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Is It Fair?
By Rob | March 4, 2008
I read a few news stories earlier today about a group of Buddhist monks in Thailand who were using the internet social networking site Hi5 to lure women back to the monastery for sex. Some reports said they were raping these women, other reports say it was consensual so I’m not going to draw any conclusions about that.
I am going to predict, however, that these monks are going to be representative of the whole religion in the eyes of the unforgiving public. It seems like a trend nowadays that if someone who holds religious office does something immoral, the entire religion is blamed for it.
Take the Catholics, for example. The whole Catholic priest pedophilia scandal rocked the world when it was brought to light. Ever since the first allegations of this came out, the entire Catholic faith was put under a microscope and every single Catholic priest was under suspicion. I was raised Catholic, spent some time as an altar boy, went to a Catholic University and I can tell you first hand that I never witnessed any sort of misbehavior by a priest. I was never molested, nor did I hear of any other child I knew being molested by a Catholic priest.
In college I spent a lot of time with the Franciscan order of Friars. These were some of the most decent, moral men I had ever known and have known to this day. Never did I see one act innapropriately toward anyone else.
This same type of stereotyping is going to happen with the Buddhists now that this incident has come to national attention. Since the media likes to sensationalize everything, this is going to become a major scandal and the Buddhists are going to be treated as unfairly as the Catholics.
The reason it’s unfair is because members of any religious order who commit acts of immorality are singled out. There are a lot of sexual predators on this planet, but they’re not stereotyped like Catholic priests are because they come from all walks of life. There are literally thousands of registered sex offenders in the United States alone, and only a handful of those belong to any religious order. It can be safe to say that there are more sex offenders that belong to a particular race (whether that be Irish, Black, Hispanic, Polish, or whatever ; I’m not singling out an entire ethnicity because I’m arguing against stereotyping here) than there are Catholic priests who commit these offenses. There are probably more lay Catholic sex offenders than there are offenders in the clergy. But that doesn’t make national headlines because it’s not sensational enough.
Topics: Ethics, Religion, Rob |
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March 4th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
No..
It’s not fair.. But that’s the thing… These men have become something that is supposed to MEAN something in society. The fact is, their actions reflect on the whole of their organizations, not just their own failures.
The Catholic debacle was ascerbated by the Church’s willingness to continually sweep the issue under a rug and LIE for these men, under the assumption that the church itself was more precious than the breeched trust.
The loss of that trust will be felt for generations to cime. The Monks will feel it too.
Even if the Monastery did the right thing and acted as soon as the information was discovered… the public has less trust than it did a few years ago.
Rightfully so.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
But also, the Buddhist church doesn’t have as much of a history in the West as Christianity does. I think that part of the reason why the Catholic scandal was so big was because a lot of people had histories - good and bad - with the Christian religion, or even the Catholic denomination. A lot of people probably looked at the one, (albeit MAJOR), problem as a reason to criticize the entire religion because they had previously-existing personal problems with it. The Buddhist church may get more of a pass on this one, (in the West), because not as many people are currently or historically invested in it.
And of course I’m certainly not saying that it’s right to assign blame to an entire religion for the actions of a few, or that it’s right to give preferential treatment to different religions. Just my two cents.