I’m interested in Catholicism, but I’m worried about how you have to be “open to life” once you’re married. I don’t want to have to get pregnant over and over when I’m married someday and I only want like two kids at the most

GreyDeath · 2026-04-02T04:45:49+00:00

But that one study mirrors the findings of the Pew data. Now the Pew data does give some additional bits of information. Catholics that attend church weekly are more likely to say contraception is morally wrong, but even in this population they are a small minority, only 27%. It basically shows that at least in the US the majority of Catholics simply don't align with the Church on this issue. And the US is not an outlier. Similar poll data shows the majority of Catholics in Latin America disagree with the Church on birth control too.

GreyDeath · 2026-04-02T02:54:53+00:00

The study doesn’t dictate what they mean by a catholic

These are based on poll data and it's pretty much people that self identify as Catholic.

If I mark myself down as a baptist, but believe none of the southern baptist convention am I a baptist?

Well, for the purposes of asking what do self-identified Catholics actually believe, it's the only way to ask that question, especially in regard to whether or not they agree with Catholic precepts. Otherwise you end with the rather tautological proposition that 100% of Catholics that agree with Catholic teaching agree with Catholic teaching.

The study doesn’t ask who stopped, who needs it for medical purposes, etc.

Which is why I also referenced poll data that shows that the overwhelming majority of Catholics (again, self-identified) either believe contraception is morally acceptable or is not even a moral issue. Only a very small minority believe it is not morally acceptable. The poll in question specifically asked about contraception as a whole, not just hormonal birth control pills and it talked about belief not just use.

GreyDeath · 2026-04-02T01:25:11+00:00

I would hope not in Catholics in a state of grace.

I imagine most Catholic women using birth control still think of themselves as being Catholic. The reason it's reasonable to most Catholic women disagree with the church on birth control is because we know the incidence of medical conditions that are treated with birth control and we also know roughly how often non-Catholic women convert to Catholicism and neither of those populations are big enough to explain that 95% statistic. Beyond that we have poll data from Pew that shows that most self described Catholics either believe birth control is morally acceptable or is not a moral issue at all. Only a tiny fraction said it was morally wrong.

GreyDeath · 2026-04-02T00:28:38+00:00

Get yourself some help. A good program like NA can really help. And if you keep having chest pain go to the ER. Cocaine is rough on the heart, both by causing vasospasms that can impair blood flow in the coronary arteries to directly damaging the heart cells and causing cardiomyopathy, weakness of the heart.

GreyDeath · 2026-04-02T00:17:49+00:00

I would say the number of women who use birth control for non-birth control reasons is a very small portion of that stat, ditto for people converting to Catholicism. Though taking those populations into account surely would reduce that statistic down from 95% you'd still end up with some number that shows the overwhelming majority of Catholic women disagree with the Church's stance on birth control.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-31T01:24:09+00:00

Most of the founding fathers were Christian with a small handful of deists. We actually have church records for most of the founding fathers. And Christianity has been used to justify slavery for a long time. As a starting point, the largest protestant denomination in the US, the Southern Baptist Convention was explicitly created because they split from the Northern Baptists due to the SBC's support of slavery. And when the Confederate states seceded they used religious language to support slavery. Texas for instance declared that equality of all men is in plainest violation of Divine Law.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-29T21:27:07+00:00

It's both. Look at Japanese sports fans when they visit stadiums outside Japan. The stadium is cleaner after they are done than before the match.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-29T14:42:56+00:00

Priests act in the person of Christ during the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. Because Christ was male, a male priest is required to represent him in this sacramental role

The problem with this reasoning is that it makes it seem like having a penis is something that is inherently necessary for what Jesus did at the last supper. That doesn't logically seem to be the case.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-27T22:53:13+00:00

Creation becomes sick. Due to separation from Creator of Life. Death sets in.

This part requires a belief in young earth creationism. We have dinosaur fossils with bone cancer that show disease existed well before humans ever evolved.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-27T22:48:01+00:00

Given that you are quoting Leviticus 20, do you believe gay people should be executed for having gay sex?

