#adding my take

[witchyam]

komodobits is richard siken

[profanityandprophecy]

The church is losing touch with working-class Catholics

Mass attendance and Catholic affiliation have been eroding steadily since the 1970s for all income brackets, but the sharpest decline has been among the two bottom economic quartiles.

This is part of the reason I left UUism... it was completely out of touch with poor & working-class UUs on pretty much every level, while patting itself on the back for being such a socially-just church. I just couldn’t handle the bullshit & hypocrisy anymore.

(Also, the woman mentioning “pay for play” church activities from the article; the BDSM scene is completely like that. I used to complain about it, and people just shrugged and was like “it is what it is” as if it couldn’t be any different, so I just accepted that. But no... it could have been different if people had cared enough to MAKE it different. (And I’m not talking about play parties. I’m talking about munches.))

[profanityandprophecy]

For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?

This is absolutely amazing and what I’ve been saying this whole time, simply outside of the paradigm of Christianity. This is what I’m afraid of if we stay on the path we’re currently on, that is, the path that the dominant social justice paradigm seems to be on, the zeitgeist of activism & social justice today. We may gain the whole world (I haven’t argued that some of this stuff isn’t efficacious... it may, indeed, work), but what will we profit if we lose our values, the things that make us who we are, the things that actually define social justice? What will the WORLD profit if we commit wrongs to establish justice? Have we not just created more injustice, only of a different sort? Justice is not just a systemic paradigm, although that is a big part of it. I’m not just looking out for the world to be a better place for the marginalized... I want the world to be a truly just & loving place overall. And a major part of that is the marginalized, of course, but it extends beyond that. When justice happens, the marginalized are no longer such, but also no one else is harmed in the process.

(And I think why I’ve been drawn to Christianity lately is because they’re the only people I’ve been hearing use the paradigm I believe in... frankly, the only paradigm I feel safe & protected from harm in. Because I know that those using harm, pain, & violence against their oppressors, once their oppressors are gone, will go looking for new people to harm. Or that their metric for what makes an oppressor will widen. Or that they will simply get it wrong sometimes (esp. amongst their own people with different or varying ideas), and innocent people, people already oppressed will end up suffering at the hands of their peers. And those last 2 things can happen even now.)