Maybe if they sink a lot of the budget into special effects…

There is no accounting for taste or credulity. Universal Pictures is planning to make Eben Alexander’s book into a movie. You remember Alexander; the Proof of Heaven guy, the surgeon who ‘died’ on the operating table and claimed to have visited heaven?

It might be interesting to see the effort. The whole tone of Alexander’s fantasy is one of vagueness, ineffableness, incomprehending awe — he talks about seeing indescribable beings like birds or angels that he can’t do justice to in words, for instance…I don’t think crisp CGI is exactly going to work in his favor.

Don’t let Catholics run hospitals

Imagine if you lived in a town where the only hospital was owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and you were in a car accident — you’ve got a ruptured spleen, you’re bleeding internally, and your life is at risk. The surgeon is going to go in and stitch up and cauterize everything, but you’re warned that they don’t keep any kind of blood supply in the hospital, and they refuse to do blood transfusions — they have an in-house professional ethicist (who is a Jehovah’s Witness, of course) who rejects the morality of exchanging sacred blood, and the administrators have signed an agreement with the church to never, under any circumstances, carry out blood transfusions.

If you need a blood transfusion, they say, don’t worry, the ambulance will take you to a different hospital…50 miles away. You, unfortunately, are in shock, you’ve got a gusher pouring blood into your body cavity, and this is not an option. You get to die.

We would not tolerate this situation. That hospital would have a change of ownership as fast as the public could drive it, and if anyone did die because of that kind of criminal neglect and refusal to follow standard medical procedure, a malpractice suit would be the least of their worries. Someone would be going to jail.

So why are Catholics allowed to buy up and impose Catholic dogma on hospitals? Is it because their ignorant dogma does the greatest harm to women (especially those slutty ones who have sex) and bizarre rules about reproduction don’t directly harm men?

But Catholics are buying up hospitals all over the country. They’ve got declining attendance, they’re closing churches, they’re having trouble recruiting priests, but they’ve still got buckets of money, and they’re using that money to impose control in another way — by taking over your health care.

Catholic institutions across the nation are merging with secular hospitals, clinics, and even small private practices at an unprecedented rate. Optimists explain that the consolidation and shared infrastructure help reduce costs. Pessimists point out that the aggressive mergers come at a time when Catholic bishops are exerting and expanding their authority. “I see it as a conscious effort to achieve through the private market what they failed to achieve through the courts or at the ballot box,” says Monica Harrington, a San Juan Island resident who’s spent the last year fighting a Catholic hospital in her town.

Three of the largest health-care systems in the Northwest—PeaceHealth, Providence Health & Services, and Franciscan Health System—are Catholic entities, and they’re busy making new deals in our state. According to MergerWatch, a nonprofit that tracks Catholic hospital mergers across the nation, there was a record-breaking 10 mergers announced in Washington State in 2012.

It’s a chilling story. Catholics can’t get their way in popular opinion, so they’ve followed another path, buying up and limiting health care options so that you have no choice but to follow their ancient biblical rules. The linked article is an examination of the growing move to limit your medicine to Catholic medicine in the Pacific Northwest, but it applies everywhere. They interviewed doctors who reported on their constraints.

Three physicians working in Whatcom County eventually agreed to speak with me. PeaceHealth bought out the secular hospital in 2008. Since then, PeaceHealth has systematically bought up nearly every specialty clinic in the area, from cardiologists to pediatricians, hospice to oncology. The physicians who agreed to meet me for coffee talked about the mindfuck of being raised Catholic, turning to atheism, and excelling in medicine—only to wake up one day with the church as your boss. The first physician joked grimly about the religious directives being “medieval torture porn.” He talked about the struggle of trying to balance his duty to patients with the edicts of a Catholic hospital.

These religious directives are nightmarish. They aren’t always followed — these really are rules laid down by religious fanatics who have no experience or connection to the actual practice of medicine, and conscientious doctors try to find workarounds — but what limits them now is competition. If Catholics get a monopoly on health care in an area, then the trouble really begins.

To understand Catholic health care, it’s important to know the rules that guide Catholic hospitals, otherwise known as Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs). These directives are drafted and tweaked by the rotating cast of mostly white, mostly celibate bishops couch-surfing at the Vatican. ERDs operate like a code of conduct that medical staff in Catholic hospitals agree to abide by, regardless of whether or not a particular staffer is Catholic. For the most part, the directives aren’t suggestions—they’re prescriptive.

