Hi All - From Lion IRC

[CliveStaples]

You are told that? By who, your local fucking predatory priest? Don't you fucking dare pass the buck to people outside of the motherfucking church. You don't like the feeling it gets knowing they are raping children so you try to pass that off on atheists? Shame on you, you fucking cretin. That was seriously and awfully low. Child abuse is not a way to push your fucking agenda. I care about every single abuse that children suffer in every walk of life. There just happens to be an awful lot of Catholics doing it. If there were a way to bleach your brain and start over, I would really suggest it for you. So hung up on your fucking fairy tales that you would use the plight of children to insult people who have nothing to do with Catholicism's many shortcomings?

Well, there's a lot of words there. I don't see anything that factually disputes what Lion said re: the prevalence of atheism among the clergy.

It seems like it could be important to get that right; if it were true that the overwhelming majority of abusive priests were actually atheist at the time of the abuse, wouldn't that impact how the church should act to prevent further abuse? And likewise, if it were true that the overwhelming majority of abusive priests were faithful Catholics at the time of the abuse, that would also impact how the church should act to prevent further abuse.

You say that there are "an awful lot of Catholics" responsible for abuse. Do you mean an awful lot as a proportion of Catholics--that is, the probability of x being an abuser given that x is Catholic is high--or that an awful lot of abusers are Catholic--that is, the probability of x being Catholic given that x is an abuser is high?

I suspect you mean the latter. Do you have any statistics regarding the prevalence of Catholicism among the general population of child-abusers?