Re: Filth
@ Androgynous Cupboard
"many more decent individuals than bad"
Yes, I can easily agree with your entire post, and particularly the quotation above. All major religion is no more than the artefact of bad people who want to control the masses with tales of The Man In The Sky and the glories of the life to come - suffer subserviently to keep us in luxury and your reward will be all the greater. Yeah, right...
However, I reserve special loathing of the Catholic church because of their long history of actively protecting their "rotten eggs", moving them surreptitiously to another parish and letting them repeat their criminal behaviour. It is my personal opinion that Ratzinger, God's Rottweiler, resigned because he was about to be swept up in the tidal wave of revelations pouring out of so many countries. So many children he (and all popes) could and should have saved, and yet the protection of the power of the church outweighed their safety - pretty Christian, right? What would Jesus have said?
I have no personal axe to grind here. I had a happy childhood unmarred by religion (my parents sensibly introduced me to it but had no objection when at the age of 6 or 7 I gave it up as mindless meaningless nonsense). My anger comes from being a father and seeing so many weeping middle-aged men whose lives were destroyed by black-frocked scum.