This is totally cheating but I thought the article below complements Filia’s article yesterday, and discussion on the blog in general, quite well. We often see conflicting opinions on the blog, often with both people proclaiming to be absolutely right with the Church on their side. The terms conservative and liberal are thrown around with many vehemently denying that either term should exist.
It’s also important to remember that there is room for different views, different ways of doing things, and neither way is necessarily right. As much as we all hate the annoying secular culture of believe whatever you want and everyone’s truth is true for them attitude, sometimes we can pull rules too far, and forget that the Church does always encourage us to think for ourselves and own our faith. Whether you agree of disagree this article is some interesting food for thought.

In Doubtful Things, Liberty
BY Mark Shea
September 30 – October 6, 2007 Issue | Posted 9/25/07 at 11:37 AM
One often hears about the supposedly monolithic or totalitarian character of the Catholic Church. You know the drill: The pope tells everybody what to think. Catholics all have to believe exactly the same thing. Freedom of thought is anathema for Catholics. Et cetera.
I heard much of this and believed it — till I got to know Catholics. Then I discovered the truth of Chesterton’s remark: “Catholics agree about everything. It is only everything else they disagree about.”
The reality of Catholic (and biblical) teaching is this: There are a few cosmic truths upon which the Church absolutely insists we must agree if we are to claim the name of “Catholic.”
These are more or less summarized in the creeds and in the few dogmatic teachings of the Church pertaining to such matters as, say, the real presence in the Eucharist, the Immaculate Conception and so forth.
Beyond this, not only does the Church not demand we march in lock-step, she positively encourages a sort of loony diversity that is much more like a garden of wildflowers or a really crazy zoo in which the keepers are the ones who cage themselves (by means of poverty, chastity and obedience) so that the strange and exotic creatures called “the faithful” might roam free.
Indeed, the curious fact of Catholic life is that most of the Church’s discipline has been exerted over the centuries, not to keep everybody towing the party line, but to make sure that people who marched to the beat of a different drum did not get hammered by those whose vision of the Church was too narrow.
The first instance of this, of course, takes place in Acts 15 when the circumcision party centered in Jerusalem took it upon themselves to insist that Gentiles could not be authentic Christians if they did not keep the ceremonial laws of Moses.
The Church rejected this position decisively.
Since that time, the temptation again and again in the history of the Church has been for some faction or other to decide that some pet cause is not merely a pet cause but, an “essential truth of the faith” that must be held by all on pain of heresy.
The pet causes vary with the time and place, but the impulse to expand an enthusiasm to a dogma remains the same.
Whether it be vegetarianism, cards, dancing, Harry Potter, tobacco, the charism of tongues, theories of predestination, the divine right of kings, or political theories about democracy, Christians have always been tempted to take some merely earthly thing and try to assert that all Christians must believe or do exactly as they themselves do, or face expulsion from the ranks of the Truly Faithfulâ„¢.
Not a few have expelled themselves upon deciding that they and they alone were the “truly pure remnant” while the “so-called Church” had fallen irretrievably into error and sin. This attitude is nicely summarized by Garrison Keillor, who remarked of his Puritan ancestors that they came to the New World seeking the freedom to be harsher with themselves than English law allowed.
It is a pattern that stretches from the Donatists to present-day sedevacantism.
The reality is this: The Church does not teach, “In the evening of our lives, we will be judged by our attitude to Harry Potter.” Paul never said, “Now abide faith, hope, and love, these three. But the greatest of these is tongues.” Jesus never proclaimed that when the Son of Man comes in his Kingdom, he would say to the sheep on his right, “I was a Republican and you voted for me.” Nor shall he say to the goats on his left, “Woe to you, for you drove SUVs and did not recycle!”
This does not mean that merely human things don’t matter. Nor does it mean they all matter equally. It means that they are contingent things related to the Essential Thing (God), but they are not God himself.
So, for instance, the Essential Thing says, “You shall have no other gods before me.” Therefore, idolatry, witchcraft, divination and the occult are forbidden, as the Church clearly teaches. But it does not follow that, since rumor has it that playing cards have their origins in tarot, crazy eights is therefore divination. Still less does it follow that if you don’t demand your spouse stop his weekly poker game, you are implicated in the sin of idolatry.
This sort of attempt to narrow the faith has played out literally millions of times in the history of the Church since Paul battled the circumcision party.
Happily, the Church has not changed in its love of liberty, either, and continues to guarantee its members the right to be eccentric — just so long as they are orthodox.

I was reading an interesting article the other day which presented the results of studies done that find we are effectively contracepting our water!   I think the studies have been around for   awhile so you would think more would be made of them.   But for me this was rather a shocking and scary thought!  

Scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a beautiful and seemingly untouched mountain stream called Boulder Creek and were shocked to find that 101 were female, 12 were male and ten were strange “intersex” fish with male and female features!   SCARY!

They studied the fish and decided the unusual sex ratio was largely caused by estrogens and other steroid hormones from birth-control pills and patches excreted in urine into the city’s sewage system and then into the creek.

Since this initial study many more have been done and similarly found the presence of female hormones  in water and the environment make  the male species less male.   Scientists in western Washington also found that synthetic estrogen drastically reduces the fertility of male rainbow trout.

However, since publishing these studies scientists have found that few people really seem to care.   We are organic, global warming and environment crazy it seems, but when it comes to contracepting our water and possible feminining our male population, the research falls on deaf ears.   Probably because it would much too inconvenient to stop using contraceptives for most people.

“But Catholics shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for environmentalists to advocate a boycott of contraceptives, said George Harden, a board member of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, based in Steubenville, Ohio.

“If you’re killing mosquitoes to save people from the West Nile virus, you can count on secular environmentalists to lay down in front of the vapor truck, claiming some potential side effect that might result from the spray,” Harden said. “But if birth control deforms fish – backed by the proof of an EPA study – and threatens the drinking supply, mum will be the word.”
Harden said the growing knowledge of estrogen-polluted water may expose the cultural double-standards that protect birth control from the scrutiny given to other chemicals and drugs.”

“It’s going to start looking funny,” Harden said. “The radical environmentalist won’t eat a corn chip if the corn contacted a pesticide. But they view it a sacred right and obligation to consume synthetic chemicals that alter a woman’s natural biological function.”

(Wayne Laugesen, Contracepting the environment – Birth-control poisoning of streams leave U.S. environmentalists mum, National Catholic Register , 7/11/2007)

You can read an interview with Dr Susan Jobling about the results of her study finding feminized fish here: http://www.in-cites.com/papers/DrSusanJobling.html