You should educate yourself on on-coming traffic.....and the art of jumping.

Awwh... how cute my own stalker troll, guess that makes me one of te "kewl kidz" now huh? :D

Precisely I'm familiar with the recent cases but I'm not actually sure what EE-BO is alleging/claiming or what he's using to back it up. Or whether this was systemic within the Church or more isolated incidents of clergy abusing power.

Turning around and trying to justify one's claims by asking someone if they deny the cruelty of the Inquisition (something pointed more within the Church membership than outside of it) is changing the subject. I'm actually quite interested in reading "a decade's worth of research" (or whatever) if perhaps he could give me a few sources to start from.

Same here - I find Church history and politics actually very interesting so I'd love to delve into this "decade's worth of research" that covers bits I seemed to have missed.

It's funnier when it's about Earp or maybe bees. Just saying.

I know.

RACooper and UGAalum94- I don't know where to begin.

First off, my original comment was a very strong one- which is obvious- and I stated I think there is some conjecture there but that there was evidence to support it. Besides, we all know there is no way to factually establish with certainty down to specific numbers. But I say again- find me another SINGLE entity, religious or otherwise, that has perpetrated so much sexual abuse on the general public.

You reference Residential Schools and the public school system. Again- a smokescreen. The Catholic Church is run by a SINGLE power structure with very tight control. Even in the preaching of the message there is not nearly the latitude offered to priests that is available to most Protestants, especially Baptists where the preacher essentially is the king.

No single entity controls ALL the public schools or Residential Schools or whatever. So this argument is meaningless.

And now to get to DSTCHAOS's wise remarks- RACooper, I am not going to play this game anymore with you since you are that guy on every message board and in every company meeting who says other people are wrong, but yet you never offer a solution of your own.

I have cited two very specific texts- both of which you should be very familiar with if you have the knowledge you claim to have.

And I have also cited the entire body of work from which I derive much of my knowledge- and you have in a single sentence said it was a bunch of leftist communist trash. I find that one especially funny since I think the term communism came juuuuust a bit more recently than the period we are talking about.

Being a "scholar" as you claim- you know the work I am talking about. And you know La Celestina, La Lozana Andaluza and Don Quixote are the 3 best known texts involved.

And while I appreciate that literature is not the same as non-fiction, history is very clear on the value of literature- taken with a grain of salt- when it comes to reporting historical injustice. Are you familiar with the works of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain?

What is specifically interesting about Spanish Literature of the era is that almost all of it criticizes the church very heavily. Dickens and Twain were somewhat unique for their eras, but I don't know of any other several hundred year period in history where virtually all works of literature were so directly critical of a single politically powerful entity that had an endurance beyond a single leader.

This is meaningful, and I have given some indication of why I think that.

Your response has been to call me a bigot and dismiss what I offer entirely. So why should I bother offering you more? I already know what your response will be.

I will be the first to admit I love a good hard debate and I like to phrase things in provocative terms- but I also back it up.

I take my Christian values very seriously, and yet intellectually I can separate myself from that to consider the historical importance of inappropriate actions that any Christian Church might take.

And I can keep that completely separate from how I live my life and treat the people I encounter daily in my personal and professional life.

That is a scholarly attitude.

You may be very highly educated, but I see no evidence you are a scholar at heart. About the only thing you have shown so far in this debate is that you know how to work your keyboard to spell medievel correctly with the fancy little symbol.

So you at least get an A for grammar.

But it is dangerous to assume that someone who is an avid debater is not open to new ideas or being proven wrong. I am very fast to learn and change my mind when presented with something new- but obviously you never intended to make this a substantive debate.

Drolefile- the texts I indicated above are a good start. The easiest one to find in English if that is what you prefer is Don Quixote.

There are many translations of Don Quixote, but the best one I have found was translated by Tobias Smollett. There is no bar code on my copy, but the number on the back which I believe to be the ISBN # is 0-374-51943-9.

It is slow going because it is translated very literally from a very old form of the Spanish language which can be tricky even for fluent speakers. But the good news is that the actual meaning of the words has not been changed to suit the English language or even modern words.

And whatever you think of this debate, that one book is a must read in this- the next best thing to reading the original in the original "old Spanish."

The other books I mentioned can be found, but translations will be hard. All the rest is really and truly just a lot of reading in many sources- textbooks, partial excerpts of stories- as in the partial remains of burned books that somehow survived, and a whole lot of other random sources.

I am sorry I cannot offer more specifics, but this is a big topic and a big assertion. It would not be possible to give a complete bibliography- and RACooper understands this well. It is why he has chosen to get personal rather than even bother to offer up his own basic facts and body of work to at least give some indication he has some rationale behind his views.

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is hard on the clergy - (to use an example that I, an English scholar, am familiar with) but I'd never use it to try and prove a historical fact. There is an entire genre, if you will, of anti-Catholic hyperbole, but if it is fiction, it's, well, fiction.
Abuses by most political entities, from ancient Rome to today's administration, will usually be outed - and non-fiction sources, while of course not 100% reliable (one does have to look out for propaganda) is a bit more convincing.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but if you wish to make a startling assertion you do have to expect that people are going to ask for supporting documents.
Oh, and the federal Department of Education does indeed oversee all of public schooling. Just look at all the states who HATE No Child Left Behind, but are stuck with it. I'm not saying that they control the handling of child abuse cases, but it's not a smoke screen. I was pointing out that today, your child would be far more likely to be abused by a teacher or coach than a priest. It's going to be hard to get any statistics for very long ago, I know.
Back to the subject at hand; now there is a great deal of criticism leveled to the state of Texas for not acting sooner. Apparently there has been a "source" for some time, but CPS could not act without an actual complaint. The 16 year old who made the initial complaint(s) has not been found, and is believed to have been taken away to another sect location.

