im going to apologise for turning this in to a debate. this was a survey, not a debate so i think we should stop debating it here.
I can agree with that, we're kind of taking a survey and dragging it off topic, so lets continue. Simply to save you the effort of flipping back and forth, here's my last two posts.
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ok, if you read your first apragraph again, you will find that your arguement is illogical.
In what sense? Be more specific please.
We're getting somewhere now.
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There were 236,000 people in jail for sexual offenses in 2000
First, you did exactly what I said people are doing with statistics. It's wonderful that 236,000 people are in jail for sexual offenses, but I'm mostly interested in a very specific branch of sexual offenses. How many of these offenses are relevant?
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Mathematically, more than 99.5 percent of the priesthood remains untainted by this scandal.
Okay. How many priests are there? How many churches are you including? Just catholic churches, or are we counting every priest in this country by including pagan ones and the sort? And as a general overview to your entire post, from where did you get this information?
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There were 236,000 people in jail for sexual offenses in 2000 (38 of them were Catholic priests). The largest group offenders are relatives of the children.
Mathematically, more than 99.5 percent of the priesthood remains untainted by this scandal.
Here's another point that didn't occur to me just now as I returned to post a statistic that I found myself. Who cares how many people are in jail for the offense? The church moves the priests to other countries, a number of priests have died since the abuse occurred, and so forth. Your number picks the smallest segment of the abusing priests, and compares them against another segment, as if that had any meaning at all.
Also, it would be useful to have a link to see where you got it.
"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air...we need believing people."
[Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933]
It doesn't matter how many average joes abuse kids. thats irrelevant to the fact that priests are doing it. Even if only .5% of them are doing it thats too much.
This is a serious issue. But precisely because of that, we should avoid alarmism. Before going further into the debate I suggest reading the following article by a secular humanist:
