Category Archives: Religious Lunacy

Worse than I thought… Tories take leave of their senses over abortion with a move very familiar to those South of the Border, down America way

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Yesterday, I put up a short (for me!) — this will be even shorter – post about fundamentalist Tory MPs who are continuing their insidious campaign to get abortion back on the Commons docket. But it was far worse than I thought. According to a National Post article this morning, it seems that the abortions in question are abortions that take place after only 20 weeks gestation. In other words, these idiots are suggesting that every abortion that takes place after that time should be investigated as a homicide! This is more than just the few “life birth abortions” that seemed to me to be in question yesterday. These MPs, three of them, as it turns out, are under the strange impression (i) that as MPs, they should have some say in the scope of police work, and can even make requests for the police to act, and (ii) that the abortion law struck down in 1988 did not include abortions after 20 weeks gestation, and, accordingly, that

Section 223a of the Criminal Code, which says a person commits homicide when he causes injury to a child before or during its birth as a result of which the child dies after becoming a human being,

applies to these cases. Nothing of course, could be further from the truth.

You’ve got to hand it to these guys for chutzpah, and arcane legal interpretation, but it is quite clear that the Supreme Court decision which struck down Criminal Code prohibition of abortion, did not think that this section should apply to abortion. The inaccessibility of abortion was struck down on human rights grounds, as depriving the woman of security of the person. These Christian clowns want to turn the hands of the clock back so far that they would apparently imprison women (and their physicians) who seek to have abortions after an arbitrary cut-off point that their Christian imaginations have delimited as the point at which the foetus becomes a child for the purpose of the Criminal Code, without any regard for the security of women whatsoever. Humiliate the stupid bastards.

Here are three stooges:

Three Stooges copy

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Margaret Somerville has a new argument against assisted dying: It’s just wrong for one person to kill another, period!

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Margaret SommervilleSince the expert legal panel in Québec has now released its report recommending medically assisted dying under certain conditions (more on that in a later post — they are not so prohibitive as I was led yesterday to believe) which is accessible in French on the Dying with Dignity site here, the voices for and against are going through their warm-up exercises once again. In the National Post this morning, we are regaled with one article in favour of assisted dying, and one against. Predictably, Margaret Somerville is put back up on her soapbox so that she can say, over and over again, what she continues, without much foundation, to say, that it’s just wrong, though it’s hard to say why.

Let’s start there. Here’s what Margaret Somerville says, comparing the cases for and against:

The case for euthanasia is logical, direct and utilitarian, so it’s easy to make. That against it is much more intangible, indirect and ephemeral, so it is much harder to communicate effectively, especially in a predominantly visual culture. We need to set up “spaces” where all our human ways of knowing, especially our moral intuition, examined emotions and ethical imagination, can function in relation to all aspects of euthanasia, in making a decision whether to legalize it.

This is scarcely compelling. The argument for assisted dying is not simply “logical, direct and utilitarian.” For Somerville, this is tough talk, because she suggests that the argument against assisted dying (which she simply calls killing) is much more culturally thick than the argument in favour. The argument in favour, she is suggesting, simply doesn’t take into consideration the depth of the issue in relation to society, community, tradition, and all the complex emotions and rich imaginative scenarios that are necessary in order to understand our ethical intuitions. What she seems to be trying to do is to discredit the arguments in favour of assisted dying by suggesting that they are culturally shallow, that they fail to take cognisance of what Clifford Geertz called the “thick description” of a culture. Arguments for assisted dying are in some sense imports from a completely artificial conception of human relationships, and if we take the complexity of real human relationships into consideration, we will find, Somerville thinks, that not only is this so, but that it is in fact seen to be so by increasing numbers of young people, who find contemporary society unsatisfyingly peripheral.

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A Closer Reading of Certain Aspects of the Pope’s Christmas and New Year’s Messages

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A few days ago I took Pope Ratzinger to task for some things he said in his address to the cardinals and the curia, seated in an over-decorated hall somewhere in the depths of the church headquarters these aged virgins consider to be a state. However, there were two speeches, and I originally mistook one for the other in my earlier post entitled “If it is so important to live according to one’s nature: Castrate the lot of them, I say!” His Christmas message to the Roman Curia is not the same as his message on New Year’s Day — “for the celebration of the World Day of Peace”. Together, the two speeches raise some serious questions that deserve closer reading, for they are, jointly, a clear indication that the Roman Catholic Church intends to interfere in the internal affairs of nations by prescribing moral legislation pertaining to matters now in dispute: specifically, matters concerning the marriage of homosexuals, abortion and assisted dying. Given the Vatican’s apparent status as a state, although, as Geoffrey Robertson points out, “[n]either the Vatican nor the Holy See, or [sic] both together, satisfy the legal definition of statehood” (The Case of the Pope, 65), these claims are intrusive and dangerous. That the leader of a religion, occupying a few acres of Italian soil, should have diplomatic representatives around the world would be laughable if it weren’t actually happening. States should recognise that for a nation to have diplomatic relationships with a church to which some of its citizens belong is already to have blurred the edges of the separation of church and state, and, as I shall mention later, the pope’s Christmas message makes it clear how dangerous an obfuscation this is. While I am no organiser of protests, this is something that should be protested and defeated.

