Category Archives: Fraudulence of Religious Claims

Am I Anti-Catholic? Damn Right! I am!

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Just in case you may have wondered about my attitude towards the Roman Catholic Church, I want to make it clear that I am deeply anti-Catholic. While I think Islam is perhaps the greater danger to the world, the Roman Catholic Church in my opinion runs a very close second. Both religions are reactionary religious sects, no matter how large they are. Their aim is to put a lid on the liberalisation of our laws and practices, to keep women in a secondary role in society, and to impose a frightened masculine heterosexuality on everyone without exception. Both religions are focused on achieving and holding onto power, and do not shrink from attempting to subvert democratic processes wherever such opportunities present themselves. In the United States, as I have pointed out recently, the Roman Catholic Church has challenged governments and is deliberately buying up or suborning medical real estate in order to make sure that their death-cult writ reaches more and more people, whether they are Roman Catholics or not.

This is why Simon Jenkins’ op-ed in the Guardian yesterday is perhaps the only comment so far on the election of Pope Bergoglio which has hit the nail directly on the head. The opening paragraph, in a sense, says all that needs to be said:

Papal elections are God’s Olympics. The splendour, the global publicity, the weeping crowds, the human drama, the race to the finish, all dazzle the senses and beg interpretive meaning. There is none. The conclave is showmanship. Those who believe the pope to be God’s minister on Earth must regard his choice as no more than an act of God. Those who believe otherwise see him as leader of a large but declining conservative sect, a genial figurehead but with a mostly baleful influence on the societies over which he claims authority. It is in the latter respect that his election matters.

Remember what I quoted from something that Jason Rosenhouse said yesterday about Bergoglio’s much touted humility:

Let us recall that with his new position comes the ability to speak infallibly, at least some of the time.  It is part of the job description that he is closer to God than the rest of us, and has unique authority to hold forth on the will of God.  It is the teaching of his Church that they, and they alone, are qualified to interpret scripture.  You place your eternal soul in jeopardy by rejecting their moral teachings.  I could go on.

Humble people do not accept such positions.  Quite the contrary, in fact.  It is only the most arrogant of men who speak with the Church’s level of certainty.  The new Pope may be many things, but humble definitely is not one of them.

This is something, apparently, that needs to be repeated constantly. This is not a humble man! No matter how ordinary a man he is, he is a man of power. Not only because of the claims that the church makes about the exalted position of the pope, or about the arrogance of those who speak with the church’s level of certainty. No, this is something that those who knew him in Argentina knew, quite independently of his position in the church. According to Eduardo de la Serna, a coordinator of an left-wing Argentinian group of priests who focus on the plight of the poor,

Bergoglio is a man of power and he knows how to position himself among powerful people. I still have many doubts about his role regarding the Jesuits who went missing under the dictatorship.

This is in an article by Uki Goni and Jonathan Watts in the Guardian: “Pope Francis: questions remain over his role during Argentina’s dictatorship.” A man of power such as this would know exactly how he would have to position himself to come out of the regime of the generals in a strong position and with plausible deniability.

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The Holiness Illusion

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I distrust holiness, and believe that it is almost always a pose. There was a time, though, when I thought it was real, and even aspired to it myself. Indeed, some people thought I was holy, and I was secretly pleased when I overheard people saying that I was truly a “man of God.” But, pleased or not, I knew that I was far from holiness, if, indeed, holiness can be thought to be real thing. There may be people whose thoughts and feelings are, in the appropriate sense, “pure,” but if there are I have not met any, though I have met many who have pretended to be.

I’m not sure when I began to think of holiness as a sham, but it is probably related to two events, widely separated in time, when my father, a minister in the United Church of Canada, who spent twelve years as a missionary in India, and then several years in Bermuda, revealed the skull beneath the skin. I do not report this to disparage my father, who is not here to defend himself, though, truth to tell, he was always a distant and rather forbidding figure to me, though he mellowed a bit when Elizabeth and I were married, when both he and my mother made up — with some deliberateness, it seems to me now – for some of the misery they had visited upon me as a child.

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Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

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The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

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If it is so important to live according to one’s nature: Castrate the lot of them, I say!

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Available in Polish translation here. Thanks again to Malgorzata!

Here’s a picture of the Clown of the Vatican giving Christmas greetings to a room full of celibate fundamentalists who have made a new year’s resolution to oppose gay marriage with all the power supposedly vested in them by the Ruler of the Universe. Indeed, Christmas, for the pope and his henchmen has become the occasion of the most virulent anti-gay campaign ever to emanate from the frowsty halls of the Vatican. Instead of peace and joy, and the sentimentality of cribs and cowsheds and a sacred baby, we have the pope in attack mode. The overly ornate hall is meant to intimidate us, but don’t let the pictures of angels dupe you. These guys know all about realpolitik.

