Beware Those Who Dress Up: Like George Pell

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By Robert Hamilton

We live in an age, where those who seek to define themselves as different from the rest of us, often do so by their dress. The particular ‘they’ I am talking about, do so by dressing in robes, when the rest of us are content to dress in a fairly nondescript fashion. Clothing has, for the general population in the last century, like language itself, become more and more functional, and so those few groups who still abide by stylized uniforms really stand out. None more than those who profess to be religious, men and women of the cloth, so to speak. Beware those who dress up: like George Pell; because they putting their own organisation’s values over the individual and the communities.

Scientifically speaking, we are monkeys who have evolved to make sounds, which now form recognizable languages. We now also wear clothes to hide our nakedness, but we all still have bottoms, and penises and vaginas, depending upon our sex. We still, if truth be told, like nothing more than to use these genitals to enjoy ourselves, and far less often these days, to procreate. Nothing too radical so far that anyone can honestly disagree with, but those of us who like to dress up and pretend that they are not of this ‘monkey brethren’, see it differently. Whether they be dressed like a Catholic cardinal, for instance like our own Cardinal, George Pell, or perhaps emblazoned in the orange robes of a Tibetan Rimpoche, these folk tell us that they have put aside their humanity or base monkeyness to focus on the idea of God inside their heads. We are assured that their idea is more powerful than their own humanity.

Of late (and really it has not been only of late, it is indeed a rich tradition, it is simply that their abuse and lies are no longer secrets), we have seen these religious fakirs , who have professed the transcendence of their genitals, being caught out in the worst kind of sexual exploitation of our most innocent community members – children. Christian ministers of all persuasions, and clergy from a wide array of religions, have been exposed as pedophiles to such an extent, that we in the community are entitled to an explanation. An explanation beyond the band-aid compensation and business as usual excuses, currently being offered. I mean, imagine if a corporation, or an entire industry, was exposed as home to purveyors of criminal sexual behaviour to the level that we see these religious people being exposed as, we would demand an Inquiry. We should be asking, what are the factors that cause their members to be so prone to be multiple, repeat, child sex offenders? Why do we blindly let these heinous crimes mount up and up, without any Inquiry or indeed action that could lead to a solution? Is compensation justified for these victims of sexual abuse?

It seems, a robe or cassock, is a means to be judged at an entirely different level to the rest of us, and that religion has become a blind spot for a civilization that professes to be an enlightened one, or at least a post modernist, post, post, (where has that last post sign gone) civilization. When are we going to wake-up as a society, and banish the possibility of clergy polluting the deepest private recesses of our most vulnerable? Religion, being a fog of unscientific beliefs, whose existence is predicated on the constantly PR boosted idea that we are dependent upon a God – who, in my humble opinion, consistently fails to live up to his or her factuality. I mean if God was the CEO of a particular corporation or industry body, he could not have been more let down by his representatives, according to their own industry standards. What is the ratio of good deeds versus the evil of pedophilia, I wonder?