[wizardoz]

Catholics are indeed often socialist, which is why I can’t figure out why believers so often claim that we atheists can’t be proper conservatives.

[tanknetter]

Catholics are indeed often socialist,

Being a Jesuit-educated Episcopalian (so I guess a two-time loser for the purposes of this thread), people need to recall that the RCC's movement to Socialism is a reaction to the abuses the Church has engaged in over the centuries.

For instance, the Jesuits who taught the various theology and history classes I took didn't like my pointing out that their explicit (so something they actually stated) embrace of Liberation Theology as atonement for the Church's membership in Central/South American "Iron Triangles" (coalition of the Church, wealthy landowners and dictatorial strongmen designed to keep the peasants in their proper place) was a complete overreaction that would ultimately do much more harm than good ...

[onedoug]

I did claim agnosticism once. But how anyone could claim the surety and finality of atheism other than a god himself?

[Mad Dawg]

Yes. A lot of Catholics are socialists. A lot of them promote women in the priesthood, abortion, and artificial birth control, while many also deny other basic Catholic doctrines like the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.

There's the sickness of people who, while in the hospital, refuse the therapies offered, and then there's the validity of the therapies. It's good to know the difference.

If one struggles through the social encyclicals, one finds that socialism is explicitly rejected. A lot of clergy and a WHOLE lot of lay people have not done so, or have and reject the Magisterium they profess to follow.

If we threw such people out, we would defy our mission to reach out to the lost AND we would be called intolerant and inquisitorial. We continue to reach out to them so we are accused of being as vicious as the publicans, wine-bibbers, and prostitutes for whom we care.

Same old, same old.