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I linked a 10m video from a well-known channel in my Reddit comment for accessibility reasons, not as a display of academic rigor. I could cite any number of more authoritative sources, but it feels as pointless as providing a citation for the capital city of a country. The facts in question are what they are and easily verifiable.
This wouldn't be a good use because right now Catholics, with regards to sex and gender, consistently refuse to engage with our modern scientific understanding. Note: not talking about moral teaching, but about just the basics of the facts and theory.
*edit: Based on this comment's engagement, I've got some bad news for the comment above me.
It's "explaining" Church teaching by appealing to Church teaching. There's no explanation, only assertion. That's why you haven't provided the premises or method by which one could independently come to their own conclusions on natural law in line with others independently undergoing the same process. You need Church teachings, appeals to authority, to come to conclusions with any consistency because the philosophy of natural law does not actually explain, only justify through assertion.
And to be clear, my view is that its function, its practical effect when cited or applied, is to hide the underlying appeal to God, faith, and the Church. I'm commenting based on observation of its utility and effect in conversation, not claiming it's knowing dishonesty.
And now we're back at my initial claim that "natural law" is just an appeal to faith, God, and/or Church authority and the issue I raised of its only real function being to disguise this underlying appeal. At which point I have to ask why anyone here takes issue with my description of it and its use/function in conversation.
None of that explains how one could reconstruct natural law independently. You're just saying that one could. It existing as a concept or moral philosophy prior to Christianity does nothing to demonstrate how I could reconstruct it from a set of premises through some independent method.
"[The] basic understanding that there is a higher power beyond us, and that each action we take has moral consequences" does not suffice either. It does not tell me who or what that higher power is, how I can interact, measure, or observe it, nor does it tell me what a moral consequence is. You're just appealing to intuition while providing no means of checking it.
Yet with secular systems, I can lay out the premises of:
- We live in a shared reality.
- Logic works.
and then point to the scientific method as a means of understanding the world and (theoretically) reconstructing all of modern scientific knowledge. But, if I ask for how to reconstruct natural law and the natural order of the world, I get pointed to God and his prophets.
So, if it's not just a means of pretending you're not appealing to God/faith/authority, follow through on what I laid out above:
- What premises are at the foundation of natural law?
- Through what method could I independently reconstruct natural law from those premises?
So why cite that instead of God, faith, and/or doctrine directly? It's confusing because it gives the impression that some source or methodology is being cited other than Catholicism, but it's not. So, citing "natural law" serves no practical function other than to disguise the fact that it's an appeal to faith/authority.
So why did the other comment say “ inline with natural law, you know, that thing the Church has consistently promoted for millennia” and not “ inline with the Church, you know, that thing the Church has consistently promoted for millennia”?
"Natural law" is just a way of pretending they're not just citing faith/doctrine. Some better apologists can play with flowery language to disguise it, but a shortcut to cutting through the distractions is to ask:
- What premises are at the foundation of natural law?
- Through what method could I independently reconstruct natural law from those premises?
Heavy emphasis on "independently" because you'll find that natural law depends on appeals to authority and prophets to determine what is or is not "natural" or "ordered". Even if you go back to ancient Greece.
We have an instinctive sense of fairness and empathy which we also observe across the animal kingdom. The foundations of morality we have are not unique to humanity. The uniqueness is from the complexity our intelligence and language gives us, allowing us to call things we like "good" and things we don't like "bad" and agree on common rules too help us pursue goals as a society. And the way the economics of resource consumption and generation works makes cooperation mathematically better for everyone, providing a plausible source of selection pressure for evolution to make this common in animals.
None of this describes objective or absolute morality, just a natural means for life to come up with and agree on moral rules.
Banning it seems correlated with a lot of bad social outcomes. I can't think of a country that has banned porn and actually found any positives associated with it. South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and still dropping, and has it banned.
Also, defining porn legally is impossible, and would practically just mean an obscenity council will determine what does or does not count. I like the harm standard for banning things like CSAM and other material created/distributed without the participants' consent.
It also just seems like a silly culture war talking point peddled to pull efforts away from progressive legislation like paid maternity/paternity leave and mandatory vacation minimums that make being a parent and social easier and more desirable. I'd rather my tax dollars be spent on things like sensible city planning and the creation of "third places" with regular taxpayer-funded events with free food. It seems better to help bring people together than to just ban unhealthy coping mechanisms.
My only problem is the people who say if you believe in the theological belief that homosexuality is a sin in Christianity at all, you hate gay people.
To be fair, you're literally saying that doing something that cannot be demonstrated to do any harm outside of contradicting scripture makes one deserving of eternal damnation, in need of forgiveness. And the people who try to say it's merely a religious belief keep providing social and political power to people who equate all visibly queer people with child molesters and groomers.
