Human beings are fallible. They make mistakes. They are imperfect. Put solitary humans in positions where they are held to be paragons of virtue, where they are the arbiters of what is moral and what isn’t, and there will be systemic abuses. This hearkens back to the old saw, “power corrupts.” However, some folks who are elevated to positions of power are already corrupt — sometimes they believe they are fighting their own corruption by claiming a life of virtue, sometimes they aren’t even aware of how immoral their personal codes are.

That religious folks are held as having a higher standard of morality is galling. I recently got into a discussion with a coworker about a person I hardly knew at all, where that person’s moral compass was in question. My coworker defended this person with, “oh, but he’s very religious, he’d never do such a thing.” I couldn’t resist scoffing. Not after seeing headline after headline where religious people, held up as moral paragons, are in fact as shiftless and corrupt as any other human being.

In my Too Many Tabs list, there’s a bunch of links I have not yet mentioned in any previous RCimT wherein a religious figure does something grossly immoral. They wouldn’t have been as big of news if the person in question wasn’t in a position of religious power, either. If they had been ordinary citizens, it might still have been news, but the outrage wouldn’t have been nearly as amplified. I guess adding a charge of hypocrisy on top of whatever existing charges they’ve accumulated, just redoubles the gravity of their crimes.

Links below the fold.

Bishop Lahey, the Nova Scotian Roman Catholic bishop that was caught last September with child porn on his laptop, is to stand trial in April of 2011. I don’t know why he gets another full year to kick around from couch to couch like he’s been doing for the past six months, frankly. They can’t possibly need that much time to prepare a case against him.

Meanwhile, a German Jesuit priest now living in South America admitted to systemic child molestation and sexual abuse over the course of close to twenty years. And the church still can’t wrap its head around the implications of this priest making children masturbate in front of him to allow them to advance scholastically, referring to his despicable acts as “intimate, fatherly behaviour”. I’m sorry, but I’d call it molestation even if he was the kids’ biological father. Worse, the man is beyond the reach of justice now, and thinks that by coming clean to the world, he’ll make things right with his god. I’m sure he can rest easy knowing that he’ll make it through the pearly gates by asking forgiveness! Too bad that means he’ll get off wholly scot-free, because if you are neither punished for nor feel guilty about your crimes, then once you die, retribution is not served. The damage was done, with absolutely no act serving as restitution. It’s a crime against humanity that evil people can “repent” before their imaginary deity and everyone considers them trustworthy once more. And in the same school, a second man is accused of such crimes — though he disputes them all. Maybe because he’s innocent, but more probably because he’s still within the reach of the law’s arm.

And this hypocrisy doesn’t stop with child molestation, oh no. Far from it. Fundamentalists regularly kill their children by denying them life-saving medical treatment because it would contradict their faith in prayer or hatred of science. Occasionally, even the religious training itself is lethal — as in the case of the seven year old Paradise, California girl who was beaten to death by her adoptive parents for the crime of mis-pronouncing a word during a Bible reading. Her eleven-year-old sister was subjected to the same treatment and was, at the time of this report, still in critical condition.

Or look at the vultures kidnapping children in Haiti in order to set up an orphanage in the name of their religion. Sure, taking kids away from a carnage zone like Haiti is empirically good — but profiteering off them, taking them away from their actual parents, and ferrying them across the border with zero documentation just smells to high heaven, if you’ll pardon the phrase.

And this hypocrisy extends to the very highest offices of the religious institutions — look no further than the Pope’s own office, and you’ll find a gay prostitution ring. This while Emperor Palpatine Pope Ratzinger decries homosexuality and condom use simultaneously. I sure do hope those gay usher prostitutes were using condoms.

The whole history of religious institutions, no matter which ones, are written start to finish with egregious examples such as these. And it’s not merely because you have to populate these institutions with fallible human beings. It’s because the more flawed you are, the more likely you are to think your religion will shield you from your own corrupt nature. That corruption doesn’t just reflect poorly on the institution, though — it corrupts the institution itself. Morality is subjective, and yet with every instance listed in this blog post, I’m sure we can all agree they are both grossly immoral, even where they do not violate any commandment. And I hope you’ll notice there are no commandments against child molestation, child discipline, withholding medicine or profiteering off hardship.

Be wary of any institution that claims a monopoly on morality. It doesn’t have any right to claim such.