Cheap saints

The Vatican is champing at the bit to turn Pope John Paul II into a saint, and central to their case is the story of Jory Aebly. Aebly was a young man who was mugged, shot in the head, and expected to die…but he recovered, fortunately. What’s the connection to a dead pope? Well, there isn’t much of one. In the hospital, he was given a rosary that had supposedly been blessed by the pope, and his religious family now credits John Paul II for his recovery. Never mind that the pope had been dead for four years.

What also isn’t mentioned is that Aebly’s friend, Jeremy Pechanec, who was also mugged and shot, died of his injuries. Was he an atheist or something? Does the pope’s magic only extend to people who hold this one particular rosary?

Why isn’t this magic rosary being used regularly for all brain injury victims in the hospital right now? Sometimes people can recover from horrific injuries, so one case isn’t at all persuasive…now if the hospital were slapping the super-duper magic beads into every victim’s hands as they were being rushed through the emergency room door, and they were all getting better, then I’d say there is something worth investigating going on.

I also want to know how many other people the hospital chaplain used his ju-ju beads on, and how many of them died. You’d think he’d be bragging a lot more about his success rate if they worked, but all we hear about is this one incredibly lucky fellow.

This is the world of Catholicism, though. Reason has no role in it, sense doesn’t matter, and statistics? What’s that? Dead man’s beads are going to get the credit, but not the surgery and care that contributed more to the recovery than superstition.

The creeping fungus of religion in government

A recent court decision went against the Bush administration, and also reveals some of the contemptible influence peddling that went on in that gathering of scoundrels. The subject was birth control, in particular Plan B and other forms of emergency contraception, and as many of you know, the Bushite regime dragged its feet with ridiculous deliberation in allowing the FDA to approve these forms of contraception, and effectively blocked them from public access. By hook and crook, by cheating and deception, and by lying to the people, as this court decision affirms. This is why we fight the inclusion of religion in government: it poisons everything.

This decision is remarkable in its detailed accounting of the corruption that religious viewpoints can wreak upon public policy. That the right-to-life community was able to derail the availability of emergency contraception so easily is a testament to how bad things truly were in the Bush Administration. It should be unnecessary to say this, but I will: Science, health, and healing should be the focus of the FDA. The pattern of conduct the district court decision reveals is lawless, not only with respect to FDA procedures, but also with respect to the constitutional right to obtain contraception established by the Supreme Court Griswold v. Connecticut. This is not the state’s role. Indeed, the imposition by the Bush FDA of the religious beliefs of some upon others who do not believe is antithetical to our system. The core of the Establishment Clause is intended to prevent this sort of substitution of religious reasoning for sound public policy decisionmaking.

But that era is over, right? Don’t start cheering yet.

President Bush seems not to have been able to make public decisions without reference to right-wing religious beliefs. That inclination was probably reinforced by his practice of having a weekly conference call with conservative Christian clergy.

It is troubling to learn that President Obama appears to have instituted the same practice of scheduled weekly consultation with clergy. While Presidents from the start have looked to their faith to give them courage and solace, and many have had a religious counselor for one-on-one discussions, the weekly call with a committee of clergy is quite different. It would be very hard to believe that the discussion does not veer away from spiritual counseling, and into public policy. And what other political interest groups get this kind of access to the President? Reading Judge Korman’s well-reasoned and well-supported decision in Tummino, one is reminded that one cannot assume that religious advising is always, or even usually, politically-neutral. Moreover, it is never accountable to the people, by constitutional design. The President, however, is.

Also, don’t forget that these so-called “spiritual leaders” use the credibility conferred by these weekly meetings to reinforce their political authority and push a political agenda on their flocks. It’s a tool that is abused and gives political leverage to people who are often the enemies of secularism.

Does anyone know who Obama’s consulting clergy are? These are people to be watched; I’d also like to see that we urge Obama to also listen to dissenting voices. Where’s the weekly consultation with atheists, I might ask? Or with scientists and engineers? Why is he wasting time with those pious con artists, anyway?

The irony is so bad, I’m having seizures

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a stern warning (definitely including fingerwagging, with possibility of ruler rapping) against the heathen practice of Reiki.

To use Reiki is to operate “in the realm of superstition, the no-man’s-land that is neither faith nor science,” the bishops warned, urging Catholic healthcare institutions, retreats and chaplains to ditch the therapy, which originated in Japan in the 1800s.

No, stop! I’m twitching so badly, I think I’ve damaged something.

Maybe I need some healing at Lourdes…

Yeah, the Catholic church has a real problem with gay priests. Sure.

One of the Vatican’s “solutions” for their perennial sex scandals is to start testing and screening candidates for the priesthood. Australia is even considering doing it: unfortunately, the targets are all wrong.

Melbourne’s Catholic Church has embraced a Vatican suggestion to test potential priests for sexual orientation. Those who “appear” gay will be banned.

The head of the Vatican committee that made the recommendations has made it clear celibate gays should also be banned because homosexuality is ”a type of deviation”.

