Doesn’t Andrew Sullivan understand what we’d say in reply?

It’s appreciated that Sullivan expresses his outrage at the stupid claims of creationists.

What do you do when people use religion to perpetrate empirical untruth? In a free country not much. But on this kind of issue, it seems to me that Hitchens was right. These people need to be mocked mercilessly for ignorance and stupidity. This isn’t faith. It’s bullshit. And yet in this advanced country, it’s everywhere – and one political party panders to it.

But didn’t he stop to think that many of us will look at him, a Catholic, and say exactly the same thing about sacred crackers, the magical power of baby dunking, the doctrines of heaven and hell (and for that matter, an afterlife), and his atrocious nightmare of a sky-daddy?

Hitchens was also right about religion. He didn’t restrict his criticisms to just the creationist subsect.

Christian love

A Christian prayer group really doesn’t like the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Now for our prayer, we pray that the women who work in your MFRR and the women in your family will befall fast moving breast cancer which can not everbe cured. We pray this for Leah Bruton, and Becki Miller, Patricia Corigan, Chris Rodda, Edie Disler, Vicky Garrison, Kristin Leslie, Melinda Moeton and Joan Slish. And you evil clan too, we pray this for Bonnie Wiensten and Amanda and Amber Wienstein and the woman lawyers Cariline Mitchel and Katherin Ritchy and all women of all who work at with for Military Freedom Against Religon Foundation.

The women targeted have nothing to worry about — you can’t get much more ineffective than sitting around wishing a nonexistent ghost would afflict your enemies — but the sad thing is that the women in this prayer group really believe in the efficacy of their magic incantation, and honestly want other women to suffer horribly from a painful, disfiguring, and life-threatening disease.

You shall know them by their love. Their blind, hateful, petty love.

I propose that states seize all the Catholic schools

I will never understand Catholicism. On the one hand, they claim to be all about the babies: procreate wildly, let nothing interfere with the spawning. On the other hand, though, they promote deep ignorance and confusion about sex and reproduction, as if they’re afraid of it.

So here’s this lovely case of a teacher at a Catholic school in Indiana who was evaluated as excellent in her work, but who, in her lawfully married and entirely conventional life with her husband at home, wanted to have children — something that ought to be fully copacetic with Catholicism. Except…she had a medical condition that made her infertile, so she and her husband were going through in-vitro fertilization.

Which meant, of course, that the priest at the local Catholic church had the right to meddle.

“On May 24, 2011, Herx, her husband, and her father met with Msgr. Kuzmich and [St. Vincent Principal Sandra] Guffey,” the complaint states. “Msgr. Kuzmich repeatedly told Herx that she was a ‘grave, immoral sinner‘ and that it would cause a ‘scandal’ if anyone was to find out that St. Vincent de Paul had a teacher who received fertility treatment. Msgr. Kuzmich told Herx that this situation would not have occurred had no one found out about the treatments, and that some things were ‘better left between the individual and God.'”

The end result: despite the priest saying that “her performance had nothing to do with the decision to terminate her employment”, she was fired for “improprieties related to Church teachings or Law.” An appeal farther up the hierarchy failed as well, because she’s just plain evil.

“Bishop Rhoades refused to renew Herx’s contract, stating that ‘The process of in vitro fertilization very frequently involves the deliberate destruction or freezing of human embryos,’ and ‘In vitro fertilization … is an intrinsic evil, which means that no circumstances can justify it.’ Herx’s appeal to the Bishop was the final step in the administrative appeals process within the Diocese.”

There’s a bit of lashing out going on now, too.

Herx says she was fired even though the defendants still employ teachers who do not regularly attend Catholic mass; who are divorced (including Guffey); who have had hysterectomies, vasectomies and other procedures that have altered their reproductive organs; and who use contraceptives.

Nobody should be fired for those things, either.

It seems to me that the problem is that the church is playing the role of a secular employer in what ought to be a secular profession, the education of children, while trying to impose arbitrary and obsolete medieval religious rules on its employees. I propose a simple change: seize the Catholic schools, remove the priests from control, and manage them as assets of the community’s public school system.

