smartypantz commented "Nice."As I read that, it wasn't clear to jessamyn (or to me, or, apparently, to several others) whether "nice" meant "oh, I like that, it's nice" or "<sarcastic intonation>Oh, niiiice you idiot.</sarcastic intonation>"
jessamyn said "I have no idea what your single-word comment means."
smartypantz clarified that what they meant was they liked the sentiment and reasoning behind jessamyn's comment, and thought it was nice.
For much of the nineteenth century, Catholics in America were the unassimilated, sometimes violent “religious other.” Often they did not speak English or attend public schools. Some of their religious women—nuns—wore distinctive clothing. Their religious practices and beliefs—from rosaries to tran- substantiation—seemed to many Americans superstitious nonsense. Most worrisome, Catholics seemed in- sufficiently grateful for their ability to build churches and worship in a democracy, rights sometimes denied to Protestants and Jews in Catholic countries, notably Italy.Quoted from last time I linked it.
In the 1840s and 1850s these anxieties about Catholicism in American society turned violent, resulting in mob attacks on priests and churches as well as the formation of a major political party, the American Party, dedicated to combating Catholic influence. This led to novel claims that the US Constitution imposed an absolute separation of church and state—claims that stem not from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington but from nineteenth-century politicians, ministers, and editors worried that adherents of a hierarchical Catholicism might destroy the hard-won achievements of American democracy. In 1875, a decade after accepting General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Ulysses S. Grant publicly warned that Catholicism might prove as divisive in American society as the Confederacy.
Like many American Muslims today, many American Catholics squirmed when their foreign-born religious leaders offered belligerent or tone-deaf pronouncements on the modern world. New York’s own Bishop John Hughes thundered in 1850 that the Church’s mission was to convert “the Officers of the Navy and the Marines, commander of the Army, the legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President and all.” The Syllabus of Errors, promulgated by Pope Pius IX in 1864, denied that the Church had any duty to reconcile itself with “progress, liberalism, and modern civilization.”....
bigotry |ˈbigətrē|So we begin the thread. Mngo quotes a particular statement on the page linked in the FPP:
noun
bigoted attitudes; intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself : the report reveals racism and right-wing bigotry.
When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.I can identify with this pretty easily. So I guess my personal argument for how a loving god can let stupid, terrible, painful shit happen is: Sweet Jesus, I have no clue, and it fucking sucks, and I'm so, so, so sorry. But my experience and understanding of the universe involves a loving god of some kind, and I don't know how that makes any sense, but that's how I feel about it. And anyone who tries to tell you differently is selling something.
posted by Burhanistan at 11:09 PM on January 1, 2011