@ Orathaic. The conviction of Cardinal Pell was not suppressed by the Court to protect the reputation of the Catholic Church. It was suppressed because of his intention to appeal the conviction and (I think) there was another, probably linked matter before the Court. I think his lawyers argued to the Court that if Cardinal Pell's conviction became public knowledge, it might (unfairly) influence the other matter before the Court. When the other matter before the Court was dropped then media organisations successfully sought to have the suppression order revoked.

Yet more evidence that anti-abortion laws are fucked up and more about controlling women than "saving" foetuses:

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-anti ... &r=US&IR=T

Jamiet99uk wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2019 11:26 am

orathaic wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2019 10:15 am

... Largely that means local communities are being charitable through the church to help their neighbours. And that is great, but it doesn't require a global institution controlling and protecting its reputation...

You don't even need a local church.

My pub (a rock/metal/biker bar) has a fund raising team .... the vast majority of whom are non-religious. This year so far we have raised over £8,000 for local charities, and there's plenty more in the pipeline.

Cheers! Here’s to good people doing good in the world!

flash2015 wrote: ↑

Fri May 31, 2019 2:25 am

His? I thought it was "SHE who must be obeyed"?

Sorry, no. That would be my wife. It says so on our Netflix ID’s

She who must be obeyed
Parasite #1
Parasite #2
Parasite #3

I don't know what "God" means.

Smokey Gem wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 05, 2019 3:26 am

Umm there is no God check your medications or go get some. Any male who thinks they have a say in this is just a male. Sorry guys you don't get to choose.

Next you will tell me mathematics doesn't exist.

It is a rather pointless argument. Because we can use maths whether it exists or not in order to solve problems.

The question become, is God useful. And many people continue to find it a very useful idea.

Umm there is no God check your medications or go get some. Any male who thinks they have a say in this is just a male. Sorry guys you don't get to choose.

I will return to this later, I'd like to discuss the behaviour of those individuals who first set themselves up as spokespersons for Gods. What motivated them, etc.

Damn right Jamiet99uk, well done, that's great collective work. Similarly, Gods, Deities or religions​ are not required to develop​ a moral & ethical code.

orathaic wrote: ↑

Mon Jun 03, 2019 10:15 am

So I did start this with 'in defence' of the church. The community role and charitable works can't be ignored. But I am rather critical, the Vatican and church authorities don't fund charitable works, those are funded by local communities. Largely that means local communities are being charitable through the church to help their neighbours. And that is great, but it doesn't require a global institution controlling and protecting its reputation...

You don't even need a local church.

My pub (a rock/metal/biker bar) has a fundraising team of which I am a member. It consists of both staff and customers, the vast majority of whom are non-religious. This year so far we have raised over £8,000 for local charities, and there's plenty more in the pipeline.

In defence of the church, they are not the only organisation which has been used by paedophiles to abuse children, (in Ireland alone i know séin ireland and scouting ireland both had issues). However the responce of the church authorities was an abuse of power.

When they (several bishops) decided to cover up these crimes, move priests from one diocese to another (allowing them abuse more children), while claiming that the priest didn't need to do any atonement greater than seeking forgiveness from God... They were acting to protect the power of the institutions. Now the only powerful institutions which exist are those which use their power the protect themselves. But most countries have established some form of checks and balanced on the power of their state.

And the Catholic Church has for decades fought state authority attempting to curb their power. I suspect they have used diplomatic immunity of Vatican City officials to circumvent the law in various places, Cardinal Pell being a prime example of taking years to actually convict - at which point the suppression of the publication of his crimes makes perfect sense, the Church continues to try to protect its own reputation. And if you are partof the church, perhaps you can see all the good they do in your life and community, so want to see others benefit from these goods, and would therefore support protect the churches reputation...

So I did start this with 'in defence' of the church. The community role and charitable works can't be ignored. But I am rather critical, the Vatican and church authorities don't fund charitable works, those are funded by local communities. Largely that means local communities are being charitable through the church to help their neighbours. And that is great, but it doesn't require a global institution controlling and protecting its reputation...

