How DARE he tell his Pro Life congregation to be Pro LIFE!
It’s not contrary to the church’s teachings.
Evidence in support of my position: Centuries of the Pope being totally fine with mass executions and murder. Also, Holy Bible. Yes, it does say “do not kill”, it also says “kill”.
For example, it says to honor your mother and father, and it says that parents should murder their disobedient children by stoning.
Then, it says “don’t kill.”
So, it’s more like ‘don’t kill*’. But they had not invented asterisks yet.
It’s almost as if different people wrote different parts of the Bible, and it’s a contradictory mess.
Anyway, if you can’t follow orders, don’t join the military. Following orders is, like, the most important part.
Yep. Turns out “the” bible is a Rorschach blot and you pretty much get the morals and ethics you had in you before you came to it.
Explains why you have things like Quakers and extremist right wing bloodthirsty crazies using it as their source. Explains why Jefferson did his own edit and basically excised it down to the red letter stuff.
They should turn their weapons on the brass.
Make Fragging Great Again
How many divisions does the pope have?
And they are intimidating…
Getting my ass beat would be too embarrassing to risk.
Here’s a better message for Catholics in the army:
You swore an oath to defend the US and its constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. A domestic enemy is actively soiling the office of the president, and rather than defend us against him, you continue to follow his orders. Stop doing what’s easy, and start doing what’s right.
You speak as if half Americans did not actually vote for Trump. They would need to fight much more than just Trump himself. Trump perfectly represents what America has always been.
You speak as if half Americans did not actually vote for Trump
Closer to a third.
Another full third couldn’t be bothered to get off their asses and vote at all.
Those people would be mad if they could read… but one of the reasons they join is because reading wasn’t so great
That’s not a failure of their own. I got straight As and graduated college and have been working with people with only highschool education. I can tell you that it’s the system. Older people can definitely learn new things if they’re attention couples with a similar push from the educator’s side.
I mean, with everybody else dropping the ball so hard it’s not like the military or a particular subgroup thereof is different here from the background noise of compliance. If anything the military is the last organization you should expect to get involved in a domestic political conflict. And besides, you don’t get into the US military by having a strong moral compass.
exactly. you mostly end up in the military by being poor, and fuck those guys amirite?
I think lemmy would be shocked at how much of the US armed forces rank and file are Trump supporters. It’s the majority.
“I did it for a college degree” isn’t a good reason to bomb people on the other side of the world, so my point still stands.
You’re not wrong, but I don’t think that’s really hitting the reality of what’s going through those people’s heads. Like, no 18 year old is sitting down and crunching a pros and cons list of a ticket to school vs committing war crimes to help distract the world from the fact that their president raped children on some sketchy-ass island.
There are a lot of reasons someone might decide to join the military… and some of them are legit just psychopaths who get off at the thought of killing someone, but those aren’t the ones my previous message is directed at. Those are a lost cause, fuck em.
But propaganda is a hell of a drug, and you gotta consider the environment these kids grew up in: in the time took between their mom squeezing them out, and walking out of that hospital front entrance, lil baby John Doe has probably already been hauled passed at least a couple of posters with some soulless “thank you for your service” shit. From literal day one, we’re inundated with propaganda touting people in the military as ‘heroes’ selflessly devoting their lives to serving their community.
As John Doe grows up, he’s made aware of some of the more horrific shit the military involves, but even that is tied into the whole altruism schtick: yeah you’ll need to kill people - but they’re the bad guys! Yeah you might get injured or killed - but who else is going to defend your family??
So John Doe is nearing adulthood - he’s developed a sincere sense of patriotism and has been conditioned to believe that the best way to act on it is by joining the military. So he does.
Fast forward a couple years, John has been paying more attention to things like global politics; that brain of his is about finished developing, and he’s noticing some increasingly grating incompatibilities with his world view vs what he’s actually seeing with his own eyes.