Texas authorities defend polygamous sect raid

After four-year inquiry, sheriff says he got legal grounds to act last week

ELDORADO, Texas - It was no secret that a polygamist sect that built a compound in the West Texas desert believed in marrying off underage girls to older men. And the sheriff had an informant for four years who was feeding him information about life inside the sect.
But authorities say their hands were tied until last week, when they finally obtained the legal grounds to move against the group.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24014376/

Sheriff: Cops had spy inside polygamist sect

ELDORADO, Texas (AP) -- When authorities moved to search the large white temple on the polygamist compound in West Texas, about five dozen of the sect's men prayed and cried around the structure, state investigators said Thursday.
Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran also said he had been working with a confidential informant for four years who was feeding him information about life inside the polygamist sect.
Doran declined to say whether the informant was in Texas or other sect compounds in Utah or Arizona. It wasn't until after the search had begun that Doran learned about marriage beds in the temple and the forced marriages of underage girls to older men.
"It was instrumental in teaching me the group's ways," Doran said.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/10/....ap/index.html

A dark history repeats for religious sect

ALONG THE ARIZONA-UTAH BORDER (CNN) -- A monument stands in a park in the twin cities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, commemorating the 263 children taken from their families during a predawn polygamy raid in 1953.
The raid at Short Creek, as these isolated border communities were known back then, holds an ignoble place in the region's history.
It was a public relations nightmare from the start. Crying children in their bedclothes were yanked from their parents in the dark of a July night.
The backlash drove a governor from office and discouraged officials from taking action against the practice of polygamy for half a century.
It also left a traumatic imprint in the collective mind of a community that has withdrawn from an outside world it views as evil.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/10/...wns/index.html

Hence my use of the example of the Residential School system - a single power structure of government control with orders or branches administered by different denominations.

Ahhhh I see, my point flys directly against yours so therefore it must be disregarded - it's inconvenient I guess when people answer your challenge to name an organization other than the Catholic Church that has suffered the stain of child abuse.

I did - you said it was only the Catholics that facilitated child abuse, and that the other denominations and even other faiths were free of this guilt. I called you on it, presented a point of reference refuting your assertion, you just chose not to acknowledge it... guess that makes you the guy at the office you hate huh?

Neat who knew that works of fiction could now be cited as historical academic sources - damn this would have made all my papers so much easier...

Yes - yet they don't seem to be used as historic sources, nor as singular sources in examining a historical era - only ONE of MANY sources from which to construct a picture, and only then supported by academic/historic sources... basically they "flesh out" the factual accounts, but they certainly don't supersede them.

Actually I'm sure if you had actually conducted "research" into the middle and late Mediæval period of Spanish literature you'd have noticed the decidedly pro-Church stance they take - lauding El Cid, tales of wander of "godly" minstrels, tales of the wise/benevolent wandering friars, saints lives, etc. Progressing into the Renaissance an entire genre of "religious literature" is firmly established and even being exported - in fact the decidedly pro-Church nature of this "religious literature" genre was one of the big things the English pointed to in decrying Spain and Catholicism during the Reformation.

Ironically it is meaningful, but not for the reasons you think - it is more revealing of your particular bias/bigotry than it is of the scope of Spanish culture and literature...

I answered your challenge... not my fault that you couldn't raise a credible defense and therefore dismissed it lest you argument collapse and I prove my point about bias/bigotry right?

That'd be a first...

Is this the only FLDS church or are there more?

Welcome to the thread-please take some time to read it.;)
Yes, there are more.:eek:
Perhaps with a little difference in name but still very similar.
As it has been said several times in the thread, Jon Krkauer's book "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith" is a rather good book to read if one has interest.

I never said any such thing, and you know it. This is just the kind of comment that makes debating with you utterly useless.

Child abuse happens everywhere and is perpetrated by all kinds of people who can be assigned any number of labels- be they religious, racial or otherwise.

I was speaking specifically to a central power structure of a specific organization which even recently has acted in ways that clearly condone child abuse at the expense of other goals to preserve the organization.

Anyhow- I am done with this thread. Keep on talking all you want about nothing.

I'm sorry, I thought you said you had sources, not Cervantes. Reading Mark Twain only helps you understand the truth behind the fiction if you have some background knowledge of what it behind the fiction. Since I have a copy of Don Quixote relatively accessible I will flip through but color me unimpressed with your "sources." Partially burned books, that you can't remember the names of? Textbooks which conveniently don't exist? You're talking as if you've amassed a great expertise on the subject and you give, not peer reviewed research but literature?



Child abuse does indeed occur everywhere, there is no higher incidence of it within the Church than there is within the schools, etc. However the Church has culpability in the fact that people with authority "covered up" rather than ousted abusers. Not that they may not have thought they were doing good, but clearly they were not. The Church does not, nor has it, condoned child abuse.

None of this, however, addresses your previous claims which are, so far as I can see, unsubstantiated. This leads me to claim that EE-BO was, 200+years ago, the head of a large child prostitution ring. If you would read Oliver! (The libretto to the musical, not the original Dickens) you would get a hint of this.

I hope you understand this is not some sort of rabid attack on you, but a serious request for sources on a topic I'd like to learn more about. Not read Spanish literature trying to make up the historical background that might somehow, if you squint, have something to do with what you're claiming.