You are free to share your opinions. You seem to only have the tens of thousands of rapes by priests in your mind’s eye, but I’m talking about nearly 2000 years of systematic corruption. Again, I believe you can quantify this…the Catholic Church is the most corrupt organization in the history of humanity. Of course, they have ample time on that scale to draw from since most organizations aren’t that old. But, damn…there is not a single sin or even bad thing you can think of that didn’t occur as a direct result of the Catholic Church.
Seriously…sit there for a second and try to come up with something in your head that they haven’t done…there are a few. They never launched a nuclear weapon at anyone. But, you have to really strain…
Where did I argue against any of the atrocities that occurred. You are arguing against yourself.
I said that I know there have been failings and some good and some bad leaders. I’m not a fan of the current Pope, for example. For me, it’s not like being in a fraternity where you just leave or bounce around because of what happened 20 years or 500 years ago.
You are free to have your opinion as an atheist.
Copy that. I am, however, not an atheist. I just don’t believe in your religion. No harm, no foul.
Agnostic?
I’m not sure I’d categorize it as such. It’s not that I don’t believe in a creator, or instigator, or even that we can’t know anything about it…but, just that man has built up threads throughout history in an effort of trying to explain why we’re here and what for, and those threads have built upon one another and into the religions we currently inhabit. I don’t believe in religion in general. I’ll have to refrain from discussing Hinduism, as I just don’t know much about it. From proto-indo-Iranian religions being built upon to create things like Zoroastrianism which were built upon to create things like Judaism and then Christianity and then Islam, each one builds on the other, but you can trace them. This story came from this then moved into this story, and so on.
I just think religions are people trying to answer basic questions, but without the needed knowledge, turn to supernatural explanations. But, I ascribe to none of them…though, the study thereof has always been a passion.
One source on the subject of history of religions is Robert Spencer. Admittedly, Spencer is highly critical of Islam. Nevertheless, his writing on religion I assess are not only interesting but formidable.
Content of character, not religion, is truly the measuring standard of assessing human worth. This is not to say, some individuals are buoyed by their faith or that their faith positively affected their lives. As most terrorists are Muslims, at least according to the Department of State, it is not unreasonable to attribute Islamic terrorism to Islam. As I’ve written often, Muslims are not intrinsically radical, but their faith Islam is radical and as we’ve discussed ad infinitum Islam cannot be changed according to its own doctrines.
I’ve often thought of writing a speculative fiction piece, not about waterboarding Warden for his own good, but contemplating how the Arab world would be changed were Mohammad to have been defeated by Arabian Jews rather than slaughtered at Medina and other Arabian venues. What would the Middle East look like today were it governed by Jews. Would I be making an extravagant statement that judging from the contemporary success of Israel, that if the Jewish governed the Middle East, it would be a land of Eden with respect for human rights, research universities, scientific discoveries, Nobel Prize winners galore, and other manifestation of a higher, more ethical civilization.
Rather than bullying Warden in which I find a certain delight in doing, I commend Warden for being curious, taking time to read even if is stuff to parry my own more enlightened offerings. I would liked to have thought John Quincy Adams wrote the piece I submitted as being by his pen, but Warden found my attribution to be incorrect. Therefore I am compelled to offer an opinion on Islam by a far greater genius than Adams, that being Winston Churchill. Here is some splendid scholarship titled The Churchill Project provided by Hillsdale College, a wonderful school to send your children. Small wonder, a Nobel Prize in literature was comferred upon Sir Winston.
Shocker…You attatched yourself to warden’s nuts long ago
How cute…You have a little friend now
Already detailed - he’s a lifetime propagandist and racist who’s been banned from actual countries.
That’s because you too are a racist who’s singularly focused on said subject
That’s unfortunate, as you don’t appear to have much character. In fact, you’re “characterized” by your consistent misrepresentation of the truth. You have an almost allergic reaction to it.
Another lie. The Dept of State only deals with foreign actors. The FBI is the nation’s lead federal law enforcement agency for investigating and preventing acts of terrorism.
" As of 2020, right-wing extremist terrorism accounted for the majority of terrorist attacks and plots in the US and has killed more people in the continental United States since the September 11 attacks than Islamic terrorism."
A 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that out of the 85 deadly extremist incidents which had occurred since September 11, 2001, far right-wing extremist groups were responsible for 73%, while radical Islamist extremists were responsible for 27%. The total number of deaths which was caused by each group was about the same, though 41% of the deaths were attributable to radical Islamists and they all occurred in a single event — the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting in which 49 people were killed by a lone gunman. No deaths were attributed to left-wing groups.
Not in modern times, until the Muslim Brotherhood took it to the fundamentalist route and it landed where we are today.
By what measure is Israel a “success”?
Yet you have no respect for any of these things in reality. In fact, you’ve rallied against literally every one of these things. Also, you don’t appear to show a great deal of “ethics” and I’m unsure you have the natural ability to determine what is and is not ethical.
Have you made a single post which hasn’t been categorically shot down in every way? If so, please direct us to it.
