I Don't Have Any Problem Answering "The Question Of Evil" When It's Raised By An Atheist

I did answer "the question of evil" in the form of raping children as it was raised to me by an anti-religious, anti-Christian atheist.  Christianity has the ability to define the rape of children as a serious evil - the words of Jesus in Luke 17:2 and Matthew 18:6 have been used, to my knowledge, to define the sexual - and other - abuse of children as a very serious sin, what I grew up knowing as a mortal sin.  The infamous, scandalous situation in the Catholic Church is a situation in which priests, bishops, cardinals, even Popes have either committed such sins or have for administrative exigencies and other, equally disgusting reasons, covered up the sins of priests and bishops, they are violating clearly stated, clearly set down moral stands that they, themselves have accepted and promulgated.   But at least those are contained within Catholicism.  The same can be said of virtually all churches calling themselves "Christian," those which don't forbid the sexual abuse of children are considered heretical sects.

Atheism not only contains nothing that can tell someone who wants to sexually abuse children why it is absolutely forbidden, its substance, in the matter of holdings of morality is only good for leading people to deny the existence of durable moral truths that are knowable to be moral truths.  There is no clear atheist holding that it is wrong to rape children or anyone none that an atheist would have the slightest problem in denying applied to them or even existed.  

I looked around the internet yesterday.  Though, apparently,  the Tumblr platform is engaged in an effort to expel the images of overt and announced child rape, sex tourists who film and want to share their vacation rape of Thai and other children, sadistic sexual abuse, fascistic bondage, overt white supremacy and misogyny and overt sexualized Nazism* but apparently those who want to post those photographic and video images and gifs have opened up new internet platforms for which children are raped or through the rapists who film their rape of children share those images with their colleagues in child rape.  It's still there, I looked, it is right there for law enforcement to go after, secular law enforcement - that is if the Courts haven't, tacitly, given their permission to it under those only virtues widely held by such secularists, "free speech - free press" which under American secular culture are the only virtues, against which all other holdings of morality must bend and break and fall and fold. 

Since so many of the great fans of that regime of "free speech absolutism", so many of the champions of the "civil liberties" industry, lawyers, scholars, journalists, scribblers who have been the exact and overtenablers of this situation have been atheists, where is the atheist opposition to all of that?   I've got pretty good hearing and I don't hear it, I looked for it and I didn't find it. 

Oddly, you never hear anything about that in the media, corporate or lefty.  The corporate media is all in on anything they can make money from, the scribbling class, largely, is mostly in favor of their privilege to scribble or print whatever they want to.  You never hear that much discussed on lefty blogs there isn't even much of it talked about among conservatives.  The cult of "The First Amendment" the slightly more genteel form of what the cult of "The Second Amendment" is has destroyed any effective suppression of the commercial packaging of child rape.  It has become just another "form of expression" under what was,  in fact, a framing constructed by atheists, many of whom have an expressed hostility to Christianity.  That was the background of what I wrote the other day.  We're so used to it, thanks in no small part to the self-interested media, that we don't notice its role in this. 

The question of evil, when raised by an atheist, couldn't possibly have an easier answer, atheism can't identify something as evil, Christianity can and does.  Christians who do evil aren't acting as Christians, they are in every context I can think of in violation of the Gospel and the teachings of the Second Testament when they do it.  THEY ARE VIOLATING ABSOLUTELY NO MORAL HOLDING OF ATHEISM, they are being perfectly proper atheists in doing it, they are being thoroughly bad Christians.   Atheism enables immorality, it contains no inhibitions to it.  Christianity may not be entirely successful in inhibiting immorality but it's more successful than atheism for that purpose. 

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I am convinced that unless Pope Francis ends priestly celibacy the sexual abuse scandal and the conditions that caused it will not end.  Having enough priests to remove the temptation of retaining those who should be kicked out and referred for prosecution because it would decimate the number of those ordained is one of the reasons bishops and cardinals made what was terrible so much worse.  If he doesn't do that this spring, I don't think the terrible scandal will end and the Catholic Church's credibility will not be rebuilt. 

The fascist establishment within the Catholic Church is what is keeping that from happening, the establishment which is comprised of everything from actual fascists, billionaires and other, less prosperous gangsters,  neo-medievalist lovers of the Latin liturgy, lunatic romantics for French and other monarchies of the remote past and others of marginal sanity.   

The question for Pope Francis and others who want to stop the sexual abuse that lies at the bottom of the scandal is if they will, finally,  take Luke and Matthew as being more serious than avoiding the schism that the billionaire gangsters will finance and which has figures in the right wing of the College of Cardinals and among bishops who already openly oppose Pope Francis.  I don't think that schism is avoidable, it's only a question of whether those who have created the conditions that led to this scandal go or the ones who are scandalized by it leave.  Taking into account the part that the celibate priesthood has played in the creation of the scandal is unavoidable in preventing it.  That's more a question of numbers than it is in even men of loose morals and mental problems being those willing to become priests.  

*  It's in no way astonishing that porn promotes those, it is all about the oppression of women, children, and men who are presented as objects for the use of, in almost every single case, men who are both able and willing to harm and destroy them.   I think the legalistic formula that makes something they can call "consent" the one and only moral condition that makes all of that OK is part of the same effort that has given permission to child rapists to show the images of raping children that they love.  We are no better than the degenerate Romans and others who did the exact same thing, the thing that was mostly suppressed when Christianity rose in Europe, though that force in patriarchal culture has always been, at best, suppressed.