Nuns killed children at an American Catholic orphanage

[Underseer]

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...rphanage-death-catholic-abuse-nuns-st-josephs

It was a late summer afternoon, Sally Dale recalled, when the boy was thrown through the fourth-floor window.

“He kind of hit, and— ” she placed both hands palm-down before her. Her right hand slapped down on the left, rebounded up a little, then landed again.

For just a moment, the room was still. “Bounced?” one of the many lawyers present asked. “Well, I guess you’d call it — it was a bounce,” she replied. “And then he laid still.”

For centuries, religions claimed that they could make you more moral.

The problem with this is that thousands of years ago, the Euthyphro dilemma proved that no religion can make anyone more moral, only demand obedience. Thus, every religion claims to provide what no religion can. Of course, this is probably done to keep people from questioning religious authorities. After all, if the man in the pulpit is the source of your morality, then questioning him might cause you to become a bad person, and you don't want to be a bad person, do you?

We have gone for centuries with a taboo against criticizing religion, and this has resulted in religions making shocking moral abuses and being able to easily cover them up, mostly by acting offended that anyone would question them. When we started getting stories about the Catholic church hiding pedophile priests in ways that exposed even more children to danger, the taboo against criticizing religion started to erode.

But pedophile priests aren't the only thing exposed by the slow erosion of the taboo against criticizing religion, including the abuse of orphans by nuns at Catholic ophranages.

What you should take away from this is not that Catholics are bad, but that the taboo against criticizing religion and against criticizing religious institutions is bad. That has to end.

 

[phands]

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...rphanage-death-catholic-abuse-nuns-st-josephs

It was a late summer afternoon, Sally Dale recalled, when the boy was thrown through the fourth-floor window.

“He kind of hit, and— ” she placed both hands palm-down before her. Her right hand slapped down on the left, rebounded up a little, then landed again.

For just a moment, the room was still. “Bounced?” one of the many lawyers present asked. “Well, I guess you’d call it — it was a bounce,” she replied. “And then he laid still.”

For centuries, religions claimed that they could make you more moral.

The problem with this is that thousands of years ago, the Euthyphro dilemma proved that no religion can make anyone more moral, only demand obedience. Thus, every religion claims to provide what no religion can. Of course, this is probably done to keep people from questioning religious authorities. After all, if the man in the pulpit is the source of your morality, then questioning him might cause you to become a bad person, and you don't want to be a bad person, do you?

We have gone for centuries with a taboo against criticizing religion, and this has resulted in religions making shocking moral abuses and being able to easily cover them up, mostly by acting offended that anyone would question them. When we started getting stories about the Catholic church hiding pedophile priests in ways that exposed even more children to danger, the taboo against criticizing religion started to erode.

But pedophile priests aren't the only thing exposed by the slow erosion of the taboo against criticizing religion, including the abuse of orphans by nuns at Catholic ophranages.

What you should take away from this is not that Catholics are bad, but that the taboo against criticizing religion and against criticizing religious institutions is bad. That has to end.

Religion has to end....it is no longer useful to humanity...it is a huge negative.

 

[RavenSky]

That is one hell of a well-researched article.

Horrifying.

 

[BH]

I've heard stories too of babies being buried in the basement floors of nunneries. The nuns got pregnant and delivered the baby and killed it. Is this an urban legand or has it been proven true?

 

[Underseer]

I've heard stories too of babies being buried in the basement floors of nunneries. The nuns got pregnant and delivered the baby and killed it. Is this an urban legand or has it been proven true?

Not sure, but there were a variety of orphanage-related horrors in Ireland that is cited when people explain why the Irish are so much less Catholic these days.

 

[Jobar]

I've heard stories too of babies being buried in the basement floors of nunneries. The nuns got pregnant and delivered the baby and killed it. Is this an urban legand or has it been proven true?

From the article in the OP:

Everywhere there were orphanages, everywhere children were institutionalized, there seem to be stories in living memory of dead and missing and even murdered children. Most government inquiries into the institutional abuse of children, including Australia’s various inquiries and Ireland’s Ryan Report, which dealt with abuse at the Artane residential school, have avoided investigating the deaths. Instead they have focused largely on survivors of sexual abuse, with some acknowledgment of physical abuse. But even though the investigations have been focused on the living, some of the 20th century’s missing children have begun to return anyway.

The remains of more than 150 people were discovered at an Irish laundry where unmarried pregnant teens were sent to work. As many as 400 babies and children were found in unmarked graves at Smyllum Park, a Scottish orphanage, with no records to say who they were. The unmarked graves of 25 children were found at the site of an old boarding school in the Blackfeet Nation, Montana. What has been described as a significant amount of remains — it’s unclear just how many bodies — of babies and even children as old as 3 were found in the sewer system at the site of a mother and baby home in Tuam, Galway, in Ireland. The remains of dozens of boys were unearthed at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Some of these incidents prompted official inquiries; just last week, Scottish police arrested a dozen people, mostly nuns, for abuse at the Smyllum Park orphanage. But in the United States, at least, nothing has prompted an investigation into the orphanage system as a whole. What happened to the millions of children who survived it — and to the unknowable numbers who did not — remains a secret and a shame.

That article tells a far more horrible story than plenty of Stephen King novels.

I once said 'Religion is an evil which wears a mask of good." That story tears away the mask.