VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|Steve|DATE|1372156124|CONTENT|To be fair to her, she did include religion in her list, although it was obviously that it wasn’t her religion she was talking about. In yer face, Catholics.

But the point she completely missed was that in all these cases the standard that they were eventually held up to, and found to be short of, was nothing more that the standard of ordinary secular society, secular in the true sense of being independent of religion. The point of transparency is not so much to let everyone see in, but to let those inside see out. All these organisations had an internal moral structure that lacked a reference point in normal society. They judged their behaviour against that of others inside their group, not against people outside of it. He’s fiddling his expenses, so it’s OK for me to as well. They’re hacking phones, that makes it fine for us to do it also. Buggering the choirboys? It can’t be too bad a thing, even the pope knows about it.

What the RC scandal did, and it remains the worst of them, was prove that religions are just the same as any other insulated organisation. They have no special morals, no hotline to a source of better moral guidance. I have heard Catholic apologists argue that the more recent scandals, especially the BBC’s, show that there was nothing particularly bad about the church. It was just the same as the others. I agree completely, but I don’t think they have thought through the implication of that statement for a religion that has spent two millennia claiming the opposite.

Ordinary secular society remains the vanguard and the protector of the best morals that exist. The fact that she mentioned homophobia as something to be fought is proof that even within her religion some light is creeping in from outside, because she most certainly didn’t get that opinion from inside it.|IP-ADDRESS|10.0.119.108, 217.36.222.79|MODERATIONFLAG|