Catholic Church Sex Abuse Report

The scriptures encourage assembly and fellowship. The physical church building doesnt have to be the place.

 

I know you’re tongue in cheek, but the report doesn’t cover anyone in active ministry. Almost all are long dead. Still important to expose for numerous reasons. But the priests in the report are largely from long ago.

 

It’s the pointy piece that moves diagonally on the chessboard.

 

Any case of sexual abuse in a church is a heinous thing and needs to be rooted out and eliminated. No amount is acceptable. But we also need to look at this in perspective. There are probably close to 1 million or more pastors in this country, and 90+ million people attend church. That’s just today, it doesn’t count all the pastors and congregants from years past. The evil pastors who commit these heinous acts are a very, very small minority of people who serve in churches.

I’ve been involved in firing a pastor for immoral behavior. There was never even a hint at covering it up.

 

I don’t want to continue off topic, but your two points require pushback. Even if you do not believe the spiritual or supernatural aspects of the Bible, most of the Bible is history: the story of a nation and the stories of people. It is not fiction and I don’t know any Bible scholars, whether Christians or not, who would call it “fiction.”

The other this idea that the Bible allows abortion. That conclusion comes from a very bad, unsupportable exegesis of a certain passage. It’s cherry picked and misinterpreted by people who want the conclusion they’re looking for.

Now back to our regularly schedule program…

 

do you believe that woman was created from the rib of a man or that Moses parted the red sea or that tablets of stone were created from a burning bush or that Jonas was swallowed by a whale? If anybody wrote such things today would they be taken seriously?

 

You're not only intelligent, you're funny.

 

Modern religion has strayed so far from the scripture that it is hard to equate the two.

 

First a couple corrections. The tablets of stone were not created from the burning bush. Those are two different incidents on two different occasions. Also, the Bible does not say that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. It says that God prepared a great fish for Jonah. Perhaps it was a species that existed, or it might’ve been a one-off species.

If you believe that an all-knowing, all-powerful being created the universe to begin with, then none of those specific events is too difficult. I tend to take the Scriptures at face value, unless there are specific reasons to know that they are symbolic or figurative.

If it was somehow shown that those are symbolic language, that would not affect my faith at all.

The reason they would be considered ridiculous today is that you’re thinking about them in terms of the normal way the world works. Those acts are no big deal for all-powerful God.

By the way, miracles do happen today. Professor Craig Keener at Asbury College has written multiple books documenting miracles that have happened. You should check them out.

 

Weve strayed back to the very Pharisees that Jesus pushed back against

 

I was an alter boy in the 60s. Apparently not a very cute one because I was never molested.

 

Didn't know that kids are much more likely to be abused in school than church. I guess church scandals sell better?