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To be quite frank, it now simply makes me angry, that a bunch of celibate men should gather together and tell the rest of the world what sexuality is for, and how people should act with respect to their nature, as though human nature were a fixed datum which cannot be varied or further defined. If the Jesus they pretend to worship were to walk into this hall, they’d have him arrested and sent packing. But the thing is that here is a room full of contradictions, every man jack of them acting contrary to his nature (or at least pretending to do so). And yet they have the unmitigated gall to define how the rest of us are to live. According to a Reuters report, the pope (along with his gang of overdressed “virgins”) is forming a coalition of religions to defend “real” marriage and to oppose the legalisation of gay marriage, and it’s high time we told this geriatric failure of a human being that we don’t think this gathering of men sworn to celibacy has anything to teach the world about sexuality or the family. About love, clearly, they have nothing to teach, the pope’s hateful “Christmas” message having gone out to all the world. You know the pope thinks he’s in trouble when the substitutes gay marriage for the manger and the holy mother and child.

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Slaughter of the Innocents Trope and William Lane Craig

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I have been waiting for someone to make the connexion. All along I have been speaking of the Newtown murders of little children as ”the slaughter of the innocents,” because, coming just before Christmas, it should be almost impossible for a Christian not to notice the parallel between the Newtown massacre and the story of Herod’s killing of the male children of Bethlehem, in his efforts to kill the child Jesus, who, Matthew tells us, so clearly, was born to be king of the Jews. And, finally, someone has made the connexion. But he hasn’t carried it far enough, which shows how shallow people’s appropriation of their own myths really is. Of course, we’ve had the predictable but stupid idea that the murders were God’s judgement on America for turning its back on God, as well as the usual run of the mill stuff about punishment for abortions or entertaining the notion of gay marriage. Leave it to William Lane Craig to make the connexion! Here he is talking about the slaughter of the innocents, and its congruity with the meaning of Christmas.

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Craig’s interpretation of this is so simple-minded, it’s hard to think of the man as a scholar of some repute. I’m not sure I’d go as far as Jerry Coyne, though, in his interpretation of what Craig has to say. Here’s what Jerry says over at Why Evolution is True:

Apparently the recent slaughter is God’s way of reminding us of “what Christmas is for, what it’s all about.” And it’s almost as if Craig thinks that God engineered the murders to that end.

I don’t think that’s Craig’s point. I think Craig is just saying that we should take it as a reminder that we live in a world in which unspeakable evils occur, but there’s no sign that he thinks that God precipitated the murders as a reminder.

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The Mindless Idiocy of Religious Morality

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Isn’t it just about time that we told religious moralists to shove it? Really, when you look at the world today, and consider the offences that religions commit against human dignity and justice, for religions to make claims to speak with authority on moral questions is not only laughable, it is plainly obscene. Religious thought is rightly thought to be “other worldly” — it certainly does not belong in this one. Roman Catholic ethicists, like the incredibly doctrinaire Robert P. George, who thinks that only Catholic morality can be justified by reason, and therefore should be made into law, cannot even imagine how it could be possible for anyone to disagree with them, and yet very few moral philosophers do agree with them. They carry on their moral projects in a private room, as though no one else was thinking about ethics at all. No wonder they are so dismayed when people turn them down.

Take Robert P. George’s arguments regarding the immorality of abortion, for example. He thinks that anyone who thinks that abortion, at any stage, is morally justifiable, is simply wrong, and he thinks that this is a position securely grounded in science itself. I will not go into detail, since I do not think the argument deserves this kind of close attention. Just consider this statement and its sequel:

What the zygote needs to function as a self-integrating human organism, a human being, it already possesses.

At no point in embryogenesis, therefore, does the distinct organism that came into being when it was conceived undergo what is technically called “substantial change” (or a change of natures). It is human and will remain human. [71]

Now, let’s stack this claim up against the claim of the woman in whom this zygote has taken up residence.

In the Independent this morning the main headline is:

Woman dies after being refused an abortion in Irish hospital

Here’s part of the story:

Savita Halappanavar, a dentist aged 31, was 17 weeks pregnant when she died after suffering a miscarriage and septicaemia.

The woman’s husband Praveen Halappanavar, 34, claimed she had complained of being in agonising pain while in Galway University Hospital.

He has said that doctors refused to carry out a medical termination because the foetus’s heartbeat was present.

A “heartbeat was present”! The woman had suffered a miscarriage, for Christ’s sake! But a heartbeat was present, so, conformable to Robert P. George’s (and the Pope’s) dictum, a human being was present. So, instead of rescuing the woman, she was allowed to die, being told that an abortion was contraindicated because “Ireland is a Catholic country.” The idiocy of this is simply stunning, and yet this is what happened. A life of a woman was forfeited, regardless of her own choices, because there was a heartbeat! It’s enough to make one scream, and to call down execrations on the heads of those “in charge,” and it reminds one that “Mother Teresa” (now Blessed Teresa of Calcutta) declared in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize (of all things!), that abortion was “the greatest destroyer of peace in the world.” (We should all retire to Bedlam!) Neither the woman’s distress nor the husband’s request availed anything, and she was left to die because of the inviolable logic of Roman Catholic ethics. It makes me so angry that I want to wring some prelatical throats.

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Why isn’t Romney’s Mormonism a bigger problem with the American electorate?

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Bronwyn Maddox, the Editor of Prospect Magazine, wrote an op-ed piece for the Times (of London) a couple of weeks ago entitled “Mitt’s weird faith should be an election issue.” The link takes you behind a paywall, but perhaps I can summarise some of the points she makes so that you get an adequate enough idea of her concerns. There is also Christopher Hitchens’ “Romney’s Mormon Problem: Mitt Romney and the weird and sinister beliefs of Mormonism,” published in Slate as long ago as last October, which runs through some of the same issues. It is interesting that both Maddox and Hitchens use the word ‘weird’ to characterise Romney’s problem. Yet the truth is that very few people have brought up any details of the Mormon beliefs which Romney apparently accepts; and while the status of all religious beliefs should be held up to serious scrutiny and question, Romney’s religious beliefs are not only weird, but have implications for American domestic and foreign policy that everyone seems keen to ignore.

One of the weirdest things about Mormonism, to start to unravel some of the weirdest aspects of the faith, is the fact of its entirely improbable origin with a well-known fraud in upper New York state, well-known, that is, to the authorities there, who claimed to have been shown golden plates written in a language never before heard of, for the translation of which he alone had the key. The plates themselves conveniently disappeared after Smith had, from behind a blanket stretched across his kitchen, delivered himself of the contents of the plates, a completely hare-brained story about a lost tribe of Israel, Jesus’ visit (after his resurrection, presumably) to North America, and the whole thing tied, with supreme insouciance, to the prophet Muhammad, and Joseph Smith’s war cry (which Hitchens’ justly found sinister): “Either Al-Koran or the Sword!” Indeed, he wanted to be known as the Muhammad of America, and like some contemporary American separatist militia groups, sought to make war upon the American government. There was also, as often common to cults of this sort, Smith’s tendency to claim women for himself. He may have married up to 34 different women, before he was killed by a crowd in Carthage, Illinois, where he had been jailed for destroying the premises of a newspaper which had accused Smith of polygamy. He had apparently, at the time, decided to run for the Presidency of the United States.

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Spufford actually does it again …, and it’s worse this time

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Over at the Guardian Spufford takes off the gloves, and gives atheism — or at least tries to give atheism — a real haymaker this time. No polite “Let’s be friends” this time around. And although he ends by saying (in a knock-off of the title of his new book which, having read his columns, no sane person will bother to read) that he is unapologetic, he begins, in typical apologetic style in his title by calling his article “a defence of faith.” Spufford, mirabile dictu, thinks that religions are composed of emotions rationalised into ideas and beliefs, and his defence upholds the claim that his book “is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity.” But if that is all Christianity is composed of — as he suggests as well in his New Humanist piece — then it is strictly irrelevant to questions of belief and unbelief. He seems to think that he has hit upon a wonderful defence of faith — as though no one had ever thought of it before. But there’s nothing new about “enthusiasm.” It has been around for donkey’s years, and most theologians have been cautious about giving their imprimatur to something composed of nothing but emotions. Pentecostalism, where religion is simply drenched with emotion, is certainly an up and coming form of Christian practice, but it is pretty short on specifics, and is intellectually negligible. Which perhaps explains the curious vacuity of Spufford’s attempts at explanation.

