I read the original thread on reddit and this pretty much sums up what I silently thought to myself.
It was a nice touch to get in front of the reddit crowd, but they completely sidestepped hard questions. It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.
[Responding critically because this comment was posted critically.] I had to re-read the Catholic comment before I found you weren't being intentionally offensive. The analogy would have been better stated if it were a Catholic priest doing an AMA. Asking a Catholic would be like asking an IE user why a Microsoft employee was arrested for embezzling, why Microsoft doesn't support Open Source, or why they arbitrarily refuse to make their browser more cross-platform. An IE user is justified in dodging the question since they don't really control those things, they just use the product.
It's interesting that you see the relationship between a Catholic and his/her church as analogous to that between a corporation and their "users".
While believers in 'ethical consumption' would say that the moral principles of producers certainly should be a concern for consumers, not everybody agrees. But when choosing a religious creed, the behaviour of the founders and keepers of the faith is surely of paramount importance.
Can you really say that issues of child abuse are not interesting to Catholic followers, because they "just use the product"?
I saw this comment yesterday and didn't take the bait, because I figured, hey, this HN, it'll find the faint grey bottom of the thread soon enough. I'm embarrased by what happened instead.
EDIT: "...completely sidestepped hard questions" is a perfectly understandable sentence that does not require an analogy to explain its meaning. The last sentence does not add any value. Taking it out will only increase the quality of the comment.
I believe making friends (and not making enemies) is simply the most important skill you can have. More important than being clever or hardworking.
And I also don't think that analogies are a very good way to discover truth as they often oversimplify a situation and take things out of context, hence implying the wrong conclusions.
Analogies help understanding. There's a reason math textbooks have worked examples, instead of merely a list of definitions and proofs. Understanding is considerably more difficult in a vacuum.
> "I believe making friends (and not making enemies) is simply the most important skill you can have. More important than being clever or hardworking."
Reminds me of an old boss of mine. He was hiring for the team, and when asked what the main skillset needed was for the new positions, he answered "They must get on well with the team". So, lo and behold, few months later we had a few new employees who were nice people, good fun even, but absolutely incompetent at their jobs.
Anyway, I guess the point was that by adding wording that may be offensive to some readers you are not improving the quality of the message, unless you want _that_ to be the message, which is in fact the (wanted or not) result of the OP.
> It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.
Weird, I just read one about an Atheist -> Catholic conversion, and he side-stepped those issues as well. (And I say 'as well', I mean 'also', because he didn't do as good of a job as the Microsoft rep did.)
I can't blame them for side-stepping those issues--I would do the same thing. Anytime someone mentions that they're Catholic on reddit, people automatically assume that (1)you are fully versed in everything about the situation, (2)you agree with how the Church handled it all, (3)you must be contributing to it by staying in the Church, etc. We're all generally angry about this problem. I don't know a single person who approves of the practice of just moving people around, but there are so many complexities to the issue. I can't even begin to discuss the finer points without someone piping up with their random, pointless garbage that taints the conversation. The Catholic Church has done a lot to fix the problems with the child abuse stuff. We've stopped with the Crusades (and apologized for them!). And the Catholic Church's stance on homosexuality and things of that nature are much more nuanced than people realize. Honestly, most of us are just tired of talking about these things. (Except the crazies who get all the press. The news people don't like talking to sensible people--that doesn't make for good TV.)
Really, most of the stuff on reddit about Catholics is vitriol and hate, and there's really no point to answer obvious flame bait questions when there are other perfectly good questions to answer.
What's complicated about moving priests around? It seems to be entirely cynical and self-serving. Had they handled the issues differently, you wouldn't see the vitriol.
I'm sorry, but you can't claim to be a member and defender of an organization that has institutionalized child rape and yet take umbrage at those who suggest your membership in said organization offers monetary and moral support to those practices. If the practice of shuffling priests and shielding them from the law is a complex one, then by all means describe how that's so. It certainly doesn't look complex to the rest of us. It looks evil.
