My post says that, and I agree – we are equal and neither is better nor more important than the other.

However, I disagree that praying for it to change will help.

I think of all the women who have suffered under the yoke of bad men for millennia, and still do. Most of them pray/ed for change, and most of them continue/d to suffer while men of the Church told them that God wants or wants or wanted them to suffer.

I think of all those women and children being abused by priests since the Church began. I bet each and every one of them prayed for God to stop it happening. Where was He then? The Church was protecting the rapists and other abusers. God is not the reason some of those priests are now being brought before the authorities.

Of course, it’s not just priests, and not just the Catholic Church. Many men in power take advantage of that power. Some women do too, when they get into positions of power, though it’s less common. We need a society where people are able to speak up and be heard, whatever their position. Among other things, that means it’s important to keep religion and government separate, so each can be in a position to hold each other to account.

When I was 12, I shut my 2 yr old bros. finger in car door. His finger was cut off between last knuckle and finger nail. The end of his finger grew back, although it is now flat tipped not rounded!

The whole premise of Ben’s article was that Jesus never calls 9-1-1, and therefore fails the morality test. That is still the case. The idea is to stop the suffering in the first place. There’s no “supposed futility” there’s just futility.

I’m pleased that you have at least stopped defending the way the Church responded when children were abused in their care.

I’ve already answered your question about the numbers. Basically we’re talking about any child in the world who is suffering, and is praying for that suffering to end, and it doesn’t. There are at least 4 billion religious people in the world. Who knows how many of them are suffering and praying for it to end at any one time? Whatever the number, their suffering continues. How about we just stick to the four million mostly religious people in and from Syria who are suffering at the moment? They could sure do with some help.

The claim is that there are thousands of suffering children whose suffering is due solely or primarily to their parents being “brainwashed by religion”. And the question is, what evidence is there of this, i.e., that there are thousands of cases of parent-brainwashing-induced suffering?

Simply guessing the number of suffering children who might turn to prayer doesn’t support the contention that it is the parents’ brainwashing that is actually the root cause of the child’s suffering in the first place. In any event, the handful of anecdotes cited seem to have more to do with a parent’s psychosis than with a parent being indoctrinated, and they have still less to do with the supposed futility of the child’s prayers. (Prayer would be more likely to increase hope than increase suffering, but either way you’d have to show whatever the case may be.)

Anyway, good luck with the comic books.

My original claim in my post wasn’t directly about clerical sex abuse, but those children abused by religious leaders are a subset of the “at least thousands of children who suffer like this every year.” When I wrote that, I considered the number “thousands” to be extremely conservative, and still do. Suffering children pray to God or Jesus or Allah or the Virgin Mary or the multitude of saints or one of the other supernatural beings their parents teach them, in all sincerity, will help them in times of trouble. If help comes, it is entirely coincidental, and bears no relation to how deep the child’s faith is, or how desperate their prayer.

There are plenty of wonderful stories of all types for children without having to revert to the horror of the tales in the Christian Bible. As for comic book heroes, most of them seem to me to have a far better values system than the God of the Bible. I would far rather a child absorbed the values of Superman or Wonder Woman than a God who seemed to spend most of his time urging his followers to murder, torture, xenophobia, rape, pillage, genocide, enslavement and the abuse of women.

In my country, children have always been much safer in state schools than those run by churches. Just this month the government, after trying to work with it for some time, was forced to shut down a church-run school where the children were physically abused by the teachers using so-called Biblical punishment. It is secular governments all over the world that have forced those religious institutions that enabled and covered up child abuse to clean up their acts. If the Church still had the power it did a century ago, I have no doubt the abuse would be continuing as before. The point is that the Church, instead of being a beacon of morality in the treatment of children, was one of the institutionalized abuse of children. Where was Jesus when those children were praying for His help?

But you repeat yourself. And strangely it doesn’t get less puerile with the repetition.

Yes, I much prefer the thrilling old Jewish fairy tales to the atheist cult’s bloodless bedtime lore, which seems to derive mostly from some aging nerd’s stash of vintage comic books.

In any case, the original claim about “at least thousands of children who suffer like this every year” said nothing about clerical sex abuse — and if that’s what it refers to, it’s wildly hyperbolic. Indeed, after years of reform on a scale that no other institution has undertaken, children are vastly safer in a church youth program than they are in a godless government-run classroom.

If you’re seriously so far out of touch with the news about the private child prostitution racket the Catholic Church has going for its administrative staff…then you’d do well to watch this documentary when it makes it to a theatre near you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56jw6tasomc

You seem like a nice lady and definitely too intelligent to be an atheist.

At least she’s smart and mature enough to realize that books with stories about talking animals in an enchanted garden with an angry wizard are just faery tales — and that it’s a really bad idea to get your morals from faery tale anthologies in which the heroes make sex slave trophies out of the prepubescent girls of the rival tribes they conquer. Alas, such levels of cognition and moral intuition are, evidentially, beyond Christians.

Cheers,

b&

Your graphic gives a handful of examples — over some unknown period of time and unknown geography — of heartbreaking but undeniably weird and newsworthy cases that you go on to claim without a shred of evidence are somehow representative of “at least thousands”. Contrary to your comment on Coyne’s site, the above graphic says nothing about sexual abuse.

You seem like a nice lady and definitely too intelligent to be an atheist.

So you believe that all children have wonderful lives? There are hundreds of millions of children of Christian parents in the world, many of whom have been taught to pray when things are bad. Statistically it’s likely that at least thousands of the children who are suffering in our world are praying to God for that suffering to stop.