Standing in line to swap fluids and disease by swilling from the same cup was going to get someone in trouble, eventually — and now it’s happened. Catholics in New York have been exposed to hepatitis A through sharing Jesus’ blood.
All the practitioners have been asked to get tested and vaccinated right away.
There is no word on who broke the ugly news to Jesus, but you just know that guy is like a major vector for all kinds of nastiness, so he’s probably used to it by now.
The CNN Belief Blog continues to blaze a vapid trail of inanity through the wilderness of insanity called religion. They have just published 11 faith-based predictions for 2011. Why? I don’t know.
To open 2011, CNN’s Belief Blog asked 10 religious leaders and experts – plus one secular humanist – to make a faith-based prediction about the year ahead.
Have a faithy prediction of your own? Share it in comments.
Here’s what those in the know are predicting:
Wait, what? “Those in the know”? Don’t they mean “those who don’t know, but believe really, really hard”?
What follows is a lot of empty noise and wishful thinking. Some of it is pretty funny, though, like the first prediction:
With the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” there will be a more concerted effort by the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered community for gay marriage, uniting conservative evangelicals, Roman Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox Jews in a much more civil but principled resistance. Respectful debate will produce more precise and pluralistic solutions.
-Dr. Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, a Church Distributed, in Orlando, Florida
Clearly, Mr Hunter is not a member of the evidence-based community, because if history is any guide, a political decision promoting greater tolerance will be followed by more shrill, lunatic posturing for extremist positions by the rabid religious right.
The rest are just as self-serving and unfounded — I really don’t know why they bothered. I guess CNN is just following the money like the tabloids do; they might as well throw in an article that asks a bunch of famous psychics to make predictions for 2011. It’s all the same.
The British government has been getting a bit mother-henish lately, arresting people for cruelty to religious texts, and clearly has it in mind to provide special legal protection for a certain class of books. My first thought would be that that is insane, books are mere objects that are easily replicable, and providing for a special privilege that we don’t also grant doorknobs or transistor radios or light bulbs is absurd. But a man named Eugenio has a better idea: we need to leap on the sacred book bandwagon.
I am therefore writing to you today to request that legal protection be accorded to all copies of the three editions of J.D. Jackson’s “Classical Electrodynamics” (ISBN 978-0471431329, ISBN 978-0471309321, ISBN 047130932X).
I believe it ticks all the boxes for a sacred text: by making me understand for the first time in all their clarity and power both Maxwell’s equations, the first step towards a Grand Unification theory that would give a single explanation for all physical phenomena in the universe, and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which let me glimpse for the first time the true nature of space, time and causality, it changed my view of the universe and my concept of our place and role in it; it opened my eyes to the beauty and harmony and marvelous complexity of everything that exists; it gave me a clear and understandable explanation of complex and baffling phenomena; it requires lengthy and intensive study under the guidance of learned masters to truly grasp its significance; I tend to swear on it when I need to prove my absolute sincerity and my cat is not around; finally, seeing it defaced, burnt, thrown in a skip, pulped or in any way damaged causes me emotional pain and occasional mild irritation.
I realise it appears to fail the test in important areas – for example, it seems to contain far less made-up stuff than, say, the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon or Dianetics; but in fact, if you look at the exercises section, you’ll find plenty of perfect conductors, infinite planes, and continuous (in the mathematical sense) physical phenomena and bodies. All demonstrably imaginary, as any first-year physics student could easily prove. So in fact there is plenty of made-up stuff, it’s just well hidden, which should make it a better-than-average sacred text.
One thing though might be construed as a flaw – the fact that nowhere in the book, not even in the pre-New Age, 1962 first edition, there is a call to genocide, ethnic cleansing, war or mass rape. In spite of the fact that the title itself refers to classical electrodynamics, there isn’t even a call for the extermination of quantum physicists – something I tended to consider a major oversight in my last year at university, to be completely honest. I’m not sure this will be enough to disqualify it from the status of sacred text, if that should be the case perhaps we could add an appendix with Richard Feynman’s autobiography, which at least contains reference to a couple of punch-ups, as a sort of Saint Dick the Divine’s Apocalypse – although he wasn’t nearly high enough to be compared to the author of the original one, not even in the bit where he tells about Brazil and the bongos.
