Ditto. Not a particularly a religious person (spiritualist more generally) and generally pretty critical of the Church but bloody tired of people who have been religion burned taking it out on others who are just clinging to comfort to get by in a hard world. Lemmy has a rather large Christian Atheist community. You know the sort, the “I don’t believe in God but the God I very stridently don’t believe in is the Christian God” type of person. It does come across as fairly insecure at times. I am reminded of the way I used to behave as an angry teen.
I think we are seeing a historic waning of faith and a reassessment of cultural values…but looking at the cycles of things that generally means there’s a backlash which might be still building or we might be facing it right now. I think it’s far better for those traumatized atheists to build solidarity with people inside the faiths who are pushing for and building the foundations for changes as “enemy of my enemy is my friend” alliances. Sadly a lot of them seem way too busy trying to attain personal catharsis by just scalding anyone who treats religion with respect.
I mean… I don’t know if that’s gunna be the complete answer. The Boy Scout leaders had no expectations of celebacy but they had an endemic issue with child molestation. The idea that it’s the lack of adult access to sex that creates these situations ignores a lot of the realities of predators.
Personally I think the best thing to do is to actually mandate age appropriate sex ed. They piloted that program in our district when I was a kid. For a youngster of the tender age of 1st grade all this needs to be is "Here’s the proper names of the different genital types and if someone wants to touch in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable it’s okay to tell a parent, a teacher a doctor or an adult you trust where and how you have been touched to help make it stop.
You would be quite frankly shocked how many kids in the district blew whistles on adult some right out the gate from that first briefing. Preserving some nebulous children’s “innocence” isn’t worth even one child suffering in ignorance.