By the same logic you support the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, killing native Americans and taking their land, extraordinary rendition, and borrowing trillions of dollars. It's unfortunate, but sometimes the leaders of an organization do things which its membership does not approve of. Very few people support what was done, but that doesn't mean they should renounce their affiliation. If the dissenters leave, who is left to change things?
people automatically assume that
(1)you are fully versed in everything about the situation,
(2)you agree with how the Church handled it all,
(3)you must be contributing to it by staying in the
Church, etc. We're all generally angry about this
problem. I don't know a single person who approves of
the practice of just moving people around, but there
are so many complexities to the issue.
The complexities of the issue isn't that they were moved around. And as I said, nobody I know agrees with that. Do I know the facts of the case? No.
Do I think that they should have been removed from public activity after the accusations? Yes.
Should these things have been reported to police? Yes.
I'm tired of talking about this stuff. The problem is that there now seems to be a witch hunt against priests, and really all Catholics. Look around here, on reddit, etc: hardly anybody even gives us a chance. Our Church has made mistakes; it has admitted this, and has changed the policies:
- Every person who works with kids in a Catholic organization in the US has to go through a training class on spotting & preventing abuse.
- The Church now reports all of these instances to police.
There really is more to the issue than just moving priests around. You won't get much argument that simply moving them around was the wrong answer, but you won't get anymore out of me when you say that I monetarily and morally support child abuse.
- 20% of the hospitals in the US are Catholic hospitals, they accept anybody--and have longer than other hospitals have. (Remember segregation? Our hospitals in the South accepted blacks and whites.)
- We probably have the most private schools in the country. They don't get money from the government, so essentially public schools are getting more money per pupil than they should. They also tend to have higher test scores on average. (Oh, and Catholics teach evolution in science class...)
- We run numerous soup kitchens, food pantries and homeless shelters. For an amazing example of this kind of charity, read up about the St. Vincent de Paul Society. ( http://svdpusa.org/ ) It's fantastic.
I've spent far too long on this, but this stuff bothers me. We don't know all the facts. We know something bad happened. We think we've fixed it. I'm not saying forgive and forget--on the contrary: don't ever forget it lest it happens again--but give us some of that 'tolerance' everybody keeps saying is so great...
I don't think you can say you've fixed the problem when the man most directly responsible for the problem is now your infallible leader, and was likely chosen as such so as to avoid direct criminal charges.
Regardless, I can appreciate the weariness everyday Catholics feel in fielding these questions. Much of my family is Irish Catholic, and I wouldn't broach the subject with them.
As for the good works the Church does, that really is inconsequential. Hamas runs schools, and Pablo Escobar was a pillar of the community. The good works one does do not absolve one of one's sins. My biggest problem with the Church and its apologists is the rather offhanded manner in which these issues are shrugged off. "Yes, we raped thousands of children, and provided the rapists with access to further children, but we're better now." "Yes, we told millions of uneducated people in AIDS-ridden sub-Saharan Africa that condoms increase their chances of getting AIDS, but the jury's still out on that."
I would have no problem forgiving the church if they offered a genuine mea culpa, turned in every child-raping priest to the authorities, and reversed their policy on condoms in AIDS-ridden and over-populated areas of the world. Far from that, however, Mr. Ratzinger has only further exacerbated these issues. I don't believe that mere membership provides material support to these activities, but every dollar you put in the donation plate does.
As for the "child abuse" issue: My dad was raised in a Catholic neighbourhood, and attended a Catholic school. The nuns would smack him with a ruler if he answered a question wrong. That's child abuse. Putting your penis inside a child is child rape. There is a huge difference between the two, and suggesting that the latter is equivalent to the former smacks of equivocation.
