WHO WOULD ___________ TORTURE?
A survey taken last year revealed some not-so-startling results:
Survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press Oct. 12-24, 2005; nationwide survey conducted among 2,006 adults
Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?
1.Total public 2. Total Catholic 3. secular
Often Sometimes Rarely Never Don’t know/refused
1. 15% 31% 17% 32% 5%
2. 21% 35% 16% 26% 4%
3. 10% 25% 16% 41% 4%
Of course, Pope Bendict XVI and Pope John Paul II have inveighed, using what counts for the Catholic Church as eloquent reasoning, against torture of terrorist suspects, and many Catholics at least feign to be spiritually guided by these men. But, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., so famously said, "A page of history is worth a volume of logic." "Religious" people know how their empires were built, who was crushed to build them, and how they were crushed. Religion, sorry to say, is, at least in this country, organized, tax-exempt bigotry that is the only institution beside the state itself that has really successfully claimed, historically speaking (and can even successfully claim in the history of this country) the legitimate usage of violence as a means of maintaining social order.
And nothing is worse than when a religion fees threatened, as Catholicism (and white male Protestantism) claim to do now, even though it has the hatronage of the most overtly faux-religious President in modern times. It is at the point when religion feels (or claims to feel) most threatened that its tentacles of ignorance, superstition and fear probe at their most pierceing, leaving entropy where once life resided.
As Christopher Hitchens once said (and he could have been speaking of any number of religions, if only history had worked out just a little differently), there has been no greater agent for the retardation of human social and intellectual development in the past 2000 years than the Catholic Church.
If I were the Church, I would not want to extend this dubious honor into the third millennium
Survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press Oct. 12-24, 2005; nationwide survey conducted among 2,006 adults
Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?
1.Total public 2. Total Catholic 3. secular
Often Sometimes Rarely Never Don’t know/refused
1. 15% 31% 17% 32% 5%
2. 21% 35% 16% 26% 4%
3. 10% 25% 16% 41% 4%
Of course, Pope Bendict XVI and Pope John Paul II have inveighed, using what counts for the Catholic Church as eloquent reasoning, against torture of terrorist suspects, and many Catholics at least feign to be spiritually guided by these men. But, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., so famously said, "A page of history is worth a volume of logic." "Religious" people know how their empires were built, who was crushed to build them, and how they were crushed. Religion, sorry to say, is, at least in this country, organized, tax-exempt bigotry that is the only institution beside the state itself that has really successfully claimed, historically speaking (and can even successfully claim in the history of this country) the legitimate usage of violence as a means of maintaining social order.
And nothing is worse than when a religion fees threatened, as Catholicism (and white male Protestantism) claim to do now, even though it has the hatronage of the most overtly faux-religious President in modern times. It is at the point when religion feels (or claims to feel) most threatened that its tentacles of ignorance, superstition and fear probe at their most pierceing, leaving entropy where once life resided.
As Christopher Hitchens once said (and he could have been speaking of any number of religions, if only history had worked out just a little differently), there has been no greater agent for the retardation of human social and intellectual development in the past 2000 years than the Catholic Church.
If I were the Church, I would not want to extend this dubious honor into the third millennium
posted by EnterCenter at 8:08 PM
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