PZ was wrong wrong wrong

My esteemed co-blogger lists the usual pope field marks — old, male, conservative, homophobic, godbag — and says “that’s all you need to know” about New Pope. But it turns out, as pointed out by a few commenters downthread, that Francis I is worse than that. A lot worse.

Says commenter sc_e94313c775e472e2749a200883fdec2e (can I call you “sc_e”?)

As an Argentinian I can confirm your “rumours” and add that this guy was a collaborator with the military during the last coup d’etat during the 70′s : Among many things, he informed to the military that two monks that were working in a low income neighbourhood were no longer protected by the catholic church, facilitating their detention and posterior disappearance.
Mind you, to “dissapear” at that time meant to be detained by the military, held without rights or trial, possibly (and often) tortured under suspicions of being a Marxist/ “terrorist”, being completely incomunicated with your family and finally be killed and buried on an unmarked grave, or thrown form a plane into the river.
Thrown.
From a fucking plane.
Into the river. (Known as “deathflights”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_flights )

I’ve seen some “progressive” Catholics in the English-speaking world already lauding this guy for his apparent concern for the poor. I seem not to be able to embed Storify curations here, so here’s a link instead: Check out this Storify being collected by Asteris Masouras. And if you’re an English speaking progressive of whatever religious orientation who doesn’t know what the Dirty War was, you need to learn. This Al Jazeera documentary is a start. (Serious trigger warning for, well, everything.)

New pope, same as the old pope

It’s Bergoglio, an Argentinian Jesuit that the Rationalist Association had as a 33:1 longshot.

Rumor has it that he’s conservative, hates that contraception and gay marriage crap, believes he has a magic spiritual hotline to the lord of the universe who is named Jesus, and is not — I repeat, is not — scientifically minded or an atheist. He also engages in magical rituals several times a week, and does not encourage women to touch his penis. At least, not openly.

He’s also old.

There. Now you know everything you need to know about the new head of one of the world’s oldest criminal organizations. You can turn off your TVs now.

Strident Catholics hurt my brain

I can call them ‘strident,’ can’t I? They apply it to atheists all the time, and this is clearly a case where the adjective is perfectly appropriate. It’s an opinion piece by a militant (I can use that, too!) Catholic who traces the fall of America to a court decision in 1972.

This year, the Supreme Court will render judgment on the institution of marriage. Though most of us don’t realize it, the Court first did so forty-one years ago in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a decision that gravely wounded marriage and set the nation on a course of gradual debilitation by ruling that states could not restrict the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people.

Oooh, marriage was ‘gravely wounded’ by that decision. It was a fairly straightforward issue in civil liberties: could the law decide that contraception could only be sold to married couples? The court decided no, it could not: even unmarried people have a right to regulate their reproduction by means other than abstinence.

Chaos then swept across the country as suddenly men and women were able to fornicate without spawning children! Yes, chaos! His word, not mine.

Having set chaos in motion in Eisenstadt, the Supreme Court quickly built the garbage bin for dumping sexual debris in Roe v. Wade, which gave a green light to the killing of 55 million unborn children, the overwhelming majority of whom were conceived by those unmarried singles with new access to contraceptives.

Having lived through that period (I started high school in 1972, so I was in prime temporal position to witness precisely all the horrible consequences), I’ve got to tell you: some kids were screwing before 1972, most were not. After 1972, some kids were screwing, most were not. There were single mothers, plenty of them, before 1972, and plenty afterwards — conveniently, during this period I worked part time as an assistant custodian in a school for single mothers*, so again I was in exactly the right place to witness the aftermath of sexual chaos.

It didn’t happen.

Also, I’ve got to wonder if the author thought his thesis through. New access to contraception led to a surge in unwanted pregnancies? Only if they weren’t doing it right. Maybe we should have coupled contraception access to better sex education.

Or just maybe the chaos was all in the author’s head.

teen-birth-rate

A lot of things are obviously only playing out in this guy’s head. This is the extreme Catholic position: it’s not just that child-raising must be carried out within a marriage, but sex is supposed to be channeled towards only supporting procreation. Which is scary, speaking as an old (but not dead) guy who has put all his baby-making days behind him.

Thus, in a well-ordered society sex and marriage go together exclusively, because the union of male and female sexual expression must be undertaken in a union that binds them in advance of the coordinated labors needed to raise the children they may bring into the world. To achieve this, a functioning society demands that each citizen channels his sexual capacities in ways appropriate to these two tasks (procreation and child-raising). That is, it demands marriage.

