Of course they were quick to respond

The head of the Pontificia Academia Pro Vita, the specifically crazy anti-choice arm of the Catholic Church, has already issued a statement about the Nobel Prize awarded to an IVF pioneer. He’s against it, of course.

Among his peculiar complaints is the objection that it “didn’t treat the underlying problem of infertility but rather skirted it”, which is rather odd. This:

Couples can’t have children
↓
Couples use IVF
↓
Couples now have children

Looks to me like a rather direct way to treat infertility. Where they once could have no children, now they have children.

They also don’t like the fact that the procedure produces excess embryos which are then discarded, stored, or used in further research in reproduction. They prefer the natural method of intercourse, which produces excess embryos which are then flushed down the toilet to rot in the sewers.

The church is also deeply concerned that the technology has produced a market for women to sell a few cells from their ovaries, when everyone knows that women are supposed to be sold whole and intact and dedicate every aspect of their lives to their owners.

As yet, there is no word from Bill Donohue.

Mel Gibson is a product of his sick ideology

Christopher Hitchens addresses the latest media meltdown by Mel Gibson. It’s great stuff; people are making all these excuses for him, that he’s not really a racist, he’s not really violent, he’s not really a misogynist, he’s not really a loathsome wackjob…but Hitchens cuts through it all.

This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

And then he follows up with damning examples from Gibson’s father and Gibson’s own actions.

It adds a fresh new perspective to all those fans of Gibson’s labor of love, The Passion, a sadistic piece of bloody anti-semitism. What Gibson rages about in (imagined) private and what he put on the screen in that movie are awfully hard to separate. One of Gibson’s most ardent defenders is right-wing Catholic kook Bill Donohue:

Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. It’s not a secret, OK? And I’m not afraid to say it. That’s why they hate this movie. It’s about Jesus Christ, and it’s about truth. It’s about the messiah.

And Donohue is still flogging this line against anyone who criticizes Gibson:

[Frank] Rich is particularly angry at anyone who dares to mention the role played by secular Jews in fomenting anti-Catholicism. I am one Catholic who will not run from this charge. It is painfully obvious, that most of the anti-Catholicism that exists today comes from two major sources: ex-Catholics (and those with one foot out the door) and secular Jews.

It’s a disorder that isn’t restricted to Catholicism, though; the other recent expression of these anti-semitic views is none other than Glenn Beck.

Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life. He did have a choice. If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the the Jews pay for what they did.

Any day now they’ll be talking about blood libel. Isn’t it time now to stop pussy-footing around? These people are anti-semitic proto-fascists, their prejudices propped up by truly weird religious beliefs.

It’s not just the Catholics!

Bill Donohue will be so relieved. Here’s a story about a youn girl being raped, her assailant protected by the church, and the girl herself getting all the blame…and it’s the Baptists! Tina Anderson was raped by Ernest Willis, a Trinity Baptist Church member, when she was 15, and got pregnant. She accused Willis in the church, and here’s what happened:

When the pastor heard Anderson’s allegations, he told her that if she had “lived in the Old Testament,” she would have been stoned to death for not reporting the attack sooner.

“He also said I had ‘allowed myself to be put in a compromising situation,’ Anderson said. The pastor decided she needed to be “church-disciplined.”

“I was completely humiliated,” Anderson said, her voice quavering at the memory. “I hoped it was a nightmare I’d wake up from, and it wouldn’t be true anymore.”

“Church discipline” apparently means sending the victim out of state and asking all church members silent, not bringing the matter to secular authorities. They stayed quiet for 13 years.

Meanwhile, Tina Anderson went on with her life, got married, had kids, and took a job as a music teacher at a Baptist college. When she was contacted by investigators tracking down the case, though, she did something remarkable: she woke up to how she’d been abused.

“I was kind of in shock, but I just answered his questions,” Anderson said. “Everything is changing because I’m seeing the things I was taught for so many years are not necessarily correct. It’s almost like I had blinders on, believing all of this was my fault.”

This is beautiful; this is what it is like to free yourself of religion.

