Shall I try once more? I refer you to the two posts of mine that contain the words "It is wrong for a man to rape a woman"
Is there still some doubt in your mind about whether I think rape is fine??
Stuart
The right to nondiscrimination
- Thread starter Nihilo
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Is there still some doubt in your mind about whether I think rape is fine??
Stuart
Is it really that hard for you to give a straight answer?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I don't know
Is it wrong for a man to rape a woman?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I don't know
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Sure. No question. But your house rules don't apply to my house, right?
It is definitely extreme. I don't have a personal motive to oppose the imperialism of the Catholic church; I was never abused by a priest or any such thing. So those who might agree about annihilating the Vatican are probably busy with something else, like getting over abuse or fighting for justice despite the attempts of so many bishops to silence victims. Doing damage to the infrastructure is probably not their top priority. That would leave me in the minority, so to speak.
Is it antisocial? That would be hypocritical, for the Catholic church to accuse me of being antisocial. Religion is poisonous to community. Wouldn't you say the long history of christian-on-christian violence in Northern Ireland, sustained by Catholic /protestant identity, has been antisocial? The Catholic church knows everything about counting sperm cells and nothing about the value of life.
Stuart
I think I will have to leave you to carry on smoking whatever it is you are enjoying there.
Take care.
Stuart
So they don't keep contraceptives in their schools and they don't perform abortion in their hospitals, what's the problem?
If any organization is around for 2000 years---whoops there's just one of those---it's bound to sin at some point. Just as America isn't perfect either, we believe in something, and so long as nothing comes along that contests the overall results we're getting with what we currently believe and hold dear, we'd be fools to get rid of it.
Alright alright. I just wanted to be sure.
So is it just wrong because you think it's wrong (subjective)? Or is it absolutely wrong?
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No problem, if all those using that service are doing so voluntarily, or because they are club members. As soon as there is a claim by a government or the church that this will be a public service open to non-Catholics, and possibly the only option for some, then you have a very grave problem.
A more subtle point is that an organisation with as much overbearing influence as the Catholic church will tend to corral the reluctant and dissenting under their umbrella - don't forget that is the official position of the RCC when it comes to all of christianity!
Let's say a child of Catholic parents, living in Ireland, of consenting age but still living at home, wants an abortion. The rules of the club will be brought to bear in a quite severe way, with no thought given to the right of the individual. That won't be just the pressure from the parents or the church, but indeed from the whole state apparatus, poisoned as it is in Ireland by the Catholic church. But no one is actually going to die, right? Wrong, very wrong.
You might be forgetting the Yamato dynasty of Japan.
You seem to be suggesting that a club rule, the concept of 'sinning', should be appreciated and understood by non-club members. Sorry, not interested in the internal club excuses for the outward hobby abuses.
Well, by pretty devious means in some cases, your church has property rights over quite a lot of real estate (that makes the resistance against abuse compensation claims all the more disgusting). I guess that means your club can do what it likes with its clubhouses. Also, thanks to the inability of your government to make laws establishing a religion, and your right to free speech, you can say and do pretty much what you like in your clubhouse, and I support your rights to do that. But I think the case is pretty clear, if the RCC had kept its activities limited to those who are keen on its views, the history of the past 2000 years could have featured less abuse of humanity. You can never tell for sure, right? But do imagine that time without the RCC. You could probably come up with five positives without even thinking hard.
Stuart
Indeed, that the public might need Church assistance for such basic things as childhood and adult education (let's not forget the many high-ranking, high-quality Catholic universities in all the hubub) and professional healthcare is a grave problem. Perhaps the public should start addressing the lack of supply in their local education and hospital market? The Church doesn't need to be doing these things. Ideally it would be as it is in most of the developed world, where the supply of public education and private hospitals is sufficient for the market, and people only choose Catholic options freely and not because of need. But that's not the Catholic Church's problem Stu, the Catholic Church is trying to help solve the problem.
You raise an important issue here, about whether children have the right to not be inculcated by their parents into any particular religion or philosophical position, since they are below the age of consent and the age of being able to contract.
An organization. Think banks, or quote-unquote clubs. And don't forget the 200,000+ Catholic church parishes that are littered throughout the whole world. What was the extent of the Yamato dynasty? How far beyond Japan did it extend?
I didn't suggest that at all.
Stu you're naive if you think the world wouldn't be still the brutal place that it was when the Church was born. She has done more for the benefit of humanity than any other organization; that's why her founder Jesus Christ is commonly considered among professional historians, secular historians, to be the most influential person who ever lived. You're taking all her good for granted, which is an incredibly idiotic position, but does explain your hatred for her.
Yes, indeed. Although in my country (a secular parliamentary democracy) we have the rather bizarre situation that in 1975 the government integrated failing Catholic schools into the state system. As a result, today Catholic education is paid for by the taxpayer, except the provision of land and buildings. Of course there is the argument that the proportions support the use of Catholic taxpayers' money for Catholic education, but it still feels like a fundamental principle is being breached.
And you can't legislate against parents teaching their own children about stuff they think is important. I think religion comes more under the category of age-restricted films. Can young people make decisions to commit to complex adult themes and the implications of that commitment for the integrity of the young person? Should monotheism be R18?
Given Japan's usual relationships with the rest of the world, I'd say not very far at all. By the way, it's still the dynasty in Japan today.
I'm not sure what that says about the morality of the god that apparently didn't intervene up until that point.
I think you have to be careful about how you attribute the good and the ill. The ill always sheets home to the dogmas and the good I think, perhaps cynically, is human attempts to atone for the ills. You can have the good without the dogma, but you can't have Catholicism without dogma.
What would you say are the three most significant unquestionable goods achieved for humanity that can be credited to the Roman Catholic church? You could include the Eastern Orthodox church if you wanted!
Stuart
I agree, and knowing little else about your situation I'd say to look at it as a "band-aid" solution that needs a more permanent and less conflicted solution.
Like I said, you raise an important issue. To my knowledge courts haven't addressed the question, but IANAL and I don't know that they haven't. If they have, then that forms an important foundation to how we administrate the right to religious liberty.
Well yeah, but there was a bit of a change to it after WWII, no? Such that it's not exactly the same thing that it was before, right?
The Catholic Church teaches that the Church is the ultimate and only answer to the problem of evil, which you do seem to admit is nonfictional, and not just some religious or "club" fictional story.
Yes to the latter (unapologetically) but I'm unconvinced of the former. While a scientist or statistician would require a true control in order to draw reliable conclusions about the efficacy of the factor known as the Church upon the world, we've no such luxury. We have to look at the book of history and figure out as best we can what impact that the Church has had upon the world, bearing in mind that once the Church penetrated a culture, that culture has become "Christianized" in some sense, and it's impossible thereafter to analytically parse her from that culture; we're left with an inseparable conflation and confounding of factors, rendering the final analysis less than sure.
Brutality and crass barbarism have been almost extinguished, the value of children has been elevated, law and order, and the care for the needy among us.
As far as I'm concerned, sex outside of marriage (and I wish I didn't have to clarify) between one man and one woman is absolutely wrong, and as such, even providing contraceptives to anyone other than married couples inherently promotes sex outside of marriage.
Abortions are also absolutely wrong. You don't punish the child for the sins of the father. EVER. You punish the person responsible for the wrongdoing. If a woman is raped, you execute the rapist, and you love the baby, not kill the baby and love the rapist. If rape is so common that you have to make the argument that the mother shouldn't be forced to carry the baby from a rapist, that shows that you don't know how to address the actual issue. Pregnancy from rape is a symptom of a larger problem, it's the sign of a bad justice system, one that does nothing to deter or prevent rape. If you're going to blame someone for a woman who will carry to term a pregnancy from rape, blame the dysfunctional legal system, not the baby in the mother's womb. But what about if the woman was sleeping around, or was seduced or did the seducing, you might ask, should she be forced to abandon her job or career so she can carry the baby to term? Again, you punish the one who's at fault. The mother and the father of the baby should be forced to marry, the idea being that if they wanted each other so bad but wanted to skip marriage, the punishment is marriage to their partner. They wanted to have sex so bad, now they'll have sex with each other for the rest of their life within marriage, and he'll be able to support her as she takes care of their child.
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Abortions are also absolutely wrong. You don't punish the child for the sins of the father. EVER. You punish the person responsible for the wrongdoing. If a woman is raped, you execute the rapist, and you love the baby, not kill the baby and love the rapist. If rape is so common that you have to make the argument that the mother shouldn't be forced to carry the baby from a rapist, that shows that you don't know how to address the actual issue. Pregnancy from rape is a symptom of a larger problem, it's the sign of a bad justice system, one that does nothing to deter or prevent rape. If you're going to blame someone for a woman who will carry to term a pregnancy from rape, blame the dysfunctional legal system, not the baby in the mother's womb. But what about if the woman was sleeping around, or was seduced or did the seducing, you might ask, should she be forced to abandon her job or career so she can carry the baby to term? Again, you punish the one who's at fault. The mother and the father of the baby should be forced to marry, the idea being that if they wanted each other so bad but wanted to skip marriage, the punishment is marriage to their partner. They wanted to have sex so bad, now they'll have sex with each other for the rest of their life within marriage, and he'll be able to support her as she takes care of their child.
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Yes, we could check under the band-aid to see if the patient has healed, then dispatch him with a rock to the head! It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The RCC is not going to invest more money in teachers and resources, and teaching priests are dying of old age.
I'd be happy to believe you, and indeed to raise you the point that the Roman church underwent a bit of a change in the late '60s too, although Josef Ratzinger (who was part of Vatican II) turned into a fascist reactionary as if no reforms had ever been even considered.
To the contrary, I see the Problem of Evil as christianity shooting itself in the foot. Abolish Abrahamism and the Problem of Evil disappears along with it.
Yes, what if Constantine hadn't saved christianity from irrelevance by making it the established religion of the Roman Empire? Would some other religion have come to dominate Europe, and would it have induced a Dark Age and later a fearful Medieval mentality? Would some other belief system taken its place and been less or more retarding of the development of Western Enlightenment thinking?
As you say there is no control experiment. All we can do is speculate based on human nature, which does seem to return to religious belief as some kind of default.
Alright then. Let me have a go at the case for the prosecution. I'll pick three horrors, which I'll assert wouldn't have happened without the RCC:
* Systematic cover up of child sexual abuse: this is not necessarily the abuse itself, which is not limited to members of the Catholic church, but the systematic institutional protection of priests and others who raped children, and the frequent moving of those rapists on to new pastures to rape again. As far as I am able to tell, it is still Canon law that a bishop decides whether or not to pick up the phone and call the police. This is a denial of justice for innocent people whose lives have been wrecked, sometimes by the coverup more than by the abuse.
* Institutional antisemitism, including the Blood Libel, the accusation that Jews murdered christian children and used their blood in religious rituals, and the 13th Century papal bull that resulted in a Canon law requiring Jews and muslims to wear distinctive dress or badges to identify them.
* The love of poverty as a necessity, as seen in the really nasty words and deeds of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, the so-called Mother Theresa, who preferred the purity of suffering to the relief of medical treatment, claimed that Calcutta could never have too many children and decried abortion as 'the greatest destroyer of peace today' (what, not even sucking up to the Nazis comes ahead of abortion in the category of destroying peace??). Family planning, possibly including abortion, is a liberation of women from their reproductive cycle and one of the single most effective ways to alleviate poverty. The maintenance of canonical dogmas against contraception and abortion directly support the maintenance of poverty, and relief of that poverty is most likely to be found where people - including Catholics - are ignoring those dogmas.
As you might appreciate, I have had to leave out some particularly brutal examples to keep it to just three.
Stuart