TrueRedMan

Lesbians refusing service based on someone’s beliefs. This is the level of stupid we are at. But if they were refused a cake they would run to a lawyer in seconds.

Roman Catholics claim an infallible church, but in practice what they defend is a selective and shifting infallibility. The problem is not hard to see. There are councils the Roman Church now rejects or downplays, such as the iconoclast council of Hieria in 754, which opposed the use of images, and then later councils that reversed course. Both cannot be protected from error. At some point, the church was wrong, and Rome decides after the fact which moments count and which do not. That is not a consistent doctrine of infallibility. That is a retrospective sorting of history. The same tension appears in the Western Schism from 1378 to 1417, when there were two and then three rival popes, each with supporters, each claiming legitimacy, and each excommunicating the others. The church did not speak with one clear, indefectible voice. It fractured, and it took decades and a council to sort out the mess. During that time, who exactly was the infallible head of the church. The system offers no clean answer. It simply moves past the problem once a winner is declared. There are also moments when popes themselves resisted ideas later defined as dogma. In the fourteenth century, during disputes over poverty, the Franciscans pushed arguments that would bind a pope to prior papal statements. Pope John XXII rejected those claims and opposed the line of reasoning that would later be used to support papal infallibility. Take another example. Pope Honorius I was condemned by the Third Council of Constantinople for supporting the Monothelite heresy. A pope was formally rebuked as a heretic by a council later recognized as authoritative. Or consider the Council of Constance in the fifteenth century, which asserted that a general council held authority over the pope. Rome later rejected that principle. So was the church speaking infallibly when it elevated the council over the pope, or when it later denied it. Both positions have been held. Both cannot be infallible. Then there is the case of Pope Sixtus V and his official edition of the Latin Vulgate in 1590. He proudly proclaimed to have produced an infallible translation. Yet within his own lifetime, it was found to contain numerous errors. Within a short time, it was withdrawn and replaced under Pope Clement VIII with a corrected version. Oops. And this raises a deeper problem. Can the church produce an infallible list of all the infallible things it has ever said. It cannot. What Rome actually has is a selective catalog, identified after the fact, under highly technical conditions that seem to change with the wind. That is not how an inherent property works of infallibility works. Even beyond that, popes have contradicted one another in teaching and policy. Councils have been called, corrected, and sometimes effectively reversed. Rome maintains the appearance of consistency by narrowing the definition of infallibility to rare, highly technical conditions, then declaring that only those moments count. Everything else is allowed to be mistaken, revised, or abandoned. That approach protects the claim while conceding the reality that the church, in its actual history, has erred. Once that is admitted, then we aren't dealing with infallibility any more. An authority that can be wrong in many of its official acts, reversed by later decisions, and divided against itself in times of crisis does not carry the marks of something that is incapable of error by nature. The historical record shows a church that can speak truly at times and err at others. That is exactly what one would expect from a fallible institution, not an infallible one. Holy Scripture is infallible because it is the word of God. It is the only infallible authority on earth.

Baptism is not required for salvation.

They vote against deporting migrants who harm humans. What did you expect?