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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.)
Errrr - I think you're skipping that part in the Gospel where, when Joseph finds out Mary is pregnant, he is going to quietly divorce her (so she won't be publicly stoned for adultery) until he gets the visit from the angel to say "no, she didn't sleep around on you, this is a miracle":
I didn't say that the virgin birth would have been seen as obviously true, in a way that admits of no possible doubt.
I said that it's not obviously absurd - not in the way that it might seem to someone with a contemporary scientific worldview. Miraculous births are conceivable (pun unintended) in an ancient Near Eastern worldview. Joseph doesn't object to the angel that what he's telling him is impossible, after all. He is surprised but accepts that this is something that God could in principle do.
Why would you say that someone with a contemporary scientific worldview would find it harder to believe in the virgin birth than Joseph did? What have we learned since then that makes it harder to believe? Surely knowing the mechanics of fertilization and early human development doesn't change the fact that people in those days knew just as well as we do that you don't get pregnant without a father involved.
In both cases believing in a miraculous birth is believing in supernatural intervention, violating the natural order. It should be just as easy or difficult to believe in any age. What have we learned since then that would change that?
I think the idea is that people in those times, especially pagans, saw supernatural forces as much more involved than people today do. The sun is Helios himself driving across the horizon, plagues or earthquakes were sent by God, the coin you put in a grave will be used to pay Charon etc. Given that context, a virgin birth doesn't violate nearly as many assumptions about how the world (usually) works as it would even for a typical contemporary theistic account of reality.
All of this is conflating two different meanings of "miracle".
In ancient world, there was distinction between 1/"paradoxon" - any strange and inexplicable thing or event and 2/"semeion" - sign or portent, that does not have to be extraordinary by itself, sent by god(s) or fate.
The difference is that semeion means something and the meaning is clear.
For example:
Lightning falling from a cloudless sky - paradoxon. It could be bad omen or warning, or Zeus could be just bored.
Ligtning falling during thunderstorm and exactly hitting notorious sinner's house - semeion. The meaning is clear: Repent and do not sin anymore.
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Supernatural forces being more involved than today might make it easier to believe that a miracle had occurred: it wouldn't change the fact that you would understand it to be a miracle. It's not like Joseph thought to himself "Well, I guess sometimes women can have babies without having sex with anyone." He knew just the same as we do that that sort of thing doesn't happen, and that if it does happen it would be a miracle. A virgin birth violates as many assumptions about how the world works back then as it does today: in both cases the only explanation for such a thing occurring would be a miracle (that is to say, a violation of the natural order by an outside force).
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