I'm Back For Seconds

I'm kind of back. But I won't be blogging as often as I did.

There's things left unsaid, I think, from before the very long hiatus. I've still got bits and bobs of thoughts floating here and there, but I haven't had the time to actually write it down properly.

So in the meantime, I'll just go on like before, on the top of my head, and no punches pulled.

In spite of how my tone has been for a lot of the entries, I don't think the world is so black and white. There's no good and evil people. People never think they're bad, or that they're doing the wrong thing when they believe in something.

Of course thinking they're right and believing what they're doing is good is not necessarily a good thing. For example, Hitler. He believed what he did was helping the Jews, putting them out of their misery of their 'sub-human' existence. He truly didn't think what he was doing was wrong. Yet in hindsight we knew what he did was unjustifiable, horrific and inhumane in the grandest of scales.

A study a few decades ago on mafia dons in New York revealed that these bosses thought they were doing the community a service. That they had their justifications for doing so. Yet we would never accept their justifications, simply because our instincts say that murder, violence and terror cannot be justified with anything.

Do I sympathise with these people? No. Do I understand how they could've been so blindsighted? Yes. It takes some kind of neurological disorder or self-denial for them to be able to justify their motives and their actions.

The thing is, we do this too, albeit on a much smaller scale. Have you ever done something bad to a person intentionally, and then justify it by saying "he/she deserved it" or "it's just for fun"?

If you have, you're guilty of the same technique. Special pleading. This is when you give yourself the privilege of being excused the reality of your actions. If someone else were to do to you the same thing, you would never give them the same excuse. You would maybe even instantly label them as bad people.

People do this all the time. It's in our nature. If we're late, we can easily explain away our lateness. If someone else is late, we tell them off for their rudeness. If we get told off for being late, we'll talk behind the person's back and make them out to be unforgiving, uptight and unreasonable.

There's a reason I use the pronoun 'we.' Because I'm sometimes guilty of it too.


In other news. And at risk of contradicting myself.

I do find this ridiculous.

"I think of those in religious orders and some of the clergy in Dublin who have to face these facts from their past which instinctively and quite naturally they'd rather not look at. That takes courage, and also we shouldn't forget that this account today will also overshadow all of the good that they also did." - Rev Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster

Sure, it sounds okay. But when we put it in context, it sounds utterly ridiculous.

This is the response to the reports of sexual, physical and emotional abuse in Irish Catholic churches. So you're saying it is courageous for the Church to acknowledge that your priests are fucking molesting the children? Fuck, I'd call that too fucking late.

You know what courage is? It's fucking handling it when it's going on. Not after a third party reveals it to the whole fucking world. That's not courage. That's fucking damage control.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/20/irish-catholic-schools-child-abuse-claims]

This is quite narcissistic, really. Think about the fucking children! Oh wait, the priests are already thinking about fucking the children!

I shouldn't really depend on the Church to be doing the right thing. Or acting with consideration or reason anyway.

The Church has excommunicated gays and pro-choicers, but it is funny they've never excommunicated Robert Mugabe or Adolf Hitler (both are Roman Catholics), even when they have been repeatedly called upon to do so. So apparently homosexuals and pro-abortionists are worse than mass murderers and power-hungry dictators.

Of course now they can't excommunicate Hitler because he's dead, but the Church has never tried to stop or say anything against Hitler in World War II even when it was clear Hitler was a practicing Roman Catholic. Now the same thing is going on with Robert Mugabe, but they've not said anything.

So why not excommunicate the paedophile priests?

Wait, if you've been reading this wondering what the fuck is an excommunication, here is its definition:

(noun) the act of banishing a member of a church from the communion of believers and the privileges of the church; cutting a person off from a religious society

Wait, did I just target on Christianity rather than Islam? I surprise myself.