How about if sex has other roles? What if it’s a general social binder that brings people together in close affection? Wouldn’t that be a good thing, too?

And what if marriage isn’t such a great matrix for raising children when the two adults involved have lost that affection? Surely no one can believe that marriage is sufficient to create a healthy family environment, and knowing more than a few stable, happy couples who are not bound by formal marriage, it’s not even necessary.

So how can Catholics justify sacrificing the richness and complexity of human relationships on the altar of their narrow definition of how people must cohabit?

*Predictably, the community felt the need to isolate unwed mothers from other women their age; they might contaminate them. Also predictably, colloquial references to that school called it the ‘school for bad girls’. Further predictability: I did not tell anyone that I was scrubbing floors and cleaning bathrooms there after school and during the summer because every idiot would have lurid fantasies about what I was doing, when actually I spent little time interacting with the women there (I was working outside of school hours), and what little I did see were women in isolated and difficult circumstances.

Might Christianity be both true and terrible?

I am late to the feast! the Digital Cuttlefish, Larry Moran, and Jerry Coyne have all picked over the bones of this ridiculous fellow Damon Linker, who has been moaning about the dearth of honest atheists nowadays. Real atheists, he says, should be dismayed and horrified at the absence of a god-being in their lives; they should be despairing at the knowledge that their lives are meaningless and doomed, nothing but the tragedy of blindly executing chemical reactions until they flop into the grave and rot. Oh, and also, atheist views are so despicable that they not only shouldn’t be allowed to run for public office, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Sweet guy, huh? And so trite and unimaginative. His lack of ability to comprehend our sense of liberation at being free of his petty tyrant of a god is not an argument that we should be similarly fettered.

But all those other guys have torn that part of his argument to shreds. Let me take a different tack and approach another of his assertions. This one, the subtitle of his article.

“That godlessness might be both true and terrible is something that the new atheists refuse to entertain.”

I’m going to try something unusual, for me. I assume that Damon Linker fervently believes that his god is real, and normally I’d go after that and argue against his deity. But this time try pretending that somehow, by some miracle, it turns out that the Christian god exists, and Mr Linker is actually correct. Is he able now to contemplate this possibility?

“That Christianity might be both true and terrible is something that Christians refuse to entertain.”

Let it sink in, Christians. Really think about it.

If this religion were true, here is what we have to live with.

  • Our lives are miserable and evil, tainted everywhere by sin. Only in our death do we have an opportunity to escape.

  • We are pawns in a war between a god and an army of demigods (angels), and Satan and his army of demons. Satan is constantly trying to corrupt us.

  • When we die, we have two possible fates. The most likely is that we’ll end up in Satan’s clutches, which means an eternity (Forever! Endlessly!) of pain and agony and grief, tortured in a lake of fire.

  • If we win the god’s favor, we get to spend an eternity (Forever! Endlessly!) servilely worshipping this deity.

  • We have a purpose. It is to be slaves to god. That’s right, under Christianity we are all slaves to a omnipotent, omniscient master.

  • In some Christian sects, everything is predestined. Your efforts are futile, your ultimate fate in heaven and hell is set. No amount of struggle will change what will happen to you.

  • In other sects, you have free will, and can influence where you end up. Unfortunately, the exercise of your will is irrelevant except in your ability to follow arbitrary and peculiar rules: you may not masturbate, for instance, and you must avoid eating certain foods. You are free to obey god’s capricious whims, or not.

  • Your god loves you so much that he will kill his own son for you. But there’s a catch: you have to believe that god is the kind of guy who would murder his own son (and worship him for it!), ot you will go to hell.

  • Your god is the kind of monster who would exterminate just about every living thing on the planet because they were wicked. But at the same time, it’s dogma that every one of us is a wicked sinner. The axe is always suspended above your neck, the only thing keeping it away are the fancies of a tyrant.

  • This god is not a moral being: he has advocated rape, genocide, the murder of children, slavery, and blood sacrifice. The purpose of these horrific acts? His glorification.

Now please notice: I am not making the fallacious argument that because these consequences are awful, god is not real. I’m stipulating that the Christian god actually exists, and I’m asking Christians whether that would be a good thing or not — whether we should exult or be downcast at the idea of Jehovah’s existence.

