Long overdue house cleaning

The bishop of Bruges,Roger Vangheluwe, has suddenly resigned over sexual abuse — he has confessed to abusing and harming a young man years ago. I’d be more impressed with his contrition if it hadn’t arisen after the media started making a lot of noise about the issue.

It seems there is a small wave of resignations sweeping through the high ranks of Catholicism.

The bishop’s resignation came just one day after church authorities in Germany said that Bishop Walter Mixa, one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken conservative clerics, had tendered his resignation to the pope after being accused of beating children decades ago.

On the same day, the Vatican said the pope had accepted the resignation of Bishop James Moriarty of Kildare and Leighlin, Ireland, under a code of canon law that allows a bishop to resign before the retirement age of 75 for a “grave reason” that makes him “unsuitable for the fulfillment of his office.”

Keep it up.

Mohammed’s dead hand still ruins lives from the grave

I’ll be going to the Atheist Alliance International 2010 Copenhagen Convention to listen to a fine group of godless speakers, but there’s one who won’t be there — there was going to be a surprise speaker, not mentioned for security reasons, and now he has decided it would be too dangerous. The meeting is being held in Denmark, so of course they were going to have Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who infuriated so many Muslims, speak about his experience.

But not now. The threats and the risk are too great, and he has withdrawn.

That is genuinely disgraceful, that the idiots of Islam can rely on intimidation and fear to silence their critics. “Religion of Peace,” my ass; Islam is the religion of ignorance and hate. It seems entirely appropriate to turn things over to Pat Condell:

He’s a little too generous towards Islam at the end, though. Strip away the fear-mongering and hatred from Islam, and it would still be a religion of ignorance and delusions.

Oklahoma…you have left me speechless

They’re considering a new law to keep women ignorant and ashamed.

The governor of Oklahoma is considering tough new abortion bills that would allow doctors to withhold test results showing foetal defects and require women to answer intrusive questions.

The results of the questionnaires would be posted online.

Women would also be required to have a vaginal ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the embryo or foetus in a third bill passed by the legislature on Monday.

So let me get this straight. If a woman in Oklahoma thinks she is pregnant, she can go in for “testing”…but she won’t get to know all the results. And she has to fill out a form so her sexual history can be posted on the web. And she’s going to get a pointless ultrasound and a lecture scripted by the likes of Prolife across America.

Why would anyone do that?

Shall we frustrate some Mormons?

It would be only fair, after all. They frustrate me with their ridiculous beliefs all the time, and with their bigoted intrusions into national politics. A few Mormons are planning a youtube challenge, coordinated on FaceBook: on 3 May, they intend to all visit one particular pro-Mormon video, comment on it, uprate it, etc., and attempt to turn it into a notable event that will bring wonderful, uplifting exposure of the Mormon Church to the public.

That ain’t gonna happen.

Here is their complete plan. We’re going to start working against it already.

Dear friends,

On May 3, 2010 (perhaps as part of your Family Home Evening program) if all reachable members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints–and any non members interested– would follow the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkKblIMfmjI and watch the YouTube video of Jeffrey R. Holland bearing testimony of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, we could potentially achieve promoting that video to the YouTube homepage, based on volume of views.

The repercussions of this could be great. YouTube reports:

YouTube Stats (US)
(comScore MediaMetrix April 2009)

"The YouTube Homepage is the highest-profile placement on the site… eleven million unique visitors a day in the US [and] 89.7 Million unique monthly visitors."

The exposure that the Church–even the Book of Mormon–could receive in one day is astronomical. Please keep in mind though, while it is ideal that this video be promoted to the homepage, it is the spirit felt from the message wherein the success lies.

TIPS ON HOW TO ACHIEVE THIS:

1 views
2 comments (the more comments, the more valuable Youtube sees your video.) Comments almost carry as much weight as views.
3 favorites – everyone needs to "favorite" the video.
4 thumbs up
5 subscriptions – daily subscriptions have a major impact on popularity. This also has longterm impact on the future videos coming to the channel because they will get emails from Youtube letting them know when MormonMessages posts new stuff.
6 reshare. The more things are shared on Facebook and Twitter the better the video’s rankings will be.

Please send this to anyone you think would be interested. Maybe you don’t have to invite them to be a part of the cause, but even just sharing the link with non-member friends on May 3 could achieve the same effects (multiple views by one viewer in a day bumps the view count as well.)

As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints blessed with the knowledge contained in the Book of Mormon I seek to share with the world what I know to be true; what I know to bring happiness and hope in the times of travail; what I know to be the word of God.

For this challenge May 3 is calculated from 12 am to 11:59:59 pm Eastern Standard Time (for those participating from different time zones), but viewing before and after the event is helpful as well. Please mark your calendars and gather round in your families, wards and stakes and join me, May 3.

