Monthly Archives: June 2012

Sister Margaret Farley has been a cause of confusion among the faithful, and risks great harm to them

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Most of  you, by now, will know about the book by Sister Margaret Farley, R.S.M., whose 2006 book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, which rocketed from a ranking of 146,982 on Amazon to 16 (number 1 in religious studies) and sold out in three days (according to a Guardian report). Though delivering a stinging rebuke to Farley, now retired from her position as professor of Christian ethics a Yale Divinity School, the Vatican, through the Inquisition (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), issued a condemnation of the book, its many divergences from Catholic teaching and Sister Margaret’s “defective understanding of the objective nature of the objective moral law,” but does not intend any further discipline, since Sister Margaret has now retired from teaching (and, presumably, can do no further damage).

The quotation comes from the official “Notification of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith regarding the book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics by Sister Margaret A. Farley, R.S.M.,” 04.06.2012. The primary author of the notification is William Cardinal Levada, whose name appears on the Notification, who, before being raised to the cardinalate in 2006 was the Archbishop of Portland (Oregon) (1986-1995) and Archbishop of San Francisco (1995-2005). Now, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (also known in the past as the Holy Office of the Inquisition), the present pope’s former position under Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła, and making pronouncements about Catholic sexual ethics, it is probably appropriate that we recall that, in 1985, Levada was presented a report compiled by a priest, Tom Doyle, head of a three-man panel,  dealing with (according to Wikipedia) the “medical, legal, and moral issues posed by abusive clerics.” Doyle asked that the report be presented to a meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and was turned down. Levada himself, in an 2008 interview, stated without qualification:

I personally do not accept that there has been a broad base of bishops guilty of aiding and abetting pedophiles… If I thought there were, I would certainly want to talk to them about that.

Father Doyle said, in response:

I vividly recall briefing Levada in May, 1985 when he was an auxiliary bishop, about the sexual abuse crisis. I also have seen volumes of documents and sworn testimony from depositions that clearly shows that most, probably all, bishops clearly knew that priests were raping and otherwise sexually abusing kids as far back as the 40′s….and I limit it to that era because I have not gone beyond that in studying documents. So, Levada’s statement is either an outright lie or evidence of a very narrow understanding and perception of reality.

Yet this is the man who now presumes to condemn Sister Margaret Farley for her stand on various aspects of sexual ethics! It is only fair to remember this, and to recall that, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine the Faith, the man who is now pope joined cause with Levada in covering up the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests and other religious in worldwide Roman Catholic Church. There is scarcely a country in which this abuse did not happen under cover of the pretence of sanctity.

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There’s always a better answer?! Fuck you! It doesn’t work that way!!

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Now available in Polish at Racjonalista. (Thanks to Malgorzata and her trnaslators. I should have been doing this all along.)

A new advertising campaign has begun in Dublin (h/t to Ophelia over at Butterflies and Wheels, for the link). Sponsored by a group known as “Youth Defence,” the poster campaign has put up posters all around Dublin — like this one:

Some people are very upset:

Some of the posters have been defaced by members of the public angry with their message

And, while we might agree that people should have the right to get their message out, there’s something troubling about the kind of message that Youth Defence is putting up all round Dublin. It’s not true that women’s lives are necessarily torn apart by abortion. Indeed, for many, no matter with what moral gravity they may approach the issue, it comes as a relief.

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The trouble with revelation

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I apologise: though I sometimes do edit text after publication, this time publication happened by accident. I must have pressed by mistake the appropriate key sequence, and there, suddenly, it was. There are a number of differences between this and the one thus so unexpectedly published to the web!

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Many, if not most, religions claim to be founded on revelation, a concept which harbours so many problems that it is astounding that some people still think it can be used unproblematically. Drive through the countryside anywhere in North America, but especially in the United States, and you are bound to come upon a large billboard containing some minatory word from the Christian scriptures: “The wages of sin is death!”, “Prepare to meet thy God!”, “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life!”, and others of that ilk. I have never bothered to take pictures of them. They are execrable excrescences and a blot on the landscape, but they reflect an odd tendency that people have of taking texts written by men (and perhaps, very occasionally, women) and investing them with ultimate significance, by supposing that they come from a god or other supernatural source. The Qu’ran is supposed to come from God via the angel Gabriel, or Jibreel, but a more confused pastiche of texts from different identifiable sources would be hard to find. The claim is, of course, spurious, and is based, not on examination of the text or the validation of its source, but on the alleged claim of a man who could not possibly have written it. There is absolutely no reason for thinking that the Qu’ran as we have it (in its various versions and recensions) is the work of a man named Muhammad. Muhammad is as loosely related to the text attributed to him as is Jesus to the works he is supposed to have done, or the words he is imagined to have said.