Starting at the end of something so empty of significance is perhaps a good idea, for if there is substance to be had it should come before the end. But, sadly, this is not the case with Spufford. He’s still arguing the deep humanity of Christian faith, though for all his words it is strangely uncompelling. This, for example, is perhaps a measure of his desperation:

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

As I said in my comment on his last effort, in the New Humanist, of course the emotions that Christians have are human ones, since Christians are human, and are bound to have them. But it doesn’t help that they have human emotions, and it certainly won’t help to pick believers out from amongst a mixed group of people including various types of believers and unbelievers. Believe it or not, we share the human condition, and we do without a doubt share many of our emotions. Spufford thinks that critics of Christianity falsify the relevant emotions by rationalising them into ideas. I think he means beliefs, here, but never mind; the truth is, despite everything that he may say about the fabric of emotions which Spufford thinks are at the centre of Christian … — ah, but here we have a problem, suddenly — at the centre of Christian what? Believing? Practice? Ritual? Community belonging? How do we distinguish between Christian emotions, say, and Jewish emotions? Could believers, then, simply dispense with belief altogether, and go off together, higglety-pigglety, in a paroxysm of emotion?

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The Catholic Idea of Dignity and the Fantasy of Perfection

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Cardinal Cahal B. Daly — we come to his exaggerations and absurdities later. You can dress them up in red, and give them exalted titles, but they still know little or nothing of the art of being human, especially about love and family values that they so frequently invoke in defence of their fantasies and superstitions — and who then, with brazen effrontery, seek to be protected against derision! See the demands of Bishop Schick in Germany.

The Roman Catholic Church has a bizarre notion of human dignity, which it uses systematically to suppress every progressive movement, and to violate human rights. Dignity, for the Roman Catholic Church, is to live life solely in terms of its moral principles, principles which have no foundation other than dogmatic assertion. This is evident wherever Roman Catholic authorities make public statements about some act or other that they deplore. It is important to note that the Roman Catholic use of the idea of human dignity is not based on evidence, or even on rational argument. It is simply an article of faith. The failure to observe the Catholic ideal of human dignity is immediately to put oneself in the ranks of those who not only trespass against the church’s moral code, but it is — we are told again and again — to put humanity itself at risk. Take as an example of this a statement by the Catholic Bishops of Kenya, objecting to Melinda Gates’ drive to make family planning information and materials available to as many women as possible. Just to put this in perspective, here are the benefits of family planning, according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:

Through family planning:

  • Maternal mortality is reduced. Family planning could prevent up to one third of all maternal deaths by empowering women to decide when to have a child and avoid unintended pregnancies and abortions.
  • Deaths and illness among young women are reduced. Pregnancy is the leading cause of death for women under 19, with complications of childbirth and abortion being the major factors. Adolescents aged 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die in childbirth as those in their 20s, and girls under 15 are five times as likely to die as those in their 20s.
  • Child health and survival is improved. Reducing the number of births less than two years apart, births to very young and older women, and higher-order births, family planning lowers child and infant mortality. For example, if women spaced their births at least 36 months apart, almost 3 million deaths to children under age 5 could be averted.

To most reasonable people aims like these seem, not only morally unproblematic, but morally laudable. Reducing maternal mortality, the improvement of child health and survival, and, though not mentioned, control over an already unsustainably large human population: all these seem to be worthy aims, and most people of goodwill would praise the Gates Foundation for supporting and furthering these aims.

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Michael Coren and the faults of Christianity

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I had the fortune until recently of not knowing that Michael Coren existed, but now that he has been thrust upon my attention by Jerry Coyne’s really hard-hitting “Vacuous Comment of the Week” over at Why Evolution is True, and since, whatever his nationality of origin, Michael Coren writes as a Canadian (for shame! for shame!), I feel the need to venture into the quagmire too, and (mixing metaphors) to hold Michael Coren’s feet to the fire. Let’s start where Jerry starts, with the Amazon.com blurb comment on Coren’s new book: Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity:

Michael Coren explores why and how Christians and Christian ideas are caricatured in popular media as well as in sophisticated society. He takes on, and debunks, ten great myths about Christianity: that it supports slavery, is racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, provokes war, resists progress, and is repressive and irrelevant. In a climate that is increasingly as ignorant of Christianity as it is good at condemning it, Coren gives historical background, provides examples of how these attacks are made, and explains the reality of the Christian response, outlining authentic Christian beliefs.

The interesting thing about this comment is that it is contradicted by statistics.  Apparently, in the United States, at least, atheists and agnostics are more knowledgeable about religion than religious believers. Only slightly more than half of Catholics polled knew that the Roman Catholic Church teaches that the bread and wine become substantially the body and blood of Christ when consecrated by a priest! (Google “Atheists and knowledge of religion” for 16 million hits.)

However, there is something even more important to note in the blurb’s claim about Coren’s book. According to Coren, Christianity does not support slavery, is not racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic, does not provoke war, resist progress, and is not repressive or irrelevant. Let’s take them one by one.

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