Klingons with Bathtubs

Recent events have led many people to wonder where they can go to find guidance for living a fulfilling and meaningful life.  However, conventional religion has proven itself to be morally bankrupt.  The Pedophile Scandal continues to rock the Catholic Church, while the destruction of the World Trade Center has revealed Islam as a pious veneer laid over a foundation of hatred and violence.  Although the news media try to play down the scandals of "The Religious" by attributing the evil to individual priests and holy men, it is becoming more and more obvious that religious institutions attract these sorts of people: the liars, the thieves, the power-hungry, the violent, the devious and the sexually deviant.  But stories of religious abuses, or abuse by the religious, rarely find their way into the national news.

Every effort is made by news organizations to play down these stories.  The focus of the media is typically on efforts to "reform" or "renew" or "correct" the problems that led to the particular scandal.  During the Catholic Pedophile Scandal, the national media spent very little time talking about the abuses, focusing instead on the efforts to "reform" the church.  The evening news spent a great deal of time covering the Bishops as they met in Dallas to discuss ways to "solve" (read: defuse) the problem, but the victims of abuse remained mostly faceless.  The national news media were determined to focus attention on the church's clumsy efforts at reform.  Only a group created by lay Catholics was ever shown on television criticizing the reforms.

The Catholic bishops have a real problem, trying to start a reform.  In spite of the fact that Christianity identifies itself as a belief based on the spiritual renew of the believer, the Catholic Church approaches reform the same way a Klingon approaches a bathtub.  They don’t like it.  They live in a culture where the believers patiently submit to all sorts of abuse, and have for centuries.  The idea that a priest might be vile, disgusting child molester is, for most Catholics, just too difficult an idea to wrap their minds around.  The idea that the priest, whose fingers are sanctified so that only he (until recently) could touch the Host, that he would use these same sanctified fingers to molest a child—the idea is just too hard to comprehend for most believers.