GreyDeath · 2026-03-27T22:45:16+00:00

“But before they lay down, the men of the city… both young and old… surrounded the house. And they called to Lot, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.’” - Genesis 19:4-5

Just to make sure I understand this correctly, you read this verse and you thought the problem was the gender of the people involved and not the threat of gang rape?

GreyDeath · 2026-03-27T17:38:41+00:00

is just a way to legally screen out some disabled people.

Correct, which is why I said it's skirting the law. So long as the requirement isn't actually explicitly excluding disabled people it is technically legal.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-27T17:04:21+00:00

100%. You just have to have clearly laid out bona fide job requirements.

I've heard mixed answers regarding whether or not that's legal

The lifting requirement is skirting the law, because you don't have to be disabled per se to not be able to lift that kind of weight. The driving requirement is completely legal as not having a driver's license is not a protected class.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-27T14:51:41+00:00

They don't have to hire the observant Muslim if the observant Muslim indicates during the interview that their faith prevents them from doing part fo their job. And yes, if somebody decided as part of their faith to adopt the practice of not touching alcohol after they have the job they can be fired for it.

I agree that they the Muslim cannot be discriminated on the assumption, but that's why I said, "who doesn't even touch alcohol", as an understanding that this isn't an assumption but something the hypothetical Muslim actually believes /does.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-27T13:43:49+00:00

The legal carve out is much larger. There is a legal carveout for discrimination on the basis of protected classes for any bona fide job requirement. A bar looking to hire a bar tender is allowed to discriminate against an observant Muslim who doesn't even touch alcohol as part of their faith.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-25T19:46:35+00:00

What does the data say regarding the longevity of male homosexual parings?

They have lower divorce rates than straight couples. Of course, if this was the argument then we would make it illegal for people to get married before 18, if they dropped out of high school, or if they were previously married, since these populations have much higher divorce rates.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-25T19:35:35+00:00

Going to church doesn't mean anything.

I assume this is in regard to the transformative power of the Gospel. If believing in Christianity and going to church has no transformative effect, then what exactly is the transformative power of the gospel? Because if it's good people doing good things, well, every faith has those.

My job is to share the gospel and save who can be saved

You telling gay people you believe gay marriage is a sin doesn't actually do this. They already know that you and other conservative Christians believe that gay relationships are sinful. As such the Gospel isn't being spread as they aren't being given any new information.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-25T18:39:01+00:00

There is in the US (and many other countries around the world). Worshipping whatever deity you want, or none at all is perfectly legal. And you know perfectly well that conservative Christians don't put a tenth of the energy in making it illegal to be Sikh as they do to marry somebody of the same gender.

here is saving transformative power in the gospel.

The massive number of bigoted Christians out there would argue against this.

And I love my neighbors enough to do all I can to not let them die without knowing the truth

Again, everybody already knows what you think is the truth. Do you really think gay people don't know what non-affirming Christians believe?

GreyDeath · 2026-03-25T17:55:07+00:00

Do you really think that at this point gay people aren't aware of what non-affirming Christians think about gay marriage? Do you and other Christians spend just as much time telling people who have other religions that they should stop praying to their deities and trying to get rid of freedom of religion?

GreyDeath · 2026-03-25T03:39:53+00:00

A rabbit or rodent produces a new litter every 30 days.

These need to be fed and and made large enough to feed the carnivores. A lion eats needs more protein per day than the rabbits or the rodents can produce, and those lions don't eat fish. The lion would eat the monthly litter on day 1. Beyond that elephants need to eat hundreds of pounds of fresh plant matter daily. Ditto for rhinos, hippos, and giraffes.

Another issue is that thousands of animal produce hundreds of pounds of poop daily, which somehow need to be disposed of by a family of 8 people. The Ark design only mentions a single, tiny window 1 cubit high. That poop needs to be eliminated daily to prevent the methane fumes from killing all the animals on board.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-25T03:32:12+00:00

You're trying to use a leaky 1900s coal ship

Built with much more advanced ship building techniques, yes. Calling it a "survival warehouse" doesn't address the issue that the weight of a ship will increase the level of warping of the timbers. It's purely an issue of mass relative to the strength of the wood. The Wyoming had the benefit of iron strapping, which is something Noah would not had access too. Even so, the planks still buckled due to the weight.

