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silveradeptToday merits a separate Worst Person in the World merit because a simple paragraph of pithy dismissal isn’t going to cut it on this one. Long, but hopefully not rambly. The regular news post for today will be the next entry as you continue scrolling. Read in whichever order you like.
The set-up: Mr. Kilpatrick says that the outrage against the Catholic church and their continual covering-up and reshuffling of priests that abuse children is not outrage against child abuse, but part of a broader anti-Christian agenda.
How does he know this? Well, we’re not outraged that the President is dropping inflammatory terms like “jihad” from the national security document, so clearly we’re a-okay with Islam, the religion whose adherents are unfailingly terrorists waiting for their opportunity to impose their world and its backwards, bizarre rules (many of them shared with Christians or Jews) on the rest of us fine, upstanding Christian citizens. Furthermore, nobody was outraged when Roman Polanski raped a young girl (in Bizarro World, perhaps) and nobody is outraged that researcher Alfred Kinsey consulted with admitted pedophiles to gather data for his survey and research on human sexuality (uh, comprehensiveness requires talking to people that will squick you out, usually).
His first thesis is that Catholics are obviously just a convenient scapegoat - once they’ve been taken down, the secularists will come for every other Christian denomination, too. Liberals are attempting to tear down the taboo against pedophilia, as evidenced by their continued attempts to normalize same-sex relationships despite most of the abuse being male priests on male children. Clearly, to Mr. Kilpatrick, homosexuality and pedophilia of teen boys are linked, if not one causes another, and it has nothing to do at all with a religion that declares only males can become priests, can hold higher offices in the religion, and has several local churches that insist only men can be the assistants at the altar as well, and then further requires that men be sexually celibate to be priests. Furthermore, the priest is supposed to be a person of trust endowed with the ultimate authority to tell us what God wants and means for us, making it much harder for anyone to believe the priest would be abusing the children. (This might not have any correlation at all, actually. Could be a red herring, but the male-centric Catholic Church does seem like it would have a higher-than-statistical chance of attracting homosexuals, and the doctrinal insistences that children must be unquestioningly obedient of the priests as well as their parents does help create an environment where a pedophile could hide.)
Mr. Kilpatrick then says recent efforts to root out pedophiles, initated by Cardinal Ratzinger, have been stunningly effective, so much so that public schools are more likely to have abuse than the Catholic Church, so there must be a hidden agenda as to why we continue to harp on these issues. The problem doesn’t exist anymore, and we don’t need to apologize for when it happened in the past! No, the real reason we’re still on this subject, says Mr. Kilpatrick, is because Christianity is one of the few places in society that still proposes moral absolutes. Moral absolutes are the Kryptonite of liberals, because they say something is always wrong and don’t let society wiggle its way out by using situational ethics. Moral absolutes stop society from being completely liberal with its sexual practices (implication: homosexuals, pedophiles, incest, bestiality, and everything bad you can think of will be okay and nobody can say it’s wrong without being accused of “hate speech”!) So Christianity must be the butt of rude jokes, told that evangelizing could be considered a hate crime, have its vocal supporters fined or jailed for expressing their views, so that its influence will be weakened enough to let the secular forces take over. It’s discrimination against them, while Other Religions can do all sorts of hateful things and they’ll get a pass in the name of diversity or multiculturalism. Which leads to his second thesis.
That thesis is that the push for secularism is actually the first part of a sinister plot by Islam, The Evil Religion that enshrines child abuse in its scriptures, marries off young girls to older men and recruits boys to be the lovers of older men, the true enemy, to take over once Christianity, the bulwark against their evil, is weakened and destroyed. No media outlet ever talks about any of the abuses of Islam, though, and never ever links those cases that do get talked about to The Evil Religion so that everyone can see how Evil it is and run to the comforting arms of Christianity, the Forces of Good. Europe, now being slowly taken over by The Evil Religion, has seen female genital mutilation, child marriages, and honor killings pop up, strictly as imports from The Evil Religion’s immigrants and the government’s unwillingness to ban The Evil Religion for condoning such practices. According to Mr. Kilpatrick, first we go secular, then Islam sweeps in and takes over in our weakened state, leaving the dominant society one where “children in hijabs [are] hurried into the local government approved clitorectomy clinic”.
