Pope Boners
It’s good to see that the Pope is undeterred by all these “petty rumors” about how he facilitated the systematic sexual abuse of thousands of children. Because that’s what all of this is, right? Petty rumors. It doesn’t matter what documented, incontrovertible evidence says. That kind of shit is for suckers.
So, if raping and covering up the rape of children, in some cases repeatedly, is just a “petty rumor”, then what else can we get away with? I mean, if that’s a petty rumor, then surely shoplifting is nothing more than childish hearsay. Armed robbery? Maybe vindictive gossip. At best. And punching an old former-Hitler-Youth assbag in the balls until he can’t even fantasize about ever sitting down comfortably again without feeling like he’s going to vomit so hard from the lasting pain that his scrotum inverts would be, what, juvenile chatter?
Meanwhile, Bill Donohue, President of the Catholic League and regrettably not just a long-since-washed stain in his mother’s panties, claims it would have been “heartless” for the Catholic church to do anything about the pedophilia among its priests. Surely, by logical extension, more heartless than raping children and then exacerbating the emotional and psychological scarring by making them completely helpless to do anything about what happened to them.
My dad — who doesn’t quite yet know I’m an atheist, for reasons I won’t get into here, though I think he suspects — recently told me (before the recent spate of evidence against the Pope and the church in general came forth) “you know, a little church never hurt anyone.” I don’t quite understand cognitive dissonance. I mean, the Inquisition alone — think of how many people were tortured to death by representatives of the Catholic church.
Yet somehow millions still think of this man, this organization, of representations of some kind of loving and benevolent God. Cognitive dissonance is an amazing thing. I can’t imagine knowing all of this and still failing to draw the connection that either this religion does not represent an actually loving God, or that the God of this religion really, really loves child rape.
Jabberwock
April 16th, 2010 at 8:54 pm
Happy to see you back in action!
And yeah, there are times when the Catholic church looks reasonable compared to Evangelical Christianity. Then there are times when it looks like more of a menace to society than E.C.
April 16th, 2010 at 9:45 pm
Jabber’s back!
These Catholics-molesting-children thing has been going on for years now. I know the Pope recently addressed this, but has something else happened that I don’t know about? I just don’t see how it’s particularly relevant.
April 16th, 2010 at 11:04 pm
Hey, good to see you posting again.
I think they hand-wave the dissonance with the duet of “mysterious ways” and “free will” … no, it doesn’t make sense to me, either.
April 17th, 2010 at 12:35 am
Good to see you posting again! I’m surprised you didn’t have anything to say about the healthcare bill being passed and the shitstorm that followed.
Really, the way the Catholic church tries to shelter child molesters is sickening. Any organization that would actively work to cover such disgusting actions by its members has no legitimacy.
April 17th, 2010 at 12:51 am
Welcome back, Jabberwock.
I’ve noticed a lot of people, and not just Catholics, have this kind of thing going on. You find yourself in some organisation, or family, or community that you know from really simple evidence is reprehensible and you should get out. But there’s a big distance between what you know is right and wrong in a kind of abstract sense, and what doing something about it means to you immediately.
If having a roof over your head or getting a paycheck depends on being able to get along with people who are deeply committed to something like the Church, then it’s real easy to just say, “well, child rape is just a tragedy that, of course, everybody condemns, so I can file that away in the mental box called Not Relevant to My Life, along with all of history and everything that happens to foreigners.” Because everything that you don’t want to accept responsibility for is just random crap that has no relation to, say, the system of unquestionable and undemocratic authority that if you’re not supporting by being a member, you’re at least condoning by silence. And then if pressed you can excuse yourself from any personal suffering for principles by saying, “well, what can one person achieve anyway…”
The most depressing part is that when you see that in others you can only wonder, “do I do that myself?”
April 17th, 2010 at 10:56 pm
Great to see you back, Jabberwock!
I wonder how much of it is ignorance of some of these facts. My mom, who hasn’t attended church in years and refuses to send money to the church because of the child-rape (she takes the money that she would have given to the church to various charities instead, mostly benefiting sick children and neglected animals), still couldn’t see why people are on this particular pope’s back, because “he wasn’t pope when it happened anyway” so it wasn’t his fault, and why oh why is everyone fixating on him? I explained to her that they don’t just select some random old wino from the street for Pope, but high-ranking members of the clergy, and that he was in charge of making a lot of these decisions that are being opened to scrutiny right now. She pouted, but she stopped arguing with me and stopped making those comments, so I have chosen to believe she “got it”. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.
BTW, Starfols, that’s the issue. These particular child-rape cases in Germany are cases Pope Ratzy had direct responsibility for when they happened, and there is documentation of him writing that the reputation of the Holy Church needed to take absolute precedence over the raped children’s rights. Maintaining the illusion of morality in the Catholic Church at the expense of the victims was more important to this douchebag than exercising actual morality.
