Oh, how sweet. Something good is going to come out of the Gulf oil spill. While the ocean is poisoned, sea birds tremble and die, fish and marine invertebrates are suffocated, work crews labor to contain the spreading oil slick, rescue workers struggle to clean animals tarred with sludge, and BP (we hope) tries to throttle the ruptured pipe, devout Christians gather to stand around, hold hands, and mumble at the clouds. They must have worked very hard to come up with that kind of pointless time-waster.

This is not a protest. It’s not about belly-aching. This is an opportunity for people to come together and show support for each other. It’s also an opportunity to have a moment of silence in memory of the 11 people who passed away in the accident and the people along the Gulf Coast who have been affected, whose livelihoods are gone because of this.

And don’t forget…a chance to parade your piety on the 10:00 news! That’s actually the primary purpose of prayer vigils, because it’s not as if they do anything.

Everyone is so angry and frustrated and we need to unite instead. We’re all tired. We’re all frustrated. This is a chance to just turn it over to someone else for a minute.

Someone else? Who? The people working on the coast or on boats? I think they’ve got enough work to do.

Oh, you mean God. He’s a useless old git who never gets anything done. Why you’d think it would be at all productive to hand off the work to a phantasm is a mystery. Is it because an immaterial nonexistent ghost would be far more productive than any gang of pious sky-mumblers?

We all know the Catholic Church has a serious public relations problem right now — they’re hidebound, they’re insensitive to the human needs of their congregations, and, well, sheltering an evil bunch of child-rapers that they shuttle about among unknowing parishes like a buggerymobile or a penis-on-wheels program doesn’t help. You would think that someone would realize that maybe some substantial reform is in order, and they have—but it’s not the kind of reform rational people might have imagined. Instead, the church is planning to crack the whip in Ireland and insist on more dogmatism.

Vatican investigators to Ireland appointed by Pope Benedict XVI are to clamp down on liberal secular opinion in an intensive drive to re-impose traditional respect for clergy, according to informed sources in the Catholic Church.

The nine-member team led by two cardinals will be instructed by the Vatican to restore a traditional sense of reverence among ordinary Catholics for their priests, the Irish Independent has learned.

Priests will be told not to question in public official church teaching on controversial issues such as the papal ban on birth control or the admission of divorced Catholics living with new partners to the sacraments — especially Holy Communion.

Theologians will be expected to teach traditional doctrine by constantly preaching to lay Catholics of attendance at Mass and to return to the practice of regular confession, which has been largely abandoned by adults since the 1960s.

An emphasis will be placed on an evangelisation campaign to overcome the alienation of young people scandalised by the spate of sexual abuse of children and by later cover-ups of paedophile clerics by leaders of the institutional church.

A major thrust of the Vatican investigation will be to counteract materialistic and secularist attitudes, which Pope Benedict believes have led many Irish Catholics to ignore church disciplines and become lax in following devotional practices such as going on pilgrimages and doing penance.

That’s just wonderful — there’s little the church could do to help secularism advance more than to totter on its creaky old legs into the fray, yelling at those damned kids to stop being so progressive. Well, they could bring back the Inquisition and send teams of witchfinders loose in Ireland…and given their record, I expect that’s what we’ll see after the new policy of increased hectoring fails.

The Nation has published an extremely generous profile of the Templeton Foundation. I’m trying to be charitable about it, but there’s little here that the Templeton itself will find objectionable — it’s one more swoop of the brush in an effort to always whitewash the foundation as sober, sensible, and serious, instead of the nest of delusional religious apologists that it actually is…apologists with astounding quantities of money and a willingness to spend it freely to promote its superstitious agenda.

For instance, it describes the founder, John Templeton, in terms that make him sound like a nice guy, open-minded and inquisitive, perhaps also eccentric and naive. From all I’ve heard, he probably was a very nice fellow, but he also had his weird ideological obsession, and his eclectic approach to religion makes him a very flaky dingleberry. He was a gentle-hearted kook with lots of money.

He’s dead now, and control has passed to his son.

Jack Templeton is little like his father. While the elder Templeton’s writings venture into the poetic and speculative, his son’s read like a medical report. Jack displays admirable filial loyalty, evident most of all in his decades-long leadership of the foundation under his father’s guidance; he has been president since it began, serving full time since he left a successful pediatric surgery practice in 1995. His memoir begins and ends with lessons his father taught him and is suffused by, as he put it, “a struggle to find acceptance and approval in my father’s eyes.”

