Catholic Cardinal authorized $20K to pay priests who raped children, then railed against ‘immorality’ of gay marriage

By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:00 am Tuesday, Jun 5

From Think Progress:

Screen Shot 2012 06 05 at 9 54 26 AMCardinal Timothy Dolan has led the charge against same-sex marriage, describing gay and lesbian unions as “unjust,” “immoral,” and unnatural. “This is a very violation of what we consider natural law that’s embedded in every man and woman and we’re really worried as Americans that it’s going to be detrimental to the common good,” Dolan said in a radio interview in June, as New York prepared to legalize marriage equality. “[W]e still worry about the detrimental effect upon society, upon culture, and certainly upon our individual churches.”

But church documents showing that Dolan paid off priests who had been accused of sexually abusing minors suggest that the prominent Catholic leader was willing to overlook these very same religious convictions to help colleagues accused of egregious wrong doing. The documents, obtained by the New York Times, also show that Dolan lied to reporters when he initially dismissed news of the payments as “false, preposterous and unjust.”

When a religious leader is found out to be a lying hypocrite, the members of the religion become much more devout. Church leaders should do this kind of thing more often.

Via Cynical-C

This is a post made by Make / Boingboing editor Mark Frauenfelder.

The Analysis

I bear Mark no ill will. I like the guy a lot actually. I enjoy both Boingboing and Make. But, this post I did not enjoy. This post reminds me of the sort of the vapid bullshit I’ve come to expect from the likes of CNN and Fox news. And by vapid bullshit I mean inflammatory posts intended to rally people against folks that the writer disagrees with.  Or simply to create hysteria and drama where there is none.  Worse still posts such as this are a veritable cornucopia of irrationality. It is an assault on critical thinking, and on civil discourse. In short, this post is EVERYTHING that is wrong with news reporting today.

I attempted to call this out on the post commentary, but the piece did its job well. Those with critical thinking experience ignored the work and went on with their day, while those ill equipped to handle the world were sucked right on in and filled up with piss and vinegar to fight anyone that dare disagree with them. Usually I am on the side of trolling. Today I chose rather to attempt to enlighten. I have been a fan of the commentary on BoingBoing since it was switched to Disqus. In fact I have a fairly large karma rating there because of Boingboing. Today however I did not receive very many +1s.

The problem inherent in a post such as this is that it addresses religion and worse, morality. Touching on either subject is difficult. People’s beliefs and morals are not steeped in any objectivity or universal truth. We each choose our own moral convictions on our own. They are ours. We live with them, and we die with them. We accept the consequences of believing the things that we do. Religion is much in the same vein. It is not a truth born from the rigors of science. It is a blind adherence to principle and in some cases purpose. And for some people, that works. Whatever religion or morality you hold, no one can take that from you. Nor should they try. I myself do not believe in god. I do however, have my own unique moral convictions that I stand by. And that’s where perspective comes in.

In history ( if you had a decent education ), you learned about the difference between primary and secondary sources. A news paper article such as the one cited in this blog post would be considered a secondary source. The words of the bishop unedited would be a primary source. It’s important to understand that with each recounting of an event or idea new perspective is added to the telling of the narrative. In short, like a game of telephone, the more people in the chain the more impacted the data is by the skew of each persons perspective. There’s no way to prevent it, we each have our own perspective and it will bleed into the things we do no matter how hard we try to avoid it. Acknowledging it exists and being up front about it is helpful. But at the end of the day it’s better we focus on the primary and secondary sources and leave the rest to their own devices. Less noise, more signal.

Now, the first problem I have with this piece is I am not sure what the goal of it is. In any essay or news article it’s generally easy to assume the summary of the piece and it’s point are in the first few lines. I didn’t see an argument that made any sense to me, so I had to come up with a hypothesis on what the point of the piece could be. And I’d need to figure out a way to check and see if I was right. Now before I break it down, it’s important to note there are two separate messages here. The message produced by the writer of the cited piece, as well as the message passed on by Mark at boingboing who added his own commentary and framing to the piece. I’m going to target Mark. I care about boingboing, I don’t give a crap about the writer of this piece.