I really want to know details about how these tests are going to be done. Do they hook the candidate up to a plethysmograph and then show them pictures of varying degrees of titillation to various sexual orientations? That sounds fun — they might get a flood of new prospects who are really just there for the test. Heck, if I was sufficiently bored, I might sign up … especially if the testing is done by hot novices in sexy wimples.

But, still, it’s all incredibly wrong-headed. Priests are people who are supposed to be celibate…it should hardly matter whether they are turned on by women or men or turnips, for that matter. There might even be a significant number of church leaders who are radical perverts deep down, but are in the priesthood specifically and sincerely for the whole denial of the flesh aspect. Why single out gays? Shouldn’t we be more worried about priests with uncontrollable urges towards children, or even heterosexual priests who are unable to resist the women who look up to them as authority figures?

This isn’t about correcting the problems of the church at all. It’s more about finding another opportunity to discriminate against gays.

Privileging belief

A horrible little cult in Baltimore committed an ugly crime.

…they denied a 16-month-old boy food and water because he did not say “Amen” at mealtimes. After he died, they prayed over his body for days, expecting a resurrection, then packed it into a suitcase with mothballs. They left it in a shed in Philadelphia, where it remained for a year before detectives found it last spring.

The child’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon, and others are on trial for murder, reasonably enough. Here’s the kicker, though:

Psychiatrists who evaluated Ramkissoon at the request of a judge concluded that she was not criminally insane. Her attorney, Steven Silverman, said the doctors found that her beliefs were indistinguishable from religious beliefs, in part because they were shared by those around her.

“She wasn’t delusional, because she was following a religion,” Silverman said, describing the findings of the doctors’ psychiatric evaluation.

Well. Why should the religion label excuse delusional beliefs?

Religious people aren’t necessarily stupid…and atheists aren’t necessarily smart

Oh, no. Richard Lynn, the fellow infamous for trying to link intelligence and race, is in the news again, this time trying to claim a causal relationship between atheism and intelligence.

“Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ,” Lynn told the Times Higher Education magazine. “Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God.”

I am always so tempted to simply accept this kind of claim — it’s wonderfully self-serving, obviously — but I can’t. I’ve known lots of religious people who really are brilliant, and I also know lots of atheists who were sincerely religious once upon a time, and there was no sudden increase in their native intelligence when they abandoned faith. And yes, I also know a few knee-jerk atheists who aren’t unbelievers because they’ve reasoned their way to that position. We live in a world with a range of intellectual abilities in different people, but anyone can be religious or infidel.

The difference is not in intelligence. It’s on the foundation of their education. Intelligent people who are indoctrinated into a faith can build marvelously intricate palaces of rationalization atop the shoddy vapor of their beliefs about gods and the supernatural; what scientists and atheists must do is build their logic on top of a more solid basis of empirical evidence and relentless self-examination. The difference isn’t their ability to reason, it is what they are reasoning about.

This is one of the reasons we godless need to be militant in expressing our ideas: there are children out there right now who have the potential for genius, but their talents are being shunted into the futile wasteland of religiosity. Yes, there are a lot of atheists in the topmost ranks of successful scientists, but it’s not because they are intrinsically smarter than someone who believes in gods — it’s because they more easily embrace the mode of thinking that is most productive and successful in scientific fields, and are less burdened with absurd presuppositions. Let’s stop handicapping our kids.

More Catholic inanity

The pope’s ridicuolus and wrong stance on condoms has led to world-wide outrage, and the Vatican is going to be sent millions of condoms in response. I have an even better idea: if you’re Catholic, leave the church. Why you are following an ignorant, superstitious kook as a moral authority is mystifying to me.

In another weird story of the Catholic persecution complex, look what a Brazilian archbishop has to say:

“The Jews talk about six million people killed. But how many Catholics were victims of the Holocaust? They were 22 million in all,” Archbishop Dadeus Grings, from Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, told advertising magazine Press & Advertising.

Hmm. About 3 million Catholics were killed by the Nazi regime in camps…but it wasn’t for being Catholic. It was for being Polish. I don’t know where this mysterious “22 million” number comes from — there were 42 million total civilian casualties in World War II. Is he trying to include every single dead Catholic as a direct victim of the Holocaust? Since by far the largest fraction of the casualties in that war were borne by the Soviet Union, shouldn’t we then be complaining that atheists were the true martyrs? (Not that I would, I think the reasoning of this archbishop is specious.)

A heartless faith

There was an appalling and tragic plane crash in Montana: 14 people were killed, 7 of them children.

Tom Hagler, a mechanic at the Oroville airport, told The Sacramento Bee that he allowed several children ages 6 to 10 to use the airport bathroom before they boarded the doomed plane.

“There were a lot of kids in the group,” he said, “a lot of really cute kids.”

Nine of them were members of one family. This was a horrifying and genuinely horrible accident; I can’t begin to imagine the grief felt by the survivors, who lost children and grandchildren.

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