Jen McCreight gets to experience Minnesota!

Living in paradise, the Pacific Northwest, has probably spoiled her, so it’s good that Mother Nature is preparing for her visit. Right now, Minnesota is looking horribly bedraggled and grubby — we’ve been thawing, slowly, over the last few weeks, so the snowpack burying us has diminished by a foot or two, and what’s left is the filthy black dirty detritus covering everything, with a few exposed brown patches here and there. But nw we hear that temperatures are about to plummet again, and a snowstorm is on the way, timed to arrive just when I’m picking her up! She’ll get to experience the range of exquisite torments Minnesota offers us, with the exception of the bugs. She’ll have to come back for that in July.

Anyway, Jen McCreight is touring the state, visiting Minneapolis, St Cloud, and of course, the cultural center of our fair region, small town Morris. She’ll be speaking here on God’s Lady Problem: Breaking up with abusive supernatural beings, at 6:30 in HFA 6 on Wednesday, 23 March. We’ll be having a slumber party at my house that evening, with my daughter Skatje also planning to be in town, but before that, I’m sure we can make a run out to Old No. 1 for some conviviality. Come on out and hang out!

If the weather allows, of course. We might be snowed in for a while. I hope she’s prepared.

Jen’s full schedule, in case you don’t want to travel to the cultural mecca on the west side of the state to see her:

Tuesday, 3/22
St. Cloud, MN
7:00pm in Atwood, Cascade Room
720 Fourth Ave South
Host: Secular Student Alliance at St. Cloud State University
Facebook event

Wednesday, 3/23
Morris, MN
Host: UM Morris Freethinkers
Part of Pride Week programming, woo!
6:30pm in HFA 6

Thursday, 3/24
Minneapolis, MN
7pm in Murphy Hall 130
206 Church Street SE
Host: Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists (CASH) at UM
Facebook event

The Credulity of Americans is Unquenchable (with bonus poll!)

The Credulity of Americans is Unquenchable
by Juno Walker

An evangelical pastor and his wife are making money off their 11 year-old son’s book about his near-death experience. If you think I sound cynical, you’re correct; unfortunately, it seems there are far too few Americans who share my skepticism.

But first, a little background about the story: the son, Colton, was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery for a burst appendix. Upon coming to, the boy recounted how “he had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus.” He said he even noticed that Jesus’ eyes were a sparkly blue. (Now, keep in mind that Jesus was a Jew, and while it’s not impossible for him to have blue eyes, the boy’s description more closely mirrors the typical Anglophilic portrayal of a long-haired, pasty-white Jesus with a goatee. Also keep in mind that Colton was only about 4 years-old when he had his “vision.” Do you think the images of Jesus he had seen up to that point would portray Jesus as a typical Jew of his day, or as an Anglo-Saxon hippie with blue eyes?)

Colton’s 163-page book has sold astonishingly well: there are currently more than 1.5 million copies in print, and it is on the New York Times best-seller list for two weeks now. Clearly many Americans have a strong need for this type of feel-good rubbish.

What’s not clear is whether he actually had a near-death experience, per se – I haven’t read the book (I refuse to spend money on it), and this article in the NYT isn’t clear; it merely says that he woke up from surgery and claimed he had died. Colton’s parents believe him, of course. They believe him so much that they published this book for him. And although Colton’s father says he was simply hoping for the publisher to break even, and that he plans on giving away most of the royalties, he is in fact keeping some of the money for “home improvements.” Well, there’s a nice plus. But as a Christian – and as a pastor – wouldn’t that money be better spent for the poor, the homeless, the sick, or other Christian goals?

Now, every parent wants to believe their kid. No parent wants to intentionally belittle and condescend to their child. And, given the parents’ religious faith, it’s easy to see how they are inclined to credulity.

But isn’t it more likely that something else is at work here? I mean, when you become a Christian, you make a commitment to a set of beliefs, a dogma, and the nature of a dogma is that you can’t doubt it and believe it at the same time. For example, a Christian can’t claim to be a Christian and doubt that Jesus was the son of God, or that he was raised from the dead. That’s the essence of being a Christian – at least from an evangelical point of view. And the typical believer can’t venture too far into the exegetical disputes over literal versus metaphorical interpretations; the theological ground there is too shaky – the fate of his eternal soul depends on it!

