecessor to Ladaria) and C) breaking with precedent in this manner is so highly unusual for a cabinet-level Vatican position that there's something there, and dragging your boss under the bus is not recommended.
What would it mean if the synod on synodality(which starts wednesday, and kicked off the whole brouhaha with this particular round of dubia) does in fact create significant wiggle room for bishops to authorize same sex non-weddings? Well, back to Cardinal Muller, who has previously pointed to this as a possible red line for some kind of ill-defined drastic action(https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/cardinal-muller-warns-same-sex-blessings-are-blasphemy-as-synod-on-synodality-looms/):
And:
Cardinal Muller, for those who are unfamiliar, is powerful enough within the church oligarchy to have previously vetoed a candidate for Cardinal Fernandez's current spot(https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2022/12/cardinals-block-appointment-of-heiner.html), so him saying something like this is a very big deal, albeit poorly defined what it would actually look like.
So the obvious response here is 'God of the margins' stuff (What the church believes/does now is nothing like what it believed/did 1000 years ago, it has always moved with the times to reflect popular understanding and preferences), real politik stuff (The church's #1 job is to keep member roles and coffers high, which means giving the audience what they want), etc. I think that's all relevant but also pretty played out as a topic of discussion for anyone who was online in the last few decades.
The more interesting question I want to ask of anyone who knows anything about how church theology works - which I don't really - is whether empirical evidence ever plays a role in determining the will of God in cases like this, and when/how it does so.
Like... we've had gay marriage for decades now, no one got turned into pillars of salt or anything, seems like empirically it works about as well as straight marriage for families and for raising kids, and even for church membership at accepting churches.
Before gay marriage was legal a Christian could speculate about all kinds of consequences of allowing such unholy unions, but they didn't really happen, so... does that weigh against those people's predictions on how God feels on the matter? Is that evidence that this was mostly people misinterpreting Him, and He's not too worried about this, since otherwise we'd expect to see some type of mortal consequence?
I feel like in practice this must be how the church works... whether it's accepting the heliocentric model or admitting that it's ok for laymen to read the bible directly, religious beliefs do eventually bow to evidence and social norms. I'm just wondering if there's a principled model for how empirical evidence like that is weighed in those cases, or if it's just real politik without rationalization.
It seems that you're arguing against the Pat Robertsons of the world who say things like Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for homosexuality.
Does anyone on the Motte actually believe things like that? No, I don't think so.
A more common Motte argument is that gay marriage is part of a word view that has led to many negative changes including declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness including, especially, the trans epidemic.
Can we have societal acceptance of gays without all the other stuff? Maybe. I don't know. It's never been tried before. But we don't need any belief in the supernatural to see that gay marriage is deeply knit into other, mostly negative, societal changes.
Declining religious belief does not seem like a negative to me.
Increased alienation of the individual is compensated for by the fact that humans are now more free from having their lives dominated by the small communities in which they grew up.
I am not sure that mental illness actually has increased, especially if you classify at least some forms of religiosity as forms of mental illness. Stuff like the Children's Crusade and the Salem Witch Trials do not seem to me like signs of a mentally healthy culture. Pre-Enlightenment Europe had horrific things like the 30 Years War happening, it was not some bastion of mental health.
Declining fertility might actually be a real problem going forward, I do agree with that, but it seems to me that most current cultures that have high levels of fertility have their own very real problems.
They might be happier in some ways. However, these are people who believe, because a few texts say so and there is a community around it, that a man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead. That does not seem mentally healthy to me. To be clear, I do not think it is impossible that Christianity is true. I just think that to be convinced that it is true is a sign of mental disorder.
If you define their religiousness as, by definition, not a mental disorder, then it is of course much easier to describe them as healthy than it would otherwise be.
It would be if I made the argument in bad faith, but I did not. jeroboam mentions the argument that gay marriage is part of a worldview that has led to increased mental illness compared to earlier times. Hence I think it makes sense for me to talk directly about those earlier times and to try to compare them to today.
Yes, close-knit communities have very real downsides when you have little freedom to leave them. Reputation culture, gossip, capture by a dominant ideology/cult... Wider modern society has all those problems too but at least now it is easier than it was in the past to leave a subset of that large society which you dislike and move to one that you like more.
Regarding the graph, well, I am curious about how "Deaths of Despair" are defined. I am a bit suspicious of that big spike in the last 20 years.
But even if the data corresponds to reality, I think that maybe much of it can be explained by economic changes which have hurt the blue collar middle class. No matter how strong a community's social cohesiveness might be, unless it goes Amish level it is hard for it to endure an economy which makes its town close to useless as anything other than a place where people pull over to get gas while traveling elsewhere.
I think you misunderstand the Christian faith, as if people stumbled upon the complete Bible and decided to form a religion around it. I guess that's forgivable since sola scriptura is so dominant in America, but it's at best an incomplete understanding.
The religion precedes the book, as do the first-hand accounts of the martyred apostles, many of which spread their accounts with the foreknowledge that it would be the cause of their own gruesome deaths.
He might misunderstand Christianity, but he's right about modern society - we are trying to pathologise religiosity.
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No, I get that. That is why I wrote "a few texts" rather than "the Bible".
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Alcohol, drug, and suicide deaths. The only "researcher degree of freedom" I can see is that "alcohol deaths" might or might not be restricted to only alcoholism-based liver disease vs. e.g. DUIs.
It's real; these are pretty easy numbers to measure. And all three components are increasing, so it might make sense to hypothesize a single psychological root cause influencing them all ... but the one factor which is going way up, exponentially, is overdoses of synthetic opioids. There's "despair", but there's also "fentanyl is a hundred times more potent than morphine, carfentanyl is ten thousand times more". Those drugs are vastly eager to smuggle, easier to "cut" other drugs with, and easier to accidentally get a lethal dose of.
That wouldn't contradict the data. Despite some complications about changing selection effects, it still seems clear that the spike is all coming from people without college degrees.
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