Californians, if you’re living anywhere near Berkeley, you might want to go to this: the Skeptical Conference on 24 April. They’ve got some good speakers, and it should be a fun meeting.
Just don’t believe anything they tell you unless they provide lots of evidence to back it up.
The Bishop of Tenerife has voiced the latest excuse in the Catholic pedophilia scandals, and it is a predictable one. Women have heard this claim about rape over and over again: the victim was asking for it.
His comments were that there are youngsters who want to be abused, and he compared that abuse to homosexuality, describing them both as prejudicial to society. He said that on occasions the abuse happened because the there are children who consent to it.
“There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you”, he said.
Oh, it is so hard to be a noble heterosexual man in this society, with every woman, every gay man, every child, every moist orifice, every knothole, every small animal burrow on the ground, every lemon meringue pie, every velvety wrinkle in the Pope’s cassock, all just taunting and teasing and tantalizing you, begging you to stick your penis in them. And then when you finally give in and let them have what they want, despite all your insistence that you’re doing it for their benefit, not yours, what do they do? They cry rape, or lock you up for child abuse, or the Vatican dry cleaning service sends you an extravagant bill.
It’s just so unfair!
It’s Paul Nelson Day, the yearly event in which we make ludicrous pseudo-scientific claims and promise to back them up tomorrow, as celebrated last year.
Nelson, some of you may recall, is a creationist who made up this wacky claim of “Ontogenetic Depth”, saying he had a way of objectively measuring the complexity of the developmental process in organisms with a number that described the distance from egg to adult. Unfortunately, he forgot to tell us how one calculated this number, or how it actually accounted for the complexity of a network, or even how we’d get a number that was different for a sponge and a cat. But he did say he’d get back to us with the details tomorrow…six years ago.
We’ll keep waiting. We’ll also keep making accurate predictions. Last year I predicted that we’d still be waiting in 2010, and look! We are!
I’ve put on a turban, closed my eyes, and am waving my hands over a crystal ball, and predict…we’ll still be waiting in 2011. Check back next year and let’s see if I’m right!
I thought the town was bad before, when they cancelled the high school prom because a young woman was going to bring a female date to it. But then there was a ray of hope: the school administrators changed their minds. There would be a prom after all, and Constance McMillen could bring her date! Wow! A progressive, reasonable attitude was prevailing!
Except not.
They had organized a new prom, all right…a prom just for Constance McMillen. The principal and teachers showed up to chaperone Constance, her date, and all of five other students who showed up, including two kids with learning disabilities. They basically quarantined off seven outcasts.
What about all the other kids at the high school? They got to go to a prom, too, a special one organized by the parents for just the True American™ kids. Constance wasn’t told about it, which is the amazing thing: all the kids who showed up at the alternate prom knew about it and kept it secret. That’s impressive. I remember my high school, and news like that would be all over the place.
The other kids at Itawamba Agricultural High School are really special. Special scumbags. Bigots and haters and cowards. I hope they remember that for many years afterwards, that what their school is internationally known for is that it is populated with weasely little homophobes. What a disgrace.
Hang on — it’s even worse than I thought. Jesus’ General has the scoop: the kids at that high school created a Facebook group, “Constance quit yer cryin”. Unbelievable. Here are samples of what they wrote there (they’re buried now; decent human beings discovered the page and have flooded it with comments supporting McMillen and berating the cowards who played this game*):
Mitchell Henderson: lulz rug munchers are hilarious. Come join me in hell, there’s ipods all around for dance parties. As long as you bring someone to scissor with.
Melody Carol: JAlthough, she asked and they said no, she should have just stfu and dealt with it. The school did not need to cancel the prom to shift attention from here. That’s just gay.
Brittany Kay Brown: jeremy, that’s your fault for not coming out of the closet. IAHS is not a bigoted school. This whole town is based on Christianity.
Caleb Waddle: i just wish she would shut up and quit makeing the freakin county stupid you say well its there fault but since when did the public do anything to you just shut the freak up already.
Traci Taylor: Carnathan who wants to c 2 girls makn out…especially one of them thats parents are totally against it.
I hope employers and college admissions committees find the hateful association between their names and what they say. Not that it’s much of a worry for these losers; Jiffy Lube probably doesn’t care much about their network trail, and Liberty University would probably consider bigotry an asset.
*Oops. Some of the people writing in opposition to that page are rather hateful, themselves.
