The Catholic Church Should Burn

[Free]

Yeah Beebs, that's what's hitting our screens today. I'd love it if he was not the fucking leader of the free world.

Last I heard, he's not been fucking anything. For years.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Do we even want to know? Yesterday he went on to researchers about injecting sunlight and cleaning products. Then today said it was some sort of a joke and nobody should take him seriously.

Well, he's definitely a joke and most of us do not take him seriously, so he's right about that. The problem will be the few extremely dim-witted followers who start mainlining Lysol or chugging Pine Sol.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Roxanne Blue]

The abuse that happened at Catholic churches is a reflection of a problem in society at large. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water, you're discarding 7,000 years of wisdom and one of the great cultural traditions of the western world in reaction.

How much "wisdom" remains in a seven-millennia run of patriarchy, misogyny, and priestly privilege seems highly debatable. In fact, that's what we're doing here. The entire global assets of the HRC should be confiscated and auctioned to fund treatment and living costs for its thousands of victims. Even sports - which has its own sinners requiring reparations for their deeds - is not as occupationally represented as priests all over the world. The Vatican is a state. Rape is a war crime, and using it is a war crime. I'd love to see attornies argue that the failure of the last several popes to curb the abuse and to call in secular authorities amounted to acts of war via rape; failure to forbid it was taken as permission to continue and they did. Pretty much similar to the convictions of Serb commanders who allowed the rapes of Bosnian and Croatian women. They denied they given permission when all they did was look the other way. Was that a crime?

Hell, yes!

Go ahead, toss that baby. It's grown up to be a monster.

 

[Roxanne Blue]

/me waves at Roxanne. Hope you are wonderful and happy lovie. <3

/me waves vigorously back at Willow. We are surviving pretty well, and more fortunate than many in our tourist town. Just imagine Key West with all its bars shuttered. The town is having an identity crisis. Fortunately, the authorities aren't so dumb as to close the liquor stores - they were always on the "essential" list. It's like a week after tossing out the tourists for a hurricane that missed us, but you can't hold hurricane parties and the utilities all work. Weird.

My musician and drag friends are trying to gig on FB and other "platforms" with varying degrees of success.

 

[Beebo Brink]

How much "wisdom" remains in a seven-millennia run of patriarchy, misogyny, and priestly privilege seems highly debatable.

Pssst, Rox, it's not that old, not even close. That number was plucked out of his troll hat.

 

[Fionalein]

The heights of stupidity are never so high that Donald Trump cannot rise above them.

Yeah we thought Einstein's infinity theorem was axiomatic, we now realize it can be proven.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

you're discarding 7,000 years of wisdom

Whoa, whoa, hold on a second there brother. Where are you pulling this number from? 7000 years ago was late neolithic. That's like 3000 years before the earliest proto-jewish history. That's 5000 years before the beginning of apostolic succession. That's 1000 years before Bishop Ussher's calculated date of the creation of the world.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Whoa, whoa, hold on a second there brother. Where are you pulling this number from? 7000 years ago was late neolithic. That's like 3000 years before the earliest proto-jewish history. That's 5000 years before the beginning of apostolic succession. That's 1000 years before Bishop Ussher's calculated date of the creation of the world.

So I wondered what life was like way back 7000 years ago.

ETA I wondered if maybe it was a typo and he meant "2000," but, because of the two keys' respective positions, I don't think that's very likely.

Maybe he was being presidentially sarcastic?

 

[Roxanne Blue]

Pssst, Rox, it's not that old, not even close. That number was plucked out of his troll hat.

Actually, it kinda IS that old, if you view it as the result of early agricultural societies. Until men could isolate and "own" a woman, many - if not most - nomadic cultures were either matriarchal or more equal in male/female rule of the social group. In a nomadic culture, you always knew who the mother was, but no one could be certain of the paternity. Once humans were able to have permanent occupation of lands for agriculture, that made it possible for patriarchal cultures to rise. Plus, it seems something weird happened to the gender distribution of men who reproduced 7,000 years ago, due to their killing each other.

But the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck, as it is known, has been something of a puzzle since its discovery in 2015. This is because it was only observed on the genes on the Y chromosome that get passed down from father to son - which means it only affected men.

This points to a social, rather than an environmental, cause, and given the social restructures between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago as humans shifted to more agrarian cultures with patrilineal structures, this may have had something to do with it.

In fact, a drop in genetic diversity doesn't mean that there was necessarily a drop in population. The number of men could very well have stayed the same, while the pool of men who produced offspring declined.

See? The rise of the patriarchy IS that old. Boys and their toys...