We all know what Hillsdale College is. I read it, and I figured Larry P Arnn would have tried harder. It is true Churchill hated the Pashtuns, who he was fighting in the scope of keeping the British imperialism afloat in the region. I’ll quote from his own autobiography on the subject
The battle was a setback, but the British—“the dominant race” in Churchill’s words—would wreak terrible retribution on the “the savages” and step up their even campaign of burning villages and killing everyone in their path who resisted. “After today we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter,” Churchill wrote to a friend that September. “The Mohmands need a lesson, and there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.” In his autobiography he matter-of-factly noted how the British went about their business:
We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.
He goes on to note that whenever the Pashtun tribesmen would put up resistance the British would lose two to three officers and 15 to 20 Indian soldiers. However, “no quarter was asked or given,” Churchill noted, “and every tribesman caught was speared or cut down at once.”
I’ve known men who fought in wars, and never met one who didn’t hate who he was fighting. Churchill, as great as he was with Britain during WWII, was definitely a racist. From calling Asians people with “slit eyes and pig tails” to calling Indians “the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans” to saying of black people “did not really think that the black people were as capable or as efficient as white people”, he was definitely a racist.
That being said, I’ve admitted I don’t like Islam. I don’t like Christianity either though. You, however, as singularly focused on your “isms”, motivated by your racism and hatred of Islam above all other things. In reality, you’re just a lonely old man who’s a racist, nothing special, nothing beyond that. The fact you can craft a sentence doesn’t excuse an obvious lifetime of dubious beliefs and activities. God knows what shit you pulled in Nicaragua.
I’ve done nothing in Nicaragua other than being a principal together with General Pittman in venture capitalizing , what turned out to be a failed coffee plantation. It turned out one of worst investments ever. I hope you read about William Walker, an American who became president of Nicaragua. Walker was a strange bird, a child prodigy who earned a medical degree at age 18.
That sucks. Would be cool to make coffee.
I did read about him but I’m not nearly done. The fun thing about you is that you plant shit and I, attempting to mitigate my horrible self with efforts in integrity, go and read and learn about the material you bring to the table so at least I feel I’m not talking out of my ass. I start trees though…so, I pick each of these topics back up at a later time and finish. Today, I read three chapters of an autobiography I’ve never read because of you, then a few articles on a war I never read about beforehand.
It’s actually not though.
I saw a study out of John Jay, I believe, that showed 4 or 5% of priests were offenders. If you look at any organization with access to children as custodians (Boys Clubs, YMCA’s, Other churches and religions, etc…) the numbers were actually lower as a percentage of offenders.
The Catholic Church certainly does get the most press though.
Summary[edit]
The report determined that, during the period from 1950 to 2002, a total of 10,667 individuals had made allegations of child sexual abuse. Of these, the dioceses had been able to identify 6,700 unique accusations against 4,392 clergy over that period in the USA, which is about 4% of all 109,694 ordained clergy i.e. priests or deacons or members of religious orders, active in the USA during the time covered by the study.[2] However, of these 4392 accused, 252 (5.7% of those accused or less than 0.1% of total clergy) were convicted. The number of alleged abuses increased in the 1960s, peaked in the 1970s, declined in the 1980s, and by the 1990s had returned to the levels of the 1950s.[3]
The surveys filtered information provided from diocesan files on each cleric accused of sexual abuse and on each of the clerics’ victims to the research team so that they did not have access to the names of the accused clergy or the dioceses where they worked. The dioceses were encouraged to issue reports of their own based on the surveys that they had completed. Of the 4,392 clergy accused, 3,300 were not investigated because the cleric had already died. Of the remainder 1,021 were reported to police and of those, 384 were charged, resulting in 252 convictions and 100 prison sentences; In total, out of the 109,694 priests who were surveyed, 100 were imprisoned.
Thus, 6% of the 4,392 clergy against whom allegations were made (252 priests in total or <0.25% of all clerics ) were convicted and about 2% of the 4,392 accused priests (100 clerics or <0.1% of all clerics) received prison sentences.[2][4] According to the report, one-third of the accusations were made in 2002 and 2003 and another third of the allegations were reported between 1993 and 2001.[3] Over the same period there were about 1,000 new clergy ordained per year in the 1960s declining to about 500 per year in 2014 and about 60,000 clergy at any one time. [5] Thus one can say there were over 100,000 newly ordained and existing Roman Catholic clergy (109,694 John Jay p. 4) in the USA over the fifty-year period of the John Jay Report. The 100 convicted clergy therefore represent less than 0.1% of the total number of US based Roman Catholic clergy over the period. Of the 4,392 accused clergy, 3,300 of these accusations (~3.3% of clergy) were not investigated due to the accused having already died. Of the accusations that were investigated, 93% were reported. Of those reports, 37% were charged and of those 66% were convicted, making a total of 23% of the still alive being convicted. Of the convictions, 40% received prison sentences.
In summary, over a 50-year period, out of more than 100,000 priests deacons and religious order clergy, 4,392 (~4.4%) were accused of sexual abuse, 252 (<0.26%) were convicted and 100 (<0.1%) sentenced to prison.
Allegations[edit]
The period covered by the John Jay study began in 1950 and ended in 2002.
