For thousands of years, religions have formed around the concept that man needs someone to blame his problems on, and the convenient answer to that quest has always been called God. Of course if man was going to blame God for all his problems then God had to have a pretty seriously exalted stature. If he didn’t, then blaming him for a man’s problems would be like blaming those problems on the rock on which that man was sitting. So man created God, often in his own image, and lo and behold there appeared priests. Who were these guys? Well, they claimed to be holy men, who seemed to know all about God and what he said, and what he wanted, and even more important, what he wanted the people who had invented him to do. These holy men, each of whom claimed to be the only true messenger of God, set about creating religions so that the newly faithful would have a structure under which to worship their newly created God. This worked like mad, especially for the priests. The people had someone to go to when they have a problem.
“Oh God, why did the crops fail? Oh God, why doesn’t my husband love me? Oh, God, why did we lose the game?”
And the holy men had someone to support them, through the people’s thankful gifts which would quickly become more or less expected.
It seemed like a pretty good system until the religion from over in Mesopotamia, clashed with the one in Mongolia. That’s how man invented war. It has continued that way down to the present day, the only changes coming when some clever sport decided that he wanted a piece of the pie and came up with a new wrinkle on the old theme, thereby being able to start his own new religion. Sometimes it didn’t work; check out Jim Jones and the Electric Coolaide finale, but most times it ran very smoothly and the people were happy gabbling rosaries and slipping their hard earned dough in the poor box, while the holy men were happy in their new Caddy convertibles.
Do we need religion to worship God? No, of course not, but for centuries, clever, manipulative men have found a way to convince a gullible public that the only way to God, is through them. That’s, as seen above, the way it has been, throughout the ages; religions have been led by men seeking power, not men seeking God. Today it is more true than ever, but because they are men seeking power, and because of the transparency of the internet creating a communications network formerly unimagined, religions have had a need to be much more careful than ever before, about how they conduct their daily business. Curiously, considering the aforementioned fact they seem to have learned nothing.
The Roman Catholic Church still carries out its business as if it were in the 16th century when Borgia’s and Medici’s were, in the name of God, poisoning each other and sleeping with each other’s women. We marvel at the evil cynicism and blatant immorality of those times but is our present religious culture any different?
We are all familiar with child abuse, existing in the church, on a monstrous international scale that defies belief. Why does this problem exist; because instead of acting as the protectors of their flock, instead of being responsible members of their social community, the leaders of the Church acted like Borgia henchmen, protecting evil doers in order to avoid scandal. Isn’t that swell. What about protecting the children? What about fulfilling their mandate as protectors of their flock? What about acting like holy men instead of leaches?
I use the term leaches advisedly but the Catholic priests aren’t the only ones who fill that bill. I was in Cambodia recently, one of the poorest countries in the world. Traveling through the countryside I came on small villages, each with its own group of predatory Buddhist monks, men who did nothing but suck the life-blood from each poverty stricken family. These were men who gave nothing but false hope to people who didn’t have enough to eat and in return they took the last piece of food from these people’s mouths.
But, I digress. While the leaders of the church should be expanding all their energy protecting the innocents who are supposed to be under their care, from the predators who are among their ranks, they are engaged in every sort of un-Christ-like behavior imaginable. Not only have the Bishops protected the pedophile priests by moving them from parish to parish to keep them out of the hands of the law but now they are trying to cut down attempts to extend statutes of limitation to keep old cases from coming to light. The excuse for doing this is that extending the statutes of limitation will not be in the spirit of the law and will not serve justice. The real reason for doing it is that they know this will allow more lawsuits and cost the church more money. The outcome of such a move, will be to allow many guilty pedophiles to escape punishment while keeping the Church from shelling out a lot of dough in lawsuits. So Holy Mother Church, as represented by her bishops is more interested in money than in the safety of her children. I wonder if the Mother of God would agree with the men who have taken up her name?
But the abuse of children and the protection of their attackers isn’t the only place the modern Church is emulating its 16th Century model. Acquiring riches has always been a big thing with all churches and Roman Catholics are a leader in that field
Even as I write, they are embroiled in a massive scandal where the Cardinals are accused of protecting the Vatican Bank from accusations that it has, for years, been laundering money for international gangsters. This accusation has already been recognized and accepted by the European banking community. The Vatican Bank’s ability to transfer funds has been severely limited by members of that regulatory group. Despite massive efforts by the hierarchy in Rome to cover this up it is not something that will go away.