Something Weird Happened to Men 7,000 Years Ago, And We Finally Know Why

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

Actually, it kinda IS that old, if you view it as the result of early agricultural societies. Until men could isolate and "own" a woman, many - if not most - nomadic cultures were either matriarchal or more equal in male/female rule of the social group. In a nomadic culture, you always knew who the mother was, but no one could be certain of the paternity. Once humans were able to have permanent occupation of lands for agriculture, that made it possible for patriarchal cultures to rise. Plus, it seems something weird happened to the gender distribution of men who reproduced 7,000 years ago, due to their killing each other.



See? The rise of the patriarchy IS that old. Boys and their toys...

Something Weird Happened to Men 7,000 Years Ago, And We Finally Know Why

Pretty much, the Catholic church, and Christianity as a whole are symptoms of the Patriarchy, more than the cause.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Pretty much, the Catholic church, and Christianity as a whole are symptoms of the Patriarchy, more than the cause.

Throwing away the Catholic Church is not throwing away 7,000 years of misogynistic "wisdom". If only.

At most, one could argue that the Catholic Church was a repository of European knowledge for the past 1500 years or so, but only from a deeply racist perspective. The church is directly responsible for the destruction of countless native Indian artifacts and writings from the Americas to Polynesia. So yeah, a very narrow view of the knowledge under its care.

 

[Maggy Hazelnut]

Thanks Kamilah for the short musical intermission by Rammstein! Love them!

 

[Sovereignty]

Throwing away the Catholic Church is not throwing away 7,000 years of misogynistic "wisdom". If only.

At most, one could argue that the Catholic Church was a repository of European knowledge for the past 1500 years or so, but only from a deeply racist perspective. The church is directly responsible for the destruction of countless native Indian artifacts and writings from the Americas to Polynesia. So yeah, a very narrow view of the knowledge under its care.

Is it racism or just conquest? Yes, explorers were racist, but the act of conquest might supersede that. Racism could be used to rationalize conquest and its horrors (e.g., genocide) but racism might not be the real driver. Just a possibility.

I think people have evil impulses that go beyond racism. If the racial differences are made moot then subjugation and control by the privileged of the less privileged will persist.

People use religion just as fervently as race to rationalize conquest. Sometimes Catholics were the aggressors. Sometimes they were the victims.

I'm no student of English history, but what Cromwell, et al. did to Catholics is barbaric. Also, there is the treatment of Ireland by the British. Where is the racism in that? You don't have to travel across the oceans to find atrocities.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Also, there is the treatment of Ireland by the British. Where is the racism in that?

People can be racist over the tiniest things.

 

[Sovereignty]

People can be racist over the tiniest things.

Which all goes to the fact that race is a cultural construction. I still think there is greater evil in us that makes these cultural constructions useful.

 

[Beebo Brink]

Is it racism or just conquest?

The deliberate destruction of cultures is more than just conquest. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that the conquest I referenced is just brute force exerted against any loser. That action wasn't what I was calling out as racist. The racism to which I was referring is specifically the common attitude that the Roman Catholic Church saved so much of European-based knowledge during the Middle Ages. As if that was the only knowledge base that really mattered and we should give them props for that good deed, while giving them a pass on destroying everything else.

 

[danielravennest]

Yes, even judaism is only 4,000 so I wonder what pagan religion they are trying to coopt this time.

More like 2700 years insofar as following a single god rather than polytheism, and 2-300 more years before the current scripture was settled on. The writings and traditions *claimed* a longer history, going back to Abraham, but archaeology and other sciences don't support this. Some of the stories in Genesis were borrowed from older mythology, but as a religion it doesn't trace back to those times.

 

[Lady Darnk Juniorette]

Just hail Eris already!!!

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The deliberate destruction of cultures is more than just conquest. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that the conquest I referenced is just brute force exerted against any loser. That action wasn't what I was calling out as racist. The racism to which I was referring is specifically the common attitude that the Roman Catholic Church saved so much of European-based knowledge during the Middle Ages. As if that was the only knowledge base that really mattered and we should give them props for that good deed, while giving them a pass on destroying everything else.

The Catholic Church didn't save much knowledge during the Middle Ages, or at least I don't think it did.

The Church created and preserved its own particular scholastic culture, but most of what we now know as classical culture was preserved by what became the Byzantine Empire, and then, after its fall, by the Ottoman Empire, and by Muslim scholars generally.

The rediscovery of that whole corpus of classical knowledge and culture was what started the Renaissance.

During the intervening period, the church had kept scholarship alive, and developed its own particular scholastic philosophical tradition, based on Aristotle, but it wasn't by any means the sole custodian of classical knowledge.