"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
It certainly isn't physically impossible, but I acknowledge that it may be metaphysically impossible.
Unfortunately, there are parts of the country where this type of racism is acceptable and even common. There as similar attitudes towards Catholics, due to America's history as a predominately protestant country. The formula is the same both way - pick a heinous crime from a few members, blame it on the group as a whole, and feel smug about yourself.
As someone who left Catholicism for Wicca and then eventually gave up on religion in general, I think it's valid to point out that these flaws are not unique to Catholicism.
I would say that in pointing at all those things it has done wrong, you are implicitly saying that that these traits are unusual — but we're all a bunch of monkeys, it's really hard to get us to be nice to each other, and it's really easy for Machiavellian sadists to rise to power in every institution.
In what way? Does pointing it out change the facts? Why can't we have a discussion about how Catholicism is objectively hypocritical and not have to discuss all of the other things that are wrong in the world?
You're welcome to point out the flaws and hypocrisies all you like, though I know from my experience as an angry bisexual Wiccan teenager that had to go to a Catholic school and study the bible as part of my education, that it does little good unless you have the goal of looking pompous — especially when the very line you were quoting was
> It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics.
rather than
> It makes me immensely sad that people don't realise Catholics are uniquely perfect.
The former does not imply perfection, nor even an absence of hypocrisy.
Correct. Organizations besides the Catholic church also get criticized for that kind of behaviour. (To various degrees, due to public awareness, religious or media or political or national or personal bias, or the fact that nobody outside the West Nowhere Parish in Nowhere cares about a regional, 800-member church scandal.)
The Catholic church is a big organization. As in any big organization, there are aspects of it that are good, aspects of it that are OK, and aspects of it that are utterly, irredeemably rotten. And it's up to the church to figure out how to navigate that complexity.
Given how hard it's been fighting accountability in this space, even very recently, I can't say they are doing a great job of navigating it, but that's just my opinion.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2022/may-web-only/south...
Do people really have this much cognitive dissonance that they lose the ability to think? Like how much delusion do you have to be under to even say the above and think it makes it better for Catholics.
Even one priest raping a child under the protection of the church is entirely unacceptable.
Nobody does this with public schools. If people always brought up the abuse and cover ups by teachers and unions regardless of the topic they would be down voted and told it is not relevant to the topic.
If people actually cared about making abuse and coverups known they would bring it up every thread schools are brought up. Instead they only do it with the Church. It is almost as if they just want to attack the Church and ignore it in their own preferred abusive institutions.
I still don't get what the problem is. What does the asymmetric treatment between schools and church abuse have to do with the facts?
> If people actually cared about making abuse and coverups known they would bring it up every thread schools are brought up.
So you are saying I don't actually care about the abuse coverups? You think I have another agenda? You have a sick mind.
> It is almost as if they just want to attack the Church and ignore it in their own preferred abusive institutions.
It's not that, at all. Shame on you for trying to reframe it as such.
Nothing.
>So you are saying I don't actually care about the abuse coverups? You think I have another agenda? You have a sick mind
I don't know what you believe. I think if somebody is willing to randomly (completely unrelated to to the topic) bring up abuse by the Church in every thread, but is not willing to do the same thing for schools it shows they have a bias.
I have no issue accepting that abuse has happened in the Church and it is despicable. My issue is nobody seems to care about the much larger abuse problem in schools.
>It's not that, at all. Shame on you for trying to reframe it as such.
Please explain the asymmetric treatment if it is not because people on HN in general don't like the Church, while they do like public schools.
> Please explain the asymmetric treatment if it is not because people on HN in general don't like the Church, while they do like public schools.
When you find a post on HN that talks about public schools maybe this topic will open up there too, and you can have your day there.
> people on HN in general don't like the Church
I don't like psychopaths either, and for good reason. I don't like the Church because of what it has enabled, the lies, the hypocrisy, and so on. You are trying to frame it as HN folks have a hard on for going after the church for no good reason. Well, lots of reasons have been listed once the OP basically said "there is no good reason to object to the church, it's all misconceptions. Lol.
> My issue is nobody seems to care about the much larger abuse problem in schools.
This isn't true. You just happened to come to a comment section that is talking specifically about the church and you are mad because it's not talking about what you want to talk about. Why not go post a tech story about schools, and then find someone challenging misconceptions about schools.
These comments aren't trying to nefariously undermine the problem in schools, that's just you being frustrated, or whatever is motivating you to get mad.
In the case of Australia which had a five year long Royal Commission into Institutional Sexual Abuse of children that took in tens of thousands of interviews across schools and all religuous institutions the final report included:
Many children have been sexually abused in religious institutions in Australia.
Based on the information before us, the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions.
In many religious institutions, the power afforded to people in religious ministry and the misplaced trust of parents combined with aspects of the institutional culture, practices and attitudes to create risks for children.
Alleged perpetrators often continued to have access to children even when religious leaders knew they posed a danger.
We heard that alleged perpetrators were often transferred to other locations but they were rarely reported to police.
The Catholic Institutions in Australia with the worst behaviour were the Christian Brothers who operate globally and there was no evidence seen that as an international group dealing with the education of minors, most often orphaned minors, their behaviour in Australia was somehow better or worse than their behaviour elsewhere - they rotated bad priests in and out, dodged responsibility, and hands down "won" the prize for most children abused.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_...
There are clearly more gravesites than we currently know about. The scale of this atrocity is beyond what was predicted.
I am not denying that there are large gravesites or that terrible things happened at those schools.
Take a look a little further down the page and you can see a list with the numbers of suspected and confirmed graves per school clearly laid out. The first three examples already put the number at over a hundred.
I dont know where you imagine all those 4,126 children went when they died if not into unmarked graves?
[0]https://apnews.com/article/canada-67da8a8af88efc91e6ffc64630....
I don't think what I have said is strong at all. The reports are eyeopening, the level of care afforded to these kids is abysmal. The Church stood in the way of providing documentation for families to find their kids. Basically buried them and forgot where.
The fact we can't find these children is the "strong" complaint I have. You are suggesting that because we can't find over 3000 children.
The discoveries of unmarked graves began to make international headlines in May 2021, starting with the detection of 215 potential graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. This was followed by several other significant findings, including over 600 potential graves at the Marieval Indian Residential School site in Saskatchewan and 182 at the former St. Eugene's Mission School in British Columbia, among others.
All of that sounds like a very strong motivation to feel the way I do. I should not have to explain how this mistreatment is all racially motivated, too.
Lots of evidence of abhorrent mistreatment, over 3k lost children in hundreds of potential burial sites and you have the bravado to say "no one has been found" as if that means nothing is to be found.
People downplaying this stuff makes me want to vomit.
[0] https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/A...
You're sort of singling out Catholicism though. Islam does all those things much much worse than Catholicism ever has - in the present day too! I'm not Catholic and I don't care to defend them. Still, I don't want them singled out when Islam is demonstrably worse in every way.
Yes, because church is the context of this post, and the OP opened the door. What does your comment have to do with the facts?
What are these misconceptions? Catholicism uses shame to induce conformity, has had numerous priests abuse children (and protecting the offenders), has a long history of violence against non-adherents, historically deeply homophobic, and so on. All of that is factual.
Edit: Oh! And now I remember, they killed and buried hundreds of children in Canada at their "schools" for indigenous people. Graves unmarked, families never knew what happened to the kids. But it's OK! Pope here said sorry, sort of, after being pressured, for decades. Also they found graves. Canadian govt. couldn't give a rats ass because the church is as powerful as governments.
But remember! We love all of God's children.