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I just don't understand any kind of absolute egalitarianism philosophy. Whether it's branded as anarcho-capitalism or straight anarchism or sockfucking libertarianism, it always misses the same point.

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The triumphant return of CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS!

Started by Cain, March 28, 2010, 09:44:45 PM

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Cain

Finally.  It's been a while, since the election IIRC, but I've found another post-insanity article of the Hitch's I can agree with:

QuoteAlmost every week, I go and debate with spokesmen of religious faith. Invariably and without exception, they inform me that without a belief in supernatural authority I would have no basis for my morality. Yet here is an ancient Christian church that deals in awful certainties when it comes to outright condemnation of sins like divorce, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality between consenting adults. For these offenses there is no forgiveness, and moral absolutism is invoked. Yet let the subject be the rape and torture of defenseless children, and at once every kind of wiggle room and excuse-making is invoked. What can one say of a church that finds so much latitude for a crime so ghastly that no morally normal person can even think of it without shuddering?

It's interesting, too, that the same church did its best to hide the rape and torture from the secular authorities, even forcing child victims (as in the disgusting case of Cardinal Sean Brady, the spiritual chieftain of the Catholics of Ireland) to sign secrecy oaths that prevented them from testifying against their rapists and torturers. Why were they so afraid of secular justice? Did they think it would be less indifferent and pliable than private priestly investigations? In that case, what is left of the shabby half-baked argument that people can't understand elementary morality without a divine warrant?

One mustn't claim all that much for secular justice either, since Cardinal Brady and many like him have neither been dismissed by the church nor prosecuted by the civil power. But this dereliction on the part of the courts and police has mainly occurred in countries or provinces—Ireland, Massachusetts, Bavaria—where the church has undue influence on the bureaucracy. When are we going to see what the parents and relatives of the devastated children want to see and need to see: a senior accomplice of the cover-up actually facing a jury?

Pope Benedict's pathetic and euphemistic letter to his "flock" in Ireland doesn't even propose that such people should lose their positions in the church. And this cowardly guardedness on his part is for a good and sufficient reason: If there was to be a serious criminal investigation, it would have to depose the pope himself. Not only did he, as Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, protect a dangerously criminal priest in his own diocese of Munich and Freising in 1980, having him sent only for "therapy" instead of having him arrested. (The question of the priest's later reassignment to assault more children, which the church continues to obfuscate, is irrelevant to the fact of Ratzinger's direct and personal involvement in the original crime.) Not content with this, Ratzinger later originated, as a cardinal and head of a major institution in Rome, a letter that effectively instructed all bishops to refuse cooperation with any inquiry into what was fast becoming a global scandal.

Fuck it.  I'm going to get ordained as a Catholic priest and start robbing banks and mugging people.  I mean, apparently, you can be excused any crime if you're in with the Big V.

MMIX

Go for it Cain. Bet you'd look stunning in robes.
also
NB There's a damn good reason for calling the laity a "flock" . . .
"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently" David Graeber

Lord Quantum

Quote from: Cain on March 28, 2010, 09:44:45 PM
Fuck it.  I'm going to get ordained as a Catholic priest and start robbing banks and mugging people.  I mean, apparently, you can be excused any crime if you're in with the Big V.

Aaaaaand sig'd. But there's a better way to do it Cain. Just get assigned to rich diocese and steal money from the plate. There was a priest in California that nicked over a million before they finally caught him. He was actually showing up to mass in a Porsche before the heat came down. But given the state in question, the timing and the fact that this happens quite regularly in the Church, it seems that the only reason he was stopped is because the Church needed the money for an upcoming "abuse" trial (which they lost miserably). But if you still wanna hit up the banks, let me know, I'll be your wheel man (not that you'll need one. The banks will of course gladly hand over someone else's money to G-d w/o even calling the police.
Quote from: Cain on March 28, 2010, 09:44:45 PM
Fuck it.  I'm going to get ordained as a Catholic priest and start robbing banks and mugging people.  I mean, apparently, you can be excused any crime if you're in with the Big V.

Quote from: Requia ☣ on September 28, 2008, 02:09:45 AM

Lets try it on an even simpler level:

1) There is a minimum energy/mass things can have, everything can be measured in a multiple of this minimum.

2) Objects at this size, or close to it, don't have an exact position or velocity, so they look like waves in most experiments.

3) If you try to measure the location, they act more like particles, just to fuck with you, but the velocity gets more uncertain, also just to fuck with you.

Conclusion: God hates physicists.

GASMs - PosterGASM (Calvinball edition), AbbyGASM

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Iason Ouabache

USER Cain's class has been changed from Assassin to Monk
You cannot fathom the immensity of the fuck i do not give.
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Jenne

He was on Bill Maher this past Friday...drunk as FUCK.  He even held a beer bottle in his fucking hand throughout the whole interview, with this glazed, reddened look on his face.  Sad.  His prose, though, was spot-on.  I mean, he had his shit DOWN.  He and Maher get along famously on this one point b/c Maher also has a hard-on against ANYTHING religious, whatsofuckingever.  One of the reasons I like him so well (at times).

Cramulus

I doubt this will do much to the Pope. All the higher-ups have been really tight lipped or dismissive of his involvement. The Vatican is going to work together to protect the pope and keep him clean. It's a process they seem to have perfected over the years.  I mean, the priest in question's boss was on NPR this morning saying, "I just got a letter saying he was assigned to my district. Nobody ever told me he used to play a mean jig on the kiddy fiddle."

Jenne

#6
Apparently, though, Ratzinger DID know...at the time he was a cardinal.  And he still just moved the dude around instead of firing his ass off to the jail asap.  That's the whole controversy at this point, I guess, is the very nature of the beast protecting itself but not the "flock" it oversees.  ETA: so it doesn't matter what they say in the media, there's "proof" that they all knew and covered it up.

Fucking sad that the disease goes all the way up the food chain, but it's the Catholic Church after all.  I've been watching "The Tudors" again on Shotime...bad, Jenne, bad.

Lord Quantum

I haven't read too much on the story but everyone seems to agree now that Ratzinger did know but even if he didn't, at this point it's irrelevant. No one has so much as suggested that the priest in question be arrested or even de-frocked and as far as I know the guy might still be out there somewhere doing mass on Sundays. But the Pope is essentially bulletproof. He won't resign and he can't be fired. And Catholics are use to this kind of thing anyway, so the odds of a real uproar over this is about zero. It just makes them look really bad.
Quote from: Cain on March 28, 2010, 09:44:45 PM
Fuck it.  I'm going to get ordained as a Catholic priest and start robbing banks and mugging people.  I mean, apparently, you can be excused any crime if you're in with the Big V.

Quote from: Requia ☣ on September 28, 2008, 02:09:45 AM

Lets try it on an even simpler level:

1) There is a minimum energy/mass things can have, everything can be measured in a multiple of this minimum.

2) Objects at this size, or close to it, don't have an exact position or velocity, so they look like waves in most experiments.

3) If you try to measure the location, they act more like particles, just to fuck with you, but the velocity gets more uncertain, also just to fuck with you.

Conclusion: God hates physicists.

GASMs - PosterGASM (Calvinball edition), AbbyGASM

Pirate Pass Off Scorecard (5)