Happy Sunday! I won't be in church today.
I was raised in a VERY religious Catholic family and went to Mass every single week for years. Forced to by my parents until 18 but I still went long after that, out of habit. Then I, finally, woke up. A marriage to a strict Catholic man will do that to you. He turned out to be right-wing nut-job who was demeaning and abusive. When our daughter was 13 we divorced. I had no support from my family because I filed for the divorce and that is a "sin." I spent all my money on a good lawyer and was able to get sole custody of my daughter because he was able to prove my husband was abusive and cheating on me. I hadn't even known about the cheating. Only some feminist-style women friends I knew from work got me through that multi-year period sane.
I tried to do things the "right way" through the Church and all I got was advice to go back to the same sick situation.
I actually tried to go back to church after that bitter experience but I was so turned off by the anti-abortion and homophobic rants I heard in sermons. The two people who helped me most were lesbians. One had an abortion.
I consider myself a spiritual person but it is between me and the great unknown. I raised my daughter as an atheist.
I usually spend Sunday morning early, like today, watching TV, listening to music, checking out DU, surfing the other web sites, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in peace on the porch. And I am very much at peace with myself and my God/Goddess/Whatever.
Sorry for the long rant. Maybe this will help someone.
Happy Sunday, fellow DU people!
= new reply since forum marked as read
Good for you and all the best. I quit smoking a few years ago but I'd love to light one up and join you for a talk on the porch. 
I'll start with the basic Old Testament verse on the subject, Deuteronomy 24:1-4, which says,
Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house and goes off to become another man’s wife. Then suppose the second man dislikes her, writes her a bill of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house (or the second man who married her dies); her first husband, who sent her away, is not permitted to take her again to be his wife after she has been defiled; for that would be abhorrent to the Lord, and you shall not bring guilt on the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a possession.
The certificate of divorce was largely a way of protecting the woman. Under the code of Hammurabi, a woman's first husband could come back and re-claim her if her second husband died or divorced her, but this passage in Deuteronomy forbade him to do so. Divorce's main purpose was to permit re-marriage so that a woman would not starve or be forced into prostitution.
The problem is the word "objectionable". The Hebrew can be translated as "sexual immorality," so here the basis for divorce is sexual infidelity. It can also mean the same as the English word. So which is the correct meaning in this passage?
Before continuing, I should also mention Exodus 21
-11
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt unfairly with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out without debt, without payment of money.
While this law initially covered a slave wife in a polygamous marriage, over time the rabbis decided that it also covered wives who were free and marriages that were monogamous. The rabbis decided that this law gave a wife rights to food and clothing (and shelter and so on), as well as sexual intimacy and affection. So if a wife was abused, neglected or abandoned, she has the right to a divorce and subsequent remarriage.
A few decades before Jesus was born, two rabbis, Hillel and Shammai, debated Deuteronomy 24. Hillel noted the text said a man could divorce his wife for "a cause of sexual immorality." Since rabbis believed that every word in Scripture was there for a reason, Hillel decided that this word "cause" must refer to other grounds for divorce besides sexual immorality. Hillel believed a man could leave his wife for any reason: wearing her hair unbound, burning the toast or renting two consecutive chick flicks from Netflix.
Shammai, on the other hand, thought that Deuteronomy 24 only referred to sexual immorality, and that this "any cause" divorce was wrong.
Hillel's "any cause" divorce was popular among Jewish men. It was much easier to get, though it could be more expensive. It is almost certainly what Joseph was thinking of when he considered divorcing Mary "quietly" in Matthew 1:19 -- "quietly" being a technical term. He would graciously refuse to charge her with her infidelity, and get an "any cause" divorce even though he’d still have to pay the bride price.
So apparently, when Jesus mentions divorce in Matthew 19, he is stating his position on the Shammai/Hillel debate. He is not talking about the legitimacy of divorce in general. No rabbi would have asked, "Is it ever lawful for someone to divorce?"; it would have been like asking, "Is it lawful to do what Moses said in the law?"
Jesus sided with Shammai on the interpretation of Deuteronomy 24:1. But Jesus and Paul (and Shammai) would have shared the rabbinic understanding that divorce is regrettable but permissible when the vow of fidelity, provision, or love has been broken and there is no repentance. This would include abuse and abandonment.
... which is achieved after quite a bit of soul-bearing, due process, and paperwork, at the end of which a tribunal will (hopefully) conclude that your marriage is, in fact, over (because it was never, say, "meant to be"
, and you are free to re-marry and have relations with a new spouse as if you had never been married before.
Interestingly, to get married in the Church to someone who had been married (then divorced) elsewhere, the Church will still require the annulment process for that prior non-Catholic marriage.