He sees the news from back home, and it’s the same shit the rest of us are seeing: people are being disappeared by unnamed police agents, families literally torn from eachothers’ arms, people just straight up shot in broad daylight. Human rights are walked back on a daily basis, corruption and malice in office are so rampant that it’s become difficult to even distinguish real news from cartoonishly overt parody.
So now we’re back to my original comment here - I’m addressing the Johns. The ones who joined for all the right reasons, only to realize after the fact that they are in fact the baddies. But that’s the thing, John, you swore an oath to defend us from all threats, foreign and domestic: why do you think it specifies ‘and domestic’? The amount of damage someone can do to our country from a position of high office would be (and has been) catastrophically worse than any threat even the most hardcore stereotype of a jihadist with an AK could possibly pose to our country. Your chain of command, all the way up to the president himself, has violated their oath - but you don’t have to. This isn’t why you joined, but you’re uniquely suited to actually do something about it, so stop following that domestic enemy’s orders, and actually do something about it.
Anyway, sorry for the long tangent, but the point is there are potential allies within the military. Even if that’s a minority of the military, the number is higher than zero, and it only needs to be one. Belittling John for making a shit decision (and it is a shit decision) to enlist isn’t going to accomplish anything; acknowledging the sense of conflict growing in John and encouraging him to make it right despite the atrocities of his chain of command… well, it doesn’t hurt to try. Hasn’t worked yet, and at this point I don’t exactly have high hopes, but the military’s a big group, and we just need a single one of them to finally take their oath seriously.
I was homeless when I joined.
So was half my division.
You don’t seem like a “I want to win” kind of person. Popular revolutions survive on the backs of people who are good at killing. Are you good at killing?
Hilarious that the church thinks it can step in and dictate which killings their god endorses
I mean thats kind of how that church works.
With a commandment stating “though shalt not kill” you’d think partitioning good kills from bad kills would be a non-starter
There’s nothing in the Bible about molesting choir boys.
The problem is that the Commandments in the Bible are so absolute that they can be reductio ad absurdum’d really easily, forcing Christian theologists to come up with the caveats (which is to say make shit up).
I mean… its still the Catholic church we’re dealing with here…
With a commandment stating “though shalt not kill” you’d think partitioning good kills from bad kills would be a non-starter
Brother, have you picked up and read a Bible? Like even just Exodus?
Edit: I forgot that the fall of Jericho is the Book of Joshua, not Exodus, although timeline-wise, in the grand scheme of things, it’s still basically right after the Commandments, which was what I was getting at.
Joshua and the Promised Land fucking up my perception of how the Bible flows narratively.
have you picked up and read a Bible?
The things full of contradictions. It’s a horrible book to claim to base your morality on.
I was raised baptist. There’s a difference between events of the bible and what christians are commanded to do. Frankly I don’t give a rat’s ass anymore.
Well yes, religion exists within society and that society’s pressures determine which interpretations and philosophies are amplified and which are silenced.
If they’re still in the military, that’s their choice. Most of these fucks want to fight for cheetohead. Otherwise, they would have looked to change their career in the last 10 years.
That’s been doctrine since 2018.
American Catholics should also be prohibited by doctrine from voting for political candidates who support the death penalty. The death penalty is carried out on behalf of the government. You know, “of the people.”
Voting for a death penalty candidate is a form of participating in the executions that come from that vote. If the executioner refuses to do their job, the government will find someone else.
Compare that with abortion, it’s only allowing others to get abortions. If an expectant woman refuses to get an abortion, that’s the end of that. It’s just her choice.
I will also point out that anti-abortion protestors often carry signs that say things like “what if Jesus had been aborted?” He wasn’t, obviously, so that’s just a weird hypothetical.
But he was arrested, put on trial by the government, sentenced to death, and lawfully executed via crucifixion by the Roman government. His death was completely above board from a legal and political perspective. So you’d think Christians in general would be more firmly against the notion of lawfully executing criminals.
no, see, the bible prescribes stonings, not firing squads.
Who threw that?
What the Bible and what the Church teach are two different things, and rightly so. Only in evangelicalism is the Bible the inerrant word of God.
