That conservative Christian who offed himself in an autoerotic embarrassment? That’s simply sad, and reflects poorly on a repressive culture. This story, of a Catholic priest who collaborated in kidnappings and torture, is just plain evil, and is something completely different.
Christian Von Wernich, 69, was chaplain to the Buenos Aires police force. He used this position to obtain confessions from prisoners, which he then passed on to police who tortured them at secret detention centers.
Von Wernich was convicted of complicity in seven murders, 31 cases of torture and 42 abductions in the Buenos Aires region; a mere smattering of the estimated 30,000 disappearances during the military junta’s countrywide purge of leftists.
And before everyone starts suspecting I think all religious people are repressed sexual obsessives or mass murderers, I’ll clarify: I don’t think these people are messed up because of religion. I think they’d be messed up if they were atheists, too. But what we can clearly see is that religion doesn’t help, and may in some cases make a problem worse. Religion, far from being a force for morality in the world, is a mask that promotes the appearance of normality while allow some truly wretched ideas to fester beneath.
The mask is crumbling, though, and at least more young people are seeing through the illusion.
Oh, that’s gold.
Religion gives them a safe haven. Even if some of these people are caught… they are usually whisked away to another place where they will not be suspected (until they do again) or they simply get a rally behind them that says “We don’t believe that they could ever do anything wrong”. It doesn’t work every time (as in this case) but it still provides that incentive. The institutions will protect them as much as they can.
From the second link:
In other words: Christians totally surprised to find criticisms of them actually have merit. Why aren’t I surprised?
I’m going to sort of disagree here. My view and a lot of data says that the extreme, cultish religions like fundie death cultism or Jonestownism or the Mormon polygamists produce more mental defectives than the norm including your average believer groups. My recent post is below. Says it all.
Good post buffybot. We’ve all noticed this correlation before. My own introduction was decades ago. A college dormie kid attacked a few coeds late at night at random. Shortly afterwards he stabbed another young girl to death. No motive, no explanation. But wait, turns out he was from some hardcore home school fundamentalist Xian cult no one ever heard of. The combo of extreme sexual repression, hostility from his wingnut upbringing, and the collision with the real world, was too much for him.
Then there are the fundie death cults that don’t believe in modern medicine and let their kids die of treatable conditions. We’ve seen that not too long ago.
I’m just going to say it. Hardcore fundie death cults produce psychologically twisted adults. These people have such miserable, empty, meaningless lives that their fondest hope is to die. That is why they babble incessantly about the apocalypse and rapture and armageddon. It isn’t a threat, it is a desire of theirs.
/Religion, far from being a force for morality in the world, is a mask that promotes the appearance of normality while allow some truly wretched ideas to fester beneath./
Visions of Judge Turpin self flagellating while shouting “Deliver me! Deliver me!”*
*(S. Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd)
Padre (who wants to bet that the Vatican will defrock this straying lamb?) Von Wernich offered this enlightening & rational apologia:
But don’t worry: the Catholic hierarchy knows who was (and most of all wasn’t) responsible:
Presumably, that statement comes from the finding that atheists / agnostics were “significantly less likely to say they are convinced they are right about things in life”.
I believe this is a blatant demonstration of the fundamental difference between how believers and non-believers approach information and worldviews. I, too, would have answered that I’m not 100% “convinced” of anything, but that doesn’t reveal doubt as Kinnaman uses it. I do not BELIEVE in gods and live my life as if they don’t exist (they almost certainly don’t). I certainly don’t waste time wondering if I’m wrong. Hence, I do NOT harbor “doubts” about my atheism. I suspect many others are in the same boat.
Sorry, my comment was from the atheists / agnostics report linked from the report above. You can find it at http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=272.
All in all, these reports seemed fairly unbiased despite the fact that they were conducted and summarized by an obviously Christian group. I do agree with #3 above. Also, I agree that many view Christianity as primarily anti-homosexual and that is certainly justifiable. Duh, Barna.
Along with raven, I’m going to “sort of” disagree, but perhaps in a slightly different way: I don’t think these people are messed up because of religion per se, but I do think they’re messed up at least in part because they feel compelled to suppress their indwelling impulses — esp. sexual impulses. As it happens, religious teaching about so-called morality seems to be the primary source of this compulsion (at least in the U.S.), so I think religion is at least indirectly the cause of some folks’ messed-upness.
