Maybe it’s like a lottery

Mary MacKillop has been officially canonized as an Australian saint on the basis of two purported miracle cures — two women reportedly dying of cancer had spontaneous remissions after praying to her. Adele Horin puts them in context.

At the time Mary MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of leukaemia, there was a lot of static in the air. In China 43 million people were dying of starvation in one of the world’s worst famines.

Thirty years later in the 1990s, when MacKillop answered the prayers of a woman dying of lung cancer, 3.8 million were dying in the Congo wars, 800,000 in the Rwanda genocide, a quarter of a million in the Yugoslav wars.

The connection between these two women praying for healing and the dead MacKillop was so tenuous to be nonexistent, while millions beg in vain for a reprieve from day-to-day misery. Praise the gods.

They hypocrisy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”

It will be interesting to see if anyone squawks about this revelation: Army Chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy seems to have a wild and frolicsome sex life, while writing pious little books promoting Christianity. There’s absolutely nothing suggesting male homosexuality in his online personal history, but isn’t the occasional menage a trois or voyeurism session as sinful to an evangelical Christian?

Belgian archbishop represents the church’s love

Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard has written a book in which he reveals Catholic thinking about AIDS.

The Archbishop who is seen as a conservative does not pull his punches. Speaking about AIDS he says that this is a kind “immanent justice”.

I note that the archbishop is probably mortal, and appears to be aging. If he someday suffers miserably from a prostate cancer that is ripping his guts apart, I hope he finds comfort in it as a kind of “immanent justice”. If he should suffer a massive stroke and his brain should bleed and fail, I hope he has a last moment of awareness to appreciate the “immanent justice” of his fate. I hope that if one day he is crossing the street and suddenly finds a bus roaring implacably in his direction, that the destination on the bus’s sign reads “Immanent Justice”.

We’re all going to die. Labeling our ends as the conscious acts of a vengeful god and treating the inevitable as an outcome contingent on our respect for religious mores is one of the oldest tricks in the book of pious lies.

Barbarity in Italy

An Italian woman, Nosheen Butt, and her mother were resisting the idea of an arranged marriage, which annoyed the men in the family. So they took action to put the women in their place.

The daughter, 20-year-old Nosheen Butt, was hospitalised with head injuries and a broken arm after her 19-year-old brother beat her with a stick in the courtyard of their building in Novi, near the northern city of Modena.

According to Modena prosecutors’ initial findings, the father Ahmad Khan Butt, a 53-year-old construction worker, threw his wife to the ground and beat her with a brick while the brother Umair attacked his sister. The father had been in Italy less that 10 years and was the owner of the local mosque.

The mother has died for defending her daughter’s autonomy.

What the hell is wrong with these benighted fanatics? Trying to murder your sister or your wife because they aren’t your obedient slaves is screwed up in more ways than one. Doesn’t this single incident alone shatter Peter Hitchens’ argument for the necessity of religion to foster morality?

There’s never a shortage of smarm among evangelicals

There has been a recent rash of publicized suicides by young gay people who have been bullied and intimidated and shamed by their peers…and we’re also getting a rash of Christian apologetics by the blind bigots of homophobia who simultaneously declaim their pious regrets that these poor children of God couldn’t find their way to redemption, while continuing the slander of damning their sinning lives. It’s hard to get more unctuously hypocritical than the odious Albert Mohler, who whimpers ‘think of the children!’ while protesting that as good Christians they must condemn the sin, and he sadly wonders where the good people to tell the suicidal that their lives are worth living are to be found (not in your ministry or any priesthood, that’s for sure…if they want humanity and caring, they need to turn to Dan Savage).

Mohler has some competition now, though: it’s from Daniel Spratlin, another of those purblind preacher boys. It’s not entirely in the article he has written, though —

Rutgers student suicide highlights growing sin problem — which is just another pile of fuzzy love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin BS, but in the comments where he opens up to complain about the criticism his article recieves. This is where he exposes the dementia of his chronic fuckwittedness.

