Answers...please

Fairy tales, fun and profit

I really am struggling to understand.

It's probably an autistic-type problem. It's probably an inability to recognise grey areas. I'm okay with them, when I can see them, but BLISS recently pointed out that being honest didn't necessarily mean being brutal or hurting someone's feelings.

Anyway.

There's an email address and there's the comments thing at the bottom of the page, and I'm really interested in how you see this, and how, if you reconcile things, you achieve that.

This is my problem:

Holocaust deniers get banged up in jail. Whether that's OTT or justified and sensible I can't be bothered with thinking about. Frankly, denying a matter of historical fact seems absurd. Absurd to the point of needing some time in stir to think about it, I'm not so sure, but we've all those geniuses in Westminster and elsewhere who want to tell us what to do and how to live to determine what's right and wrong on our behalf.

There are, however, people who claim the earth is flat. They're walking free. There's people who won't recognise climate change as a man-made (or at least man-enhanced) problem. They're not only free to walk the streets, but talking about the absurd, we seem to have one as the minister for the environment. Still. There are, as well, people who claim the earth's only a couple of thousand years old, that some guy ascended to heaven on a winged horse. There's people causing death and disease through their views on birth control, arising from myth and magic. There's all manner of hate and war, oppression and cruelty performed in the name of non-existent gods, and the hangers, the stoners, the killers and the torturers are all walking free.

I don't understand.

A woman gets ten years for talking people out of money with patent rubbish and lies.

Yet any given Sunday there's collection plates passed around churches.

What's the difference? Just because one load of made-up bollocks has been around for years and has loads of people conned, doesn't make it any less a load of bollocks.

For a judge to describe taking £1m off a load of rich and gullible clients as the 'worst con-trick' he's ever come across just does not stack up, when the churches are full of gold.

I don't understand why one bloke in Germany gets jailed for denying the facts, while down the road in the Vatican, another is living the highlife in a silly hat, surrounded by wealth and riches, and denying the facts.

I'd really appreciate an explanation, because it just does not add up.

I don't think fleecing people, telling them their money is going to be stuck on a magic tree and their cancer will be cured, is in any way right, and probably should be punished in some way. Repaying the losses as far as possible would be my preferred option.

But equally I don't think promising people eternal life in return for their faith and compliance is right, either. It has some pretty nasty side-effects, too.