Oh, how sweet. Something good is going to come out of the Gulf oil spill. While the ocean is poisoned, sea birds tremble and die, fish and marine invertebrates are suffocated, work crews labor to contain the spreading oil slick, rescue workers struggle to clean animals tarred with sludge, and BP (we hope) tries to throttle the ruptured pipe, devout Christians gather to stand around, hold hands, and mumble at the clouds. They must have worked very hard to come up with that kind of pointless time-waster.

This is not a protest. It’s not about belly-aching. This is an opportunity for people to come together and show support for each other. It’s also an opportunity to have a moment of silence in memory of the 11 people who passed away in the accident and the people along the Gulf Coast who have been affected, whose livelihoods are gone because of this.

And don’t forget…a chance to parade your piety on the 10:00 news! That’s actually the primary purpose of prayer vigils, because it’s not as if they do anything.

Everyone is so angry and frustrated and we need to unite instead. We’re all tired. We’re all frustrated. This is a chance to just turn it over to someone else for a minute.

Someone else? Who? The people working on the coast or on boats? I think they’ve got enough work to do.

Oh, you mean God. He’s a useless old git who never gets anything done. Why you’d think it would be at all productive to hand off the work to a phantasm is a mystery. Is it because an immaterial nonexistent ghost would be far more productive than any gang of pious sky-mumblers?

We all know the Catholic Church has a serious public relations problem right now — they’re hidebound, they’re insensitive to the human needs of their congregations, and, well, sheltering an evil bunch of child-rapers that they shuttle about among unknowing parishes like a buggerymobile or a penis-on-wheels program doesn’t help. You would think that someone would realize that maybe some substantial reform is in order, and they have—but it’s not the kind of reform rational people might have imagined. Instead, the church is planning to crack the whip in Ireland and insist on more dogmatism.

Vatican investigators to Ireland appointed by Pope Benedict XVI are to clamp down on liberal secular opinion in an intensive drive to re-impose traditional respect for clergy, according to informed sources in the Catholic Church.

The nine-member team led by two cardinals will be instructed by the Vatican to restore a traditional sense of reverence among ordinary Catholics for their priests, the Irish Independent has learned.

Priests will be told not to question in public official church teaching on controversial issues such as the papal ban on birth control or the admission of divorced Catholics living with new partners to the sacraments — especially Holy Communion.

Theologians will be expected to teach traditional doctrine by constantly preaching to lay Catholics of attendance at Mass and to return to the practice of regular confession, which has been largely abandoned by adults since the 1960s.

An emphasis will be placed on an evangelisation campaign to overcome the alienation of young people scandalised by the spate of sexual abuse of children and by later cover-ups of paedophile clerics by leaders of the institutional church.

A major thrust of the Vatican investigation will be to counteract materialistic and secularist attitudes, which Pope Benedict believes have led many Irish Catholics to ignore church disciplines and become lax in following devotional practices such as going on pilgrimages and doing penance.

That’s just wonderful — there’s little the church could do to help secularism advance more than to totter on its creaky old legs into the fray, yelling at those damned kids to stop being so progressive. Well, they could bring back the Inquisition and send teams of witchfinders loose in Ireland…and given their record, I expect that’s what we’ll see after the new policy of increased hectoring fails.

The Nation has published an extremely generous profile of the Templeton Foundation. I’m trying to be charitable about it, but there’s little here that the Templeton itself will find objectionable — it’s one more swoop of the brush in an effort to always whitewash the foundation as sober, sensible, and serious, instead of the nest of delusional religious apologists that it actually is…apologists with astounding quantities of money and a willingness to spend it freely to promote its superstitious agenda.

For instance, it describes the founder, John Templeton, in terms that make him sound like a nice guy, open-minded and inquisitive, perhaps also eccentric and naive. From all I’ve heard, he probably was a very nice fellow, but he also had his weird ideological obsession, and his eclectic approach to religion makes him a very flaky dingleberry. He was a gentle-hearted kook with lots of money.

He’s dead now, and control has passed to his son.

