Priests and their evil ways

It’s odd, but several of the major sex abuse cases involving the Catholic church involve deaf kids. I didn’t understand why, until I heard this song. And now I have to get some q-tips and sulfuric acid and scrub out my ears.

For a not-quite-so entertaining story, read this account of Father Oliver O’Grady, a despicable monster who committed all kinds of depravities.

O’Grady has admitted abusing many children of various ages, boys and girls, and said he slept with two mothers to get access to their children. He was convicted of child sexual abuse in 1993 and spent seven years in prison.

Now here’s where the Catholic church simply doesn’t get it. The few priests who didn’t like this fellow, who wanted to get rid of him, are making excuses for their inaction even after his criminal conviction. It was too hard to defrock a priest, they say, it took a long time and lots of paperwork, and there was no guarantee the process would even come to a successful conclusion, which says to me that there are some serious problems of the institution of the church, and that maybe they should be working on fixing it so the kind of moral turpitude involved in molesting five year old girls would be sufficient grounds to swiftly eject someone from the priesthood. But no! Institutional change in the church is not a goal to which they aspire.

But still, they didn’t like having O’Grady around: he smelled bad to the press, and he probably spooked off some of the less gullible marks in the pews. They had to get rid of him, but simply finding him morally unfit does not get you out of the priesthood. So what to do?

They bought him off. They got him to voluntarily leave the priesthood for the price of a monthly annuity for his retirement. It wasn’t a lot — $788 a month — but there’s a principle involved. Father O’Grady raped small children for 17 years, was convicted of his crimes by a secular court, but the Catholic Church is paying him money. And they don’t see the problem with that.

“Yes, he did a terrible thing,” Doerr [associate director of the office of Child and Youth Protection for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops] said, but a bishop has a responsibility to take care of priests in any case — he can’t just kick them to the curb.

I guess the Bishop didn’t see his responsibilities to the innocent church-goers of O’Grady’s diocese as very important; they can be kicked to the curb. Once a priest, always a priest, though, and no heinous crime against children is sufficient to warrant stopping the payment of hush money.

I get email

I mentioned earlier this week that sometimes I get positive email, and that it actually outnumbers the outright hostile hate mail. But both classes are greatly outnumbered by the most common kind of email I get, the cranks and crazies. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce Woolsey, Stephen D Mr CIV USA — a perfectly representative exemplar of the crap clogging my in-box.

Yes, he’s posting from an army.mil email address, which may account for some of the strange stuff inserted in the text, but not all of it.

[Read more…]

In which I have to defend Morgan Freeman

People were apparently rather peeved about Morgan Freeman’s appearance on the Daily Show on Wednesday night (that link is to the whole episode; Freeman appears at about 15 minutes in). He’s narrating a new science show that, in the clip shown, seems to be mainly about physics and cosmology. After talking a bit about the show, they get down to the problematic bit: Stewart asks if scientists know what happened at the beginning of the universe, and Freeman basically says they don’t; that there are different scientists with different ideas, some contentiousness, and some outright ignorance about the details.

This is not offensive. That’s the truth. I hope no one was bothered by that.

I get the sense that what did bother people, though, was that Stewart pressed a bit and asked Freeman what scientists tell him when faced with stuff they don’t know, and here’s how Freeman replied:

Whatever scientists don’t know becomes the god factor.

Again, Freeman is right! This is what happens so often: there are many things we don’t understand, and some people, even some distinguished scientists, are prone to look at the gaps in our knowledge and announce that that is where god lurks. It’s the standard ‘god of the gaps’ logic, and it’s bogus, but it really does happen and there are a lot of scientists who indulge in it. Look at Einstein, who was constantly flinging out god references for all the mysteries of the universe, despite the fact that he was an unbeliever himself.

Now it’s a short clip, a seven minute interview, and of course they don’t get into meanings and implications at all, so Freeman’s interpretation is completely ambiguous. If he’s trying to say our ignorance is evidence for a god, then he’s full of it and we can point and laugh at the movie star floundering out of his depth…but he didn’t say that at all. In the context, I took it as more of an admission that there is still a lot of god of the gaps thinking even in the scientific community, and that’s entirely true.

So don’t get mad at Morgan Freeman just yet. Roll your eyes at the scientists who bleat out “God!” every time they’re baffled by something, instead. Save your scorn for the nonsense of people like Tipler and Davies and even Kaku. They’re the ones feeding mystical fluff into our perception of reality.

It’s usually not this blatant

Oleg Savca is a boy in Moldova who had a deadly brain tumor, and was expected do die, because nobody in his area knew how to treat him. His mother, Zina Savca, was reduced to hoping for a miracle from god.

Left alone, the tumor would put Oleg into a coma and ultimately kill him. What happened next Zina Savca can attribute only to divine intervention.

