Whale Oil is just getting tedious with his attacks on the Pope and Catholics

Cameron Slater, aka Whale Oil, is an anti-Catholic of the most virulent type.  I've come across a number of them now, and I find it's really difficult to converse calmly with them.  They tend to have beliefs of the most extreme kind, and like conspiracy theorists of the type who believe all our world leaders are actually alien reptiles, don't believe anything you tell them unless it matches their imaginary framework.  In this case, Whale Oil seems to believe the purpose of the Catholic Church is to act as a front for child sex abuse around the world.  If he doesn't believe that, then he's still happy to put that view forward in his posts.

But first, the post Another dodgy Catholic priest, where Whale shows he doesn't care about correcting errors of logic and fact when they are pointed out to him.  He said, of the story that he links to:

This is just going to keep on keeping on until the Church actually addresses what appears to be a systemic problem with pedophile priests.

Except his sentence above contains a logical fallacy in that it assumes that if systemic problems he alleges are addressed today, then somehow these past cases will just vanish into thin air. But reality doesn't actually work that way.

As I have said before, these stories that are coming out are old abuse cases. This particular case is on abuse that occurred more than thirty years ago. In recent times, a lot more has been done recently to make the Church a much safer place for children, including tightening up the selection criteria for the priesthood, but in the meantime, there are still these cases from the past, which unfortunately tend to feature Catholics because others in society aren't that much of a target for prosecution right now.

Also, the man in the story he links to isn't even a priest, he's just an ordinary man who took vows. That's why he had the title, "Brother", and not, "Father", as priests are called. He's not even a "Brother" anymore. So, his title and premise of Whale Oil's post are both factually incorrect.

None of that seems to matter to Cameron Slater/Whale Oil, now editor of Truth. Maybe Truth should be renamed, Pravda. It's really the biggest irony that media that implicitly purports to be the truth through the use of the word as their name, is generally anything but. Bloggers who care about truth will change their posts when errors are pointed out to them. Not so Whale, which shows he doesn't actually care if what he posts is true or not.

Then later in the day, Whale posted a truly disgusting piece basically accusing Pope Benedict XVI of knowingly heading a church that is really some sort of front for child trafficking, torture and other crimes against humanity, and trying to keep his papal immunity so that international law can't get him or the Vatican.  Whale's own comments in the post show that he believes that what the Church really is will become apparent at some point in the future.

Every time, I read that post, I'm just flabbergasted and horrified. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. When a person doesn't even care about the little details as shown in post of the ex-brother, then it's much easier to make wild claims, even if just for propaganda purposes. When truth doesn't matter anymore, there are no barriers on going too far, on posting anything if it suits the narrative that you support.  In Whale's case, that is gay-marriage and Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church stands firmly against the redefinition of marriage, therefore the pope and the Church has to be taken down. 

I'll finish with a quote from a Protestant, Russell D. Moore, the Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration and Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on Pope Benedict's moral leadership:

Benedict has countered the sexual revolution with an Augustinian view of the meaning of human personhood. A human person, he has reminded the world, is not a machine. We are not merely collections of nerve endings that spark with sensation when rubbed together. Instead a human person is directed toward a one-flesh union, which is personal and spiritual. Destroying the ecology of marriage and family isn’t simply about tearing down old “moralities,” he has reminded us, but about a revolt against the web of nature in which human beings thrive.

And Benedict has stood against the nihilism that defines human worth in terms of power and usefulness. He has constantly spoken for those whose lives are seen as a burden to society: the baby with Down syndrome, the woman with advanced Alzheimer’s, the child starving in the desert, the prisoner being tortured. These lives aren’t things, he has said, but images of God, and for them we will give an account. When society wants to dehumanize with language: “embryo,” “fetus,” “anchor baby,” “illegal alien,” “collateral damage,” and so on, Benedict has stood firmly to point to the human faces the world is seeking to wipe away.

As Protestant Christians, we will disagree with this pope, and with the next one, on all sorts of things. Here we stand, we can do no other; God help us. But let’s pray the next pope, like this one, will remember what it means to be human, and will remind the rest of us when we forget.