Do this everywhere for all religious schools, not just the Catholic ones. The strengths of those schools have always been in the teachers, not the dogmatic nitwits in the religious hierarchy who mismanage them. It also ought to be considered a violation of basic civil rights when an employer decides that they have the power to regulate the private, personal behavior of all employees at all times, even when they are not on the employer’s time and property — they have no right to interfere to such an egregiously excessive extent.

“Undeniable” denial

I didn’t attend the Christian “Undeniable” event that was supposed to happen in Federation Square in Melbourne last night. They were dishonest and boring.

The gang of Christians did show up outside the Melbourne convention center after the Global Atheist Convention, and commenced chanting and howling: they passed a microphone around and bellowed their thanks to Jesus at a loud volume, while their fellows closed their eyes and waved their hands at the skies. They looked awesomely foolish. There was no attempt at conversation; they couldn’t, they just had their scripts to recite. But as has been typical of all the religious demonstrations at the GAC, they just amplify their own voices and ignore everyone else, which kind of defeats the point, I would think.

After their circle jerk was over, one fellow started ordering people to get into small groups and march over to the square. He made the mistake of passing his microphone along, so I managed to ask him some questions.

“Why are you here at the atheist convention, rather than at Federation Square?” He answered that it just happened to be a convenient place to meet. He was a liar. Of course he was at that particular place because he wanted to testify to atheists.

“Who were you people talking to over your microphones?” He said they were just talking to each other. Again, a lie. It’s obvious that they were putting on a public display of piety. When I pointed out that their shrieking was all addressed to their god in the sky, he just shrugged. Someone else corrected me and said their god was everywhere. Which made me wonder why they needed to amplify their voices, and why they were all looking and raising their arms skyward. I guess God is hard of hearing.

“What do you hope to accomplish with this loud howling at your god?” And with that, they all scurried away.

I don’t see how I was supposed to ask them their story when all they were prepared to do is deny their purposes and scream at an invisible god. So I blew them off and didn’t bother to follow them to the square, where they’d just blindly babble anyway.

The mystery of the disappearing laptop

That priest who flashed gay porn at his audience is being investigated, and something strange has happened: the laptop that he used has vanished completely and somewhat mysteriously. It’s also the only thing stolen from the priest’s home.

Makes you go “hmmm”, doesn’t it.

I’ve got two possible explanations: 1) them evil gays broke into his house to steal his legendary Gay Porn stash, or 2) Jesus teleported the computer to his party room in Heaven. I can’t imagine any other way this could happen.

Oh, OK, a priest could have intentionally destroyed evidence that he had a computer full of dowloaded porn, but that’s so ridiculous and ludicrous that it beggars belief. Priests have vows and a special connection to a beneficent god and know for sure that lying and masturbating to gay porn and using a condom or other such sinful apparatus would send them straight to hell, so they’d never ever do that. Ever.

Rick Warren’s Libertarian Jesus

Have you heard Rick Warren’s Easter message?

Well certainly the Bible says we are to care about the poor….But there’s a fundamental question on the meaning of "fairness." Does fairness mean everybody makes the same amount of money? Or does fairness mean everybody gets the opportunity to make the same amount of money? I do not believe in wealth redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.

The only way to get people out of poverty is J-O-B-S. Create jobs. To create wealth, not to subsidize wealth. When you subsidize people, you create the dependency. You — you rob them of dignity.

So it’s come to this. Modern Christians happily interpret away the egalitarian message of the New Testament — perhaps the one salvageable bit of compassion in the whole Bible — to now denounce charity as robbing the poor of dignity. Even a wicked atheist like myself can see how Warren has completely distorted his own holy book.

On the other hand, though, Warren does believe in giving more to the rich, as you discover in his letter to his congregation, in which he reaches out his hand and begs them to donate a million dollars.

He is right about one thing. Rick Warren has no dignity.

Is that border magical?

What strange transformation occurs within humanity as we trace the population northward, from the United States to Canada? A recent survey of Canadians (especially the Quebecois variety) revealed something:

Buried away in the survey was a single question that caught my eye immediately: Personally, do you consider yourself to be a religious person? A minuscule 22% answered yes. Presumeably, a whopping 78% of Quebecers do not consider themselves religious.

