This is a video by an apostate: an atheist who has left the flock and become a believer. I was all ready to point a gnarled bony finger at him and screech to my minions that he must be rent limb from limb, but then I made the mistake of listening further…and he actually makes a good case.
I’m thinking, though, that if I get sick this year and don’t recover, then I’ll be able to mock and laugh at him again. Briefly. From my deathbed.
Lose all faith in Catholicism, please. If you haven’t already, this story should help you on your way. If that’s not enough, perhaps Cuttlefish’s poem will persuade you.
To summarize: A Franciscan priest uses his office to seduce multiple women. He lives with at least one of them as husband in all but official name, and gets her pregnant (which he suggests ending with an abortion; she refuses), and has a son. He then scampers off and leaves both. The woman rattles the cage of the Catholic church and gets child support…as long as she signs a confidentiality agreement and promises to never mention the matter publicly. Now in her later years, she has cancer, and even worse, her son has cancer, and where’s good ol’ Father Willenborg? In a new diocese, acting as if it had never happened.
A few amoral, irresponsible individuals don’t ruin the reputation of an organization — they’re everywhere, even among atheists — but what does indict the church is their response to bad behavior. It’s the cover-up, stupid. It’s not just the demand for confidentiality, but that they continue to enable their sleazy playboy priest to go about his seductions with only an occasional finger-wag.
Clergy members of many faiths have crossed the line with women and had children out of wedlock. But the problem is particularly fraught for the Catholic Church, as Catholics in many countries are increasingly questioning the celibacy requirement for priests. Ms. Bond’s case offers a rare look at how the church goes to great lengths to silence these women, to avoid large settlements and to keep the priests in active ministry. She has 23 years of documents, depositions, correspondence, receipts and photographs relating to her case, which she has kept in meticulous files.
Those files reveal that the church was tightfisted with her as she tried to care for her son, particularly as his cancer treatments grew more costly. But they also show that Father Willenborg suffered virtually no punishment, continuing to serve in a variety of church posts.
And then there are the statistics.
A landmark study in 1990 by the scholar A. W. Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine, found that 20 percent of Catholic priests were involved in continuing sexual relationships with women, and an additional 8 percent to 10 percent had occasional heterosexual relationships.
I actually have some sympathy for the priests here: celibacy is an aberration for most people, and for the church to demand it is bound to induce or attract pathological individuals. But if they’re going to insist on it as a matter of dogma, at least be consistent and boot out priests that violate their doctrine; they’re obviously not suited for the job.
But I have no sympathy at all for Willenborg. He is a father — a literal father, more than the fake title he’s given as a priest — and that means he has certain moral responsibilities. Yet he ignores them, and thinks that having his religious order grudgingly sending an allowance fulfills his obligations to a very sick son.
Why would anyone expect him to tend to his duties to his religious flock if he is so aloof to his own true child?
Americans have to own up to a little bit of an inferiority complex in one thing: our accents. If you watch TV at all, you know that whenever a documentary wants its viewers to be impressed with the erudition of the narrator, it’s got to have a British accent — it sounds so posh and educated and aristocratic, you know.
I have a cure.
Watch the videos below. These are direct recordings from the exhibits in a creation museum in the UK, and you get to hear those lovely British voices reciting the most godawful drivel, the most cliched creationist nonsense, the most ridiculous lies, and I guarantee you that after 20 minutes of that, those round vowels and gentle ‘r’s will sound to your ears like the braying nasalities of an episode of Hee Haw.
Oh, and you will realize that English creationists are just as stupid, if not more so, than their American counterparts.
I shouldn’t pick on Hee Haw, though. The most beautiful accents in America are from the South — just listen to Shelby Foote sometime. There are good things that come out of Mississippi, even.
Sorry, there’s another piece there that really irritated me. Maher reads the data selectively: he quotes the CDC’s list of possible contaminants of vaccines, like aluminum, insect repellant, formaldehyde, etc. But that is simple honesty in advertising! Everything you put in your body contains at least some trace amounts of environmental contaminants; if you freak out over the fact that insects have crawled over the organic and chemical components of food and drug manufacture, don’t look at the FDA description of what you might find in a jar of peanut butter. And especially don’t look at the crap that you’ll find in the unregulated herbal and organic nutritional supplements that Maher probably considers just wonderful.
So Maher just looks at a tiny piece of the detailed information that the CDC presents about the vaccine. He must think they’re some kind of sophisticated authority on this matter, or why doesn’t he simply dismiss everything that the CDC says because they’re pawns of Big Pharma?
