Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Hard to Argue With

Agreed.

1 comment:

Stewie said...

O_o Sooo, the conclusion is NOT that there was a culture of abuse in the Catholic Church based on a perfectly reasonable and provable idea of human nature that "like people collect together" but instead, ALL organized religion is prone to sexually exploit children?

Because all "reasonableness" aside, there's no way anyone can assert that such a high frequency of abuse is normal in any human organization.
I don't understand how any one (even armed with a "study" can claim that there simply has been extremely high numbers of victims in this particular org (the catholic church0 WITHOUT negating and invalidating the victims. Not a cool thing to do at all. It seems ot me that the victims themselves are saying exactly that - that the Catholic org. under the leadership they have had over the last many decades has been much more prone to abusing youth than other religions and orgs. of any kind.

I have to wonder - back in centuries past, were there articles written by perons wishing to appear "fair" that claimed that the Catholic Church was not more inclined to orchestrate Crusades, persecution of pagans, or even torture free-thinkers to death during Inquisition? and you know,
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition.

But trust me, the attempt to "be fair" to ABUSERS is very very harmful to victims and all too common in society. It seems to be human nature to be initially shocked at the idea of abuse (of any type) but then after awhile almost get tired of talking about. Probably due in part to confusion over how to respond in a "just" manner and complicated by the fact that with child abuse quite often a great deal of time has passed since the incident(s)
There is a difficulty in how to address that, and so after a while frustration seems to foster a need to "downplay" or minimize in some way.
But instead of being in danger of getting too much "consequence" over these abuses, it's far more likely that the overwhelming majority of abusers in these cases will NEVER face consequences and continue to deny even to themselves.
The Catholic Church establishment is not, and is not in danger of EVER becoming, the victim here. However if the point is to say "lets' take a closer look at other religions, to root out abuses there if any" then more power to this idea. But any lessening of pressure upon the 'Corporate Catholic Establishment' is a very unfair thing for the victims. If people think Enron and the sub-prime mortgage guys got away with a lot of shit, that ain't nuthin' compared to these guys.