Although I blew up a considerable number of electrolytic capacitors during lab courses (I tended to get the polarities mixed up with annoying regularity) I haven’t caused any intentional explosive damage to anything/anyone since my mother threw away my chemistry set when I was 12 (and even then, the Kitchen Table Incident was at least partly an accident); therefore, alas, I cannot threaten you with an onslaught of terror, violence and murder in case you should not accede to my request, but I’ll be severely annoyed and possibly even a bit snappy if The Book does not receive the full protection of the law. After all, what matters is how I feel about it, not the actual fact that it is God-, Allah-, Xenu- or Flying Spaghetti Monster-inspired, and I feel very strongly about this.
I am not a physicist, but I’ve read enough of James Clerk Maxwell to be humbled before his obvious holiness, and agree that his works deserve the same or greater protection that we would give to frauds and poseurs like Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed. They never unified electromagnetism; they never even got off their butts long enough to ask the question, “Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”
Let’s not stop with Maxwell, either. Give me a minute, I’ll make a list.
It makes me want to give her a big smile and a hug and whisk her off to get psychological counseling.
Lawrence Murphy was an evil man. He was a Wisconsin priest who molested over 200 boys, and just to make the story particularly deplorable, they were deaf children. Preying on the weakest and most vulnerable was apparently his life’s mission. Furthermore, this was the scandalous case that was reported directly to then Cardinal Ratzinger in his role as the Vatican enforcer; his enforcement involved shuffling the guilty around to hide their crimes and give them fresh opportunities in new hunting grounds.
Well, the Vatican has finally found it in its black (but gold-plated!) and shriveled husk of a heart to do something for Wisconsin: they’ve blessed a ghost sighting as genuine. Woo hoo! That’ll fix everything right up!
The church has declared that a sighting in 1859 of a blond Mary hovering between two trees was real and worthy, and the local Catholic church is now busily expanding their parking lot to cope with the expected influx of gullible suckers pilgrims who will flock to the site to imagine a floating cheerleader for Jesus.
It’s a funny story, too. A Belgian immigrant, Adele, claimed to see this:
As they approached the hallowed spot, Adele could see the beautiful lady, clothed in dazzling white, with a yellow sash around her waist. Her dress fell to her feet in graceful folds. She had a crown of stars around her head, and her long, golden, wavy hair fell loosely around her shoulders. Such a heavenly light shone around her that Adele could hardly look back at her sweet face.
You know what really made it miraculous? Adele was accompanied by two other women, who couldn’t see or hear the floating lady.
” ‘Adele, who is it?” said one of the women. ‘O why can’t we see her as you do?’ said another weeping.
” ‘Kneel,’ said Adele, ‘the Lady says she is the Queen of Heaven.’ Our Blessed Lady turned, looked kindly at them, and said, ‘Blessed are they that believe without seeing. What are you doing here in idleness…while your companions are working in the vineyard of my Son?'”
That settles it. It must have been a magical manifestation if it was invisible. Invisible and blond, just like I always imagined a Middle Eastern Semitic peasant woman. And the statement that you’re blessed if you believe without seeing is pitch-perfect Catholicism.
Another funny thing is that the priests are obviously uncomfortably aware that this all sounds like rather convenient timing.
Catholic leaders described the decree in Wisconsin as a bolt of joy at a trying time for the Catholic church, which is troubled by revelations of sex abuse.
“This is a gift to the believers,” said the Rev. Johann Roten, director of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton.
“It would be devious to say that this was somehow pulled out of the attic to exorcise the problems of the church today,” Father Roten said in a telephone interview. “But hopefully this will have a beneficial impact on the people, showing them that there are ways of living with faith that are very pure.”
Yeah, how?
Never mind that! We’ve got child-raping priests! This calls for an immediate distraction in the form of invisible blond women, bugger the blatant nature of the ploy, and pass out the platitudes!
The Pope had a Christmas message for the world this year: we should forgive Catholic priests for raping children because everyone else was doing it. He invented a peculiar history that bears no resemblance to the late 20th century I lived in.
“In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.
“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than’. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”
The Pope said abuse revelations in 2010 reached “an unimaginable dimension” which brought “humiliation” on the Church.
I grew up in the 1970s. Some of you did, too. Does anyone remember anyone influential saying that child-rape was a reasonable practice? How about anyone on the fringe making vague suggestions that children can give permission to participate in sexual activity? I don’t know of any substantial culture at that time that would have endorsed such a thing; NAMBLA was little more than a freakish collection of perverts who got far more attention than their numbers warranted. If there was anything that was universally reviled, it was the creepy pedophile.
So here’s the Pope pretending that they were living in an environment that somehow condoned child abuse, so the priesthood somehow went along with it? Madness.
