Moderator: Moderators
For debate:brunumb wrote: Even if the Bible did not exist, the notion that it is good to love others would still be there. I find it hard to get my head around the need for some sort of instructional manual to tell us how to be good people.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/prison-living ... y?id=90004Though prison officials in some Northeastern states question the idea of an automatic social hierarchy among prisoners based solely upon their offenses, most agree that if there is one, child molesters and informants derided as "snitches" occupy the lowest rungs.
"Once their crime has become known, they usually don't make it" without protective custody
https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeffrey-epst ... rison-hell"Chomo" is prison slang for a child molester and, inmates and officers often claim, they are at the absolute bottom of the implied prison hierarchy.
Chomos are definitely bottom, then snitches are targeted after them. Drug dealers, white-collar, common folk, the former inmate said. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) talks a good game, but you won't ever provide a safe haven for a chomo in custody.
Two months earlier, Clinton Don Simpson who was accused a decade earlier of abusing more than a dozen children in his backyard was killed at the age of 76 by a fellow prisoner in Texas. In May 2018, an inmate in California jail killed an accused pedophile telling authorities that it was his "public service."
http://www.d2l.org/wp-content/uploads/2 ... nitude.pdfAbout one in seven girls and one in 25 boys with be sexually abused before they turn 18.
Nearly 70% of all reported sexual assaults (including assaults on adults) occur to children aged 17 and under.
https://www.nsvrc.org/node/4737One in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3518746/In the United States, child sexual abuse (CSA) affects approximately 16% of men and 25-27% of women.
https://www.rifleco.org/250/Myths-and-F ... -OffendersApproximately 60% of boys and 80% of girls who are sexually victimized are abused by someone known to the child or the child's family (Lieb, Quinsey, and Berliner, 1998). Relatives, friends, baby-sitters, persons in positions of authority over the child, or persons who supervise children are more likely than strangers to commit a sexual assault.
https://www.stopitnow.org/faq/is-there- ... s-childrenYou cannot pick out a sex offender in a crowd. People who may sexually abuse children are fathers, mothers, step-parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. They are neighbors, babysitters, religious leaders, teachers, and coaches. They come from all classes, racial and religious backgrounds and may be homosexual or heterosexual.
http://www.d2l.org/wp-content/uploads/2 ... rators.pdfThose who molest children look and act just like everyone else.
Abusers can be neighbors, friends, and family members. People who sexually abuse children can be found in families, schools, churches, recreation centers, youth sports leagues, and any other place children gather. Significantly, abusers can be and often are other children.
About 90% of children who are victims of abuse know their abuser. Only 10% of sexually abused children are abused by a stranger.
Approximately 30% of children who are sexually abused are abused by family members.
Completely agree. I do not discount Christians from being able to commit evil. They can even use the Bible to justify their actions. So, what is the correct way to interpret the Bible? This is quite complicated, but I'll just suffice it to say that Christians should follow the model of Jesus as he walked on earth. He calls Christians to deny themselves, carry the cross, and follow him.Mithrae wrote: And those burning witches and torturing heretics were regular, normal Christians.
Yes, of course. But, if it's used to justify they are morally superior to another, then I would disagree with them.Some people are smarter than others.
Well, who's to say anyone's moral framework is better than anyone else's? On what objective basis can we say one's moral framework is the one everyone should be following?You're not really going to try arguing that Hitler's moral framework held the same merit as Gandhi's, are you?
https://historycollection.co/sources-cl ... ndniece/2/Gandhi frequently slept and bathed with his young female followers. When others criticized this practice as being unseemly, Gandhi argued that it was a way for him to increase his spiritual power. And as Gandhi said of his practice of bathing with Sushila Nayar, the younger sister of his secretary, “While she is bathing I keep my eyes tightly shut. I do not know … whether she bathes naked or with her underwear on.� Obviously, it wasn’t an explanation that satisfied his critics. But the opportunity to bathe or sleep with Gandhi was seen as a great honor among his followers.
Gandhi sometimes asked the women he slept with to perform strip-teases or make sexually explicit conversation. As Gandhi explained it, this was the ultimate test of his vow of chastity.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-ente ... 37411.htmlAs he grew older (and following Kasturba's death) he was to have more women around him and would oblige women to sleep with him whom – according to his segregated ashram rules – were forbidden to sleep with their own husbands. Gandhi would have women in his bed, engaging in his "experiments" which seem to have been, from a reading of his letters, an exercise in strip-tease or other non-contact sexual activity.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... aked-womenHis behaviour in the winter of 1946-47 shocked many of his followers. At least two of his helpers, his stenographer and his Bengali translator, quit his service in protest when they discovered that he was sleeping with 19-year-old Manu. The Indian press stayed silent. Unusually, Gandhi kept his “experiment� with Manu reasonably private – behaviour that he later regretted because it violated the principle that the seeker after truth must keep nothing hidden.
