Harold Camping

HAROLD CAMPING



Harold Camping has made millions of dollars falsely predicting the coming Rapture and the end of the world. The dimwits who believe in him and who sold everything and emptied out their bank accounts on the strength of his prophesy are nothing more than marks in a great scam. Is Harold going to give his millions to those poor dummies who relied on him? No, apparently he is just moving the date for the apocalypse to October 21, 2011. It is likely that many of his followers are so stupid that they will go on believing in him and prepare for the October date.

If Camping is so sure of the October date, perhaps he would be open to a wager. I would be willing to bet Harold $10 million that October 21 will go by like any other Fall day, like May 21, like September 1994, and that there will be no Rapture, no end of the world, no apocalypse. Harold may refuse to bet me because I don’t have $10million, or because he doesn’t believe in gambling, but if I were to lose, what difference would it make? Harold and his believers would all be sucked-up into heaven, and people like me would be left on earth to experience the horrors he predicts.

There is only one reason why Harold Camping is a false prophet. The reason is that there is no such thing as God, and any prediction based on the Book of Revelations in the Bible is pure nonsense. There is a large number of phony prophets out there claiming that the world is about to come to an end. I have heard Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, Tim LaHaye and others who claim to believe that we are approaching the apocalypse. They base their whole argument on the wording of the Book of Revelations. None of them seems able to pierce the veil of idiocy surrounding that book and the absurdity surrounding all predictions based on the Bible.

The Judeo-Christian Bible is not a book of history. It is not a book of fact. Virtually nothing in it is true. It is a fairy-tale, a book of myths, which, in many cases, is based on more ancient myths of other ancient religions. Millions of dimwitted people base their lives on this book of myths, just as millions of Moslems base their lives on the Quran. In the absence of a real god, or of any real evidence for the existence of God, these people latch onto the one thing that they believe gives them access to the teaching of God. It is pitiful.

I wish people would read my book: "The Case Against God: A Lawyer Examines the Evidence." It is available on Kindle and can be brought-up on any device that has Kindle applications. In it I demonstrate that the Bible is merely a kind of mythological sacred scripture. I show that Moses was nothing more than a mythical figure, that the Exodus never happened, and that Jesus of Nazareth was nothing more than a Jewish holy man who wanted to share certain ideas about Judaism based on the teachings of the Pharisees. In no way did he want to start a new religion naming himself as the Son of God. The poor misguided millions of sheep who went on to create and follow a church based on this misinterpretation of his teaching are always prey to the seduction of cults, sects, televangelists, rogues, and phonies of every kind.

Catholic Church Smokescreen

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has just released a report explaining the scandal of priests who abused thousands of young boys over several decades and who were protected by the hierarchy. As one who was raised in the Catholic Church, attended Catholic grammar school and college, and who even briefly entered a Catholic seminary, I can say that the Stories in the news about the report are consistent with the fact that the Catholic Church is an organization that sees its primary mission as preservation of its own existence--and not necessarily the promulgation of the teachings of Jesus Christ or the worship of God.

The report says that the abuse of these thousands of children occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s. The New York Times reported that this “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002. Now the bishops, who are the ones largely responsible for the continuation of this abomination, have offered this phony report as a lame excuse for their inexcusable behavior.

In one of its most bizarre findings, the report says that fewer than 5 percent of the abusive priests exhibited behavior consistent with pedophilia, which it defines as a “psychiatric disorder that is characterized by recurrent fantasies, urges and behaviors about prepubescent children.” The report goes on to say: “Thus, it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as ‘pedophile priests.”

I can tell you that the priests who abused children are pedophile priests. During my life as a lawyer I had the opportunity to conduct a great deal of research on the subject of pedophilia and on one occasion I wrote a lengthy report for the court in connection with the sentencing of a pedophile. I can say for certain that the conclusions of the Church’s report are hogwash. The Church is attempting a vast cover-up of its own complicity in the abuse of so many children.

