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Notes -
Pope Francis has announced that priests are now allowed to bless same sex couples as long as it is not done in a way that implies that it's a ceremony or equivalent to a marriage. I haven't read the full document and the Vatican press release is confusing (like a lot of what this Pope does) but it seems to be trying to thread the needle of blessing gay couples but not their "union".
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-12/fiducia-supplicans-doctrine-faith-blessing-irregular-couples.html
Of course that distinction is subtle and the mainstream media mostly appears to be either misunderstanding it or intentionally misrepresenting it as allowing the blessing of the union itself. ABC went with the headline:
While he inserted a lot of caveats so that people will not interpret this as accepting gay couples and that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, my prediction is that lay people will just walk away with the headline that the Church has got with the times and is finally ok with gay marriage. A lot of the more liberal clergy will probably spread that view as well, even if they use language that could kind of technically be considered orthodox if you squint.
It reminds me of what CS Lewis wrote about how in each age we warn people the most about the errors they are least likely to commit. So in a time when most Catholics are already essentially apostates the Pope is doing his best to guard against zealotry and intolerance. It's hard for me to believe that this will lead to anything good for the Church. The future is clearly in the more conservative faction with large, churchgoing families. A move like this will discourage them but do nothing to bring in more liberals who will applaud from a distance but aren't going to start attending Mass.
At this point arguing Catholic theology feels like arguing Star Wars lore. It's fake. It doesn't have to make sense. It doesn't make sense. It was always fake, but now it's super doubleplus ultra fake. If you try to apply logic to it you will end up running in circles.
Yes, elements like the trinity in particular are some of the biggest historical examples of "point deer, make horse" style shit tests for making dissidents reveal themselves and getting others to show a token of submission to an authority over their own sense of reason.
Even from an atheist perspective, I feel like the Trinity is a weak example of that? The Trinity is a theological doctrine that doesn't directly contradict any experience of how the world works, and if it sounds strange or unintuitive, frankly it seems even more unintuitive that an infinite, all-powerful deity would have an innermost being exactly like or easily comprehensible to humans.
If I wanted to point to something empirically absurd, I would have thought the obvious candidates are things like transubstantiation or even the virgin birth - something that appears to plainly go against how we think the world works.
(Of course, it is perhaps relevant to say here that transubstantiation or the virgin birth didn't go against how ancient people thought the world worked, so they can't have been demanding believe in an absurdity as proof of loyalty. If they seem absurd now, that is surely more due to a changing weltanschaung around them. I doubt that the church at any point actually demanded belief in something that seems absurd as a loyalty test to weed out dissidents; that sounds to me like a post hoc rationalist attempt to make sense of something that probably just made sense to people at the time on its own terms.)
Maybe you don't really understand the doctine of the trinity? It's something that you can't logically explain or understand but you have to believe. I'm not even sure what it could mean to believe something you don't understand.
Any attempts at making it make logical sense have been declared heretical, for example:
I agree with you, it seems like even accepting the basic principles of Abrahamic religion regarding the power of God, Jesus’ existence as a human defies all explanation and any attempt to describe it in terms that make sense to humans are heretical. The point is that it doesn’t make sense, it’s not even like any of the above would make God less omniscient or omnipotent or the rest of it all, it’s almost like a game where you’re banned from rephrasing the question itself. It’s effectively prohibited to TRY to make sense of it.
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