Vatican forgives Galileo after only 400 years

[Husar]

Our savior selected Peter as the rock upon which to build this church -- even knowing that Peter would deny him in his moment of crisis.

Yes, but he never said a lot of guys in funny expensive hats should follow Peter. And he especially never said those should be selected by humans, Peter was selected by Jesus himself, not by a bunch of disciples who held a few votes about who is the greatest and closest to God. In fact, the disciples tried that and Jesus wasn't exactly amused. Now the church always holds a vote about who will be the next pope, how that can be seen in the spirit of Jesus is beyond me. Like I said in another thread, show me a place in the bible where God did not choose his representative himself.

That humanity is central to the faith, and to the Church itself. Humanity is, almost definitionally, far from flawless. In studying organizations for much of my adult life, I have yet to find one that got everything right and kept on doing so throughout its history.

Which is why the leadership of the church should be in God's hands and not in the Pope's hands, now if you do not get a response from god then either there is something wrong with your faith or how you ask him or there is no God, if you then put a pope in a golden hat and robe on top of your organization, it might remind you of the story where Moses was receiving God's words on top of a mountain while the people grew impatient and put a golden calf at the top of their organization.
God wasn't amused about that either.

You imply that the doctrine of infallibility in matters spiritual, coupled with the ex cathedra decisions of some Holy Fathers that have altered, or indeed reversed, the decisions of others who walked in the shoes of Peter, renders the whole concept (and by extension the entirety of the faith) null. Yet you yourself imply a fixed reality -- "the reality of the world and the inherent truth of it does not change..." -- even though reality DOES change, our perceptions and understanding of that reality are constantly changing, (though not always because of a change in Holy Fathers) and you and I may have from the outset a very different conception of the inherent truth of existence. Is it not possible for the Church itself to grow and change as its understanding of God changes? Or must we forever be bound by the words and actions of the original 5 bishops without hope of growth or change? I would assert that changes over time ARE integral to the faith -- it's part of growing closer to God.

I thought the whole point of the Pope was being God's representative on earth? If he is just as stupid as you and me, why put him on top and why not just use my own interpretation of the message? It may be wrong, but his may be just a wrong or even worse.

Concerning changes, God never changes and if you believe that Jesus was his son then his word is the word of God, he said you cannot buy your way into heaven, the church said you could and sold those letters of indulgence which haven't been abolished until today last I heard. Jesus also said your deeds won't save you, the church keeps telling people to pray several times to be saved etc. etc.
This is not a change of perception, this is corrupting the actual message from God himself.

The church spent years as a barely-connected group of enclaves. Unification into the larger, and inevitably more bureacratic, church was a way to strengthen the Church's ability to reach people and bring more peope the News. Did it also come with an increase of temporal authority that some misused? Clearly so. Does this mean that coalescence was a bad choice? I think not.

It lead to certain corruptions of the actual message which is the actual bad part.

The point is you and God, and growing that relationship.

That is indeed correct, but the catholic church in my and many other's eyes has added a lot of stuff to this that runs very contrary to what God wants from his people in order to advance the relationship as I tried to point out above.