Another dishonest revelation of the report is the claim that the scope of abuse of “prepubescent” children was far less than imagined. The report employs a definition of “prepubescent” children as those under age 10. Using this cutoff, the report found that only 22 percent of the priests’ victims were prepubescent. However The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies a prepubescent child as generally age 13 or younger. The New York Times reports that if the bishops had used that cutoff, a vast majority of the abusers’ victims would have been considered prepubescent. Moreover, even if some of the priests’ victims were 14, 15, or16, the sexual attack on such youngsters is still repellent.

Perhaps the most outrageous finding of the report is the claim that the silence by the young victims “is one reason why the abusive behavior persisted.” In other words, blame the victims. Can the Catholic Church be so indifferent to the suffering of these innocent young victims that it fails to realize why so many failed to speak-out about the unspeakable behavior of their trusted priests?

The real cause of the sexual abuse of children by priests is self-evident. During the 1960s and 70s vocations to the priesthood began to fall-off dramatically. In order to fill-up the seminaries, the Church loosened its ban on people with alternate sexual preferences. When I entered the seminary in 1958, the priests in charge questioned me and all other novitiates extensively to be sure we were not homosexual or pedophiliac. In the following decades, such screening simply was not done.

The result of the loosening of criteria for entrance into the priesthood was the ordination of large numbers of men who did not have the usual heterosexual orientation. To men with pedophiliac predispositions, employment by the church became an enticing occupation. Such men were not driven by desire to serve God. Rather, they were encouraged by the opportunity to be around, influence, and exert authority over young boys. In my research I came to understand that most pedophiles are not attracted to grown women. They are strongly attracted to young boys. By becoming priests they were able to avoid the uncomfortable problem of having to explain why they were not getting married. On the contrary, they could feel assured that their parents and relatives would admire and respect their choice of vocation.

It should be understood that homosexuality is not the same as pedophilia. Most homosexuals are not pedophiles. They are not interested in having sex with children. However, some forms of pedophilia do involve homosexuality. I do not believe that the ordination of homosexuals hurt the Church. Consensual homosexual behavior between adults should not be considered a reason for denial of ordination and should not be thought of as a sin. But many pedophiles are sexually attracted to children of their own sex. Pedophilia is a crime and an abomination. A child cannot consent to such treatment. It is irrelevant that the crime is caused by a mental irregularity. Many crimes are caused by psychological disturbances. That is not an excuse. The sexual abuse of a child is no more excusable than the rape of a woman.

According to the report, it was not possible for the church, or for anyone, to identify abusive priests in advance. The report said that priests who abuse minors have no particular “psychological characteristics,” “developmental histories” or “mood disorders” that distinguished them from priests who had not abused. In other words, the bishops want the public to let them off the hook because there was nothing they could do to prevent this atrocity. Well, I do not believe that for a moment. I remember the grilling we received when I entered the seminary, and if the church had continued that form of screening there might have been fewer priests but there also would have been far fewer pedophiles.

More important, the actions taken by the bishops after learning about the sex abuse of children were unconscionable. Instead of reporting these offenders to the police, the bishops sent them to internal programs run by the church. After treatment, the pedophiles were transferred to other parishes where many of them continued their predatory behavior toward young boys. Basically, the bishops committed the crime of aiding and abetting in the commission of felonies. In legal terms it is called “compounding a felony.” The bishops should have been sent to prison. The only reason they were not jailed is that the scandal did not break until years after much of the abuse was conducted and somehow the bishops received special treatment from the law because of their positions in society.

I suspect that there was more than one motive for the cover-up by the bishops of these crimes. Obviously, the bishops did not want to see the priests being hauled before the courts with the accompanying bad publicity for the Church. Also, they obviously felt that the Church could not afford to lose more priests from its already thinning ranks. But one further motive may have prevailed. I suspect that large numbers of bishops were also themselves pedophiles who understood the sexual drives of these priests and wanted to protect them.

One would think that an organization dedicated to religion, holiness, worship, and truth, would have the decency to come clean about this scandal. Instead, this report shows the Church for what it really is. There is nothing holy about the Holy Catholic Church.