I understand that you are not your church, just as I understand that Israelis are not Israel. Like that example, however, the support that you provide the church, be it direct or otherwise, is at least partially responsible for its actions. Just as Israelis are responsible for the atrocities carried out against Palestinians, just as Americans are responsible for the atrocities inflicted on Iraqis, Hell, just as we Canadians are responsible for the actions of our government, so too are you responsible for the actions of your church.
The pope is not our infallible leader. He's fallible just like everybody else. Popes are only infallible when they are speaking ex cathedra (from the chair). They don't do this very often. Most infallible doctrines have actually been put in place by the college of cardinals. I seriously doubt that Ratzinger was elected pope to avoid criminal charges.
I don't have the time to address these things properly, but here's the short form.
We are better now, at least in the US--and the other countries are starting to get it together as well. If I remember correctly, any case of abuse (not just child rape, I do mean abuse--rape is a terrible form of abuse, but there are other forms as well) is reported to authorities.
The one thing I will say about Africa is that the church teaches abstinence. If you're going to ignore the abstinence teaching, you might as well ignore the condom teaching as well. You can't just pick and choose which parts of Church teaching to follow (but everybody does, and that's why we have problems...)
Of the money I give my church, 10% goes to my diocese. I don't think my diocese has had the same problems that other diocese have--so no, I'm not supporting the practice. Some of the diocese's money then goes to the Vatican (and I think the USCCB, but I'm not sure), but I believe most if not all of that goes to charity work. You can't hold people responsible for actions that they did not know about. And I believe that these things are no longer going on.
If you want to continue this conversation, feel free to email me and I will try to explain more when I get enough time to properly research and answer things. I think that this is getting way OT for HN, so I do not intend to make any further response on here.
While I may agree with you, this type of meta conversation is getting really old, it seems to be happening more recently on HN. I would honestly rather see the comment stand alone or see a decent rebuttal than half a page of useless chatter about it. If people upvote it, you are free to ignore it. You can take this to Reddit, too.
I like your comments, in general. But this one comes too aggressive against the whole reddit community and it's a disproportionate response. I'd rather say:
Could you please take that kind of topic to the proper forum, perhaps r/atheism, please? HN focus on startups, business and technology only. Think of it as r/technology + r/programming + r/business. Thank you for understanding.
We could talk about what the proportionate response is to being lumped in with child rapists, but we intentionally avoid that on HN because there is no way that conversation ends well. So. Take it to Reddit.
They tell me not to feed the trolls but here goes anyway.
You have constructed a straw man. He is not saying that one IE9 problem corresponds to one problem with the catholic church - in fact you made that up! Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them. This is made evident by the tl;dr version but is just as obvious if you read the original thread.
It is impolite to put words (and other ridiculous things) in other people's mouths.
Ha, and here's me thinking it was I that was feeding the trolls, perhaps we're into trollish recursion here. He trolled me, I trolled him back, you're trolling me now. Touché?
In fact what he was trying to do was pass off as truth several controversial and highly volatile statements without proper [on-topic] opportunity for retort wrapped up as an argument against Microsoft's effort to troll Reddit.
>Instead the argument is that, when pressed on issues that have unpopular answers, that are difficult to answer, or that have bad press, the team sidestepped them.
The Catholic church certainly has much to blame with how they've handled the revelation of child abuse amongst it's followers. However, the current situation can not faithfully be described as ignorant. If the head of the IE9 dev team were meeting people in person who'd had been "victim" to the beta, then perhaps there's some comparison. Maybe if it were a metaphor for their past behaviour - but this is the rub, there are huge [unsupported] assumptions required to leap to the point at which this metaphor is even valid. That then isn't addressing whether it's useful.
My post was intended to be inflammatory in interpreting his statements in a way that would clearly (to me) conflict with his views without giving him a genuine avenue for reply. Trollish, perhaps, but there ya go I'd assume that the thread would be downvoted and ignored generally on the basis of the OC content but instead it was being heavily voted up. Perhaps reddit is down?
It was a nice touch to get in front of the reddit crowd, but they completely sidestepped hard questions. It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.