Malta mustn’t offend the Pope!

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The mayor of Malta is quite anxious to have a statue removed from a prominent place on the road from the airport, before the Pope arrives. He might be embarrassed, after all. That’s the statue on the right; it’s called “Colonna Mediterranea”, and some people fear an obelisk is too phallic. Because, like everyone, when I see a giant green monument with multi-colored patches and a series of constrictions in it, I think of my penis.

The mayor shouldn’t worry. The Pope and the Catholic Church have no shame.The statue might serve a useful purpose in reminding the Catholic entourage to get their VD shots, while also intimidated them into keeping theirs in their pants. Or frocks. Or whatever they’re wearing. And rather than worrying about offending the Pope, shouldn’t he be more concerned about the offense to Malta?

Malta has its own history of priestly pedophilia, and has received complaints about 45 priests, which is rather impressive for such a small place…but the church claims that almost half of those accusations are groundless. I think they should be more optimistic, and phrase that as over half the accusations are not groundless. Either way, the Catholic church has been waving its erections around Malta for many years, the Pope should be able to cope with one more comparatively harmless one near the airport road. It’s the one that hasn’t raped any children.

I’ve been reminded that there is an even bigger phallic symbol erected in St Peter’s Square, right where the Pope can see it and touch it any time he wants.

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Maybe Malta should feel a little inadequate and think about putting up more and bigger columns, instead.

Mr. Deity plays into the hands of Ken Ham!

You know, Ken Ham is fond of claiming that if Genesis isn’t literally true, the entire basis of Jesus’s redemption is lost — and he’s right. And look, Jesse notices!

I’m a little worried that the blame for the pointlessness of redeeming an original sin that didn’t exist is being placed on some guy named P-Zed…I’m getting new locks on the doors and a security system, I think.

Episode XLVII: Mounting numbers, and a song to their significance

There was much talk of music in the prior embodiment of the immortal thread, so I thought everyone would appreciate a special song. It’s just like having a conversation with a god-bot.

By the way, for you statistics freaks: the last thread hit the round-numbered landmark of 40,000 (nice number, makes me think of an excellent novel) comments in this linked parade of threads, with 959,854 total comments on Pharyngula, and this is the 9,999th entry I’ve posted here.

Deep Rifts with the skeptics!

It’s been a long term issue: a lot of vocal skeptics want nothing to do with atheism. They see it as a difficult issue that could sidetrack campaigns to encourage critical thinking, even though a lot of prominent skeptics are also atheists. I’ve never quite seen the logic: they’re going to oppose the use of magic crystals to enhance your aura, but praying to a magical sky-primate to bring you a new bicycle…eh, it doesn’t hurt. It seems a little inconsistent.

Anyway, Rebecca Watson, a godless skeptic if ever there was one, wrote a bit in support of the Hitchens/Dawkins proposal to bring legal action against the perfidious pope, and she caught some flak for it — people claimed that opposing religion, even if it is a baby-raping religion, could ‘harm the cause’ (Oh, those three words…I have heard them so often). Watson has a good reply.

So is this effort going to somehow hurt the “skeptical movement?” You may notice that I use the quotation marks here, because I can’t bring myself to seriously consider a movement supposedly based on the defense of rationality that would turn its back on children who are raped by men they trust because those men claim a supernatural being gives them power, wisdom, and the keys to eternal life with a direct line to God’s ear. If we discovered that a world-famous psychic was leading a secretive cabal that protected child rapists, would we be silent? If a world-famous faith healer was using his heavenly persona to molest kids, would we say that it’s not our fight? You might. I couldn’t.

I would hope, though, that it wouldn’t take molestation of children to stir up a skeptic (although, apparently, even that won’t rouse some of them, if the culprit is a priest). Shouldn’t an organization that claims you’ll go to hell after you’re dead if you don’t give them money while you’re alive also be on every skeptic’s hit list?

Another predictable excuse

The horrible evidence of a Catholic cover-up keeps piling up in these various sex abuse cases…what’s going on? Certain minds are certainly drifting towards conspiracy theories, evil attempts to bring down the church with a web of deception. And if that’s the case, who is behind it all? Isn’t it obvious? It must be…The Jews!!!

A website quoted Giacomo Babini, the emeritus bishop of Grosseto, as saying he believed a “Zionist attack” was behind the criticism, considering how “powerful and refined” the criticism is.

Unfortunately, the article is accompanied by a photo of the Pope…and this doesn’t necessarily reflect his views. It is the position of one rather cranky, old, and possibly senile priest.

Allegedly speaking to the Catholic website Pontifex, Babini, 81, was quoted as saying: “They do not want the church, they are its natural enemies. Deep down, historically speaking, the Jews are God killers.”

