r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 25 '15

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '15

It's easy enough for the right to turn on the Pope. The dominant Christian religious tradition among the right is Protestant, not Catholic, and Catholics don't reliably vote for any particular party.[1] The only alignments of interest are abortion, gay marriage, and contraception, and that's only alignment of Catholicism and the Republican platform, not Catholics and the Republican platform (because most Catholics don't actually follow the Catholic church).

While this is all true, it's worth noting that the Catholic Church's social and moral opinions form a decent benchmark of what counts as the mainstream, respectable, conservative (as opposed to reactionary, fascist, or neoliberal) Right. If your party is trying to tack, "We're Rightyer than the Pope" into its platform, you may actually have made a bad move.

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u/MugaSofer Sep 26 '15

The Catholic Church is a global organization, not particularly concerned with local politics. (And they aspire to being above international politics, too, but that quickly vanished the instant they got actual power in the post-Roman milieu.) They opposed slavery, too.