God hates sports

Stevie Johnson, a player for the Buffalo Bills football team, dropped the ball in a catch that would have won his team a game. I have to commend him for some consistency, though — most players just credit their good catches to the Man Upstairs, but not Stevie: he got on Twitter and cussed out his god.

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…

I’ve learned from this, at least. Stevie Johnson really likes exclamation points, and you can chew out god using Twitter. Who knew?

Meanwhile, over in Scotland, a football referee joked about the Pope on email. He apparently passed along this image:

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I guess the Catholics are darned sure that their god doesn’t have a sense of humor, or at least doesn’t like jokes about priests, so one little pipsqueak in the church complained…and the referee was fired. No, not tied to a stick and set on fire, just sacked…no, not tied up in a sack and beaten, just pink-slipped…no, not…well, I’m pretty sure there must have been some old Catholic torture called pink-slipping, they’ve been so thorough in that department. Anyway, he has been released…aaargh, now everything is looking like a euphemism for hallowed Catholic death-dealing techniques.

He lost his job, OK?

So now Dawkins is calling on a letter campaign: inundate the Scottish Catholic office with pope jokes. You can just copy and paste the picture above, if you want, and send it to:

[email protected]

[email protected]

This could be fun. That office clearly needs some instruction in humor.

The Bible is not a medical text

Although citing the Bible seems to be a way to fast-track bad science papers to publication. In yet another example of a journal letting bad Bible interpretations pass for science, a paper titled “Newer insights to the neurological diseases among biblical characters of old testament has been published in the Annals of the Indian Academy of Neurology. It isn’t new or newer, it doesn’t offer any insights, and the title isn’t even grammatical. Among its inventions is the idea that Sampson was autistic because he was violent and had odd dietary habits, that Isaac was diabetic, and that Ezekiel had a stroke.

Could someone explain to me how dubious diagnoses based on vague descriptions of serially translated myths can actually advance our understanding of disease, other than by promoting the publication careers of scientists happy to pander to superstition? I suppose one use for these things is enhancing the jocularity of interactions between neuroscientists at the lab bench, since laughing at religious idiots could be a productive bonding experience between the grad students and post-docs.

(via Neuroskeptic and Autism Blog)

Blair v. Hitchens poll

Tonight, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens will debate on whether religion is a force for good. I’d love to hear Hitchens on that subject, but Blair? That’s almost as comical as having Hitchens debate Bush on the subject. The newspapers are relying on two tools to promote the event. Hype:

Together, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens are two of the great British thinkers on religion.

Wait, Blair…isn’t he the simpering me-too former prime minister who was our American lackey in the UK? The one who converted to Catholicism, an act that clearly marks him as mentally deficient? Hmmm.

Oh, well. The second tool is the online poll:

Is religion a force for good in the world?

Yes 17%
No 83%

They haven’t even had the debate yet and Hitchens is already winning!

Not this again!

What is wrong with people? It’s just a frackin’ book!

A 15-year-old girl has been arrested on suspicion of inciting religious hatred after allegedly burning an English-language version of the Qur’an — and then posting video footage of the act on Facebook.

No. It is obscene to start jailing people for destroying their own books, simply because some oversensitive wackos think it is magical. Apparently, this girl burned it on school property, though — call her on creating a fire hazard. But not for contradicting someone’s delusions.

And the kooks defending the arrest aren’t helping their own cause.

Catherine Heseltine, chief executive officer of the Muslim public affairs committee, said burning the Qur’an was one of the most offensive acts to Muslims she could imagine.

Oh, really? Ms Heseltine’s imagination is not very impressive.

How about digging up their grandfather’s body, sawing off the top of the skull, and using it for a dog food bowl? Or how about walking up to their mother and pissing on their burqua?

Or hey, how about cruising over a Muslim country with a Predator drone and opening up on suspicious-looking crowds with Hellfire missiles? Would it be more offensive if the missiles had Bible verses painted on them?

It really diminishes the quality of their outrage when they have tantrums over such trivial and harmless offenses. Man, if I hadn’t already buried my only copy of the Qur’an, I’d be taking it out back right now and setting it on fire.

Awww, that’s kinda sweet and silly

There’s a campaign of sorts that’s beginning in the UK, in which Christians are urged to stand up and announce that they are not ashamed to believe in a zombie redeemer who will protect them from his flaming torture pit deep beneath the earth. In a way, I’m sure it’s very nice for them personally to sustain that kind of self esteem, but really…they should be embarrassed to believe in such absurd nonsense.

