Dutch Catholics De-Baptize Themselves To Protest The Pope's Anti-Gay Stance

I understand 'faith,' that sort of untenable belief in some one or some thing, but I don't understand 'blind faith.' I don't understand the idea that, if you were raised one religion, then you must stay there and never question and never ask why and never demand explanations.

Of course, I'm talking mostly about the Catholic Church, and those who choose to follow a Pope and a church that allow children to be molested, a church that has worked hard to protect pedophiles, a church that, while masking it's message as one of love, continually denounced Gays and Lesbians. 

I don't understand how people can continue to follow that church and that pope, who has basically said, in his Christmas message of all places, that The Gays are destroying everything.

Of course, he failed to mention his own crimes of aiding and abetting child rapists.

But how do people justify, rationalize, or explain, their allegiance to a church like that? How can you attend Catholic Church services, knowing that any money donated will probably go to defending pedophiles, or paying off massive claims of child sexual abuse? How can you rationalize your faith with that crime?

And how do you rationalize the Pope's continuing messages of hate and fear-mongering of the LGBT community in his, alleged, messages of Peace and Love?

Well, a lot of Dutch Catholics have decided to stop rationalizing their faith with a body that protects sexual predators, to stop standing alongside those who preach hate and intolerance, and they have begun a process of leaving the Catholic Church over it's anti-gay, pro-pedophile policies.

are researching how they can leave the church in protest at its opposition to gay marriage, according to the creator of a website aimed at helping them find the information.

Tom Roes created a website--ontdopen.nl, also known as de-baptize.nl--which allows people to download the documents necessary to leave the Church. Traffic on his site has soared from about ten visits a day to more than 10,000 a day, all in the last month since Pope Benny;s latest diatribe against The Gays and Marriage Equality.

Now, Roes makes it clear that a person cannot actually be ‘de-baptized’ because baptism is an event, but his website allows people the ability to publicly unsubscribe or de-register themselves as Catholics.

Roes says he left the Church and set up his website partly because he was angry about the way the Church downplayed or covered-up sexual abuse in Catholic orphanages, boarding schools and seminaries, but when he began hearing the Pope's "messages" of intolerance and hate for the LGBT community, he decided enough was enough and began to help others symbolically de-baptize themselves.

The question of faith, though, still remains. The faith of a Pope who expends so much time and energy denigrating a segment of society, turning his back on that group, and asking his "faithful" flock to do the same; who has the faith, upon finding out that a man of the cloth has betrayed his flock by sexually abusing a child, that helping the pedophile is the right choice. His faith is that hate will rule, that hate will win, but, at least in the Netherlands, it seems people are putting their faith in themselves, and one another, and not behind an angry man on a Golden Throne.

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