So the temptation to believe what would otherwise be met with a healthy skepticism and gentle patronization (e.g., if Colton woke up and said he died and met Alexander the Great), is so strong as to blind one from the more obvious explanation. The parents, of course, claim that Colton made reference to things that “there’s just no way he could have known.” The example they give is that the mother had had a miscarriage but never told Colton about it; but Colton had referenced it directly. This is a common refrain among those who have had near-death experiences.

But we know that our brains absorb a lot more stimuli via our senses than our “conscious minds” can register. I don’t intend to get into a discussion of consciousness – other than to say that no one really knows how to explain it yet – but there is literature out there documenting research and experiments related to human perception and human memory – but all too few people read this stuff.

And for all you parents out there – how many times have you been surprised at something your child has repeated to you that you were convinced they never could have known? How many times have you heard them parrot something that you swore they couldn’t hear or couldn’t understand?

What’s particularly sad is the effect this experience will have on Colton himself, as well as the effect his book will have on other credulous families with children. For his part, Colton, 7 years later, “now plays the piano and trumpet, is fascinated by Greek mythology, listens to Christian rock and loves Nebraska football.” That seems innocuous enough; but listen to what he says about his book: “”People are getting blessed, and they’re going to have healing from their hurts…I’m happy for that.”

He’s happy that people will believe a delusion as long as it makes them feel better. We are breeding generations of children who will gladly accept a lie instead of truth, so long as it makes them feel good. But one day, at some point in their lives, they will have no recourse to any real resilience in times of real crisis; they’re used to digesting the superficial bromides and platitudes our culture relishes. They won’t be able to digest a truly harrowing physical or psychological experience.

And don’t get me started on the further dampening of scientific curiosity and thinking this type of anecdote permits – and almost encourages.

And you know that if Colton were born a Buddhist, he would have seen the Buddha; if he were born a Muslim, he would have seen Muhammad; and if he were born a Hindu, he would have seen Krishna – or any of the other myriad deities in the Indian pantheon.

Stories like this one, especially when presented uncritically in a venue such as The New York Times, makes me truly pessimistic about the future of humankind.

By the way, there’s a poll by the Today show on this subject. Help it out.

Do you believe in heaven?
Colton Burpo had a near-death experience at the age of 4 during which, he says, he not only sat in Jesus’ lap, but met a sister lost to a miscarriage and his late great-grandfather — things of which he could have had no knowledge, his parents say. Do you believe there is a heaven?

64%
Yes.

28.6%
No.

7.3%
I’m not sure, but I hope so!

Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, accurately

Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, accurately
By OldCola

[Note from pzm: The text of this one is a little rougher than I like, but the content is interesting and addresses the claims of a character who has been lurking about here for a while, and whose work I’ve criticized before. If nothing else, I’d also like to see a few science posts submitted as guest articles, so think of this as priming the pump.]

The article, “Clarifying tetrapod embryogenesis, a physicistʼs point of view,” by V. Fleury, hasn’t steered the revolution expected by Fleury in evo-devo. Two years after the publication, cited by one (Fleury himself), the article seems to have being more useful to clarify the way he perceives the world, then anything related to the tetrapods embryogenesis. And the most useful elements are to be found on the Web, not in the article per se. Direct questions remain unanswered, critics are threatened by legal action for defamation, and hierarchical superiors are solicited to politely ask the critics to STFU.

While Fleury must be aware by now of major flaws in the way he represented several of the articles he used as sources of information, and of several inconsistencies of his model and the way he extrapolates his own data, he doesn’t seem to have done anything to correct them. The article remains available unchanged, a shame for EPJ AP editorial board (and Editor-in-Chief Dr Drévillon B. in particular), sufficiently shameful at least for the guy who invited the review, for Fleury to avoid disclosing his name.

A new element comes to complete Fleury’s quest:

The pattern of tetrapods exist in the platonician space of forms, just like the sphere. You can write its essence without evolutionnary arguments.

