We’ve been told to stop being so hostile to the Pope

I don’t know why we should; he’s a delusional old man who uses fear to demand obedience to archaic dogmas. But Carla Powell tries to make the case for the Pope, and fails. Here’s her reason why we should be nice to the guy.

Though he has none of John Paul’s film-star charisma [Wait, what?], Benedict is a man with a message. He was the late pontiff’s closest friend, his intellectual soulmate and loyal colleague. In all his time in Rome as Pope, and on his travels around the world, he has argued against what he calls “the dictatorship of relativism”.

Moral relativism has become a kind of intellectual disease, weakening the vitality and self-confidence of Europe and the west. Left unchecked, it will destroy us, because it removes our power to resist the distortion of our values, erosion of our liberty and, ultimately, threats to our democratic way of life.

Well, you know that this kind of preaching of an absolute morality, usually backed up by nothing more than tradition and power and fear, isn’t unique to Catholicism. Powell’s words are clearly dogwhistles for the evil Muslim threat, but the thing is, they aren’t big on ‘relativism’ either — both Christianity and Islam seem to be in a competitive race for the title of most deranged patriarchal tyranny on the planet.

i-e2b08eb2fd75363ece98f7743b019489-godfellas.jpeg

But OK, let’s play her game. Let’s admit that there are some things that really are wrong and even evil. I’ll start.

Raping children is wrong. Using the power of a wealthy institution to shelter people who rape children is wrong.

See? No relativism at all.

Now what was Ms. Powell saying about treating the papacy with the respect it deserves?

Newt Gingrich on gay marriage

Newt Gingrich, the man who told his wife he was leaving her as she lay in a hospital bed sick with cancer, has declared that “overturning Prop 8 is an outrageous disrespect for our Constitution and for the majority of people of the United States who believe marriage is the union of husband and wife” on his website. Unfortunately for him, he left comments open, and is on the receiving end of a lot of contempt for his hypocrisy.

My favorite so far is “Which one of your multiple marriages was the most sacred to you?”.

I’m also rather peeved that Gingrich’s website has the url of newt.org. He has deprived some worthy member of the Salamandridae of a good and memorable web address! Not to mention the dishonor he’s already brought to the good name of the Pleurodelinae. I can’t believe that guy is mumbling about running for president again — I’d rather see a real mud puppy in the office.

From the department of not getting it

Muslims in Saudi Arabia are building a giant clock that resembles Big Ben, but is over six times larger. They want to replace Greenwich Mean Time with Mecca Time as the world standard.

As Mohammed al-Arkubi, manager of one of the hotels in the complex, put it: “Putting Mecca time in the face of Greenwich Mean Time. This is the goal.”

This is a beautiful example of cargo cult science. Big Ben has nothing to do with establishing GMT — it’s just a big clock in London. GMT is entirely about establishing a uniform standard reference time. It was set rather arbitrarily to the time at an observatory in England, because England was the leading maritime nation at the time and used solar observations relative to Greenwich to determine the longitude of ships at sea. Greenwich time has also been replaced since then by Coordinated Universal Time, which is based on measurements of a world-wide network of atomic clocks, which turn out to be more reliable than figuring out the position of the sun.

It’s an arbitrary standard, get it? Building a giant clock in the desert will not suddenly attract time to line up with it. Although it does sound like a perfectly kitschy and annoying clock, with bright lights that can be seen 18 miles away that will flash and blink in colors to let people know it is time to pray. I suspect they’re also trying to standardize the web back to 1995 html, too.

And of course there is more. There is a whole lot of freakish cargo cult science going on down there.

According to Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian cleric known around the Muslim world for his popular television show “Sharia and Life”, Mecca has a greater claim to being the prime meridian because it is “in perfect alignment with the magnetic north.”

This claim that the holy city is a “zero magnetism zone” has won support from some Arab scientists like Abdel-Baset al-Sayyed of the Egyptian National Research Centre who says that there is no magnetic force in Mecca.

“That’s why if someone travels to Mecca or lives there, he lives longer, is healthier and is less affected by the earth’s gravity,” he said. “You get charged with energy.”

What does that even mean? The magnetic north pole is currently located somewhere near Ellesmere Island, in Canada, and it wobbles about a lot, by several miles each year. How can a city in Saudi Arabia be in perfect alignment with an island in Canada? Being at the magnetic north pole, or even aligned with it, doesn’t mean there is no magnetism there, it’s not going to change how gravity works, and it’s not going to zap you with energy.

What the Saudis clearly need to do is build a 2000 foot tall horseshoe-shaped magnet in Mecca, cover it with strobe lights and Allah’s name, and then pray for the earth’s core to rotate and drift in alignment with their little monument.

By the way, if you’re just laughing at those dumb Muslims, keep in mind that Christians look exactly the same to us atheists. Every one who thinks that the heavens proclaim their petty parochial deity’s glory…you’re just as wacky and blind as the desert misogynists throwing away their oil wealth on knick-knacks for Allah.

But what if she had vapors, or an imbalance of humors?

Come on, journals. What kind of garbage are you stooping to publish now?

This paper in Virology Journal has to be seen to be believed. The entire data set for the “study” is a few brief lines in the Bible, where Jesus heals a sick woman with a fever. From this, the authors conclude that she had influenza. Huzzah! A completely unjustifiable diagnosis from hearsay.

And even more absurdly, the journal editors thought this superficial noise was worthy of publication.

