Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religion. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

"Endemic"

How the Catholic Church thinks it has any standing to lecture the rest of us about sexual morality is beyond me. 
Tens of thousands of Irish children were regularly sexually and physically abused by nuns, priests and others over a period of decades in hundreds of residential institutions that housed the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday. “A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys,” the report said, adding that sexual abuse was “endemic” in boys’ institutions....

[T]he Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, exposes for the first time the breathtaking magnitude of the problem, and shows how an entire establishment in an overwhelmingly Catholic country seemed to collude in perpetuating a cruel and sadistic system.... Speaking of sexual abuse, the report said that sometimes the abusers were moved to other facilities where they could prey on other children. “At worst, the child was blamed and seen as corrupted by the sexual activity, and was punished severely.”
Condoms are bad. Gay sex is bad. Sex out of wedlock is bad. But raping little children is no big deal. Someone should tell these people to shut the fuck up. 

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Coming Out

It was nice when Obama mentioned us in his inaugural along with Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus. We're here and we're nonbelievers. Get used to it.
More than ever, America’s atheists are linking up and speaking out.... They are connecting on the Internet, holding meet-ups in bars, advertising on billboards and buses, volunteering at food pantries and picking up roadside trash, earning atheist groups recognition on adopt-a-highway signs. They liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement, which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public....

Polls show that the ranks of atheists are growing. The American Religious Identification Survey, a major study released last month, found that those who claimed “no religion” were the only demographic group that grew in all 50 states in the last 18 years. Nationally, the “nones” in the population nearly doubled, to 15 percent in 2008 from 8 percent in 1990.