Archive for November, 2010

Is is just me, or does pretty much every news story about the Pope’s latest emanations annoy you, too? No matter what he has to say, the media is there like hungry puppies eager to lap it up and puke it out in your local newspaper or TV news program. There’s usually a whole series of puff pieces trying to add drama to his latest moral pronouncement. Rarely is there any real balance to the stories and the Pope is held up as some great expert on whatever he chooses to blather about. This week, the media was all about the Pope’s latest message about condoms being ok sometimes, but not others. Two stories have run in the Austin American Statesman about this “burning” issue. Here are my list of gripes: The media consistently fails to point out that whatever the Pope/Vatican has to say is self-serving. In this case. using condoms to stem AIDS infections would certainly take a little heat off the Vatican from health experts who have rightly pointed out that its policies are tantamount to murder. Condoms also have the very helpful benefit of not leaving DNA behind in the behinds of boys molested by priests. Furthermore the Pope still frowns on any contraceptive usage that might reduce the number of potential future tithers. Self-serving “moral” pronouncements are nothing more than propaganda and they should not be repeated in the media. Neither the Pope nor anyone at the Vatican is qualified to speak on health issues. They just have nothing valid to say and health advice from anyone so blatantly unqualified should not be repeated in the media. To make matters worse, it’s rare to see any news piece that will add at least a little balance by quoting a health expert. Even a junior trainee at a family planning clinic would be far more qualified. I have yet to see an acknowledgment in most articles about Vatican pronouncements that the they are on the wrong side of this issue by consensus of 99% of the people who...
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Well, well. Fireworks on the show today, with Lee and his outlandish misrepresentations and conflations. I enjoyed it myself, though we still have serious sound issues to deal with. Have at it, gang.

Here are the first three (of nine) video installments of the debate between Matt and Fr. Hans Jacobse at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, yesterday. According to the writeup, Fr. Jacobse “views the current world as a battle between competing moral visions of the secular and the sacred, and hopes that Christianity can restore the moral tradition of the gospels.” Whether this involves angrily killing fig trees is, I suppose, left to be clarified. (Zing!) Anyway, enjoy. (Note: I’ll be embedding the rest of the vids as they are posted to YouTube, and will offer my assessments as I watch and absorb them.) Final addendum, 9:30 PM 11/20: All 9 parts are now embedded, using the playlist embed code provided by the lovely and multitalented Catherine Blackwell. Thanks!

So the Rethuglican Taliban are on the warpath, and once again they’re all about using the government to shove Jebus down all our throats (all the while pontificating that they got back into power because they’re all about “less government,” of course). So far, we have one gasbag here in Texas wasting no time in making sure that Ten Commandments slabs are erected in every school in the state. Just how many lawsuits over idiocy like that do we need before they figure it out? And the San Antonio paper has a poll, in which jackbooted theocratic thuggery is currently ahead by a two-thirds margin. We aren’t Pharyngula (I and several other folks I know have emails out to PZ at the moment), but perhaps we can “AXP” this poll just a tad in the direction of religious freedom and sanity. Anyway, to those of you on the left who sat out the mid-terms because you were disappointed that Obama didn’t fix the world fast enough, welcome to your new Saudi America. Addendum: PZ has now posted and the squid hordes have acted, and the poll is where it should be, at over 90% against.

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