You may not owe the soldiers anything but common decency dictates that you owe something to the Afghanis being raped. Besides, if you have evidence that an innocent person is being sexually abused, you must come forward. To not come forward would place you in the same position as the Catholic Church leadership you have been so critical of.
Orwellian use of language: mom pleads guilty in cult starvation death
- Thread starter Scott Free
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You may not owe the soldiers anything but common decency dictates that you owe something to the Afghanis being raped. Besides, if you have evidence that an innocent person is being sexually abused, you must come forward. To not come forward would place you in the same position as the Catholic Church leadership you have been so critical of.
I owe them nothing.
OK, now you are pissing me off. they are serving you, at the behest of the government that represents you. You owe them A LOT. They risk extreme harm and death in YOUR service. While you sit on your soft little arse, safe and warm, pretending some ethical and intellectual superiority............ If you have a problem with our foreign policy, insult the useless politicians in Ottawa that give the orders, don't kick at the honourable people in your service.
Especially with unsupported vicious innuendo.
Absolutely unfair.
But ancient bronze age mythology does? LMAO.
Just to make a point, I googled a friend, a prof at UNB-SJ, to see what came up. Page after page on his work.
Are you sure Mr. Krause is not Bronze Age mythology?
LMAO
OK, now you are pissing me off. they are serving you, at the behest of the government that represents you. You owe them A LOT. They risk extreme harm and death in YOUR service. While you sit on your soft little arse, safe and warm, pretending some ethical and intellectual superiority............ If you have a problem with our foreign policy, insult the useless politicians in Ottawa that give the orders, don't kick at the honourable people in your service.
Especially with unsupported vicious innuendo.
Absolutely unfair.
But ancient bronze age mythology does? LMAO.
Just to make a point, I googled a friend, a prof at UNB-SJ, to see what came up. Page after page on his work.
Are you sure Mr. Krause is not Bronze Age mythology?
LMAO
I get that you don't like organized religion, but the word cult exists for a reason. This was a cult. You could argue other religions are also cults, but it doesn't change what this group was. Starving a child to death for not saying "amen" is pretty extreme. I'm no fan of the Catholic church, but comparing the two is really a reach.
You've suggested that Canadian soldiers are raping people in Afghanistan. You need to report it or you are no different than Priests that looked the other way while sexual assaults were occurring. Surely you consider yourself better than the Catholics you criticize.
I believe Scott Free is using rape in the same sense that we have raped our forests. Canada and the gang of the willing are raping Afghanistan. The Canadian military, the government and the ruling elite do not serve you or me, they serve only the self interest of the ruling elite. If you think Canada is a democracy with a government that represents the citizens that live here, you truly are delusional.
The only difference between a cult and a religion is in the numbers of adherents.
The only difference between a cult and a religion is in the numbers of adherents.
The soldiers are raping and pillaging Afghanistan.
I am not criticizing Catholicism. I used the religion as an example.
A good argument doesn't consist of manipulating what people said and meant into something you wish they meant and said.
I suppose its inevitable, now that you're here, that this post will spiral into an endless game of you framing my posts and spinning them out of context and me correcting you.
I suspect in some way you really think your making valid arguments. It is the Bill O'Riely school of moronism I suppose.
It seems you figure hijacking yet another thread and acting like a stupid child will be a victory somehow.
It's pathetic.
Maybe you should try and act like an adult? You are an adult aren't you? I'm not sure anymore. I'm starting to suspect your 16 or so.
Thank you Cliffy but Cannuck knows full well what I meant. He just twists and manipulates things people say to make a straw man. So far it's the only tactic I've seen the troll use.
I suppose they are both heavily caught up in the mortification of our culture.
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The child was only 1 year old. He was probably just starting to speak. He probably couldn't say Amen at all! At 1 year old you don't make conclusions, oк think for yourself!!!!!
As far as I understand, Scott Free wasn't talking about average members of the Catholic church abusing children. He was talking about priests and church officials who did that and remained honored in their church. Priests of any religion are the representatives of what their religion or church teaches and preaches. Thus, what they are is ultimately what the church is.
This wasn't a cult. This was rather a sect. Cult means worshipping a deity. All the religions are ultimately cults.
Yes Vereya, those guys who claim to have a direct contact with god to hear confessions and be the moral standard bearers for society. The ones that get shuffled about or given refuge in the Vatican when they transgress social and moral codes of conduct.
I just stumbled on this while going through reddit. I fail to see how this is less evil than starving a single child to death. There has been untold human misery born out of this tragedy and who knows how many people have harmed themselves because of it.
I don't mean to pick on catholics. I am of the opinion that all religion is dangerous. It is a toxic mix of wish thinking, zealotry, irrationality and delusions of grandeur that make it so IMO.
Bishops were warned of abusive priests
As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual-abuse crisis broke publicly across the U.S. Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inability to change that he searched for an island to purchase with the intent of using it as a place to isolate such offenders, according to documents recently obtained by NCR.
Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paracletes, an order established in 1947 to deal with problem priests, wrote regularly to bishops in the United States and to Vatican officials, including the pope, of his opinion that many sexual abusers in the priesthood should be laicized immediately.
Fitzgerald was a prolific correspondent who wrote regularly of his frustration with and disdain for priests "who have seduced or attempted to seduce little boys or girls." His views are contained in letters and other correspondence that had previously been under court seal and were made available to NCR by a California law firm in February.
Read copies of letters Fitzgerald exchanged with U.S. bishops and one pope.
Fitzgerald's convictions appear to significantly contradict the claims of contemporary bishops that the hierarchy was unaware until recent years of the danger in shuffling priests from one parish to another and in concealing the priests' problems from those they served.