...where to begin? Do I start with the parts of Christianity that explicitly can say that beating your child is acceptable and necessary to raising them properly and steering them away from evil? “Christian Domestic discipline?” The part where the prophet summons bears to eat the children that make fun of him? The practice of stoning people who violate the moral laws? The possibility that King David was LGBT, an adulterer, and yet is blessed to be the head of the line from which Jesus appears? The Levitical laws and their selective application in modern society? Jacob stealing his brother’s birthright and then tricking his dad? The gang rapists of Sodom and Gomorrah (who got theirs in the end, we must note)? The incestuous daughters of Lot?
The Jewish and Christian traditions are soaked in blood, violence, taboo breaking, blasphemy, sex, adultery, and all sorts of sinful behaviors. Mostly, we note, in the beginning parts, the histories and the accounts of the people, their kings, and the judges. Once we hit the Christian Foundational Writings, the message shifts. The main message there is faith, hope, and love, especially love, with some fairly explicit commands to tell the Laws of old to go fuck off if they don’t bring someone into a deeper faith and inspire more love for their fellow humans. The stoners for the adulterer? “If you’re perfect, go ahead and throw.” Roman tax collectors, Samaritans, lepers, sinners, The Other People? “Let’s have dinner together. Let me get you a drink of water.” Clerics with an inflated sense of their own importance? “Fuck off.” People making profit off of religious activities? “Fuck off, and here’s a few lashes on your ass for good measure.” Even so, the way to salvation for the people is through a blood sacrifice! One foreshadowed (by the arrangement of the text) all the way back in Genesis, when God commands Abraham to take Isaac, his son, and slaughter him as an offering. Abraham’s hand is stayed at the last minute, but there’s no God to overrule the killing of his own divine son. Even in the hopey-changey parts, there’s still plenty of stuff bubbling underneath the surface. To displace all of that tradition onto your kid brother and say he’s the only one who’s ever violent or misogynistic in modern times (let’s not get started on Paul of Tarsus) or seeks to impose himself on the world requires some serious ignorance or cognitive dissonance.
Yes, we’re seeing people immigrate to other countries and bring their cultural practices with them. That does not mean they’ve been legalized - there were several well-publicized cases where FGM was roundly condemned and another set composed of child brides seeking injunctions from the law that they had to marry. They won, by the way. Even the vaunted “Sharia courts” in Europe are only empowered by the regular courts to handle disputes that don’t involve breaking secular laws, as far as I know. And we get much more publicity about bombings done in other countries by people of other religions, but curiously little about the religious motivations of non-Muslims when they commit violence. Scott Roeder? Christian terrorist. He doesn’t get that moniker, though, because the debate over him focused mostly on the medical service that George Tiller provided and the morality of that rather than condemning the terrorist attack. For those that did condemn them, by the way. There were plenty of Christian terrorist groups that praised Scott Roeder, and that praise the use of explosives and murder against those seeking or providing medical services, out of their own twisted desire to impose their morality on the rest of us and take over the country. Christian terrorists beat and kill plenty of LGBT people every year, but the debate focuses on whether or not being LGBT is something that should be allowed, not on condemning the vicious violence against fellow human beings. They’re not mutilating their children, but they are leaving them unprepared for the world around them. Some Christians believe that vaccination is unacceptable, and so will leave their children to die rather than seek treatment. That’s not just child abuse, that’s infanticide. Yet they are not universally condemned as “baby-killers”. Government contractor Xe, nee Blackwater, has a lot of evidence suggesting that some part of the organization, if not the whole upper management, viewed themselves as Christians taking the fight to Muslims - Christian terrorism against the Muslim population, wrapped, knowingly, in the language of a War against (Muslim) Terrorism. (It sounds like the beginning of an awful recursion loop.) And that’s apart from all the stories emanating from the armed services about the treatment of non-Christians by their fellows and officers. An outsider to our culture could probably say with high certainty that the Christianists, including their terror arms, have successfully subverted the intended secular government to create their own empire. They’ve got an abundant amount of evidence to choose from.
Mr. Kilpatrick and anyone of his ilk are not only denying their history and projecting it onto the other, they’re trying to fight against someone else doing what they have already done, and are throwing up as many smokescreens designed to appeal to the societal inculcation of what is right and wrong as they can to hide it. It’s not “Save us from the Evil”, it’s “Save us from having our power challenged!” An actually secular government would look and act much differently than the government of the United States and of the various States. I think that if the government were to find a way of detaching itself from the thorns of Christianity wrapped around it and find a way of keeping them from returning, there would be no need to worry about Islam supposedly taking its place and taking over - the right structures would already be in place to resist any religious entity trying to take over, regardless of what religion it was.
