Well, it took the church hundreads of years to say sorry to poor old galileo!

Sex is differant because we cannot deny it so as long as these men are deprived of it they will continue to abuse. Apologizing for discrimination against science involves recognizing that it has greatly influenced humanity a fact the church could not deny for very long so its little wonder it only took hundreds of years.

No you're right.

Actually they are statistically less likely to do so.  Young children are actually safer with a priest then most people.

The horrible part is the coverup really. 

Why they defend it is likely because they see it more as a "weakness" rather then a psychologically persistant problem.

Something that can be fixed rather then needed to be monitored... and that if fixed, such a scandle would pretty much ruin that persons life... well for life.

The Pope needs to hurry up and approve wanking as "the expulsion of sin" or something

Priest are no more likely to offend and personally I find the idea of a pedophile priest no more shocking than any other pedo.

What is disgusting is the systematic cover up that the Church as an organization committed.

I don't think it's healthy and natural for people in general to live without having sex with a partner (when they old enough ofcourse). So as long celibacy exists, there will be incidents like this, maybe not on such a big scale.

On a side note: Would've been nice for all the victims if the Vatican would admit they did awfull things in the past and apologize for that.

It only killed less people because we took such great precautions to prevent the spread. If we had sat around and done nothing it would have gone on to infect millions, if not billions. That's how a pandemic works when humans have no natural immunity. Do you understand what pandemic flu is and why it differs from seasonal flu?

The last large scale H1N1 flu pandemic was the 1918 flu pandemic where 500 million people got infected and 40 million died, which it potentially could have been if we didn't take action. It was very serious.

A church: I'm still to find out to this day what's that for.

Some for the pope. The world really needs an old man, dressed like an albino penguin, to read parts of the bible and to be the master of the obvious in his speeches?

A world without churches, is what we refer in the science fiction as an advanced civilization.

Sorry, I missed this earlier.

I understand the whole "fear factor" behind the media, that stories of doomsday sells papers. But behind the media coverage there was still a significant risk from swine flu to take preventative action.

It differed from seasonal flu in that it had the potential to infect millions of people over a wide area, just like the Spanish flu where nearly 40% of the world's population was infected, as almost no-one had a natural immunity to swine flu. Unlike seasonal flu it could infect everyone, and not just those susceptible to seasonal flu like the elderly or the weak.

As you said, the Spanish flu scenario was the worst case scenario, but there was a significantly high enough chance of that kind of scenario occuring to take extensive preventative measure.

Imagine working out swine flu on a risk chart and you'll understand. You have two main variables when calculating risk, impact and probability. Swine flu could have had a potentially catastrophic impact if it had reached its full potential infection rate. This wouldn't matter if the probability of this occurring was insignificant, but it wasn't. The probability of it occurring was significantly high enough. This warranted extensive preventative measures to attempt to reduce the probability of the potentially catastrophic impact.