That's great, but your arguments are still laden with false assumptions, uninformed opinion and a criminal misreading of their texts.youngterrier wrote:I'm kind of numb to your ironyD1B wrote:
Yawn.
Try reading them again, Shitcrates. Take an intro to logic class too, then reevaluate your last few posts which are chock full of fallacies.
Says the pot to the kettle?D1B wrote:That's great, but your arguments are still laden with false assumptions, uninformed opinion and a criminal misreading of their texts.youngterrier wrote:
I'm kind of numb to your irony
Grow up and get some perspective before you shoot off your teenage mouth.
youngterrier wrote: I have read quite a few books by Sam Harris (I would guess more than you, for what that's worth)so if you truly want to qualify my statement I shall. The problem with his positions are that they are ahistorical and idealized concepts of ~the scientific method~ as if the empirical method or what have you is always something where everyone sees the same answer and has the right answer the first time. In other words, he'll talk about the injustices of religion as institution but not of the injustices of science as an institution.(cleets) Sam Harris has written 5 books and I've read three of themHe literally skips over stuff like the atomic bomb and eugenics but won't let others forget the inquisition or crusades. I'm not saying we shouldn't do either, but he dresses up his opinions as if they are ~objective~ which they aren't, no perspective is objective.(Cleets) He's arguing about the dangers of believing something that is obviously complete bullsh!t - like getting 72 virgins for blowing yourself up in a cafe' - he's not writing books on the scientific method or the history of science...And that's the whole problem with the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris; they make you think they're questioning dogmatism of society,(Cleets)The point you're trying to make isn't particularly valid in light of Sam Harris goals, which are not a debate on the failings of nuclear arms treaties as you somehow would like him to coverbut these criticisms have been around for decades, if not centuries. They prance around as if they advocate some sort of brand new philosophical position, but it's extremely outdated. Philosophy isn't about ~finding objective truth~ as they pronounce it to be, it's about exploring different hermenuetics (perspectives) to have a better understanding of truth.(Cleets) They areThey don't do that, in fact they hold this dogmatism to the scientific method that rivals religion.(Cleets) This is where you really fall down... Because the Bible is the most defended example of hermenuetics gone horribly wrong... It's written (without doubt) to be taken quite literally - if not - then it should be edited today by the church and corrected and re-submitted... (Right..?)They neglect societal problems that are real, like poverty, sexism, racism, imperialism, and so on and criticize the low-hanging fruit that is religion (which, like every institution is as much an effect of oppression as it is a cause). In this way, it's a reflection of the privilege Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and so on have. It's the privilege to pretend to have an objective viewpoint from a birds-eye view. They don't know what true oppression is.(Cleets) This comment is used to make you feel better about your personal views - they will willingly and enthusiatically change their views if the data changes... Religions will not
In this way, they're liberal, in the classical definition of the word. They champion the enlightenment as if all philosophy died after it.Criticizing fundamentalism isn't edgy or provocative, it's simple. Criticizing religion in the way they do---as an idea as opposed to simply the function of the institution, is boring and unhelpful.Cleets) Wrong... The Bible is THE END of debate / It quite literally is the end of thinking and learning - were it used as it was designed and intended to be used - as the FINAL word
(Cleets) He's not so much criticizing "fundamentalism" as much as the insanity of defending dimwitted antiquity and dogma without so much as a considering the world as it exists today - His enemy is "Dangerous blind faith" quite literally
But I get it... I see why you dislike him
He's asking questions that the three major Religions (Islam Judaism Christianity) can't answer without straying way outside their books / because the answers held within those books are ridiculous in light of this world today and right now - quite simply - ridiculous...
Personally...
I actually believe in "GOD" for lack of a better word - I believe in a power greater than myself and the distinct possibility of a prime mover, in fact I'm all for it... (I love the Idea of God) but I'm not nearly stupid enough to believe the piles of crap that are required to swallow a book edited almost 300 times in it's present state missing 22 of it's original texts and intentionally translated from Greek to alter it's meaning... Taking a standard King James Bible and believing it, frankly should be embarrassing for any human alive today...
You stopped "thinking" a long time ago.JoltinJoe wrote:I think faster than I type. That's why I employ proofreaders.Cluck U wrote:
Are you sure you want to continue criticizing people for not clearly expressing their thoughts in writing?
If you want a job, send your résumé.
FIFYD1B wrote:YT: Gayle, OMG, please help!
Gayle: Get a life you pussy. You should be out bird-doging chicks and banging beaver.
YT: I read about banging beaver somewhere, but have no personal experience with it. However, let me tell you all about that subject...and don't interrupt with your personal examples because I will show you I know more than you.