Here are the reasons, clearly set forth by Geoffrey Robertson. The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) provides that:

(1) Without prejudice to their privileges and immunities, it is the duty of all persons enjoying such privileges and immunities to respect the laws and regulations of the receiving state. They also have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that state. [my italics; quoted in The Case of the Pope, 86]

Robertson points out that for many years the Vatican has done precisely that. It has reserved for itself and its own law, cases concerning clergy sexual abuse of children, and has refused, and often required silence on the part of the offended person or persons, until statutory limitations had expired, on pain of excommunication, to inform the appropriate civil authorities of the felonious actions of its employees. Besides this, the church has interfered in the internal affairs of countries to which it sends papal representatives, by the ‘spiritual blackmail’ of Catholic politicians, threatening excommunication if they do not, in relationship to legislation such as that concerning abortion and homosexual marriage, vote in accordance with orthodox Catholic moral principles. Robertson’s conclusion is clear:

The reality is that the Holy See has, by exerting its Canon Law jurisdiction over crime, and by making spiritual threats to democratically elected politicians, fundamentally ignored the Convention obligations of a state under Article 41 of the Vienna Convention, and should no longer be treated as if it is one. [86-87]

This is important, in view of what the pope, in his address to the Curia, has to say. It is my view also that we should cease to pay attention to the elaborate fiction of the papacy, by using the titles and names associated with the office claimed by the pope. The man’s a man for a’ that. He was given names by his mother and father, and used those names for most of his life. Now that he is the octogenarian totalitarian ruler of an effete collection of old cronies pretending to be a state, the name that he has so narcissistically chosen for himself, and which is imagined by some of the faithful to raise him above the common lot of humankind, should be reserved for intra-church occasions — they may, of course, call each other whatever they like — but we who dissent from the pretence of holiness and spiritual jurisdiction should not accord him the respect attaching to the customs of these few acres of Italy, whose presumed ”statehood” depends upon that scoundrel Mussolini, which was simply a fascistic con, just like all the rest of that man’s pretended power and glory.

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What a horrible, nasty little man Richard Carvath must be to say Tony Nicklinson is selfish, cowardly and dishonourable

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Richard Carvath is a horrible, nasty little man. Here’s how he describes Tony Nicklinson in a post that he misleadingly calls “For the love of Tony Nicklinson“:

Tony certainly isn’t a  human rights hero or a positive role model for the severely disabled either.  Tony is selfish: he is concerned for no one other than himself.  Tony is cowardly: he lacks the courage to live with dignity.  Tony is dishonourable: he seeks murder and despises his own life.  Make no mistake: however much Tony is being manipulated by the media, the pro-euthanasia lobby and even his own family, Tony is guilty of pursuing the legalisation of murder, which, if he ever achieves his aim, would inevitably lead to the murder by doctors of hundreds of vulnerable disabled, incapacitated or elderly patients in an NHS holocaust of involuntary euthanasia.

None of this — not one word of this — is true, and Richard Carvath is a horrible, nasty little man to say it. To start at the end, there is absolutely no evidence that assisted dying will lead inevitably “to murder by doctors of hundres of vulnerable disabled, incapacitated or elderly patients in a NHS [National Health Service] holocaust of involuntary euthanasia.” There is no evidence for this at all, unless, like Carvath, you take it that helping someone to die who wants to die is to murder him or her. But this is simply Christian propaganda of the worst sort. Carvath should be ashamed of himself to say deliver himself of this sort of emotionally uncontrolled nonsense. Again, there is no evidence for this claim at all.

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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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Remembrance of Things Past: Hell and other Diversions for Young Minds

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Woodstock School, Mussoorie, in the Garhwal Himalayas, Uttarakhand State (still Uttar Pradesh when I was a child)

One of my most vivid memories of school — a religious boarding school in the North of India (still going strong) by the name of Woodstock — is of the repeated expression of, and warning against, the sin against the Holy Spirit. The warning appears with slight variations in each of the three synoptic gospels. In Mark (chapter 3) it takes this form – Jesus is speaking:

28 “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”

In Mark this warning comes in close proximity to the rejection of his family, an ironic commentary on later sentimental conceptions of the Holy Family (which reminds me of something, to which I will return towards the end — but see the photo at the beginning):

31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” 33 And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

So those Christians who idealise the Christian family as, in some sense, the cement of society, get scant support from the Lord they adore.