Only now, though, are we beginning to learn how that struggle will express itself in his father’s absence. With Harper gone, and his replacement yet to be announced, there is a vacuum at the top. It is, says physicist and trustee Paul Davies, “an anxious time.” What seems to have people there most on edge right now, though, is not so much science as politics. In this respect too, the younger Templeton differs in kind from his father. He has financed a right-wing organization of his own, Let Freedom Ring, which once promoted the “Templeton Curve,” a graph he designed to advocate privatizing Social Security. Now Let Freedom Ring lends support to the Tea Party movement. Jack Templeton’s money has also gone to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and to ads by the neoconservative group Freedom’s Watch. In 2008 he and his wife gave more than $1 million to support California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

That is not reassuring. Give it a few years, and I’m willing to bet that the Templeton Foundation will be getting far more attentive to the Teabaggers, and then we’ll be facing a major money institution run by a narrow-minded conservative religious zealot. We should be strangling this evil baby now.

But, you know, even if it were in the hands of gentle liberal Christians who also advocated equality and civil rights instead of opposing them, it’s still an organization dedicated to injecting foolishness into the scientific enterprise, throwing money at cronies willing to put a soft and accommodating polish on science that undermines their biases. Yet this article oozes softly over that fundamental issue; it has only brief comments from Richard Dawkins, Sean Carroll, and Harry Kroto. We really don’t need more funding for garbage science selected for its appeasement of religion, and that’s all we’re going to get from Templeton, because it is not dedicated to science, its sole goal is propaganda.

And this conclusion is pure gushing BS.

John Templeton built a place where the right’s hardened partisans, like Dreher and Rosen, can settle down and turn to life’s real Big Questions, in peace, for all mankind. But the foundation meanwhile has associated itself with political and religious forces that cause it to be perceived as threatening the integrity of science and protecting the religious status quo. This is quite the reverse of the founder’s most alluring hope: a spirituality finally worthy of our scientific achievements. As a result of such alliances, though, the foundation is also better positioned than most to foster a conservatism–and a culture generally–that holds the old habits of religions and business responsible to good evidence, while helping scientists better speak to people’s deepest concerns. On issues that range from climatology to stem cells, science has too often taken a back seat to the whims of politics, and Templeton’s peculiar vision offers a welcome antidote to that. To live up to this calling, Big Questions are one thing; but the foundation will have to stand up for tough answers, too, as it did when announcing the findings of a major study that intercessory prayer doesn’t improve medical outcomes, or when rebuking intelligent design.

What ‘deepest concerns’? Pandering to religious biases and reassuring people that their faith in angels is reasonable is not addressing a concern, it’s surrendering to it. I agree that science has been buffeted by the whims of politics, but I fear the whims of religion as much, if not more — and as we can see in the instance of Jack Templeton, religion and politics are not separable.

I am also not at all impressed with the occasional admission of failed politico-religious strategies, like prayer studies and ID. These are tactical retreats where they recognize that progress for their agenda cannot be made, but it doesn’t change their overall intent in the slightest. And, as usual for this kind of insidious religious apologetics, the goal isn’t to find clear answers to anything, but to blur all of the edges and foment further doubt and ignorance, because that is where religious wishy-washiness thrives best.

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.

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.

We have another flaming authoritarian cretin of inexplicable popularity here in Minnesota: Bradlee Dean. He runs an outfit called “You Can Run But You Cannot Hide Ministries”, which trundles about the region bringing the word of god and Bradlee Dean to kids.

He actually gets into the schools, despite the fact that he’s a hateful sectarian weirdo. The scam they run is to claim that they’ll entertain kids with a rock concert and bring an anti-drug, anti-sex message…neatly omitting any mention of evangelical proselytizing.

You might be wondering what “controversial issues” that aren’t for the “faint of heart” he might be talking about. He also has a radio program, so we know what the subject most dear to him is.

He wants to kill gays.

Muslims are calling for the executions of homosexuals in America. This just shows you they themselves are upholding the laws that are even in the Bible of the Judeo-Christian God, but they seem to be more moral than even the American Christians do, because these people are livid about enforcing their laws. They know homosexuality is an abomination.

This kook is so far out and so hateful that even Exodus International, the gay conversion ministry, has distanced itself from him. That takes some doing.

Who hasn’t dumped him is just as telling: Michele Bachmann loves Bradlee and prays for him, and EdWatch praises him. EdWatch, by the way, is our local right wing group that would dearly love to get control of the Minnesota board of education…and if they should ever succeed, Minnesota would make Texas look like a beacon of the enlightenment.

After all, if the New Life church in Yorktown, Indiana can offer a course in the New Atheism, I must be qualified to discuss all the nuances and fluff and crazy beliefs of Christianity. I am most amused, though, by their choice of instructor. It’s some fellow named Jim Spiegel, who derives his authority from having written a book about atheism.

The title? The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief. Yeah, he has credibility.

