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Did you even read the article? These priests were on Grindr. That is different from experiencing temptation.
"But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Matthew 5:28
These instances of rejection of final rights - were perhaps some of these cases due to the fear of transmission prior to common understanding of the means of transmission? Same for the Bible studies?
Again with the term "queer", this masks the important distinction mentioned above, because its use presents certain actions as morally-neutral. Many of us view(ed) the AIDS crisis as being used as a justification for sinful actions. I'm sure you're familiar with the Stop the Church event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_the_Church). It is rather obvious, based on who organized this event and others like it that they were opposed to actual teachings of the Church, such as its condemnation of sodomy, contraception (even as a prophylactic against contracting diseases) and even abortion.
Well for starters, while obviously both are sinful, for a priest to break his vow of celibacy with a woman would require fewer conceptually-separate sinful actions than for a priest to break his vow of celibacy with a man. The former would at least require betraying an oath to God, fornication, and scandal, while the latter would require the addition of sodomy. Therefore, the latter is a graver moral evil.
(Additional note: while Dante Alighieri is not an approved moral theologian, many Catholics see his breakdown of Hell in the Inferno to be quite valuable; Dante places sodomites in the seventh circle with usurers and blasphemers, while those simply guilty of lust are placed in the second circle).
[
EDIT: For more info on this particular aspect of Dante's breakdown of Hell, I made a video on this topic, if you are interested:
https://odysee.com/@ConnorCreegan:a/violenceaswenolongerknow...
]
But as far as the investigation, many of us (again, I am representing a certain demographic within the Church, not an aggregate of every card-carrying Catholic) see the problem of homosexual clergy as far more interrelated with other present scandals, such as the sexual abuse crisis, widespread poor catechizing of the youth, general moral flimsiness, and the desire to displace the Tridentine form of the Mass. It's sort of a guilt-by-association thing, sure, but most investigative work in general works on heuristics. Of course, there isn't a necessary link between so-called "homosexual" inclination and behavior on the one hand and pederasty on the other. But there are a few things to keep in mind:
1) This association is actually ancient - it isn't merely some prejudice from puritanical 1950s America. You find it in Plato and Aristotle, despite the overgeneralizations people make about Ancient Greece (much of which is based on very little evidence).
2) It doesn't follow that just because homosexuality is not a consistent predictor of pederasty in the broader population that this lack of pattern is maintained among homosexual clergy.
I would add that most people I speak to in the Church are consistently disfavorable toward priests that have children out of wedlock. But it doesn't really seem to be as major of an issue at present.
A vestige of the internet of my childhood. Wipes tear.
You wanna talk about safe internet - the only think I think that is safe is solid gold bars like from Looney Toons.
You wanna be safe - you wanna start up a nonprofit, grant yourself eehhhh SIX figure salaries.
You wanna be safe? Build a bomb shelter.
You want safe? AK-47 automatic assault rifle. House rigged with live grenades and sawed-off shotguns.
Other than that, you ain't safe.
Because if my instincts cannot be altered to the point of having "neutral" heuristic judgment (again, whatever the heck that is even supposed to entail and even supposing that that is an ideal) then it is literally a benefit to their community if I am not regularly among them. My presence among them would necessarily be parasitic (regardless of my intentions, because we are talking about inflicting harm unconsciously). That is, so long as I am otherwise giving to their community as much as anyone else in that community.
