Myles, Since the Roman Catholic dogma of Papal infallibility when speaking on church matters ex cathedra was formalized only in the late 1800's that could not have been the reason Martin Luther was excommunicated.
Martin Luther was excommunicated because of one simple sentence. Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. He was oredered to recant certain of his writings and refused.
I seem to rember saying the same as you are saying. He was defying papal authority. It was more a matter of politics than religion. I agree with what you say about that the ex-cathedra business . But the history of the papacy is one of keeping people in line ( crowd contol ). As for doctrines, they made it up as they went alomg and they are still at it.
A few years ago I looked through a Catholic catechism in a local bookshop and noticed they had changed or softened their stance on a number of issues.
When I was a boy I was taught that a suicide went to Hell because he was guilty of the sin of despair. He could not be buried in consecrated ground and so on. What a comfort for grieving relatives ! The Church has softened it stance. Their current position is that they have nothing to say, it is up to God, but they will pray for the soul of a suicide. Having nothing to say on the matter suggest a doubt concerning the soul of the deceased. So what are the relatives to think ?
Mere humans talk of suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed.
Limbo has been abolished. It always struck me as cruel that a mother whose child died before it could be baptized would, in addition to her normal grief, have to believe that her child would never see God. So much for a loving God.
I may be cynical but I suspect that Limbo has been abolished so the RC church can better compete for souls in Afrca , against Muslims who have no such stupid doctrine.
I could go on ad nauseaum about the nonsense people are expected to believe. When I started learning German. I came across a German Reader in a secondhand bookshop in Dublin. Among the contents ,I discovered copies of some of Luther 's letters to his children, from which I concluded that he was not the demon I had been told he was. Additionally, I found that many of his objections chimed with objections that I had arrived at independently.
All that was many years ago. Having looked closely at religion, I chose atheism. That was about 60 years ago und ich stehe immer noch auf demselben Standpunkt.