I wonder if that guy who made Reefer Madness ever published a textbook on neuropharmacology…

The Vatican is reaching out to atheists. They are creating a foundation called “The Courtyard of Gentiles” to encourage discussion between Catholics and the godly — I can hardly wait. Except, alas, it turns out their invitations are only going to a select few.

But in an interview with the National Catholic Register, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, made it clear he would not be willing to give a platform to certain prominent atheists.

The foundation, he said, would only be interested in “noble atheism or agnosticism, not the polemical kind – so not those atheists such as [Piergiorgio] Odifreddi in Italy, [Michel] Onfray in France, [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins”.

Such atheists, he added, only view the truth with “irony and sarcasm” and tend to “read religious texts like fundamentalists”.

There has got to be a cabal of atheists working within the church — I can’t imagine them being this incompetent by accident. So apparently they only want faitheists in their little clubhouse, because as we all know, the primary weapon of the atheists is irony and sarcasm…the two weapons of the atheists are irony, sarcasm, and ridicule…wait. Man, we are so danged vicious. We actually mock Catholics, so we’re just too mean to come to their party.

Except me, right? They didn’t mention that little guy in Minnesota as being on their blacklist, so there’s still hope…

What is it with some English professors and their contempt for science? Some of the noisiest, most obnoxious, most self-indulgently prolix and goofy critics of the New Atheism are full-of-themselves pomposities like Eagleton and Fish, and now we can apparently add another, Marilynne Robinson. She’s a novelist — I have not read any of her books, but they have received quite a bit of critical acclaim — and she recently gave a series of lectures, now published as a book, Absence of Mind, in which she is going to give the godless a piece of her mind. Unfortunately for her, it seems to be a small sliver, very spongy and soft, and it bounces off like a bullet from a nerf gun. This review starts off promisingly:

“Absence of Mind” derives from the Dwight Harrington Terry lectures on “religion, in the light of science and philosophy.” [uh-oh, bad sign already: Eagleton’s awful book was also a product of the Terry lectures] As Robinson tells us in her introduction, her book aims to “examine one side in the venerable controversy called the conflict between science and religion.” In particular, she wants to question the kind of authority claimed by certain modern scientists and to raise questions about the quality of their thinking. In her first chapter she focuses on what one might loosely call the sociobiologists, thinkers like E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who assert that our lives are ordered by overt or unconscious self-interest, that our minds are unreliable and constantly trick us, and that traditional religious belief is a primordial hold-over, certainly childish, sometimes deluded and generally embarrassing.

Yes, actually, I think she’s got it right. At least that’s how I feel about the matter. Charges accepted, officer. Now all she has to do is show that she can criticize the anti-religionists without demonstrating that her position actually is rather embarrassing.

Robinson argues strenuously that such thinkers grossly simplify religious thought and testimony — and they ooze condescension. “The characterization of religion by those who dismiss it tends to reduce it to a matter of bones and feathers and wishful thinking, a matter of rituals and social bonding and false etiologies and the fear of death, and this makes its persistence very annoying to them.” She notes that these same crusading debunkers consistently portray those who dare to disagree with them as intellectually dishonest, as naifs who refuse to face facts.

Ooooh, I don’t think she like us. But OK, show us that she can face the facts. Show us that religion is something more than the delusion we say it is.

In particular, Robinson says, these “parascientists” deliberately slight “the wealth of insight into human nature that might come from attending to the record humankind has left.” At the very least, “an honest inquirer” into the nature of religion “might spend an afternoon listening to Bach or Palestrina, reading Sophocles or the Book of Job.” We are not, she maintains, simply the instrument of selfish genes. Indeed, she suspects that the “modern malaise,” our sense of emptiness and alienation, can be attributed not to the “death of God” but rather to the widely promulgated, and reductionist, view of the self as wholly biological.

Bad start. Criticizing legitimate scientists by coining a new label for them, parascientist, while incapable of demonstrating that she has any grasp of science herself is a very bad idea. See this article on scientific impotence: what she’s doing is trying to pretend that the scientists who disagree with her aren’t doing science. But then, she’s no scientist herself, so if thinking scientifically is a virtue and unscientific ideas are grounds for insulting people, where does that leave her?

Scientists know about and appreciate art. Seriously, does she think we’ve never listened to Bach, and all we have to do is hear the Magnificat and presto, we’ll believe in God? We admire and respect the accomplishments of our fellow human beings — people of flesh and bone and nerve and sinew — and it is no surprise that they can create beauty. This is no argument against us.

If we are not the product of our genes (and many other natural and material influences, as any biologist will tell you), then what else? Does Dr Robinson have any component to add, other than supernatural, magical stuff for which she has no evidence?

