The people spending $10-$15 bucks to get drunk enough to rate a free cab ride are too stupid to walk and breathe, let alone drive.

It's kinda like the Catholic belief that promoting condom use will lead to Sodom and Gamorrah levels of fucking.

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Yeah, I've never understood churches being exempt from taxation. I know the argument is that the government could use taxation as a method to infringe upon which churches it doesn't approve of, but if all churches were forced to pay exactly the same rate it would be impossible to discriminate against a specific one.

Of course, churches and religions get away with a lot of crimes that anyone else would get destroyed for. Looking at you, Catholic Church!

RICO should definitely be used against churches. They should not be above the law, separation of church and state. Catholic church first.

Heh, I rather liked that line, but there's a rather nasty reversal in there if you account for Catholic school girls.

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I'm an atheist and will always be one of the first in line to suggest that religions should be subject to criticism and the rule of law just like any other organization.

That being said, I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that congregations are complicit in the misdeeds of the institution itself, whether or not they are aware of verified instances of misdeeds. ...Pretty slippery slope.

Expand that to, say, nations. In the history of the US, the government has committed some pretty indefensible atrocities. Genocide, mass relocation, and other offenses against Native Americans in the name of "manifest destiny". Enslavement of a race of people based on skin color, with disenfranchisement and continued abuse well after slavery was abolished, with elements that certainly persist to this day. Funding and supplying extremist organizations because they happen to have a short-term enemy that coincides with ours, which frequently comes back to bite us in the ass later. Using underhanded tricks including false-flag operations to justify wars and other offensive actions. Attempting to assassinate democratically elected leaders of foreign governments. And on and on.

Are all US citizens complicit in those misdeeds, merely by an accident of birth? But those things were in the past, you might argue. Given the depth of dirt you can find on our past with a little digging, I'd say it is reasonable to expect that there's things that the government is doing now that we may or may not be aware of that would be similarly difficult to defend.

Many/most Catholics can either remain intentionally blissfully ignorant about these problems, or will be able to go to great lengths to rationalize their way around them. Just like most US citizens don't lose much sleep over our government's past and present misdeeds. In either case, indoctrination puts the blinders on -- and can be incredibly difficult to escape.

For the religious, "love the sinner, hate the sin" is an oft-repeated phrase. As an atheist outraged by these scandals and the decades/centuries of intentional cover-ups by the Church itself, I might be tempted to turn that on its head. "Accept the religious, hate the religion." By all means, be outraged towards the institution itself. By all means, fight to end the protections that have allowed this kind of abuse to go unchecked. But perhaps try to keep some (Christian?) empathy for the average Catholic congregation members who have been brainwashedindoctrinated their whole lives and are likely in too deep to escape. Reserve that hatred for the clergy that abused their positions of power and control to commit these crimes, and the organizational system that systematically allowed it to happen while covering it up. They deserve every bit of hate you throw their way.

It's Time to Quit the Catholic Church! has been added as a related post - related requested by noims on that post.

Let's also keep in mind these outrageous numbers are only the reported, documented, fairly well proven or admitted cases in one area of one state, records of which were finally found after decades of stonewalling by the church who intentionally blocked any investigation at every turn in their (successful) efforts to run out the clock on statutes of limitations so their members could escape justice. The real number of victims in just that area alone must be 100 times larger if history is any guide.
The real national numbers would be easily 1000-10000 times larger. World wide, you have to multiply by millions.

This is the MO of the catholic church and has been for endless decades. Move (not remove) the abusers and hide the abuses, then apologize much later for the sins of your predecessors while continuing to shield them (and while secretly shielding the current known crop).
Where are the right wing nutjobs breaking into churches to rescue kids from the Catholic sex slave trade? This story is true and verified, but Piousgate is repeatedly ignored while pizzagate is still a thing.
Sweet zombie Jebus.

Um....it was time to leave when the first public massive child molestation case happened decades ago which also included a massive thorough cover-up by the church.

It's time to use RICO to seize all the catholic church's assets in America and end them. What the fuck is wrong with people that they wouldn't want to eradicate this cabal of child molesters?

*promote telling Catholics to GTFO of this molestation gang or be labeled complicit in the molestation. You give tithe, you paid to molest children....you still tithe, then you're doing it knowingly and should be lumped in with the molesters.

You really don't know the history of your own religion, do you?

"Hey, Protestants, convert or die!" says the French Catholic.
"Hey, Catholics, convert or die!" says the Austrian Protestant.
"Hey, Jews, convert or die! Uh, but lend us money first -- we need to kill those false Christians over there!" says both the French Catholic and the Austrian Protestant.

You know Christians waged wars on each other over whether the Bible should be in common vernacular or not, right?

Also, you have no fucking clue about Islam. Learn about them? I've gone to a mosque (Sunni); I've watched them pray; I've talked to an Imam. Which of any of the above three have YOU done, O Scholar of Islam?

People in Canada ARE talking about it for the first time.

First Nations people had their entire culture turned upside-down by the government of Canada and the Catholic Church. They were torn from their homes, raised in abusive conditions in institutions that expected them to conform to European norms, and even when they met those norms they were mentally and physically abused.

Now people are surprised that a generation of abused children makes for poor parents? The criminal problem with First Nations people is one that European Canadians created. It is a problem that's been ignored for far too long.

People like this need help. They do not need to see the inside of yet another cell.

Glad to hear you stating things as you did, I largely agree with you.

The trick playing out in Canada now is that because we've expanded the definition of protected classes more quickly than the US, the protected classes rights are interfering more and more.

I do not believe that religion should be a protected class in the same way as race, gender or ethnicity. Similarly sexual orientation and gender identity shouldn't be either. Race, Gender and ethnicity are all assigned at birth and can largely be determined by blood test and demonstrated to be something entirely outside an individuals control, choice and behaviour.

Religion is the most easily demonstrated as deserving a different status of protection than the others in that most religions ALL hold the others as heretical. Declaring other faiths immoral is necessary to religious freedom and I take as the very positive basis of America's freedom of religion notion being a wonderful agreement between Catholics and Protestants to agree to disagree over war.

More controversially, I would also class your sexual preferences and identity in with religion as a different degree of protected class. There is an element of behaviour and choice here that can not be determined at birth with any manner of blood test or parental bloodline.

More simply, the right to discriminate should not exist for immutable things people are born to and remain beyond their choice or control, while the right to discriminate based upon behaviours is entirely necessary and important. If you want to believe Scientology can help you heal broken limbs and transcend the world your free to it, but I'm gonna treat you differently than a sane person. To similarly treat someone different based upon race or gender though is unacceptable.

Meh, just give up sex altogether. Nothing bad ever comes from that. Just look at Catholic vows of abstinence. Perfect example of best practices.

This is extremely important, and (as far as I know) is extremely prevalent in Judaism, where the notes and interpretations are literally just as important as the scripture itself. These notes have been debated and clarified over the centuries by people who specialise in studying it; beyond that there is still debate, and the notes are still evolving. This means they have something of a self-righting mechanism whereby the mistakes of the past can be corrected.

This is in a way similar to the scientific approach, but using debate instead of empiricism.

The problem is that most christian churches ignore this fact and go by the interpretations of the church leader(s). The most extreme are the bible literalists who can justify pretty much anything by cherry-picking passages. The larger established churches like the catholics have some of this, but are largely missing the key feature of self-correction (except over far longer periods of time, and almost fully at the discretion of the pope).