All my best,

Erin Jakob

*** As the group has more than 5000 members I am not able to send out a reminder email for the event so I will update the event details a couple days before (so you can send out your last minute reminder emails) and the day off. These updates will appear in your notifications and serve as a reminder.

Also, I am deleting all links that are not the video itself, mormon.org or lds.org, and any disputes that may arise. If you would like to discuss something with someone please private message them.***

I’m sure you’re all itching to take a look at the video — and I’ll give you the link in a moment, so you can witness the dumbassery in all of its pompous inanity — but here’s the deal: when you go look at it, you must also click on the little “don’t like” button to downrate it (and yes, it’s true, you won’t like it), and ideally, leave a negative comment behind (if you can, it’s censored, as you might expect). Not one of the stupid profanity-laced misspelled ungrammatical comments so typical of youtube, but one that points out the absurdity of the video. And then ignore it. Don’t go back to look at it again, since that will just jack up the page views.

The second step is a more positive one. Leave some suggestions in the comments here for a great godless pro-science video that we can promote. I’ll pick one and announce it on the evening of 2 May, and we’ll send the horde there to uprate and promote it — so even if the Mormons do make a push for their video (and it’s entirely possible that, after we trash Holland’s idiocy, they’ll shift their target to a virgin Mormon message), we’ll still dilute their efforts.

Got all that? It’s a two-pronged attack: downrank their awful video now, then ignore it; and give me suggestions for a good atheist/science video that I’ll highlight before their big day. Easy.

As for the video they are promoting — it’s appallingly illogical. In case you don’t even want to watch it at all, I’ll summarize. It’s a well-produced video of a prophet, seer, and revelator of the Mormon Church, Jeffrey Holland, who is also a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, so he is quite highly ranked in the hierarchy. He’s telling a story — and actually, he’s a good speaker, if you discount the dead-eyed glaze of the true believer — of the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Joseph Smith was the crazy leader of the cult who had led his people to Nauvoo, Illinois, where he started to build his theocratic polygamous empire. It’s a typical story for the beginnings of a major cult — think Jim Jones in Guyana, David Koresh in Waco, Elizabeth Clare Prophet and her Montana compound.

Unfortunately for the Smith brothers, they were still a batty minority, and outraged members of the community assaulted the Mormon leadership and managed to kill them both. This was a criminal act that also made a couple of martyrs for the cause.

Holland’s version of the story is supposed to be a testimony of the truth of the Book of Mormon, and his reasoning is sadly familiar. It’s a Mormon version of the Trilemma argument of CS Lewis! He claims that Hyrum and Joseph had been reading from the Book of Ether in the Book of Mormon before they were killed, and while in jail, Joseph Smith had written that the Book was true. That’s his starting premise.

From that, he concludes that well, if the Smiths knew they were under threat of death, they wouldn’t be turning to a book that they knew was false for comfort. Therefore, the book must be true!

Using this logic, of course, means that every cause for which someone has died — both sides in the American Civil War, communism, the Nazi party, the love of a woman, the Albigensian heresy, Al Qaeda’s cause, every shift of every border, every battle over religious dogma, the fight between the caves of Og and Thag for the local water hole, the cults of Jim Jones and David Koresh — has been absolutely true. Holland is assuming that no one ever dies for stupid causes, or for cherished delusions, or for greed…and we know that is false.

It’s not at all intellectually persuasive, but it pulls out all the standard Christian tropes: the self-sacrificing prophet, martyrdom as a substitute for reason, pious emotionalism, a self-serving twisting of the facts, overstatement, and the conclusion that does not follow from the premises, but still appeals to what they want to be true.

So somebody find a video that represents our cause without those flaws. Something by Sagan or Feynman, perhaps? Someone new, since we don’t rely on simple authority?

The Mark of the Beast will be foiled by Republicans!

I learned something odd this morning. Three US states have laws on the books, created by Republican legislators, making it illegal to insert microchips into people. Virginia has even declared them to be the mark of the beast from Revelation.

And now Georgia is hoping to join the ranks of the crazy states. There is a bill pending, SB 235, the “Microchip Consent Act of 2009; prohibit requiring a person to be implanted with a microchip”, which is symptomatic of the problem. This nice opinion piece summarizes why it is nuts.

In Gov. Roy Barnes’ stump speech, the bill has become a routine example of the Republican tendency to attack problems that don’t exist, and ignore the ones that do. Besides, Barnes argues, if someone holds him down to insert a microchip in his head, “it should be more than a damned misdemeanor.”

But it goes even deeper than that. These bills, despite the protests of the sponsors, are driven by biblical baloney — there is this weird fear by crazy Christians that the onset of the apocalypse is going to be signified by people getting barcodes or chips or tattoos or something weird on their hand and forehead. The Georgia state house recently witnessed testimony in favor of the bill that shows how close this religious delusion is to serious mental illness.

