middle aged female wrote:frank - up in grand blanc wrote:doesn't change the facts about what the unwed mothers, their children and other orphans went through in the Irish Magdelane system and other church run orphanages and homes.
Yeah, but living beings have a history of being very tough on children of questionable paternity. Creating a bogeyman of a bad old partriarchial church to explain what is clearly an evil is not necessary because we, people, are inclined to flush away children who are not our own. Richard Dawkins lays out the argument for a biological precedent for slaughtering some among the "innocent." The upshot of the hypothesis is that one should not squander resources in support of children who do not carry one's genes. Shit, even lions will kill the cubs of other males when then come upon a new family group. I won't even say that there's a tyranny of patriarchy here because womenkind buy into regimine.
I expect better of my co-religionists as illustrated in the original story, but in light of the willingness of greater society to figuratively shit on these women and children I will ask: DID the order of nuns do worse by these young women and children?
Max's question about the contemporaries failing to shout to the rafters that an abomination was afoot strikes a chord: what about the present era's legal protection of abortion? How will the future regard the today's protection of the practice as well as the prioritization of privacy over incubating life? Myself, I understand and can argue both sides of the abortion issue, but as society changes (as it does; change is constant) will future generations judge us as being enlightened or as inheritors of the Bon Secor order's mantle of evil? "We do the best that we can," is the answer for today, and my read of western society is that as a general rule this is and has been true from at least the time of high Greek civilization. Periodic but temporary regressions aside, western society has liberalized in thought and in practice, and as such I read the past as being darker than the present and at the same time better than what it followed. Guess that I'm saying that I expect that our grandchildren will one day be talking shit about us and 2014 because of any number of sins omission.
The nuns may not have done worse by these girls and their children, but that shouldn't be the question. The question should be "Why didn't the nuns do better for these people? Shouldn't they have done, being designated servants of Christ?"
I agreee. No question at all.