V. Fleury, Dynamic topology of the cephalochordate to amniote morphological transition: A self- organized system of Russian dolls, C. R. Biologies (2011), doi:10.1016/j.crvi.2010.11.009

During evolution of vertebrates a sequence of events is empirically observed: first, animals are bilateral, but they have no heart, no head, and no surrounding bag during development (these primitive animals are called cephalochordates [1]).

From the very first phrase of the Introduction, you know hope that no biologist read the manuscript before it was accepted for publication. And certainly not any evo-devo person, which would be the right choice for a referee for this kind of subject.

Cephalochordates are certainly not vertebrates and they certainly have a head, the sub-phylum being named after the fact that the notochord extends into that head. One may think that Fleury misused the word “head”, meaning “skull” or whatever, but if you read the French summary of the paper you do get the same information, Cephalochordata don’t have a “tête” (French for “head”).

And he dare give a reference! But if you had the courage to read his previous article (for a review) you may be familiar with the strange way Fleury reports his readings (at least the way he understood them), in an absolutely surreal way, including data from his own lab! If not, there is a brand new example in this one (see below).

By the title you may have expected to read about comparative embryology/anatomy that will enlighten you on the relations between the body plans of cephalochordates and amniotes. If so, you will be deceived. Fleury focuses entirely on chicken embryos, hoping to prove experimentally the existence of some kind of order in the ontogeny of the chicken that reflects an order in the phylogeny of chordates. The reading is interesting not to learn anything about evolution or embryology (or physics by the way), but to see how an a priori can lead someone to mess up things badly. Fleury observes the world through a keyhole shaped by Plato a long time ago and he seeks some equivalent of the Holly Grail: a way to write the essence of the pattern of tetrapods without evolutionary arguments, as it “exist in the platonician space of forms“, while avoiding being embarrassed by the bullshit produced by embryologists, geneticists or evo-devo people.

The aim of this work is to support that “the formation of amniotes would be a deterministic attractor of a physical process over a flat visco-elastic plane,” and that the formation of the heart and the chorion (you should pronounce it amnios to make sense) are the consequence of the body’s growth along the anteroposterior axis.

Thus, any embryo with the amniotic (and chorionic) cavity formed before the beginning of gastrulation would falsify Fleury’s model definitively. I’ll come to that later.

While aware of the lateral folding of the embryo around an antero-posterior (AP) axis, Fleury avoid to discuss it as his model don’t explain it. Cardiac tubes are formed as mirror structures at both sides of and parallel to the AP axis, they migrate to the midline where they fuse to form the heart and they are already pre-determined to produce almost fully developed hearts if by some mutation their migration to the midline is impaired. Cardiac formation is not caused by the the cephalic fold renamed “cardiac fold” by Fleury.

The fact that the cephalic and caudal folds forming the anterior and posterior intestinal portals are distant in time by almost 24 h doesn’t bother him and his model lack any modality that would explain the latency for the formation of the posterior intestinal portal. On the contrary, he manage to represent the two folds as the result of the AP axis extension in a single schema, as being the consequences of a single phenomenon, “[f]or the sake of clarity“. He is not at his first temporal jump of embryonic structures, even of imaginary ones.
What kind of physicist could have reviewed the manuscript without requiring some kind of explanation about this particularity?

There is nothing really new in his description of the development of the chicken embryo, except the errors and omissions which make it unusable. One may prefer a classic textbook, published a while ago: Patten, B.M. (1920). The Early Embryology of the Chick. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son and Co. You can browse through it at UNSW Embryology pages, where the scans of the illustrations are of much better quality.

Some data may be interesting for people interested by the dynamics of the embryo formation, the article being based on time lapse videos of the developing embryo. There is no much of it and the graphics seem to report on single experiments (no number of observed embryos given, no variance bars on the graphics). What is really new for me, is that Fleury found a way to report a “rate of variation of the radius” of an ellipse, with a major vs minor axis ratio of ~1,5 (fig 3, a, 0′), giving a single value! Any mathematician around to explain us this?