I remember watching a TheraminTrees video a while back that included an idea that stuck with me: We know it's bad to allow and follow ideologies that dehumanize others, lowering them to the status of animals. What does that then imply about ideologies that justify viewing others as kindling?
Something important that many Christian stories miss is accurately reflecting the people you're writing about. Nothing worse than "God's Not Dead" style atheist caricatures that undermine your own message. Unless you only want to preach to the choir, but you don't give that impression.
Does dignity and compassion include forcing them into the closet or else be labeled a child groomer?
It's threads like these that make me wonder if y'all even like humanity.
Also, morality being subjective isn't solved by appealing to God. You're just defining "objective" in relation to the context of God's personal, subjective will/nature. Even granting God, I've met plenty of atheists who would argue against following His morality.
The secular alternative of appealing to human well-being/flourishing is just choosing a different context subjectively within which one can be as objective as in any other. Like how the rules of chess are subjective, but objective ruling can be made within the context of those rules and the desire to win.
My parents and family weren't the most Catholic, but they definitely believed.
The thing that kinda helped clarify the disconnect for me was my mom telling me she had never read the Bible. She suggested we read it together, but I gently pushed it off for "eventually" because it reaffirmed my experience that the only people outside of professionals who have read the Bible are atheists who left shortly afterwards.
I've slowly come to understand that the words and feelings my family appealed to in Catholicism are exclusive to Catholicism, their meanings divorced from their secular usage. They've effectively compartmentalized their faith and the comfort it brings from the rest of their life and never think about the contradictions and implications.
The main disappointment I feel now is knowing that I can't talk about Catholicism in depth with my Mom without either directly threatening her faith and the comfort it brings her or threatening her relationship with me. I know she'd choose me, and would choose God (as she understands Him) over the bigotry of the Church, but it's not something I'm rushing to confront and resolve.
Not exactly a direct response, but hopefully my story is related enough.
Born and raised, I never had a reason to think negatively of non-Catholics. This has been broadly the norm with my family both in the States and in Europe.
Regarding converts, I swear 9 times out of 10 Catholic converts are barely restraining themselves from blaming the Jews for social degeneracy and converted because authoritarians love having a higher authority to appeal to if they cannot be that authority themselves. The others think the fault is in secularism, though they'll listen to the likes of Charlie Kirk blame "secular people with Jewish last names" and think they're different from the ones who say it with their chest.
Mostly venting after another wave of realizing I'm not welcome in Catholicism, the religion or its social spaces.
That’s just a misrepresentation of modern cosmology on both your part and the part of whoever you’re talking to. It’s assertion without the math or physics to back it up. And even hypothetically granting that, it’s a LONG way away from that cause being the Catholic God specifically.
Is it more logical to claim knowledge or to say "I don't know?" And the only point chance comes in is before the Big Bang, after that everything is deterministic, following understandable rules, even if it is so complex as to appear chaotic to our limited perspective.
Also, to clarify, the secular perspective isn't "something from nothing" because "nothing" appears to be an incoherent concept. "Nothing" cannot have properties without thus becoming something, and it is not certain that before the Big Bang there was nothing. If you look up what cosmologists say, they have hypotheses they are trying to test, but no definitive claim of what was before time if such a concept even makes sense.
You can test and verify whether a product will be in a store. This "faith" is effectively belief with sufficient evidence and can be proven true or false. Religious, spiritual faith is clearly a different thing, a different word to describe a different kind of belief with a different level of confidence.
I don't like this expansion of "faith" to include every belief of every confidence level and every sort and degree of justification and verifiability. If someone is asking this kind of question, your response will not be seen as an answer, but a dodge. You're toying with semantics to avoid the heart of the question.
*edit: Really? Downvoted and blocked for what? Accurately pointing out that basic apologetics doesn't address the concerns being raised? Do you guys even care about answering people's concerns or do you just want them to shut up and go away?
The idea is logic from the premise of faith. That you should presuppose faith like you presuppose the rules of logic and that you are not a brain in a vat. That God is the only rational answer because the alternative is uncertainty, saying "I don't know." If you are not granted the gift of faith, if you sincerely ask and do not receive, then there is no logic in accepting something you did not receive and do not have.
At least, this is what I have found after years of asking and searching from a similar position as yours.
You sound kinda obsessed with trans genitalia. Like, in a repressed way.
Think back on this exchange next time the Pope says something about how American conservatives are backwards.
Do you think asking a question on an unrelated topic is actual engagement?
Like I said, I could cite plenty of other sources because I'm just referring to the basics of what sex and gender are. You distracting from this and changing the subject to attack the infallibility of the first source I thought of to cite a mundane claim just reinforces my point and undermines yours that Catholics aren't anti-science (especially when neither the scientific community nor its advocates and institutions do not claim infallibility; that's the whole point).
If you could clear up any misconception about the Catholic Church forever, what would it be?
Catholicism