This week, Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop Peter Comensoli said he would rather go to jail than report admissions of child sexual abuse given in the confessional.
After everything that’s happened… The Royal Commission, the outpouring of emotion, the reliving of events by victims, the conviction of George Pell…
…isn’t it a tad irresponsible and insensitive for a leader of the Catholic church say this?
During a recent Q&A discussion of the Israel Folau incident Penny Wong said:
There is a distinction between a right to belief and the assertion that that belief should lead to you being treated differently before the law.
A related point is that just because a “sacred” tradition has existed for hundreds or thousands of years, that doesn’t make it magical or special.
To one who stands outside the Christian faith it is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.
(Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation)
What I just can’t comprehend is why anyone could take the catholic church seriously anymore. Quite apart from the abuse of children, it has done so much harm in other ways, including declaring it to be a sin for its adherents to exercise birth control.
This is especially problematic in the poorest countries, for those who can least afford it.
In this way, the church has made a significant contribution to the unchecked human population that threatens all life on earth.
And yet, so many otherwise rational people continue to trust the catholic church with their children, their childrens’ education, their collective future, and act as if the church still has anything of worth to say in the twenty-first century.
My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own.
(Sam Harris)
I guess I should be happy that a high-profile public catholic figure is making his church seem irrelevant, but for many devout catholics, such comments by a prominent leader of their church will gently wash over them and they will wonder what all the fuss was about.
Such is the irrationality of our species. Aren’t there other more important issues for us to worry about, such as climate change and our relationship with the other species of earth? Religion is so yesterday.
One of the greatest challenges facing civilisation in the 21st century is for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest personal concerns, about ethics, spiritual experience, and the inevitability of human suffering, in ways that are not flagrantly irrational.
We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith.
(Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation)
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