Catholics are making it up.

I'm not suggesting that you should be "deferential", just less rabid.You're stuck in the past, like Faith. Today's Catholic Church is barely on the radar of dangerous religious groups.

You're losing the plot. We've been talking about your statement in Message 264:

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And these puddled men will emerge shortly and declare on how they think families should behave and we're supposed to take them seriously?

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My point is that no, we shouldn't take seriously their ideas on how families should behave. If African families take them seriously and spread HIV as a result, that's a different issue. "We" are not Africans. "We" can not solve African problems by blathering on the Internet.

No. Best to stop whining about it on the Internet and do something tangible. There probably are plumbers who rape children - but it isn't something that they learn in plumbing school and it isn't something that the plumbers' union recommends. It makes no sense to blame plumbing for everything the plumbers do.

Wrong again. Whining is only half of the purpose of this site. The other half is telling whiners how silly they're being, whether they're whining about science being wrong or something else. You could probably make your case better without the hyperbole.

To recap: a few bad apples in the Catholic Church does not translate into a systemic problem in the Catholic Church.

You have that backwards. We don't believe miracles are possible because none of them has ever been substantiated.

It doesn't much matter who is doing the investigating. The rules of what constitutes a genuine miracle are still made up by the Catholic Church, aren't they? If you tell me to give you a number between 1 and 10, I can't say 49, can I?, even if it's the right answer. I don't refuse to believe in miracles. I don't refuse to believe in Bigfoot or unicorns or leprechauns either.Do you "refuse" to believe in unicorns?

It can be frustrating to find out that you're wrong. You can try to end the frustration by nailing down your Caps Lock key. Or you can just stop being wrong.

If only you can sense it and many of us can't, that suggests that what you're sensing isn't real - i.e. it isn't something outside your head. It certainly can be wrong. If you believe in a young earth, you're wrong. If you believe in Noah's Flood, you're wrong.If you believe in Bigfoot or unicorns or leprechauns, you might not be wrong - but you shouldn't act as if they were real. If the leprechaun tells you to burn things, you shouldn't do it.

I like that phrase. Interesting juxtaposition there. As far as I know, the Catholic Church doesn't command people to abstain from meats - but you claim that God did until Noah.

I've asked that same question and got no answer. That would make more sense; God gave Adam and Eve animal skins to replace their fig leaves. It would be funnier (though even worse linguistically) if it was "sieze the fish".

Well, of course fish is meat in the Biblical context - e.g. shedding of blood.

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Genesis 9:3-5 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man.

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Fish got blood.

I wasn't sure if i had had the discussion with you specifically so I didn't accuse you of saying it - but some literalist nutbars claim that the passage in Genesis was God giving Noah permission for the first time to eat meat.You literalist nutbars have a problem conflating the Adam and Eve story with the Cain and Abel story and the Noah story. They're different stories. They don't need to agree in every detail. Trying to shoehorn all of them into agreement is what makes your theology so stupid.

You can't eat crustaceans at all. That would be like wearing a cotton-polyester shirt, strictly taboo. The same would apply to insects, including the four-legged ones, unless they have cloven hooves and chew their cud. I'm not sure where octopuses fit in in Judaic taxonomy.

The problem is that you can't seem to get your story straight. Why would we not? Eating the meat would be less objectionable than wasting the meat. It also doesn't say that the "vegetarian rule" was a rule. God said they could eat this. He didn't say they couldn't eat that. It's the conclusions you draw that are stupid. Imagine the stupid conclusions if you tried to fit The Grapes of Wrath and The Lord of the Rings together. And since the stories don't fit together, we can conclude that it is not God's work. God, if He existed, would not need you to try to stitch His stories together.