Very little is black and white. Morality is not simple.
Morality in the bible is black and white in a rather extreme way. The fact this differs from reality is something that escapes many people it seems.
Um. No. Priests are not 'better'. They have merely dedicated their lives to religious teaching and study instead of farming or designing CPUs. They are not 'free from sin'.
If a priest is to take part in confession, oversee ceremony, help us as moral guides then they should definitely be more humane than most humans. they should at least manage to be above average. They should aspire to be free of sin as they profess. Farmers and hardware designers make no such bold claims, vows or even inclinations.
All followers of Christianity are presumably equally bound by the commandments, not just priests.
Yet it is the members of the clergy that are their to explain, guide etc. Arguably more educated they should, in theory know better than to behave as those they would educate.
That is a Catholic tradition and is in place as an essentially symbolic sacrifice to show their dedication to the calling; it doesn't make them more 'holy'. If they violate their vow of celibacy... then yes there should be consequences. But the point is that, yes, we should expect that some of them will fail to live up to their vow. They are just people.
Nice to apply a little modern leeway and explanation to what was not argued in the past by religious people. In any case, your explanation sounds reasonable but do priests take vows optionally? "til failure do us part"? life as I understand it is not so rigid but the church historically has not been flexible in such matters.
They will make mistakes. And some of them will be criminals.
Some of them are criminals and the percentages of abuse amongst priests is disturbingly high compared to other professions. Not only that but the extent of the cover-ups of their wrong doings is especially damning.
Would you argue that they are less human? Or more? I'd think they are exactly as human as the rest of us.
Divinely inspired and guided humans...human+1 or at least so is the convenient association. How many look up to their local priest, how many associate more positively just because the person is a priest. they start of "human as the rest of us" and then they become men of god, more than 'regular human' in the eyes of the church. The fact they are the same decaying organic matter escapes the faithful.
Define "special treatment". If you mean should their criminals be exposed and punished, then yes, absolutely, but I can understand why they would simultaneously seek to mitigate the harm to the church. If prominent executives at a major corporation were to be criminals, the corporation would surely wish to deal with it as discreetly as possible as well.
Special Treatment as in their crimes are hushed, they are given legal leeway beyond what Joe Average gets. Special Treatment as in the association of trust and honesty, a privileged position in society etc. Corporations are not people, do not claim to follow god, follow commandments and so on.
It is twice the pride and double the fall for a man of god to expose the frail human and ordinary nature of every single "man of the cloth".
Forget the church a moment, and just consider public life in politics. Where your opponents take every thing you say, take it out of context, and twist it around, and then spend more money than you'll make in a lifetime telling everyone else that twisted out of context lie. Eventually, you too will start being gaurded about what you say in public, and will seek to keep large parts of your life private, not because there is anything wrong with what you say or do but simply because your opponents will have that much more to use against you.
That is a problem for society to solve. The Church, being an institution sanctioned by god, above the petty nature of regular every day man should show us regular people the way forward. Instead of being all secretive about it like the NSA's dealings they should turn the other cheek and aspire to be more like Jesus. He had transparency
:-)
When judgement day comes god will know who was a good boy...right? I mean, it's not all nonsensical garbage that has no place in modern life, right?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. It is silly to attempt to protect everything for fear someone will find fault. If you are subject to a smear campaign it will be done to you one way or another. Is telling the truth, like we're supposed to really giving ammunition to the fictional opposition?
If I withhold the truth, withhold information, not comment, write singular meaning sentences in Lojban then everything will be OK?
I would welcome transparency.
And you would be hung. Go you!
We don't know that for sure. What we know for sure is that if someone really wants to hang you, they might manage. If there is a reason for it or not.
Shall we live in constant fear of political, social or even physical hanging?
For public institutions, especially owned by the public I believe maximum transparency is the way forward.
Now you are just being hopelessly naive. The texts of the bible are hundreds to thousands of years old. Languages have changed and died. Few today are familiar with the societies that they were written for, or the historical contexts.
Who wrote what, when, where and why they wrote it, who they were writing it for, who they were, why is it in the bible vs other things that are not. The meanings of various names. Right on down to why a particular english word chosen; and which of the english words several definitions aligns best with the original sense of the original text.
Its just plain silly to seriously argue that a guy with a standard modern American high school education is going to have even half a clue about half of what's going on in there.
I believe the only reason people need to explain the word of god is because any literal interpretation would be impossible to live by in today's society.
It would have been impossible to live by literally in any society. It -never- was all neatly wrapped up for a particular point in time.
If the meaning is so obscure that we need special teachers to explain this rather popular, in print book than perhaps we need a re-write for the simple folk that need the explanation about how god created the Heavens and the Earth...it seems to me that it's rather convenient to acknowledge partly that the bible had many authors, translations and even printing errors and yet still cling to the contents as being somehow correct due to some possible interpretation or explanation.
Anyone who can read can read shakespeare, but its absurd to suggest that everyone who reads it gets as much from it. Cole's notes, and a good teacher can bring more from it than the average person could even imagine. And one could spend and some have spent their whole life on it. The Bible and most other religious texts are no different.
Now who's being naive? -they are completely different. One cannot compare with a great literary work/s with "holy books" it's blasphemous by nature. One is inspired or even written by god directly and the other the fictional (at times) work of an author.
Shakespeare may have used big words and complicated prose that can escape many people but god? is god fallible? this really casts doubts on anything with the "God" trademark.
To say that the Christian holy book, the Bible (OT, NT or whatever you like to call it) is the work of pure fictional conjecture by various authors is to make the entire Church, Vatican and associates illegitimate.
If you would like to argue, as you seem to, about the bible from the atheist perspective and the very non-religious management the Vatican must do as they know the bible is a lie told to stupid people then that's an entirely different matter. :-)
Note that I'm not at all religious, but I don't see any reason to presume that the Bible's teachings would somehow necessarily be transcendant and spring forth fully formed into any mind that could manage to phonetically sound out the words on its pages regardless of scribe, translation, or even printers errors. You could certainly argue for the potential that a God could have that be a property of his scripture... but I can't imagine why you would think it would be a "necessary property".
I do. Because the bible has +god. Nothing else does, apparently. There is nothing that god almighty cannot do, right? unless we acknowledge it's a load of garbage...which the Vatican could never do of course.
For what its worth, I don't really disagree with this. Although I'm not sure that I'd characterize it as sad. Is it sad that there is a collective human wish to meet their creator and discover the meaning of life? I think it's pretty interesting, even hopeful, even as I think finding the 'answer' in any religious mythology is pretty misguided.
It is sad in my opinion. It's nice sometimes to find the silver lining...If you want to, you can paint a rosy picture, it's a choice.
To think that people are "Soul searching" and clutching at straws is sad. Like lost children without their parents, except that their parents are just as lost and the best they can give them is "god did it". -perhaps it originates in the fear of the answer; "I don't know".
It has been interesting to read you replies and while we may not completely agree I've been enjoying it nonetheless.
