I just have to say that if you’re worshipping a scrap of skin from an 800-year-old corpse, there is something wrong with you. Something sick, perverse, and warped.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a stern warning (definitely including fingerwagging, with possibility of ruler rapping) against the heathen practice of Reiki.
To use Reiki is to operate “in the realm of superstition, the no-man’s-land that is neither faith nor science,” the bishops warned, urging Catholic healthcare institutions, retreats and chaplains to ditch the therapy, which originated in Japan in the 1800s.
No, stop! I’m twitching so badly, I think I’ve damaged something.
Maybe I need some healing at Lourdes…
One of the Vatican’s “solutions” for their perennial sex scandals is to start testing and screening candidates for the priesthood. Australia is even considering doing it: unfortunately, the targets are all wrong.
Melbourne’s Catholic Church has embraced a Vatican suggestion to test potential priests for sexual orientation. Those who “appear” gay will be banned.
The head of the Vatican committee that made the recommendations has made it clear celibate gays should also be banned because homosexuality is ”a type of deviation”.
I really want to know details about how these tests are going to be done. Do they hook the candidate up to a plethysmograph and then show them pictures of varying degrees of titillation to various sexual orientations? That sounds fun — they might get a flood of new prospects who are really just there for the test. Heck, if I was sufficiently bored, I might sign up … especially if the testing is done by hot novices in sexy wimples.
But, still, it’s all incredibly wrong-headed. Priests are people who are supposed to be celibate…it should hardly matter whether they are turned on by women or men or turnips, for that matter. There might even be a significant number of church leaders who are radical perverts deep down, but are in the priesthood specifically and sincerely for the whole denial of the flesh aspect. Why single out gays? Shouldn’t we be more worried about priests with uncontrollable urges towards children, or even heterosexual priests who are unable to resist the women who look up to them as authority figures?
This isn’t about correcting the problems of the church at all. It’s more about finding another opportunity to discriminate against gays.
A horrible little cult in Baltimore committed an ugly crime.
…they denied a 16-month-old boy food and water because he did not say “Amen” at mealtimes. After he died, they prayed over his body for days, expecting a resurrection, then packed it into a suitcase with mothballs. They left it in a shed in Philadelphia, where it remained for a year before detectives found it last spring.
The child’s mother, Ria Ramkissoon, and others are on trial for murder, reasonably enough. Here’s the kicker, though:
Psychiatrists who evaluated Ramkissoon at the request of a judge concluded that she was not criminally insane. Her attorney, Steven Silverman, said the doctors found that her beliefs were indistinguishable from religious beliefs, in part because they were shared by those around her.
“She wasn’t delusional, because she was following a religion,” Silverman said, describing the findings of the doctors’ psychiatric evaluation.
Well. Why should the religion label excuse delusional beliefs?
Oh, no. Richard Lynn, the fellow infamous for trying to link intelligence and race, is in the news again, this time trying to claim a causal relationship between atheism and intelligence.
“Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ,” Lynn told the Times Higher Education magazine. “Academics have higher IQs than the general population. Several Gallup poll studies of the general population have shown that those with higher IQs tend not to believe in God.”
I am always so tempted to simply accept this kind of claim — it’s wonderfully self-serving, obviously — but I can’t. I’ve known lots of religious people who really are brilliant, and I also know lots of atheists who were sincerely religious once upon a time, and there was no sudden increase in their native intelligence when they abandoned faith. And yes, I also know a few knee-jerk atheists who aren’t unbelievers because they’ve reasoned their way to that position. We live in a world with a range of intellectual abilities in different people, but anyone can be religious or infidel.
The difference is not in intelligence. It’s on the foundation of their education. Intelligent people who are indoctrinated into a faith can build marvelously intricate palaces of rationalization atop the shoddy vapor of their beliefs about gods and the supernatural; what scientists and atheists must do is build their logic on top of a more solid basis of empirical evidence and relentless self-examination. The difference isn’t their ability to reason, it is what they are reasoning about.
This is one of the reasons we godless need to be militant in expressing our ideas: there are children out there right now who have the potential for genius, but their talents are being shunted into the futile wasteland of religiosity. Yes, there are a lot of atheists in the topmost ranks of successful scientists, but it’s not because they are intrinsically smarter than someone who believes in gods — it’s because they more easily embrace the mode of thinking that is most productive and successful in scientific fields, and are less burdened with absurd presuppositions. Let’s stop handicapping our kids.
This is not one of those fake church signs: it’s the real thing, taken in Arkansas.
This looks like an irreconcilable difference to me.
The pope’s ridicuolus and wrong stance on condoms has led to world-wide outrage, and the Vatican is going to be sent millions of condoms in response. I have an even better idea: if you’re Catholic, leave the church. Why you are following an ignorant, superstitious kook as a moral authority is mystifying to me.
In another weird story of the Catholic persecution complex, look what a Brazilian archbishop has to say:
“The Jews talk about six million people killed. But how many Catholics were victims of the Holocaust? They were 22 million in all,” Archbishop Dadeus Grings, from Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, told advertising magazine Press & Advertising.
Hmm. About 3 million Catholics were killed by the Nazi regime in camps…but it wasn’t for being Catholic. It was for being Polish. I don’t know where this mysterious “22 million” number comes from — there were 42 million total civilian casualties in World War II. Is he trying to include every single dead Catholic as a direct victim of the Holocaust? Since by far the largest fraction of the casualties in that war were borne by the Soviet Union, shouldn’t we then be complaining that atheists were the true martyrs? (Not that I would, I think the reasoning of this archbishop is specious.)
There was an appalling and tragic plane crash in Montana: 14 people were killed, 7 of them children.
Tom Hagler, a mechanic at the Oroville airport, told The Sacramento Bee that he allowed several children ages 6 to 10 to use the airport bathroom before they boarded the doomed plane.
“There were a lot of kids in the group,” he said, “a lot of really cute kids.”
Nine of them were members of one family. This was a horrifying and genuinely horrible accident; I can’t begin to imagine the grief felt by the survivors, who lost children and grandchildren.
I’m sure you all remember that plane crash in the Hudson a while back, in which all the passengers survived thanks to the commendable competence of the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, and the crew. What impressed the atheist community, too, was that this was not a case where the crew credited some fickle deity for keeping them alive — it was good old skill, training, and keeping a cool head in times of danger.
What if, instead, the pilot had trusted in a god? We’ve got an example of that, too.
A plane made a similar emergency water landing off the coast of Sicily in 2005. In this case, the Tunisian pilot panicked, and instead of taking emergency measures or even trying to reach a nearby airport, he instead chose to pray loudly. I’m sure that was reassuring to the passengers.
Sixteen people died.
Reason gets some revenge, though. The pilot has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for his neglect of his responsibilities. I like that; resorting to prayer represents an abdication of responsibility.
The Pope is on a grand tour of Africa, where he has been striking up a theme of — brace yourself — opposing superstition. The man who heads an institution with an official top exorcist is asking Africans to “shun witchcraft”, and to reject fear-mongering talk of evil entities…
In his homily, he urged his listeners to reach out to those Angolans who believe in witchcraft and spirits. “So many of them are living in fear of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they even end up condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers,” he said.
Right. Don’t believe in malign spirits, like, say Satan. Has the Pope become an atheist lately?
Oh, I guess not. He’s still demanding that people believe in supernatural occult powers that have battled and defeated other supernatural occult powers.
In his homily, the pope urged Catholics to try to persuade those who had left the Church that “Christ has triumphed over death and all those occult powers.”
If only they would turn their powers of skepticism, critical thought, and rejection of unfounded supernatural phenomena on themselves, the Vatican would implode overnight.
