They just don’t get it

A major court decision in Vermont slammed the Catholic church there.

A Burlington jury issued a landmark verdict against the state’s Roman Catholic diocese Tuesday, ordering it to pay $8.7 million in damages to a former Burlington altar boy fondled multiple times by a priest the church knew was a child molester.

It’s a harsh penalty, but warranted by the way the church turned a blind eye to outrageously criminal behavior. I’d like to say that they’ll learn a lesson from it, but the comments from Catholic officials suggest that no, they won’t.

A grim Bishop Salvatore Matano, who attended the six-day trial, said in a brief, separate interview that the size of the verdict could pose serious problems for the diocese. He called the looming predicament a “sad and tragic moment in our history.”

Wrong! The sad and tragic moment occurred in 1972, when they hired the child molesting priest while fully knowledgeable about his prior history. The legal damages aren’t the problem, it’s what these people did to children.

“I have to look very seriously at what this verdict means as it impacts on our services and the activities of the diocese,” Matano said. “I have to be very conscious that the verdict as it stands will have a very serious impact on a rural diocese; a small, rural diocese.”

The diocese? What about the people? Where was your concern for the diocese when the church set a child predator loose upon them?

“I do not want in any way to inflict any suffering or any pain upon the faithful in this diocese because of what happened in the past,” Matano said. “That is certainly not appropriate, and I am conscious of the universal needs of the diocese.”

Oh, well then…it all happened in the past. No worries about the now, then. I’m sure there aren’t any child abusing priests any more, and the victim in this case…why, surely, he’s over it now.

Diocesan lawyer Tom McCormick said he was taken aback by the jury’s decision and would likely appeal.

“Clearly, in hindsight we should have, could have looked at things differently,” McCormick said. “We expected that a Vermont jury would not unleash a number of this sort for behavior that took place 35 years ago.”

These evil clowns in their funny suits are clearly out of touch. When you’ve defined yourself as a moral authority (often, the sole moral authority) you don’t get to back away from the consequences of your actions because time has passed or because the consequences are severe. Perhaps they ought to look at this expression of tangible outrage by a community as a not-so-subtle signal that they have not and are not supporting the actual behaviors that community considers important, and regards as part of the church’s trust.

Personally, I think bankrupting the gilded monstrosity of Catholicism is an eminently desirable goal in itself.

Unclear on the concept

Just what we need — another evangelical Christian theme park, this one in the planning stages in Tennessee. This one has one particular instance of blinkered blindness, though, that I thought was rather funny.

The Park is planned as an “edutainment” experience, combining education and entertainment. The Park is without a particular religious ideology or theology and does not promote specific religious beliefs of any kind; instead, it is designed to bring to life history of Biblical times and stories from the Holy Bible.

If you read the rest, you’ll learn that this thing is taking fundamentalist, literalist reading of the Christian bible entirely for granted…how this translates into an absence of theology or specific religious beliefs is hard to understand, unless these people are so oblivious to the narrow theological domain of their beliefs that they are unable to imagine its grossly sectarian nature. Or unless they’re really stupid.

True monsters

I have a daughter myself, who I want to grow up to be independent and free and sensible and interesting, so I can’t even imagine what it would take to bring a parent to this:

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Yikes. What did she do? Become a mass murderer, a terrorist, a destroyer of entire cultures by acts of destruction?

No, nothing quite so horrific. She was guilty of puppy love.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British solider in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader Ali is a coward and a monster, the warped product of a bestial ‘civilization’ that treats half its members as chattel and the other half as little better than junkyard dogs, brutes who will maintain the savage order by denying love and individuality and murdering anyone who does not precisely fit their mandated roles.

Abdel-Qader Ali is not an aberration, not some random psychopath who committed an evil and then, all alone and despised, tries to justify it. No, he’s part of a whole culture that favors this violence.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

…

It was her first youthful infatuation and it would be her last. She died on 16 March after her father discovered she had been seen in public talking to Paul, considered to be the enemy, the invader and a Christian. Though her horrified mother, Leila Hussein, called Rand’s two brothers, Hassan, 23, and Haydar, 21, to restrain Abdel-Qader as he choked her with his foot on her throat, they joined in. Her shrouded corpse was then tossed into a makeshift grave without ceremony as her uncles spat on it in disgust.

‘Death was the least she deserved,’ said Abdel-Qader. ‘I don’t regret it. I had the support of all my friends who are fathers, like me, and know what she did was unacceptable to any Muslim that honours his religion,’ he said.

They are not men, they are abused dogs. They have no honor; honor is not blind, stupid obedience to a death cult that demands that you murder your children or your sisters for showing signs of humanity.

I count at least three tragedies here.

One is these ‘men’ who have had their minds corrupted by a foul religion.

The greatest is Rand Abdel-Qader herself, murdered for an infatuation.

The third is one only briefly mentioned: the mother, Leila Hussein. I wonder…does her skin crawl at having to submit to the vile creature who tortured her daughter to death, or is she sufficiently indoctrinated into the evils of her culture that she accepts it? Either way, it’s a nightmare.

How sad

Paul Jones has died. I didn’t know him, or even know about him, until his obituary was sent to me, but it’s an utterly tragic life story. He was an ordained Baptist minister — there’s a waste of a life right there — and his death was ironic and futile.

He died of a heart attack, just as he was about to pray with a member of his Upper Room Fellowship. His last word was “Jesus”.

Someday I’m going to die, too, and I hope it is while doing something productive, and that I don’t go out with the name of an imaginary being on my lips. And in particular, it would be nice if my obituary would say something about the good things in my life, rather than babbling on about dedication to a superstition.