======================
Some of which are rather abstruse (see "Pauline Privilege" and "Petrine Privilege" , but the whole thing is basically dishonest. The person seeking the annulment is basically trying to pretend that the marriage never really happened.
Let me tell you of a couple of contemporaneous historical annulments requests, those of Henry VIII of England and his sister Margaret in the 16th century.
Henry and Margaret's father, Henry VII, arranged a political marriage between his eldest son, Arthur, and Catherine of Aragon. A few months after the wedding, Arthur died. The king wanted both to maintain the political alliance with Spain and to keep the dowry that Catherine brought (over a million in today's currency, which would have had to be repaid out of the Privy Purse). So he decided to marry his second son, Henry, to Catherine.
There was a problem: Under Church marriage law, one cannot marry one's deceased spouse's sibling. However, this could be got round with a dispensation. So King Henry went to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Warham, to get the dispensation. Warham was then in a political fight with the King and refused to grant it; but Henry twisted his arm, and Warham gave in. Henry then applied to the Vatican for their approval -- Pope Julius II rubber stamped the dispensation and the fullness of time Henry and Catherine were married.
Twenty-some years later, it was obvious that Catherine, now in menopause, was not going to give Henry the son he so desperately craved. (Henry wanted a son because the last time an English king, Henry I, died with only a daughter to follow him, Matilda, there was a civil war.) The incest that Henry was committing was preying on his mind -- that he had fallen in love with the young and beautiful Anne Boleyn was, of course, quite irrelevant.
Recall that Henry VII had pressured Archbishop Warham to get the dispensation for his son's betrothal to Catherine. Church marriage law says that if any party to the marriage is acting under duress, the marriage is void. So Henry VIII requested an annulment on the grounds that the dispensation was improperly given.
However, Catherine did not want her marriage annulled. She claimed that she loved Henry; a dubious claim at best, since Henry did not treat her well. It is far more likely that Catherine did not want her daughter Mary to lose her place as Henry's only legitimate child. After all, should Henry remarry and have a son, this son would take precedence over Mary as Henry's heir. (One of the great "what if"s of English history is "what if Mary had been a boy?"
So, Catherine counter-attacked on two fronts: One based in Church marriage law, and the other purely political. In Church marriage law, in order for a marriage to be valid, two things must happen. The first is an exchange of vows before witnesses, and there was no question that this happened when Catherine married Arthur. The second is that the marriage must be consummated. Catherine claimed that she and Arthur had never consummated their marriage. Thus, the dispensation was irrelevant, and her marriage to Henry was, in fact, her first marriage.
This claim should have gone nowhere. First, Church marriage law makes the presumption that a married couple will have intercourse unless it can be proven otherwise. Second, under Church marriage law, the burden of proof would have been on Catherine, and the operative word is "proof". I'm sure that 16th century divorce lawyers and judges knew just as well as their 21st century counterparts that all parties in a divorce probably lie. Catherine's unsupported word should not have sufficed, and at the time she made this claim, she was not a virgo intacta. Thus, she had no support for her claim.
Something else in Church marriage law is that dubious claims about the validity of the marriage are to be dismissed in favor of the validity of the marriage.
However, her other point of attack depended on her nephew Charles -- King of Spain, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Naples -- to oppose the annulment. Charles was happy to support his aunt, since he disliked Henry both personally and politically. Charles and Henry had entered an alliance against France which Henry broke at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and Charles felt that Henry had betrayed him. What concerned the Pope was that in 1527, Naples and the Papal States had a war, which Clement lost. Some of Charles' troops sacked Rome. Clement did not want a rerun of that war, so he took Catherine's claim of non-consummation seriously. There were Papal Delegates, special commissions of enquiry and so on. Basically, Clement was stalling.
Finally, when Henry discovered that Anne Boleyn was pregnant, he forced Clement's hand. He pushed through some laws in Parliament, one saying that marriage questions could be settled locally, another saying that all English clergy owed their first allegiance to the crown and a third saying that the Peter's Pence collection (an annual collection in each parish going directly to the Vatican) and the Annates (essentially a tax on Church properties that also went to the Vatican) should go to the Exchequer instead of to Rome. Clement was Not Amused, and decreed against Henry's annulment.
Thus, the actual reason for Clement's action was politics and money.
Now, on to Margaret. Henry VII married her off to King James IV of Scotland. For some reason, James invaded England in 1513, and was met by English troops at the Battle of Flodden. Flodden was an overwhelming victory for the English, and James was killed in the battle. His body was seen by quite a few people, both English and Scots, who knew him at least by sight; he was buried on the battlefield.
James' son became king as James V, but since he was only two, a council of regency was set up. Margaret was one of the regents, and another was Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Angus. In order to solidify his political position, Angus persuaded Margaret to marry him.