Here’s a suggestion. Read the CDC’s recommendations and explanations of the swine flu and its vaccine. Read the whole thing. That’s where you’ll find the settled medical science, with overall results and recommendations, and reasonable discussions of the reservations. Maher is not an informed source at all. He’s bought into quackery and is searching for rationalizations.
Orac is breathing fire over this, as expected. He points out that Maher’s litany of ingredients isn’t just from the CDC’s list, but also comes from another site: that lunatic radio personality, Jeff Rense.
Once again, Maher sticks his foot in his mouth and gnaws on it for a while.
The most telling moment for me was when he compares vaccination to global warming and evolution; global warming and evolution, he says, are settled science (which is correct), but vaccination is not. That is not correct. Vaccination works. It’s been tested and measured and analyzed, and vaccinations save lives. It has been settled, repeatedly.
Michael Shermer has commented on RichardDawkins.net on this issue, too. Maybe someday it will sink in.
I have to give the Baptist Standard some credit — they actually have a good article that debunks common stereotypes and myths about atheists, and chides people for falling for patently bogus rumors. At the same time, though, they ask a question that made me laugh:
From the old Procter & Gamble Satanism libel to tales of more recent vintage about President Obama’s faith and citizenship, Internet-fueled rumors seem to run rampant. And, frighteningly, Christians seem at the very least to be as susceptible as the population at large to spread false stories.
So, why are Christians so willing to believe unsubstantiated rumors? And more troubling, why are Christians, who should hold the highest standards of truth-telling, so eager to spread rumors—and even downright libels?
There is nothing in Christian history to suggest that they have ever felt an obligation to adhere to higher standards of truth, and…do you really have to wonder at how Christians could grow up to believe silly stories? Hello, zombie Jesus? Hi there, talking snake? Hey, Virgin Mary in a bird poop stain!
Lying in the wheelbarrow is the body of Dorothy, a chimpanzee who died suddenly of natural causes; the people in the scene are preparing to bury her. Behind the fence is a quiet gathering of her friends.
It makes me wish I could have a conversation with a chimpanzee. I wonder what they are thinking, and how close their feelings would be to those of a human family…
The commenting issues here are seriously driving me nuts. I’ve just written another letter of complaint on the Seed backchannel, which always seems to mean that it will sink into neglect once again, so I’ve decided to also post it here, publicly. I hate to air dirty laundry like this because I really, really like Seed, I respect all the people running the operation for both their goals and their willingness to work towards them, but they’ve just fallen down on the job of maintaining the basic nuts and bolts of the blogging system.
Look. Fixing the commenting system has to be a high priority.
When I turn off comment registration, I can tell you fairly precisely how big a load spam is causing: spam outnumbers regular comments two-fold right now, and I know from past experience that the longer I leave the barrier of registration off, the more spammers will pour in. I have got a LONG filter file to try and catch the worst of it, so the majority of the spam gets caught by the filters. It’s not enough. Even with filtering, between 25-30% of the comments that manage to get posted on my blog are pure spam. If I don’t clean it up, the successful spammers also detect that and flood threads with garbage. Anyone with a popular blog (and I presume Seed wants all of us to have popular blogs) knows that spam can easily overwhelm the comments section of even the biggest discussion of science on the web and turn it into a wasteland. I have to monitor every single comment that gets posted and cut out the trash. Manually. Do you know how many comments I get? It’s driving me insane.
The alternative is to turn on comment registration. Currently, that technology is perfectly adequate to obliterate 99.9% of the spam. It made my life so much easier — I could ignore comments for days without worry, the only spam that made it through was the occasional hand-crafted variety rather than the usual machine-generated jackhammer of repetition, it was sweet. I want it on all the time.
Except that our FUCKING BUGGY IMPLEMENTATION doesn’t work for half or more of my readers. It is inconsistent and flaky and hard to use. It’s not because these readers are stupid and incapable of working with technology, either; sometimes it bugs out on me and I can’t comment either. I’ve had to resort to maintaining a direct html link to the typepad registration system that bypasses the crappy MT interface to get it to work reliably. This is ridiculous. It is intolerable. We have a solution available with the existing software, and it is so badly mucked up that it is unusable. Seriously, if I were running my blog on my own server and had access to the guts of the software, I would have sat down with it a year ago and patched up something that worked reliably and simply. I could have even stuck in a simple captcha system which, although some spammers are doing a good job of circumventing that nowadays, would still have reduced the spam problem by an order of magnitude. And I’M NOT A SOFTWARE TECH PERSON. I’m just a casual geek.
