Bible-Thumping Catholics?

I came across a link to an article in the National Catholic Reporter on Facebook the other day.  The article was about how the Catholic Church in Europe might be bowing to pressure to deal in some positive way with gay marriage...though gay relationships are frowned upon and gay marriage is banned by the Church, perhaps some kind of  "blessing" of the relationship could be finagled without everybody going to hell about it.  I didn't read the article, but I did click into the comment section just out of curiosity. 

I had to laugh at a thread that had two commenters spouting bible verses at each other.  The Catholic Church is about as connected to the bible as Santa Claus is to the Nativity story.  My sense when I was growing up Catholic was that the bible was an inscrutable sacred text which only theologians and scholars tackled...we peons were entitled to nothing more meaty than the watered-down and politically engineered interpretations they passed down to us.   

So I had to throw in my own comment.  Which no one has as yet commented upon, but I thought it worth bringing here:

"I was brought up Catholic, went to Catholic school. I have to laugh when I see Catholics quoting the bible. We were never taught bible in religion class, only catechism--Catholic dogma. The bible was a book you had in the house and cherished as if it was some kind of icon...you didn't actually READ it (and since it was the KJV, you would have had a hard time reading it, anyway..) I literally knew nothing about the bible until I became a "born again Christian" in my twenties.

"Unfortunately, the most enduring thing I learned about the bible during that time was that you can cherry-pick "scripture" to prove blessing or damnation of just about anything. You can bless sin (many a born-again Christian has "forgiven" adultery using the example of David and Bathsheba. Knew a pastor who fooled around on his wife, married his lover and named their first child "Solomon." Sheesh!)

"Any thinking human gets to the point of understanding that Christianity does anything BUT honor the Spirit of Creation. Neither does it promote brotherhood, empathy, compassion, or love of fellow man (esecially if he is in any way different from you.) One only needs to look at the violent track record of organized religion over the ages to see how poisonous it is. I would advise gay couples to walk away from such a destructive, violent and ultimately evil source and seek out blessing from some agency that is actually capable of  and joyous about conferring it. Rather than trying to change a backward and judgmental Church."

With my apologies to my Christian friends.  I am normally not (publicly) so angry and condemnatory about Christianity--I know there are fine people who embrace it with love and understanding.  But sometimes the intractable judgmentalism that seems to be so much a part of the basic foundations of the faith just cause me to...lose it.