09-01-2022, 01:14 AM
(08-31-2022, 01:41 PM)Anthony Wrote: Young-earth creationism is entirely a low-church Protestant fundamentalist (Southern Baptist, Pentecostal etc.) concept.
Catholics are not told that they must believe that the earth was created in 4004 BCE (or 3760 BCE, which is at least technically the Jewish belief).
Religious novelties are more often heresies than refinements that improve the religious experience. Although one can accept as a Christian that capitalism that creates wealth to a far greater extent than it concentrates wealth and power and that the profit motive is one way to create prosperity in which people can have more to share so that charity becomes less necessary, the subservience of all else to personal power, indulgence, and gain (initials deliberately chosen to resemble the new Ruling Class in George Orwell's Animal Farm) is a clear denial of Jesus' Ministry as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount.
The sole reasons for religious life are to improve oneself as a person or to connect to some eternal truth available in no other way. If the only way for one to give up booze, smokes, narcotics, and whoring is to become a Mormon, then one might as well become a Mormon. I could twist Rene Descartes' cogito ergo sum into an argument that because the Universe makes sense that there must be a God Who established the inescapable realities of mathematics, physics, and the logical dialectic as His Ultimate Law. God is thus a Great Lawgiver for such a reality as the rule of non-contradiction in core realities in mathematics, physics, and logic and a Guide to moral law.
The Catholic Church rejects young-earth creationism for creating more of a hindrance to Faith than an aid. One can derive no ethical values from believing in young-earth creationism, but a religious tenet itself a hindrance to more critical beliefs is more likely to lead one away from more essential tenets of faith. If I had a child who had to decide between attending Notre Dame University and Liberty Baptist University, I would push Notre Dame because one can be a devout Catholic and well educated and that one cannot be a fundamentalist Protestant without rejecting the rationalism necessary for a coherent view of the world.
I took one of the on-line tests for what religious heritage (including atheism as having much of the same characteristics of religion in establishing moral values and an overall view of reality) and the three closest to me were in some order Unitarian Universalism, liberal Quakerism, and Reform Judaism.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.