Of the 11,000 allegations reported by bishops in the John Jay study, 3,300 were not investigated because the allegations were made after the accused priest had died. 6,700 allegations were substantiated, leaving 1,000 that could not be substantiated.
According to the John Jay Report, one-third of the accusations were made in 2002 and 2003. Another third of the allegations were reported between 1993 and 2001.[3]
Some bishops have been heavily criticized for moving offending priests from parish to parish, where they still had personal contact with children, rather than seeking to have them permanently removed from the priesthood. Instead of reporting the incidents to police, many dioceses directed the offending priests to seek psychological treatment and assessment. According to the John Jay report, nearly 40% of priests alleged to have committed sexual abuse participated in treatment programs. The more allegations a priest had, the more likely he was to participate in treatment.[3]
The Church was widely criticized when it was discovered that some bishops knew about some of the alleged crimes committed, but reassigned the accused instead of seeking to have them permanently removed from the priesthood.[10][11] In defense of this practice, some have pointed out that public school administrators engaged in a similar manner when dealing with accused teachers,[12] as did the Boy Scouts of America.[13]
"Curiously, the report was up to 2004. It’s 2020 and LOTS more has come out. It appears from the report, it isn’t about the small % that were counted. "
Though, I’m not shocked you’re trying to outright defend the Catholic Church and the routine raping of children and protect from the law they enacted regularly. It’s on par with your “character”
One day your mouth is going to get you in trouble Warden. You say things without knowing. I have a close family member who was sexually assaulted as a young child. I know what it’s like to think about murdering pedophiles and bringing them to justice. The last thing I would ever do is defend a pedophile.
Any priest, any person for that matter who sexually assaults a young child deserves the worst punishment God can dole out.
I’m making a simple point that the Catholic Church is no different from Protestant Churches, Jewish Synagogues or Muslim Mosques. They all have similar or higher rates of abuse. So do youth organizations.
Abuse of children, unfortunately happens everywhere, in every denomination, culture, industry, and jurisdiction. The Catholic Church, being the largest body of faith in the world, receives the most media attention over it. That’s just a fact.
I do agree that the Clergy spent years keeping it quiet and protecting priests and for that they should be held accountable.
Watch what you say to people on such explosive topics next time.
I’m talking about killing people. Raping kids is the poop icing on the shitcake
Already has. I learned to fight by fighting. Now, I’m old. I only fight on the mats now
I typed. I didn’t say anything.
That sucks. We all do, however. That’s an unfortunate reality
That’s a curious statement. Do you have data on that or are you just trying to (no other word for it) “defend” that Catholic Church of which you are a part? Hmm…not sure what other word to use. You’re throwing shade, you’re acting as an apologist, but yeah…it’s defending. You’re stating “everyone does it”, “it’s not that bad, just we’re the biggest of the organizations and the media, the media, the media…it’s not us, it’s the media pointing the finger at us.” Also, from what you listed…youth organizations by and large are religious focused and filled like the Boy Scouts…would you consider there being an issue with religious people and their relation to abuse? Tell me, what’s the ratio between furry organizations and child abuse compared to the religious organizations you’ve listed. I’m sure you have the data handy considering your previous comments.
But do you? What do you think of Pope Benedict?
It is common, to an extent, yes. However, you’re stating (flat out) that the Catholic Church is no different or worse than anyone else, every "denomination, culture, industry, and jurisdiction. The Catholic Church, being the largest body of faith in the world, receives the most media attention over it. "
I would suggest you’re full of shit and acting as an apologist, flat out. The Catholic Church is NOT the same as every industry, denomination, culture, etc. That’s absolute horseshit. Name another one who is on record raping tens of thousands of children over the course of decades and then hiding it internally, up to the highest levels of said organization.
Your church has a history of this going back to 1629. Your Pious Schools, the counter to the Reformation, were suppressed and shut down (eventually) allegedly as punishment for their association with Galileo (of which you disagree to this day, coincidentally), who had been convicted of heresey in 1633 by the Inquisition. But, why were they really shut down? History is seeing it as their sexual abuse of the children of the time, their “impure friendships with schoolboys” and “many accusations f impurity and ill-renown.” The founder of said schools is recorded “Calasanz wrote to the administrator of a nearby school, whom he had sent to investigate Cherubini: “I want you to know that Your Reverence’s sole aim is to cover up this great shame in order that it does not come to the notice of our superiors.” Cherubini was swiftly promoted by Calasanz, first to rector (headmaster) and then to visitor general (inspector). Soon, more priests were discovered, promoted and moved to different schools. The Church’s position then, as it is now, is first priority to protect reputations, the Church’s, the order’s, and the perpetrator’s.
Your Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was just the Inquisition where they burned and tortured people for denying orthodoxy (among a myriad of other reasons…just plain sadistic murder in reality).
Nah man, you’re full of it. If you would have come back and said, yep- my church has been fucked up for a long time and there is no defense of it. Period. But, you didn’t. You keep telling me its not that bad, everyone is doing it, it’s the media, the media, the media. Full of shit. What a filthy guy down to his core