Sorry for What?

A Catholic priest took a 12-year-old boy out for ice cream right after the boy's father had committed suicide. The priest used the opportunity to rape him. This isn't a hypothetical. It's a documented case. And it's one of thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands, if the most comprehensive studies are to be believed.

All we hear from Christians is excuses.

Their own scripture says: "By their fruits you shall know them" (Matthew 7:16). Two thousand years of fruits are on display, and the display is damning. The John Jay Report (2004), commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops themselves, found that 4,392 priests were accused of sexually abusing 10,667 minors between 1950 and 2002 in the United States alone. The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report (2018) identified over 1,000 child victims across just six dioceses and documented the systematic institutional cover-up that protected abusers and silenced victims for decades. The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2017) found that 7% of Catholic priests in Australia had been accused of abuse. Seven percent. The French Sauvé Commission (2021) estimated 330,000 victims of clerical sexual abuse in France over 70 years. Three hundred and thirty thousand. In one country.

These numbers are not outliers in an otherwise healthy system. They are the statistical output of a system operating as designed. An institution that demands celibacy from its clergy (a practice with no basis in early Christianity, imposed by the Council of Elvira in 306 CE and progressively enforced through the medieval period), that concentrates unsupervised access to children in the hands of men whose sexual development has been systematically warped, that protects its institutional reputation above the welfare of the vulnerable, that uses Canon Law (Can. 1395) to handle abusers internally rather than reporting them to civil authorities: this institution doesn't have a "problem" with abuse. Abuse is a predictable output of its structural design.

The defence is always the same: "those aren't real Christians," "the Church has reformed," "you can't judge the faith by its worst examples." But the pattern hasn't changed. The institution continues to produce the same results because the theological and institutional structures that produce them remain intact. Celibacy is still required. Unsupervised access to children is still granted. Internal discipline is still preferred over external accountability. The pattern repeats because the causes of the pattern haven't been addressed.

Secular humanitarian organisations (the Red Cross, the United Nations, Médecins Sans Frontières) have done vastly more material good for suffering people than the Christian churches, without demanding anyone's soul in return for a meal. Without the Birburim (false sacred speech) and the Eilotil (spiritual enslavement) that accompany every act of Christian "charity." When Médecins Sans Frontières treats a wounded child, they don't require baptism first.

Zeus is the opposite in every measurable way. He has been consistently positive and constructive in the lives of those who follow Him. He guides. He protects. He empowers. He doesn't demand submission. He develops strength. He doesn't prey on the vulnerable. He strengthens them until they're no longer vulnerable.

So when a Christian asks you to apologise for your path, ask them: sorry for what? For following Gods who don't rape children? For belonging to a tradition that doesn't burn books? For practising a spirituality that develops the soul rather than enslaving it? They should be apologising to us. They should be apologising to every civilisation they destroyed, every temple they burned, every practitioner they tortured, every child they failed to protect. We've been waiting 2,000 years. The Family of the Gods stands in permanent contrast to the family the Abrahamic God has built.