by JDHURF » Thu Aug 23, 2018 2:43 pm
Galt, if you can manage to restrain yourself from fabricating straw-men fallacies and stop kneeling before the United States, you will find that we agree on the issue of the Catholic church and its institutionalization of child sexual abuse.
You're claim that my first post "instead of trashing the catholic church" was trashing America is wildly false. The very first sentence of my first post in this thread was the observation that these PA revelations are another "horrific revelation that a large segment of the Catholic Church functions as a criminal organization." I linked to a DemocracyNow! segment with a sexual abuse survivor and a former Catholic priest discussing the crimes at length. I ended by posting Hitchens' opening arguments in the IQ2 debate about the Catholic Church which is as extensive and damning a critique of the Catholic Church as can be found in a comprehensive 20 minute excursion.
It's incredibly peculiar that your state worship is so severe that you become immediately willfully blind to the overwhelming majority of my post in order to have an absolute conniption about my brief mention of the deference to theocratic impulses in the United States, present since before independence. No doubt it was a tenuous tangent, but let's keep it real, it was a brief comment in passing and, fundamentally, an accurate one.
When I mentioned Trump and the klan in passing it wasn't in response to your present assertion that "instead of trashing the catholic church" I trashed America, which, as I've already observed, is wildly false. I was responding to your claim that the pilgrims and puritans ("those people" as you referred to them) "hated" catholics (your emphasis). You ironically enough then defended the Catholic church you now want to castigate me for not trashing. You asserted that the historical residues I mentioned "are found in pentacostals and baptists, not in catholics."
My brief mention of the klan and of Trump was in relation to my response to your wildly false claim. I correctly stated that the nativists were later iterations of colonial lunacy which did, in fact, hate Catholics and that much of Trump's program is that of the nativist program.
The sex abuses largely began to be uncovered in the 80s and it was not unique to the United States. The media began to report significantly on the issue in the 90s and this too was not unique to the United States, this involved Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. It's also had extensive coverage in Austria, Belgium, India, Norway, Poland, etc. You would know more about this if you expanded your information horizons or, at minimal, reviewed the Hitchens clip I've posted twice and cited several times more. Your perception that the United States is some unique moral force on the issue is a consequence of your living in the United States and consuming its media.
As to the fundamental problem of Catholic priests' sexual abuse of children, we both agree that it is a catastrophic institutional crisis of the Catholic church. We also agree that it isn't unique to the United States as the Catholic church is a global church that functions on every continent.
The church should absolutely change its structure, it's millenniums past due that it rescind it's inhuman policy of celibacy for priests and nuns and its exclusion of women from the priesthood and higher roles in the hierarchy. Secular oversight is a fantastic idea, but, as I've said, one ought not hold one's breath for anything significant. Something else that would help tremendously and have as much a probability to occur as any of the preceding, keeping to your favored state, the IRS should start taxing these religious business rackets.