Quote:
Originally Posted by RACooper
Careful your bigotry is showing... or rampant anti-Catholicism if you really want to be picky.
Perhaps before tossing out the old "educate yourself" bit (particular about Mediæval stuff - me being a Mediæval scholar and all) you might want to do so yourself... and so to help you in your education I'd suggest you should look into "Residential Schools" if you want to look into systemic child abuse.
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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.