In a way I hesitate to post this, because there is absolutely no way for me to prove what I am going to say (quite unlike the Revelation at Sinai). Personally, I don't know why in the world you don't simply ignore my posts since they so bother you. But be that as it may . . .
I did not enter the Catholic Church screaming for everyone to reject evolution and source criticism. Quite the opposite. I was quite prepared to accept the fact that there was something wrong with me and mine (unlike all those illiterate peasants the ancient churches are so proud of). It was the historical argument that cinched it for me (goodness knows, it's all they have going for them), and I asked only if, since in times past Catholics were much more literal in their Biblical interpretation, I could therefore retain these earlier beliefs (since I assumed what was once perfectly legitimate could not suddenly and magically become excommunicable heresy). Granted, the flagrant hypocrisy of accepting some alleged supernatural phenomena while rejecting others because "we know now stuff like this doesn't happen" is about as two-faced and hypocritical as you can get, and can only be driven by an absolute mania to distance oneself as far as possible from those awful people who live in trailer parks.
But when I went out of state to study Divinity and was facing all this stuff for the first time, "my" Church gave me absolutely no support. In fact, it agreed with the atheist professors. When I went to "my" denominational counselor I was told to "get out" because my beliefs "just weren't Catholic." But did I? No. I had come to believe that Catholicism was the one true religion, and the day being a holy day of obligation, I went straight to "my" church for mass where I refrained from communion because I was such a bad, rebellious Catholic (unlike all those homosexuals the Catholic Church wants so badly to court). I actually confessed my Biblical literalism as a sin in the confessional because my "infallible" church evidently labeledd it "bad" and "heretical." The priest was an older man with white hair, yet he spent some fifteen minutes (with a line forming outside the confessional) to try to convince me of all the errors the Bible contained. I actually went to an eastern Catholic church for I felt welcomed for a while, but quit at the end of Lent when one of the seminarians there said he had absolutely no evidence that a man named Noah ever existed (or that he didn't). I talked with him about being now stuck in a "one true religion" I simply in good conscience could not agree with, and he basically told me it was all right. After leaving there, I had both an Eastern Orthodox and a Myophysite church to investigate. The latter had a particularly beautiful liturgy, but it was a typical liberal ethnic church where apparently the only thing they believed in was their holy nation and their grudges.
Naturally, when I found out (thanks to an Eastern Orthodox booklet) that the true doctrine of human nature is found in the Talmud, I felt as if I had been cheated. Here are all these ancient religions boasting of their at once greater antiquity and oxymoronically their greater liberalism (did not compute). Why wouldn't I be bitter?
I saw a religion that claimed that the ancient Biblical religion had to be replaced even though there was nothing wrong with us, the so-called savior had not in fact "died for my sins," and that Judaism's teaching on human nature remained the correct one.
Then why in blazes the need to start an entirely new religion if the only thing wrong with the first one was that all the ritual and calendar dates needed to be changed? How can I not regard chrstianity as the greatest and cruelest joke ever perpetrated on the human race, with my own people with their sincere beliefs that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are true and that J*sus had indeed died in their place as the supreme suckers of the whole operation?
I've told this story often, but I know it will mean nothing to you. But here on FR I often read posts attacking snobby liberal elitists and defending the American "redneck." What makes a "conservative" Catholic elitist any better?
What about all the various blasphemous vermin who post here exclusively to celebrate their holy white European chromosomes? What about all the people who post about all the hundreds of thousands of years Blacks are "behind" whites on the evolutionary timescale? How are these b@st@rds and my people even on the same board? How could we ever be allies? Good gravy, is hearing the words "ax" or "exscape" that grating??? That is all this is about???
Since you will not even try to get inside my head or give my case even a hearing, I suggest you simply ignore me from here on.
As for me, I am delighted that the ancient fraudulent evolutionist churches are going down the drain, clinging to Darwin and Wellhausen with their cold dead fingers to the very last.
But when I went out of state to study Divinity and was facing all this stuff for the first time, "my" Church gave me absolutely no support. In fact, it agreed with the atheist professors. When I went to "my" denominational counselor I was told to "get out" because my beliefs "just weren't Catholic."
If so, that was unfortunate. But they may have been trying to say that interpretation is necessary in any religion. The literal sense is only one level of meaning. That is true of Judaism as well as Christianity. Interpretation has been at the heart of text-based religions for a very long time.
I was quite prepared to accept the fact that there was something wrong with me and mine (unlike all those illiterate peasants the ancient churches are so proud of). It was the historical argument that cinched it for me (goodness knows, it's all they have going for them), and I asked only if, since in times past Catholics were much more literal in their Biblical interpretation, I could therefore retain these earlier beliefs (since I assumed what was once perfectly legitimate could not suddenly and magically become excommunicable heresy).
It sounds like your colleagues were too literalistic in their rejection of literalism. That is not uncommon in the seminaries of all denominations. I suspect other Catholics outside academic centers wouldn't be so absolute in their rejection of miracles and supernatural phenomena.
But your combination of contempt for Catholic "illiterate peasants" with glorification of Fundamentalists you call "rednecks" -- and then combining that with contempt for some of the most cherished beliefs of those Protestant Fundamentalists -- is off-putting.
It's hard for me not to see your former teachers' and spiritual advisors' attitudes as something very American and very regional, something that doesn't affect Catholics in Africa or Asia or elsewhere in the world.
It's also hard for me to avoid seeing some complicated psychology at work. You appear to be one of those people who is always punching up or punching down. Always looking for somebody to be the elitist to attack or the elite to join, the victimized to uphold or the suckers to despise. And you have to expect that writing or speaking in that combative mode will provoke responses.
What about all the various blasphemous vermin who post here exclusively to celebrate their holy white European chromosomes?
I deplore those people as well. But do you not see some similarities between their way of thinking and your own? Have you considered that you are more likely to run into those people or to think you do, because of the similarity between your views and theirs?
Then why in blazes the need to start an entirely new religion if the only thing wrong with the first one was that all the ritual and calendar dates needed to be changed?
Christianity and Judaism are different religions. Like all religions they have their core assumptions. If you're outside the religion you won't accept those assumptions. Most people have come to realize that tearing down institutions that have lasted for millennia can have some very negative consequences and leave people prey to even worse thinking.