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Conflict between secular and ecclesiastical power

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It seems to me that we might usefully consider the behaviour of the Roman Catholic Church in many jurisdictions today in the light of historical struggles between Rome and secular power. In an article in the Guardian published yesterday (26 June 2012) Katherine Stewart (author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children) argues that Catholic bishops in the United States are abusing the idea of religious freedom in such a way as to claim religious privilege. In a summary statement at the beginning, the article says this:

The founding fathers saw the state as guarantor of freedom from persecution. Now, the Church is trying to cast it as persecutor.

In the article itself Ms. Stewart gives us a number of examples of religious leaders complaining that religious freedom is in danger because powerful religious institutions are not being permitted to exercise authority over employees in defiance of federal or state labour legislation.

But the problem, as Stewart says, goes far beyond the question of the right of religious institutions, like hospitals and other agencies, which are often funded by the government, to impose religious values on their employees — as in the cause célèbre of the requirement that coverage for contraception be included in health care insurance for female employees in religious institutions (such as hospitals and clinics) funded by federal agencies. Not at all. It extends even to

 … the astonishing claim that religious freedom has suffered in America because the country is becoming “less religious”, and people who aren’t religious supposedly don’t care about religious freedom.

The claim is made by Archbishop Gomez (archbishop of Los Angeles) in an article in the conservative Catholic journal First Things, where, astonishingly, he says this:

But our freedoms are also being eroded as the result of constant agitation from de-Christianizing and secularizing elements in American society. In the public arena, we’ve seen relentless efforts to get Church agencies to go along with secular agendas that violate Catholic beliefs—from trying to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions and sterilizations, to trying to coerce Catholic adoption agencies to place children with homosexual couples.

In our wider culture, Christian faith and values are increasingly portrayed—in the media, in the courts, even in comments from high government officials—as a form of bigotry. In our diverse, pluralistic society, it seems sometimes that Christianity is becoming the one lifestyle that can’t be tolerated to have a role in public life.

“Our freedoms”, in other words, according to the archbishop, are being eroded by the mere fact that others are exercising their freedom! There is a pattern developing here, and it is  a dangerous one. It assumes that religious freedom, as Stewart says, implies religious privilege. Secular criticism of religion erodes religious freedom, because it makes it seem as though religious beliefs are hangovers from the past, bigoted, and out of step. But of course no one is saying that religious people cannot be bigoted. Their freedom is unimpaired, even though those who disagree with them will criticise them for bigotry and unjustified prejudice. They, after all, criticise others for being relativists, unprincipled, and immoral; they claim is often made by the religious that contemporary society is morally rudderless, deeply conflicted and in a state of moral and social crisis.

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The Very Idea that Texts can be Sacred is Absurd!

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Our ancestors must have been amazed that they could actually write things down, and that their thoughts could be preserved in stone, on clay tablets, on sheets or scrolls of papyrus or parchment. Just think of how astonishing this must have been to the first humans who first realised that their words could live, in a sense, forever. Of course, their actual preservation would often depend on the vagaries of history, and it must soon have occurred to those first writers that they could also make sure that the words of their competitors would not live on, simply by destroying whatever they were written on. At first, though, the wonder of being able to preserve words which, until that time, could only be spoken, and were as ephemeral as the sounds which carried them, depending for their preservation on their own and others’ memories, must have been overwhelming.

No doubt, by that time, phrases and common expressions, and even stories and tales of heroism, would have come to be remembered and repeated. Perhaps the wonder of language itself led to the incantatory repetition of certain words and phrases, and language may have developed pari passu with deeper resonances of originally undifferentiated experience, where dream and reality, trance and chemically induced transformations of consciousness bled into each other in ways that improved people’s ability to cope with a new-minted world full of dangers and opportunities. When and how modern Homo sapiens became consciously language-using animals is probably hidden in the past and unrecoverable; but most of us, who have very little idea of how many of the things in daily use actually work, and why they work — think of things like computers and aircraft, skyscrapers and spacecraft, computer tomography and magnetic resonance imaging – live perpetually in a region of perplexity and wonder, may have at least some idea of how language must have appeared to our earliest language-using ancestors, and how, around ancient campfires, the mystery of living between dreamland, and altered states of consciousness, and waking, was lived out.