I don’t (nor do the majority of confessing Evangelicals) believe homosexuality to be abhorrent because my “religion says so.” Rather, I believe it to be so because God says so.

I have no doubt that America will eventually accept homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle. Nor do I have a problem with it. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not equal to American values. Never has been and never will be. This world has to be destroyed in the end and I welcome it. That doesn’t mean, however, that I won’t stand firm in my position and continue to shout.

Do I want homosexuals to “feel isolated and ashamed to the point of suicide”? Of course not. I want them to feel isolated and ashamed to the point of repentance.

Look at the awesome arrogance of that first paragraph, the ridiculous gall of claiming that he and his fellow fundie sphincter-lipped wardens of the public morality have the one true hotline to the mind of their omnipotent god. Remember this every time someone accuses an atheist of being arrogant — we don’t claim to be speaking for a cosmic tyrant who will torture you for eternity if you don’t obey us.

And then he proudly announces that he welcomes the necessary destruction of the world. This is one of the most perniciously vile doctrines promoted by the Abrahamic religions, not just that an apocalypse will occur, but that believers should be actively working to bring it about. Agents of destruction like that are objectively evil; if such creatures were to appear in a fantasy novel, you know that they’d be the orcish villains.

The bottom line is that he wants gay people to “feel isolated and ashamed,” period. Suicide is to be regretted because a body count is bad PR, and it’s a lie when an idiot prancing towards armageddon claims that he grieves over the death of one. He wants the death of billions, and he’s also happy to spread misery through oppression while he’s waiting for the last trump.

But they didn’t even get their hands dirty!

We’ve all heard about the Chilean miners trapped in a cave-in, who have been sustained for over two months by supplies delivered through a narrow tunnel drilled down to them. Their rescue is imminent, with an escape tunnel being drilled and almost at their position — they should be out this week. Personally, I credit technology with saving them, but…three religious groups are squabbling over which version of god deserves thanks.

The three Christian denominations have each claimed credit for what they say is divine intervention in the survival – and expected imminent rescue – of the 33 men who have spent 67 days beneath the earth.

“God has spoken to me clearly and guided my hand each step of the rescue,” said Carlos Parra Diaz, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor at the San Jose mine. “He wanted the miners to be rescued and I am His instrument.”

Yards from where he spoke Caspar Quintana, the Catholic bishop of Copiapo, prepared an altar to celebrate an outdoor mass for a small congregation of miners’ relatives and phalanx of TV cameras. “God has heard our prayers,” said the bishop. “I have received comments of encouragement from all over the world. Let us give thanks.”

A litte bit further up the hill of Camp Hope, the improvised settlement of miners’ families, rescuers, government officials and media, an evangelical preacher, Javier Soto , wandered from family to family with a guitar and songs of praise. “He listens to the music,” said the pastor, gesturing to the azure sky.

You know, the drill hasn’t quite reached the miners. Maybe we should just shut down the machinery, withdraw all the tools and the laborers, and have Mr Diaz, Mr Quintana, and Mr Soto stand above the men and use their magic to complete the rescue. That would be impressive.

I’d also like to see the three frauds step forward and take the blame for all mining deaths, as well.

Does everything have to be laced with religion?

The Smithsonian has opened a new permanent Hall of Human Origins exhibit, which means I need to get out to Washington DC sometime. Unfortunately, it gets a mixed review from Greg Mayer. It sounds like the museum faced the standard dilemma of whether to emphasize information or interaction, and parts of the exhibit steered a little too far in the direction of interactive fluffiness. It also has some underlying weirdness: the hall was funded by a Tea Party bigwig, David Koch, and it also had a “Broader Social Impacts Committee” of mostly religious advisors, which is just plain odd — what was their purpose? Was the USNM trying to intentionally filter the information, somehow?

Jerry Coyne looks a little deeper at that part of the exhibit, and there is a lesser subtone of pandering to religion, and while it doesn’t overwhelm the story at all, there’s still an element of turning an exhibit on the science of evolution into an opportunity to promote theology. Which may partly explain why a wealthy kook like Koch was willing to throw money at it.