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The Tide of Religious Idiocy at the Full

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People like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne continue to play gentlemanly games with words in which they pretend that they are reconciling religion and science. Despite their assurances it is clear that no such reconciliation takes place. If it had, scientists would use religious insights and categories for their usefulness to science, and the religious would help to deepen religious faith by preaching about the wonders of science. It really is only a pretence, no matter how much accommodationists continue to distort the relationship of science and religion, and regardless of the attempt by scholars in the supposed discipline of “Religion and Science” to assimilate science to religion by persistently fictionalising the history of the relationship of religion and science.

Thomas Dixon shows us how this is done. In his little book, Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction, he tries to marry religious doctrine to scientific theory using various strategies. One of the most popular is to point out that religious scientists see no conflict between their religious beliefs and their scientific conclusions, seeing each as in some sense complementing the other. Of course, this in itself proves nothing more than that it is possible to compartmentalise our lives. Collins can work on the human genome project during the week, and then on Sunday entertain a completely different set of beliefs, entirely unrelated to what he does in the laboratory. That’s one reason why Elaine Ecklund’s “research” is pointless. Asking scientists about their religious beliefs shows no more than that it is possible to insulate some of your beliefs from others, so that you feel no cognitive dissonance. But people are continuously deceiving themselves about the scope of their beliefs. Roman Catholics, for instance, speak of the sanctity of life, but it is not obvious that the church can hold both this and then, at the same time, largely ignore the fact that children are dying of poverty, malnutrition and preventable disease at a startling rate, without ending up in a contradiction. Nor can they extol the sanctity of life, and then oppose controlling population growth, when excess population in some parts of the world puts so much stress on the environment that, sooner or later, the number of the dying will begin to increase from its already imposingly high number.

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It really is time to tell the whole religious crew to shove it!

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I never cease to be amazed and disheartened by the antics of the religious worldwide. A day does not pass without some outrage committed by some religion, or some group of religious people, somewhere. One of the sources for this checklist of religious horrors is Ophelia Benson’s “Latest News” over at butterfliesandwheels.org. I thought I was going to do something similar here on choiceindying.com, but it never really took off. It needs constant attention, and at my age attention span is a bit meagre. But just as a for instance, let’s take the latest offerings from Ophelia’s website:

Bail denied for Sanal Edamaruku

He could be picked up at any time, and his lawyers are advising him to leave the country for a bit. Spread the word, donate if you can.

Pakistan: 4 women who “sang at wedding” killed

4 women and 2 men were sentenced to death by a jirga for singing and dancing at a wedding. The men managed to flee but the women were all killed.

No review for woman charged with “feticide” in suicide attempt

Despite amicus briefs from eighty respected experts, the state of Indiana will do its best to send Shuai to prison. Potential sentence: 45 to 65 years.

Westboro Baptist to picket Seattle shooting victim’s funeral

St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Seattle has been told that members of the anti-gay church plan to be present at the funeral of Gloria Koch Leonidas on Thursday.

And this goes on, day after day, sometimes hour after hour, one religious horror piled on to the next …., and the next, and the next!  It’s this that gets my goat every time someone complains about the new atheism, as though the new atheism is a form of extremism, when it’s patently obvious that it’s scarcely extreme enough. How does one counter the kind of idiocy represented by the religions without going postal? And yet the new atheism is confined to making arguments, and pointing out the madnesses and inconsistencies of religion. Who could possibly complain about that?

Well, John Gray, for one. Consider his review of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. To a large extent I think Gray is right on the money, but when he comes to the new atheism he writes:

A part of The Righteous Mind is a useful critique of the primitive type of rationalism that has lately been in vogue. Haidt is refreshingly dismissive of the “new atheism.” Considering why religious communes have lasted longer than secular ones, he writes: “The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient, and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally.”

Here Gray simply lapses into uncritical emotional response, where elsewhere he seems to be critically awake. The ritual practices which contemporary science of religion call costly, hard to fake signs of commitment, Gray simply supinely accepts as a new atheist dismissal of something socially important, achieving cooperation without kinship. This, as Philip Kitcher points out in his wonderfully penetrating book The Ethical Project, is part of the ethical project, a wholly human creation, and not, in any sense, dependent on supernaturalist ideas.

