pupomin

To my mind, if you tell me "Hey, you can't go see other people's ideas", my natural inclination is to think "Well why not? I'm a smart person, I'm a good person. If they're wrong, if they're bad, I can evaluate that myself."

I'm not religious, and I'm curious what OP might have to say on the topic.

But I suspect it's similar to any other high-control group. They teach from a young age that ideas are insidious and that it is necessary to protect oneself from hearing certain things in order to avoid contamination. It is of course possible to be protected from those ideas, often through some kind of religious training or life experience (elders) that is only accessible to a small subset of people who act as or for the prevailing community leadership.

Are the people buying ads seeing my private data?

Generally, no. They usually provide information about what sort of people they want their ads to reach and how much they want to pay, and then an automated bidder system matches up eyeballs with ads based on the matching attributes and best price.

That doesn't mean it can't happen, but mostly they try to avoid leaking that data, partly because it's a valuable asset.

Do you have any sense of why their superiors protect them? What's the up-side of keeping child abusers in the organization? Is it that hard to find new priests?

Are churches required to post notice of that hotline in places where children in the church will see it?

That makes sense. Probably moreso if there is a compartmentalization problem where middle-managers don't understand the scope of the problem. If they don't realize that 1 in 3 of their priests are child abusers organization-wide, they might start by covering.

Also, evidently it takes an act of god's-right-hand-man to fire a priest, so probably the simple headache of administrative overhead is also a factor.