As Fleury decided to rename the formation of the subcephalic pocket “cardiac fold”, and he was seeking some symmetry at the caudal region, he also renamed the subcaudal pocket “cardiac fold” and he triumphantly mention the “aneural heart” of the hagfish as an evidence of the power of prediction of his model. Now, the caudal heart of the hagfish is just a pair of specialized structures on the caudal veins, parallel to the AP axis, as the primitive heart tubes, separated by a cartilage septum and they are innervated! Jensen, in the Introduction of his paper clearly explain the anatomy of the circulatory system of the hagfish and what elements are innervated, or not. Either Fleury didn’t bothered reading the paper or he is simply unable to understand what he is reading (or both, your guess). It would have be nice if he had read the paper, because he passed over the existence of the portal heart and of what some people call the cephalic hearts of the hagfish (specialized gill musculature which propel the blood through the arterial circulation). There is even an illustration for people bored by textual explications (fig 4). Such a little animal, so many hearts and not enough folds to explain them. Unnerving.

Patten starts his Introduction by a very wise advice:

The only method of attaining a comprehensive understanding of embryological processes is through the study and comparison of development in various animals.

As I said, any embryo with the amniotic cavity formed before the beginning of gastrulation would falsify Fleury’s model definitively. Let me present you an artist’s rendition of Dr Fleury at his early youth, second week of development

Capture d'écran 2011-02-21 à 18.24.47.png

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The illustration is from the online Human Embryology course notes (clic the image for the full page). I’m not sure they had in mind Vincent Fleury when they draw this cartoon, but it’s the best I can offer you: A cute embryo with his amniotic cavity lined with cells from the epiblast and his primary yolk sac lined by cells derived by the hypoblast. The Heuser’s membrane is still attached to the extraembryonic reticulum.
A few days later, the secondary yolk sac had formed and the chorionic cavity was installed.

DF0AC65B-3FA5-4C5B-AA9A-405F4C654DE4.jpg

At this stage little Vincent was still bilaminar with fully formed amniotic and chorinic cavities.

Those of you interested to learn about embryo’s folding can also visit Folding of the germinal disk and the generation of the abdominal wall, in which case the comparison of the two foldings (cephalo-caudal and lateral), animation is a must for the visitor, and certainly for Fleury.

How sad that a great model from an experimentalist working all day with embryos, goes down the drain after being confronted to elements of chapter 5 of a Human Embryology textbook.

Several questions come in mind in this situation, the first one being: who the hell reviewed the manuscript. Not a biologist, probably not a physicist (he should have ask for a mechanism explaining the delay of formation of the caudal fold). Not a second year student of biology or medicine neither; she would have spotted the problem with the amniotic and chorionic cavities subito presto.
Fleury’s precedent paper was an invited review by one of the editors of a journal of physics. You can’t blame the guy for being unable to understand the bunch of errors the review contains. OK, you can blame him for not having a specialist’s opinion on the final piece of work. Misplaced trust. And sometimes, some physicists are just pissed-off by life scientists. Fleury didn’t even dared to give his name.

This time, the journal is a publication of the French National Academy of Science and it displays “Biologies” on the cover. Shame on them. Until this paper is retracted who would trust the “Development and reproduction biology” section of the journal, or the journal at all? I wouldn’t, would you?

“Therefore, this suggest” is one fabulous transition.

The Methods section of the paper may be interesting if you plan a few experiments with chicken embryos, but dramatically incomplete. The most interesting part is missing: the references of the software and the method Fleury is using for PIV, which gives him astonishing images. I would like to be able to check by myself, previous interpretations of experimental data, even the ones generated in his lab, by Fleury being as much surreal as his usual stuff. Hopefully he could complete this section in the comments of this post.