At least they’re mostly doing no harm. The action they’re calling for is for everyone to pray harder.

Please pray for the Not Ashamed campaign and especially that the official launch next week will increase the profile of the initiative and give rise to good opportunities to speak to leading figures in public life about Jesus Christ, the only true hope for our nation. Perhaps you could include such prayers at church this Sunday? For prayer suggestions, please click here.

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Sick and crazy can have other causes than religion

John Fiala is a bad man, and he’s also a Catholic priest. I’ve got a flood of email telling me I ought to highlight the case because he’s a priest who forced a boy to have sex with him at gunpoint, and later tried to hire a hit man to kill him. What he has done has been awful and evil, but, you know, it’s not an indictment of religious belief.

Fiala is simply nuts.

If his religious order did cover up his crimes (and that is one of the charges here), then it is evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Catholic church, but that’s still an open question — from the accounts I’ve seen, he was removed from the active ministry when his predilections were discovered, and transferred to administration. I don’t know how openly crazy he was; if it was known that he favored sodomy at gunpoint, then yes, that the church only tried to hide him in the attic for a few years is bad news for religion. But psychopaths can mask their nastiness fairly well.

But otherwise, I have to ask, if this guy had been an atheist, would I consider it a sign of problems in the atheist philosophy? And I have to say no. Emotionally disturbed individuals and psychopaths and just plain bad people can crop up as individuals anywhere, and the issue is whether the institutions towards which they gravitate ought to be held accountable for sheltering or promoting or enabling their behavior. This is a case where the wretchedness of John Fiala is obvious now, but is religion responsible? I don’t see a case for that.

Of course, you can make the case that being in the presence of the Lord and being nestled in a holy sanctuary every single day didn’t seem to miraculously cure Fiala’s sickness, but we don’t believe in magic miracle cures anyway.

The screaming of the lambs

Scientists are often accused of cruelty towards animals, and there are some experiments that do cause pain…but at the same time, what we can do is very tightly regulated and scrutinized, with every experiment requiring rather thorough justification, and in every case that I know of, the investigators themselves are greatly concerned about minimizing suffering, even without the watchdogs of animal care and use committees hovering over them. And need I mention that scientists actually accomplish something useful in their animal work?

If animal rightists want to focus right now on a widespread practice that causes intense pain, they ought to look to the rules for halal/kosher meat. As Johann Hari explains, there are religious rules that demand that animals needlessly suffer when they are slaughtered, and when criticized, of course the barbarous butchers hide behind the claim that their religion demands this agony.

Atheists who criticise religion are constantly being told we have missed the point and religion is really about compassion and kindness. It is only a handful of extremists and fundamentalists who “misunderstand” faith and use it for cruel ends, we are told with a wagging finger. But here’s an example where most members of a religion choose to do something pointlessly cruel, and even the moderates demand “respect” for their “views”. Their faith makes them prioritise pleasing an invisible supernatural being over the screaming of actual living creatures. Doesn’t this suggest that faith itself – the choice to believe something in the total absence of evidence – is a danger that can lead you up needlessly nasty paths?

It says something about faith that it can be used to justify torture, simply because they’ve always done it that way.

Oh, and for a beautiful example of misplaced priorities, contrast the insensitivity of the public to slitting the throats of conscious farm animals to this bizarre story of pulling plastic pigs from children’s toy sets, because of the possibility that kosher/halal gobbling religionists might be perturbed by the existence of itty-bitty models of smiling swine.

You’ve got to be kidding me

Do you detect the little scientific and logical problem in this press release about a new prayer study?

A ground-breaking online study was recently initiated to discover if Americans believe prayer has a place in medicine. Shannon Pierotti, a graduate student at USciences, is using a social networking basis for recruiting participants in a National survey to assess attitudes regarding the inclusion of spirituality and prayer in medical practice.

What’s “ground-breaking” about that? She’s simply using an online poll, advertised on religious sites, to ask if respondents believe that magical incantations have a medical benefit. What’s the point? We know how people will respond, and it’s completely meaningless, except as a confirmation that religious people think religion matters.

And the rationale sucks.

Findings from an extensive scientific literature review showed a need for data from a United States survey to determine whether further progress towards standardization of a holistic approach in medical clinical practice is indicated through the incorporation of spirituality by introducing spiritual assessment tools and resources for patients that include use of prayer and its associated benefits.

That’s impressively vacuous.

Go ahead. Take the survey. I think they need input from a few people who are not credulous, gullible loons. It’s only a few pages long, and the questions are easy — they ask how likely you are to ask your doctor for spiritual aid, for instance. Let’s make sure they’ve got a whole bunch of people responding who reject all that nonsense.

