Bill Donohue, the vitriolic cranky grandpa of the Catholic League, has a guest column in the Washington Post. It’s not very interesting — it’s more of Donohue’s tedious yapping about communists, godless libertines (that is, those wicked gays), and how the ACLU is out to smash Judeo-Christian culture — but it ends on a strange note I hear a lot lately.

The culture war is up for grabs. The good news is that religious conservatives continue to breed like rabbits, while secular saboteurs have shut down: they’re too busy walking their dogs, going to bathhouses and aborting their kids. Time, it seems, is on the side of the angels.

Where does this nonsense come from? It’s wishful thinking and weird stereotyping and a kind of desperate hope that, while they may be totally outclassed on the intellectual front, religious conservatives can find solace in mindless rabbity procreation. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not have my children propagate by way of the wastefully prolific r strategies. They are human beings, and they shouldn’t aspire to be lagomorphs or rodents or blatellids.

Also, when I recollect the many godless people I have known, most are fairly conventional middle class couples (self-selection, of course — most of the people I know are like me, conventional and middle class); most have a small number of children; most are concerned with raising those kids well. I also know gay atheists, atheists who are unmarried, atheists who are young and getting married, atheists who are in childless relationships by choice, etc. It’s true, I don’t know any atheists who have chosen to breed like rabbits.

Strangely enough, though, I also know a number of ordinary Christian people, and they all seem to have roughly equivalent demographics: middle class, some with kids, some without, some heterosexual, some homosexual, all diverse and following their own paths. I did know a few Mormons who bred like rabbits in Utah (one woman I knew had 15 kids!), but that was also correlated with a weird kind of poverty that was deeply dependent on government support, and wasn’t a model for family life that I was ever tempted to follow.

I suspect that the whole of the difference in reproduction rates that people like Donohue find so essential to propping up their self-esteem has nothing to do with atheism or religion at all, but is more a matter of affluence: people with wealth and education choose to have fewer children and invest more in the few that they have, and also people with more education tend to abandon conservative religious beliefs. That’s the real enemy of religion that Bill needs to rail against: intelligence and material success.

Which leads to my deepest wish for Bill Donohue and all the people like him. May your children and grandchildren be prosperous, healthy, and happy, and may they all succeed in finding wisdom in learning. And if my wish should come true, your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be more like me than like you. Godlessness is cultural, not genetic.

Oh, and in a final ironic twist, I am a fellow of perfectly ordinary conventional morality with a family and three healthy, well-adjusted, and well-educated children. Mr Donohue is divorced and has two children. Despite my radical secularism and cultural nihilism, I’ve managed to outbreed him!

Lose all faith in Catholicism, please. If you haven’t already, this story should help you on your way. If that’s not enough, perhaps Cuttlefish’s poem will persuade you.

To summarize: A Franciscan priest uses his office to seduce multiple women. He lives with at least one of them as husband in all but official name, and gets her pregnant (which he suggests ending with an abortion; she refuses), and has a son. He then scampers off and leaves both. The woman rattles the cage of the Catholic church and gets child support…as long as she signs a confidentiality agreement and promises to never mention the matter publicly. Now in her later years, she has cancer, and even worse, her son has cancer, and where’s good ol’ Father Willenborg? In a new diocese, acting as if it had never happened.

A few amoral, irresponsible individuals don’t ruin the reputation of an organization — they’re everywhere, even among atheists — but what does indict the church is their response to bad behavior. It’s the cover-up, stupid. It’s not just the demand for confidentiality, but that they continue to enable their sleazy playboy priest to go about his seductions with only an occasional finger-wag.

Clergy members of many faiths have crossed the line with women and had children out of wedlock. But the problem is particularly fraught for the Catholic Church, as Catholics in many countries are increasingly questioning the celibacy requirement for priests. Ms. Bond’s case offers a rare look at how the church goes to great lengths to silence these women, to avoid large settlements and to keep the priests in active ministry. She has 23 years of documents, depositions, correspondence, receipts and photographs relating to her case, which she has kept in meticulous files.

Those files reveal that the church was tightfisted with her as she tried to care for her son, particularly as his cancer treatments grew more costly. But they also show that Father Willenborg suffered virtually no punishment, continuing to serve in a variety of church posts.