What the hell is wrong with Seed that they can’t fix this long-pending, serious problem?
I just turned off comment registration this weekend so the people blocked by our absurdly buggy system can have a voice for a little while. I’m seeing a lot of expressions of gratitude because they are so pleased to finally get a chance to say something. That’s what I want, for people to be able to freely converse. Unfortunately, it also means I’ve got a weekend of annoyances to deal with, because I’m going to have to constantly watchdog the comments section again (in just the time it takes me to type this, 6 more spam comments appeared). I can’t do this anymore. It’s going to drive me crazy.
That means I’m going to switch registration back on on Monday — I have no choice. And once again, there will be howls of protest from my readers who are being driven crazy by our buggy software, and even worse, there will be a lot of unhappy readers who won’t be able to protest because they’ll be silenced. Unfortunately, since I am a godless tyrant, when the choice is between me going crazy and many thousands of readers going crazy, I get to win and impose my will on everyone else. We are talking about seriously unhappy readers, OK? That should matter!
Fix it now, please. There is no excuse for this kind of incompetence.
Ah, this is going to be painfully dreary. Why do I let myself get dragged into these podium battles with kooks? I’m committed, anyway. Come on out to the UMTC next month for a game of kick-the-puppy. I’m going to be coming down off a real high that weekend, the IGERT symposium on evo-devo, where I’m actually going to learn something, and the next day I have to stand up with these clowns. Do me a favor and show up to ask some leading questions about science in the Q&A so I can talk about some interesting stuff.
This is the ad copy from the Twin Cities Creation Science Association. They’re very happy. Their young-earth crackpot is going to share the stage with me.
Monday, November 16, 2009, 7:30 – 9:00 pm
Debate: Dr. P.Z. Myers vs. Dr. Jerry Bergman
“Should Intelligent Design Be Taught In The Schools?”
University of Minnesota, St Paul Campus
North Star Ballroom, St. Paul Student Center
(Buford Ave. near Cleveland Ave. St Paul Campus)
For a More information and a map, Go To www.tccsa.tcTwo Heavyweights Battle on Huge Topic
P.Z. Meyers has stated that teachers who accept intelligent design are pseudo-scientists who should be fired and publicly humiliated. Jerry Bergman was denied tenure and subjected to a hostile work environment at Bowling Green University for his beliefs, despite being the most productive member of his department and most popular teacher.
Dr. Myers website, www.scienceblogs.com/pharyngula, is a focal point for those who oppose intelligent design theory. Dr. Bergman has written Slaughter of the Dissidents: The Shocking Truth About Killing The Careers Of Darwin Doubters, detailing the way Dr. Myers’ vision is actually
being carried out.Is it logical to do so? Is it science? Is it education? Is it right? Come and hear. Then decide for yourselves.
Dr. Myers is an evolutionist and teaches at University of Minnesota Morris
Dr. Bergman is an intelligent design advocate who teaches at Northwest State College in Ohio.
The event is co-sponsored by Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists (CASH) http://cashumn.org
and Christian Student Fellowship (CSF) www.csf.net
at the University of Minnesota.
If we’re heavyweights, how come they still can’t spell my name consistently correctly?
I will be amused to learn how my agents have been carrying out my vision of slaughter and killing. They’ve been a little thin on details in their reports, so maybe Bergman will have some photos or something. Blood spatter? Broken machetes?
I also will be interested in meeting this academic paragon — did you know he has nine degrees? I’d feel outclassed numerically, except that his reliance on how many degree programs he shuffled through, the strangely unrelated fields they are in, the rather shady status of the institution that granted him a Ph.D., as well as the peculiar fact that he always leaves one little word out of his affiliation at Northwest State Community College (come on, there’s absolutely no shame in that — smart people go to and work at community colleges all over the country. Be proud. The Trophy Wife has an AA degree from a fine community college herself, and it’s eminently respectable) makes me think he’s really trying to compensate for something.
Wow, a whole month to go and I’ve already got my game face on and am sharpening up the knives. It might be fun, after all, as long as I go into it with the right attitude.
I really hate the buggy comment registration system here, and I know you do, too. However, it’s also been a huge help to me — the thousands of spam comments that were flooding in every day were throttled way back.
So I’m going to try something. The registration requirement is off, temporarily, just to let those people held back by the bugs get a word in for a while. It’s going back on on Monday, though (or sooner if the spam load becomes intolerable), simply because it eats up too much of my time if it’s not. So get your words in now.