And what modern malaise? I don’t feel empty and alienated, do you? Almost all the atheists I know seem to be enthusiastic and cheerful, with a real sense of optimism about the future. If it’s just the miserable god-botherers who don’t understand science who are moping along under the cloud of this imaginary malaise, I don’t think you can logically blame their psychological problems on being depressed about the conclusions of biology.

Sure, God is dead. But we aren’t at all sad about it — we’re dancing on his grave. Viewing the self as biological is a wonderfully liberating way to see the world, too, since it means we don’t have to rely on the whims of uncommunicative ghosts to find fulfillment in life.

As it is, she’s just a blustering babbler with a lot of resentment towards those darned scientists who keep on shaking up her comfortable illusions about her soul. She takes another step, though, and this is where she does embarrass herself — she uses her ignorance about a significant medical case in the history of science to bash away at “parascientists” some more, and she gets it all wrong.

Robinson assails Wilson and company most powerfully by accusing them of faulty, narrow-minded thinking. Take their frequent use of the story of Phineas Gage, the railway worker famous for surviving an accident in which a large iron rod was driven through his skull. Afterwards, according to contemporary accounts, his behavior changed dramatically and he was “fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane.” For the parascientists, this proves that personality and character “are localized in a specific region of the brain,” a fact, adds Robinson, “that, by their lights, somehow compromises the idea of individual character and undermines the notion that our amiable traits are intrinsic to our nature.”

But Robinson asks us to actually think about Phineas Gage. How would you feel and react if you had had your upper jaw shattered, lost an eye and suffered severe disfigurement? Gage “was twenty-five at the time of the accident. Did he have dependents? Did he have hopes? These questions seem to me of more than novelistic interest in understanding the rage and confusion that emerged in him as he recovered.” In the parascientific writings about Gage, she asserts, “there is no sense at all that he was a human being who thought and felt, a man with a singular and terrible fate.” In essence, these scholars “participate in the absence of compassionate imagination, of benevolence, that they posit for their kind.”

Why, yes, Phineas Gage did have a very serious accident that almost killed him, and seriously damaged his brain, resulting in changes in personality and behavior. That’s a well-documented fact. But Robinson’s claims about the interpretations of this event are bizarre and wrong.

No one claims that “personality and character ‘are localized in a specific region of the brain'”. In the 19th century, phrenologists were all over the Gage story, but their claims are no longer accepted. Personality and character are diffuse in the brain, with different regions contributing different, interacting influences. The forebrain, for example, has (in very broad terms) a restraining effect on impulses — it’s a region involved in thinking ahead and recognizing possible consequences, and damage to this area, as in the case of Gage, can lead to the kinds of behavior he exhibited.

I don’t even know what she means by “compromises the idea of individual character”. Does she think scientists reject the idea that individuals have different personalities? Our minds are complicated ensembles of modules that generate our thoughts and behaviors; we’re all different.

As for “undermines the notion that our amiable traits are intrinsic to our nature”…no, that makes no sense. Actually listen to what those New Atheist scientists are saying, and you discover that they’re actually arguing that our ‘amiable traits’, like empathy, cooperation, morality, actually do have a biological foundation, as do some of our more hostile traits, like competition and aggression. She’s arguing that we hold a view that is the exact opposite of the one we actually endorse!

The rest of her account is equally fantastic. She seems to be implying that maybe there wasn’t a discrete change to the functioning of his brain, but that he was just rightfully upset about a devastating accident. This is absurd. The doctor who treated him happily reported that his recovery went well and that he seemed to have full return of his mental faculties — it was Gage’s friends and family who reported that his personality had changed to the point of unrecognizability. This is the report Dr Harlow published on the changes:

His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinent, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.”

In the “parascientific” writings about Gage, by which Robinson actually means the genuinely scientific writings, there certainly is a focus on fact and observation. Read Harlow’s account of the accident, for instance: what you will see is a dispassionate account by a doctor who was doing everything in his power to keep a seriously injured man alive. I’m not sure what Robinson expected in these writings; that they do not indulge in hysterics, that Harlow did not treat the patient with prayer or literary readings from the Book of Job, may disappoint her, but do not indicate that the doctor had a lack of feeling for Gage as a human being. That Harlow followed the case of his patient for at least twenty years suggests that perhaps there was more to it than Robinson can believe.

You can also read an account of the Gage accident here on Scienceblogs, and I can tell you that it is also a common entry in introductory biology textbooks — but the interest is precisely because this was a human being with hopes and fears and a unique personality who was tragically changed by a sudden accident. To claim, as Robinson does, that scientists have no sense of Gage as a person, that they lack a “compassionate imagination” is simply rank defamation and dehumanization. It is the vile bigotry of a provincial mind that substitutes prejudice and stereotype for actual knowledge of what scientists think.

It was a good review of her book, though. It convinced me that I needn’t bother reading anything she’s written.