Farooq (SF Ali) 📊🅿️Ⓜ️
3 min readApr 18, 2023

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Unpopular opinion:

What you depict more accurately describes any centralized entity (as you appropriately conceded earlier): historic and contemporary secular corporations, governments, and militaries function necessarily due to their rigid hierarchies, unquestioned chain of command, and absolute state violence monopolies, to enforce undisputed control and demand total obedience, even if subjugates are deluded by fabled myths of various freedoms afforded through the narrowest tolerances within precisely calibrated Overton windows. This is to say nothing of the universal most common setting of child sexual abuse (CSA): the nuclear familial context (Source: Independent Commissioner for CSA Issues)

Similarly, much of what's conflated here with organized religion can be attributed more accurately to the manifestation of patriarchy across cultures and their respective institutions, and the gross incentives afforded predators, including but not limited to: unobstructed access and extensive isolation, hierarchical power dynamics, socially (not religiously, see post-script below*) sanctioned lack of accountability/surveillance, absence of intracommunal policing, exploitation of disparities across socioeconomic strata between predator and victim/survivor, tendency of serial predators to infiltrate vulnerable populations in new communities over time, etc. This can be seen across a variety of secular institutions, including The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) and affiliated Scouts groups, youth camps, and schools (where the vast majority of schools are public, non-parochial, government-funded, and supposedly government-supervised).

Moreover, across religious organization, seems a much more Christian indictment (e.g., the Catholic Church's longstanding industry of child sexual abuse, appropriately elaborated upon here), as neither traditional Islam nor Judaism express "clergy" in any meaningful orthodox sense nor ordained sacerdotal distinction (notably, neither do the Baha'i Faith, Jainism, Sikhism. While the latter Abrahamic organizations are certainly not innocent of practitioners engaging in predation and sexual abuse, they are historically and explicitly, de jure, less structured than the former (including, but not limited to: pastors, reverends, deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and the 4 current multi-denominational popes).

Finally, blanket condemnation of organized religion (and by necessary conclusion its billions of diverse adherents) as some kind of irresistible predator magnet--while not acknowledging the same centralization seen in organizations of every kind, and the universal human ego and its thirst for power--and then allege some phantom inherent "shortcomings of religion itself" without articulation nor explanation (besides the correlation=/=causation fallacy of attribution for a litany of discriminatory -isms you insist "result in... sexual abuse" instead of the multivariate causative factors of CSA incidence, prevalence, and predator etiologies) reduces your polemic to a monolithic antitheist screed rife with logical inconsistencies and informal fallacies.

This is particularly true considering the spectrum of eschatological belief across religions and world faith traditions, thus negating the common tropes of damnation, guilt/shame, and other negative emotions most commonly associated with specific, though certainly not all, Abrahamic creeds. (Not to mention, the most common actions, behaviors, and characteristics comprising the psychological profiles of predators [violence, transgressing consensual boundaries, abusing God's creation, etc.] are ad litteram antithetical to the teachings of all major religions, certainly the four great faiths claiming 77% of the world's population--Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism.)

*P.S. 2014 German government study (n=1050) examined the nature of abuse and differential outcomes across religiously-affiliated versus secular institutions. Data showed the victims in secular institutions were significantly younger than victims in religiously-affiliated institutions. The researchers concluded child sexual abuse (CSA) was attributable more to the nature of institutional structures, and the societal assumptions about the rights of children than the attitudes towards sexuality of a specific, or any, religion. (Source)

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Farooq (SF Ali) 📊🅿️Ⓜ️
Farooq (SF Ali) 📊🅿️Ⓜ️

Written by Farooq (SF Ali) 📊🅿️Ⓜ️

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