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La belle province du Québec est plus avancé en question de la comprehension de la déontologie de soin de fin de vie que la reste du Canada

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I finished this post at about 11:30 Atlantic Daylight Time, saved the draft, and then found that WordPress had eaten up about a thousand words and changed them all into ampersands! So, once again …

As they say, “pardon my French”! But I have been reading the Rapport de la Commission Québecoise sur la question de Mourir dans la Dignité, and I am quite frankly astonished at its grasp of the entire scope of the problem of end-of-life concerns, and how these interact with, and must be allowed to modify, how the medical ethics of end-of-life care can be interpreted in the light of issues and facts about death and dying today, in the age of technological medicine, that are becoming more and more clear as time passes. The report itself is only available in French, so far as I can tell. Indeed, it took some time before I was able to find it online, which explains why I have not addressed it so far. Now I am reading it in conjunction with the report of the Royal Society of Canada’s expert panel on end-of-life decision making, and consequently I will be making occasional comments in the days ahead on both of these documents, as well as on the ruling by Madame Justice Lynn Smith of the British Columbia Supreme Court. Today I simply want to take note of a few things of interest in the Québec Commission report — which I have uploaded, and is accessible here. I will give the text in the original French, and then provide my translation. My French is by no means perfect and I expect to be called on my translations from time to time. That is how it should be.

First of all there is this:

Enfin, nous avons été très étonnés d’apprendre que les futurs vétérinaires reçoivent plus d’heures de formation sur le contrôle de la douleur que les futurs médecins de famille, alors qu’il s’agit d’une question centrale dans les soins à donner en fin de vie. [30]

Finally, we were very astonished to learn that future veterinarians receive more hours of training in pain management than future family physicians, even though this is a central concern of the provision of care at the end-of-life.

Which surprised me too. And it becomes even more astonishing when you consider the following from one of the expert witnesses before the Commission. According to Doctor Golda Tradounsky:

Il est incroyable que les vétérinaires reçoivent une meilleure formation en traitement de la douleur que nous [notre] futurs médecins. Les futurs vétérinaires reçoivent en moyenne 130 heures de cours uniquement sur le traitement de la douleur, alors que les étudiants de médecine, seulement une quinzaine d’heures. [30: sidebar]

It is unbelievable that vets receive better training in pain management than our future doctors. Future vets receive on average 130 course hours devoted solely to pain management, whereas medical students receive only around fifteen hours.

I have to say that I found this unbelievable as well, although this explains the many stories one hears of inadequate pain management at the end-of-life. Some doctors, incredibly, express concerns over habit forming drugs and addiction in end-of-life situations, as though such considerations are relevant to someone who is dying.

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Must we read the English Bible?

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I don’t like “piggy-backing” on someone else’s post, but doing so in this case permits me to say something about the author of the post that prompts this one. Jerry Coyne has just put up a post about the Bible. In “The Bible is Boring and Insipid” — as it often is — Jerry tells us about his latest “religious” project: to read the Bible straight through. It’s not a labour of love, and, as anyone who has done this knows, it can be almost stultifyingly dull — and not only in the “begats” either. As Jerry points out, the parts where the priestly author spends so much time describing the construction of the Tabernacle — which is to house the Ark of the Covenant (which is also described in tedious detail) — is anal as well as banal — and unintelligible too, if it is thought to come from a transcendent being. As Jerry says:

I don’t get this at all. He’s GOD, for crying out loud: omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly good.  Why the hell does he need people to praise him all the time, and why does he kill those who fail to do so? If he’s perfect, he wouldn’t need that kind of constant reinforcement.  For example, some of the Israelis [Israelites?], wandering in the desert, are getting sick of eating manna all the time, and kvetch about not having meat.  So what does God do? He makes it rain quails—thousands of luscious birds falling from the sky.  And then, when the people bite into those toothsome birds, God smites them with the plague for their lust, killing many of them.  What? They deserve to die because they want some real food?

The point, however, is that Jerry is actually doing this. Atheists are so often accused of knowing nothing about religion or theology, but the truth is that many serious atheists do try to find out about religious teachings, and Jerry Coyne is one who takes this seriously as an obligation. If you’re going to criticise something, and dismiss the entire premise of that thing, then you have some responsibility to do your homework. No one can say that Jerry Coyne doesn’t do this. He reads much more theology now than I do, and his latest project — will he persevere to the end, I wonder? — while obviously an onerous labour, has already produced good things.