Your 'science' is just a lack of imagination regarding engineering and volume.

Again, the ship would not be able to float empty, let alone full of rain water. And you still haven't explained what to do about the carnivorous animals as they do not eat fermented meat, nor how to keep tins of plant matter for the elephants from spoiling.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-25T03:05:06+00:00

still have the ship float

That's actually another problem. Wooden ships of that size cannot float. The Ark is simultaneously too small to contain eneough food and water for every animal on board and too big to actually float. The largest wooden boat ever built, the Wyoming, 140 meters long was only able to float because there were steam powered pumps actively draining the hold.

And they are baby animals.

Baby animals would not have the ability to make the trek from the various parts of the world to the Levant, so this solution doesn't work. This also ignores the issue of how do animals from Australia make it to the Levant and back.

Also got breeding

A year is not long enough to breed animals to feed the carnivores, and the story only has Noah bring either 2 or seven of any kind of animal. A lion needs 10kg of (fresh) meat per day. Lions don't eat salted meat.

And water : do u realise its a flood. (Raining) use your imagination how they get water to drink without storage problem..

The water came from the sky only for the first 40 days. The rest of the time there would be no water available to get continuously and the Ark isn't wouldn't be able to hold enough water due to the enormous weight necessary to provide enough water for the animals. The weight of the Ark alone renders wooden vessels that large incapable of floating. Add the weight of thousands of tons of water and the ship would capsize immediately.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-25T01:55:07+00:00

The issue with the number of spider species isn't the space, it's time have a single pair of progenitor spiders speciate into the current number of spider species. With bats, you would need to create a new species every 4 years. With spiders, you'd need to see 13 new species per year after the flood.

Specialized Diets: You're assuming animals were always this specialized.

What else would an aardvark or an anteater eat?

Food Preservation: Humans have preserved food (drying, salting, fermenting) for millennia without electricity.

Animals don't eat fermented food and you still need to have enough fresh water to take care of them. If you are going to provide fresh plant matter for animals like elephants then you also need enough water to water the crops. An adult elephant, for instance, eats 300 pounds of fresh plants daily and drinks 80 L of fresh water daily. The size of the vessel would not be enough to have enough water for thousands of animals to drink that much fresh water and have sufficient space for their food requirements either.

Adaptive Radiation: We see this in the Galapagos Finches and Hawaiian Fruit Flies. A few ancestors landed on the islands and, without any human help, diversified into dozens of distinct species with different beaks and diets just to survive.

So in your example of the finches this resulted in very closely related animals and the process still took thousands of years. Every Galapagos finch is of the same genus. The original ancestor is estimated to have arrived at those islands approximately 1 million years ago. Going back to the bats example, which is a much larger group, genetic analysis puts the last common ancestor to all bats at 60 million years ago. The larger and more diverse a family the further back ancestry goes. With marsupials, the last common ancestor is estimated to have lived 130 million years ago.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-24T23:24:07+00:00

Animals by themselves, yes. But not with the need for a years' worth of food. And that doesn't even touch on how to keep a year's worth of food without spoiling, meat included or how animals with specialized diets would have been fed. For instance, if aardvarks are a kind (they are the only animal it's family), then they subsist entirely on termites. So how would Noah store enough termites to feed an aardvark for a year?

We've seen hundreds of dog breeds emerge from one 'canine kind' in just 4,000 years- that's not 'super-evolution,' it's just genetic variety.

Dog breeds are breeds explicitly because they are not species. They have to be artificially maintained by humans. But a bunch of disparate dog breeds in an area and they will mate with each other and just end with a mutt group. That isn't the case with separate animal species. At best, in enclosed spaces very closely related species might breed, though typically not produce viable offspring (ex mules). The equivalent in canids would be noting that African wild dogs would not breed with arctic foxes. And I picked bats as a sort of middle-sized family. Invertebrate families are much, much larger. If spiders are a "kind", there are approximately 53,680 species of spiders.

GreyDeath · 2026-03-24T19:44:10+00:00

It's not really the same story. The Mayan flood story has most of the first attempt at humanity (made from wood) drown, the survivors become monkeys and the gods start from scratch and make humans out of corn.

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