|
MMM you're running some strange apologetics for religion.
There was a big mess to wade through to get caught up on this thread, so I'll just throw some quick thoughts at you:
You mention Catholicism a lot in your examples-- this is a fun one because it's a hierarchical religion, and what one must believe to be a Catholic is not in dispute. And in enters transubstantiation. To not believe that the cracker and fermented grape juice is the literal body and blood of Christ is to not be a Catholic. It is not metaphor. It is a measurable claim about reality.
You keep claiming that the fact that not all Muslims are suicide bombers is evidence that the suicide bombers' convictions come from outside of the religion. An organization can be structured in a way that purposefully or accidentally creates certain behaviours in subsets of the population that it encompasses. Not all Nazis killed jews, or even thought the final solution was a good idea, the majority of Muslims don't actively support jihadists, and Catholics weren't cheering on the pedophiles in their clergy.
That last one is really important. The pedophile abuse in Catholicism can reasonably be ascribed to the structure of the organization. It's not like the first two examples where you can argue that members of the organizations tacitly support the transgressions of a violent deranged minority. In this case no one supported child molestation, but they supported and propped up an organization with a structure based in belief that obviously would lead to child molestation when you sum all the parts. Children were molested because of Catholicism. Not because there are bad people in all walks of life. The structure of Catholicism funnelled sexual misfits into authority roles with children and imposed on them rules of absolute abstinence. It isn't a surprise what happened, and it doesn't require Catholics individually or as a whole to believe pedophilia is a good thing or be active pedophiles for the religion to be responsible.
|