are "sex offenders" more likely to "sin again"
than murderers?
which would worry you more as a neighbour? an ex-con
who served 20 yrs for murder or a convicted sex offender...
.,
Well, maybe not. I'll quote him below, but the statement was made several years ago and my agreement is limited by a couple of issues:
(1) I'm not sure he still agrees with the statement;
(2) He would rather focus on the abuse that is allegedly inherent in religious education per se, a sentiment that I cannot endorse:
Priestly abuse of children is nowadays taken to mean sexual abuse, and I feel obliged, at the outset, to get the whole matter of sexual abuse into proportion and out of the way. Others have noted that we live in a time of hysteria about pedophilia, a mob psychology that calls to mind the Salem witch-hunts of 1692? All three of the boarding schools I attended employed teachers whose affections for small boys overstepped the bounds of propriety. That was indeed reprehensible. Nevertheless, if, fifty years on, they had been hounded by vigilantes or lawyers as no better than child murderers, I should have felt obliged to come to their defense, even as the victim of one of them (an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience).
I can't link the primary source (it's from one of his books) but that passage has been quoted on the web.
Not to minimize the very real problems associated with child abuse by priests (or family or ...) but he is spot on in his description of the current hysteria as not much different from the Salem Colony during its time of infamy.
I am astounded by the fact that, although murderers can finish their sentences and go on to live the rest of their lives in comparative peace, (albeit with diminished civil rights) people who may have committed comparatively minor sexually oriented offenses find themselves literally unable to find legal housing. Something is wrong with this picture. (BTW: in some cases it is not even clear that the sexual offenders actually did anything wrong. Weird things have sometimes been alleged in the he said/she said confrontations that pass for divorce proceedings in this country.)
File this Dawkings quote under 'things found while looking for something else'. I was actually trying to determine whether the phrase "Christus Domine hodie resurrexit" is grammatically correct - I don't think so (should be Dominus I think but I don't know enough Latin to have an opinion) but it's interesting how one link leads to another.
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