(March 2, 2014 at 9:06 am)discipulus Wrote: But to say that these wicked men and women, were somehow acting in accordance with Christ's teachings and are representative of a Christian is simply dishonest.It does call into question the transformative power of the Bible and of Christianity. People who spend their lives surrounded by followers of Christ and by his teachings are unable or unwilling to stop from committing a truly horrific act. And there are many cases where both congregation members and church hierarchy either ignored what was happening or dealt with it by moving the offenders from one area to another, where they were able to continue to harm innocent children.
You can't just say "well they were not really Christians" and dismiss the problem that easily. These are not always just isolated cases; people are harming children either by direct action or by deliberate inaction. When you include the ones who facilitated the abuse, there are many more crimes involved by many more people who will almost certainly remain in the church.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
