Shopping Tips and Guidance by Mandy Claire

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where we're time-starved and chore-laden! I'm going to keep this one short.

I'm not kept up to date on the news like I used to be before I started teaching school. So it was just yesterday that I heard about the most recent scandal in the Roman Catholic Church -- that of deaf men accusing priests of having abused them when they were schoolboys.

Just when you thought you'd heard it all about that Church, huh?

I've been thinking a lot about the evils of the Catholic Church. Only a few of them are coming to light, I'm sure. Some big ones have made history. Heck, Dante put two popes in the lowest bowels of Hell, and when he sees them on his journey, they tell him that the next pope will soon join them. (In fact at first they think Dante is said pope.) Inferno was written in the early 1300s.

However, throughout its career, the Roman Catholic Church has also done a great deal of good. A huge amount of good. Let's say we were to weigh good vs. evil in the Catholic Church. If we did that, and we found that for every evil deed, the Church produced 10,000 good deeds, does that mitigate the evil deeds? Put another way, does the preponderance of good allow leeway for some evil?

I'm interested in what you have to say on this subject.

As for me, I just look at that whole RC thing and thank the bored gods that I never had any truck with it. Bad enough to have spent time in a Pentecostal Church, but the Roman Catholic Church -- where my poor husband was born, raised, and educated -- seems to have taken the fork in the road that leads to Creepy about 3,000 miles ago.

This is just my opinion, though. I am not going to sit here and lob stones. It's not my place to judge a particular sect of a particular praise and worship team. What I'm wondering about is a deeper issue. Does a preponderance of good mitigate a smaller amount of evil? How much evil is too much? Can any praise and worship team be condemned solely on its bad deeds if it has also done good in the world?

If all this is too heavy for you to ponder, hey. I hear ya. Who do you think will win the World Series this year?