“Any partnership… must respect church teaching and discipline,” one directive states. The church monitors the implementation of these directives through hospital ethic committees overseen by regional bishops like our very own Archbishop Peter Sartain.

Sure, in 43 pages of Ethical and Religious Directives, there’s some common-sense guidance to be found. But they’re also flush with horrifying detail. As you’d expect, the directives pertaining to women’s fertility read like a misogynist romance novel or found art from the Middle Ages: “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices.” Emergency contraception can only be given to rape victims, and even then only “if, after appropriate testing, there is no evidence that conception has occurred already.” Vasectomies and tubal ligations are also prohibited. Egg and sperm donors are deemed “contrary to the covenant of marriage,” surrogate motherhood is prohibited because it denigrates “the dignity of the child and marriage,” and doctors at Catholic hospitals can’t help infertile couples conceive artificially—using their own eggs and sperm—because test-tube babies “separate procreation from the marital act in its unitive significance.”

Then there’s this: “Abortion… is never permitted.”

Not even when the egg attaches outside the uterus and puts a mother’s life in danger: “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.”

The short-sighted and selfish male readers out there (and we know we have no shortage of those assholes in the atheist community) aren’t possibly quite as outraged as they should be. These rules affect women, right? I got mine, let them worry over it, it’s not my fight.

Unfortunately, Catholics also have some weird ideas about LGBT relationships. Another set of people who are going to be hurt by this Catholic takeover are those who are in any kind of relationship that doesn’t fit their narrow definition of one man, one woman…and give them the power to flex their ideological muscle, and you might find yourself snubbed if you’re divorced.

So maybe you aren’t gay and your sexual relationships are conservative and conventional. The other big problem is death, which all of us will do someday. Washington state passed a death with dignity law a few years ago, allowing physician-assisted suicide in terminal cases. Guess which hospitals ignore the law and will prolong your suffering indefinitely?

Don’t let Catholics control your hospitals. Keep the church out of your health care decisions. Make Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) illegal — individuals may follow them at their personal discretion, but no health care facility gets to impose them on their patients, especially when they defy the law.

What? Zen Buddhists too?

This is getting ridiculous. Now there’s an ongoing sex abuse case within Zen Buddhism.

Joshu Sasaki Roshi, the founder and Abbot of Rinzai-ji is now 105 years old, and he has engaged in many forms of inappropriate sexual relationship with those who have come to him as students since his arrival here more than 50 years ago. His career of misconduct has run the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interview, to sexually coercive after hours “tea” meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students. Many individuals that have confronted Sasaki and Rinzai-ji about this behaviour have been alienated and eventually excommunicated, or have resigned in frustration when nothing changed; or worst of all, have simply fallen silent and capitulated. For decades, Joshu Roshi’s behaviour has been ignored, hushed up, downplayed, justified, and defended by the monks and students that remain loyal to him.

There’s something about being granted supernatural authority founded on claims that cannot be tested or supported with evidence that allows the nastiest side of some people’s psyche to run unchecked, isn’t there?

Be afraid

Ross Douthat wrote a column for the New York Times on Sunday…wait, hold it right there. How does that guy even get the privilege of a regular column in one of the biggest papers in the country? It’s a marvel.

OK, but anyway, he wrote this ridiculous column in which he moaned about the decline of Catholic influence in American politics. I would have just said “good!” and moved on, but this analysis made me worry.

The problem for authoritarian conservatives like Douthat is that the GOP is wildly out of step with the US Catholic Bishops and the Vatican on just about every economic issue: wealth inequality, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unions, universal health care — even global warming (not to mention the death penalty and immigration).

The other problem he has is that American Catholics overwhelmingly reject the bishops’ stance on the sex stuff the GOP obsesses about and a whopping 60% of them want the Church’s leadership to focus on social justice issues — which are of course anathema to the Republican Party.

Do you get that? American Catholics find the Catholic bishops too conservative, and the Catholic bishops find the Republican party too conservative. The Republicans are worse than the Catholic hierarchy, and we all know in what contempt I hold Catholicism.

When Catholic bishops find you too stony-hearted and callous, you know you’ve got a problem.

Perhaps they should have tried this technique on the priests?

I don’t know how the Catholic Church manages to hold itself together in the face of all these revelations. The Dutch church was practicing the usual heedless barbarities.

Up to 11 boys were castrated while in the care of the Dutch Roman Catholic church in the 1950s to rid them of homosexuality, a newspaper investigation has said.