Even though I don't think it is necessary to make an appeal to the destiny of an ethnic minority, I would nevertheless maintain that Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision and really the whole paradigm of "civil rights" beginning with the Fourteenth Amendment was and has been objectively bad for blacks in America considered collectively. We romanticize decisions like Brown vs. Board and the forced integration that came thereafter because of cherry-picked pictures of well-to-do white ladies screaming at a little black girl in Little Rock, but the fact of the matter was that most black parents wanted their children to attend all-black schools, and these schools basically went out of existence and many black teachers were left without jobs because they couldn't get hired at the integrated schools that stayed open that were by-and-large white-administrated. Of course, the civil rights apologist would say that this was because federal government had not yet gone far enough, but the federal government is necessarily slow and there is little incentive for a holistic program of forced integration on behalf of the executive branch. But there is just enough incentive to dish out these measures when it appeases some short term interest a particular critical mass, and this kind of high(center)-low(periphery) cooperation against the middle(subsidiary) is quite commonplace throughout Western history. The fact of the matter is that the history of civil rights in America is a sequence of not-having-gone-far-enough-yet that stretches to nowhere. This is why I prefer the Malcolm X approach, despite some of his own flaws. Blacks do not have a position of national sovereignty. They have a position of being dispersed into the urban areas of major cities and integrated (often initially by force of higher power) into what were originally WASP institutions. Their dependencies on white institutions is what has utterly screwed them for decades now.
You're talking about the "majority demographic" like they're some kind of parental figure. Like they have some kind of, uh, burden or something. No matter. By refusing to engage people who wouldn't even dream of extending their scrutiny of my theorized unconscious "biases" to themselves, I am doing more to advance the cause of muhnorities than ten Martin Luther Kings combined. I am ousting myself - a racist - from their community! What could be better than that?
These are good distinctions. But I think maybe the central question or line of questioning I was driving at was this: what is it that makes some given discriminatory judgment borne of animosity or pure arbitration without reason? How could we even consistently determine something like that? Even about ourselves? If it must be borne of explicable reasons, to whom must we justify ourselves with these reasons?
Personally, instead of dealing with this litany of issues I'd rather do what I normally do and just lol at people who charge me with waaaacism for whatever bizarre reason they happen to concoct today.
A few questions that are never really addressed in these discussions about "bias", "discrimination", "race", etc.:
What is discrimination at a fundamental level? The term originally means to perceive something as validly distinct - e.g. to discriminate between truthhood and falsity, between up and down, between black and white. The term is most often now used with the implicit qualification of "unjust", "unwarranted", "unreal" or "quasi". So-called "racial discrimination" is a charge made when there appears to be some kind of injustice in the evaluation. So does this mean the mark of racial/ethnic/(even religious)/whatever stock is to be totally unrecognized as a heuristic in all judgments? Or just some? If just some, which ones? Why? Where is the line drawn? How many cycles of flawed attempts at psychological programming (the unintended consequences of which are perhaps not even entirely observed or taken into consideration) do we need to go through before ditching this endeavour? As it pertains to law enforcement, is it easier to simply admit that our current system can't be reformed through psy-ops, and that maybe we need to revert to a more subsidiarian/local principle of security in general?
You darn well can bet it is already.
Unfortunately, the people here in the comments attributing this phenomenon to feminism tend not to go deep enough. Yes, feminism is cancerous, but most of these teenage-level critiques just play into the hands of enemies by arguing on the same terms of liberals, utilitarians and socialists. I invite you not to dialogue with these people, who are largely unaware of the occult roots of their own belief systems, and instead look to logical conclusions of feminism being an historical error.
If you follow the trail long enough I think you will find that the only thing like a "solution" to this "problem" lies in catechizing youth in a consistent doctrine of sex before they grow too old, proud and familiar with justifying their own passions with pre-packaged ideology like many of us have throughout our lives. This doctrine of sex is as an ordering toward procreative ends (impregnation in the case of males, gestation in the case of females), and the conjugal act as having the intrinsic, divinely-ordained primary end of conception, rather than viewing conception as merely a natural consequence relating only to design in the case of humans actively attempted to conceive.
My own exposure to him was primarily through his early works, which are at least worth reading to get a good grip on his intellectual genealogy. I think his foundational commitment to Hegel is ultimately what prevents him from repudiating Prometheus and revolution, not necessarily the fact that his thoughts are sanctioned by money.
The liberality of "abortion" and of "gender identity" fundamentally follow from the same misconceptions about sex, so the equivocation is quite warranted.
