Edit: Thread title changed, not appropriate

Edited by Joffa: 29/2/2016 11:48:24 AM

Pell is entitled to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Hearsay doesn't prove guilt.

I predict Mid-sermon walkouts this Sunday.

If only it was just 198

No surprises here.

One witness, possibly. Two incidents from two unrelated witnesses, is more than heresay.
The biggest positive to come out of this Royal Commission is that, ultimately from a domino effect in one's mind, people are less likely to have beliefs based on magical thinking.
I expect at least 90% of non-immigrant Australians to be atheist or agnostic by 2100.

The weight of evidence is stacking up against this guy. Apart from being completely unlikable, he seems to lack compassion for others.

I hope that the truth comes out and when it does, he spends the rest of his miserable life in jail.

He is a potential future pope.

Surely whether he eventually proven guilty or not this scandal has been enough to end his chances of leading his chances of becoming the pontiff.

The church has enough issues with relevance as well as existing internal scandals to want to bring more in with the hiring of Pell.

BTW, the lawyer Pell has personally hired to cross examine victims (which he previously promised he wouldn't) is costing $20,000 a day

I don't doubt it.

If I was a parishioner attending a catholic church I would be severely concerned about the lengths the church is going to just to save Pell.

My opinion is that the church has already been severely tarnished and allowing Pell to fall on his sword wouldn't change the animosity towards the church very much.

Also that the church can afford 20k a day for a lawyer means they're making too much money somewhere and obviously have a slush fund for this sort of thing. They should be paying tax.

If The Greens held the balance of power there'd be a chance, albeit slight, of religious organisations losing their tax free status. I wonder how much 'loss' it has on the economy
As for Pell's lawyer, it's actually coming out of his own pocket

I don't think people will be deferring to the royal commission to help clarify their religious beliefs.

Unless you can offer people a better option for the afterlife than eternal nothingness I think belief in god will stay strong.

Pell is entitled to the presumption of innocence. If he has truly done anything wrong he will be arrested and convicted for it. A concerted media campaign designed to smear Pell and the church shouldn't usurp their natural rights, nor derail his ambition to become pope if he is innocent.

The concept of an afterlife is due to mankind's narcissistic denial of eternal obliteration. If it wasn't for cultural norms, religious belief will be diagnosed as a mental disorder.

The Catholic Church is an evil organisation that has caused numerous suicides and Pell is one of its flag bearers.

Aren't you just generalising? And isn't 'evil' a religious concept?

You aren't aware of victims of child sexual abuse by Catholic employees committing suicide?
As for 'evil', it is a word in the English lexicon to convey a concept

That for millenniums across all cultures and civilizations humanity has had the capacity for religious faith shows it is entirely normal. That doesn't make it true, but as history proves it is a fundamental intrinsic part of the human psyche. One might also argue that the belief something can come from nothing and we are all here by accident our lives are worthless and futile is evidence of mental illness.

I am aware there is evil in the church, just like there is evil in every single religion and institution (ie schools, hospitals, governments) ever conceived. But I don't allow the actions of a few to define the whole. Less than 1% of priests are perpetrators so should you take that into context when manipulating victims to launch your ideological offensive against the church.

Weight of numbers does not qualify it as normal.

What amuses me is that if you ask people if they believe in unicorns they laugh, and yet an omnipotent man in the sky is somehow reasonable? A double standard like this only proves that religion and faith are paid far too much respect.

The issue with human psyche is that we irrationally fear the unknown. That doesn't make religion/faith even remotely reasonable or positive.

It's actually the institutional attempts to cover up the 1% that is the issue at play here.

I don't want to get into any hair splitting conversations about what 'normal' means, but it's safe to say when the majority of the world has religious faith that it has foundations broader than mental illness. It wasn't so long ago that an omnipotent man in the sky might have been considered more rational than an invisible man in nature pulling the evolutionary strings.

The comparisons of the omnipotent sky man and the unicorns are laughable. Unicorns don't transcend nation, race, culture and civilisation like religious faith does. There is a consistency about religious faith that cannot be denied, and although it might take on various forms it proves ultimately that belief in god, although perhaps not true, is absolutely reasonable.

The reality is the majority of the world fears the unknown. Numbers do not add weight to speculation.

Evolutionary strings? Evolution just is. There is no driving force other than the conversion of energy from one form to another. A lack of understanding by people does not reasonably infer a 'god like' driving force behind evolution. That kind of association is playing "god of the gaps" essentially which in itself is trying to define rather than understand (I sound like Murdoch's Rags).



What's laughable is that you fit my previous post perfectly. Unicorns are a mythical creature talked about by numerous cultures and races as well. There is a consistency that unicorns have a horn sticking out of the top of their head.

Belief in god is unreasonable. There is absolutely no basis other than personal anecdotal evidence that there is god. If belief was reasonable, it wouldn't be called 'faith'. Faith essentially accepts the absence of logic.

Try selling that to people before the 18th century, try explaining to them that there existence on earth is down to accident and sheer luck. Now you might be correct, but in the absence of evidence your ideas would be dismissed as heretical and lunacy. Given the choice between belief in omnipotent man creator of all things and mankind, and mistake, accident and sheer luck, do you really think it was so irrational for people back then to put their faith in a creator and architect? Perhaps people back then tried their best to make sense of the world with the limited knowledge and education they had - and religious faiths is what stacked up logically. Does this make them mentally ill, or just ignorant?



Unicorns aren't spoken about across all cultures, civilisations etc with the same consistency of religious faith. Religious faith is absolutely unique in this regard. It doesn't matter where or what era you go, where there are people, there are believers. My point isn't to demonstrate that god is real, rather that religious faith is reasonable due to its sheer ubiquity across time and place. Again it doesn't make it true, rather that given its almost universal acceptance and consensus that it requires solid proof to prove otherwise.

They were taught to fear by the church so they did. Their irrational fear of death or things they didn't understand was a product of their time.



Religions simply developed as a way to find peace and hope in death and the unknown. Humans are inherently afraid of what we cannot understand.

I guess the drop in faith correlates to an increase in understanding.

So they were all just zombie people who had no concept of reason or ability to think independently of church doctrine?



They were also, for their time, the best way of understanding the natural environment. For many people it's still the best way of explaining things. An increase in understanding doesn't really directly correlate with a reduction in faith, vast majority of folks choose their beliefs based on superficial understanding of these themes, most is derived from intuition. It's more likely the separation of church and state and the resultant less direct influence of church over people's lives freed them up to think more independently and go on their own tangents.

No they were fine as long as their thinking was within the scope of the church.

There are thousands of examples of free thinkers getting killed by the church.



Yes because some people are unable to grasp that we cannot understand everything. It's a weak and illogical way to explain something.

But there were millions more who believed sincerely in what the church taught them.



That is your opinion. For many religious faith is perfectly congruent with their worldview. Advances in science and knowledge help to clarify their understanding rather than redefine it. Some people are also unable to grasp that science cannot explain much, we're really at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we know. Imagine in 1000 years humanity will look back on us and our methods as intellectual neanderthals.

I'm loving being a partially evolved creature, makes life so meaningful.

Yet the terms of reference specifically excluded all legislative and judicial bodies from the Royal Commission. And just yesterday an ALP politician in South Australia was charged for kiddy fiddling, like so many of his colleagues before him.