I'm thoroughly impressed with this latest Pope in the Vatican. While I remain faithful to the idea that the Vatican shouldn't be this gold filled place where the pope lives, dressed in his Godly-finery...the most recent Pope sheds new light and gives me new hope for the faith of Catholicism.
Now, I'm in no way considering re-joining the religion...I find too many hypocrites, and disjointed beliefs among the followers. However, in light of recent events, this Pope has made tremendous strides to gain back the trust of the pubic. For example...one of the latest announcements he made is his acceptance of homosexuals as God's creatures. While the bible may have an excerpt that says it's sinful to have a "man lay with another man", you cannot deny the fact that people DO live this way and are just as deserving of God's love as anyone else. No one is above another; no one is more Godlier than another. We all forget that Jesus hung around with the undesirables. Who are seen as undesirable these days more than Homosexuals (and unfairly so).
Another recent announcement is the acceptance of Evolution!! Whoa! That's an enormous step for the Catholic religion! Being Christian in nature, they tend to believe in Creationism (at least that's how my grand-in-law's believe). But evolution need not be in contrast to the Christian belief in how we all got here. The bible more or less says that humans **poofed** into creation: "So God created mankind in his own image..." --Genesis 1:27. It doesn't say that they started out in a puddle of goo and grew from there. In fact, the whole chapter and subsequent chapters since dont' say anything about HOW they formed other than God formed man from dirt.
Could this now be interpreted that we came from the ground...from the formation of the earth, evolved from sand, microbes, or even goo, to amphibious animals, to mammals, to a subspecies, to cro-magnon, to neanderthal, to what we are today??
My dear, ignorant neighbor believes that evolution says we all **poofed** into existence (clearly she didn't pay attention to science class when she was in school...no where does "evolution" teach that we all **poofed** into existence). She also is the type to teach her children that the sky is blue and the grass is green, all because "God wanted it that way", not because blue is the dominant color that breaks through the atmosphere when the sunlight hits it, and that the grass is green because of chlorophyll. She's against this Pope's ideas that evolution could be true...and chooses to misinterpret the bible in her own way (which is not surprising to me (She's also Christian-Reform,not Catholic)).
It's an enormous leap into the 21st century for the church to acknowledge these basic ideas. Naturally there are those who are rebelling against these ideas (even within the Vatican itself). Perhaps God is TRULY speaking through this man trying to get humanity to understand that we are NOT as bad as misinterpreting people have made us out to be, and is trying to get us to see that we are meant to be the way we are, and using the Pope to get that message through. And just like the Jewish priests in Jesus' time who rebelled against the idea of Jesus, the bishops oppose this Pope's ideas too.
It's been a while since I truly admired a leader of a religious group (that I am not a part of). I hope he continues with his crusade of halting the hate because we are all different, and denying basic common sense. I hope he doesn't let the nay-sayers push him around into retracting anything he's said, and remains faithful to these ideas.
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