Marks argument is fairly straightforward ( and clarified in the commentary around the article ). Basically he is saying that he thinks people are likely to believe hypocrisy and accept leadership from those who embrace it. To support this he offers the citation from the other piece. This is a pretty simple argument. Let’s try to psuedo code it.

// Mark's Argument
def Mark_Argument() {
    when( religious_leader == 'Liar' || religious_leader == 'Hypocrite' ) {
        religious_members_devotion++
    }
}

Pretty simple right? He technically said ‘and’ but I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’d accept the logical or as well. I think that’s fair. Anyways, basically what this states in a logical syntax is that whenever religious_leader must equal lying evaluates to true, or whenever religious_leader must equal  ‘Hypocrite’ evaluates to true, the devotion of their congregation increases. Mark sums up the point by saying that religious leaders should take advantage of this function to increase devotion.

Obviously, Mark is being sarcastic. What he most likely means here is that there is a high likelihood among our population for people to accept the argument of a hypocrite or a liar over that of a truthful person devout in their beliefs. There’s some serious irony in play here. I actually love it.

Mark responded to one comment of mine with this:

“I didn’t say his opinion was wrong because he was a hypocrite (though Think Progress may have been saying that). I’m arguing that hypocrites are effective religious leaders.”

Lets now take a look at the citation in argument form:

// Think of Negative / positive as a boolean moral value set.
if (Dolan_View_on_Gay_Marriage == Negative) {
    set dolan_dislikes_gay_marriage = True
} else {
    set dolan_dislikes_gay_marriage = False
}

if (Dolan_View_on_Defrocked_Criminals == Positive) {
    set dolan_favors_defrocked_criminals = True
} else {
    set dolan_favors_defrocked_criminals = False
}

// The implied argument is that it is hypocracy to believe one of these is wrong the other not. Or vice versa.
// To avoid hypocracy any logically equivalent set will do.
if (dolan_favors_defrocked_criminals == dolan dislikes_gay_marriage) {
    set dolan_is_hypocrite = False
} else {
    set dolan_is_hypocrite = True
}

if (dolan_favors_defrocked_criminals == True || dolan_dislikes_gay_marriage == True) {
    dolan_opposed_to_church_morality = True
}

If (dolan_opposed_to_church_morality) {
    set dolan_is_hypocrite = True
}

if ((dolan_denying_allegations == true) && (dolan_proven_guilty == true)) {
    dolan_is_liar = True
}

So for Mark to use the citation he needs one of the following:

dolan_is_hypocrite == True
dolan_is_liar = True
congreation_devotion_pre_dolan_actions < congregation_devotion_post_dolan_actions

This will give him a valid data set to satisfy his argument. However, this citation does not define the value of devotion as increasing in his congregation. That eliminates it as a viable data point to argue a correlation between hypocrisy OR lying as increasing devotion.

This is a pretty nasty missing point. He loses the correlative argument immediately Which is distressing as he has no other. Unless of course you consider the author of the citation to be an authority. In which case that is an argument from authority and a false argument.  Regardless a single data point does not make for a correlative argument.  And argument from ignorance maybe.

So right off I can strike the full argument brought forth by Mark as being unsupported by his data. His argument has already failed in totality.

But let’s continue further.

The ‘allegations’ levied against the Archbishop are allegations. That implies that the truth value of them is not defined at this time. As such any argument relying on the truth value of ‘dolan_proven_guilty’ is also undefined. In code that would result in a failure to compile until the argument was removed entirely. So we lose the argument that dolan is a liar in its entirety until such time as he can be proven so.  I believe that is more difficult than people realize.

Now. The Moral value of Dolan being opposed to homosexuality is pretty much definitely true. It’s important to note that I included two conditionals for achieving hypocrisy. The first is personal hypocrisy. The second is hypocrisy in his role as an arch bishop. In either case dolan_is_hypocrite is set to true. However there is a problem.

if (dolan_favors_defrocked_criminals == dolan dislikes_gay_marriage) {

This is not a logically supported argument. It relies on an assumption that one position is related to the other. In the first case one CANNOT make that assumption as the personal opinions of Dolan cannot be judged as being positive or negative. There is not enough information regarding his personal views. That breaks one of the possible arguments for hypocrisy right off the bat. This is at best a straw man argument. At worst it’s just a blind assumption based on nothing.

