THE BRITISH THREAD II

I'm not reading that. I know what it will say and I know who it is sucking up to.

What should concern you is why a society produces any peediwhatsits. It is found nowhere in evolution and thus it must be derived from the cultural side. The nurture rather than the nature. The priesthood is one of many professions which allows contact with young people. Someone inclined that way might well have acted at being a priest. Some have acted as scoutmasters and sport's coaches and social workers. Our government now has a strict vetting procedure for such occupations. It didn't used to but it has now. I've seen an ex-boxer filling the forms out and going for interviews. So our Government has recognised it is something going far wider than the priesthood.

And while you are all focussed on priests and having your twee outrage freakouts, so you can justify your licentious behaviour, which will be rife in the offices of the Grauniad, you are being distracted from the serious question. Why are there any men like that at all. Does the Grauniad play any part in creating them? If it does then I can see why it lays out the shitescreen. And why people gobble it up like a hungry spaniel does its Chunkameat. As if the Church has caused them. Like our Government it will have tightened up its recruitment standards.

And a materialist is in no position to cast aspersions on them. Or anybody else for that matter. Can they help it? Some men inclined that way might even join the priesthood because they think it will make it easier to control their urges.

It was by way George of providing you, and others who read it, with a proper answer to the obsessive puerilities so commonly being peddled and which have a few faint hearts startled.

The idea is that you take it into the wider world yourself instead of being cowed by a steady stream of leftie gibberish which hides behind the idea that the audience is completely stupid.

I feel a little like the sausage roll that was chosen after your hand had wavered around the buffet display.

I agree.

Not so sure about the sausage roll bit. Why not just say "thank you" in response to what was thoughtfully intended as a compliment ?

Spendi doesnt "do" thank you.

because it may contain information which is at odds with your views, is that it? How inconvenient.

The main argument is not about errant priests. It's about what the Church decided to do about them, or not to do.

Here's the book review:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/11/pope-vatican-abuse-geoffrey-robertson

Why do you say that Mac when I specifically told you that I didn't read it because I knew there would be nothing in it I didn't know.

I have read it at your insistence on not accepting what I said and there is nothing new in it. Thus my reading it was a waste of time. Some of it, as is usual in these matters, is nothing more than publishers blurb material for which due rewards of one sort or another will be forthcoming.

I hope you don't buy it Mac when you can get a clean copy of Tristram Shandy for a quid on e-bay. And most of us already know where Eagleton is coming from. I'd like to see Eagleton review Tristram. That review could have been written on a ride on the big dipper.

He has used the Grauniad's columns to call for the abolition of football.

I invite you to read the Wikipedia entry on the man.

I notice you have made no attempt to answer my posts about this matter. Was it inconvenient?

This is an official State visit and Sky News are giving it blanket coverage.

Do you want the Church to disappear? Eagleton does.

Now there's a thought worth pursuing. As Richard Dawkins said,

"Good men do good things and evil men do bad things, but for good men to do evil you need religion."

From what I remember about your posts on this matter, they were nonsequiturs.
I freely admit that among scoutmasters and swimming instructors there are paedophiles, and some go into these activities for that reason, but that is not the main issue here.

No it isn't. The main point is why a culture produces men of that type when biological evolution hasn't. How those men who are produced by the cultures of the world go about satisfying their inclinations is another matter and a subsidiary one. Not many will become priests due to the extensive and difficult training. Prevent the production and the problem is solved.

The focus on priests obviously has another agenda which it is reasonable to assume is the destruction of the Church. All Marxist want that having been sent on a self esteem wobbler with the "opiate of the masses" tripe. As if the masses don't need an opiate of some sort. The Church is better than the KGB and the stifling of free speech in that role. And proven to be.

Is the production of these men caused by sexual arousal in the service of cheap and popular productions from Media. Is it a fear of women? Is it the view that sex equals male orgasm?

On the secrecy and the cover-ups isn't that what every organisation does to avoid discreditable stories? Whistle blowers are always getting sacked. There's nothing new there.

I don't know how many allegations are concocted against priests. There are a few motives for them being so and Media coverage has softened up the public to be disposed to believe them all on the basis of unsupported assertions relating to many years ago, i.e encouraging them.

Geoffrey Robertson QC has a motive too. He seeks to bring allegations to his chambers.

And who doesn't have a motive when the Church's teaching on sexual matters is so forbidding and so difficult to follow? Yet I will maintain that the Church is correct in those matters and that the rejection of its teaching on them is profoundly demeaning to women.



That's a very weary sentence Mac. "From what I remember" is cute and you need to show why you think I used non- sequiturs rather than simply asserting that I did.

