Lee Moller's Blog, page 15

Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and Sexual Abuse of Children; Jason Berry; 1992; Doubleday

It begins with a story from Louisiana. The usual denials, obfuscations etc. follow a priest accused of sexual assault. The details are nauseating. 

Nothing tops the story of Cinel, an RC priest with the usual list of sins, but an even bigger sense of untouchability. He went on vacation to Italy and lost his keys. He asked a mate to find his spares in his apartment. Instead, he found 160 hours of videos of what you might expect. Blechh. The videos, now in the hands of the diocese, would not be released as there were possible legal issues wrt to passing them on. The DA (Connick, a rabid RC) was adamant he would prosecute nothing. Cinel had sent a photo of one of his rapees to a Danish porn mag, who published it. His position: the person was of age (he wasn't) and he had received no money and, besides, he had not sent a picture… he had sent three rolls of film. His employer could not fire him because he was tenured. I googled Cinel. He got away with it all, as far as I can tell, and, hold on to your hats, sued to get his porn back! This is how strong the pro-church lobby is in the US. Canada faired a little better, but only a little.

The RCC treats accusers (family and child) as enemies. They suggest that forgiveness is all that counts, ignoring the possibilities of recidivism, and transfer pedophiles to protect them and the church. They go further to say that parents are at fault for bringing it up at all, as it will harm the child… like they give a rats ass.

Finally, some estimates put the number of gay priests at 60%. If you take gay+priest+promescuity, get a FAG. I.e.: hypocrite.
      

Masters of the Planet; Ian Tattersall; 2012; Macmillan Science

​I wanted to get a feel for the current state of the very fluid science of human paleontology. This book did a fine job. 230 pages, but a quick read (loose leading, decent sized font). Over the years, the various names have come, gone, been absorbed and/or abandoned. It is tough to keep up. I wanted the latest evidence wrt to fire and language (80,000 BCE) and I got it.

It would seem, for example, that Neanderthals did not contribute to the modern Homo gene pool.

The most interesting story came from a book by Susan Schaller called The Man Without Words. It tells of a deaf child Ildefonso who grew up in a hearing, non-signing household. He was obviously smart but only communicated via a kind of charades. She was trying to teach him ASL when she realized that he literally had no concept of words (i.e.: almost no concept of (symbolic) concepts). There came a day when he suddenly realized everything had a name! His world exploded. He doesn't like to talk about his pre-names experiences because they now seem alien to him now. Without language, it would seem, complex thinking is damn near impossible.

This led to the fascinating conjecture that modern man may have all the mental equipment for abstract symbolic thought for thousands of years until this stroke of genius (naming things) hit them. Further, just as deaf kids today often create their own languages, this stroke of genius may have hit children first. How AC Clarke is that!

In any case, very readable, and a nice summary of the current debates.   

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice; Christopher Hitchens; 2012; Signal

​Large type, heavy leading and only 100 or so pages make it a light read. MT hung out with baby doc and his wife, and with S&L scandal gangsters to name just two. She took money from them all. It did not go to the poor, about whom she cared not a wit. Rather it went to expanding her evangelical empire. When confronted with the fact that she had taken millions that had been stolen from other, in many cases very poor, people, she opted to keep the dough. Her major talent was for photo ops and restricting her speech to empty cliches, or silence. She even refused NYC's offer to install an elevator at one of her hospices for free! She felt it was the disabled poor's place to swelter in the heat and die (because the surgery was upstairs).