P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula fame asks why something obvious wasn't in the Ten Commandments - not molesting the vulnerable, like kids.   Pretty obvious, but that is not why I link to it.  I link to it because I learned there is actually not only a 'Hobo' set of rules but an actual hobo convention every year, which seems to defy the point of being a hobo but it's still interesting and I got a little smarter knowing that.

During my youth, the term hobo was smashed out of existence by politically correct progressives so I am tickled to see P.Z. use it without shame.    He's not a progressive anyway, he is an out-and-out liberal who believes in freedom more than fake progressive fairness (most of the time - we all have our progressive individual issues, like we all have conservative ones) and that is rare in academia, or general society really.   Instead of using plain language, we got sneered at if we called a 'hobo' a hobo and had to use the fuzzy-wuzzy 'homeless person' term or something else meaningless.  A hobo is not some homeless person on big city streets, a hobo is a bounder, a wanderer, one of the last off-the grid Luddites left in society.    We don't call Amish people 'alternatively religious', we call them what they want to be called.  So it should be with hobos, who are not 'domicile challenged', they want to move around.    Maybe they're right, that whole housing bubble did not hurt them in the least.

Decades ago, when being a hobo would not get you surrounded by busy-body progressives using you as a poster child for why taxes should be raised on people who make a million bucks a year so they can get more money to feed hobos, hobos had their own cool language - a 'banjo' was a small frying pan, a 'barnacle' was a hobo who stayed in an area and got a job and a 'jungle' was a place near the railroad tracked where hobos congregated.  It was not necessarily a peaceful existence, thus the desire for rules of conduct.   Like the basis of religion, the benefits of a moral society quickly become evident so they came up with a code, but theirs is more practical than not coveting someone else's manservant, like in the Christian Ten Commandments - I don't even have a manservant.

First, the hobo rule P.Z. thinks should be generally known:
Do not allow others to molest children, expose all molesters to authorities, they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
Fair enough, and he takes a shot at religion (probably Catholics, since they just pulled a guy out of Ireland over molestation charges) but he generally takes shots at them all, and asks
Maybe it was on that set of tablets Moses smashed — it's certainly a more useful law than the ones about how to cook goats or what kind of clothes to wear or the injunction to do nothing useful on Sunday. But no, that's from the hobo ethical code. 

Isn't it nice that hobos have a better moral foundation than priests?
Hard to disagree with that but there is an important note I will add - it used to be that any finook(1) priest got the boot if he got caught but it was the call for liberalism in Vatican II that changed the way Catholics dealt with those issues.   After Vatican II, the Church was now supposed to rehabilitate gays, horny guys or child molesters or gamblers or whatever else that deviated from being repressed, chaste, etc.   The reasoning was nice enough; if you love someone, help them to get better, don't throw them out.   And the more militant priests about strict religious codes of conduct were weeded out in seminary(too militant) so the ones who remained were a lot more tolerant - and then it was only a matter of time before priests who were okay with molesting kids or having sex in the shower got into positions of power.  Then there were two problems; well-meaning, progressive leaders who believed they could really help wayward priests and those complicit in that conduct.

In a sense, the Church tried to become more liberal to appease the liberals who disliked it and as a result it ended up doing more damage to its reputation than if has just remained disliked by liberals who thought playing guitar in church is important(2).   P.Z. is an atheist, he is not going to like religion no matter what, but if you shuffle around priests who are deviants because you think Grace can help them, you get atheists and the rest of the world making fun of you.

Hobos can't really be all that much better;  even in 1889 they had to issue their edict about running down child molesters, so it had to have been a common enough problem to warrant a commandment against it, the same way murder, theft and adultery made the real Commandments - maybe child molestation was not an issue way back in Bible days.   Either way, I hope hobos deal with the issue a little more directly than the modern Church does.

Now excuse me while I listen to Roger Miller's "King Of The Road"



NOTE:

(1) Finook used to mean a priest who wasn't really all that priestly - he had sex, for example - but in "The Sopranos" when Carmella Soprano says to Father Phil in season one, after it seems like he is hitting on her, "Of all the fanook priests in the world, why did I have to get the one who's straight?" she means of all the priests with gay characteristics, not the ones who want to have sex.

Various slang dictionaries seem to imply it was always that way and cite its derivation from 'finocchio' but it isn't true - lots of Italians are named Finocchio and that is because of the Italian fennel.  Were it meaning gay (other than modern Italian slang use) people would have changed their names long ago.  Basically, finocchio had the same thing happen to it the word 'gay' did but in both cases it wasn't always that way.

(2) And local Mass instead of Latin as well.  It used to be you could go anywhere in the world and you would all not understand Mass equally but now if you go to a foreign country where you don't know the local language, you are the only one lost.   That is not helping build a worldwide community so the only historians who think Vatican II did much good are the ones involved in it.