I also am not impressed by his regret that the church was humiliated. That’s not an appropriate response at all: church members were the perpetrators of the crime, and the Pope still can’t seem to empathize with the victims…you know, the kids. They always seem to get forgotten when the pontiff pontificates on the abuses of his church.
The other night, I saw this ghastly little documentary called Hell House, about fundagelical nutcases who put on these elaborate morality plays around Halloween, to scare people into Christianity. They have this same moral blindness. I was struck by all the horrible little scenarios they put on: woman goes to rave, is given date-rape drug and is raped; woman gets pregnant, has abortion, bleeds to death; etc., etc., etc. In every case I was struck by the fact that it is the victim who suffers and is abused and dies, and who is then sent to hell for eternal punishment because she doesn’t believe in Jesus. I was expecting in these cases to see them end in an orgy of punishment for the drug-dealer, the rapist, the abortionist (all played by men, by the way), but no…they all get forgotten in the denouement, their behavior isn’t damned, it’s all about the victim being punished for her victimization. That’s religion for you.
Anyway, after listening to this ethical rapscallion invent fantasy stories to justify the abuse of innocents, the BBC, in a fit of moral blindness themselves, offered him a radio spot to blather on some more. What were they thinking? The good news, though, is that he didn’t flaunt his moral turpitude this time. Instead, he highlighted the intellectual vacuity of the church, by talking about the nonsense of their beliefs.
He added that God “often surprises us” in the way he fulfils his promises.
“The child that was born in Bethlehem did indeed bring liberation, but not only for the people of that time and place — he was to be the saviour of all people throughout the world and throughout history.”
It was not a political liberation, achieved through military means, he added, but rather “Christ destroyed death for ever and restored life by means of his shameful death on the cross”.
I just wish people could see through the platitudes and realize that these oft-repeated claims make no freakin’ sense. A guy getting killed 2000 years ago did not end death, you may have noticed, a shameful death is not turned into a point of pride by waving corpses-on-a-stick in our faces, and Christianity has been an agent of ignorance and servility for millennia now, never a cause for liberation.
Shame on the BBC for giving this flabby-brained antique a megaphone and a spot on the airwaves.
Tim Moyle (I will not call him “Father”; I have a lot of respect for my father, none of it transfers to the clergy) wonders why atheists are so grumpy, and offers some explanations. He apparently does not know any atheists and is completely lacking in self-awareness, so his arguments don’t hold up very well.
Why is it that so many in the atheist community cannot bring themselves to get past their anger whenever they engage in discussion about religion? The language of many of atheist contributions in public debate is laced with venom and dripping with sarcasm.
Well, actually, when I consider religion, I feel two moods: either anger or hilarity. The reason we tend to feel that way is because religion is so damned ridiculous, full of crazy doctrines and absurd assumptions, and yet people believe in it so fervently. Look at Moyle’s version of Christianity: it’s an ornate death cult that makes up stories about an afterlife to justify servility in this one, and its major premises are that we’re all evil because an imaginary distant ancestor listened to a talking snake rather than god, we’re all damned, and the only way we can rescue ourselves from an eternity of sadistic punishments from our benign deity is to believe without doubt in a magic Jewish carpenter who was nailed to a stick and came back to life.
That makes no sense. It’s stupid. It’s funny, because it is so crazy.
But it’s also infuriating, because people are indoctrinated into this myth from an early age, they are closed-minded to any objections to the absurdity of the belief, and it sucks away time and resources from our culture that could be more productively invested in something useful and true. And, oh, yeah, it ruins people’s lives.
The explanation for why atheists are often exasperated is that simple: people believe in something that isn’t true. Worse, it’s not just false, it’s stupidly false. We’re people to whom the truth matters.
Moyle is incapable of seeing that, though. Instead, he makes excuses for his faith.
We speak not to the culture of death that grips our world but rather for the culture of life and light that ends with the gift of eternal life.
Sorry, no, Catholicism is a death cult and he just confirmed it. That “eternal life” they’re always talking about? We call it “being dead”. Religion invented this marvelous euphemism for death in which they refer to it as being alive in heaven (or hell), but really, it’s still just dead. To an atheist, death isn’t something to be celebrated but to be avoided, and dressing it up in silly stories about paradise doesn’t help.
Why are believers so confident? It’s because even though we have suffered the wounds of sin from various clergy, we know that they not the totality of our experience. There have been times when we stood as a paragon of grace for believers. Even today there are times when the voice of the Church has truly spoken to the core of many, moments when the transcendent presence of God is visible despite our sinfulness and brokenness for anyone who has both the eyes and heart to see it.
Who else read that question and the first answer that popped into your head was “Dunning-Kruger”?