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The Vancouver Province and Madame Justice Smith’s ruling in Carter v. Attorney General (Canada)

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I have just taken Alex Schadenberg’s advice and have written a letter to the editor of the Vancouver newspaper, The Province, in response to its edtiorial on the ruling by Madame Justice Lynn Smith of the British Columbia Supreme Court in the matter of Carter v. Attorney General (Canada). The editorial is one of the most bull-headedly opinionated as well as generally false pieces of editorialising that it has been my misfortune to read. Here, for your delectation, is the editorial (linked here):

Asssisted suicide ruling is wrong

Like abortion, the homicide euphemistically known as “assisted suicide” is an  issue on which almost everyone has firm opinions that are unlikely to be  reconsidered after hearing the arguments of other people, including last week’s  ruling by B.C. Supreme Court Justice Lynn Smith.

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Smoke and Mirrors in the Canadian Debate on Assisted Dying

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Some time ago I put up a post entitled “W5 on Euthanasia: A Second (or is it a Third?) Look“. It referred to a CTV W5 programme with Victor Malarek in which a number of questionable claims were made by Dr. José Pereira, who ”is Professor and Head of the Division of Palliative Care at the University of Ottawa and Medical Chief of the Palliative Care programs at Bruyère Continuing Care and The Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa, Canada,” as we are told on the University of Ottawa Department of Medicine Feature Series. Even added are details about Pereira’s publications and honours. I too was involved in that programme, and, when I was interviewed in my home by Mr. Malarek, I was blindsided by a paper published in the journal Oncology Today about the dangers of assisted dying, written by Pereira. At that time I had not heard about the paper itself, although I was quite familiar with the kinds of information or supposed information it contained. No one at W5 had thought it relevant to give me access to the paper beforehand, so that I could have given a considered response at the time. He was an expert; I was a layman. Throwing the paper at me in the way that Malarek did was an expression of the assumption that, while I might support assisted dying, I could not speak as an expert. As it turns out, this was not true, for as soon as I had read Pereira’s paper the first time, I was quite aware that something was seriously amiss. According to the Priests for Life homepage:

Fr. Tom Lynch and Fr. John Lemire interviews Dr. José Pereira on the issue of Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, Palliative Care, and End-of-Life Issues. Dr. Pereira is one of the leading Canadian authorities in these subjects. He will be the main presenter at the Priests for Life Canada “Pro-Life Clergy Symposium” to take place in Ottawa, May 8-9, 2012 (during the March for Life week).

Dr. Pereira is a palliative care physician, but he is not an authority on the issue of euthanasia or assisted suicide. Indeed, Pereira is the familiar garden-variety religious shill for the pro-life propaganda that issues ceaselessly from the Vatican, from conferences of Catholic bishops, from the almost uncountable number of Roman Catholic organisations pushing their supposedly “pro-life” position on an unwilling public.

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Slavery in the Sacred Texts of Christians and Jews

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Available in Polish at Racjonalista.

Since the matter came up in a recent post, it is worthwhile adding something to what has already been said about the practice of slavery in the Bible. The Christian Old Testament, Jewish Tanach, is easiest mined for such evidence, but as I said the New Testament is just as complicit. In the New Testament slavery is simply accepted as a fact of life, and no moral implications are drawn from it, except that in the letter to Philemon, Paul expects (whether or not the expectation was borne out in fact) that Christian slave owners will treat their slaves as brothers in Christ). There is nothing in the Christian scriptures which can justify the claim that Christianity, at its foundation, threw a critical light onto this most serious of human moral failings — namely, the ownership of other human beings, and their use as living instruments. Here, for those who are interested, are some passages in which biblical slavery is expressed and condemned picked out and commented on by the author of evilbible.com:

Except for murder, slavery has got to be one of the most immoral things a person can do.  Yet slavery is rampant throughout the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments.  The Bible clearly approves of slavery in many passages, and it goes so far as to tell how to obtain slaves, how hard you can beat them, and when you can have sex with the female slaves.

Many Jews and Christians will try to ignore the moral problems of slavery by saying that these slaves were actually servants or indentured servants.  Many translations of the Bible use the word “servant”, “bondservant”, or “manservant” instead of “slave” to make the Bible seem less immoral than it really is.  While many slaves may have worked as household servants, that doesn’t mean that they were not slaves who were bought, sold, and treated worse than livestock.

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