Incidentally, if the numbers matter, your use of the “wicked/pursueth” phrase is 13 since 2005, nine years instead of the fifteen and out of, say, 26000 posts instead of 43,400+. Notably, I think, 10 of those occurrences are from February 2009 and later, correlating with the Obama administration and what I’ll cheerfully speculate is your discomfort with and reaction to a perceived rise of liberalism in America. Perhaps it you who feels pursued.
Meaningless pop-psychology, of course. Beyond you being repetitive and pretentious, I have no basis for serious theorizing except for my own amusement.
That’s what I commented upon, then. In your magic wand world.
Thanks. I’m not indignant, though. I’m simply pointing out your willingness to dictate your standards for the rest of the world to accept. But since it’s now clear you’d only do that if you were equipped with the technology to actually make it happen, I fell better.
Of course, the California teacher’s union is not an organization that INTENDS for its members to molest children, and neither is the American Board of Internal Medicine. And neither is the Catholic Church.
I don’t defend the Church’s past handling of molesting priests. But neither do I distance myself from the great works the Church has done. One does not erase the other: the good of the Church does not allow use to erase the molestations; the horror of the few individuals does not allow us to erase the vast good done by the vast majority of the Church.
Nice suggestion that my “world” is one of magical-wand thinking. Obvious and self-serving, but nice.
Bullshit again. Mere speculation on how one would change to world if one could is not a sign of frustrated dictatorialism. It’s a commonplace activity you yourself have engaged in.
Even if true… so? Your cite about the teacher (singular) doesn’t happen to mention if the California’s teacher union covered up his alleged activities, moved him from school to school… the article doesn’t mention the union at all. Is it even called that: “The California Teacher’s Union” ?
After some googling of my own, I see it’s called the “California Teacher’s Association”. Well, the name doesn’t really matter, anyway.
The American Board of Internal Medicine is not explicitly mentioned in your second cite, let alone that it enabled the doctor (again, singular) in his alleged molestation. There is a reference to “state medical boards” charging the accused with practicing after his license was suspended.
In neither case am I seeing anything comparable to the decades- (perhaps century-) long practice of the Roman Catholic Church in enabling and covering for child molestors. I’m sure if you did more than another cursory google search, you could find long-established institutions with comparable records. Heck, we had a gargantuan thread about Penn State, and that was just one molester also, and I’m not certain if any particular Catholic diocese has been sanctioned to the same extent Penn was.
Debatable, but irrelevant. Is there systematic corruption in the CTA and the ABIM that is comparable to that in the RCC to cover up the crimes of multiple offenders and indeed enable more crimes? A priest is known to have molested children, gets transferred to a new parish with only cursory (if that) oversight. Do you want to debate if this reflects an “intent” on the part of the RCC to enable future offenses?
Well, whatever historical good the RCC has done (and finding further outrages is not difficult in the slightest), its mystical beliefs and rituals are self-serving power structure is something I am comfortable contemplating humanity as discarding.
Not to single out the RCC, of course. I view organized religion in general as something no longer needed and worth phasing out.
The relevance for this thread is that mystical beliefs on the part of the Hobby Lobby owners have been used to skirt laws that apply to other for-profit corporations. This is not a result I see as positive (though I can recognize that it conforms to an not-unreasonable interpretation of current American law), which is why I said earlier that I was hoping it will lead to more cases and a backlash that leads to a diminishing of religion’s influence over law.
Since I am a rational person, I have no illusions about this being easy or inevitable.
In other words, you suggest the Catholic Church is unique in some way, even though statistically the incidence of molesters in priests’ garb is not particularly different from the per capita number of molesting rabbis, molesting plumbers, or molesting Canadians.
What sets the church apart was it’s reach. It is the only hierarchical organization that had the ability to reassign offenders to new locations with near-absolute control.
Sure, because it didn’t. It reflected the mistaken belief that therapy and prayer would be effective in preventing an offender from offending again.
You cannot seriously contend that the Roman Catholic Church, as an institution, intended to facilitate molesting of kids.
Sure, and in your magic wand world you’re totally comfortable telling people they have to accept your determination of the matter.
Personally I am not so much chuffed at the ruling as I am at the remedy. I think a better remedy would be that if a law or regulation is found to infringe on one person’s religious beliefs then the proper remedy should be that the law or regulation is void for everyone and not just the person in question. That way we avoid the law treating people differently based on their beliefs. If it is important enough to force me to pay for certain things to be covered by insurance then it is important enough for everyone. If it is fine to let Bob off the hook then I should have that option as well.
That’s what the evidence says, Counselor. It also says you, by your absolute loyalty anyway, are an accomplice to those massive, systemic crimes. It’s about time you dealt with it.
No, you want your own to prevail instead. We get it, Precious Snowflake.
What steps would have been taken, if that were so, that were not? I don’t think the RCC could be said to have had some kind of organisational scheme to further the amount of child molestation in the world, that’s certainly ridiculous. But moving offending priests to places where they could continue their offences and keeping the knowledge away from other authorities seems about as far as they could go in terms of facilitating those particular priests, at least.