I noticed in the Crooks-and-Liars thread about the Joey DiFatta case that many commenters seemed to be wondering “why don’t we see these kinds of things in Democrats”? I’m reasonally sure that Dems (and liberals) have the same (if not greater) diversity of sexual interests and appetites as Repubs (and conservatives)… but I can well imagine they feel less need to be secretive about them, since their public lives aren’t founded on condemning all but a very narrow range of sexual expressiong.
Ironically, it seems that denying your sexual kinks — by, for instance, seeking out furtive assignations in bathrooms — is more likely to get you outed than just getting on with your life in a relatively self-affirming, low-guilt sort of way.
Reading that link just shows me something I always felt. Atheists/agnostics are never the small number that is professed in some polls.
40% of 18-29 and the trend is increasing with each generation. Science and reason are making the inroads many say they couldn’t. This isn’t really suprising as it has happened all over Europe.
I wonder if that’s because we grew up during the (continuing) onslaughts by the Xian Right coalitions to force christianity down everyone’s throats – sometimes politically, sometimes with proselytizing, sometimes with violence. Methinks there’s a backlash brewing in my generation.
I want to register my disagreement with that bit too. It’s obvious when you look around that religion is correlated with hypocrisy, sexual molestation, repression of women, bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and other moral failings.
If that’s true, and I sure think it is, then religion is doing worse than failing to correct people’s moral problems, it’s enabling, worsening, and/or causing them. Which is hardly surprising. Of course embracing a lie is going to cause immoral behavior. How shocking is that, anyway?
Hear hear on the likelihood of religion enabling/worsening/causing certain crimes and moral failings. After all, this is nothing new, and there aren’t many atrocities that can’t be rationalised through careful selection of Bible passages. One of the major themes of that book is of humans giving in to their worst and most violent impulses, then justifying them with the pretence that they were fulfilling god’s will. What’s a religiously-warped sexually-repressed misogynist to do these days? In the past there was an openly church-sanctioned outlet for anyone with a taste for sexualised torture and domination, but now that witch-hunting is over those impulses have nowhere to go.
What about their other survery, referenced in that same article? According to the Barna Group (who might be a questionable source), atheists and agnostics donate less than 1/7 the amount of money to charities than active churchgoers do, are less likely to be registered to vote, and are less likely to volunteer and be active in their community. I’ve heard this criticism before, and, assuming it’s true, I think it should be a valid concern.
Of course I don’t think that having no religion causes one to be less moral. I mean, “atheists and agnostics” is really only a category of people that share a rejection of religion; claiming to be an atheist says little about my morality. There are secular arguments (they might not be very good) against gay marriage, abortion, and most other culture war issues. I could be an atheist who is utilitarian, or an atheist who is an Ayn Rand style ethical egoist — and I’m pretty sure those are nearly exact opposites.
So I think there’s an important question here: why are non-religious people apparently so much less concerned with the welfare of others? Are half of us just a bunch of objectivists or something? Is “atheists and agnostics” just sort of a meaningless category with respect to these things?
*I should note that I’m a pretty lazy agnostic/atheist, who isn’t active in his community at all, so I am probably more to blame for this phenomenon than most of you. But seriously, I’m tired of hearing this same tired argument from the religious. Why can’t we non-religious get it together?!
As a person who had a parochial school upbringing up to sophomore year in high school, I have to disagree and say that religious upbringing plays a part in creating sexual deviance. When the child asks innocent questions about sexuality in nature and in humans and gets completely contrived and false answers, it does two things (at least!)it makes the child question his own feelings and instincts, and look at the world through a falsehood. If the child’s instincts are at all good, he or she, can probably spare him or herself some damage, but if not, whatever frailty they have regarding sex is actually cultivated, not dissipated.
Uber, it always occurred to me that the national census always underrepresents atheists/agnostics because a xtian head of household is simply not going to put down that x number of his children are now non believers. The numbers don’t increase until the children are themselves h of h and can then count themselves and THEIR children as non believers.
stnemmoc-
As you read the article it also states that no religion types give less by 2:1 if you remove the church giving from the equation. I suspect the actual answer lies in the nature of the group. If you don’t belong to one there isn’t as much cultural inertia to compel you to give this or that to some group.
I would be skeptical though if atheist GROUPS don’t give as much.
There is also the fact that atheists tend to be much more skeptical and I know from my time in church that many folks give to things that I had my doubts about.
stnemmoc,as a history buff, I can tell you that charity and “good works” have always been rife with fraud and undue political influence. I am very careful where I send my money–certainly not to the Red Cross and UNICEF, both of which tend to spend too much on marketing or political shennanigans. Do you remember recently that Don Imus’ charity foundation was brought up by the MSM as if to excuse his remarks? Oh gosh, people, please don’t pick on poor Mr Imus, he takes care of disabled kids! Well, one does not excuse the other, and it’s not the first time that priviledged people have tried to hide behind their charity functions.