Yes, this is the second time you pointed out I made a mistake. Congrats, I'm happy for you.Cluck U wrote:You stopped "thinking" a long time ago.JoltinJoe wrote:
I think faster than I type. That's why I employ proofreaders.
If you want a job, send your résumé.
Oddly enough, despite you sternly teaching others that judges won't give them a second chance, you believe some judge somewhere might give you a second chance.
What are the odds you'd follow that type of thinking?
Joe, where's the info I asked for regarding the cemetery fund? You said the records "clearly show" the money was raised, $57million dollars, for (holding back laughter) cemetery maintenance. Do you have links to those records? I specifically would like to see check copies, donor reciepts, general ledger entries, deposit entries and info specifically showing solicitation materials and donor reciepts.JoltinJoe wrote:Yes, this is the second time you pointed out I made a mistake. Congrats, I'm happy for you.Cluck U wrote:
You stopped "thinking" a long time ago.
Oddly enough, despite you sternly teaching others that judges won't give them a second chance, you believe some judge somewhere might give you a second chance.
What are the odds you'd follow that type of thinking?
Actually this brings back memories of happy times when I was a kid. Sometimes one of the stupid kids would get something right on a test that I got wrong. Then he wouldn't stop talking about it.
This never made me mad. I actually felt happy for the stupid kid because, for a moment, he felt like he was smart.
So thank you for reminding me of simple, happy times and also for allowing me to reflect on what a good person I am for feeling good for the stupid kid.
JoltinJoe wrote:When did we have this discussion?
How come Cardinal Dolan is skating on these allegations? Only the usual suspects and the gullible NY Times have even bit on this "story." And now three days after the "story" broke, it is dead.
It reminds of the way that NY Times "story" claiming Pope Benedict shielded pedophiles flamed out within a couple of days.
And please don't play dumb. You know darned well when you bury a loved one in a Catholic cemetery, you are asked to provide a gift for "perpetual care" of your loved one and the others interred there. Every diocese has a perpetual care fund. Dolan acted appropriately -- and consistent with the legal advice of any competent attorney -- when he tried to protect these funds. He acted a fiduciary duty to preserve the donors' intent.
No surprise that you're fine with Ander$NAP trying to pilfer the money donated by grieving widows, so that Jeffrey Anderson can drive the latest model in the 700 series. But I think honoring donor intent is a perpetual matter of honor and duty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor_intent" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Some reporters are trying to make an issue of Dolan's transfer of $57 million into a cemetery trust fund, but if you look at the documents in their totality, the money at issue was solicited for that use, and should have been segregated from general funds in the first place.
Not paying for an account. Email me the documents. Again, I want receipt copies, solicitation materials with specific language designating the intent of the money raised, donor receipts specifically acknowledging receiving the money and designation to the cemetery trust.JoltinJoe wrote:I didn't remember discussing this with you.
Here is the ECF link to the docket for the case, Cemetery Trust v. Creditors' Committee, at the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. I've accessed and read all the documents there. You can do the same, except you will have to pay for an account.
https://ecf.wieb.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Don't think Dolan is "skating," at least not yet. Skate he will, not because he did nothing wrong, but increasingly, people, including many catholics, just expect this arrogant immorality and criminal behavior from the church leadership.JoltinJoe wrote:When did we have this discussion?
How come Cardinal Dolan is skating on these allegations? Only the usual suspects and the gullible NY Times have even bit on this "story." And now three days after the "story" broke, it is dead.
It reminds of the way that NY Times "story" claiming Pope Benedict shielded pedophiles flamed out within a couple of days.
New York Times, 7/6/2013
BOSTON, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. The archdioceses change but the overarching story line doesn’t, and last week Milwaukee had a turn in the spotlight, with the release of roughly 6,000 pages of records detailing decades of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests there, a sweeping, searing encyclopedia of crime and insufficient punishment.
But the words I keep marveling at aren’t from that wretched trove. They’re from an open letter that Jerome Listecki, the archbishop of Milwaukee, wrote to Catholics just before the documents came out.
“Prepare to be shocked,” he said.
What a quaint warning, and what a clueless one.
Quaint because at this grim point in 2013, a quarter-century since child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church first captured serious public attention, few if any Catholics are still surprised by a priest’s predations.
Clueless because Listecki was referring to the rapes and molestations themselves, not to what has ultimately eroded many Catholics’ faith and what continues to be even more galling than the evil that a man — any man, including one in a cassock or collar — can do. I mean the evil that an entire institution can do, though it supposedly dedicates itself to good.
I mean the way that a religious organization can behave almost precisely as a corporation does, with fudged words, twisted logic and a transcendent instinct for self-protection that frequently trump the principled handling of a specific grievance or a particular victim.