Bergoglio has offered that there were as many as 4500 pedophile priests that his organization knows about, following a long and disgraceful period of denial and footdragging, which continues today. Bernard Law is still safe as long as he never returns to the US, and he even gets to vote for pope.
But even if hiring and enabling and protecting pedophiles was/is a matter of organizational culture rather than formal, written policy, so what? Are they any less culpable as an organization due to not writing it down?
Supporting, including financially, an organization that you know is engaging in criminal activities, and even volunteering as their pro bono counsel / defender on message boards, is what else, then?
I’m not saying there’s no responsibility there. Or blame. I’m just saying that I don’t think it would be at all reasonable to say the RCC took steps to deliberately increase child molestation - they were just incredibly, foolishly pisspoor at stopping it, if and when they tried.
I certainly wouldn’t do it, personally. If nothing else, I can’t see how I would square donating my money to an organisation that did something like this when there’s plenty out there that don’t have track records of covering up pedophilia. But “accomplice” says to me something much more direct and purposeful than anything you mention here.
Are you inviting me to list large organizations that are hundreds of years old or something, just to compile a list of possible alternate choices? I’m not really interested in pursuing a “but they do it too” line of argument, I admit.
I’m saying the RCC is bad in a very particular way, and in a way incidentally that has nothing to do with Catholic beliefs - it’s a large, old organization that has considerable influence and power and insulation to some degree from criminal prosecution and has suppressed public knowledge of abuses taking place by its members for many decades that we know about, has taken steps to blame victims, has obstructed investigation and prosecution, and there is no doubt that the previous two heads of the organization were well aware of these problems, even while resisting doing anything about them.
There’s nothing persecutory aimed at Catholics here, if that’s where you’re going. If the XYZ Corporation had a similar record, I’d be similarly outraged. The aggravating element is that ostensibly secular governments have paid and are paying deference to the RCC because it is a religious organization, whereas the XYZ Corporation would have been destroyed by criminal prosecution.
Are there systematic organizational cover-up efforts among rabbis, plumbers or Canadians? If so, nail those organizations, too.
Well, whether or not that’s true, they used that ability to reassign offenders with the goal of protecting the organization itself, not the children the offenders were hurting. It’s not clear to me how this in any way defends the RCC.
How many times does an offender have to reoffend before this belief is re-evaluated? How long can mistaken belief be maintained as an excuse despite evidence that it is mistaken?
I can. I do. More accurately, the RCC’s intent was to protect itself from scandal. That more children were molested as a result is, as best, a sign of comparative indifference. The RCC is certainly not alone in this - numerous organizations have chosen denial over action, pretending to not know a problem existed, pretending to not know it would only continue if not addressed.
My magic wand world doesn’t actually exist. I know it. You’re only disingenuously claiming not to know it.
Teachers unions, and public schools in general, have indeed done exactly that.
[
](Bill to expedite firing teachers is rejected)Many, many schools settle for “if you let us get rid of this guy, we promise not to tell his next school,” so it’s hard to distinguish the blame to the schools and the blame to the union, but this is an immense problem that is well covered up, with the unions and school administrators covering for each other and the media disinclined to investigate.
The most thorough study I know of concluded that about 6.7% of all school children experience some kind of “educator sexual misconduct,” that involves actual, physical contact. Considering the number of kids in public schools, that dwarfs the allegations against the RCC.
No argument. I’m sure lots of other organizations would fit the bill also. I see you brought better cites than Bricker did.
Sure, possibly. I don’t see how someone else’s criminal activity mitigates the RCC’s criminal activity, though. I’ll cheerfully state for the record that any organization, religious or otherwise, that engages in systemic cover-ups of this kind should be thoroughly investigated and if need be disbanded. I’m willing to accept the RCC as the lower threshold, so I have no problem with potentially crushing legal action against the RCC and anyone worse. Cyros, your proposal is interesting. I think something comparable is being discussed in a current thread about a Senate bill seeking to equalize medical regulation such that abortion clinics can no longer be singled out for onerous burdens that have no medical justification.
In the same sense, do they believe if a Lover says to it’s beloved;“Here is my heart Take it and say we will never part"Or if I give my heart to you will you handle it with Care?” Are they then Physically taking their heart from their bodies or is it symbolic?
It was my understanding that, to Catholics, the transubstantiation is not symbolic at all. The substance of the wafter and wine actually do change to the body and blood of Christ even if the form does not. If we take Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the shadow remains exactly the same but the substance causing that shadow has changed. The change is real and not symbolic at all even if we cannot apprehend that change.
(the above is purely my understanding as a non-Catholic and, as such, is subject to change based on responses from actual Catholics)
As a post script: I have RC friends and family, they take the meaning when Jesus was quoted as saying “Here"IS” my body, Here “IS” my blood to mean it actually turns into the body and Blood of Christ. It is a belief and they in all respect do not see it as a cracker, it is a piece of bread. I believe early RC’s used a loaf and broke it but as the years went by it was more sanitary to make what they call the hosts. Perhaps some RC can describe it better than I can.