Who is to blame for all those priests raping children?

The pope has the answer, and it’s not the priests. Can you guess whose fault it all is?

If you guessed godless secular society, you’d be right. It doesn’t count for much, though, because you know it was an easy question.

I’m not sure how it works, though. He claims that secular society was making excuses for pedophiles, promoting moral relativism, which I don’t think was at all true…but let’s pretend it was, just to give him the full benefit of the doubt. Then what? A priest sees George Carlin, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace all busily promoting a lifestyle of hedonism and disregard for others, so he is unable to resist buggering the choir boys? Hey, I saw KC and the Sunshine Band live once, so now I have a penchant for cannibalism? Westboro Baptist Church pickets against gays, so suddenly I want to have sex with chickens?

Catholic logic doesn’t seem to have much to do with real logic.

I think they’re getting more and more easily offended

This is getting ridiculous. Now people are getting irate at the use of a common word.

The teacher…was explaining to the class how the cold climate in Trevélez, Granada province, aided in the curing of the village’s most famous local product, jamón serrano. The boy told his teacher that hearing the word ‘ham’ in class was offensive to him because of his religion and asked his geography teacher to stop referring to the product which caused him offence.

El Mundo newspaper reports that the boy’s parents then reported the teacher to both the National Police and to the courts. It’s understood that an internal investigation is also underway by the education authority in Cádiz province.

Personally, I only have temper tantrums over “ham” when it’s preceded by “ken”.

Ricky Gervais can’t just say “Merry Christmas”, now can he?

So instead, he’s written a Christmas essay about why he’s an atheist. It’s not bad. He pegs why people get so sniffy at innocuous words from an atheist, and what we all have to live for, so there’s that.

So what does the question “Why don’t you believe in God?” really mean. I think when someone asks that they are really questioning their own belief. In a way they are asking “what makes you so special? “How come you weren’t brainwashed with the rest of us?” “How dare you say I’m a fool and I’m not going to heaven, f– you!” Let’s be honest, if one person believed in God he would be considered pretty strange. But because it’s a very popular view it’s accepted. And why is it such a popular view? That’s obvious. It’s an attractive proposition. Believe in me and live forever. Again if it was just a case of spirituality this would be fine. “Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. Buts that’s exactly what it is -­‐ a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven. My reward is here and now. It’s knowing that I try to do the right thing. That I lived a good life. And that’s where spirituality really lost its way. When it became a stick to beat people with. “Do this or you’ll burn in hell.”

You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.

You know, that would be a nice cheery message to slap on the side of a bus or a billboard: “You won’t burn in hell.” Somebody ought to do that just so we can see a few angry Christians bluster about how you will too and you must really hate God to say something so sacrilegious.

The commonality of bad movies and bad religion

Face it. Star Wars sucked. Even the original movie, which I remember fondly and vastly enjoyed watching, was horribly written — that George Lucas did not have an ear for dialog, and once he drifted away from a simple mythic archetype couldn’t put a plot together to save his life, was something that became increasingly evident throughout the series.

And Star Trek? Embarrassingly bad science, hammy acting, and an over-reliance on gobbledygook and the deus ex machina. There was maybe a small handful of episodes that were more than cheesy dreck.

So why do people adore those shows so fanatically?

Here’s one interesting explanation: cult movies plug into the same cognitive keyholes as religion does. The article is a bit superficial — comparing Star Wars to Catholicism, Star Trek to protestantism, and the recent Star Trek retcon/reboot to Mormonism is stretching the analogy way too much. But there’s something to it.

The Star Wars/Star Trek phenomena are a bit odd; I watch bad movies sometimes for entertainment, but I never lose myself in apologetics for them. They’re bad movies. They’re fun for the comic opera klutziness of them, and half the pleasure is being able to stand above them and outside them, and appreciate the sincerity of the exercise in slapping together a weird piece of crap in spite of little obstacles, like a lack of money or talent. But Star Wars/Star Trek have serious fans who devotedly study the lore and get into arguments about which is better, and even think they represent some high quality story telling.

I will boldly predict that some people will be arguing for that in the comments. Of course, they’re wrong. They sucked. Just like religion.

So the question is why do people cling to them…and it seems to me that our brains are equipped with a kind of ideological inertia, which is probably a good thing, since you don’t want to too casually flip-flop on ideas before you’ve worked out their viability. But sometimes we seem to be prone to a pathological degree of attachment, where because once we favored some strange object of worship, whether it’s Jesus or Spock or America or the Green Bay Packers, we can’t let go. Changing our minds would be an admission that we were wrong and could be wrong about something we regard as important in our lives, and there’s a reasonable fear that opening the door to that kind of uncertainty might lead to chaos.

There’s also a peculiar inability to separate the parts from the whole. You can like classical sacred music without endorsing the silliness about magic crackers and Original Sin, just as you can enjoy a light sabre battle on the screen without getting goofy over The Force.

So what is religion? It’s a parasite on a couple of useful features of how the mind works, its tendency to try and model the world around us as a coherent whole and its reluctance to abandon models that fail to work. It’s a particularly successful parasite because it can be introduced early, with mother’s milk, well before they get plonked down in front of the boobtube, and so it generally outcompetes Captain Picard…and it also gets relatively little pushback from the culture once the child leaves the breast to spend more time with outsiders, who are all praising the same mysterious being, and so far Yoda worship isn’t very common.