Across the whole of Canada, 36% answered yes, which is a little worse…but still, where has the United States of America gone wrong?

Who needs a $30,000 watch?

The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church was caught on camera wearing a $30,000 Breguet watch. I can think of little that’s more worthless than spending the entirety of a middle-class working person’s yearly salary on an ostentatious geegaw that has no function that isn’t served as well as a $10 throwaway or the ubiquitous cell phone…no function other than showing off that you’re more profligately wealthy than anyone else, that is. You know, if someone gave me something that trivial and that overpriced, I would thank them, quietly sell it, and then find a cause on Foundation Beyond Belief that could make better use of the money than being tied up in flashy bling.

But what do I know. I’m a godless atheist, he’s the moral leader of millions.

But he does have some shame. After the photo appeared, the church quickly whipped out a copy of photoshop and doctored the image to hide the jewelry. Can’t have the peons witnessing the church’s conspicuous consumption!

Remember, moral leader of millions.

Then the Patriarch denied everything.

Patriarch Kirill weighed in, insisting in an interview with a Russian journalist that he had never worn the watch, and that any photos showing him wearing it must have been doctored to put the watch on his wrist.

Remember, moral leader of millions.

Unfortunately for the Patriarch, the evidence was undeniable, and the church was later compelled to admit that yes, the old guy had been wearing the watch, and yes, they’d tried to airbrush it out of existence. They lied, he lied.

Remember, moral leader of millions.

But the patriarch has presented himself as the country’s ethical compass, and has recently embarked on a vocal campaign of public morality, advocating Christian education in public schools and opposing abortion and equal rights for gay people. He called the girl punk band protest at the cathedral “sacrilege.”

Remember, moral leader of millions.

The Patriarch has more important concerns than petty trivialities like his penchant for extravagant jewelry, the corruption of his church, or the ridiculous hypocrisy of a religion founded on claims of the importance of the immaterial spending profligately on toys of the obscenely wealthy.

The Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, a senior church cleric, played down the episode. In a telephone interview, he said that the controversy over the watch was distracting attention from more serious questions, like “the borders of artistic freedom and the meaning of the Gospels today.”

Do not question the moral leader of millions.

Still getting it all wrong

I can sort of sympathize: here’s a Christian pastor who’s trying to be relevant and a little bit progressive, and actually make real life issues, like sex, part of his church. And then, splat, look at this pratfall.

"On one side, (we’ll have) what men want or desire: your stripper pole, your video games, your sports," Scruggs said. "The woman’s side (is) orderly, neat. It’s all about love, candy, teddy bears, roses and being wined and dined and cherished."

This is what we call not really getting it. He’s dimly aware of a problem, but thinks the answer involves pushing stereotypes harder.

Oh, I hate it when that happens

You go off to give a talk on hedgehog gene expression in teratomas, or something similarly scientific. You put the memory stick in the auditorium display projector, the A/V guy pushes a button, and all of a sudden, the audience gets a brief glimpse of that unholy quantity of squid close-up photography you keep around for personal reasons. Now it’s never happened to me, personally — I’m competent with a computer, and much more careful — but here’s a story of a man who ‘accidentally’ showed the wrong powerpoint presentation.

In this case, the man was a Catholic priest (oooh, now you know exactly what happened next, right?)

And it wasn’t a zoology exercise on display. It was, as they delicately put it, “indecent images of men”.

I’m confused by one thing. On the one hand, they say the flustered priest quickly removed the memory stick and fled the room; on the other, the parents and children present report quite specifically that there were 16 pictures shown. I’m thinking it must have been a particularly vivid montage. Although the parents found it impressively memorable, the priest, Martin McVeigh, said he had no knowledge of it. Hmmm.

I am a little amused by what happened afterwards.

Twenty minutes later he returned, he continued with the meeting and wrapped up by saying that the children get lots of money for their Holy Communion and should consider giving some of it to the church.

That’s so typical of a Catholic priest: first they waggle a pile of penises at your kids, then they ask you to fill their coffers. Those priests better look like Chippendales dancers, or they shouldn’t get a penny.

I haven’t found any reports on how persuasive the audience found the presentation.