Add to child abuse and bank fraud the fact that the Pope and Bishops have
gone to war against their nuns, the backbone of the Church’s charitable and teaching work, accusing them of showing signs of radical feminism. This accusation presupposes that a cabal of 60+, year old men who have been sheltered from the real world most of their adult lives, has any clue as to what radical feminism actually means. The study, conducted by The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, (read: Torquemada and the Inquisition) was upset because the nuns had. “stayed silent on the right to life from conception to natural death.” Further it was stated that, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (a nun’s fraternal organization) did not have “the church’s biblical view of family life and human sexuality as part of its agenda in a way that promotes church teaching.” In other words the Pope was ticked off because these women were starting to think for themselves.
As if they were not involved in enough stupidity for one time frame, the Church has once again launched a campaign against a book, Just Love; A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, by Sister Margret A. Farley, past president of the Catholic Theological Society and an, award winning scholar. It seems that a nun has had the audacity to mention sex in polite company. In the church’s time honored, if brain dead, tradition, the book has been condemned, transforming it from a six year old dweller of back shelves in Catholic college libraries to the current star of the NY Times best seller lists. Don’t they ever learn? I don’t know, maybe the Pope had a piece of the royalties.
You’d think they were through, but now we find that the church has also attacked The Girl Scouts of America. Who knows what for? What is wrong with these numbskulls? And as if that were not enough, and just so we don’t forget how badly the Church has handled the whole of the pedophile priest situation, Cardinal Dolan has admitted giving as much as $20,000 to pedophile priests to disappear quietly into the bush. He claims it was charity but what kind of charity is that? Rewarding men who should be jailed is not anyone’s idea of charity.
Oh yeah, one last tidbit from the Vatican itself, where a former butler to the Pope is being held by Vatican police in an unidentified location while they question him about a information he has given journalists about the Borgia and Medici like intrigues that are the food of the, plotters for power, who lurk around the Pope. This guy will definitely be burned at the stake.
Just so you don’t think I have a thing about Roman Catholicism. Let’s take a very brief look at Orthodox Judaism and any form of Islam. In Islam women are draped in burlap, raped with immunity, beaten for almost no reason and killed for any infraction, no matter how insignificant. In Orthodox Judaism, men and women are separated, even in this country, but when they manage to come together and the women get raped or when some male member of the community attacks a child, male or female, instead of the group standing up to protect the victim and reporting the evil-doer to the authorities, they take a page from the Catholic Bishops and shield the attacker. But they take it a step further ostracizing any member of the community who attempts to contact the police. As if this were not enough, the victims and their families are also shunned and attacked by the community. Why, because the Rebs want to control the trial process and because they do not want to spread scandal about their sect. Various Orthodox sects in Brooklyn are currently under investigation for failing to report crimes against children or for hampering police investigations. This is how supposed men of God act? Maybe they should trim their beards, cut their paius and step into the nineteenth century.
And it’s not just the Catholic, Jews and Muslims. Take the Rev. Dr. James Cooper of Trinity Church in New York City. Trinity is the third largest landowner in Manhattan. Cooper earns $1.3 million a year. He lives in a $5.5 million townhouse in SOHO, receives a church allowance to maintain his Florida condo, dips into church funds to take his family on African safaris and overseas the church’s, $1 billion real estate holdings, from which the church receives some $30 million each year. He recently spent $5 million on a public relations campaign, nearly double the $2.7 million the church gave out in grants. Ten Members of the church’s board of directors have left over Coopers authoritarianism and extravagance. This is the man who is pressing charges against OWS members who used a vacant park on 6th Avenue and Canal Street to hold a demonstration. The man’s a true Christian who probably wears a dollar sign around his neck instead of a cross.
So what’s the point of all this ranting? The point is that religion, not content with enslaving a huge segment of the world’s population through its pseudo-Godlike pose, is now getting big time, into politics. It always did, from individual pulpits but now, in this country, it is associating itself with the political far right, when all Christian principals should be forcing it to agree with the far left. Why is this happening? Why are all the Christian churches allying themselves with a group that has already abandoned the poor, and the disadvantaged? It doesn’t make sense. The fiscal policies of the Romney/Ryan camp are as un-Christ-like as any that can be imagined. The immigration policies of the right fly in the face of everything Christ preached. The social policies of the right are a denial of all that is in the New Testament. How do people who claim to be religious, who claim to have a moral center, who tell us, far too loudly, that they follow a just God and so should we, reconcile these statements with the positions of the political right to whom they are unrelentingly leaning? It seems that the Christian community in this country had best look around and decide whether they wish to follow the lead of their shameful rulers or whether they should take a hard look at what both sides are saying and see how each lines up with the moral principals that they claim rule their lives.