Well, I turn the question around. Do you reject the word 'power' because it could imply a being?Danmark wrote: I see no need to invoke the word 'power.' It connotes a sense that this 'good' comes from a being. Is that why you use it?
In the context of what I'm arguing, the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials had to appeal to an external source (international criminal law) and not an internal source (personal ethics). The prosecution relied on an external source to be able say the Nazis are guilty.In any event, I see no need to claim it must come from an external source, whether one anthropomorphizes that source as a 'power' or not.
Do you dispute my claim that it is normal, ordinary people who are buying children for sex? Or is it only abnormal, eccentrics that are doing this? If so, please provide evidence for this.
How do you define "normal, ordinary people?"otseng wrote:Do you dispute my claim that it is normal, ordinary people who are buying children for sex? Or is it only abnormal, eccentrics that are doing this? If so, please provide evidence for this.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/ ... 073459001/But what of the men who paid to rape this child? What consequences did they suffer?
Not a single one was ever charged.
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/children-and-teensOne in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys under the age of 18 experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult.
82% of all victims under 18 are female.
Females ages 16-19 are 4 times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.
Most of the people that you see in the airport, in the mall, at the workplace, in your neighborhood, in church, in sports arenas, in concert halls, etc. They are the everyday people that we encounter and interact with.Danmark wrote: How do you define "normal, ordinary people?"
Totally agree.As I wrote earlier, when people have little fear of getting caught, they are more likely to give in to their lesser selves.
Some more tidbits from that source:
I can't imagine many sex abusers signing up to be studied or even letting anybody know about their dark side.The 'demand side' has been 'woefully understudied' compared to the 'supply side.'
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ ... rkommandosThe Sonderkommandos were groups of Jewish prisoners forced to perform a variety of duties in the gas chambers and crematoria of the Nazi camp system. They worked primarily in the Nazi killing centers, such as Auschwitz, but they were also used at other killing sites to dispose of the corpses of victims.
You say people, but any believer can only say "God."In the Nazi concentration camps, we wonder what evil people can lead the Jews to the gas chambers,..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DehumanizationDehumanization or an act thereof can describe as the denial of full humanness to others, and the cruelty and suffering that accompany it.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015 ... oks-kirschPolitical prisoners favored fellow-activists over criminals and asocials category that included the homeless, the mentally ill, and prostitutes whom they regarded as practically subhuman.
Like many Nazi institutions, the K.L. embodied conflicting impulses: to reform the criminal, to extort labor from the unproductive, to quarantine the contagious. But most fundamental was the impulse to dehumanize the enemy, which ended up confounding and overriding all the others. Once a prisoner ceased to be human, he could be brutalized, enslaved, experimented on, or gassed at will, because he was no longer a being with a soul or a self but a biological machine. The Muselmänner, the living dead of the camps, stripped of any capacity to think or feel, were the true product of the K.L., the ultimate expression of the Nazi world view.
The impulse to separate some groups of people from the category of the human is, however, a universal one.
So "sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans were denizens of the bottom of the human category," when they were even granted human status. Mostly, they were seen as "soulless animals." And that dramatic dehumanization made it possible for great atrocities to take place.
https://www.aaihs.org/they-had-no-right ... o-respect/The Supreme Court's rejection of Dred Scott's claim to freedom was not based on legal precedent alone, but also the deeply held belief of Black inferiority. The belief in their inferiority and the superiority of whites was a long held justification of oppression and brutal practices against Blacks. Even constitutional amendments could not eradicate the sentiment.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/ ... story.htmlIt has once again placed an ugly truth about mainstream America in the spotlight that it views African American boys as less than human.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticideFemale infanticide is a major cause of concern in several nations such as China, India and Pakistan.
https://hmmdaily.com/2019/03/08/how-we- ... -homeless/But human beings in our society ”including me” have an ingrained proclivity toward labeling, judging, and punishing the unhoused. The behavior fits into a category with a name: the dehumanization of the homeless.
https://www.umcjustice.org/what-we-care ... btq-rightsDiscrimination and dehumanization by individuals, institutions and societies, rob LGBTQ people of their God-given dignity.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archi ... humanized/Press coverage of a young man thrown out of his wheelchair during the UK student protests suggests that "real" disabled people are not whole human beings.
https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issue ... -1_Key.pdfCentral to the abortion debate is the extent to which a fetus
constitutes a person under the Fourteenth Amendment. Pro-choice
advocates argue that categorizing the fetus as a person will lead to the
prioritization of fetal rights over and against the mother's
constitutional right to privacy.93 Alternatively, fetal personhood, or the
idea that zygotes and embryos are legal persons subject to the
protections and benefits of the law, frequently serves as the ideological
underpinning of anti-choice legislation.
Although all human beings likely qualify as constitutional persons,
there is no jurisdiction in the United States that treats prenatal entities
as persons for purposes of constitutional protection.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/09/we ... rs/403030/For now, it's important to acknowledge that dehumanization is more common than previously thought.