He was followed by a hefty woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County. “I’m also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip,” the woman said. Slowly, she began to lead the assembled lawmakers down a path they didn’t want to take.

Microchips, the woman began, “infringe on issues that are fundamental to our very existence. Our rights to privacy, our rights to bodily integrity, the right to say no to foreign objects being put in our body.”

She spoke of the “right to work without being tortured by co-workers who are activating these microchips by using their cell phones and other electronic devices.”

She continued. “Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission,” she said.

That’s just sad. That woman is ill; she’s paranoid and delusional. And she’s being called upon to support time- and money-wasting legislation to endorse her hallucinations.

Even sadder: the committee hearing this testimony went on to approve the bill.

Those naughty Germans

Apparently, German Catholics are a bit irate over the cover to a satirical magazine. I don’t understand why. This one just shows a reverent priest, titled “The church today”.

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And this one actually offers a practical use for Christian icons (“Does Jesus play a role?”).

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This cover is a little more serious, befitting a more serious magazine. It says, “The Hypocrites: the Catholic Church and Sex” — this is a little more accusatory.

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Maybe the church does have good reason to be a bit touchy about it all.

Michael Ruse agrees with Richard Dawkins! The apocalypse is nigh!

I’m feeling a bit light-headed, and wondering if I’m still asleep. Or if it’s April Fools’ Day. Ruse actually concedes some ground to Dawkins in the religion wars. Of course, it’s in the HuffPo, so it could be some perverse nonsense, anyway.

Recently, the New Atheists’ most prominent representative, Richard Dawkins, wrote a highly emotive piece for the Washington Post, in which he derided the present pope and expressed glee and satisfaction that such a person was now leading the Catholic Church. In Dawkins’s judgment, not only was this no less than the Church deserved, but such leadership could only hasten the Church’s demise. I thought at the time that Dawkins was over the top and wrong. I now think that he was right and that it was I who was wrong. Let me say at once that, unlike Dawkins, I don’t necessarily want to see this as the end of religion or even of the Catholic Church in some form. I stress that although I cannot share the beliefs of Christians, I respect them and applaud the good that is done in the name of their founder. But I do now think that as presently constituted, the Catholic Church is corrupt and should be eradicated.

…

Dawkins is right. The moral mess gets worse and worse. Hope of change is illusory. Götterdämmerung beckons. Although we have different motives and undoubtedly hope for different outcomes, I join Dawkins in welcoming the prospect.

He also points out that one of the most damning things about the church’s problems is that they are responding by digging in and resisting change. He’s not alone in noting that Ratzinger’s papacy has been bad news for Catholicism.

However, just a note of reality, though: this is what the Catholic Church has always done. They have never been a bastion of liberal thought, and what they’ve always done in response to problems is recover by retrenchment — and it doesn’t hurt them. Those who revel in arcane dogma will not be deterred by the material aberration of wicked priests engaging in buggery.

Seriously — Catholicism survived the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, blatantly political and corrupt popes, schisms and violence. The current events are trivial in comparison.

The church is going to exist for a long, long time to come. What we should expect, though, is that as the more liberal membership boils off to join progressive churches or to abandon religion altogether, as the elements lobbying for change give up and go elsewhere, what will be left behind is exactly what we’re seeing: a hard kernel of very conservative Catholicness that will become increasingly crazy and detached from reality. It will become much worse…but it will still exist, and will be populated by the devout ranks of the truly fervent, the Bill Donohues and the Father Coughlins, and they aren’t going to be dissuaded at all by us weird atheists or those wishy-washy Anglicans. Don’t expect demise, just a diminishment and a hardening.

Malta mustn’t offend the Pope!

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The mayor of Malta is quite anxious to have a statue removed from a prominent place on the road from the airport, before the Pope arrives. He might be embarrassed, after all. That’s the statue on the right; it’s called “Colonna Mediterranea”, and some people fear an obelisk is too phallic. Because, like everyone, when I see a giant green monument with multi-colored patches and a series of constrictions in it, I think of my penis.

The mayor shouldn’t worry. The Pope and the Catholic Church have no shame.The statue might serve a useful purpose in reminding the Catholic entourage to get their VD shots, while also intimidated them into keeping theirs in their pants. Or frocks. Or whatever they’re wearing. And rather than worrying about offending the Pope, shouldn’t he be more concerned about the offense to Malta?

Malta has its own history of priestly pedophilia, and has received complaints about 45 priests, which is rather impressive for such a small place…but the church claims that almost half of those accusations are groundless. I think they should be more optimistic, and phrase that as over half the accusations are not groundless. Either way, the Catholic church has been waving its erections around Malta for many years, the Pope should be able to cope with one more comparatively harmless one near the airport road. It’s the one that hasn’t raped any children.

I’ve been reminded that there is an even bigger phallic symbol erected in St Peter’s Square, right where the Pope can see it and touch it any time he wants.