It is clear, too, in letters between Fitzgerald and a range of bishops, among bishops themselves, and between Fitzgerald and the Vatican, that the hierarchy was aware of the problem and its implications well before the problem surfaced as a national story in the mid-1980s.
Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles archdiocese, reacting in February to a federal investigation into his handling of the crisis, said: "We have said repeatedly that ... our understanding of this problem and the way it's dealt with today evolved, and that in those years ago, decades ago, people didn't realize how serious this was, and so, rather than pulling people out of ministry directly and fully, they were moved."
Indeed, some psychology experts seemed to hold the position that priest offenders could be returned to ministry. Even the Paracletes, as the order developed and grew, employed experts who said that certain men could be returned to ministry under stringent conditions and with strict supervision.
The order itself ultimately was so inundated with lawsuits regarding priests who molested children while or after being treated at its facility in Jemez Springs, N.M., that it closed the facility in 1995.
Whatever discussion occurred during the 1970s and 1980s over proper treatment, however, for nearly two decades Fitzgerald spoke a rather consistent conviction about the dim prospects for returning sex abusers to ministry. Fitzgerald seemed to know almost from the start the danger such priests posed. He was adamant in his conviction that priests who sexually abused children (often the language of that era was more circumspect in naming the problem) should not be returned to ministry.
In a 1957 letter to an unnamed archbishop, Fitzgerald said, "These men, Your Excellency, are devils and the wrath of God is upon them and if I were a bishop I would tremble when I failed to report them to Rome for involuntary layization [sic]." The letter, addressed to "Most dear Cofounder," was apparently to Archbishop Edwin V. Byrne of Santa Fe, N.M., who was considered a cofounder of the Paraclete facility at Jemez Springs and a good friend of Fitzgerald.
Later in the same letter, in language that revealed deep passion, he wrote: "It is for this class of rattlesnake I have always wished the island retreat -- but even an island is too good for these vipers of whom the Gentle Master said it were better they had not been born -- this is an indirect way of saying damned, is it not?"
The documents were sealed at the request of the church in an earlier civil case involving Fr. Rudolph Kos of Dallas. Eleven plaintiffs won awards in the case in which Kos was accused of molesting minors over a 12-year period. He had been treated at the Paraclete facility in New Mexico. The documents were unsealed in 2007 by a court order obtained by the Beverly Hills law firm of Kiesel, Boucher & Larson, according to Anthony DeMarco, an attorney with the firm that has handled hundreds of cases for alleged victims of sexual abuse in the Los Angeles archdiocese and elsewhere.
According to Helen Zukin, another member of the firm, the documents have been used in some cases to dispute the church claim that it knew nothing about the behavior of sex abusers or the warning signs of abuse prior to the 1980s.
In a September 1952 letter to the then- bishop of Reno, Nev., Fitzgerald wrote: "I myself would be inclined to favor laicization for any priest, upon objective evidence, for tampering with the virtue of the young, my argument being, from this point onward the charity to the Mystical Body should take precedence over charity to the individual and when a man has so far fallen away from the purpose of the priesthood the very best that should be offered him is his Mass in the seclusion of a monastery. Moreover, in practice, real conversions will be found to be extremely rare. ... Hence, leaving them on duty or wandering from diocese to diocese is contributing to scandal or at least to the approximate danger of scandal." The advice was ignored and the priest was allowed to continue in ministry, and was ultimately accused of abusing numerous children, for which the church paid out huge sums in court awards.
While Fitzgerald told anyone who would listen of the futility of returning sexually abusive priests to ministry, that conviction became less absolute as the order, today headquartered in St. Louis, grew and the scope of its work became more complex. Fitzgerald, by most accounts, was deeply motivated by a sense of obligation to care for priests who were in trouble. Originally a priest of the Boston archdiocese for 12 years, he became a member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross in 1934, and started the Servants of the Paraclete in 1947. His concern at the time was primarily for priests struggling with alcoholism. As his new order matured and its ministry became known, bishops began referring priests with other maladies, particularly those who had been sexually abusive of children. The order for years was the primary source for care of priests in the United States with alcohol and sexual problems.
At times, Fitzgerald appears to have resisted taking in priests who had sexually abused youngsters. In his 1957 letter he requested concurrence from the cofounder archbishop "of what I consider a very vital decision on our part -- that for the sake of preventing scandal that might endanger the good name of Via Coeli [the name of the New Mexico facility] we will not offer hospitality to men who have seduced or attempted to seduce" children. "Experience has taught us these men are too dangerous to the children of the parish and neighborhood for us to be justified in receiving them here."
In September 1957 the bishop of Manchester, N.H., Matthew F. Brady, sought Fitzgerald's advice regarding "a problem priest," John T. Sullivan, who seemed sincerely repentant and whose difficulty "is not drink but a series of scandal-causing escapades with young girls. There is no section of the diocese in which he is not known and no pastor seems willing to accept him," Brady wrote. The "escapades" involved molestation of young girls. In at least one instance, he procured an abortion for a teenager he had impregnated. In another case, he fathered a child and provided support to the mother until she later married. The charges of molesting girls would follow him the rest of his life.
"The solution of his problem seems to be a fresh start in some diocese where he is not known. It occurred to me that you might know of some bishop who would be willing to give him that opportunity," Brady wrote in his original letter.
Fitzgerald responded that in his judgment the "repentance and amendment" in such cases "is superficial and, if not formally at least subconsciously, is motivated by a desire to be again in a position where they can continue their wonted activity. A new diocese means only green pastures."
Continued...
I suppose a claim that learning that you shouldn't starve children to death has a learning curve too as that you shouldn't allow priests to molest children appears to have, but there is no doubt in my mind the commonality here is an inability to think and reason rationally.
Because you will never find the Pope telling followers to starve a child for not saying Amen. There are bad catholics out there, but the religion itself doesn't teach followers to be bad.