tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1043911407239713889.post8838329555147739585..comments2023-03-31T10:46:34.042-06:00Comments on Wicked Lemons: God is, in fact, a pretty good playwrightTimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14927780034069872147noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1043911407239713889.post-91570715224537471572010-04-16T12:48:44.463-06:002010-04-16T12:48:44.463-06:00I agree it's evil, etc. I'm not arguing wi...I agree it's evil, etc. I'm not arguing with you on that point. I like where you're going. You're pushing my narrative buttons. And I respect you and that brain of yours, so these are more questions like....well: why call this a divine narrative or say that god set it up? <br /><br />On narrative (my true religion), I don't see god's scripting, I see a protestant/WASPish scripting. Everything you're saying seems to me what Luther or his legion of imitators said and why protestants called (or still do i guess) the Catholic Church the antichrist. It smells like post-reformation theological dankness.<br /><br />I guess the idea or notion that we should expect moral behavior from the Church comes not from God or something out there but from post-Lutheran ethics and a particular set of failures in narrative stemming from Aristotle to Aquinas (the failure of the principle of analogy)--that there's an analogous relationship between a non-divine and a divine narrative. One might make this simpler by saying a Platonic relationship in which this "ought" to reflect that. But that's Aristotle and then Aquinas and yadda, yadda, Luther, yadda on down the ages using "natural law" and whatnot. It has nothing to do with a "divine narrative" if such a thing exists. It has to do with justifying man's ways to God, to crib from and reverse Milton.<br /><br />If you look at other narratives: Freud in Totem and Taboo or Moses and Monotheism, or Rene Girard's work on mimetic theory, or the Catholic theologian James Allison, you see a wide variety of ways in which the current violence of the church comes down through social taboos and neuroses, from exogamy and sexual taboos, from homophobia and homosocial displacement. It just doesn't follow for me that any of this is related to "god's scripting" whatever that might mean.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1043911407239713889.post-73024115276788968162010-04-16T09:06:59.193-06:002010-04-16T09:06:59.193-06:00Pedophilia is a fact of life, of course, just like...Pedophilia is a fact of life, of course, just like murder, violence, and so on.<br /><br />(And pedophilic rape is an act that is not exclusively male by the way - if you looked at the horrific prison report about the abuse of juveniles in American prisons, you'll find that the FEMALE guards raped the children as well).<br /><br />Also, girls as young as five were raped, so the victims were not exclusively male, either.<br />What I most object to in all this is the simple lack of humanity on the part of the pederastic priest's colleagues and supervisors. <br /><br />If I knew someone was raping children -- and the evidence in many of these cases is incontrovertible -- I would turn that person into the police. I would do it to protect children. I do not at all consider myself particularly virtuous or moral; it just seems like the right and relatively easy thing to do.<br /> <br />Now, even if I were a blinkered priest in utter fealty to my Church, I would still ensure that the pederast were de-frocked and removed from my beloved institution. That seems like the very, very least one could do. It would not be pleasant, but it would be an easy way to save face and get the priest out of a protected position. The bishops do not seem to have even taken that feeble step.<br /><br />Granted, you're never going to have a perfect institution or culture in a world full of imperfect people. <br /><br />However, even my robust cynicism moves to outrage when a putatively beneficial group essentially sanctifies the rape of children -- the crime, by the way, that puts you on the very bottom rung in prison. Being a 'short eyes' is the lowest of the low to even murdering scum. How it avoids that status within the realm of a church beggars description.<br /><br />What I was trying to get at, is that God created a scenario so vile, so obviously fucked up and wicked in vivid black and white, wrong and right, that it's impossible to make a defense of it. And yet, that's what Ratzinger and the rest of the cardinals are mostly doing.<br /><br />It's not news that the church has served its own survival rather than its flock for centuries. But in a lot of cases, you can say that that institutional preservation is benign, or understandable, or even arguably okay.<br />What the raping priests and their accessories to the crime show is that there is simply utter corruption at the core of the institution, thanks, again to to vivid scripting of Our Lord.<br /><br />I'm not at all reflexively anti-religious, and I find people like Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkins kind of tiresome on the subject -- they exhibit a tone-deafness in a way.<br />But in this case, I hope they're able to put the pope in the dock and in prison. I see no difference between the pope and that ringleader in Belgium who made pornographic movies of eight year olds being raped, and then distributing them on the Net.<br />The Pope, as a hypocrite and betrayer, is by his own set of values, very much worse.<br /><br />(I'd say Greek pederasty, at least in the Classical era, was very much a different practice, too.)Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14927780034069872147noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1043911407239713889.post-53150728192126167712010-04-15T01:22:27.269-06:002010-04-15T01:22:27.269-06:00nice one. rage is exactly what you should feel wh...nice one. rage is exactly what you should feel when confronted with such indelible evil.Robert Greenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06731808616299843937noreply@blogger.com