Jon:

Simply a historical correction.  The Red Cross was founded by and as a faith-based organization, but has, as you suggest, engaged in its global disaster relief efforts without regard to age, gender, faith, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc., and without proselytizing.  Medicin Sans Frontieres was originally founded by a group of faith-based doctors, but has since become a mostly secular organization.  Thus, while Red Cross COULD proselytize (though I know of no reports that it does), DWB would have nothing TO proselytize (unless one can proselytize secularism…LOL).

Peace.

to trog69:

1. Discrimination, child abuse, and all the other merry goings-on are simply an obligatory feature not only of all religious organizations, but also and much more of non-religious ones like the army, the police, etc. Of course in the latter it’s mass murder, crimes against humanity, etc even more than rape and putdown. The other obligatory feature is that the leaders always systematically justify and cover the criminals unless their hand is forced.

2. So people (especially “liberals”) are indicibly ridiculous when concentrating on some churches instead of the real criminals, the state/government criminals, for whom most of them continue to vote, becoming fully accessory to the crimes! In fact they are doubly despicable because, as in the comments here, some attack other people’s churches while sticking up for their own brand of BS.

3. Continuing to be superstitious while getting disgusted selectively by other features of religion is politically a total non-issue: organized religions are private groups. Congregation members are supposed to have joined voluntarily and by choice; whoever wants to change some features only has to start his own, without involving the public at large. Didn’t they know what they were joining? Only if they are held in against their will is there an issue.

4. The real scandal where no one hears any “liberals” protesting is the fact that, while the state takes away your children if you allow them to eat or drink what some Puritan DA thinks is wrong, one can force minors to attend to mumbo-jumbo and get indoctrinated about imaginary friends before they know enough to decide by themselves.

Who the hell do you think sent to church the abused kids?

Were these religious women asking for equality stupid enough not to know they were joining a basically reactionary, misogynist institution?

Organized religion is threatened by any percieved loss of
control. Control is maintained by the tacit
understanding that there is a chain of command from
God through church officials to the head of each family
(which must be a man) who has authority over the wife
and children.  So anything that reduces membership or
breaks that chain of command is considered evil and a
war must be fought against it, ie:

gays and gay marriage
contraception
abortion
feminism
women clergy

“Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the
first place, want us to leave the church, but so do
Catholic conservatives who want the church all to
themselves.”

I don’t think anyone will disagree with your
assessment of John XXIII, but he’s been dead now for
49 years and his message and the message of Vatican
II has been all but obliterated by the conservative
tacts of Paul VI, John-Paul II and now Benedict.
You need to catch up.
Very few American Catholics give a damn what dogma
is, care less what draconian messages filter down
from the college of cardinals, and care even less
than that what Benedict has to say on just about any
subject. Benedict has exposed himself as both
extremely disingenuous and so far removed from the
reality of life and living as to be comical - a
caricature of the Holy Father.
Now - taking you at your word that you will not leave
the church, are you willing to stand up to the
extremist edicts flowing from the USCCB, from its
president, cardinal Dolan, and from that loud mouth
would-be-Savonarola, Bill Donahue?
Are you - in all your quaint moderation - willing to
stand up to the conservatives and say “NO! This is
NOT Catholicism!”
If the moderates don’t grow some balls and fight back
against these conservatives the church will continue
to make itself irrelevant.
Don’t be a milquetoast, Dionne! Speak out! Do the
Jesus thing and overturn some tables in the temple!

*******

I was really only involved with the Christian religion for the presents on Christmas and the candy on Easter.

Once I grew up it all seemed rather silly.

FREE AMERICA

REVOLUTIONARY (DIRECT) DEMOCRACY

*******

If churches would teach and abide by the moral and ethical principles they preach, they would endure.
They doom themselves by sticking to ancient stories and procedures that try to freeze changes over several thousand years.  That’s not only impossible, but unwise as well. 
  As to helping the poor, etc., any decent person of any faith or no faith ought to be doing that regardless—and many are.  Those who do it under the name or the instruction of a religious autocarcy are not uniquely giving or self-sacrificial.
  Organized religions all need to drop a lot of worn out fearful baggage and become a lot more tolerant and understanding of themselves and each other. They cannot be held together by the sheer will of authoritarian pressures.

Azythos, what are you on about? Did you post just so
you could stress your dislike of “liberals”? And, since
you’re not exactly clear, are you saying that the
blatant child-abuse and subsequent cover-ups are
something that people should just mind their own
business about?

What’s the point of this rant?

How is it related to anything?

Someone wants to remain religious, and so declines an invitation by the Freedom from Religion foundation. Well, duh! Did you expect Freedom FROM Religion to encourage you to go on with your mumbo-jumbo?

But even more disgusting were all the comments from “liberals” going on about women’s rights and crimes of the church and kids fondled by priests to whom they were sent by their religious parents… how on earth is some private nonsense in some closed community affecting our public rights and freedoms?

Most protesters sound a lot more like religious “liberals” with their own particular non-Catholic superstition venting their dislike of one particular cult among all.

As a Catholic,  the election of our present pope meant
that for as long as he remained pope we liberation-
theology Catholics would have to commit ourselves to
making our voices heard, our disagreements public
knowledge. Faint of heart need not apply.

I am an atheist, so, grain of salt and all that. I
have responded to Catholics who are distraught over
the ultra-Conservative takeover of the church
leadership that they should not quit the church if
they wanted to stay and worship under it’s tenets.
They have just as much right to claim membership in
that religious group as the Pope, himself, and
they’ll never change the church direction from
outside it.

But Mr. Dionne cannot have it both ways, brushing off
the attempts to make him see the outrages performed
in his church’s name, yet admitting to knowing about
them and doing nothing about them. Wringing his hands
in a newspaper column is not going to change
anything, and instead is allowing misogynists in the
church to lead it as they see fit.

dionne makes an error when he eschews to differentiate between at least
four diff entities: belief in a deity, bible, organized religions-cults, and
priests.
belief in a deity is acceptable to me. organized ‘religion’ [really only an
ideology] appears evil to me, and bible is not understandable; it teems
with contradictions.

i thought that we all have “natural dignity”. so, was pope john patting
women on their smaller [no insult intended] heads than those of males?
and is he speaking-thinking of those smallheads as ‘saint’ paul spoke of
of? he said [but not in ‘god’s’ or jesus’ names]: man is the head of the
family or house.
dionne, please, look it up and tell me as a liberal godolgist whether u
still think that the bible was written by god?

*sigh* another apologist for the church. I left the church many years ago, took my family with me, and don’t ever regret it. I will come back with family in tow if and only if the social justice liberal priests and nuns, yes, the nuns, get to run the place.

Putting aside the fact that as a catholic you choose to be a part of totalitarian organization with one absolute leader and a group of red shirted cronies claiming absolute power over all catholics, by “devine right” of course, How can anyone, anywhere, support the catholic church after their inabilitity to purge the church of sex criminals?

Oh Dionne! You, like most catholics, still fail to realize that your church is still, in the yeear 2012, against all womens rights. They stand against birth control, and any and all reproductive choice. They still believe that women should not be a part of public life. That they are inherantly evil because of something written in a bullshit manifest a couple thousand years ago.

Doinne, you and all other catholics like you, who choose to support this criminal organization, might as well be holding small boys down for your “priests” to continually penetrate.

There is no redeeming quality left in the church. Unless of course you want to continue to subjugate the masses with ignorance. Oh, that’s right, catholics choose to be ignorant to the crimes of their church.

Just like the financial industry, the time has come to burn the church to ground and start again.