The fourth and final "Youtube Heresy"is the over-exagerated relationship between religion and violence. This has become completely exacerbated after September 11th, 2001. The basic argument against faith from this perspective is that religion is so irrational, it must resort to violence. The arguments from this particular angle against Catholicism almost always brings up the Crusades, Inquisition, and most recently the sex-abuse scandal in the Church.
Although the reports of the Crusades are extremely unbalanced and the Inquisition numbers have been greatly overblown. The Crusades were in reality a retaliation against the Muslim invasion of the Holy Land and their violence against Christian pilgrims. For example, a group of about 7,000 German pilgrims were en-route to Jerusalem when a group of Muslim occupiers slaughtered all but 2,000 of them (all un-armed and many women and children). Nevertheless, I digress.
You can go "tit-for-tat" with what this and that group did throughout the course of history, but it is still really begging the question. The Church is holy, but Her members are sometimes not. This of course is not a license for clergy to do whatever they want, but a reality check. The sins committed within the Church, although many of them repulsive, do not alter Her mission which is immutable.
The Church has both human and divine dimensions. The Church with Her sacraments, teachings and apostolic tradition make up the mystical body of Christ. However, the people who are in the Church (even in the highest positions), are not prevented from doing stupid and sometimes horrible things. For an institution about 2,000 years old, its nothing less then miraculous that it is around at all but with 1 billion plus members. Its worth remembering also that the worst perpetrators of violence of all time were Hilter, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. They were not the products of religion, but militantly atheistic anti-religious ideologies.
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