Aiwendil, great post! I haven’t had this much fun since… well, school!
In regard to movie critics, I’m speaking of the act of censuring, that is judging something as bad (or in the case of SW II, absolutely horrendous), not restricting access. This is the type of censuring that is practiced by theologians and ultimately bishops in my religion. Contrary to popular opinion the Church doesn’t, nor can it, restrict access to any written material, unless not having a book on a school library is considered restriction. (In that case it is probably at the discretion of the administrator, and usually for the same reasons you would find some books absent from public school libraries, that is, they just don’t happen to have a copy of it).
Something tells me that you would never scream such a thing. However, not just some people, but most people do. The reason for this is because most people lack a language to deal with the objective reality of religion, as is evidenced by our constant referral to rights language that neatly sets religion aside as a peripheral subject relevant only to the individual.
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Still, you can't deny (at least, I don't believe you can) that Catholic schools teach Catholicism. If a student therein were to ask a teacher if there is a God, what would the answer be? Would it be "I don't know?" Because that is the open-minded answer.
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I have to strongly disagree on this. Agnosticism is not equivalent to open-mindedness. When having an open mind strips us of all convictions, then the old adage, “if you have an open mind, your brains fall out,” is true. Having an open mind, rather, is having the willingness to test all things. When something fails the test, it is not close minded to reject it; likewise, if something proves the test, it is not close minded to accept it. Agnosticism does not open debate, it closes it. Once you admit that something can not be known, you make all further inquiry pointless.
It would be very difficult to argue that Catholic schools do not primarily teach Catholicism. In fact, that is the only reason why they exist, and reading, writing, and arithmetic are secondary. Catholic schools “cater to Catholic interests” because they are Catholic. The connotation that this is a bad thing perplexes me, but I may be reading something into your post that is not there. There are those in the world who freely choose to be Catholic, and believe it or not, there are those who freely choose to be good Catholics. Can you fault the Catholic Church for striving to provide guidance and nourishment for these people? Non-Catholics, it is true, can have problems in this atmosphere, but lets face it, if you want your children to grow up as Marxists, you are going to have problems with the public school system.
In order to distinguish between purely philosophical ethics, such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or secular fields of ethics such as medical ethics or legal ethics, and ethical systems based on revelation, it was a common convention for us to use the term “morality” when dealing with the later, and “ethics” when dealing with the former. Ethics then is a broader field than morality.
Toleration in our modern parlance receives more devotion than it deserves, especially since we must maintain a higher degree of intolerance than tolerance to function in communities. The legal system, a vast labyrinth of volume after volume after volume, is the most prevalent monument to intolerance that comes to mind. In fact, there is much more we are intolerant of than tolerant. Compare all these law books to the single piece of paper that represents what we tolerate.
In my country, my neighbor can spout all manner of racist sentiments he wants, but I’m not required to tolerate this, both from my own personal convictions, and out of genuine concern for my neighbor. Does my intolerance give me the right to burn down his home, run him through, and starve his wife and children? Of course not! But my intolerance can take the form of constantly challenging him and the views he holds, and, of course, this would entail an emphatic, “you are wrong” occasionally, which is a form of censorship. Just because you can say whatever you want, doesn’t mean that what you say must go unchallenged (as this thread demonstrates very well), or that you are right. The challenging of my neighbor’s views, or the emphatic denial of their validity, is not the same thing as repressing him.
In the above example, my faith, or at the very least, my personal conviction, takes precedence over toleration. I don’t disagree with this statement: “It is possible to be tolerant both of a religion and of ideas that contradict that religion.” However, it is not possible to be faithful to one’s religion and to be tolerant of ideas that contradict that religion. If that were true, then why should anyone believe in anything? But, I hope that I demonstrated well enough above, intolerance doesn’t equal repression, nor should it.