So much charity has religious underpinnings that I find it difficult to give at all. Giving money to help perpetuate religious delusion is not a good thing.
There is also the fact that there isn’t a weekly gathering of atheists in a social setting like Sunday churchgoing that makes it difficult to create our own charitable entities–because it does take more than just giving the money, it takes cultivating and managing the charity together as a group.
“So much charity has religious underpinnings that I find it difficult to give at all”
There are plenty of charities that have nothing to do with religion. Personally, I’m very impressed with the work of the Innocence Project, which frees wrongly convicted people from jail by exonerating them with DNA testing.
-jcr
I think they’re religious because they’re messed up. I think that the more virulent fundamentalist strains attract those who are desperately trying to purge themselves of something that scares them.
The sad thing is that had he been more comfortable with his kinks, he likely could have learned to exercise them safely and responsibly. And quite likely would not have needed to be quite so extreme.
Sad.
It is a bit of both/and in terms of being messed up and religious.
Religion does present a model and ideal of morality that people would like to follow. It is impossible to do it all at once. Depending on how messed you were before trying to live up to the ideal, living with the impossibility of instant change into perfection may be enough to totally traumatize one. This can have dire consequences.
If one does not have a too fundamentalist grasp of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Testament, then it is obvious that there is a great deal of struggle and failure in living up to some of the moral standards which evolved in ancient Palestine. At the same time those writings chart a little progress in the matter.
Now and then there is the psychopath who simply exploits any system for their own gratification. Nothing can prepare us for pathologically disturbed persons who make it into positions of trust and power. Any system which contains a grain of idealism can be exploited by these pathological persons.
Most of us are simply too fuzzily good-natured not to be taken in by the psychopath or sociopath, and they can be extremely good “company types” at one level, while doing distressing things at the same time.
Any system promoting ideals will attract the seriously disturbed. Anything that turns into an organization, rooted in trying to promote a better humanity, will have to deal with this unhappy fact at some point, whether it be a non-believing non-sectarian charity or cardinals in conclave.
This part from the Barna atheist survey is the best;
http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=272
The new evangelists are atheists.
Now we’re evangelists. Bahahaha. Nice cheepshot.
So how many of us insist on pestering our family, friend, co-workers and complete strangers about our lack of belief?
Again, this is something that can be misread. If you think that 90% of the charities are *wasting* your money on new crosses, gold leaf for the churches, forcing religion on the people they propose to help, etc., you **might** be just a bit less interested in funneling money into such organizations. We also are not like the people I mother know, who are living in poverty conditions, not because they couldn’t get out of it, but because they send damn near every dime they have that isn’t needed to simply survive to some stupid televangelist. Its a matter of trust and logic. Its hard to know *which* charities to trust, and logic dictates that, in most cases, the $200 you send to some charity some place “may” just be the $200 you need tomorrow. Both of those things make the odds of something not invested in saving their own ass by saving other people’s higher than those that think they will receive some magical reward via doing so.
As for registering to vote.. That is another issue entirely, and not even related just to atheists and agnostics. My niece probably hasn’t either, and she (sadly) attends church. Her reason can be summed up the same as mine was 10+ years ago, “How the hell does voting help anything if the people that are *picking* the candidates to vote for are all lunatics and idiots?” Its like going to a fair and being asked to vote for the best pig, when your choices are all hand picked by the mentally disabled, and include a goat, a moldy piece of cheese and a rutabaga. Just convincing yourself to get out of bed on election day to try to express your view that the goat is at least a mammal, and thus marginally “closer” to what you where asked to vote on, isn’t real easy to manage for someone that wishes there was a real choice in the lot.
The problem isn’t that Atheists and Agnostics wouldn’t contribute or vote as often, given incentive, just that when you are confronted with the only reason to do so being to marginally limit the stupidity of a much larger number of fools that don’t get what is wrong with the situation, its hard for anyone not actively pissed off, extremely stubborn or possibly themselves so emotionally unstable that they think their one voice will have a cataclysmic effect, to conclude that handing $20 to a good charity or voting for the least offensive candidate will do a damn thing to undermine the 1,000:1 odds against them, from people that think the cheese at least “smell” like a pig to them, or that actually believe that X cents out of every dollar will buy shoes for poor children in some village some place. And, to be quite clear, **most** atheists and agnostics are told by the news, by their own politician, by church groups, by most types of popular fiction, etc. that they are *alone*, and can’t make any difference, which hardly helps one bit either.