As someone who dressed up as Žižek at a Halloween party in my early twenties, I must say the man remains a puzzle to me. Or rather, it remains puzzling to me how he doesn't see the connections between the facets of culture that he criticizes (as in this piece) and the legacy that he defends. He is certainly intelligent enough, but perhaps lacks the courage to dismiss centuries of revolutionary legacy as ultimately vain. This, I think, is the hardest step most secularists have to make in their journey toward Truth.
When you disintegrate the family unit, you stimulate the demand for outside intervention, especially in the form of state-backed "services". Like anything, because no one watches the watchers (except other watchers appointed appoint to watch the watchers that are not themselves watched), there is plenty of room for abuse of power. CPS has been out of control for decades now, and it largely has to do with the fact that in many states the first resort is removing the child from their parents.
I'm not necessarily poopoo-ing the laws they're trying to pass, I'm just saying that these laws don't really address the bigger issue of the why these services were brought into being in the first place (widespread child abandonment and neglect in mostly industrialized areas), and they do not address the question of whether or not the genesis of these services has anything to do with why they behave the way they do.
The two might be conceptually-separable but they tend to go hand in hand in practice. Although maybe you have some different things in mind by "socially liberal" than I do.
When I think "liberal" I think the liberal vein of natural rights philosophy - Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Jefferson, et cetera - which implies a kind of unique anthropology in which man is no longer axiomatically communal, but first and foremost an individual without a common final end with his fellow man. This is the philosophical basis for both "economic" and "social" liberalism.
Not sure what constitutes "abuse" in your book, since it is an extremely vague charge and men and women tend to exercise their malevolence in ways befitting their own aptitudes (men typically with more brawn, women typically with more subtlety). But in any case, I hate to break it to you but divorce was not created for the purpose of "womens' liberation", it was created to justify serial monogamy.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/12/12/u-s-childre...
The problem is very-much downstream, not wholly-determined. Obviously this issue criss-crosses with other issues, such as race, infrastructure, compulsory education, et cetera. But I would rank doctrine of sex as the brightest star in this constellation. It isn't a coincidence that the UK is second behind us. Its founding event was the invention of divorce.
This is neat and all, but the problem is very much downstream of the children-out-of-wedlock problem, which is downstream of so-called "sexual liberation" (a misuse of both the term "sexual" and the term "liberation"), which is downstream of an inconsistent sexual education, which is downstream of an inconsistent ethics of sex, which is downstream of the Fall (save for a few unmentioned steps).
How do you define "liberal"? Per my understanding, the United States and liberalism are almost synonymous. The US is basically the representative of liberalism on the world stage, at least that's how most of the world tends to think of us.
As someone who is certainly on-board with the greater fight against the Devil's iconography, I can't foresee this kind of legislation as having an overall good impact, especially with how popular commercial VPNs have become and how frequently you see them advertised. Children aren't stupid. And as other commenters here have pointed out, kids that aren't smart enough to use VPNs will probably just look for non-compliant sites or other means of access.
States simply aren't equipped to deal with the issue of access. And not only that, but the issue of access is a false framing of the problem, when there should be as much (if not more) concern about the very existence of pornography, the means by which it is made (prostitution, voyeurism, and exploitation), and the motivations for making it (injured intellect and corrupt will). Until people are having the more important conversation about sexual ethics, the very meaning of our sex, and not this phony "sex education" you get in public schools, I don't think we will see meaningful improvement.
"... the safety of children should not be a matter for our culture wars."
Unfortunately, everything attested in this article is the direct consequence of adopting philosophical tenets of the currently-victorious contender in the Kulturkampf, namely Liberalism. Save for some cataclysmic distraction (like a war total enough to drain our resources and attention to the point of bringing us back to nature, as it were), this situation will not improve unless Americans begin to challenge the liberal dogma of bodily autonomy. Of course, no one wants to do that because that would mean admitting that the will of each individual is corrupt - and that's, like, original sin, or whatevur...
Surprise: most people in this community have a theologically-impoverished view of mankind. Not sure what you were expecting from an aggregator site run by venture capitalists.
Obviously not every convo needs to be a duh-bate. but "works for me/them" is a pretty low bar for veracity or moral permissibility.
The only one who got it spot on was C.S. Lewis (in 'That Hideous Strength').