In Ireland I know the influence of the church has declined in recent years, and along with that the communities centered around rural churches have moved more towards sports (specifically the Gaelic Games, GAA which is well established across the country). So I am more than happy to assume the community element will easily find a substitute without the church (even without replacing it with another religion).

So, my real defence of the church is merely, all powerful institutions act to protect their own power. And often at the expense of their original stated mission.

(as an aside, in responce to the 'charitable works' angle, I know that on Kiva - an online micro lending platform - the atheists and christians are competing to lend the most money...)

Agree with a lot of that Carl. The trial of Cardinal Pell in Australia (convicted, conviction suppressed from publication whilst appeal lodged, eventually suppression order overturned, public finally get to know.. a never ending saga of expensive lawyers representing Pell & Church) and more instructively, the lengths the Catholic Church went to in defending him, the resources used in that defense compared to the Catholic Church's treatment of victims of abuse & allocation of resources to compensate victims of abuse, is damnable inditement of the systemic problems within the Catholic Church

Whew. Had me worried for a sec.
Though I don't disagree with the sentiment, just the length of it. Like any institution with access to considerable power over society for a long length of time, the Catholic Church has wrought great good and great evil. It is currently badly in need of reform because it has failed to address, and appears systemically incapable of addressing, considerable atrocities perpetrated against children.
I wouldn't be so quick to throw the entirety of the Catholic Church or religious organizations generally under the bus though. They are the foremost providers of relief to the poor and charity in the Western world, and they are often the bedrock of constructive community life.
That said, from what I know (and have learned in this thread) about the actions taken at Bon Secours and by pedophile priests, with the Church leadership looking the other way, there is clearly a deep rot and corruption within the Church that must be purged.

The Catholic Church, like most if not all churches, is an evil institution which has done untold harm to many people.

Jamiet99uk wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 02, 2019 7:20 pm

Ben Shapiro is a horrible person. He's just absolutely vile.

Whoa, stop talking so much sense, you're weirding me out. Lol.

flash2015 wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 02, 2019 2:22 pm

@orathaic, as part of the inquest did they come to understand **why** all the deaths occurred? I assume that it largely came down to lack of resources and no oversight (religious institutions often get a pass because of their special status)?

<snip>

The investigation is ongoing, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Sec ... _Baby_Home

The article has some good links in the references.

But AFAIK, the religious order got state funding for these children (possibly not enough) and many died from malnutrition, though also other causes of death are listed (possibly diseases which would not have been fatal in a well nourished child). The death rate was very high.

Ben Shapiro is a horrible person. He's just absolutely vile.

@orathaic, as part of the inquest did they come to understand **why** all the deaths occurred? I assume that it largely came down to lack of resources and no oversight (religious institutions often get a pass because of their special status)?

Some people get incensed with abortions made for economic reasons ("how dare these women think of money!!"). But you just can't leave it out of the equation. If you are going to force women to give birth then an important part of the discussion is how we would fund it. We can't just wave it away and say "God provides" because as it has been shown that it is not a given.

Thanks for reminding me why I don't think of myself as a Catholic anymore...

Mother and baby homes weren't unique to Ireland. They happened in Australia too. PM Gillard a few years ago apologized for all the forced adoptions which came out of the mother and baby homes:

http://forcedadoptions.naa.gov.au/resou ... stitutions

To be fair to the Church, as it says in the report, for a long time the Church was often the only organization which did anything to help unwed mothers. But as a society I think we should have grown past that, that we now know it is wrong to force largely poor single mothers into these sorts of institutions.

Of course, if you have ever watched "The Ben Shapiro show" Ben (who is strongly against abortion) talks about how welfare should only be provided at the local level and how religious institutions should be the primary providers of welfare...which effectively will take us back to things like this.

Following on from that rant, indulge me in a second one.

Are foetuses babies? Well categorical thinking is another tool for simplifying things. It often leads to errors, and i would advocate for defining things based on their qualities. For example, brain dead humans in a vegetative state do not have the quality of conscious (or otherwise) thought. Therefore you can say they are alive, but they are no longer people.

