@BrazenlyLiberal I would largely agree but allowing themselves to be misled is a forfeit of free will. The entire reason their lamb of god died. They don’t even get their own book message.
The thing is people are taught good/bad when we're very young. The lessons come from people we instinctively trust and we aren't yet mature enough to evaluate them.
By the time a person is grown, that sense of right/wrong is baked in and the best likelihood of healthy acceptance of some of it and rejection of others is if a tendency for independent thought has also been baked in. Nobody consciously decides to be hypocritical. Inconsistencies are brushed off as "God's will'
@BrazenlyLiberal Oh contrare, I had to treat 2 pedophile priests for years. They both made conscious decisions to do horrible things.
I was talking about the congregation.
@BrazenlyLiberal Agreed. I had at least three known pedophiles as permanent patients. It wasn’t the highlight of my day to assist them to better health. I’ll tell you that.
They can't help the urges. I have genuine sympathy for that. but they must be required to get whatever help they need to not act on them or be confined for life. And the traffickers who profit off them should be one and done and jailed.
@BrazenlyLiberal Sorry but I agree with Dennis Miller: if you are so broken that the only way you can get off is to hurt a child, then you need to lean in, take one for the team and kill yourself.
@BrazenlyLiberal Then the congregation should stop, pause, then consider who they are following.
The answer most would come to is "not MY priest. He's not one of the bad ones"
@BrazenlyLiberal Right! He’s the good catholic priest living vicariously through your tawdry tales in a sound proof booth of human judgement, all the while being no better at solving human foibles than the person who has to testify before him
Well, I dunno. It all looks much different from the outside and more complex on the inside. Catholicism is not just a religion in some places, it's a culture with rich tradition.
You left it. I left it. But a lot of genuinely good people stay.
@BrazenlyLiberal I can agree with that.
@MidnightRider
Those priests should be in jail, not church. And charges should be filed against church officials who knew what they had done and hadn't reported it.