I stopped going to a gym a few years ago and nowadays do everything at home. I'll try to do HIIT a few times per week, splitting that up between running and jumping rope. On top of that, my regular training integrates a lot of calisthenics - mostly handstands, pullups, pushups, etc. - and stuff with kettlebells. I have a barbell and plates, but I don't use them as much anymore because I got rid of my weight bench. Nowadays, I mostly do deadlifts and cleans with the barbell. Have screwed around with some other things like Arthur Saxon lift, etc.
As far as how training has benefited me personally, I would say that some kind of training or regular "exercise" is in order if you want to be a fulfilled, well-rounded person, especially as a man. I didn't take fitness seriously at all until my early adulthood. I was living in my car at the time and had a gym membership for the initial purpose of taking showers, but at one point I figured, "why not try out this exercise thing that people do?" so I started running on the treadmills regularly and it had an incredible impact on me at the time and also motivated me to stop smoking (because of how difficult running was with smoker's lung). Over time I started picking up more things and now it's part of my daily life.
in the english context...
Not a bad source of counter-argumentation.
Looking through a mod/trad prism...
Perhaps I should clarify my use of the dimension of "modern"/"traditional" - my intention was not that politics ought to be understood through the lens of those who are against and in favor of the present establishment. It is instead an epistemological distinction: do the certainties which motivate my actions originate in my immediate sensibility and in abstract arguments, or in relationships and in the thoroughly-mediated historicity of my surroundings? What is intended in my use of "modern" is closer to the original sense of "modo" - "at-present", etc. The same goes for my use of "traditional" - I don't mean "old" or "established" as much as I mean "transmitted" or "perennial".
The contest between liberalism, communism, and the axis ideologies that culminated in the second World War was one between different versions of modernism, and different visions of a post-war world. You are definitely correct in your observation about the collaboration between NatSocs and communists, though I'm not sure they would have regarded the forces of international capital as "traditional". Status quo certainly, but I imagine, since their thinking was deeply-infected by the ideas of Rousseau and Hobbes (and Marx of course), that they, like most traditionalists, would at least assent to the proposition that capitalism is more fat than meat as far as the transmission of intergenerational wisdom goes. The reasons for doing so might differ among all parties involved, but their is at least an assent to the proposition taken at face value.
I just shared it here because it because it is a good excerpt from one of his most important essays and the editor gave it the fantastic (and nowadays clickbait-y) title of 'Human and Divine Nomenclature'. I was just flipping through this volume because I found it referenced on de Maistre's wiki page, and figured I would share it somewhere (I don't use any conventional social media).
To the issue of American "civic" nationalism: I must say I have always been perplexed by the phenomenon, but it is perhaps most unsurprising to witness among Mormons. Quite like the framing of the Constitution, the LDS is undoubtedly freemasonic in its origins, and many Mormons are themselves heritage Americans. There's also that whole BYU-CIA recruitment thing.
I'm not sure I would class de Maistre as a "Christian nationalist", certainly not if we are opening that term up to Protestants. The authority of the Church is essential to the whole of his theopolitical conception.
I was introduced to de Maistre years ago in my reading of Berlin. While I appreciate Berlin for having shared his name and thought to a generation of people who otherwise never would have heard of him, nowadays his reading of de Maistre appears to me to obscure his meaning.
Interesting about Pound; I was entirely unaware that he had read de Maistre, but I definitely see the connection.
I would certainly hesitate to class de Maistre as "proto-fascistic". Fascism was always opposed to the Church and held to an all-encompassing view of the state, and the Church hierarchy is not simply an alternative form that "the state" takes in de Maistre.
However, I can see how it would make sense to class de Maistre in such a way if one represents political thought strictly within the dimensions of "libertarian/authoritarian" etc. [For myself, the key dimension in politics is "modern" (in the sense of an obedience to what is immediate in the senses)/"traditional" (in the sense of an obedience to what is received mediately). There are, of course, many subsidiary dimensions that are important to consider, but from an aerial view it seems to boil down to this primary axis.]