It’s probably also the view of Mel Gibson and a terrifying number of conservative Catholics. It’s also a position advanced by that important event in Catholic history, the Fourth Lateran Council, which also, curiously enough, established that whole celibate priests nonsense. You can trace a lot of the most horrible Catholic ideas right back to 1215, and we’re still suffering for their foolishness.

Am I to be the next enemy of the NCSE?

I’m a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I’m already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.

Uh-oh.

I am proudly and unapologetically blasphemous, and I encourage other people to join my heretical ranks all the time. If ID is blasphemous, it’s the first element of their program that I can approve of — anything that weakens the grip of faith has got something good going for it. It’s simply not a problem. It can’t even be a problem for a religious program in America — we’re a pluralist society, and everything is blasphemous to someone. The mild-mannered theistic evolutionists think ID is blasphemy, but so does Ken Ham…and Ham also thinks the theistic evolutionists are heretics, apostates, and blaspheming bastards who defile the Holy Word of God. Lutherans are blaspheming Catholics. Baptists blaspheme against the sacred doctrines of Calvin. Every time you pull out a cell phone, you’re insulting the Amish way of life, and Ron Jeremy is glad the Shakers died out. So? We can’t use and absence of blasphemy as a criterion for truth and accuracy. It’s silly to bring it up. And, as Jason points out, the same religious arguments applied against ID are equally valid when aimed at theistic evolutionists.

I’m also troubled by this whole position of Faith Project Director. Peter Hess is almost certainly a nice guy, and he’s on the side of evolution, or he wouldn’t be working at NCSE…but why is the NCSE now actively engaged in the business of promoting Faith Projects, and why do they have a professional Bible thumper to pontificate on hair-splitting matters of dogma? They’re all wrong. Having a theologian on staff to tell us that some of them are more wrong than others on matters sacerdotal, from his position which is just as shaky as everyone else’s, seems to me to be so bad that it falls into the category of not even wrong.

And then there’s the matter of this paper. It is titled, “CREATION, DESIGN AND EVOLUTION: CAN SCIENCE DISCOVER OR ELIMINATE GOD?”, and the answer Hess gives is no: “The scientific quest for the designer behind the veil of nature ultimately fails—science can neither discover nor eliminate God.”

That’s easy, then. God is irrelevant. These guys always seem to use “science” as a word demarcating a very narrow field of endeavor involving white lab coats, test tubes, and strangely colored solutions, but it isn’t. Science is simply a process for examining the world, and anyone can do it, even if you do’t have a lab coat. If something has an effect or influence, you can try to examine it using the tools of science — so when someone announces that gods cannot be detected by observation or experiment, they are saying they don’t matter and don’t do anything, which is exactly what this atheist has been saying all along.

This is the strange thing about the whole argument. When I was on my daily walk today, I was surrounded by a million mysteries: what’s in that house? How was this sidewalk made? What signaling molecules are moving through that tree to trigger new bud formation? What insect was making that odd sound? Why was my left ankle sore this morning? Were there any neutrinos whizzing through me right now? How did that boulder get on that lot? You get the idea. We’re immersed in a piece of the universe and we don’t know a lot about it, but we’re seeing these curious eruptions of natural phenomena all around us, and we can pursue them if we want.

That’s the obnoxious part of religion, and why it’s in conflict with science. Science is the world of Let’s-Find-Out, while religion is always the land of You-Can’t-Know-That. One tries to build fences around sacred domains, the other has great fun knocking them down. Go ahead, pretend that your god is safe and hidden away where scientists can’t poke at him with needles or measure his emanations with widgets that go beep or photograph his spoor and stick it in a chromatograph — we don’t care. The only way he can escape our probes is if he doesn’t exist…so the more you protest that he is absolutely indetectible, the more we nod and say, “Then you’re admitting that he isn’t even vapor.”

Denying god is yet more blasphemy, isn’t it? That’s why I’m in trouble. Of course, claiming that god has no measurable influence in the world is probably also blasphemy, which puts Peter Hess in the theological clink, too.

Mike Huckabee endorses my candidacy for the presidency

I’m a shoo-in now. Although my mind may have just blown up.

In what may come as a surprise for some, Huckabee agreed that an atheist could be fit to serve as president. “I’d rather have an honest atheist than a dishonest religious person,” he said.

Don’t worry. He didn’t mean it. He’s actually just doing some sneaky sniping at Mitt Romney. He continues with a clarification of what he really meant.

It’s better to have a person who says, ‘Look, I just don’t believe, and that’s where my honest position happens to be. I’m frankly more OK with that than a person who says, ‘Oh, I am very much a Christian. I very much love God.’ And then they live as if they are atheists, as if they have no moral groundings at all. That’s more troubling.”

I think it’s nice if a person believes in God. I’d hate to think somebody was making decisions who thought that he couldn’t be higher than himself.

See? He still equates atheism with a complete lack of moral grounding. He’s still a slimebag.