In Heart formation, Fleury undergo to explain how the heart is formed by the heart fold. Here is the first part where it goes really bad. I can understand the frustration of a physicist who would like to have more data concerning the biomechanics of the process, and hopefully somebody else than Fleury will go for them. But there is no need to reinvent the wheel, there are nice descriptions of the movements by which the heart tubes are forming, how the lateral folding of the embryo make them join along the anteroposterior axis and describing their fusion to produce the unique heart tube [1]. Certainly, the 125° rotation of the heart fields and the lateral folding of the embryo necessary for the normal cardiogenenic process are not perpendicular to the anteroposterior axis and doesn’t fit Fleury’s model, but it isn’t reasonable to just ignore them. You can’t just ignore what it doesn’t fit your model to make it sound plausible.
Anyway, even the fusion of the primary heart tubes doesn’t seem to be necessary to support the development and morphogenesis of the heart, up to some point: “a highly differentiated four-chambered mammalian heart” in the case of Foxp4 mutant mice embryos [2].

The point of junction of the cardiac tubes do travel caudaly along the anteroposterior axis of the embryo, but that’s just the point of junction…

An interesting description of the heart formation can be found in a relatively old textbook: The Early Embryology of the Chick (pp 68-72, fig. 26 & 27, with emphasis for fig 27) [3]

For those who will take the time to read the paper, please pay attention to the part discussing the role of chemotactic forces ; Fleury didn’t managed yet to understand morphogenic gradients and that most of them are embedded into the cells and the extracellular matrix.

You may need to go through the whole section about the Chorion formation to understand that Fleury discuss just about the amniotic folds of the chorion and completely ignores the rest of it. It’s just that it isn’t folded in the right direction for his model. On the other hand the amniotic folds of the chorion are folded in the right way and Fleury carefully studied the ways the meet around a single point. Not only it’s weird how he doesn’t discuss the lateral part of the amniotic folds (absolutely necessary to form the amnios and the dorsal part of the chorion), but not perpendicular to the anteroposterior axis, but somehow he manage to found a single rate of variation of the radius of an ellipse!

Patten [3] offers a series of diagrams showing the growth and foldings of the somatopleure which form the amnios, from transverse sections of the embryo, in fig 30 and from longitudinal sections in fig. 32. That gives a global image of the tissue growth, in all directions, not just the keyhole presentation Fleury is giving in his article.

While Fleury is aware that the cephalic and caudal amniotic folds appear at different developmental stages, he present their occurrence as being caused by the “extension of the median axis” without explaining what may be the mechanical causes for the delay of almost 24h for the apparition of the caudal amniotic fold. “For the sake of clarity” he present them in the same figure (4b of his paper) as if they occurred in the same time. As much clarity as usually.

1. Heart Field: From Mesoderm to Heart Tube, Radwan Abu-Issa, and Margaret L. Kirby, Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology Vol. 23 (2007): 45-68, doi: 10.1146/annurev.cellbio.23.090506.123331

2. Advanced Cardiac Morphogenesis Does Not Require Heart Tube Fusion, Shanru Li, Deying Zhou, Min Min Lu, Edward E. Morrisey, Science Vol 305 (2004): 1619-1622, doi: 10.1126/science.1098674
3. Patten, B.M. (1920). The Early Embryology of the Chick [link to scans in pdf at archive.org]. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son and Co. You can browse through it at UNSW Embryology pages, where the scans of the illustrations are of much better quality.

V. Fleury, Dynamic topology of the cephalochordate to amniote morphological transition: A self-organized system of Russian dolls, C. R. Biologies (2011), doi:10.1016/j.crvi.2010.11.009

Happiness is a warm gun

i-f644b2b3fe02be8d5c66b50fc7a119df-browning1911.jpeg

Isn’t this charming: Utah has officially declared the Browning model 1911 semi-automatic pistol their official state gun. How lovely! I remember when our kids were growing up in Utah, one of their school assignments was to compile all of the state symbols into an illustrated report, so I knew the Utah state bird was the California gull, and the state insect was the honey bee, and the state fossil was Allosaurus, but they weren’t pasting pictures of firearms into their scrapbooks. That will all change now.

If I were helping a kid through the Utah school system, and I had to help them find pictures for that assignment, I’d point them to this page on the geography of gun deaths. It has some pretty illustrations.

