Catholics Don't Eat Meat On Friday
5-7-06 Lies My Family & Church Taught Me
This I guess is why I became a Catholic---at least an intellectual one. I never regained the church habit after losing it in college. The original was a losing proposition----a crazy Hollander Calvinist Protestant outfit that gave me enough dogma & smugness & hatred to last a few lifetimes. But as a kid I heard in my home and about the church my family attended this very strange sounding notion: Catholics don't eat meat on Friday. Which meant: Catholics are weird & unBiblical & Unbelievers. Yes, one of those kind of Protestant denominations. One of those outfits that busies itself in judging other churches to be ineligible for Heaven because they have so many idolatries. Those words had terrific moment for me as a 7, 8, & 9 yr old lad and even beyond that to age 11 & 12. Nobody in my family or church whom I talked with went behind the custom. Nobody! These were essentially ignorant church-going peasants who had no interest in the WHY of The OTHER. I did cultivate an interest in The Other. But it took me a while. My real eye-opener came when I entered the public high school & immediately & naturally began to befriend Catholics & Methodists & Lutherans and even a few agnostics. Immediately I perceived these were human beings much like myself---without the trappings of a self-righteous & prosecutionary church such as the one I was forced to attend as a child & adolescent.
To this day the sentence "Catholics don't eat meat on Friday" is a potent statement to me because of the undertones it carries coming from a violently anti-Catholic base. It was never explained to me that Roman Catholics decided as have all major religions that it was their duty to make a sacrifice for the Source of their Redemption---as it would have been described in my own family & church. And so they considered it a minimal act to give up eating meat on the day Jesus was said to have been crucified. Catholics also give up meat during Lent. I have never heard of Protestant Christians of the orthodox breed to give up anything as part of the custom of their religious practice. They became part of the capitalist program of the USA that plays whore to the ruling State Pimp of Absolute Consumerism. These new right wing fanatics that call themselves Christians have essentially eviscerated the 4 gospels & The Sermon on The Mount & The Life of Jesus for their own measly capitalist purposes.
Thus one even hears of them spewing out calls for revenge against for example Muslims as their forbears called for the blood of Catholics (or Protestants if they were zealots from the other side). In today's LA Times one of these hate-mongers and fear-peddlers glorifies those good wars that he affirms save the good from the wicked. Such stupid & monstrous paranoia does not belong in the pages of any respectable newspaper ever. It suggests that the newspaper believes it is addressing its opinions to morons & imbeciles & idiots. There is a better way of operating a newspaper business than allowing such fools to vent their rage & stupidity. One simply allows the very best minds to express their views. Plato once argued with tremendous powers of persuasion that the only truly fit rulers for a successful Republic are the philosopher kings. These would be the persons who had been trained their entire lives to rule fitly. And why shouldn't we have the best trained and most wisely educated men & women ruling us at all times? I await your answers to these brief disquisitions & sometimes confessions of mine
RLG Copyright 2006
This I guess is why I became a Catholic---at least an intellectual one. I never regained the church habit after losing it in college. The original was a losing proposition----a crazy Hollander Calvinist Protestant outfit that gave me enough dogma & smugness & hatred to last a few lifetimes. But as a kid I heard in my home and about the church my family attended this very strange sounding notion: Catholics don't eat meat on Friday. Which meant: Catholics are weird & unBiblical & Unbelievers. Yes, one of those kind of Protestant denominations. One of those outfits that busies itself in judging other churches to be ineligible for Heaven because they have so many idolatries. Those words had terrific moment for me as a 7, 8, & 9 yr old lad and even beyond that to age 11 & 12. Nobody in my family or church whom I talked with went behind the custom. Nobody! These were essentially ignorant church-going peasants who had no interest in the WHY of The OTHER. I did cultivate an interest in The Other. But it took me a while. My real eye-opener came when I entered the public high school & immediately & naturally began to befriend Catholics & Methodists & Lutherans and even a few agnostics. Immediately I perceived these were human beings much like myself---without the trappings of a self-righteous & prosecutionary church such as the one I was forced to attend as a child & adolescent.
To this day the sentence "Catholics don't eat meat on Friday" is a potent statement to me because of the undertones it carries coming from a violently anti-Catholic base. It was never explained to me that Roman Catholics decided as have all major religions that it was their duty to make a sacrifice for the Source of their Redemption---as it would have been described in my own family & church. And so they considered it a minimal act to give up eating meat on the day Jesus was said to have been crucified. Catholics also give up meat during Lent. I have never heard of Protestant Christians of the orthodox breed to give up anything as part of the custom of their religious practice. They became part of the capitalist program of the USA that plays whore to the ruling State Pimp of Absolute Consumerism. These new right wing fanatics that call themselves Christians have essentially eviscerated the 4 gospels & The Sermon on The Mount & The Life of Jesus for their own measly capitalist purposes.
Thus one even hears of them spewing out calls for revenge against for example Muslims as their forbears called for the blood of Catholics (or Protestants if they were zealots from the other side). In today's LA Times one of these hate-mongers and fear-peddlers glorifies those good wars that he affirms save the good from the wicked. Such stupid & monstrous paranoia does not belong in the pages of any respectable newspaper ever. It suggests that the newspaper believes it is addressing its opinions to morons & imbeciles & idiots. There is a better way of operating a newspaper business than allowing such fools to vent their rage & stupidity. One simply allows the very best minds to express their views. Plato once argued with tremendous powers of persuasion that the only truly fit rulers for a successful Republic are the philosopher kings. These would be the persons who had been trained their entire lives to rule fitly. And why shouldn't we have the best trained and most wisely educated men & women ruling us at all times? I await your answers to these brief disquisitions & sometimes confessions of mine
RLG Copyright 2006
posted by rlg at 3:45 PM
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