The second piece is interesting. The argument is that Dolan’s actions can be judged based on the churches past record. The problem here is that the church espouses a fundamental belief in mercy and a universal acceptance, as well as forgiveness. In short, whether one is a defrocked priest that diddled kids, or if one is a CPA from Pasadena the church will not judge you as being undeserving of their help. At least that is their stated position. There are certainly historical arguments to be made both supporting and denying this. But at the end of the day the best argument that can be made is one built from hard data. And we have NONE here. So, the church’s position on the matter remains undefined. More to the point Dolan’s position in regards to showing favoritism is ALSO undefined.

So yet another argument falls apart.

In short, the entire citation is worthless in supporting Mark’s argument. From a rational argument’s stand point, Mark has failed utterly to provide any valuable supporting data to his claim. There is no reason to believe that lies, or hypocrisy have any effect on ones ability to lead whether in a religious environment or not.  However one might be inclined to view the comment thread of this post and draw all sorts of conclusions from that copious data set.

So is there anything we can draw specifically from this piece?

What is defined is that Dolan does not support gay marriage. I can’t say I personally agree with that. And I know a lot of Boingboing readers find this to be a very hot topic. If Mark had said ‘Dolan doesn’t support gay marriage’ I think we’d all agree. More to the point I think a large majority of Boingboing would disagree with Dolan’s position. And there’s plenty of data to use as ammunition in forming an argument on why gay marriage should be allowed. Or disallowed if that’s what you believe. That’s not what happened here though.  And I’ve already stated my opinion on the matter as being opposed to Dolan’s and the Church.

We see an allegation that a priest showed favoritism to another priest, and to a criminal. The church celebrates their capacity for forgiveness and mercy. They have an active role within the prison system, and they do give last rights to ANYONE who asks. I think it’s fair to say that the church has no problem showing favoritism to bad people. They’ve said repeatedly that they need their help most.  And I will ALWAYS support someone who chooses to be kind to those that have done nothing to deserve kindness.  I’m proud to know our species is capable of that.  However the realist in me wonders whether or not Dolan or the Church was showing favoritism to ex-priests over other criminals. And that is an interesting question. Were they? I have no idea. Not enough data at the moment to say. Seems possible though. More so in the case of Dolan showing favoritism than the church I think.  That would certainly be something I disagree with either way. And I am pretty sure the church would be at odds with itself if it were showing favoritism. That would arguably be a case of hypocrisy.  I’d certainly make that argument.   Not argued here though.

And that’s it. That’s all we can get.

And while I appreciate the nuts in this turd of a post, it’s still shit to me.

On a personal level, I think that a piece that calls out a person, or an organization as being a hypocrite, or a liar, or just plain ‘wrong’ is fully unhelpful. It’s not constructive. It’s destructive. It rallies people to oppose someone. To divide people against each other. It does not promote compromise or mutual understanding. It’s derogatory. Yes, there are bad people in the world. And yes sometimes action is beneficial in curbing their negative contribution.  But it is most beneficial to find a common accord when possible.  This sort of thing leads to conflict, and destruction.  It’s usually a net negative and it serves to drive people into intractable positions.

We have rational arguments, the rules of logic, and the scientific method to allow us to join in a common pursuit of truth. Of what is beneficial for us all. And if we adhere to those principles we will prosper. There will be times when violence is called for. When denunciation is called for. But this is not one of them. And this sort of divisive rhetoric only serves to exacerbate a misunderstanding on all sides.

Mark is in many ways a leader of at least two communities.  And his example promotes both himself and the people that follow him.  This post does not serve to entertain, or to benefit either communities.  It does hurt them though.  And it creates conflict with people who in many cases are willing to engage in open and rational discourse.

*sigh*

Hopefully someone somewhere will read this. And get something out of it.

-Matt