And then there are the statistics.

A landmark study in 1990 by the scholar A. W. Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine, found that 20 percent of Catholic priests were involved in continuing sexual relationships with women, and an additional 8 percent to 10 percent had occasional heterosexual relationships.

I actually have some sympathy for the priests here: celibacy is an aberration for most people, and for the church to demand it is bound to induce or attract pathological individuals. But if they’re going to insist on it as a matter of dogma, at least be consistent and boot out priests that violate their doctrine; they’re obviously not suited for the job.

But I have no sympathy at all for Willenborg. He is a father — a literal father, more than the fake title he’s given as a priest — and that means he has certain moral responsibilities. Yet he ignores them, and thinks that having his religious order grudgingly sending an allowance fulfills his obligations to a very sick son.

Why would anyone expect him to tend to his duties to his religious flock if he is so aloof to his own true child?

I have to give the Baptist Standard some credit — they actually have a good article that debunks common stereotypes and myths about atheists, and chides people for falling for patently bogus rumors. At the same time, though, they ask a question that made me laugh:

From the old Procter & Gamble Satanism libel to tales of more recent vintage about President Obama’s faith and citizenship, Internet-fueled rumors seem to run rampant. And, frighteningly, Christians seem at the very least to be as susceptible as the population at large to spread false stories.

So, why are Christians so willing to believe unsubstantiated rumors? And more troubling, why are Christians, who should hold the highest standards of truth-telling, so eager to spread rumors—and even downright libels?

There is nothing in Christian history to suggest that they have ever felt an obligation to adhere to higher standards of truth, and…do you really have to wonder at how Christians could grow up to believe silly stories? Hello, zombie Jesus? Hi there, talking snake? Hey, Virgin Mary in a bird poop stain!

We’ve all seen the stories about Jesus in a cinnamon roll, or the Virgin Mary in a stain on a window, and they’re all getting a bit old. That fervent religious mindset will impose a Christian interpretation on just about any random blob. So here we go again, another unbelievable hallucination.

[Read more…]

I woke up this morning after a poor night’s rest, with a surly brain and tired eyes, and what do I behold as I scan through the last few day’s worth of email? Stories of faith that piss me off. So allow me to purge my demons by slapping around a few religious goofballs — it’ll take the edge of my headache and lighten my step for the rest of the day. Don’t worry, I’ll start off easy and work up to the really bad ones.

• John Shelby Spong is giving some lectures. You know, I think I’d like Spong as a person, and I think he espouses some worthy humanist values, but jeez, he always comes off as a cheerful airhead. He’s essentially an atheist who skims off a bit of the moldy skin of the rotten fruit of religion, and tells us how pretty the colors are…thereby making an implicit argument to keep the decaying garbage around.

  Yes, God exists, but God is not a separate deity who intervenes in our lives.

  Jesus’ resurrection is not an historically accurate event, but a symbolic story of what it means to live a fully human life.

  Eternal life is not a journey to heaven or hell, but a state which can only be glimpsed when we experience love.

  He’s like Karen Armstrong, so taken with the language of religion that they’re willing to ignore the substance. When you’ve reduced god to the uncaring smear of cosmic background radiation and a collection of psychological quirks in the human brain, you might as well admit it: he’s dead. Get over it and move on. And deceased figments don’t need a weepy wake or much sympathy for the family.

• Similarly, Bible scholars can be such nuisances. Actually, Bible scholarship is a fine thing; I appreciate historical analysis, and think the secular study of old documents is an eminently respectable academic discipline. Unfortunately, the freaking Bible is fraught with cultural connections that lead too many people to draw unwarrantedly deep conclusions from it. I’m sure this Professor van Wolde is a reasonable scholar, but her conclusions about Genesis are fine nits that need picking, nothing more.

  Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

  She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

  Yeah, yeah. It’s a small piece of the puzzle, nice to know, tells us squat-all about the origin of the world (which van Wolde is not claiming), and a little bit about the culture that scribbled down the Genesis myth. It generates breathless excitement among the credulous, though, who believe the book actually provides some insight into the creation of the world.

  It doesn’t.