The Milwaukee documents underscore this, especially in the person of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, previously the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009 and thus one of the characters in the story that the documents tell. Last week’s headlines rightly focused on his part, because he typifies the slippery ways of too many Catholic leaders.
The documents show that in 2007, as the Milwaukee archdiocese grappled with sex-abuse lawsuits and seemingly pondered bankruptcy, Dolan sought and got permission from the Vatican to transfer $57 million into a trust for Catholic cemetery maintenance, where it might be better protected, as he wrote, “from any legal claim and liability.”
Several church officials have said that the money had been previously flagged for cemetery care, and that Dolan was merely formalizing that.
But even if that’s so, his letter contradicts his strenuous insistence before its emergence that he never sought to shield church funds. He did precisely that, no matter the nuances of the motivation.
He’s expert at drafting and dwelling in gray areas. Back in Milwaukee he selectively released the names of sexually abusive priests in the archdiocese, declining to identify those affiliated with, and answerable to, particular religious orders — Jesuits, say, or Franciscans. He said that he was bound by canon law to take that exact approach.
But bishops elsewhere took a different one, identifying priests from orders, and in a 2010 article on Dolan in The Times, Serge F. Kovaleski wrote that a half-dozen experts on canon law said that it did not specifically address the situation that Dolan claimed it did.
Dolan has quibbled disingenuously over whether the $20,000 given to each abusive priest in Milwaukee who agreed to be defrocked can be characterized as a payoff, and he has blasted the main national group representing victims of priests as having “no credibility whatsoever.” Some of the group’s members have surely engaged in crude, provocative tactics, but let’s have a reality check: the group exists because of widespread crimes and a persistent cover-up in the church, because child after child was raped and priest after priest evaded accountability. I’m not sure there’s any ceiling on the patience that Dolan and other church leaders should be expected to muster, especially because they hold themselves up as models and messengers of love, charity and integrity.
That’s the thing. That’s what church leaders and church defenders who routinely question the amount of attention lavished on the church’s child sexual abuse crisis still don’t fully get.
Yes, as they point out, there are molesters in all walks of life. Yes, we can’t say with certainty that the priesthood harbors a disproportionate number of them.
But over the last few decades we’ve watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies — shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth — that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line.
In San Diego, diocesan leaders who filed for bankruptcy were rebuked by a judge for misrepresenting the local church’s financial situation to parishioners being asked to help pay for sex-abuse settlements.
In St. Louis church leaders claimed not to be liable for an abusive priest because while he had gotten to know a victim on church property, the abuse itself happened elsewhere.
In Kansas City, Mo., Rebecca Randles, a lawyer who has represented abuse victims, says that the church floods the courtroom with attorneys who in turn drown her in paperwork. In one case, she recently told me, “the motion-to-dismiss pile is higher than my head — I’m 5-foot-4.”
Also in Kansas City, Bishop Robert Finn still inhabits his post as the head of the diocese despite his conviction last September for failing to report a priest suspected of child sexual abuse to the police. This is how the church is in fact unlike a corporation. It coddles its own at the expense of its image.
As for Dolan, he is by many accounts and appearances one of the good guys, or at least one of the better ones. He has often demonstrated a necessary vigor in ridding the priesthood of abusers. He has given many victims a voice.
But look at the language in this 2005 letter he wrote to the Vatican, which was among the documents released last week. Arguing for the speedier dismissal of an abusive priest, he noted, in cool legalese, “The liability for the archdiocese is great as is the potential for scandal if it appears that no definitive action has been taken.”
His attention to appearances, his focus on liability: he could be steering an oil company through a spill, a pharmaceutical giant through a drug recall.
As for “the potential for scandal,” that’s as poignantly optimistic a line as Listecki’s assumption that the newly released Milwaukee documents would shock Catholics. By 2005 the scandal that Dolan mentions wasn’t looming but already full blown, and by last week the only shocker left was that some Catholic leaders don’t grasp its greatest component: their evasions and machinations.
I didn't download the docs when I looked at them. Sorry, if you want to see them, you gotta pay.D1B wrote:Not paying for an account. Email me the documents. Again, I want receipt copies, solicitation materials with specific language designating the intent of the money raised, donor receipts specifically acknowledging receiving the money and designation to the cemetery trust.JoltinJoe wrote:I didn't remember discussing this with you.
Here is the ECF link to the docket for the case, Cemetery Trust v. Creditors' Committee, at the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. I've accessed and read all the documents there. You can do the same, except you will have to pay for an account.
https://ecf.wieb.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/login.pl" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Send me documents that detail the operating costs, long and short term, of the Archdiocese cemetery holdings and operations. $57 million dollars is a lot of money for cemetery upkeep in a diocese that size. It is immoral as well as a major ethics violation to solicit money when there is no need to. This is especially heinous when the money was, as you said, given by grieving widows and the grief stricken.