Look! Utah is a lovely orange!

i-f237b6b1be7ecdadfbee4b6137f9e0ed-stategundeaths.jpeg

This is also useful, but it might be a little difficult for elementary school kids…although it might be a springboard to teach them about statistics and correlations. Every fourth grader should know about those.

i-24688397b88846948b4dfeebef1b099c-gundeathcharts.jpeg

So celebrate your gun culture, Utah! And celebrate poverty and ultra-conservative politics, too — they all go so well together.

Just another day in Rethuglican America

More authoritarian bills are working their way through congress. They simply have no restraint anymore, and are rushing hell-bent to create a police state.

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

In testimony to a House taxation subcommittee on Wednesday, Thomas Barthold, the chief of staff of the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee, confirmed that one consequence of the Republicans’ “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” would be to turn IRS agents into abortion cops—that is, during an audit, they’d have to detemine, from evidence provided by the taxpayer, whether any tax benefit had been inappropriately used to pay for an abortion.

Why are they doing this? Because they are spoiled children who refuse to think that a few pennies from their pocket might end up helping some horrible woman who got pregnant.

(via Mike the Mad Biologist)

How’s that astrobiology gig working out for you, Dr Wickramasinghe?

Ooops. Hot off the dramatic fizzle of the bacteria in meteorites story comes word that Chandra Wickramasinghe is losing his job and the University of Cardiff is closing their astrobiology center. Not because they oppose his work, of course, but simply because the weird science isn’t cost-effective.

It turns out it was a pretty rinky-tink operation to begin with. All it was was Wickramasinghe, getting paid a part-time salary of $24,000/year, with a little unpaid assistance from other people working at the university. In other words, the Astrobiology Center of the University of Cardiff was Chandra Wickramasinghe sitting at a desk for a few hours a week, writing effusive editorials and essays about the wonderful things astrobiology was discovering. No loss.

Psychic powers provide comfort and therapy. Sure.

That’s the message the despicable John Edward and Dr Oz tried to give in a recent television program. I knew Edward was beneath contempt, but I’ve never watched Oz and had only heard second-hand that he was a woo-meister…but this show confirms it. Even worse, Oz brought in a critic, Katherine Nordal, to assess Edward’s psychic readings, and she has since complained about what the show did with her commentary.

In a letter to producers of “The Dr. Oz” show Nordal said, “I provided very balanced responses to Dr. Oz’s questions during the show’s taping, however, the editing of my responses did not capture my full comments or give viewers an accurate portrayal of my professional view on John Edward’s methods. Instead, it seems that ‘The Doctor Oz’ show intentionally edited my responses in a way that gave the appearance of my endorsement of Edward’s methods as a legitimate intervention.”

Keep that in mind, skeptics, if you’re ever asked to participate in one of these scammy shows: they want you for window dressing, to give an air of critical evaluation to their games, but they won’t hesitate to mangle your words. We already know that psychics are liars and con artists, why should we expect them to treat anyone honorably?

And then…oh, man, this is evil ghoulishness. Edward did one of his typical fishing expeditions, saying someone who had lost a child was present, and getting a gullible victim to volunteer for a little torture and exploitation.

This was unbelievable.

His next victim (patient?) was a middle-aged man who rose to his feet when Edward suggested someone had lost a son. As the reading continued, Edward informed the grief-stricken parent that the car accident that claimed his son’s life was in fact a suicide.

“I’ve never known that he committed suicide for sure,” said the grieving father, “but I believe it.”

Edward is making this stuff up as he goes along; he is taking the grief of a heart-broken parent and twisting it and making it harder, sharper, more painful. And he’s getting paid for it.

Jebus, but I hate these amoral psychopaths, these molesters of memories, these exploiters of tragedy.

And Oz is an enabler, the monster’s assistant.

The Catholic Church still doesn’t get it

The Catholic Church still doesn’t get it
By Adrian Liston

No matter how many revelations of child sex abuse by Catholic Priests come out, the Catholic Church still doesn’t get it. Take, for example, this story told by the Archbishop of New York, in which he recounts a (probably apocryphal) encounter with an angry man at an airport.

According to the Archbishop, the ex-Catholic said that he cannot look at a Catholic Priest without thinking “sexual predator”. The Archbishop’s response is telling, as he thinks only of the “shame and damage of the wound” that had been inflicted on himself with those words, rather than the far worse damage inflicted upon countless children by the Church’s actions.

