Atheist blames faith for sexual abuse, resigns over...you know

It is often the very thing a person most publicly denounces in others that he has the most problems with himself. I've been yelled at by a portly priest on the subject of how fasting "doesn't matter." I've sat through homilies from priests on the evils of lying who were later removed for financial dishonesty. I've listened to men complain about how women are immodestly dressed at church whose marriages have fallen apart due to adultery. You get the picture.

Religion is an easy target (Christianity chiefly because it doesn't "hit back") and has been blamed for all the world's ills. A careful study will show that it is not actually the Church that causes these troubles, but the Church has quite often been used as a tool to accomplish secular goals; politics, money, and expansion of empire come immediately to mind. So, when an atheist decides to blame the Church for being morally bankrupt and a source of iniquitous behavior then is found to have engaged in the same behavior he decried, I see a continuation of some Freudian projection behavior at play here.

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(First Things) - Noted philosopher of the mind Colin McGinn is resigning from the University of Miami:

Mr. McGinn . . . denies allegations that he behaved improperly. Those allegations were lodged by a female graduate student who has said that the professor sent her a series of sexually explicit e-mail and text messages, starting in the spring-2012 semester. . . Mr. McGinn wrote that he had been thinking about the student while masturbating.

McGinn, a wide-ranging but not terribly careful critic of religious belief, wrote in 2008 that sexual abuse in the Catholic church was “made possible” by “unquestioning obedience to the authority of the representatives of the church, i.e. priests.”

McGinn also has held up the idea of “atheist as ‘role-model’” which he calls a “revolutionary concept”:

[Atheists] make up in morality what they lack in belief; whereas believers have to do so much work to believe that they have no energy left over for morality. The depravity of the Catholic Church is a nice illustration.

Yet the abolition of the priesthood would not mean the end of clerisies, nor would it stop the abuse of authority. As Colin McGinn’s sad case reminds us, a world without faith is not a world without sin.