Yes! He has been saved! Because the Savcas sacrificed all their livestock, burning the bones wrapped in fat on an altar, and god sent angels who lofted them all into the air and carried them to a strange, magical land where devout mystics with miraculous powers hummed and prayed and waved their hands over Oleg’s head until the tumor-demon crept out, at which time Jesus himself wrestled with it and finally opened a deep pit into fiery hell, where he cast the monster. Oleg lives!

Oh, wait. That’s not quite right. The divine intervention was a little more mundane.

The Savcas’ doctor, Andrey Plesco, visited Sutter Memorial in late April on a professional exchange. He saw Ciricillo operate and realized Ciricillo could save the boy.

Yeah, the “divine intervention” was finding an American doctor who had the skills to carry out a delicate operation. They did have to sacrifice all their livestock…to raise airfare for the flight to magic miracle land, which happens to be Sacramento. I suppose you could use Clarke’s third law — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — with the Savcas as a real world example, but I’m simply not buying the divinity of Sacramento.

Monckton dissected

Christopher Monckton, that pompous know-nothing who professes to be an expert on climate change and doesn’t believe in it, gave a talk here in Minnesota last fall, at a little Christian college called Bethel University (which curiously has a biology department that manages to never once mention evolution in its curriculum, just to give you an idea of what it’s like). That talk infuriated a professor at another Christian university — but one that doesn’t try to hide away from the evidence — who has put together a rebuttal of Monckton’s claims. Would you believe that essentally all of the studies Monckton cited as supporting his claims about the nonexistence of global warming actually said the exact opposite? It was so bad it’s impressive — it’s as if you don’t have to actually read and understand research papers if you’ve convinced yourself that they say what you want them to say.

John Abraham has put together a thorough presentation on the follies of Monckton. Good stuff!

Stereotyping women right out of science

One of the most cunning tools of the patriarchy is the assignment of woo as a feminine virtue. Women are supposed to be intuitive, nurturing, accepting, and trusting, unlike those harsh and suspicious men. It’s a double-trap; women are brought up indoctrinated into believing that being smart and skeptical is unladylike and unattractive, and at the same time, anyone who dares to suggest that intuition and soothing, supportive words are often unproductive can be slammed for being anti-woman, because, obviously, to suggest that a human being might want to do more with their life than changing diapers and baking cookies is a direct assault on womanhood.

This naive imposition of unscientific modes of thought on women specifically leads to the state we have now. Assume a fundamental difference in attitude: women feel, while men think. Now declare an obvious truth: science requires rigorous thought. The conclusion follows that women will not be taking advantage of their strengths (that woo stuff) if they are trying to do science, therefore they will not be as good at science as men, and they will also be harming their femininity if they try to shoehorn their tender and passionate minds into the restrictive constraints of manly critical thinking.

I’ve seen that condescending attitude often enough; it was at its most vivid when I was working with surgeons in training, and if there were any women in a group, they would invariably be shunted off into some task like post-op animal care while the men would get the sharp scalpels and dental drills and do the hard work of cutting into the animal subjects. I once dared to ask the team I was assisting, after seeing that casually assumed division of labor, if maybe they should ask her what she wanted to do, and was told indignantly by the men that she would be so much better at taking care of sick cats, as if their concern was their inferiority at the nurturing part of the job. It’s the academic version of the wheedle, “Honey, I couldn’t possibly do housework as well as you do…”, and it’s just as phony.

Twisty Faster has the other side of this bias — it ends up portraying science as anti-woman, therefore women should embrace the woo.

The argument has been made that intuition is superior to science because it is somehow free of the oppressive misogynist entanglements that encumber its dude-dominated counterpart. A spin-off of this argument says that, because academia has traditionally given (and continues to give) women the stink-eyed bum’s rush, science is antifeminist and, presumably, must be shunned in favor of this women-centric intuition dealio.

I have to say that I really like her two answers to this view.

Science, like everything else on the planet, is Dude Nation’s minion, yes, but “intuition” doesn’t exist in a magical patriarchy-free zone merely because it is associated with women’s reality. In fact, it is because of patriarchy that women were assigned the supposedly unique and mystical power of hunchiness the first place.

Exactly. Woo is powerless; you want to make someone powerless, put them in charge of nothing, but give it a happy-sounding title. Women have been taken on a millennia-long snipe hunt. But, you know, it keeps them busy and out of the hair of the guys doing the real, important work.

Her reply to the argument that science is anti-feminist, is even better:

But the statement “science harms women” is not as accurate as is “the application, by misogynist knobs, of scientific method to systems of oppression harms women.”

The answer seems clear to me. Women shouldn’t be cornered into the realm of superstition because it is more touchy-feely, and they shouldn’t be anti-science. What they need to do is take the toys out of the hands of the misogynist knobs.