Yeah, its a problem. The real problem though is if they are less likely to do it, or just more likely to take a good look around and say, “Everyone is trying to cheat the people that *need* the help/votes out of them, so screw everyone!”
Kagehi-
I understand where you’re coming from, and (not to be insulting) it kind of proves the superiority of a religious value system in some instances. You reason (if I’m not mistaken) that one vote doesn’t really make that much of a difference, and neither does an individual donation to charity, because of the logic involved. With no afterlife, there is no reward for giving $200 to charity other than a warm fuzzy feeling–if that–and a very small improvement in the overall wellbeing of society. So it’s hard to put the very small effects you could have on society above your own potential problems. I agree that it’s a good thing non-religious lower income people might not sacrifice their own income to charities as much as religious lower-income people do (assuming that’s true). However, it’s my impression that those of us in the western world could typically give the $1500 per year that religious people give without sacrificing too much. (Note: I’m don’t hate America/Capitalism!)
Your last paragraph gives the impression that atheists are so fed up with the state of things that they reject any attempt to make the world a better place. Sort of like, maybe, they lack the motivation that religious people get from their religious community or their belief in a higher power.
But why does it have to be like that? I’ve heard descriptions here and elsewhere of the beauty people find in the universe without any reference to the supernatural, and of faith in the power of the human spirit to do great things that could be just as inspiring to atheists/agnostics as theology is to the religious, without some of their over-the-top conservative leanings… But I’m rapidly becoming a hypocrite so I think I’ll stop there.
With no afterlife, there is no reward for giving $200 to charity other than a warm fuzzy feeling–if that–and a very small improvement in the overall wellbeing of society.
don’t forget the tax write off!
(well, provided one gives a bit more than just a couple hundred, anyway)
raven #4: Glad you said it. That’s an aspect I can certainly agree with. (I’ve noted a very similar scenario to the one you describe).
Bill Dauphin #9: Yes, a “slightly different” yet equally agreeable aspect.
Evan #19: Yes, yet another aspect that fits well into the big picture.
PZ said, “I’ll clarify: I don’t think these people are messed up because of religion. I think they’d be messed up if they were atheists, too. But what we can clearly see is that religion doesn’t help, and may in some cases make a problem worse. Religion, far from being a force for morality in the world, is a mask that promotes the appearance of normality while allow[ing] some truly wretched ideas to fester beneath.”
Seems to me all of the above mild “disagreements” are quite adequately accounted for in this statement.
The last two sentences (but for the opening “but”) should be honored with a place in PZ’s magnificent quotations archive.
In other words, if one is emotionally unstable (for any reason) to begin with, religion doesn’t help or makes matters worse.
I would just add to this train of thought that ALL of us in childhood begin in an emotionally undeveloped (unstable) state, where its okay to take irrational thinking seriously, as a child will nominally (and properly) entertain fantasies as part of play-behavior seriously. Religion simply sustains the instability and makes a murk out of the necessity to establish what is serious in adulthood. Its always been a way to hold on to the blissful innocence we all go through in childhood.
Of course, it gets a great deal more sinister as soon as power-brokering adults exploit everyone’s innate tendency to recapture the innocence of their childhood.
The question of “what causes what” in this regard, as in so many other similarly complex circumstances, is rather simplistic.
Intense Roman Catholicism and rabid, paranoid anti-Communism go hand in hand, round the globe. The Inquisition didn’t go away, it just changed venues.
stnemmoc #14 reports, “According to the Barna Group (who might be a questionable source), atheists and agnostics donate less than 1/7 the amount of money to charities than active churchgoers do, are less likely to be registered to vote, and are less likely to volunteer and be active in their community.”
Well, according to what you report, that could mean that atheists and agnostics are better contributors than churchgoers are, considering that the latter outnumber the former in this society by a factor of better than 7:1.
JJR says, “The Inquisition didn’t go away, it just changed venues.”
Neither did the mob…
Let’s refrain from excessive praise of atheists’ compassion, please.
Isn’t it rather revealing that we have here over two dozen comments on the religious side of this story, and zero about the years of torture and police state oppression in Argentina (aided by US policy, arms & other subsidies), in which Von Wernich and his organization were relatively minor players?
“Well, according to what you report, that could mean that atheists and agnostics are better contributors than churchgoers are, considering that the latter outnumber the former in this society by a factor of better than 7:1.”
I see that I forgot to mention the survey was referring to the average for individual donations, not the totals for each group. Anyway, the point still remains and my mistake doesn’t make any difference in that.