I had no idea this was even a question

Sometimes…sometimes you just want to kick some ass. And the only thing holding you back is the unpleasant task afterward of having to scrub your boots.

This is an actual article from USA Today’s “Faith and Reason” section, which doesn’t seem to have much reason behind it. It’s by Cathy Lynn Grossman, who claims to love talking about “visions and values, faith and ethics”, and yet, manages to provide the most nauseating commentary on the recent Nobel for in vitro fertilization yet, even worse than anything I’ve seen from the Catholics. Consider these repugnant questions from Ms Grossman.

Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes — or mind or hands, depending on your theology/philosophy — of God? Does the science behind this merit the Nobel Prize for Medicine or condemnation in the realm of faith and ethics?

Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes of God? Does the science behind this merit a Nobel Prize, or ethical condemnation? And what about the parents? Is their IVF choice selfish or loving? Are they creators — or merely shoppers?

I read the whole column. There’s not much there. I was looking for some indication that these were rhetorical questions that would be quickly dismissed, but there’s nothing…there’s a quote from the bioethicist Arthur Caplan about the impact of IVF, and there’s a bunch of standard Catholic nonsense deploring the commodification of embryos, but Grossman just raises this vile and ignorant question without a single remark about the obvious fact that the 4 million people who are here because of IVF are…people.

So what are these children? Soulless zombies? Or are they just damned?

The title alone is remarkably off. “‘Test tube babies’: God’s work or human error?”: those are our choices? These kids are mistakes?

I find it disturbing that some people consider the circumstances of a child’s conception to be serious grounds for contemplating their status as members of the human race. This is where magical thinking about undetectable spiritual entities leads you — to a different kind of dualism, where I am privileged because I’ve imagined that I’m granted a soul, while you are lesser because I’ve imagined that you have not…and by the way, you have no means to challenge my claims, which are entirely ethereal and supernatural and also accepted by the majority of the law makers and enforcers in my country.

And it’s incredibly offensive to go further and suggest that the parents of these children, who have gone to extraordinary expense and trouble to conceive, are mere “shoppers”, as if people who get pregnant in a casual evening’s rut are somehow necessarily conscientious ethical philosophers and serious about their children, while someone who sinks $10,000+ dollars into invasive medical procedures and subjects their body to a few months of stressful hormonal treatments must be getting pregnant on impulse.

There really are stupid questions. Grossman just asked a few, and is entirely oblivious to what they imply about her and her attitudes towards children born by methods of which she disapproves. What next? Shall we consider ostracizing a few bastards, too?

How many ways can we screw up little girls?

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You already know I dislike religion; it’s a dreadful tool for distorting human values. I’m also an opponent of sexist socialization that short-changes women, in particular. How about if we combine both? Behold, My Princess Bible(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book you can give to your little girl to turn them into Disneyesque Bible freaks.

I’m a little disappointed, though. Is there also a Bratz Bible?

Sadly, this thing gets mostly good reviews at Amazon, and there’s only one 1-star review. That’s not the worst of it, either: the one bad review complains that there isn’t enough Jesus and too much focus on the women of the Bible.

Of course they were quick to respond

The head of the Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, the specifically crazy anti-choice arm of the Catholic Church, has already issued a statement about the Nobel Prize awarded to an IVF pioneer. He’s against it, of course.

Among his peculiar complaints is the objection that it “didn’t treat the underlying problem of infertility but rather skirted it”, which is rather odd. This:

Couples can’t have children
↓
Couples use IVF
↓
Couples now have children

Looks to me like a rather direct way to treat infertility. Where they once could have no children, now they have children.

They also don’t like the fact that the procedure produces excess embryos which are then discarded, stored, or used in further research in reproduction. They prefer the natural method of intercourse, which produces excess embryos which are then flushed down the toilet to rot in the sewers.

The church is also deeply concerned that the technology has produced a market for women to sell a few cells from their ovaries, when everyone knows that women are supposed to be sold whole and intact and dedicate every aspect of their lives to their owners.

As yet, there is no word from Bill Donohue.