Abusing, Religiously

THE SEXUAL ABUSE EPIDEMIC and resulting scandal within the Catholic church,centered mainly around members of the clergy, has long since been brought to the attention of the general public. A seminal study of this shockingly common behavior was researched, written, and published by formr federal investigator Leon Podle in 2007, in his ground breaking book "Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse In the Catholic Church",in which he used his comprehensive body of facts and figures to clearly demonstrate that sexual abuse, especially abuse of children, among the clergy, was (is) shockingly common, had manifested for a very long time, and that the initial and primary response of the church hierarchy, all the way up to and including various popes, was to conceal the problem and to keep it concealted by dealing within it entirely from within the church, leaving proprer, appropriate law enforcement agencies and the civic legal system completely out of the picture. Moving priests and bishops from parish to parish, amost as if playing hide and seek to keep their crimes from coming to light, was for decades the most widely employed strategy of the church. Podel has written several revealing monographs about the Catholic church, including a brilliant examination of the "feminization" of the holy mother church. The degree and extenst of clerical sexual abuse of children of both sexes by members of the supposedly celibate clergy are, it sometimes seems, endless. Tens of thousands of children worldwide have, according to well substantitated, corroborated testimony, been victimized by this horrible behavior. People are scarred for life, of course. Hundreds of parish priests engage in this crime for decades, victimizing each new generation of Catholic children, even while being allowed to remain at their pulpits, their suspicious behavior, red flags, and tell tale signs laregly ignored and overlooked not only by local congragents, but by the highest levels of church priestly hierarchy. It is not unreasonable to argue that, considering the enormous extent of the damage done decade after decade, involving so many people as perpetrators and victims both, that the church is corrupt beyond repair, rotten to the core, and that therefore the best and most compassionate course of action is to, as Voltaire famously said in the eigtheenth century: "crush the infamous thing"! A morally bankrupt, ancient old, rotting institution, having done as much good as it can, and more evil than it ever should have, best allowed to simply fade away, and die the same death that ultimately all religions ever conceived by the human mind have done and will do. More importantly and shockingly, the same moral corruption and decay, the same rempant criminal behavior, is epidemic in nearly all major organized branches of the Christian religion; The Baptist church, the Jehovah's witnesses, among many others, and does not exclude fundamentslist, evangelical denominations. Religion was an ancient invention of human culture, intended to fulfill social and emotional needs, to explain human life and the world we live in, to provide comfort, inspiration, and social cohesion. Is the human species ready to move on, to new and improved forms of understanding and admiration? It is easy to argue that indeed it is.