>> ^my15minutes:
i have a 'great wave' print, on the wall behind me right now. you can even see it, in some of my youtube clips.
nice pick, kerotan. i guess you just wanted the one sift, and get rid of the P next to your name?


Well now I have 2 sifted videos!

yes and this is the slowest reply ever.

i have a 'great wave' print, on the wall behind me right now. you can even see it, in some of my youtube clips.

nice pick, kerotan. i guess you just wanted the one sift, and get rid of the P next to your name?

Yeah, 'natural family planning' is about as effective as Russian roulette is at not getting you shot.

I can see how in 'Old World' countries the Catholic Church still has a lot of sway... it also exerts similar powers throughout Latin America. However, here in the US and Canada, which were first settled by predominately Protestant peoples who had fought against the repression of the Catholic church and continued to preach that it sought to control our country from abroad, the Roman Catholic Church has pretty much failed to gain any strong political powers. When the United States Constitution was drawn up that idea of 'Separation of Church and State' undoubtedly came not only from the English experience of having lived under the Anglican Church where the King is defacto spiritual leader, but also from the memories of the Catholic Church and the inquisitions carried out all over continental Europe.

Also, the bulk of the Catholic population in this country came over in the great waves of immigration towards the end of the 19th century from Catholic countries, Italians, Germans, Polish, Irish (my people, W00t), etc. With an established system of political power already set in place by predominantly Protestant peoples, Catholics, only up until very recently, were largely disenfranchised and politically without power in this country, so even if Rome tried to exert its might via its people, it would have had a hard time accomplishing anything. Those in power almost universally viewed the immigrants as superstitious, unwashed, uneducated, masses... largely because they were poor, but also because they still were a part of the 'Old' religious system. To some extent that lives on today in the current immigrant 'crisis' involving Mexico... the rhetoric that often accompanies that, "oh they'll just breed and breed and not work and we'll have to support the lot of them... and then if they outnumber us, then they'll start changing everything thing, and OMG lets just deport the lot of em"... is so similar to the rhetoric spewed forth regarding my ancestors only a hundred years ago it makes my head spin sometimes... I mean fuck, the Irish were barely human beings in this country really until WW2, and in retrospect I feel damn lucky sometimes that I'm getting a college education.

But anyway, the point I was getting to, is that there is a pervasive political paranoia regarding Catholicism in this country... like, whenever someone of Irish or German descent runs for the Presidency, everyone is always like, Wait, what church does he go to? This happened with John Kerry (who had been politically savvy enough to go Methodist decades earlier), and it happened with JFK, who actually was our only Catholic President ever, and at the time, the predominant worry about him prior to his election was if he was all of a sudden going to start taking orders from Rome after being sworn in.

Also, in the last 40 years or so, the number of active Catholics in this country has declined rapidly. I think this is due not only to that whole priests touching little boys thing (that certainly has turned a lot of people off from the church) but also because of the shift to modern American culture and all the other things about our society that impact pretty much all religions in this way. Yes, there are still people who go to church, but as Krupo said, over here anyway, if you are Catholic, what you hear in church, is probably vastly different from what you actually do in real life... there is just a lot more detachment than you see back over in Europe, or even in Latin America... Catholics over here, for the most part it seems, are, like my family, and are only really Catholic on Sundays.

I hope that clears up things for you looris, why, when you say stuff about the Catholic Church controlling people (which I believe you are right about, especially in Italy and other countries on that side of the Atlantic), we people over here are just like, "Say What? Catholic Church doing something more than holding bingo raffles? Whatever"