It’s a shame. Jones might have been a wonderful fellow, but all we strangers know about him is that he was “committed to expanding God’s kingdom” — that he had dedicated his life to a lie.

Eternal injustice

Sid Schwab considers the meaning of eternal torment. Even a moment’s thought should make anyone realize that eternal punishment, besides being literally unimaginable, cannot possibly be just. Yet this principle is dogma in Christianity — Jesus himself said, “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment” — and even worse, those who are good and are admitted into heaven are going to be eternally aware of the torments inflicted on their unsaved fellows, and will be going out to witness the punishment of the wicked (according to St Augustine, anyway…I hear he’s a fairly highly regarded source on doctrine.)

I suspect that the truly good would be in rebellion against such a tyrant god, but then, we always knew Christianity was a death cult for sheep, that rewards submission to the odious and the unlikely.

I’d add to Schwab’s rejection of the principle that it isn’t just eternal punishment that is a problem, but the whole idea of eternal life. There can be no such thing. People change all the time, and the I that is here now will not be the same I that could exist in 20 years; my mortality is a part of my being, and removing that would be an event so traumatic and so life-changing that it would produce an identity even more substantially different than the vast revolution I went through 51 years ago, when I gastrulated. Immortality is meaningless and achieving it is impossible.

That’s not to say we don’t want a long life and will fight off death as long as we can. It’s just that life itself represents a kind of incremental dynamism that can’t be frozen without destroying it.

Maybe politicians should just avoid evangelicals and used car salesmen

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Why do they waste their time with these idiots? Barack Obama has been struggling against the guilt-by-association of having been a regular member of a lunatic’s church, this odious little ignorant rat-bag named Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Yet at the same time, McCain joyfully accepts endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley…and if Wright is a rat-bag, those two are festering, reeking mountains of putrefying rat-shit. Does the media give a damn? No. They’re also white members of the televangelical racket, and ever since the anti-semitic backwoods babbler Billy Graham was canonized for introducing the appearance of delusional piety into the hypocritical Nixon White House, it’s become the habit to defer to the liars for Jesus who brag about bringing morality to government.

And yet, someone who refuses to sit quietly as these nutjobs rave, who refuses to endorse the lie of religion, who does not suffer through the weekly tedium of sitting in a pew to listen mutely to a know-nothing air his ignorance to a flock of sheep, cannot possibly be elected to the presidency. Meanwhile, if the press is antagonistic towards you, they will cheerfully take some stupid sermon you listened to and blame you for its contents (and if they don’t want to trouble your march to election, they’ll quietly ignore it). It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.

So why not just Kobiyashi Maru your way out of the whole corrupt situation and stop pandering to the churchies all together? That’s my advice to the candidates right now. You’re screwed no matter which way you jump, so you might as well take the rational route and announce that you’re washing your hands of the whole wretched lot of preachin’ scalliwags, whose faith-based advice doesn’t belong in government anyway. Be bold! Be free of gods, or at the very least, free of god-bothering liars.

(By the way, if you don’t know how vile Hagee and Parsley are, Revere has video clips.)

Let’s not forget Hillary Clinton. She’s entangled with a far right-wing fellowship of fascists.

That gay religion

Sometimes, I am extremely annoyed with the principle of separation of church and state — it leads to absurdities, like this recent court decision that a gay student support group was was using unconstitutional tactics — it was using materials that mentioned that some religions are more tolerant of homosexuality than others. This is, apparently, an endorsement of particular religions and therefore violates church-state separation.

Well, yeah, it is — for specific subjects, like gay rights, science education, and pacifism, some religions clearly are better than others — yet because we have to mindlessly avoid any perception of preference for one over another at any official level, the more enlightened faiths must be lumped with the dumbest, vilest, crudest kinds of religions, and you are not allowed to distinguish between them. I’ve said it before: church-state separation is a principle that protects and privileges religious belief in the United States, and furthermore as we can see here, it isolates pathological, dangerous beliefs from valid criticism.

This decision could be of some concern for future court battles over creationism, too, because science support organizations clearly do have a preference for some kinds of religions over others, and actually do promote certain doctrines over others. This is a fight driven by religious ignorance by the creationists, so of course we’ve got to engage them on the wrongness of their stupid claims about science … but if they wrap those up in the protective mantle of their holy and sacred religious beliefs, this decision says criticism is violating their religious protection. Will we have to worry that someone in the court system will take seriously the claim that teaching that the evidence says the earth is 4½ billion years old amounts to belittling religions that preach that the earth is 6000 years old, and favoring those that are agnostic on the age of the earth?

At least I can take comfort in the fact that the Pharyngula strategy is still safely on the side of the constitution: I don’t favor any religion at all, I despise ’em all equally.

The stupid, it burns

Oh, no … I mentioned the existence of godtube the other day, and now people are farming it for incredibly stupid videos that they send to me. It’s rich soil for stupid over there, and they’ve got a bumper crop — you would not believe how awful some of their arguments are.

I hesitate to mention this one because I know it’s going to trigger yet more bad videos in my in-box, but it is so bad, so crazy, that I have to share it. This one claims that Food Patterns of our Body Proof for Intelligent Design, and, well, you have to see it. It starts with the claim that a sliced carrot looks like a human eye, and carrots are good for your eyes, and just goes downhill from there — tomatoes are red and have chambers, just like the heart, walnuts look like brains, kidney beans look like kidneys, etc.

I think the creator must be a virgin. He also claims that citrus fruits look just like human mammary glands.