A young man was castrated in 1956 after telling police he was being abused by priests, the newspaper reported.

Although it does suggest a better solution. Like the priesthood of Cybele, perhaps the Catholic priesthood ought to demand voluntary self-castration as a prerequisite to admission? I understand that they’re already having problems getting recruits, and this certainly wouldn’t help — but at least the ones you would get would be much more dedicated.

Wait, no…one thing we don’t need is more dedicated Catholic fanatics.

How about if we stop pretending religion is an important academic subject at all?

I was asked to promote this petition to stop forced religious indoctrination in Greek schools, and I support it and you should go sign it if you agree.

Greek public schools hold daily Orthodox prayer, schedule regular church visits as well as mandate the taking of a “religious studies” class every year. However, Greek law also allows students to opt out by submitting a simple form signed by their guardian if they are under 18. Unfortunately, many school administrators are either unaware or simply refuse to allow the exemption and ministry officials are not holding them to account.

The latest case is Stavros Kanias, School Principal in the Glika Nera suburb of Athens. Kanias is refusing to allow a middle school student to opt out even stating that his refusal is based on a desire to “follow the law of Christ”. Even though the required form has been submitted it is not being accepted. Many similar cases are often not publicized.

When Greek MP’s have raised the question in parliament, the Education Minister has simply reiterated the procedure and deferred to lower ministry officials.

But I do have one reservation: it doesn’t go far enough. It’s a good idea to give students the ability to opt out of religious instruction, but why is religious instruction in any school any where?

I’ve usually taken a pragmatic perspective on this issue before. We don’t have much choice to but to give way on minor compromises in school curricula, and this is often an easy one: if religion is taught comparatively and objectively, it’s a good tool for breaking dogma. I can’t get too irate at a school offering a “world religions” class, because I know that would be the first step towards atheism for the students (for the same reason, though, I’m suspicious. Our opponents aren’t morons, and they’d know this too — I suspect them of plotting to smuggle orthodoxy into the classroom under cover of objectivity, and for instance, knowing that a local priest of the dominant cult will often offer to teach the course.)

But here’s my major problem. It’s a useless subject. And no, I’m not one of those elitist yahoos who thinks art and philosophy are useless subjects, rejecting anything that isn’t a hard science; I mean, it is literally useless, distracting, and narrow. If right now students were getting an hour a week in a “religious studies” class, I think they’d be far better served by getting an hour a week for anthropology, or philosophy, or poetry…or sure, more math.

I know what the usual argument would be: but every culture has a religion of some sort, it’s a human universal, people find it important and we ought to acknowledge it. So? Every human culture has parasites and diseases, so why don’t we have a mandatory weekly course in parasitology? It would be far more entertaining, interesting, and useful. What wouldn’t be quite so useful, though, is a course taught from the perspective of the malaria parasite, praising its role in shaping human civilizations for thousands of years, which is pretty much equivalent to what kids get in a “religious studies” class right now.

I don’t think religion will ever disappear, but I’ll be satisfied when seminaries and theology departments all shut down everywhere for lack of interest.

Mighty fine lawyers down there in Kentucky

The Kentucky office of Homeland Security is being sued by American Atheists and others for the absurdity of a statement on a plaque and their training materials that the “safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God” — that statement just fills you with confidence in their competence, doesn’t it? Splattering an official document with testimonials to your failure to cope except by closing your eyes and praying is not something I want to see from people responsible for my security.

The state Attorney General has responded, and no, I am not reassured or confident that we’re dealing with grown-ups anymore. The gist of his arguments that this is not a problem of church-state separation is that:

  1. Denial! State security has a secular purpose, so this isn’t really a religious claim.

  2. Evasion! They aren’t making anyone swear an oath, so it’s OK.

  3. Contradiction! While there may be a mingling of religion and government (? See statement 1), you can assess the statute while pretending it doesn’t have a religious component.

That’s in a petition to the Supreme Court defending the right to rely on their god. I’d say it doesn’t have a chance, except…SCALIAAAA!

Who cares if the pope retires?

Get rid of one, and they’re just going to appoint another one. It’s not as if the job description has changed: the primary criteria are the ability to profess brain-buggering bullshit and work your way through the arcane medieval hierarchy of church politics, so it’s not as if we’re going to be surprised. It’s going to be another old guy who has dedicated his entire life to superstitious nonsense.

How I’ll always remember this pope: