Should the Catholic church be banned — as an organization that churns out sex criminals? — Am I serious?

© 2018 Peter Free

 

20 August 2018

 

 

Caveat — whether I am serious or not, it is a legitimate question

 

When "recognized" religion displaces common ethical sense, insanity is afoot.

 

 

What follows — picks up on my "jumping through invisible hoops" theme

 

That was the essay in which I pointed out that we all jump through hoops that propaganda has blinded us to. Propaganda ignores facts and intentionally confuses clear thinking. Most of the time we are unaware just how deeply our perspectives have been influenced by it.

 

 

Banning the Catholic church sounds like an idiotic idea — until you think about it

 

Historians can pretty much agree that the Catholic church has been depredating since the church's inception. One plundering and predatory evil after another. All in God's purported name.

 

No other (supposedly respectable) religion displays such a singular record of absolute immorality across centuries of institutional functioning. At least so, within the supposedly "developed" world. That last provision lets Islam skate.

 

 

For instance — laying lusting hands and more — on kids

 

For decades, we have witnessed one exposure after another of the Catholic church's predatory child molestations.

 

All performed under God's presumably guiding hand. With the church hierarchy generally covering up most of those happenings.

 

Pope Francis admits that the church has a pedophile problem.

 

His admission presumably comes without actually knowing just how pervasive the problem might be. No underling is going to tell the Vicar of Christ that he's out stiffly gallivanting among hapless young people.

 

 

Conspiracy?

 

In an era in which the church has trouble recruiting priests in the "developed" world, the church statistically knows that a noticeable proportion of its recruits are going to use:

 

 

its institutional authority

 

and

 

its religiously hierarchical environment

 

 

— to provide them with a ready supply of victims.

 

How is that institutionally shared knowledge essentially different than indulging a criminal and civil conspiracy?

 

 

A ban's logic

 

Normal folk, who combine ethical standards with common sense, should (by now) recognize that enough has become enough.

 

As with government handling of the mafia — at least outside Italy — national endorsement of such a harm-producing religious organization should (arguably) cease. An international association of camouflaged perverts does not a legitimate church make.

 

 

Or does it?

 

See how common ethical sense and religion collide?

 

I am pretty darn sure that Catholics (who have had the steel stomach to read through the above) are now coming up with reasons why their church is not really an evil-inviting and wrongs-spewing institution.

 

It's always the bad guys, right?

 

Bad guys, after all, filter into everything human.

 

 

"Every institution is inherently demonic"

 

Is Paul Tillich's (never properly attributed) observation excuse enough?

 

Should religion be allowed to spew crime, with no equivalently large retribution against the organization itself?

 

When is the stream of damaged human beings (that the church churns out) large enough to cause an ethical society to toss that structure out of their midst?

 

 

The moral? — Just because a Catholic hierarchy runs a "recognized" religious institution . . .

 

. . . should not obscure that same hierarchy's long demonstrated role in continually "screwing" children.

 

Admittedly, religion generally becomes an excuse to avoid indulging common sense and evidence.

 

But, even so — when does an institution's proportion of recruited and mostly protected perverts become too much for the rest of us to bear?

 

When "faith" becomes an excuse to actively wound people, what then?

 

What is the properly proportionate and non-propagandized response?