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Maybe Malta should feel a little inadequate and think about putting up more and bigger columns, instead.

Another predictable excuse

The horrible evidence of a Catholic cover-up keeps piling up in these various sex abuse cases…what’s going on? Certain minds are certainly drifting towards conspiracy theories, evil attempts to bring down the church with a web of deception. And if that’s the case, who is behind it all? Isn’t it obvious? It must be…The Jews!!!

A website quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a “Zionist attack” was behind the criticism, considering how “powerful and refined” the criticism is.

Unfortunately, the article is accompanied by a photo of the Pope…and this doesn’t necessarily reflect his views. It is the position of one rather cranky, old, and possibly senile priest.

Allegedly speaking to the Catholic website Pontifex, Babini, 81, was quoted as saying: “They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.”

It’s probably also the view of Mel Gibson and a terrifying number of conservative Catholics. It’s also a position advanced by that important event in Catholic history, the Fourth Lateran Council, which also, curiously enough, established that whole celibate priests nonsense. You can trace a lot of the most horrible Catholic ideas right back to 1215, and we’re still suffering for their foolishness.

Am I to be the next enemy of the NCSE?

I’m a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I’m already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.

Uh-oh.

I am proudly and unapologetically blasphemous, and I encourage other people to join my heretical ranks all the time. If ID is blasphemous, it’s the first element of their program that I can approve of — anything that weakens the grip of faith has got something good going for it. It’s simply not a problem. It can’t even be a problem for a religious program in America — we’re a pluralist society, and everything is blasphemous to someone. The mild-mannered theistic evolutionists think ID is blasphemy, but so does Ken Ham…and Ham also thinks the theistic evolutionists are heretics, apostates, and blaspheming bastards who defile the Holy Word of God. Lutherans are blaspheming Catholics. Baptists blaspheme against the sacred doctrines of Calvin. Every time you pull out a cell phone, you’re insulting the Amish way of life, and Ron Jeremy is glad the Shakers died out. So? We can’t use and absence of blasphemy as a criterion for truth and accuracy. It’s silly to bring it up. And, as Jason points out, the same religious arguments applied against ID are equally valid when aimed at theistic evolutionists.

I’m also troubled by this whole position of Faith Project Director. Peter Hess is almost certainly a nice guy, and he’s on the side of evolution, or he wouldn’t be working at NCSE…but why is the NCSE now actively engaged in the business of promoting Faith Projects, and why do they have a professional Bible thumper to pontificate on hair-splitting matters of dogma? They’re all wrong. Having a theologian on staff to tell us that some of them are more wrong than others on matters sacerdotal, from his position which is just as shaky as everyone else’s, seems to me to be so bad that it falls into the category of not even wrong.

And then there’s the matter of this paper. It is titled, “CREATION, DESIGN AND EVOLUTION: CAN SCIENCE DISCOVER OR ELIMINATE GOD?”, and the answer Hess gives is no: “The scientific quest for the designer behind the veil of nature ultimately fails—science can neither discover nor eliminate God.”

That’s easy, then. God is irrelevant. These guys always seem to use “science” as a word demarcating a very narrow field of endeavor involving white lab coats, test tubes, and strangely colored solutions, but it isn’t. Science is simply a process for examining the world, and anyone can do it, even if you do’t have a lab coat. If something has an effect or influence, you can try to examine it using the tools of science — so when someone announces that gods cannot be detected by observation or experiment, they are saying they don’t matter and don’t do anything, which is exactly what this atheist has been saying all along.

This is the strange thing about the whole argument. When I was on my daily walk today, I was surrounded by a million mysteries: what’s in that house? How was this sidewalk made? What signaling molecules are moving through that tree to trigger new bud formation? What insect was making that odd sound? Why was my left ankle sore this morning? Were there any neutrinos whizzing through me right now? How did that boulder get on that lot? You get the idea. We’re immersed in a piece of the universe and we don’t know a lot about it, but we’re seeing these curious eruptions of natural phenomena all around us, and we can pursue them if we want.

That’s the obnoxious part of religion, and why it’s in conflict with science. Science is the world of Let’s-Find-Out, while religion is always the land of You-Can’t-Know-That. One tries to build fences around sacred domains, the other has great fun knocking them down. Go ahead, pretend that your god is safe and hidden away where scientists can’t poke at him with needles or measure his emanations with widgets that go beep or photograph his spoor and stick it in a chromatograph — we don’t care. The only way he can escape our probes is if he doesn’t exist…so the more you protest that he is absolutely indetectible, the more we nod and say, “Then you’re admitting that he isn’t even vapor.”

Denying god is yet more blasphemy, isn’t it? That’s why I’m in trouble. Of course, claiming that god has no measurable influence in the world is probably also blasphemy, which puts Peter Hess in the theological clink, too.