That sounds great, I’ll give it a good look. And Sturgeon’s Law applies to literary genres; if it applies to socio-political movements, then we have a problem. We certainly can’t judge, say, the Catholic Church or the Objectivist movement by their 1% of most virtuous fellows.
if it applies to socio-political movements, then we have a problem. We certainly can’t judge, say, the Catholic Church or the Objectivist movement by their 1% of most virtuous fellows.
If you ask an average Catholic to to explain you some things about their religion, and if you ask a Pope, you will find a lot of differences. You may also find Catholic theologists saing that Pope is actually not a Catholic.
This is not merely a criticism of Catholicism… this is what happens when you have a sufficiently large movement. It happens to other religions, it happens to policial movements, it happens everywhere. I guess even Ayn Rand couldn’t prevent it. This is what humans do.
We might ask what is the true Catholicism? But that’s assuming that words have a meaning on their own, instead of merely being labels attached to meanings, inconsistently by different people. If you would look at people’s beliefs as points in the belief-space, you could empirically find a few clusters: there would be current version of the official belief (or a few competing versions) that only educated theologists know, schisms and heresies, various kinds of folk interpretations, etc. That’s the territory. It’s your choice whether you apply the label “true Catholicism” to the opinion of the current Pope, or to the most popular folk version. Either way, someone will insist that you are using the label incorrectly.
I believe this is a source of many hopeless arguments about politics. For any political label X, you get many people self-identifying as X, with many different beliefs, sometimes contradictory. Now are the “true X” the most educated of them, or the most numerous ones, or those most visible in media? How about those who are very educated, but controversial within the group; how much weight to we assign to their opinions? How about those who try to follow their leaders, but misunderstand what the leaders are trying to say; is their true belief what the leaders believe, or the most frequent misinterpretation of the leaders? -- And in real life, most people will use “what most of my neighbors who self-identify as X seem to say”, which is a different answer for different people.
Should alchemists be considered part of the same group as chemists? Today most of us would say “no”, but what if we lived when chemistry was new? Etc.
I am not a theologist, and I only met one Sedevacationist in an internet forum and he didn’t seem quite sane to me, so I don’t know how much his opinions are official. He said something like “the Pope has implicitly excommunicated himself by...” I don’t remember what exactly was the reason, but probably because of the alleged heresy.
(Makes some sense to me. I mean, if you are serious about a religion and serious about the religious hierarchy, because you believe that the bishops are literally the messengers of God and the whole Church is the God’s living body on Earth, or something like this, then… being a heretic, not being a Pope, but still pretending to be a Pope… that seems like an insanely serious offence. It’s a religious equivalent of falsely pretending to be a King.)
There are probably some parts you have missed.
Also, remember the Sturgeon’s law.
That sounds great, I’ll give it a good look. And Sturgeon’s Law applies to literary genres; if it applies to socio-political movements, then we have a problem. We certainly can’t judge, say, the Catholic Church or the Objectivist movement by their 1% of most virtuous fellows.
If you ask an average Catholic to to explain you some things about their religion, and if you ask a Pope, you will find a lot of differences. You may also find Catholic theologists saing that Pope is actually not a Catholic.
This is not merely a criticism of Catholicism… this is what happens when you have a sufficiently large movement. It happens to other religions, it happens to policial movements, it happens everywhere. I guess even Ayn Rand couldn’t prevent it. This is what humans do.
We might ask what is the true Catholicism? But that’s assuming that words have a meaning on their own, instead of merely being labels attached to meanings, inconsistently by different people. If you would look at people’s beliefs as points in the belief-space, you could empirically find a few clusters: there would be current version of the official belief (or a few competing versions) that only educated theologists know, schisms and heresies, various kinds of folk interpretations, etc. That’s the territory. It’s your choice whether you apply the label “true Catholicism” to the opinion of the current Pope, or to the most popular folk version. Either way, someone will insist that you are using the label incorrectly.
I believe this is a source of many hopeless arguments about politics. For any political label X, you get many people self-identifying as X, with many different beliefs, sometimes contradictory. Now are the “true X” the most educated of them, or the most numerous ones, or those most visible in media? How about those who are very educated, but controversial within the group; how much weight to we assign to their opinions? How about those who try to follow their leaders, but misunderstand what the leaders are trying to say; is their true belief what the leaders believe, or the most frequent misinterpretation of the leaders? -- And in real life, most people will use “what most of my neighbors who self-identify as X seem to say”, which is a different answer for different people.
Should alchemists be considered part of the same group as chemists? Today most of us would say “no”, but what if we lived when chemistry was new? Etc.
Sedevacationists believe that the Pope is a heretic. Is that the same thing as not being a Catholic?
I am not a theologist, and I only met one Sedevacationist in an internet forum and he didn’t seem quite sane to me, so I don’t know how much his opinions are official. He said something like “the Pope has implicitly excommunicated himself by...” I don’t remember what exactly was the reason, but probably because of the alleged heresy.
(Makes some sense to me. I mean, if you are serious about a religion and serious about the religious hierarchy, because you believe that the bishops are literally the messengers of God and the whole Church is the God’s living body on Earth, or something like this, then… being a heretic, not being a Pope, but still pretending to be a Pope… that seems like an insanely serious offence. It’s a religious equivalent of falsely pretending to be a King.)