Thursday 20 February 2014

Forgive me


A Catholic scholar told me something the other day (over the airwaves) which I am surprised I had never known of or thought about before, and throws a hell of a lot of light on a very serious problem as well as providing a very simple solution to it.

It has only been since 1910 that children over the age of seven have been required to make confessions of sins once a week whilst shut up in a small, dark box with a male priest.

Think about it. On one hand, the Catholic Church regards children as innocents, and on the other, they are expected to confess to sins.

Aside from pinching a few sweets without permission, the greatest sin that your average child is most likely to commit is masturbation, and the child is duty bound to confess to it to a man in a dark, wooden cupboard who has taken a vow of chastity.

So the kid goes into the box already feeling guilty, and the man in the box is the only one who can rid them of their guilt. With some token punishment of a few thoughtless and mumbled incantations, the child is totally forgiven - until next week.

Since Catholic priests have been forced into celibacy - and it hasn't been that long since even the Pope was married - they have struggled with all the lascivious demons that we all struggle with, but without any morally correct recourse to placate them. Most of us do not actually fight these demons, we just try to keep them under control.

Chronic paedophiles are famous for their deviousness, and the lengths that they go to in order to get closer to vulnerable children has always been underestimated by the rest of us who can never fully understand them. Grown men who have never really been interested in cooking sausages on an open fire in remote woodland, suddenly start wearing shorts and spending weekends well away from the parents of the children in their care. Not all of them, of course, but these are jobs which will undoubtably attract the disturbed and dedicated few.

The scholar had a very simple solution to eradicate at least this one danger, and that was to lobby the Pope to raise the age for confessionals to where it used to be before 1910, which I guess was sixteen.

I have another suggestion directed toward the theologians who decide on all this stuff. Stop deliberately misinterpreting the Scriptures to suit your own purpose when you tell the five or six generations of Catholics since 1910 that we are all BORN sinners, in the same way that babies of heavy drinkers and heroin-users are born addicts.

I don't care if you want to spend your whole life fighting against Mother Nature for the sake of your own spiritual well-being, just don't accuse my babies of having committed any sins before they could even say the word, let alone understand it.

19 comments:

  1. As all religions are man made and god does not exist, then it serves the followers right for putting trust into false beliefs!

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    1. Children don't put their fucking trust in religion as soon as they leave the womb. They are forced to by their parents who have had the same lies perpetrated on them when THEY left the womb. That is the whole point of this post.

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  2. Well I just learnt something I'm not catholic so I've never been to confession but I always understood that the church only held confessions from children that had reached adult years.
    To think children have anything to confess seems a bit strange to me.
    Merle..........

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  3. Baptise them when they're born, and you've got em.

    Personally I find that the two words Catholic and Scholar don't sit too happily together.

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    1. Nothing wrong with the originals, but this lot insist they ARE the originals.

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  4. Better yet: Confess your sins to God directly (if you are a believer) and not to some dude in a box.

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    1. We all do that - whether we like it or not. Every little sparrow, etc.

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  5. I always liked confession (was raised Catholic, 12 years of Catholic schooling, but no longer Catholic). And if you have ever been in a confessional the 'box' where the priest is is totally cut off from the part where the confessee is.

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    1. I know there is barrier between priest and confessor - shame it doesn't exist out of the box.

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  6. I wish to confess that when was small and had to go to Sunday school I regularly gave my two pence collection money to the chewing gum machine near the church. I wish to confess that I used to put my hand in the collection plate and stir the coins to give the effect that I had given the said two pence to God. I wish to confess that I also accepted a bribe from the Sunday school teacher who gave me a silver sixpence for learning the Lord's Prayer. I confess that I spent the silver sixpence from God at the sweet shop and didn't give it to the poor. I mean to people in Africa who have no food as my mother used to say when I wouldn't eat my boiled cabbage and turnips. May God forgive me.

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    1. Reminds me of the Convent girl who - when leaving aged 17 - was asked by the Mother Superior what she intended to do in the outside world.

      "I'm going to be a prostitute," said the girl.

      The Mother fell to the ground in a swoon and was carried away by nuns. When she recovered a little, she asked for the girl to be brought into her cell.

      "What did you say you were going to be when you leave here?" asked the M.S.

      "A prostitute," affirmed the girl.

      "Ah thank God!," she exclaimed, "I thought you said Protestant!"

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  7. I went to a Catholic convent school for 12 years. Look what it did to me.

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  8. Your protestant joke reminds me of the case of syphilis in the convent joke....

    Well it makes a change from the usual Chablis......


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