I will say, though, that my favorite parts were the bits where the authors noted that Jesus did not take her temperature because the Fahrenheit scale wasn’t invented until 1724, and the part where they seriously rule out the possibility that the woman’s illness was demonic possession. Another cheer for science!

Never mind me, though, Tara Smith knows more about disease than I do, and she pans the paper too.

Now we know the price of academic freedom at St John’s University

It’s $20,000.

St John’s is a very nice, private Catholic college not too far down the road from us. They also have a program named after our celebrated liberal Minnesota politician and alumnus, Eugene McCarthy, the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement, which has a Senior Fellows program to bring in new and interesting people to the community. So you’d think they’d be good guys; I’ve had a good opinion of them for some time. That’s changing fast.

One of the Senior Fellows they recently appointed was Nick Coleman, formerly a well-known columnist at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, one of those old school working class liberal writers with an assertive tone which, as you might guess, I liked, but which conservatives found abrasive. So far, so good: Coleman plus St John’s sounded like a good combination.

But then St John’s decided not to extend his contract.

Why, you might wonder. It’s easy: Coleman, popular liberal columnist, annoyed a few conservative donors to the school. One, Bob Labat, “a 1959 St. John’s grad who has donated to the school every year since”, thought Coleman was “grating” and “caustic” and “inappropriate” for a Catholic school.

Another, Len Busch, “who has given $20,000 to the St. John’s theology department each of the last three years” objected to the fact that Coleman dared to criticize corporations and our Republican sleazebag governor, Tim Pawlenty. Notice that his donations are exclusively to the theology department, which gives him the clout to dictate who can be in the department of public policy.

Labat and Busch announced that they would make no further donations to the university, and St John’s caved in. I guess donors to Catholic theology have bought out the integrity of the college.

Catholicism has compromised them in more ways than one. The university has an associated Benedictine monastery, which has a — can you guess? — history of housing pedophile priests. But then, we all just take that for granted at Catholic institutions nowadays, anyway.

Catholics don’t get to define my marriage — even if I am heterosexual

Some Catholic site is giving advice on how to field questions from Leftists about homosexuality. After all, those danged lefties keep bringing up issues of equality and civil rights when gay marriage comes up, and it’s awfully hard to talk about restricting gay rights without sounding like a bigot or homophobe, so you’ve got to have a different set of talking points you can switch to whenever talk about equality and fairness and those other non-Catholic doctrines are brought up. So they’ve come up with five different tactics Catholic bigots can use to divert attention from their bigotry. They hope. Mainly, though, it diverts attention to the fact that they use really, really bad arguments. Here are the five, reworded from their misleading rhetoric to a blunter description of what they propose.

  1. Obfuscate about rights. Redefine rights any old way you want to, endorse equal rights for everyone, but then claim marriage isn’t a right because there are restrictions (can’t marry your sister, there’s an age of consent, you have to pay a fee to get a marriage license), so it’s OK to add one more restriction. Never mind that by this reasoning the old miscegenation laws are perfectly valid, and don’t really deny anyone a right.

  2. Point out that heterosexuals have damaged marriage. How this helps the Catholic case against gay marriage is a mystery, but they’re welcome to make the argument — they’re saying that contraception and divorce and artificial fertilization are all also crimes against nature. What a winning strategy!

  3. Lie about how awful homosexual parents are. Kids need both a mother and father, because mothers are nurturing and fathers are brave and disciplined. Yes, right, arguing from sexual stereotypes is OK if you’re Catholic, and it also means you get to ignore the fact that a third of all households are headed by single mothers.

  4. Slippery slope! Some guy wanted to marry his horse, there are horrible awful polyamorous relationships, and even if you allow gays to marry, they don’t all rush to the altar. This is a pointless argument: it’s basically saying that we should only permit traditional 1 man:1 woman marriages because if we allow other possibilities, not all marriages will be between 1 man:1 woman. We also allow marriage between couples of different races, and a Catholic can even marry a Protestant — this has not led to a massive rush to marriages between a man, an oyster, a pelican, and a watermelon.

  5. Lie with statistics. This one is my favorite argument here. Gay marriage will hurt people! Did you know that 31% of lesbian report physical violence with their partner in the last year? (Don’t mention the fact that 39% of women in a heterosexual relationship report domestic violence.) Gay men are more likely to be killed by a partner than a stranger! (Don’t mention that heterosexual women are five times more likely to be killed by their partner than a stranger.)

Oh, and they do cite sources: most of them seem to be something called the Witherspoon Institute, which made a report…funded by the Templeton Foundation. Don’t be surprised. Those rich jerks are pouring money into all kinds of dubious, religiously-motivated projects.

I’m beginning to wonder if Catholicism damages the brain: Ross Douthat also has a column on why gay marriage is wrong. It’s not because gays are bad or unnatural, oh no — we must get away from the ghastly bigoted language and promote bigoted ideals more ambiguously. It’s because relationships between men and women are specialer than those between men and men or women and women.

This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

That’s a non-argument. Of course opponents of gay marriage keep saying that heterosexual marriage is unique and special — but so what? They keep asserting that it’s better and best and worthy of support, but no one is trying to say that men and women don’t get to marry any more.

The whole problem is that we’ve got all the homophobes claiming that their favored kind of marriage is more admirable than any other kind of relationship, and so we must turn away from those other kinds of relationships. Hey, if you’re looking for a “microcosm of civilization” of the kind I want to live in, it’s not one where we quarantine and regulate love and tell people that they cannot love a rather large subset of the human race, even if it is reciprocated.

But then, that whole Catholic culture is one that I consider the antithesis of an enlightened and rational civilization, anyway.