Mexico is a weird, weird, weird place

Yesterday, among many other wanderings around Mexico City, I made a pilgrimage to the Lady of Guadalupe, the sacred Catholic heart of Mexico. It was not what I expected.

We left the subway station to join a trudging, milling mob on a hike to the basilica, which wended its way through a narrow tunnel lined with ramshackle booths where people tried to sell us all kinds of iconographic kitsch. That, I expected.

The surprise came when a horde dressed as Aztecs, half-naked with giant elaborate feathered headdresses, painted or wearing fierce masks of skulls or leopards, came charging through, forcing everyone to move off to the side to allow them to pass. They were chanting and pounding drums and waving censers about, so the whole group was wreathed in a fog of incense.

When we finally got to the plaza in front of the three basilicas (an original one, a later, larger one, and the newest, which is a huge modern building designed to accommodate the crowds), it was filled with Aztecs dancing, and all you could hear were these loud, throbbing drums. I captured a few minutes of my struggle through the mob of pilgrims, surrounded by circular spaces taken over by whirling Aztec dancers; the sound capabilities of my recorder were overwhelmed by the noise, so the roaring you hear below is the sound of the drums. You’ll just have to imagine this rhythmic cacaophony that you could feel vibrating up through your bones.

The modern basilic itself is completely open along the sides facing the plaza, so we had the pleasure of hearing a loudly amplified Catholic mass with pagan drums pounding throughout. And yes, you could see Aztec headdresses scattered throughout the crowd.

In the smaller, oldest church, they also carry out the Mass, and here’s a mother and child in Mexican Catholic formal wear, on their knees. We saw several other people making a slow crawl across the plaza on their knees, including a couple of young children with their parents hovering about (on their feet, though), as the kids made the painful trudge. I guess it makes your prayers more potent if you do them on bleeding knees.

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The syncretism is fascinating, and so far Mexico has been a delight, rich in character and history, and I’ve got to come back and spend more time here. But that religion is so fluid and flexible and complex doesn’t make it right, and the obsessive, fanatical weirdness of this unique version of Catholicism is the product of its unfamiliarity; if you step back and look at it with eyes unfilmed by tradition, every religious ceremony looks this bizarre, and every religion thrives on hope built on despair…and some try to maximize the suffering to reinforce devotion. At least the modern Aztecs draw the line before raising obsidian knives and chopping out hearts nowadays; they seemed to be having more fun than the bloody kneed Catholics.

I’m going to be in Springfield, Missouri next weekend. The weirdness bar has been raised pretty high right now, and the Assemblies of God are looking rather drab and colorless in comparison.

What madness will the NY Times take seriously next?

I’ve noticed that the bad practice of “he said, she said” journalism so common at the NY Times disappears when the subject is religion. There, instead, the standard role of the journalist becomes one of the credulous, unquestioning observer. It’s evident in this new article on the revival of Catholic exorcisms, being discussed at a conference.

The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

That’s not a quote from one of the participants in the conference, it’s straight from the reporter, Laurie Goodstein. Does she really think there are patients who really need an exorcism rather than psychiatric care? Is demonic posession a real problem? Maybe Homeland Security should be involved, if we actually have an ongoing invasion by demonic creatures from Hell.

No critical thinking is presented in the article, and I was rather disappointed: the usual journalistic substitute for critical thinking is to scurry off and find some random person who disagrees, in order to toss one or two contrary quotes on the page. That’s what they’d do if the subject is evolution or climate change, for instance, and that’s the way so many cranks can get their words in major newspapers. We don’t even get that much here, though: just quotes from various people who think it’s perfectly ordinary for the Catholic Church to be promoting the idea of the Devil instead of dealing with the idea of, you know, real human people and real illness.

I would like to have seen at least one sentence suggesting that it’s nuts to be training witch doctors, but nope…this is the closest we get:

“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.

“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ “

OK, so the Catholic Church deals only with the unreal and nonexistent. Now if only we had media that dared to point out that angels and demons don’t exist.

“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”

In any other subject, if someone made a specific claim like that, I’d expect a good journalist to ask, “how do you know that?” and try to track down a credible source for such a claim about an individual. When the subject is the Devil, though, anything goes. You can say any ol’ crazy thing about Satan, and the reporter will dutifully write it down and publish it without ever stopping for a moment to wonder, “Hey, is my source just making shit up?”

Oh, well. It’s important news, I guess. “Catholics are crazier than we imagined!” should have been the front page headline.