If it would help, because I know they’re so soaked in the indoctrination that says an immortal incarnation of Dexter is a great thing that they’ll find it difficult to see beyond that, imagine if Allah were the one true god and you were expected to follow Muslim practices in order to be in his good graces. Or if that’s still too benign for you (I can’t imagine how), picture what eternity would be like if the True God were Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war and human sacrifice.

I rather suspect that extortion on a cosmic scale will dictate what most Christians can say. The existence of the Christian god would be a colossal catastrophe for humanity, reducing us to inconsequential slave to an invulnerable authoritarian megalomaniac, but if you really believe in such a nightmare, you wouldn’t be able to complain — you’ll LOVE GOD AS HE DEMANDS, or he’ll SET YOU ON FIRE. And if you have any doubt, if you speak out and suggest that maybe his rule is a bit scary, he’ll just wish you into the cornfield.

But try, for just a moment, to admit that that god is damned evil. If he’s not so evil, he’ll forgive you a little doubt, right? And if he is that evil, why are you planning to spend eternity worshipping him?

Hamza Tzortzis’s reputation goes before him

Ophelia is hosting a wonderfully entertaining guest post on Hamza Tzortzis and the UCL segregation debacle. I know that guy; Tzortzis seems to show up somewhere every time I’m in Europe to peddle his peculiar brand of ignorance, and he’s invited me to debate him a couple of times now. The article will make clear why I’ve turned him down every time, even though it would have gotten me an expenses-paid trip to London. There are some things I just won’t do.

Absurd segregation

Lawrence Krauss agreed to a debate with a Muslim spokesman at University College London, and discovered that the Muslims had organized segregated seating: men in one section, couples in another, and women in a third (apparently, in back, too). He walked out until they agreed to allow mixed seating. Richard Dawkins has an account, and there’s another on facebook from an attendee, with video.

It’s bizarre. I have no idea what they talked about; it’s all overshadowed by the archaic bigotry of an old patriarchal religion. Of course, do we even need to know what was said after the Muslims shot themselves in the foot so thoroughly?

A punishment poll

The Magdalene Laundries were a horrible blot on Irish history — thousands of young women and girls were basically enslaved by the Catholic church and abused and exploited. The Irish government is taking steps to make amends and be open about this unsavory taint, and one of the things proposed is to pay compensation to the surviving victims. Seems only reasonable, right? The church profited, it’s fair to extract the money criminally acquired back, with some punitive damages as well.

But no — the nuns who tortured and mistreated girls are unapologetic and claim they provided a “service”, and that €200,000 (less than €7 per victim!) was “excessive”.

There’s a poll. Apparently a majority of the respondents think the nuns are right. The horrible, awful, nasty nuns.

Should the religious orders involved pay compensation to the survivors of the Magdalene laundries?

Yes 31%
No 61%
Don’t know 7%

Rumors of our demise are highly premature

Ed West is a columnist for the Telegraph who seems to have two claims to fame: he’s a Catholic anti-atheist, and he’s one of those people who seriously argues that being against racism makes you a racist and oh, aren’t those immigrants a pain in the butt? Not one of my favorite people.

He now has a column in which he claims that the New Atheism is dead…a remarkable assertion, given that what I see of atheism, new or otherwise, is lively and thriving. The corpse is still dancing; perhaps we’re going to have to rename it the Zombie Atheism?

But wait: on what grounds does West claim that the New Atheism is dead or dying? Maybe he has a good argument.

Or maybe not. Here’s how he backs up his argument:

  • Richard Dawkins is annoying.

  • Another guy who is an atheist thinks Richard Dawkins is annoying.

  • Nobody likes Sam Harris.

  • Dan Dennett agreed with Dawkins, which makes him annoying.

  • Hitchens didn’t appreciate religion enough, which made him annoying.

  • Religion isn’t going away.

  • Religion isn’t as bad as Dawkins claims.

…and that’s about it. You know, if you’re going to claim a movement is fading, I would think citing some numbers would be indispensible to bolstering the claim; crankily reciting your animus against a few people within it doesn’t quite do the job. I could tell you that the Pope is far, far more annoying than Richard Dawkins and supports odious policies that have done far more cataclysmically awful things to other human beings than Dawkins has ever done — and in fact that there seems to be a remarkable dearth of facts showing that Dawkins has done any harm at all — but I wouldn’t be so stupid as to claim that the unsavory nature of ol’ Ratzi means the church is in decline.

