capsaicin67

c67: Out of every 100 sent out there is likely to be a few chumps or intellectually challenged persons that will bite.

nogods4me: Like the President, Attorney general, and most of Congress.


Exactly the ones!

lpetrich

Of course, they could be posturing. Niccolo Machiavelli had advised that rulers ought to seem virtuous, no matter how wicked they actually are.

Thus, politicians kissing babies and doing similar sorts of things with religion.

openeyes

Of course we're talking Catholics again, but if prayer and god is so powerful and useful, why weren't all the people involved in all the molestation scandals able to make better judgments? I mean, those priests and bishops lives were suppose to revolve around god and prayer, correct?

Or doesn't it count if the violence is quiet and committed by adults?

I know my mom, still a devout Catholic, wants to believe all this bad stuff happened years ago. So would that have been back when god was supposedly present even in the public schools? Shouldn't he have been in the parochial schools, sacristies, and priests' homes to an even larger degree? If all these incidents don't argue for not relying on "godliness" for moral guidance, I don't know what does.

gilly54

From an earlier post:

How about the students who were gunned down by the National Guard at Kent State in 1968?

andy_d

Perhaps you can't.

However, you also can't claim that there is a causal link between these facts and the lack of institutionalised Christianity.

simian

I wish I had the time to dig up the references, but here's a couple of school violence issues I know of from the past:

1920 in Michigan (I think) anarchists bombed a school building. If I remember correctly, the bomb was place in a boiler room, several children killed. I tried a quick internet search, but turned up nothing on it.

1890s there were boys bringing guns to schools, but I don't remember any of the details.

Simian

Jewel

That was the Bath School Bombing in 1927. I posted some links about it earlier in this thread. It wasn't done by anarchists but rather by a very disgruntled man who blamed his financial situation on taxes being raised because the Bath school joined a school consolidation. 37 children and 8 adults were killed in the bombing.

Vylo

To keep things in perspective, I do remember doing research for a paper and finding that more children are killed in the course of 2 days by their own parents then are killed over 11 months by school shootings. School violence pales dramatically in most areas to domestic violence.

What the starter of this thread has done is refered to in sociology as miscorrelation. Here is a classic example: It is found that in areas where more ice cream is consumed, there is more violent crimes. So ice cream makes you violent? No, look at it more closely. People eat ice cream when it is hot, and heat causes increased irratibilty.

Jewel

Good point, Vylo.

All too often I think people make broad generalazations like that at least partially because of media coverage. Just think how people would freak out if the national media made a big hooha everytime domestic violence included the death of a child.

Vylo

I now present you with this supreme and most hilarious spoof on statistics: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark...read-panic.htm