The set-up: Mr. Kilpatrick says that the outrage against the Catholic church and their continual covering-up and reshuffling of priests that abuse children is not outrage against child abuse, but part of a broader anti-Christian agenda.
How does he know this? Well, we’re not outraged that the President is dropping inflammatory terms like “jihad” from the national security document, so clearly we’re a-okay with Islam, the religion whose adherents are unfailingly terrorists waiting for their opportunity to impose their world and its backwards, bizarre rules (many of them shared with Christians or Jews) on the rest of us fine, upstanding Christian citizens. Furthermore, nobody was outraged when Roman Polanski raped a young girl (in Bizarro World, perhaps) and nobody is outraged that researcher Alfred Kinsey consulted with admitted pedophiles to gather data for his survey and research on human sexuality (uh, comprehensiveness requires talking to people that will squick you out, usually).
His first thesis is that Catholics are obviously just a convenient scapegoat - once they’ve been taken down, the secularists will come for every other Christian denomination, too. Liberals are attempting to tear down the taboo against pedophilia, as evidenced by their continued attempts to normalize same-sex relationships despite most of the abuse being male priests on male children. Clearly, to Mr. Kilpatrick, homosexuality and pedophilia of teen boys are linked, if not one causes another, and it has nothing to do at all with a religion that declares only males can become priests, can hold higher offices in the religion, and has several local churches that insist only men can be the assistants at the altar as well, and then further requires that men be sexually celibate to be priests. Furthermore, the priest is supposed to be a person of trust endowed with the ultimate authority to tell us what God wants and means for us, making it much harder for anyone to believe the priest would be abusing the children. (This might not have any correlation at all, actually. Could be a red herring, but the male-centric Catholic Church does seem like it would have a higher-than-statistical chance of attracting homosexuals, and the doctrinal insistences that children must be unquestioningly obedient of the priests as well as their parents does help create an environment where a pedophile could hide.)
Mr. Kilpatrick then says recent efforts to root out pedophiles, initated by Cardinal Ratzinger, have been stunningly effective, so much so that public schools are more likely to have abuse than the Catholic Church, so there must be a hidden agenda as to why we continue to harp on these issues. The problem doesn’t exist anymore, and we don’t need to apologize for when it happened in the past! No, the real reason we’re still on this subject, says Mr. Kilpatrick, is because Christianity is one of the few places in society that still proposes moral absolutes. Moral absolutes are the Kryptonite of liberals, because they say something is always wrong and don’t let society wiggle its way out by using situational ethics. Moral absolutes stop society from being completely liberal with its sexual practices (implication: homosexuals, pedophiles, incest, bestiality, and everything bad you can think of will be okay and nobody can say it’s wrong without being accused of “hate speech”!) So Christianity must be the butt of rude jokes, told that evangelizing could be considered a hate crime, have its vocal supporters fined or jailed for expressing their views, so that its influence will be weakened enough to let the secular forces take over. It’s discrimination against them, while Other Religions can do all sorts of hateful things and they’ll get a pass in the name of diversity or multiculturalism. Which leads to his second thesis.
That thesis is that the push for secularism is actually the first part of a sinister plot by Islam, The Evil Religion that enshrines child abuse in its scriptures, marries off young girls to older men and recruits boys to be the lovers of older men, the true enemy, to take over once Christianity, the bulwark against their evil, is weakened and destroyed. No media outlet ever talks about any of the abuses of Islam, though, and never ever links those cases that do get talked about to The Evil Religion so that everyone can see how Evil it is and run to the comforting arms of Christianity, the Forces of Good. Europe, now being slowly taken over by The Evil Religion, has seen female genital mutilation, child marriages, and honor killings pop up, strictly as imports from The Evil Religion’s immigrants and the government’s unwillingness to ban The Evil Religion for condoning such practices. According to Mr. Kilpatrick, first we go secular, then Islam sweeps in and takes over in our weakened state, leaving the dominant society one where “children in hijabs [are] hurried into the local government approved clitorectomy clinic”.
...where to begin? Do I start with the parts of Christianity that explicitly can say that beating your child is acceptable and necessary to raising them properly and steering them away from evil? “Christian Domestic discipline?” The part where the prophet summons bears to eat the children that make fun of him? The practice of stoning people who violate the moral laws? The possibility that King David was LGBT, an adulterer, and yet is blessed to be the head of the line from which Jesus appears? The Levitical laws and their selective application in modern society? Jacob stealing his brother’s birthright and then tricking his dad? The gang rapists of Sodom and Gomorrah (who got theirs in the end, we must note)? The incestuous daughters of Lot?