April 18th, 2010 at 6:58 am
Hell, not only do they cover it up, they insist that The Gays are somehow to blame for their own vile behavior, and that saying otherwise makes you a Nazi.
To say cognitive dissonance is involved makes the faulty implication that there is cognition going on here.
April 18th, 2010 at 6:59 am
…Clarifiation: By “their own vile behavior,” I’m referring to the pederasts among the Catholic clergy, NOT homosexual people.
April 19th, 2010 at 9:18 am
Welcome back. I’ve also been checking the site daily for updates. Good to have you back.
April 19th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
FWIW, I would not mind those red papal shoes under my own bed.
April 21st, 2010 at 3:18 pm
@1: Thanks!
Yeah, definitely. Most religions are pretty terrible, to be honest, and they’re indicative of cultural immaturity.
@2:
Everything is relevant. Anyway, there have been more revelations recently about the extent of abuse and the now-Pope’s cover-up of that abuse over the years. In addition to his addressing all of this irrefutable evidence as “petty rumors”. Guy’s a dickbag. No wonder he has to drive around in a bulletproof box.
@3: Thanks! Glad you’re still reading. Same goes for all of you.
The dissonance is just a coping mechanism. It’s understandably scary for someone to question all these things they’ve taken as truths their whole lives. So they have to weave increasingly-elaborate lies of increasingly-ridiculous levels of contradiction in order to avoid having to deal with very profound and terrifying emotional and intellectual changes.
@4: I did, and I probably will write about it, but I’d gotten sort of burned out emotionally and mentally with regard to politics and religion. I found I had difficulty writing too much about them beyond a brief, like, Twitter update or something. Just too frustrating and enraging, and words come out too slowly.
@5: Thanks! And yeah, you’re exactly right. I think we all lie to ourselves, to an extent, as a necessary way of coping with how shitty this world can get. Part of the difference — and it’s a crucial one — is what you said about thinking “hey, do I do this?” Introspection and questioning yourself is key.
@6: Thanks! The way I understand it, a lot of Catholics are writing it off as “well, it was just a relative handful of them, and that was back when they thought that these priests could be rehabilitated psychologically after it.” There are infinite excuses available, usually, and it operates in much the same way as battered wives making excuses for their horrible husbands.
@7,8: Yeah, it’s fucking ridiculous. But then again, religious folk took to blaming cats for the Black Plague, too, and we all know how right we were on that one as well. One would think that the population at large would stop listening so closely to organizations that have demonstrated consistently that they’re so fucking wrong about things.
@9: Thanks! Glad you’ve been keeping an eye out. I feel kind of bad about abandoning the site for so long.
@10: Hah! *shudders*
April 22nd, 2010 at 3:53 pm
The Pope is going to Hell. I don’t care if he says he’s the representative of God, he does not represent him and, he sure does not represent me or any other decent Catholic.
The Church needs a clean-up. It’s lost itself to, well, decadence. The cardinals and the bishops are so wrapped up in their own privilege they can’t see beyond it. It’s the good ol’ boys club, and, as a Catholic, I am fucking ashamed of it.
April 23rd, 2010 at 2:06 pm
But Christians can do no wrong! So when they do wrong things, it’s not REALLY wrong, and it’s completely justifiable.
April 24th, 2010 at 6:25 am
Back at the J-man:
It’s not always necessarily that they think any of it is *right,* per se. (”And they did pardon Galileo, so blah blah stupid excuse et cetera”) Catholics have all kinds of weird reasons for sticking with it, even if they don’t believe the central dogma or condone the corruption that’s plagued the Vatican almost from the beginning. During my last few years as a Catholic, I clung to the idea that I was participating in a ritual that other people had also participated in, in the exact same way, for a good 1500 years or so (and for most of those years, all in the same language, too). This, of course, is as stupid as getting married for the sole reason that marriage is such a long-lived and near-universal institution.
I don’t dare ask my parents for their opinions on the scandal. My mother is happy to turn the other cheek as long as you’re not rocking the boat in any way, and my father is as close to Catholic fundie as you can get and still condone birth control.
May 7th, 2010 at 9:43 pm
@ demonhype & J
That explains a lot about that. I knew he addressed it, but I never knew he was involved in covering it up. Thanks for clearing that up. You’re right, though. Somebody oughta roll his pope-box down a hill
As for irrelevance, I didn’t mean it like that. I was just expecting new material to be about Palin 2012 or something, I don’t know.
July 4th, 2010 at 8:51 pm
I just wanted to tell you two things:
1) My dad’s pretty comfortable with my being an agnostic (I refuse to go all the way, just in case I’m proven wrong one day–it’s the kind of thing I live for)
and
2)He was raised a Roman Catholic, but nowadays the Church and the current Pope pretty much sicken him. We have fun snarking at the Midnight Mass they show on TV every Christmas Eve.
Here’s my comment, too: if they presume to follow the teachings of Christ, then why do they have so much gold and other ornamentation? Should they not believe in simple living?