  Here’s how you should look at the book of Genesis. Long, long ago, a tribe of desert nomads bumped up against the more cosmopolitan culture of Mesopotamia. They learned useful skills from the city people, like writing, but at the same time, the allure of those older, more sophisticated ideas was leading to the dissolution of tribal identity, and especially to a loss of respect for the austere and demanding desert god. Who wants to worship dry old El when slinky, sexy Innini is calling?

  So in a move as old as religion, almost, the desert priests slyly adopted the popular culture of their neighbors, stealing all their myths, but rewrote them to put their one great god in charge of the whole story. Genesis is an exercise in syncretism, a wholesale theft of one tradition to be repackaged with a new set of symbols. It is not about the creation of the universe. It is about resolving a conflict between two human cultures. That’s interesting, sure enough, as long as you don’t forget where you are and start building big pseudo-museums in Kentucky dedicated to your misconceptions.

• It’s also a problem when you have professional rabbinical nit-pickers who use their silly fine-grained interpretations of ancient texts to demand ridiculous and irrelevant impositions on people’s lives. As a further example of scholars losing sight of the context of their great big dusty books, consider the case of Shabbos elevators. There is a strict Jewish tradition of not doing any work on the sabbath, even to the point of not flicking any switches, so many buildings in Jewish communities have ridiculous and wasteful elevators that stop at every floor, so the devout don’t need to push a button. Except that as they learn more about the technology, they are becoming afraid that it might offend their god.

  But the recent ruling, whose signers included Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv — at 99, widely considered the most influential Torah sage of his generation — introduced a caveat based on new technology in elevators. The rabbis wrote that this new technology, which was explained to them by elevator technicians and engineers in “a written and oral technical opinion,” made them aware for the first time that using Shabbos elevators may be a “desecration of the Sabbath.”

  They did not name the offending technology. But for several years there has been debate among Orthodox rabbis in Israel over whether devices that measure the weight in an elevator car, and adjust power accordingly, effectively make entering a car the equivalent of pressing a button.

  Come on. Seriously? Listening to the most hidebound, most literal, most conservative, and most ancient geezer in your community is a useful way to maintain tribal tradition, but sometimes traditions need to break and respond to the times. Whoever scribbled down the old Sabbath laws couldn’t even imagine elevators, let alone electronic sensors, so it would make more sense to abide by the spirit of the old laws rather than trying to impose a precise meaning on them that simply isn’t there. Adapt! Your pointless dilemmas simply make you look like a gang of unimaginative old fools.

• Adhering to ancient dogma kills people, too. Khristian Oliver has been convicted of murder and sentenced to die. I’d be willing to concede that he’s a bad guy who committed an evil act — nobody seems to be arguing over whether he actually committed the crime — except that his trial took place in Texas, and we’ve had a few examples of Texas “justice”. But let us, for the moment, concede that he has legitimately been found guilty. Now look at how the decision to execute him was reached.

  After the trial, evidence emerged that jurors had consulted the Bible during their sentencing deliberations. At a hearing in June 1999, four of the jurors recalled that several Bibles had been present and highlighted passages had been passed around.

  One juror had read aloud from the Bible to a group of fellow jurors, including the passage, “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death”.

  Holy crap. Condemned to death because of a Bible verse? By the way, if you read the rest of Numbers 35, from which that verse was taken, it’s fairly exhaustive: if somebody kills someone else with iron, wood, or stone, they’re murderers, and need to be put to death. It’s simply yet another piece of Old Testament blanket savagery: simple-minded, unthinking, absolutist, and prejudicial demands for execution of anyone who violates their rules.

  The jurors also seem to have ignored the subsequent verses, where it says that you can offer an alternative verdict in the absence of malice of confining the killer to his ‘city of refuge,’ until the high priest dies, at which time he’s free to go. Is that a valid sentence in 21st century America, too?

  Given that Texas is a state that can’t be trusted in determining guilt, and given that the dim-witted jurors threw away reason and justice to blindly obey an archaic book (and only a select, small piece of that book), that sentence ought to be reduced, and the death penalty in general stricken from the state law books. Until, that is, enough of the state’s population is well-enough educated to make rational determinations of guilt, at which time they’ll also be smart enough to reject the death penalty as a primitive barbarism anyway.

I feel a little better now. Still need a nap, though, and maybe some aspirin.