The recent charges of massive sexual abuse and cover ups by the Catholic church in Pennsylvania has opened yet another window on the sordid inner workings of the Catholic church. The latest is an accusation by a senior Vatican official Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò accusing pope Francis of complicity in the cover up of sexual abuse and calling for his resignation.
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As a scientist interested in the history of science, I have become acutely aware that much of the science ‘history’ we picked up in the course of our scientific training is largely folklore (what Richard Feynman referred to as ‘myth-stories’) and highly unreliable. Hence it is advisable not to make sweeping conclusions based on them. Via PZ Myers over at Pharyngula I came across an interesting article that looks at a recent discussion between Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro, where they use history to draw conclusions about the relationship of science to religion. You could not pay me enough to listen to these two people but Tim O’Neill, an Australian atheist who writes the blog History for Atheists: New Atheists Getting History Wrong did, and he has done a thorough analysis of the historical assertions made by both and finds them, especially those of Harris, utterly wanting.
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The senate in Argentina recently voted to not allow abortions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and the Catholic church was instrumental in achieving that outcome.
The Catholic Church lobbied aggressively against the legalized abortion bill. Every year, about 500,000 illegal and unsafe abortions take place in the country, and since the abortion rights vote, at least one woman has died from an attempt to perform an abortion on herself.
The pre-eminent leader of the Mormon church Russell Nelson announced that in future everyone should stop using the terms “Mormon Church”, “Mormons” and “Mormonism” when referring to the church or its members. Instead, the church should be called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and the members as “members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” or “Latter-day Saints”. He said that even the abbreviation LDS should not be used. The church’s style guide has more.
I think Nelson is going to have a tough fight on this front. It would be like the Catholic Church asking to be referred to as the Roman Catholic Church and its members as Roman Catholics in future. Once people are used to calling an institution and its members something, it will be hard to change the usage.
Nelson said that his god had spoken to him and told him to tell the world all this. It would have been more likely to happen if his god had spoken directly to all of us. But he never does.
In response to the Satanists installing a statue of Baphomet on the grounds of the state capital in Little Rock, Arkansas in response to the installation of a Ten Commandments monument, Republican state senator Jason Rapert, a minister and lead sponsor of the law allowing the Ten Commandments monument, promised to have the Satanist statue removed, saying that it will be a “very cold day in hell” before a statue of Baphomet would be installed.
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Those wacky Satanists are at it again in their efforts to maintain the separation of church and state, targeting the inane practice of some legislatures to post monuments to the Ten Commandments on public grounds. Some people think that the lack of public religiosity is the cause of America’s descent into immorality and that reminding people about what their god expects of them will make their behavior better. There is so much that is obviously wrong with that view that I will not waste time dealing with it.
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The most recent scandal involving sex abuse in the Catholic church has received widespread attention because of the numbers of children and priests involved and the scale of the cover up. The courts released a grand jury report that was devastating.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has released a grand jury report detailing sex abuse in the Catholic Church, naming over 300 accused clergymen.
The landmark grand jury investigation found more than 1,000 children had been abused by members of six dioceses in the state for the last 70 years.
Officials say the probe found systematic cover-ups by the church.
The report is the latest inquiry into allegations of sex abuse by Catholic clergy worldwide.
After an 18-month investigation, “over one thousand child victims were identifiable, from the church’s own records,” the grand jury states in the report released on Tuesday.
“We believe that the real number – of children whose records were lost or who were afraid ever to come forward – is in the thousands.”
The document states that young boys and girls, as well as teenagers, were abused by clergy.
“All of them were brushed aside by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all,” the report reads.
Due to alleged cover-up efforts by the church’s senior officials, most of the cases are too old for prosecution, the grand jury noted.
But officials warned there may be more indictments as the investigation continues.
While the report names hundreds of priests, some names remain redacted due to claims that naming them violates their constitutional rights.
It has rightly been pointed out that while atheists span the entire spectrum of the population, the atheist movement itself, in the sense of the leadership of organizations and the most visible atheists in the media, has been dominated by white men. This is fortunately changing and Christopher Cameron in an article titled Black atheists matter: how women freethinkers take on religion reports on those developments. In doing so, he addresses the often-raised question of why the horrors of slavery did not result in the wholesale discrediting of religion in the black community since religion was often used not only to justify slavery but to encourage black people to passively accept their situation in return for their reward in heaven. He says that support for religion in the black community ebbed and flowed depending on the contemporary situation.
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John Fea, an evangelical and professor of American History and chairman of the Department of History at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, PA, has written an essay where he tries to understand why his fellow evangelicals have such a deep devotion to Donald Trump that they are willing to overlook and even celebrate actions that should revolt them because they contradict the basic values they claim to profess.
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Some readers may recall my post making fun of the press release of a new book by a theologian Edward Feser where he claims to provide five proofs for the existence of his god. My point was that people had been trying for eons to logically prove the existence of any god without success, and there was no reason to think that Feser would be any more successful. Trying to prove the existence of an entity without the use of any evidence is futile.
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