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.
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