Babies have the quality that they can survive independently outside their mother's uterus. Therefore, after about 24 weeks, a foetus becomes a baby. There is still maybe a 50/50 chance of survival are 24 weeks, but that is a fine cutoff point. The vast majority of abortions happen before 24 weeks, and those that happen after are consider medically necessary (there is no point in killing both the mother and baby, or fatal foetal abnormalities as examples). If a pregnancy needs to be safely ended after this point a C-section will usually be performed and doctors will attempt to save both patients.

So I refute the term 'baby killers' in the strongest of terms.

Second, a narrative about hating women. I live in Ireland and we have had a long history of religious persecution. The last 20 years has seen the growth or a progressive secular Ireland, but during the 400 years before that we had no freedom of/from religion. The protestant ascendancy were the ruling class (aligned with the Church of England) and catholics were persecuted, poverty was a political tool used to try to force the Irish to convert and Protestants were seen as loyal to the British Crown (and their king was also the head of church); since 1923 and Irish independence we replaced British influence with the pope's influence from Rome. Catholics no longer persecuted instead began forcing their views on others. And it is very clear from the outcomes what this amounted to.

In 1983, the year is was born, we added the 8th amendment to the Irish constitution. The laws at the time paint a stark picture of Catholicism. Sex was seen as purely for reproduction, and not for fun. Thus all forms of contraception were banned, as was gay sex. Women's place in society was to make babies. Thus abortion was illegal, but more horrifyingly 'marital rape' was not a crime, and divorce was illegal - basically the Church, perhaps in a desire to make more catholics had come up with a system where women became property of their husband upon marriage. Sex was mandatory, contraception illegal, and abortion unthinkable.

It is worth noting that sex outside of marriage was frowned upon, and women/teenage girls found pregnant outside of marriage were consider fallen women. There were regularly shipped of to 'mother and baby' home and then confined in 'magdallen laundries', a kind of prison/slavery system where women worked for no pay and suffered physical and mental abuse from the nuns who ran the places (while the state benefitted from the services of these laundries). The police would return run aways despite the fact that they had committed no crime, and had no opportunity to have a fair trial... Mother and baby homes have been revealed in recent years to have sold children to American families aka illegal adoptions, forcing women to give up their wanted children, and significantly to have allowed hundred to die of malnourishment which were (in at least one case) dumped in septic tanks instead of being offered a 'proper Catholic burial'.

The Church and State were both complicit in these actions and it is clear that this was not purely 'pro-life'. It was all about controlling sex, making women subservient to men (their husband's property) and punishing any woman who refused to get married (even if their partner was an abusive drunk, being married to him would be seen as better than being a broken women). Not many came from families with strong matriarchal figures who would have told the nuns to fuck off. But teenage girls died due to lack of access to abortion.

Many of these laws were target of the progressive left, abortion was not one of them. In 1983, there was no hope to overturn the abortion law, and an amendment to 'protect the life of the unborn' was introduced to our constitution. It wasn't about stopping the killing of babies, this was happening in Mother and Baby homes all over the country. It was about maintaining control over women. Not just their bodily autonomy, but their sex lives in general.

I am thankful to say that the only law remaining from that era is the one prohibiting the sale of sex (logically, you can't have women making a profit from sex, as that could give them power - over men - and money to control their own lives). This is the last piece to undo. But it is completely clear that the church cared more about control of women than about the lives of babies. They had hundreds of babies die in their care, they had money from the state to feed and protect them, and they let those babies die. Because those particular babies were born of sin, and thus the church didn't value them.

This is the kind of narrative which easily leads on to see the 'pro-life' movement as anti-woman. The church in Ireland used the 'every life is sacred' idea as a tool in their oppression of women, while treating certain lives as far less sacred (ie dumped in a septic tank not sacred).

There are many women in the pro-life movement who will tell you they don't hate women, and don't hate themselves. And look, it is entirely possible that they are happy to be part of a family, to stay at home making babies, and to love that life. But when you have a society where that is not a choice freely made by the women who feel it suits them... The is oppression, that is hatred of women. And enforcing this on anyone is disgusting.