That statement is rubbish. It doesn't define evil nor allow that bad things sometimes have to be done to produce good. The atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945 being an extreme example.

It also cunningly avoids the question of how good men can be produced at all without religion. Religion, especially Christianity, is the anti-thesis to the thesis of evolution. I doubt Dawkins could hold the concepts good and evil in his mind without Christianity having put them there. Evolution knows no such concepts.

I don't think thanks were due.

George wrote--



Which says, not suggests, that I'm inconsistant and confused and I just happened to have hit upon something George agrees with. Hence the wandering hand over the buffet settling on the sausage roll metaphor.

A compliment would have been--" Very insightful spendi--as usual."

Now you're being pedantic.

I expect an ex-senior officer in the US Navy to be pedantic George.

And to be unwilling to recognise that he might have made an error in adding that "every now and then...." After all "Very insightful, Spendi" does not imply that you approve of any other post of mine other than the one you were responding to. But you then make an extra effort to point out that there are some you don't approve of, to avoid anybody getting the idea that you might approve of them all, which wouldn't do at all I know, without saying what they are, giving your reasons for not approving them and inviting me to have a chance of defending them.

Pedantically, "now and then" could mean anything, outside of never and always, and "never" is out for internal logical reasons, but it's poetic use is taken to mean, colloquially, spasmodically and not very often. Which means you don't approve of most of my posts.

I was the lucky old sausage roll in other words. Thanks very much you old curmudgeon you. And you want me to be grateful. Sheesh!

It was no error. Instead a purposeful attempt at balance, and the pleasure of poking a finger, gently and affectionately, in your eye.

I won't deny the curmudgeon part. However that is a condition shared by you, me, and McTag as well.

I think you are smitten with Smorgs. Understandable... she is a uniquely agreeable sort.

She's too posh for me George. She's a manageress in H.M. Civil Service you know. I'm a fish-pan scourer or cinders wench type. I know she has had lapses of taste from time to time but she was educated in a convent.

BTW--I don't accept pokes in the eye however affectionate and gentle they claim to be.

It was an error in polite company. A faux pas. A solecism. You only need substiture "once in a while" for "every now and again" or "fitfully" to see how I was being damned with faint praise.

You might only have thought of praising the post to engineer the opportunity for a sneaky sneer. (On stage an aside to the audience. )

This is garbage. Much of the anti-establishment heat has come from devout people within the Catholic church, notably in Ireland, and also in the USA.

That's not the impression I have got from what I've seen of it on various news broadcasts.

And you're evading the central question of why any men get that way as a result of their upbringing when it doesn't come from nature. Is a proportion of men like that inevitable and if so why and which aspect of life is the cause.

Could it be Media and not the Church. The Church just gets landed with some of them as do other occupations.

It's the focus on the very few the Church gets rather than the very many of priests who do sterling service at home and overseas that gives the game away. It's a stick to beat the Church with. Which begs the question of who wants to beat the Church and why and if it is Media that's the cause rather than the Church, the cause, then beating the Church will cause more of it. Which, whatever you say, will lead to more easy to write and attention grabbing stories.

And victims appearing on our screen, and don't think I'm not sympathetic, who elicit so much sympathy (compensation) that there's no level to go to remaining for sympathy (compensation) to a soldier with two legs and an arm blown off. And the return of coffins to the US is kept off the TV screens.

They are just too eager to wallow in it for my liking.

And tonight on the TV before retiring, breaking news, another similar far-reaching scandal blows up in Belgium.
Seems likely the Vatican is now very much regretting the idea of coming to Britain, so far out of their Roman redoubt.



Obfuscation. The central question, my central question, is why the Church moved priests around instead of removing them, when it knew they were continuing to seriously abuse children in their care. And why they considered serving clergymen should not be subject to the same laws, and the same justice, as the rest of us.

I thought there was a hint of sarcasm...perhaps it was only subtlety...I always confuse the two....no doubt he thought he was being generous and sociable, which is worrying if one worries about others.

I've not seen anything Mac but then again I haven't searched for it. How does it compare to some of the other things that have happened in Belgium during the time period involved on a scale of 1 to 10.

Would we not be better saying "it happened" and "move on" instead of dangling the carrot of compensation to encourage the victims to be in trauma forever?

How does it compare to the state of the victims of speeding motorists in terms of numbers and consequences?

And, as I understand it, the Pope is against the war in Iraq. And he is a guest of Her Majesty the Queen on Wednesday.

Why are you not answering any of the points I'm raising?

Do you want rid of the Catholic Church or not? I don't. That is your central question. As it is mine.

How did you know there was a scandal in Belgium? From Media? What proprtion of Belgium priests are involved? Have any allegations been tested under cross examination in a courtroom?