Whoa whoa whoa, the guy with the artery in my hypothetical wasn’t a criminal, he’s just an innocent victim. The only criminals here are the pedophile-protecting Catholic priests.
Very appropriate for you, hamlet–
But are you sure you own a Toyota?
That IS the question…
Please accept my apologies. I did misunderstand.
I don’t think you should call them criminals as that implies they have been tried and convicted and they haven’t.
What? … What?? 
I guess not.
I’m very sorry to hear that. A close friend of mine has a similar issue with her brother.
Her parents, or at least her mother(with dad doing what she wants) won’t let him go out of some mad hope, against the advice of his doctors, that he might “wake up.”
If anything, I honestly think the family would have been better off if he’d been killed in the car accident. At least then they could simply say goodbye and move on, or at least move on as well as can be expected.
Stellar synthesis, friend Bricker. If I may engage in a dialectic of my own? There are good ways, fair ways and poor ways to prosecute scumbags. The poor way is to fabricate evidence against them or bribe the judge. The good way is to only prosecute for laws one can be reasonably certain they violated. The fair way is to be disingenuous, to exploit the biases of the jury and to prosecute crimes unrelated to the scumbags main behaviour.
So far we have dismantled “the least of these my brothers”, “sell your material possessions” and “lilies of the field” (the population could not be sustained). This equally applies to “ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake”: far better to surreptitiously spread the faith and be pragmatic about it. Obnoxiousness will only get one so far: claiming mutual compatibility of tenets and conglomeration of beliefs is likelier to lead to survival. Similarly, praying in public ought to be encouraged once a religion has become entrenched in society: while it may lead to a reaction, a higher profile will help it spread.
Likewise, we cannot claim that woe will betide lawyers. Law, along with math, is the basis of civil society (it being merely the official recognition of fact). As long as laws are based on consensus, there will always be dissent and coercion will be necessary to stifle that dissent. This makes exhortations not to resist evil meaningless. We can also extrapolate that “they know not what they do” is to be discarded, since humans are held to have agency and the phrase was addressed to individuals above the age of majority.
It is impractical to assume that humans will have one mate for life. One study put average life sex partners for Britons at 8.8. The Coolidge effect is well documented. Perpetual virginity is another doctrine which can be dismissed out of hand, given references to the siblings of Jesus. Quite apart from coveting one’s neighbour, it is also juvenile to prohibit coveting the possessions of a neighbour - relative deprivation is an impetus to action.
There is an inherent contradiction between the claim that faith can move mountains and that one ought not put the lord to the test. Every prayer is an attempt to reinforce existing beliefs, an attempt to prove, rather than disprove, the existence of a personal God.
The requirement for a bishop to be the husband of one wife is clearly tosh, given the number of other important duties a bishop must carry out. Quite so with the notion that Jesus was presenting his physical body for his disciples to eat - they clearly had other means of sustenance.
Now that we’ve dispensed with the teachings of Jesus, his predecessors and his apostles, we can establish an effective church.
That’s right the Catholic Church, who would have you believe are moral arbiters on this earth with a direct line to God himself, admit no wrongdoing in this case where it is clear they protected and enabled a paedophile.
I sometimes wish they were right and there was a Hell.
Because he’s still a cardinal, he’s participating in the conclave to elect the next Pope.
If the rest of the cardinals had any decency, they’d exclude him. Of course, who knows how many of the other cardinals were also involved in coverups of priestly child sexual abuse?
Vatican delenda est.
– Licinius, Roman Emperor, 308-324 (paraphrased)
But, somehow…
How profound.
And inappropriate, given the data showing how severely shrinking are the numbers of people who still offer their loyalty to that denomination. It’s a little early to say definitively that they’ve become totally irrelevant to the world except for a few old, deluded diehards, but *delenda *is unquestionably the direction.
Probably every European, North american, Australasian and South American one.
Really? You have some reason for thinking the African and Asian Churches are clean?
Because from what I’ve seen, those scandals will be breaking soon.
I wonder how much of the conversation is along the lines of “*Any *of you guys wanna tell us you’re sure you’re clean? Anybody? We need to pick somebody. We sure got fooled by Ratzo. Mahoney, Law, you two just shut the fuck up, okay?”
No reason at all other than I’m not aware of any specific scandals but I’m sure you’re right and it’s only a matter of time. But for the regions I named the scale of atrocities commited by the RCC in them is so immense that it is inconceivable that the RCC isn’t guilty en masse at the higher levels. The RCC is guilty from the Pope on down and IMHO should be treated as an international criminal organisation.
…to find it’s living above a gay sauna.
Ha-ha </Nelson Muntz>
The organization and its leaders, yes. But there are still many, many very fine individuals in it, doing wonderful work, who have had nothing whatever to do with child rape or Vatican Bank corruption, and are unfairly labeled as guilty by association. If only they had the ability to do that work inside another denomination, or outside religion altogether - or at least the ability to decide the RCC as it exists today isn’t *The *Church after all.
If people associate and give their allegiance to such a corrupt institution then that’s the price they pay.
Besides, I don’t beleive for one secnd that the ‘good’ done by the RCC is anything more than a feather on the scales.
This article details its expenditure.
So. In the USA 62% of the funding could simply be allocated to some non-criminal organisation. And whatever comes from donations etc can also go to same. And people could also devote their time and energy to same.
Besides the Mafia and Hamas do all kinds of good works also. Don’t get them a pass.
Maybe to some organisation that doesn’t kill people by lying about AIDS and contraception.
Doing good does not require the RCC. More good could be done if its assets were seized, sold off and the proceeeds used for charitable ends.
Just like it wasn’t possible for anyone of goodwill to turn the blindest of eyes to the crimes of Communism after the Hungary invasion it is no longer possible to do that with the RCC. At this point you’re just aiding and abetting.
Time to start again and build the kind of Church that won’t have Jesus weeping when he returns.