If 1000 policemen raped some people, but the other 59000 policemen are model citizens, is it just to call all policemen 'police-rapists?'

That's the point I'm trying to make, most people unjustly group all the innocents in with the guilty in order to slander the Catholic Church, just because they hate the Catholic Church.

Accuse the priests for raping the children, the higher ups for covering them up. Persecute them under the full extent of the law. But don't insult a good people who happen to be part of the same institution.

Can you cite us someone saying ALL Catholics are child rapists?

The difference is, public school employees generally lose their jobs and are brought up on criminal charges. Their superiors do not simply transfer them and shield them from legal action. You do understand that that is the real core of why the Church case is so heinous, right?

Now, that would be ridiculous. At best they are 'accessories after the fact'.

Really?

Do you mean that most people, world-wide, do this, and do it because they hate the Church, or that most people who do it do so because they hate the Church?

Both seem pretty unlikely to me. Anyway-
Are you retracting this?

I am glad that we can agree that an organization that aspires to be a universal moral authority should be held to higher standards than a commercial company.

I am glad that we can agree that the catholic church is not above the law.

Undercover journalism has blown the scandal wide open:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VABSo...eature=related

From Brendan O’Neill
How the New Atheists are abusing the truth

Did Catholic priests really rape 10,000 children over the past 50 years, as respectable media outlets claim? No, they didn't.

But how true is this ugly truth? Were 10,000 children in America and thousands more in Ireland really raped by Catholic priests? In a word, no. Instead, what has happened is that in the increasingly caliginous, almost Inquisitorial mindset of sections of the New Atheist anti-pope lobby, every allegation of abuse against a Catholic priest - whether it involved sex talk or fondling or actual penile penetration - has been lumped together under the heading of ‘rape’, and every allegation has been described as an actual proven ‘rape’ regardless of whether it resulted in a legal trial, never mind a conviction.

Out of the 10,000-plus allegations made against priests in America, 3,300 were not investigated at all because they were made after the accused priest had died (surely even the most riled anti-pope commentator accepts that a man who is no longer around to defend himself cannot be convicted of a crime). Of the 4,392 priests in America who were accused of sexual abuse in the period of 1950 to 2002, 1,021 were investigated by the police, and of these, 384 were charged, of whom 252 were convicted. So around six per cent of all American priests who had allegations made against them were finally convicted. (Of course there are many reasons for this relatively tiny number of convictions: some alleged victims were pressured to keep quiet; some (25 per cent in the US) didn’t make their allegations for more than 30 years after the alleged incident occurred; and in some instances there was just a lack of evidence.)

You know you are grasping at straws when your defence is "well he only fondled the child".

Yeah even if the number of abuse cases was the main argument, the piece quoted by Joey does a remarkably poor job of talking it down.
Off course the most important criticism is still the cover up by high level church officials, which he conveniently forgets to comment on.

JD's post should be titled "How Protestants are abusing the truth"

I don't downplay the scandal. I down play some of the bull**** people come up with regarding it.

I don't think enough people have been jailed to account for molesting 4.5 million students.

If the 4.5 million figure is true theres a lot of educators out their molesting kids that are going un-punished. Do you think some of those crimes are covered up?

Maybe. I don't believe there is an attempt to shield abusers by, say, the Department of Education, who oversees the schools, nor are teachers or other employees exempt from prosecution when they flee to an Italian enclave that gets to be run as a theocratic state with an absolute monarch.

The attempt to draw some sort of equivalency in this thread is fairly shameless. There are probably abusers and otherwise sinister individuals within any large organization, and any time you have a large organization dealing with children, you're bound to find a few pedophiles and pederasts. But I do not see most organizations going to the same lengths as the Catholic Church, which claims to be a guardian and beacon of morality, to protect abusers, shield them from prosecution, pay victims hush money, or otherwise cover up the fact that there is a problem within the organization at all.

I agree that the Catholic Church should be held to a higher standard than the department of education. But don't demonize me for pointing out there may a similar problem in the DOE. You should instead demonize yourself for giving the D.O.E. a pass.

How am I giving them a pass? I'm saying that if they discover someone is abusing kids, then they ought to take legal action, which to the best of my knowledge, they do (well, local schools anyway, that's not really a task for the federal DOE). When evidence to the contrary surfaces, get back to me.

This had better not turn into a "well maybe there IS a problem and the media isn't focusing on it" or a "prove that there ISN'T a problem" thread, either.

Why do you feel more anger about the 4500 kids molested by catholic preists than the 4.5 million kids molested in the public school system? Isn't that behavior shameful?

Stupid,

He isnt.

Phil you're about the biggest dumbass on here. Of course I'm being sarcastic. Nothing I have written is shameful and neither is anything Turnprophet has written. Whats dumb is calling people shameful who aren't in complete agreement with you regarding all the facts....which happens all the time in threads like this.