An old post from a poster who has moved on to bigger and better things in life, but worth the reading:
If we wanted to be a serious religion we would let people know if you join another religion you go to hell and start excommunicating people for abortions and stuff
YEAH, that's a great idea! Why don't you guys just go back to the Middle Ages, when you brutally tortured anyone who so much as tried to think for himself?
I'm sure that will really boost the Church's worldwide membership.
That's my point exactly, a church should be about practicing what you believe. It's not politics, you should not be pandering to attract new members. So in my opinion that is a great idea.
Join a Protestant Church then. I don't believe the Catholic Church has ever been truely about following a creed. It has been for most of its existance a grouping of people with quite diverse theological views that have come together under one roof, especially since the Renaissance and subsequent liberalizing of both the entire Western world and of the Church itself. While you might not consider this completely holy, or right in the sense of papal superiority and the superiority of cannon law, it is the truth. Even with Church organizations you have a wide variation between groups like the Jesuits and Opus Dei or the Franciscans. I doubt that you would not consider any of these groups not Catholic but they have widely varying beliefs about the mission of the Church and the goals of spreading the gospel.
The thing is the Catholic Church isn't pandering to anyone it has 1 billion people that it considers its members, that's one sixth of the world's population. If you try to create a Church that is as conservative or "theologically pure" as your fundamentalist or conservative Protestant sects then you have a major problem since I doubt since I doubt that Kwando Akembe in Nigeria is going to care about the same issues as an upper class conservative Catholic in New Jersey or a liberal Catholic in the Netherlands.
Also you have to consider that in many ways in many countries Catholicism has gone beyond just being a religious entity but has become a part of the culture in much the same way as Judaism connects the world's Jewish population both spiritually and as a cultural entity.
That's just my opinion I don't really think that you could start excommunicating people for abortion or not going to Church or whatever and unless you want to see all that great 19th century anti-Catholicism come back the Church shouldn't destroy the good relations it has forged with it's Protestant bretheren.