Jack Templeton is little like his father. While the elder Templeton’s writings venture into the poetic and speculative, his son’s read like a medical report. Jack displays admirable filial loyalty, evident most of all in his decades-long leadership of the foundation under his father’s guidance; he has been president since it began, serving full time since he left a successful pediatric surgery practice in 1995. His memoir begins and ends with lessons his father taught him and is suffused by, as he put it, “a struggle to find acceptance and approval in my father’s eyes.”

Only now, though, are we beginning to learn how that struggle will express itself in his father’s absence. With Harper gone, and his replacement yet to be announced, there is a vacuum at the top. It is, says physicist and trustee Paul Davies, “an anxious time.” What seems to have people there most on edge right now, though, is not so much science as politics. In this respect too, the younger Templeton differs in kind from his father. He has financed a right-wing organization of his own, Let Freedom Ring, which once promoted the “Templeton Curve,” a graph he designed to advocate privatizing Social Security. Now Let Freedom Ring lends support to the Tea Party movement. Jack Templeton’s money has also gone to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and to ads by the neoconservative group Freedom’s Watch. In 2008 he and his wife gave more than $1 million to support California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

That is not reassuring. Give it a few years, and I’m willing to bet that the Templeton Foundation will be getting far more attentive to the Teabaggers, and then we’ll be facing a major money institution run by a narrow-minded conservative religious zealot. We should be strangling this evil baby now.

But, you know, even if it were in the hands of gentle liberal Christians who also advocated equality and civil rights instead of opposing them, it’s still an organization dedicated to injecting foolishness into the scientific enterprise, throwing money at cronies willing to put a soft and accommodating polish on science that undermines their biases. Yet this article oozes softly over that fundamental issue; it has only brief comments from Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, and Harry Kroto. We really don’t need more funding for garbage science selected for its appeasement of religion, and that’s all we’re going to get from Templeton, because it is not dedicated to science, its sole goal is propaganda.

And this conclusion is pure gushing BS.

John Templeton built a place where the right’s hardened partisans, like Dreher and Rosen, can settle down and turn to life’s real Big Questions, in peace, for all mankind. But the foundation meanwhile has associated itself with political and religious forces that cause it to be perceived as threatening the integrity of science and protecting the religious status quo. This is quite the reverse of the founder’s most alluring hope: a spirituality finally worthy of our scientific achievements. As a result of such alliances, though, the foundation is also better positioned than most to foster a conservatism–and a culture generally–that holds the old habits of religions and business responsible to good evidence, while helping scientists better speak to people’s deepest concerns. On issues that range from climatology to stem cells, science has too often taken a back seat to the whims of politics, and Templeton’s peculiar vision offers a welcome antidote to that. To live up to this calling, Big Questions are one thing; but the foundation will have to stand up for tough answers, too, as it did when announcing the findings of a major study that intercessory prayer doesn’t improve medical outcomes, or when rebuking intelligent design.

What ‘deepest concerns’? Pandering to religious biases and reassuring people that their faith in angels is reasonable is not addressing a concern, it’s surrendering to it. I agree that science has been buffeted by the whims of politics, but I fear the whims of religion as much, if not more — and as we can see in the instance of Jack Templeton, religion and politics are not separable.

I am also not at all impressed with the occasional admission of failed politico-religious strategies, like prayer studies and ID. These are tactical retreats where they recognize that progress for their agenda cannot be made, but it doesn’t change their overall intent in the slightest. And, as usual for this kind of insidious religious apologetics, the goal isn’t to find clear answers to anything, but to blur all of the edges and foment further doubt and ignorance, because that is where religious wishy-washiness thrives best.

It’s odd, but several of the major sex abuse cases involving the Catholic church involve deaf kids. I didn’t understand why, until I heard this song. And now I have to get some q-tips and sulfuric acid and scrub out my ears.

For a not-quite-so entertaining story, read this account of Father Oliver O’Grady, a despicable monster who committed all kinds of depravities.

O’Grady has admitted abusing many children of various ages, boys and girls, and said he slept with two mothers to get access to their children. He was convicted of child sexual abuse in 1993 and spent seven years in prison.