The first persuasive argument for Christianity that I’ve seen

I was sent this link to an apologist defending Christianity against rationalist requests for evidence, and I was unimpressed — all he’s got is repeated claims that the Bible says Jesus was lord of the universe, which is not a good argument. I can also point to the Lord of the Rings, which says Gandalf was a powerful wizard, but that doesn’t even begin to support any claim that he actually existed.

But I read on, and it got weird. Read this, and somebody explain to me…is he arguing for or against Christianity?

As for the empirical and falsifiable evidence scientists and atheists demand, let’s just say it might never be found, at least not on this side of the grave. It may not even exist. And even if someone does find it, along with the missing link, it will probably be like nothing they ever expected.

But if you look up in the sky some cold winter’s night around the 25th of December, you just might catch a glimpse of it. No, it’s not the space shuttle, or a Russian spy satellite; nor is it an Iranian missile with a nuclear warhead or some other terrorist attack; it’s certainly not Louis Farrakhan’s mothership, or any other extraterrestrial spacecraft. Is it a myth? Is it science?

No — it’s Santa Claus! And if you don’t believe that well, you just ain’t trying. Or maybe what you really need is a little less science, and a little more myth.

OK, I give up. He has convinced me. Jesus is just as real as Santa Claus.

Look at it as a promising sign of the rapidly accelerating senility of religion

Last week, the CNN Belief blog published some transparently inane pseudoscience from Oprah.com; this week, it’s publishing some awesomely trivial tripe about where your dog goes after death (how does the author know they go to heaven? He dug up some Bible verses, of course.)

This is amazingly bad stuff. It’s as if there is some sneering, mocking atheist who has been put in charge of CNN’s religion section, and she gets up every morning on a quest to find whatever will make religion look profoundly stupid…and she succeeds three minutes after going to work, and spends the rest of the day sipping lattes and cocktails while writing scenarios for her nightly Dungeons & Dragons game.

There is a danger to thinking this way, though: pretty soon you’re wondering if Pope Ratzi isn’t actually some godless antitheist mole for the Global Atheist Conspiracy, because he’s doing such a good job of making Catholicism look evil, and every silly expression of faith begins to look like an intentional effort to discredit themselves. Either the world is dominated by a lot of atheist weirdos who get off on making everyone else look ridiculous, or religion really is this goofy. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, so I’m going to have to favor the latter.

What’s the difference between the Vatican and the Mafia?

At least the Mafia doesn’t tolerate baby-rapers in its ranks.

Otherwise, though, they’re both shady organizations with very tightly closed ranks and a sense of privilege. It seems the Vatican is also suspected of criminal enterprises — it has its very own private, secretive bank that is accused of money laundering, and recently had about $30 million in assets seized.

I don’t think the Vatican has any ties to grisly gangland murders, though…oh, wait.

Calvi headed the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982 after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans made to dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.

Calvi was found a short time later hanging from scaffolding on Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets loaded with 11 pounds of bricks and $11,700 in various currencies. After an initial ruling of suicide, murder charges were filed against five people, including a major Mafia figure, but all were acquitted after trial.

While denying wrongdoing, the Vatican Bank paid $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors.

Now I’m thinking about getting a tattoo

Blasphemy laws have some novel consequences. Take the case of this devout fellow who uses his name as a legal weapon.

Pakistani authorities have arrested a doctor on suspicion of violating the country’s contentious blasphemy law by throwing away a business card of a man who shared the name of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, police said Sunday.

…

The case began Friday when Muhammad Faizan, a pharmaceutical company representative, visited Valiyani’s clinic and handed out his business card. He said when the doctor threw the card away, Faizan went to police and filed a complaint that noted his name was the same as the prophet’s.

If mere business cards with a holy name written on them must be treated with reverence and respect, well, I’m just going to have to get my favorite body parts tattooed with the names of gods and prophets. I’m goin’ for the full Muhammad…I’m afraid a cowardly weenie like Mr Faizan is out of luck, and will have to settle for “Mu”.

Another “sovereign state” affected by Wikileaks

This time, it’s the Vatican. Wikileaks has released documents related to the Irish priest scandals.

Pope Benedict refused to allow Vatican officials to testify in an investigation by an Irish commission into alleged child sex abuse by priests, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, The Guardian newspaper reported.

Benedict was also reportedly furious when Vatican officials were called upon in Rome, The Guardian reported Saturday.

The Murphy Commission of Inquiry into sexual and physical abuse “offended many in the Vatican,” according to a cable dated February 26, 2010.

No surprises. The Pope was more concerned about his little city-state than he was about the kids.

Oh, also…the Irish government caved in to the Catholics.

The Irish government, meanwhile, wanted “to be seen as co-operating with the investigation” because its churches and education department were also involved in the scandal.

The Irish ambassador’s deputy, Helena Keleher, told U.S. diplomats that her government eventually acquiesced to the Vatican and granted their officials immunity from testifying, the Guardian reported.

The testimony they did get was damning…how much worse was the situation? We won’t know, because the Vatican did its best to cover up the story.

I just look at the pictures

I can’t understand a word that’s written in this article, but I like the cartoon.

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Somebody should make a similar one for moderate Christians…they can tut-tut over murdered abortion doctors, they can make excuses for pedophile priests, they can go in a voting booth and pull the lever against gay rights, but an atheist puts up a billboard that says you can be good without gods, and zowee! Screaming fits on Fox News!