Why does John Gray simply turn off his mind at this point? Because it’s easy and customary. The new atheists are the pariahs of the intellectual community. They are dismissed regularly as extremists, strident, arrogant and simplistic, almost always by people who have not read them. It’s an easy cop. In a way it’s as easy as dismissing the religion of the Vikings. It’s not a living reality for people — people like R. Joseph Hoffmann — to pull a name out of a hat — who thinks that what is taught in departments of religious studies is a necessary foundation for criticising religion. And at a certain level, he’s right. If you want to engage in a critical study of religion, you have to do what departments of religious studies do. But that’s not what the new atheism is about. It’s about present reality, and the idiocies that are promulgated, daily, hourly, in the name of religion, and the offences that are done to good sense and humanity in the name of religion — the killing of women who sang at a wedding, the trial for murder of a woman who in despair attempted suicide, the charge of blasphemy against a man who showed a bleeding statue was a religious scam, and, of course, the ever-present Fred Phelpses of the world, the idiots who think they are doing their god’s will by being as obnoxious and intrusive as they can.

Should these things be entered in religion’s debit column? Yes, of course, because they’re repeated again and again without surcease, until the litany of idiocy seems to know no bounds at all. And yet people like John Gray can call the new atheists’ reasoning primitive, because they see this kind of idiocy as the inevitable spin-off from religion. Well, I think it’s high time we told religion to shove it. It’s continuously trying to determine how we live our lives — like the stupid pope and his church criticising a nun for thinking that sex is a perfectly normal and natural thing, and should be recognised as such, without all the doom of mortal sin hanging over every erotic feeling. Or like the churches’ constantly running interference on people’s desire to have the right to assistance in dying when life has become a burden too great to bear, and where further suffering is only further suffering, and nothing more, after all. It’s time for the religious just to shove it. Sure, they should have the freedom to believe whatever nonsense they want to, but they shouldn’t get to tell other people how to live their lives. They have no more insight into the moral life than the parade of religious idiocy marshaled by Ophelia Benson, day by day, and hour by hour. Let’s hear no more of religion’s value. It’s a blight on the human landscape. Let’s consign it to history, and get on with life.

Beyond Belief!

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According to reports which have just been made public, some boys who were abused by priests in the Netherlands, and who complained about the abuse, were sent to psychiatric hospitals run by the church, where they were castrated, because of their homosexual tendencies! As I say, this is simply beyond belief. The bishops must have known of this, and if they knew, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — the Holy Office of the Inquisition — must have known, and so did the civic authorities, and this has been kept  secret these many years. Cases such as this go back to the 1950s! It is truly beyond belief. And this same organisation, remember, is the one that is screeching like scalded cats over extending the right to marry to homosexual people! The pope should be ashamed to show his face in public. And for other leaders, cardinals and archbishops of the church to make claims to moral leadership is ludicrous and risible. (Thanks to Ophelia for the link.)

PZ Myers has also addressed this issue, with these poignant thoughts:

As you might guess, this is a major scandal.

It’s also a truth. Catholicism is a horror, a nightmare, a medieval monstrosity that has ruined far too many people’s lives. It’s about time people woke up to it. You can tell me that there are good people who become priests, and I’d agree with you…but when do good people stop colluding with an evil institution, tear off the clerical collar, and refuse to further a cause so tainted with corruption and wrongness?

It’s time for thoughtful, reasonable people to leave the Catholic Church. Does there not come a time when you just have to say, “So far and no further”?

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Catholic church abuse: inspectors knew minors were castrated

Monday 19 March 2012

Government inspectors were aware that minors were being castrated while being looked after in Catholic-run psychiatric institutions, local paper the Limburger reported on Monday.

The NRC reported on Saturday at least one boy under the age of 16 was castrated to ‘help’ his homosexual feelings while in Catholic church care in the 1950s.

Minutes of meetings held in the 1950s show inspectors were present when the castrations were openly discussed, the Limburger said. The minutes also showed directors of the institutions did not think parents needed to be involved in the decision-making process when minors were involved.

Read more . . . .

Scottish Cardinal has lost Discourse of Reason – or – Slippery Slopes and Catholic Morality

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One of the problems with Catholic morality is that it is perpetually situated at the top of a slippery slope, and every moral change or progress in morality immediately leads Catholics to a sense that the ground is shifting beneath their feet, when the truth is that they are simply sliding down a slippery slope prepared well in advance for the precise reason to hold the world at ransom lest moral change bring about a diminution of their power.Every time society goes through a period of moral change, hyperbolic language emanates from celibate men in red hats, from the Vatican or from a thousand Catholic pulpits, as the Church attempts desperately to stop the slide towards what it conceives of as inevitable ruin. Security is to be found only behind the walls of the Vatican, we are to understand — anything else is madness, immorality, relativism, and goodness knows what else besides!

Here’s the man with the pointy hat who says so. Imagine, says this man in the Telegraph, in an article entitled, “We cannot  afford to indulge this madness,” a man who, it must be said, could scarcely be more out of step with contemporary society — apparently a requirement for cardinals and other high church officials in the Roman Catholic Church — “imagine for a moment”, says this man in the pointy hat,

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