I must have a lot of Australian readers, or the few of you are really upset about this, because I’m getting a rising volume of email about World Youth Day. This is a bizarre Catholic get-together for young people — bizarre because, well, the idea of a pack of Catholic priests herding a flock of young boys and girls into one central mass sounds like the preliminaries to a feeding frenzy to me — which is going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, a substantial chunk of which is being subsidized by Australian taxpayers. Isn’t it a bit peculiar that a secular government is paying for a massive membership drive for sectarian superstition? Furthermore, the Australian government is expanding police authority to restrict protests at the event, levying prohibitive fines for even trivial expressions of free speech.

All this for a goofy medieval religion that has decided that it needs to get jiggy with the young’uns to maintain its relevance.

Anyway, Australian atheists, agnostics, and secularists, you’ve got reason to be pissed off. The thread is yours.

Well now, isn’t this special: if you’re a religious leader on official business, you can get free parking permits in North London.

Mike Freer, leader of the council, said: “The importance of religion to many Barnet residents cannot be underestimated and the council has acknowledged this with a policy that will assist spiritual leaders when engaging with people in times of illness or crisis.”

It may be important to some people, but since it doesn’t actually do anything for them, this logic seems backward to me — clergy should be paying extra for the privilege of peddling superstition, as a kind of idiot tax.

Well now…if you’ve had a hankerin’ to torture, abuse, and do who knows what else to people at your whim, here’s what you do: move on down to Texas and set up a religion. The Texas Supreme Court just ruled on a case in which a young woman was subjected to extreme distress and restraint during a church-run exorcism (isn’t that insane enough right there? An exorcism in 21st century America?), and they threw the previous judgment against the church out. Why? Because holding a church liable for psychological damage “would have an unconstitutional ‘chilling effect’ by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs.”

Damn right it would. Holding religion accountable for the stupidity perpetuated by it certainly should send a shiver down the spines of hordes of witch-doctors and mullahs and priests and other such folk with a vested interest in superstition.

The court ruling basically says that because this church carries out this practice all the time, and because adherents of the religion accept it, it’s OK to pin people to the floor and scream at them for a few hours.

The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion, said the church’s exorcism sessions were a matter of church doctrine and were thus subject to certain — though not absolute — First Amendment religious protections.

“The laying of hands” and the presence of demons are part of the church’s belief system and accepted as such by its adherents,” the ruling said in part. “These practices are not normally dangerous or unusual and apparently arise in the church with some regularity. They are thus to be expected and are accepted by those in the church.”

Hello, world. In the United States, it is not considered unusual to accuse teenagers of being possessed by demons, and we subject them to frightening magic rituals to cast out such satanic forces with some regularity. Do not be alarmed. We also have nuclear weapons and sophisticated delivery systems. But I repeat…do not be at all alarmed.

One of the lawyers for the church noticed a key point of this ruling — it’s too bad he thinks it is a good thing.

“The key point of this ruling is that we don’t have a right to have our standards of reasonableness foisted upon some other religion,” Dallas attorney David Pruessner said. “None of our religious beliefs can be examined when they are emotionally disturbing to other people.”

No religious beliefs are to be examined critically, no matter how disturbing they may be. That’s the way things work down in Texas, I guess. Oh, but he hastily adds…

Pruessner said no one should think Friday’s ruling would give protection to a church leader accused of abusing a child.

Except that that is exactly what happened in this case: the victim of this church-endorsed abuse was 17 at the time, and the church has now gotten off scot-free, held not culpable for their insanity, and told that they can keep on doing it with the protection of the law…and they’ve been informed that any weird religious belief is “normal”.

I would suggest a well-known compromise, one that has been violated by the Texas court decision. You are free to believe whatever wacky nonsense you want — you can believe moody teenagers are possessed by demons, and you can believe that cutting out the hearts of virgins will guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow, and you can even believe that barbecued babies are especially delicious — but you are not free to act on those beliefs in a way that infringes the rights of other people. The Texas court, in its zeal to protect religious beliefs, has gone too far and has endorsed the right of a church to do harm in the name of their god.

Uh-oh. The president of Minnesota Atheists, August Berkshire, is descending into the den of idiocy that is our local evangelical radio station, KKMS. Listen if you can bear it. Personally, I don’t know that I can — it’s too repellent to listen to people who stress the importance of mindless faith, yet have only bad faith to offer.

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If you missed it, here’s an MP3 of August’s segment.

I’m in Vegas, I’m at the Amaz!ng Meeting, I’m distracted by all the shiny flashy lights and all the strange people who want to talk to me, so you’re all going to have to talk among yourselves for a while. Here are a few news items to prime the pump.

• Don’t read this one until after breakfast. It’s the sad case of Ondrej Mauerova, a young boy kept imprisoned and tortured by a weird Czech cult. I don’t even want to say any more about it.

• In a less malevolent but even more catastrophic cult failure, Neil Beagley, a 16 year old Oregon boy, has died because his family only believes in “faith healing”. He could have been cured with a catheter.

• The Anglican church is about to be sundered by rabid homophobes. While it’s always good to see another cult fall apart, it’s not good to see the more vicious side isolating itself from more moderate influence.

• Canadians have it good. Their largest Protestant denomination, the United Church of Canada, is having meetings where they talk about just giving up in the face of plummeting church attendance. How wise, and how Canadian.

• Americans United is suing South Carolina over their state-sponsored “I Believe” license plate.

Many people have been sending me this article about how high IQ turns academics into atheists. I’m afraid I don’t trust it at all: the author is the infamous racist, Richard Lynn, and carries all the baggage of his peculiar notions of genetic determinism and narrow views on the significance of IQ.

I don’t think the religious are necessarily stupid, and I most definitely do not believe they are born stupid. I do believe they are saddled with a set of foolish misconceptions that can throttle their intellectual development and send them careering off into genuinely weird sets of beliefs, but this doesn’t make them stupid. I also think that IQ tests are written by people who promote an implicitly scientific perspective (which is a good thing!), and it’s therefore not surprising that a group in which a significant fraction of its membership actively reject science will do poorly on such tests.

While I can see where accepting the handicap of faith might lead to poor performance on non-faith-based tests and scientific thinking, I reject Lynn’s usual premise of a biological basis for such ability.