Please send me info as to why cemetery trust money was not restricted to the purpose for which it was solicited and instead put into general funds - where it could be used to pay off pedophiles and defense attorney. That is a massive ethics violation.
Perhaps you should worry less about Jeff Anderson and more about a church that asks widowers for money and does not use it for the intended purpose.
Similar editorials all over the world.JoltinJoe wrote:Quoting the NY Times proves nothing. It's really become a pathetic paper and its editorial pages have no credibility.
A few years ago, the NY Times ran an editorial which characterized Bruce Springsteen as a "limousine liberal."
The Daily News observed what the Times was actually saying that Springsteen's appointment to the the Times editorial board was imminent.
JoltinJoe wrote:I didn't download the docs when I looked at them. Sorry, if you want to see them, you gotta pay.D1B wrote:
Not paying for an account. Email me the documents. Again, I want receipt copies, solicitation materials with specific language designating the intent of the money raised, donor receipts specifically acknowledging receiving the money and designation to the cemetery trust.
Send me documents that detail the operating costs, long and short term, of the Archdiocese cemetery holdings and operations. $57 million dollars is a lot of money for cemetery upkeep in a diocese that size. It is immoral as well as a major ethics violation to solicit money when there is no need to. This is especially heinous when the money was, as you said, given by grieving widows and the grief stricken.
Please send me info as to why cemetery trust money was not restricted to the purpose for which it was solicited and instead put into general funds - where it could be used to pay off pedophiles and defense attorney. That is a massive ethics violation.
Perhaps you should worry less about Jeff Anderson and more about a church that asks widowers for money and does not use it for the intended purpose.
I hate to break this to ya, but nobody on here gives two shits that you've been told you're smart your entire life. But kudos anyway.JoltinJoe wrote:Yes, this is the second time you pointed out I made a mistake. Congrats, I'm happy for you.Cluck U wrote:
You stopped "thinking" a long time ago.
Oddly enough, despite you sternly teaching others that judges won't give them a second chance, you believe some judge somewhere might give you a second chance.
What are the odds you'd follow that type of thinking?
Actually this brings back memories of happy times when I was a kid. Sometimes one of the stupid kids would get something right on a test that I got wrong. Then he wouldn't stop talking about it.
This never made me mad. I actually felt happy for the stupid kid because, for a moment, he felt like he was smart.
So thank you for reminding me of simple, happy times and also for allowing me to reflect on what a good person I am for feeling good for the stupid kid.
Happy times indeed.JoltinJoe wrote: Yes, this is the second time you pointed out I made a mistake. Congrats, I'm happy for you.
Actually this brings back memories of happy times when I was a kid. Sometimes one of the stupid kids would get something right on a test that I got wrong. Then he wouldn't stop talking about it.
This never made me mad. I actually felt happy for the stupid kid because, for a moment, he felt like he was smart.
So thank you for reminding me of simple, happy times and also for allowing me to reflect on what a good person I am for feeling good for the stupid kid.
You give joe too much credit. Nobody said joe was told he was smart his entire life...although it is possible he was under that delusion.kalm wrote:I hate to break this to ya, but nobody on here gives two shits that you've been told you're smart your entire life. But kudos anyway.JoltinJoe wrote: Yes, this is the second time you pointed out I made a mistake. Congrats, I'm happy for you.
Actually this brings back memories of happy times when I was a kid. Sometimes one of the stupid kids would get something right on a test that I got wrong. Then he wouldn't stop talking about it.
This never made me mad. I actually felt happy for the stupid kid because, for a moment, he felt like he was smart.
So thank you for reminding me of simple, happy times and also for allowing me to reflect on what a good person I am for feeling good for the stupid kid.
Cluck U wrote:Happy times indeed.JoltinJoe wrote: Yes, this is the second time you pointed out I made a mistake. Congrats, I'm happy for you.
Actually this brings back memories of happy times when I was a kid. Sometimes one of the stupid kids would get something right on a test that I got wrong. Then he wouldn't stop talking about it.
This never made me mad. I actually felt happy for the stupid kid because, for a moment, he felt like he was smart.
So thank you for reminding me of simple, happy times and also for allowing me to reflect on what a good person I am for feeling good for the stupid kid.
It was always a pleasure to play sports, have girlfriends, get better grades, and, eventually, make more money than the self-proclaimed, "smart", lonely, intolerant nerds.
Life is good.
Still waiting for he docs.JoltinJoe wrote:Cluck U wrote:
Happy times indeed.
It was always a pleasure to play sports, have girlfriends, get better grades, and, eventually, make more money than the self-proclaimed, "smart", lonely, intolerant nerds.
Life is good.
NOW I understand why everything you post is a lame-ass cliche.