West is guilty of very bad reasoning, which I guess isn’t surprising given that he somehow finds Catholicism reasonable. Even if every argument he made were true (and most aren’t, or are matters of taste and opinion), they wouldn’t support his thesis.

But the core of his claim is simply that there are many forms of religion out there, and even many kinds of atheism, and that that somehow means religion doesn’t do harm.

Even to non-believers, the argument that religion is a damaging parasite seems implausible. In their everyday lives people see that atheism does not explain the fundamental questions and a godless world doesn’t make us happier or even more questioning. The popularity of the Sunday Assembly, an “atheist church” in Islington, or Alain de Botton’s “10 commandments for atheists”, reflect the growing belief in secular Britain that religion is not just a beneficial thing but perhaps an essential one. Perhaps that is why New Atheism is as dead as Nietzsche.

The Sunday Assembly is a comedy act: a ‘church’ run by comedians to mock religion with a bit of positive spirituality thrown in. It had about 200 attendees on its opening day, and while not something I’d care enough to attend or oppose, isn’t exactly a testimonial to the failure of atheism. Next he’s going to try and tell us that Brother Sam Singleton signals a return to our Protestant roots.

De Botton…well, I’ve said a few things about de Botton before. The most generous thing I could say now about him is that he is a very silly man. That some people want to wear glasses made out of stained glass says nothing about the health of the New Atheism, which is populated by people who have no interest in any form of religion. You might as well claim that the existence of Wiccans means Catholics have ceased to exist.

But my main objection would be that atheism does address fundamental questions about the universe and our place in it, and answers them honestly, unlike religion. The answers may not be consoling, but they have the power of being true, and truth is a better foundation on which to build a good life than lies. Do they make us happier? It depends on who you are, I suppose: they certainly make me happier. Does religion make us happier? Clearly not, I can imagine few greater sources of world misery than the awfulness of the philosophies behind its religions — and as he is a Catholic, I would wave the miseries and death promoted by Mother Teresa, revered as nearly a saint by his faith, as an example of just how truly unhappy believers in his religion are.

At least I can return a favor. Catholicism isn’t as dead as Jesus; it’s an animated delusion, as lively as a cadaver on puppet strings, and still poisoning the world with its decaying reek. Would that it someday join Jesus’ physical form as scattered dust. Be one with your lord.

Christian hypocrisy…no surprise at all

Here’s a sign of women’s progress: you can’t get fired by a Christian school for getting pregnant anymore. That’s against the law. Unfortunately, you can still be fired for fornicating, along with a few other things.

The way that Christian organizations try to get around the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which bars firing women for pregnancy, is to claim they’re not firing them for the pregnancy, but for the fornicating. San Diego Christian College went another step by making employees sign a pledge requiring employees to abstain from "abusive anger, malice, jealousy, lust, sexually immoral behavior including premarital sex, adultery, pornography and homosexuality, evil desires and prejudice based on race, sex or socioeconomic status." Also, drinking, which means that Jesus would not be able to teach at this college established in his name.

Which does make me wonder how the school would respond if some woman got pregnant via artificial insemination or worse, in vitro fertilization. Test case, anyone?

That doesn’t help Teri James, though. She got fired from SDCC for getting pregnant the old-fashioned way, via <gasp> fornicating with a man. Escape clause met! College has an out and can get rid of the wicked woman!

Except…in a fit of the stupids to which adherents of ridiculous religions are prone, the college turned around and offered the job to a man. The man who fathered Teri James child. Who is, presumably by the symmetry of the act, a fornicator himself.

Unless this is one of those things where it’s IOKIYAM — it’s OK if you are male.

I had a brilliant idea!

I was inspired by this cartoon:

scaliatoles

I have a better plan: appoint Scalia to the papacy. It’s win-win all around: you know it’s what Scalia really wants, it gets a fanatical kook out of the judiciary, and it gives the cardinals exactly the kind of regressive ideologue they really want. His only failing is that I don’t think he has a history of sexually abusing children, but that’s only a rough guideline, not a requirement for the job.

Any of my readers good buds with some high ranking Catholic nabob so they can drop a hint in their ear? I don’t think any of the Catholic bigwigs read this blog, so I’d hate to have such a perfect idea fail to be implemented simply because they didn’t hear about it.