This was not a happy marriage. To give just one example, in 1520, Angus attempted to enter Edinburgh at the head of some troops, and was taken under fire by artillery and infantry under the personal command of his wife.
In 1527, Margaret seized on an unfounded rumor that James IV had not died at Flodden, but had regained consciousness, dug himself out of his grave, and recovered from his wounds. However, James had not returned to Scotland, but rather made a secret pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Nevertheless, James was supposed to return to Scotland at any moment. This rumor, of course, is just as credible as the one that Elvis Presley is still alive.
Margaret sent in a petition to Pope Clement for an annulment of her marriage on the grounds that her first husband was actually still alive. Cardinal Beaton, the Archbishop of St Andrews, who loathed Angus as much as Margaret did, supported the petition. Angus, who also wanted out of the marriage, raised no objection -- indeed, he suggested that a better ground for the annulment might be that he had been betrothed as a young man.
In any case, Margaret got her annulment, realized that her first husband was dead, and promptly married someone else.
So, Henry VIII was denied an annulment even though he had solid grounds, and Margaret was granted one on flimsy grounds. It was all political in both cases.
Southern Baptist. By the time I made it to 14 yo I had realized that the church wasn't anything it was purported to be. A bunch of liars and two shoes. I haven't been to church since. I'm 66 yo btw.
I raised me since then to be Atheist
Peace
I like me this way too
Above all, Peace!
But check out vaping, maybe you can set the cigs aside. 
I smoked nearly two packs a day for over 40 years, and walked away from it with those. Now zero nicotine, just scented stuff. Food tastes much better too.
As far as religion goes, though, yeah.
I was raised Southern Baptist (bet you can still sing the dang songs you haven't heard in years as well), got away from it via college and some other experiences, but my wife was raised Catholic, and is still caught up in it.
Scary, much of what that religion stuff has become.
Thank you for posting.
Southern Baptist school/church. I may never be right after some of those experiences, but it's ok. If that is what is considered "normal" and "right." I'll be abnormal and left. That's a blessing, not a curse. The curse would be trying to bend my mind to fit some of the messed up stuff I was expected to endure. I'm so glad I don't have to go to that school any more. Something as simple as that is a huge relief.
Happy Sunday to you too. 
Glad you became your own person, free of the dogma.
Happy Sunday and peace always!
"Normal" is so overrated. 
Peace.
Except in windstorms...Then I wish they were all about four feet tall!
I am also divorced (after 13 years of marriage), but after a time married again and have been so happily for 33+ years. I wish you and your daughter well and hope that you will both find happy and fulfilling lives.
It is not so much the idea of religion or church that bothers me. There is much that I admire in Catholic teachings - especially those that are universally reflected in other religions that deal with loving one another, respecting one another and treating others as one wishes to be treated. What I dislike are petty points of dogma, specifics on how women are/should be subservient to men, etc. I loathe the idea in any religion that one is somehow superior to others who do not follow that religion.
I believe that human beings have a spiritual essence that needs to be nourished and that is why so many humans search for purpose and reasons in religion. Others find their purposes and reasons in a philosophy dissociated from religion. So long as that religion or philosophy empowers them and improves their lives and the lives of those around them, I have no problem with it. Indeed, I sincerely respect those who actually practice the universal precepts noted above. Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers, for example, are two very strong role models to emulate.
Participation in communal gatherings, whether they be church or similar services, should help humans to reinforce social ties and encourage common ground, not division. One should attend because one chooses to, not because one is obliged to.
While I was raised Catholic because my father's family were Catholic, my mother's family were Protestant, representing nearly every type from mainstream to wildly evangelical. It seemed to me nonsense from the get-go that my father's side believed that my Protestant relatives were all going to hell and that my mother's side believed that I and my Catholic relatives were all going to hell. With a few exceptions (not dependent on religious label but on individual character), we were all good human beings and tried to be kind to one another. Does hell even exist, after all?
The idea of any deity that includes or excludes individuals merely on the basis of a religious label is totally abhorrent. The idea of any individual who would govern a nation-state based on such precepts of inclusion or exclusion is equally abhorrent. It is to be avoided at all costs. This is the crux of my antipathy to organized religion generally and especially towards those who do not understand that there must be boundaries between church and state.
'total bullshit" - yeah, pretty much.
Quitting the Church felt very liberating to me and sounds like you felt the same way.
Glad you enjoyed the 'sermon."
PEACE AND LOVE! 
I will go so far as to say the Catholic Church was largely created for the purpose of stomping down women. And it has been been incredibly effective at doing this the world over, for centuries. The sooner people reject this institution en masse, the better off the world will be. Same goes for the other major religions.
Glad you are in a better space now!
The lunatic is in my head
The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade, you make the change
You re-arrange me 'till I'm sane
You lock the door
And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me.
