Uhrm... I didn't say I was entirely free of biases. Obviously that's not the case. Just as your pro-Catholic bias is predisposing you to look favourably on the Church of which you claim membership.
The conclusion you've reached is that you can "dip a hand into almost anywhere in that institution's long and ignoble history and find something ultraviolent or discriminatory." You're talking about an organization singularly responsible for more schools, orphanages, and hospitals than any other in history, and you're predisposed to see any given thing done by the Church as ultra-violent and discriminatory. I'd think you were crazy, but I'm aware of the centuries of propaganda fed to people to create that image by governments that did not like the Church having influence over people.
imagine thinking it would be necessary to do that to conclude that the supranational organization that ruled over Europe for centuries has a sordid history.
Hrmmm... yeah. Singularly responsible because branches operating under its umbrella operate in almost every country on earth, and often receive official dispensation to set up shop: exemption from national curricula, tax-exempt status, etc etc. Let's not pretend it's a level playing field.
How about you give me the credit to be able to form conclusions that aren't purely resultant from propaganda, hmm? The recognition that I'm capable of critical thought.
Critical thought, or really any variation of logic and reason, is entirely dependent on the information fed into it. Perfectly valid reasoning applied to lies leads to faulty conclusions. It's not an insult to you or your intelligence to say that you've been lied to.
Some of the governments of the world with the strongest Catholic sympathies are the ones now scapegoating the Church for their own crimes. Listen to the podcast posted above, and see what happened in Ireland. The Catholic Church had voluntary charitable services, the government of Ireland decided to outsource their social services to the Church, then effectively turned them into prisons, not because the Catholic clergy held anyone prisoner, but because the Irish authorities would just take people back if they left. "Oh, we took all the orphans, single mothers, the mentally ill, the beggers, the prostitutes, etc and shipped them into the Catholic institutions so that we didn't have to deal with them in polite society, anything that happened after that must be the Church's fault." It's a cruel game of human hot potato, and the Church was the last ones holding the tragedies.
Eh, this is still the patronising insinuation that I'm incapable of critically appraising sources.
Why do you bother? They've clearly drank the koolaid years ago, and will stand to hear nothing said against their cult. Stop wasting your time and energy trying to convince someone who clearly has no intention of listening to anything, and obviously ignores blatant examples of atrocities. At some point you just have to wash your hands of them and move on.
Except you'd be hard pressed to find who would be lying to me. Not even the Catholic authorities themselves put forth the defense that I do for them. (Catholics are known to have religious fervor for penitence, people I know who love the Catholic Church get uncomfortable when they hear my defense of it.) On the other hand, some of the most prolific untruths stem directly from anti-Catholic propaganda. Flat-earth conspiracies began with the claim that Catholic Europe didn't know the Earth was round, that lie became a controversy, the controversy became a conspiracy. Just in this thread, we have wildly misunderstood ideas about papal infallibility. Dishonesty against the Catholic Church is very, very easily evidenced, and frequently consequential.
Churches, priests, other believers. Or perhaps your commitment is such that you'll dream up excuses yourself for an institution you cannot conceive as being in the wrong.
As a wise man once said, "Perhaps your commitment is such that you'll dream up excuses yourself for an institution you cannot conceive as being in the wrong".
You of all people should be agreeing with me that things that didn't actually happen can influence beliefs, maybe even more so than the truth. You, who are so determined to be skeptical of western media, that you doubt firsthand accounts of genocide in China.
Are you saying they didn't dig up 200 dead children in an unmarked grave on catholic property? Is that the level of denial you're on?
Meh, not really, nothing inherent in religion precludes it from being, or worshiping, evil.
To rephrase, it’s possible that sometimes the road to heaven is paved with hellish intentions.