Some of our stats have been released to the press today.
ScienceBlogs.com, the leading social media site in the science category, today released traffic figures for 2009 and the first quarter of 2010 (Source: Google Analytics).
Visits for the quarter ending March 31 grew by 41% year-over-year to approximately 13 million, and page views topped 25 million. Monthly unique visitors grew to 2.4 million worldwide and in the US surpassed 2 million for the first time this March.
Total visits for 2009 grew by 55% year-over-year to 45 million and average monthly unique visitors climbed 49% to 1.9 million.
ScienceBlogs.com has achieved high double-digit traffic growth (at least 50%) every year since its launch in 2006.
You will be assimilated.
I also notice that the number of comments on Pharyngula alone is around 954,000, and we’ll probably hit a million sometime early this summer.
I’ve just won an award. I hope there’s cash, or at least a gaudy trophy, to go with it.
Sorry, I’m going to have to ruin your breakfast again. The Stranger has a revealing article on pedophile priests — in particular, it focuses on the native populations of Alaska and Canada, which were used as a nice, obscure dumping ground for the very worst sexual predators the Catholic Church could provide. Small children were raped, entire villages are decimated by mental health trauma and suicides brought on by these monsters, and in one particularly appalling instance, a priest was caught raping a dying woman he was supposed to give the last rites. There’s also an interview with a former priest who was a “cleaner” (yes, he actually calls himself that), brought in to tidy up the messes these evil men brought into a community…before they got shipped off to another community.
The sheer concentration of known sex offenders in these isolated communities begins to look less like an accident than a plan. Their institutional protection looks less like an embarrassed cover-up than aiding and abetting. And the way the church has settled case after case across the country, refusing to let most of them go to trial for a public airing, is starting to look like an admission of guilt.
Here’s the reason why the church covers up for rapist priests.
Why does the church keep sending these priests, who have come to be such a major liability, back into ministry? “It’s all about keeping the stores open, keeping the revenue rolling,” Wall says. The Alaskan provinces in particular, Wall says, were a source of revenue–not from the Native population living there, but from parishioners in the lower 48 who were encouraged to donate for the Native ministry up north. “You could raise thousands to fund a mission that cost very little to run,” Wall says. “The profit margin is huge.”
The story makes 1950s Ireland look like a paradise of blissful religious sanctity. It is not for the squeamish.
If you’d rather read something a little more encouraging, read Katha Politt on priestly pedophilia. She nails the priesthood on their sanctimony and hypocrisy, and their pretense to a moral superiority that is so patently betrayed. She also mentions this surprising story:
In February, Bishop Margot Kaessmann, the first woman to head the German Protestant Church and a much-admired public figure, was caught running a red light while intoxicated. There was a lot of sympathy for her, even in the conservative media, which disagreed with her liberal and anti-war views, and she received the support of the church’s governing body. Nonetheless, within four days Kaessmann resigned, saying her moral authority had been so compromised she could no longer do right by her high office. Maybe Pope Benedict and his bishops could learn something from her example.
What? A Protestant bishop resigns for the crime of running a red light under the influence? She got a traffic ticket and felt her moral authority was compromised? I mean, that’s a bit excessive, but OK, at least she’s taking religion’s claims of morality extremely seriously.
Meanwhile, the Pope heads a Catholic office that was sheltering child-rapers, and the entire Catholic hierarchy is busily claiming the martyrdom of Christ for itself because people have started to complain about their intrusive little penises. They aren’t even trying for the moral flood plain, let alone the moral high ground. It’s more like they’re taking a dive in the Marianas Trench of turpitude while pretending to climb the Everest of propriety.
While we can’t expect the church to expire in shame, at least we should start regarding Catholicism as a Mafia-like criminal organization…and maybe our governments should stop treating with them.
Does anybody else think he ought to be wearing a filter mask? That stuff has got to be incredibly toxic.
(via Effect Measure)
For those of you in the Washington DC area, the Center for Inquiry has some events coming up. Jamie Kilstein will be performing on 21 April, and you should go — if you don’t mind rude, loud atheists. He’s also one of the heads of the Church of the Smiling Vagina (although Allison Kilkenny ought to be the Pope of the CSV, since she, like, has one).
Also coming up on the CFI slate for June 13th is Christopher Hitchens. I know I don’t need to explain who he is.