And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear
And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes
I'll see you on the dark side of the moon
I started rebelling early, well before I was ten yrs. old; the beatings from the nuns made me realize that I never wanted to be like them. I still frequently analyze my thoughts to ensure it's me, and not Sister Mary Elefunt, motivating my behavior. It's a lifetime process, wiping away the indoctrination and brainwashing.
There's someone in my head, and I know it's me.
Life is fun, and beautiful.
Glad that you rebelled from those horrible people. 
Seen that, too!
"He can't believe what he just saw. Hahahaha."
And you can rant as much as you want!
I consider myself lucky for that. Ended up being anticlerical but don't have the knee-jerk reaction to attack all the priests, nuns etc when they are not doing shitty things. When they do I'm very nasty. Sorry for your wife having to go through all this. My parents did too and its probably why I was spared. Heard a lot of horror stories. 
:clap
I'm glad things are so much better for you now.
I was raised Episcopalian. That's very similar to Catholic. We went every damn Sunday unless I was on a Boy Scout camping trip. Both parents were very religious but not of the fire-and-brimstone variety, so they were tolerable.
I no longer go there. Last church I went to was a Methodist one. I know the Bible says you have to worship with other believers, but meh on that for me. Long story short, I'm probably one or two steps away from being an atheist, but I find comfort in the church. I would never dream of imposing my values on others, but it works for me. I'm just too secular-minded to totally buy into it. I also highly value science and the scientific method.
I strongly believe in doing my best to practice my faith through action, and not just through lip service. Way too many "Christians" talk a good game, then fall way short in action. I'd rather keep my mouth shut and "just do it".
Anyway, best wishes to you in your spiritual and earthly journeys!
Response to Kath1 (Original post)
so is spirituality. Good for you. I just went through the worst February of my 67 year old life. Besides February being my deceased sisters birth month, I have faced some incredible bad luck this last month. My faith in religion went out the window when I was faced with bigots/racists in a fundamentalist church I attended, because of an interracial relationship I was in, in the early 80's. Never went back. Still trying to hold on to some kind of faith but I'm struggling with the concept of a 'loving' god.....this is not something that makes sense anymore, especially with just recent events, BokoHaram, Ukraine and the evilness perpetrated by IsIs or what ever they call themselves. Great rant, and I do understand.
But I'm also glad that it sounds that you found peace and have been able to move beyond the negativity you encountered.
Happy Sunday - and the rest of the week, too
Tim
It really makes me sad when I hear stories like your's....I'm a practicing Catholic, and although I've had a very positive experience with the church, I know that others have been greatly hurt....so (as I said before) I'm glad that you found peace.
Best wishes
Tim
You are a strong woman, good work!
And a very happy Sunday to you!
Well said!
My place of worship..
Glad everything worked out your way, Kath! I was interested in the priesthood at the end of my Catholic grade school experience, but thank God, I wised up. I was an altar boy since third grade, and actually felt good about getting up at 5 am and going to the convent to help the priest serve mass to the nuns at 6, or 5:30, or whenever it was.
We were so rigidly programmed to believe every sin had a level of damnation attached to it. Never could quite get a handle on the "mortal" "venial" sin thing. I guess if you know it was mortal, and you did it anyway...ah, forget it. It all makes no sense now; but we tried to make sense out of it when we were growing up.
My four kids all went to Catholic grade and high schools. Paid a bundle for that "private education", and then when they were nearly grown, my wife filed for divorce after I worked my butt off putting her through engineering school, and she got her profession that out paid mine by at least another 50%. She didn't need this log any longer. Same story about affairs. I never knew, and never even thought about that going on, but she enlightened me when I couldn't understand why we broke apart. I still say, "damn her", and mean it.
I met my current wife, and being Catholic was a real leg up. She is Mexican, and that means a lot to most of them. I don't go any longer, and she still goes alone, sometimes. I have ZERO respect for the Catholic Church any longer. I am impressed by the latest Pope, but that's ONE person. Pope John Paul was OK too, but the turd in between was the typical hypocrite.
We find our own God. I still believe in the Christ and the Maker, and maybe there will be something after death. I'm not betting all my marbles on it anymore. I just know when it's over, it's over. If there's something after this life, well, that will be a nice surprise. If not.....what am I going to do about it? Nada.
Thanks for sharing your story. I enjoyed reading it. I find some of the most hypocritical low lifes hide behind their religious piety. It's all bull shit to me. I found ONE Church I enjoyed attending in my whole life. It's like going to a "flower child festival". They are good, decent people, and they spend ALL their energy in "helping the least among us", something Christ actually told us to do. The rest of the churches are all about building a new parish hall, or paying down the mortgage on a monstrosity of a church, etc. All bull shit.
Amen....