Now here’s where the Catholic church simply doesn’t get it. The few priests who didn’t like this fellow, who wanted to get rid of him, are making excuses for their inaction even after his criminal conviction. It was too hard to defrock a priest, they say, it took a long time and lots of paperwork, and there was no guarantee the process would even come to a successful conclusion, which says to me that there are some serious problems of the institution of the church, and that maybe they should be working on fixing it so the kind of moral turpitude involved in molesting five year old girls would be sufficient grounds to swiftly eject someone from the priesthood. But no! Institutional change in the church is not a goal to which they aspire.

But still, they didn’t like having O’Grady around: he smelled bad to the press, and he probably spooked off some of the less gullible marks in the pews. They had to get rid of him, but simply finding him morally unfit does not get you out of the priesthood. So what to do?

They bought him off. They got him to voluntarily leave the priesthood for the price of a monthly annuity for his retirement. It wasn’t a lot — $788 a month — but there’s a principle involved. Father O’Grady raped small children for 17 years, was convicted of his crimes by a secular court, but the Catholic Church is paying him money. And they don’t see the problem with that.

“Yes, he did a terrible thing,” Doerr [associate director of the office of Child and Youth Protection for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops] said, but a bishop has a responsibility to take care of priests in any case — he can’t just kick them to the curb.

I guess the Bishop didn’t see his responsibilities to the innocent church-goers of O’Grady’s diocese as very important; they can be kicked to the curb. Once a priest, always a priest, though, and no heinous crime against children is sufficient to warrant stopping the payment of hush money.

Oleg Savca is a boy in Moldova who had a deadly brain tumor, and was expected do die, because nobody in his area knew how to treat him. His mother, Zina Savca, was reduced to hoping for a miracle from god.

Left alone, the tumor would put Oleg into a coma and ultimately kill him. What happened next Zina Savca can attribute only to divine intervention.

Yes! He has been saved! Because the Savcas sacrificed all their livestock, burning the bones wrapped in fat on an altar, and god sent angels who lofted them all into the air and carried them to a strange, magical land where devout mystics with miraculous powers hummed and prayed and waved their hands over Oleg’s head until the tumor-demon crept out, at which time Jesus himself wrestled with it and finally opened a deep pit into fiery hell, where he cast the monster. Oleg lives!

Oh, wait. That’s not quite right. The divine intervention was a little more mundane.

The Savcas’ doctor, Andrey Plesco, visited Sutter Memorial in late April on a professional exchange. He saw Ciricillo operate and realized Ciricillo could save the boy.

Yeah, the “divine intervention” was finding an American doctor who had the skills to carry out a delicate operation. They did have to sacrifice all their livestock…to raise airfare for the flight to magic miracle land, which happens to be Sacramento. I suppose you could use Clarke’s third law — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — with the Savcas as a real world example, but I’m simply not buying the divinity of Sacramento.

We have another flaming authoritarian cretin of inexplicable popularity here in Minnesota: Bradlee Dean. He runs an outfit called “You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Ministries”, which trundles about the region bringing the word of god and Bradlee Dean to kids.

He actually gets into the schools, despite the fact that he’s a hateful sectarian weirdo. The scam they run is to claim that they’ll entertain kids with a rock concert and bring an anti-drug, anti-sex message…neatly omitting any mention of evangelical proselytizing.

You might be wondering what “controversial issues” that aren’t for the “faint of heart” he might be talking about. He also has a radio program, so we know what the subject most dear to him is.

He wants to kill gays.

Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America. This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.

This kook is so far out and so hateful that even Exodus International, the gay conversion ministry, has distanced itself from him. That takes some doing.

Who hasn’t dumped him is just as telling: Michele Bachmann loves Bradlee and prays for him, and EdWatch praises him. EdWatch, by the way, is our local right wing group that would dearly love to get control of the Minnesota board of education…and if they should ever succeed, Minnesota would make Texas look like a beacon of the enlightenment.

After all, if the New Life church in Yorktown, Indiana can offer a course in the New Atheism, I must be qualified to discuss all the nuances and fluff and crazy beliefs of Christianity. I am most amused, though, by their choice of instructor. It’s some fellow named Jim Spiegel, who derives his authority from having written a book about atheism.

The title? The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief. Yeah, he has credibility.

I wonder if that guy who made Reefer Madness ever published a textbook on neuropharmacology…