The Jewish and Christian traditions are soaked in blood, violence, taboo breaking, blasphemy, sex, adultery, and all sorts of sinful behaviors. Mostly, we note, in the beginning parts, the histories and the accounts of the people, their kings, and the judges. Once we hit the Christian Foundational Writings, the message shifts. The main message there is faith, hope, and love, especially love, with some fairly explicit commands to tell the Laws of old to go fuck off if they don’t bring someone into a deeper faith and inspire more love for their fellow humans. The stoners for the adulterer? “If you’re perfect, go ahead and throw.” Roman tax collectors, Samaritans, lepers, sinners, The Other People? “Let’s have dinner together. Let me get you a drink of water.” Clerics with an inflated sense of their own importance? “Fuck off.” People making profit off of religious activities? “Fuck off, and here’s a few lashes on your ass for good measure.” Even so, the way to salvation for the people is through a blood sacrifice! One foreshadowed (by the arrangement of the text) all the way back in Genesis, when God commands Abraham to take Isaac, his son, and slaughter him as an offering. Abraham’s hand is stayed at the last minute, but there’s no God to overrule the killing of his own divine son. Even in the hopey-changey parts, there’s still plenty of stuff bubbling underneath the surface. To displace all of that tradition onto your kid brother and say he’s the only one who’s ever violent or misogynistic in modern times (let’s not get started on Paul of Tarsus) or seeks to impose himself on the world requires some serious ignorance or cognitive dissonance.
Yes, we’re seeing people immigrate to other countries and bring their cultural practices with them. That does not mean they’ve been legalized - there were several well-publicized cases where FGM was roundly condemned and another set composed of child brides seeking injunctions from the law that they had to marry. They won, by the way. Even the vaunted “Sharia courts” in Europe are only empowered by the regular courts to handle disputes that don’t involve breaking secular laws, as far as I know. And we get much more publicity about bombings done in other countries by people of other religions, but curiously little about the religious motivations of non-Muslims when they commit violence. Scott Roeder? Christian terrorist. He doesn’t get that moniker, though, because the debate over him focused mostly on the medical service that George Tiller provided and the morality of that rather than condemning the terrorist attack. For those that did condemn them, by the way. There were plenty of Christian terrorist groups that praised Scott Roeder, and that praise the use of explosives and murder against those seeking or providing medical services, out of their own twisted desire to impose their morality on the rest of us and take over the country. Christian terrorists beat and kill plenty of LGBT people every year, but the debate focuses on whether or not being LGBT is something that should be allowed, not on condemning the vicious violence against fellow human beings. They’re not mutilating their children, but they are leaving them unprepared for the world around them. Some Christians believe that vaccination is unacceptable, and so will leave their children to die rather than seek treatment. That’s not just child abuse, that’s infanticide. Yet they are not universally condemned as “baby-killers”. Government contractor Xe, nee Blackwater, has a lot of evidence suggesting that some part of the organization, if not the whole upper management, viewed themselves as Christians taking the fight to Muslims - Christian terrorism against the Muslim population, wrapped, knowingly, in the language of a War against (Muslim) Terrorism. (It sounds like the beginning of an awful recursion loop.) And that’s apart from all the stories emanating from the armed services about the treatment of non-Christians by their fellows and officers. An outsider to our culture could probably say with high certainty that the Christianists, including their terror arms, have successfully subverted the intended secular government to create their own empire. They’ve got an abundant amount of evidence to choose from.
Mr. Kilpatrick and anyone of his ilk are not only denying their history and projecting it onto the other, they’re trying to fight against someone else doing what they have already done, and are throwing up as many smokescreens designed to appeal to the societal inculcation of what is right and wrong as they can to hide it. It’s not “Save us from the Evil”, it’s “Save us from having our power challenged!” An actually secular government would look and act much differently than the government of the United States and of the various States. I think that if the government were to find a way of detaching itself from the thorns of Christianity wrapped around it and find a way of keeping them from returning, there would be no need to worry about Islam supposedly taking its place and taking over - the right structures would already be in place to resist any religious entity trying to take over, regardless of what religion it was.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-01 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-01 07:24 pm (UTC)