I’ve never seen a priest stand as a paragon of grace, and it’s telling that Moyle assumes that role. I’ve found that human beings are capable of grace and goodness, and they don’t need to be propped up by mystical ju-ju to do good — and in fact it detracts from virtue when it has to be cajoled into existence with promises of rewards or retribution in an imaginary afterlife.
Besides, some priest getting a holy tingle is not sufficient compensation for one raped child.
Atheists tend to see the state of their personal world as being limited to the best they can achieve. Life’s injustices will never ultimately be surmounted and they are limited to a ‘what you see is what you get’ assessment of life’s trials. Believers know that things will be better. They know that following the teachings of the church can bring them closer to that promised ideal in the here and now, and that any justice denied them by the events of their personal lives as a result of their fidelity to God will be theirs to enjoy in the life to come.
Wait. Limited…to the best we can achieve? So to a Catholic, the best we can achieve is inadequate and futile, and we need the assistance of some invisible cosmic spook to achieve justice? This guy has everything backwards. That makes the Christian perspective the one that is limiting and futile, because when I look at all we can do and all the potential of future knowledge, I find myself far more uplifted than any reassuring lies from the church can ever accomplish.
And once again, “life to come” is a euphemism for “death”. Moyle is basically saying he believes we’ll find justice in our death, which is a rather grim sentiment when you see through their fabrications.
See what I mean? Death cult. Belittling human accomplishments and celebrating an imaginary life for corpses — is it any wonder we can’t decide whether to laugh or rage at these antic ghouls?
St Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Arizona was a Catholic-affiliated institution, and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix has just made a major strategic error: they have stripped the hospital of its affiliation.
There are two reasons this was a bad idea for the church. One is that it exposes them as callous, evil bastards who don’t care for their patients as much as they do their invisible, nonexistent souls. The reason the church took this action is that doctors there performed an emergency abortion on a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant and dying. The choice was to stand by and do nothing while watching the mother and fetus die, or abort and treat woman and let her live. The Catholic Church believes the doctors should have taken no action and allowed her to die.
The second big mistake is that the fraud of the Catholic hospital charade stands exposed. This was an incredibly revealing statement:
St. Joseph’s does not receive direct funding from the church, but in addition to losing its Catholic endorsement, the 697-bed hospital will no longer be able to celebrate Mass and must remove the Blessed Sacrament from its chapel.
In other words, the Catholic church has benefited from the association with an actual house of healing, while providing nothing but magic crackers and the recommendation of local priests.
No loss. If that’s all the saint’s name tagged onto a hospital provides, they’re all better off leaving that nonsense behind.
Soon, it will be the end of the year. Soon, all those various forms will come trickling into your mailbox, telling you how much money you earned. Soon, you will have to fill out a whole bunch of other forms and pay out your share to the state and federal government. For most of us, it’s a big bite, but if only we were ministers of the lord, it wouldn’t hurt so much.
Read this summary from a tax preparer who did a local priests taxes, and feel your wallet cringe.
The minister gets paid from his church, from which he received cash of $105,000 in 2009. He received a W-2 with wages of $40,000 and a “housing allowance” of $65,000. First, ministers, along with other state workers, are allowed to elect out of social security and Medicare. By electing out, they don’t have to pay into the programs and they don’t ever get to draw from the programs either.
Next, of his housing allowance of $65,000, he only has to recognize as income the portion that he did not spend on ANYTHING related to his house. So, he can essentially deduct mortgage interest, mortgage principal, taxes, utilities, HOA fees, insurance, furniture, appliances, silverware, napkins, gardeners, soap, towels, etc, etc, etc from his income. Normal people can only deduct their interest and property taxes. So, after all of his expenses, he only had to recognize about $9,000 of his housing allowance as income, for a total income of $49,000 ($40,000 in wages and $9,000 of excess housing allowance).
Next, even though he already deducted all of his housing expenses, including interest and property taxes, he still gets to use Schedule A like everyone else. So he is able to deduct his mortgage interest and property taxes again. (Technically, the first time was just an exclusion from income, so he’s not getting double deductions. But essentially he is. The end result is a double deduction).
Final tax bill for Mr Holy-Come-to-Jesus: $740, on an income of $105,000. Final bill for a secular citizen of equal financial status: $18,826.
So the US subsidizes the rich and the pious. Does anyone else see something wrong here?
Also, here’s the kicker:
To top it off, he wrote a letter to our firm asking for a discounted preparation fee because he is a minister of humble means. It made me sick to my stomach.