Archbishop Dolan considered yelling and swearing at the guy, but instead proceeded to excuse the Church from all misconduct — taking the common line that sexual abuse is everywhere, so the Catholic Church should not be singled out.  The Church just doesn’t get it, still treating child sexual abuse as just another sin on par with consensual homosexuality, rather than as a crime. They are also ignoring their own records, which suggest that Catholic Priests are more than 100-fold more likely to be a child sex offender than an average member of the public. There is a real genuine problem of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church that just cannot be eradicated until the Church accepts that the problem is within Catholicism itself, rather than just being a society-wide problem that has reached into the Church.

Most revealing of all is the musings by the Archbishop on the reasons why the Catholic Church is attacked over child sexual abuse. The Archbishop gives three reasons:

1. “For one, we priests deserve the more intense scrutiny, because people trust us more as we dare claim to represent God, so, when one of us do it – even if only a tiny minority of us ever have — it is more disgusting.”

I have to say, I think the Archbishop has a point here. Not about “a tiny minority”, the Church’s own figures suggest that ~9% of Catholic Priests ordained in 1970 were child sex offenders. But it is true that the crime is more horrific when the same monster who is abusing children is also telling adults in a loving consensual relationship that their act is a crime against God. The solution is simple, however – until the Church achieves some semblance of morality itself it should cease from condemning others.

2. “Two, I’m afraid there are many out there who have no love for the Church, and are itching to ruin us.  This is the issue they love to endlessly scourge us with.”

Ah yes, the Church is the victim of a witch-hunt (a term which originates, incidentally, from the practice of the Catholic Church in persecuting innocent women and executing them without evidence). America does indeed have a history of Protestant discrimination against Catholics, but the child sex abuse scandal is not limited to America. There has been scandal and outcry in staunchly Catholic European countries, such as Belgium and Ireland. The rise of anti-Catholicism in these countries is not due to historic prejudice, but rather is being directly created by the actions of the Church. The Archbishop has cause and effect the wrong way around – child sex abuse is driving anti-Catholic sentiment, not the reverse.

3. “And, three, I hate to say it, there’s a lot of money to be made in suing the Catholic Church, while it’s hardly worth suing any of the other groups I mentioned before.”

This is contemptible, the Archbishop is making the outright accusation that cases of child sex abuse are being invented for profit. Once again, the Church is considering itself to be the victim rather than the culprit. Not only is this a disgusting slap in the face to all those people abused by Catholic Priests, but it is certifiably wrong. The John Jay Study, commissioned by the Catholic Church, detailed that Church investigations of sex abuse allegations found that 80% were “substantiated” and only 1.5% were “false”. So even when the Church investigates itself, using a Canon Law process that is judged by the local Bishop and does not allow for forensic evidence, they agree that only the tiniest minority of cases are made up.

The Church needs to stop assuming that the outrage against child sexual abuse is confected for political or monetary gain. The outrage against child sexual abuse is genuine outrage at the horrific nature of the crime itself.

I have suggested before the five steps that the Church needs to take in response to these crimes:

1) Admit that child rape is a wide-spread crime being perpetrated within the Catholic Church by a substantial proportion of Priests, reaching across continents and as far back as records exists.

2) Admit that this child rape has nothing to do with homosexuality or secularism or any such, and is instead a problem disproportionately within Catholicism.

3) Admit that the Church knew for a long time that this was a problem but chose to cover it up, and that Church doctrine is still preventing cases being reported directly to the secular authorities.

4) Admit that the Church has spent, and still spends, far more time devoted to petty concerns such as preventing contraception than it has to preventing child rape by its own members.

5) Fix the damn problem. Sell a few pieces of art and pay restitution to the victims. Make it official Church policy to report every incident to the police. Investigate Priests with the zeal shown during the Spanish Inquisition. Shut up about other people’s “sins” until the Church is clean. Change those aspects of doctrine or theology that drive child rape. Show some humility.

Unfortunately, decades into the scandal the Church is still failing to grasp step 1.