“If they’re not dealt with, the cycle will continue,” said Anderson, who resigned from the Baptist college the day before Willis was arrested. “I do not, anymore, unquestioningly obey authority, which is what they would teach.“

Michael Ruse agrees with Richard Dawkins! The apocalypse is nigh!

I’m feeling a bit light-headed, and wondering if I’m still asleep. Or if it’s April Fools’ Day. Ruse actually concedes some ground to Dawkins in the religion wars. Of course, it’s in the HuffPo, so it could be some perverse nonsense, anyway.

Recently, the New Atheists’ most prominent representative, Richard Dawkins, wrote a highly emotive piece for the Washington Post, in which he derided the present pope and expressed glee and satisfaction that such a person was now leading the Catholic Church. In Dawkins’s judgment, not only was this no less than the Church deserved, but such leadership could only hasten the Church’s demise. I thought at the time that Dawkins was over the top and wrong. I now think that he was right and that it was I who was wrong. Let me say at once that, unlike Dawkins, I don’t necessarily want to see this as the end of religion or even of the Catholic Church in some form. I stress that although I cannot share the beliefs of Christians, I respect them and applaud the good that is done in the name of their founder. But I do now think that as presently constituted, the Catholic Church is corrupt and should be eradicated.

…

Dawkins is right. The moral mess gets worse and worse. Hope of change is illusory. Götterdämmerung beckons. Although we have different motives and undoubtedly hope for different outcomes, I join Dawkins in welcoming the prospect.

He also points out that one of the most damning things about the church’s problems is that they are responding by digging in and resisting change. He’s not alone in noting that Ratzinger’s papacy has been bad news for Catholicism.

However, just a note of reality, though: this is what the Catholic Church has always done. They have never been a bastion of liberal thought, and what they’ve always done in response to problems is recover by retrenchment — and it doesn’t hurt them. Those who revel in arcane dogma will not be deterred by the material aberration of wicked priests engaging in buggery.

Seriously — Catholicism survived the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, blatantly political and corrupt popes, schisms and violence. The current events are trivial in comparison.

The church is going to exist for a long, long time to come. What we should expect, though, is that as the more liberal membership boils off to join progressive churches or to abandon religion altogether, as the elements lobbying for change give up and go elsewhere, what will be left behind is exactly what we’re seeing: a hard kernel of very conservative Catholicness that will become increasingly crazy and detached from reality. It will become much worse…but it will still exist, and will be populated by the devout ranks of the truly fervent, the Bill Donohues and the Father Coughlins, and they aren’t going to be dissuaded at all by us weird atheists or those wishy-washy Anglicans. Don’t expect demise, just a diminishment and a hardening.

They don’t want to let you go

Poor Paddy K. He wants to formally leave the Catholic church, so he followed the official procedures…and what does he get? A long letter from a priest telling him how wonderful the church is.

Maybe he needs to send the priest this video of Bill Donohue reiterating his claim that the problem is the infiltration of the church by the homosexual agenda. The low point for me was when the really terrible interviewer, Rick Sanchez, asks whether the problem with the church isn’t priestly celibacy, and Donohue smugly takes this as a vindication of his point, somehow. I don’t get it. He sure seems positive that he’s got a logical point connecting celibacy with gayness, though.

Anyway, it’s hard to question one’s desire to leave the church when one sees the kind of vermin defending it.

By the way, a while back I tried to follow the official Lutheran church’s procedure for being formally stricken from the rolls, and wrote to the only church I was ever a member of, way back in my childhood. They have no record of me, not even a baptismal record. I felt a little miffed that I was forgotten, but I got over it — I guess this just means I was never really a Christian, which is fine with me. I can set that brief youthful embarrassment aside and pretend it never happened.

A fine example of apologizing oneself right into a defense of the indefensible

Wow. Bill Donohue is going to love Andrew Brown. Brown has written a defense of the Catholic church titled “Catholic child abuse in proportion“; you can tell right away exactly where it is going to be going. ‘Only’ 4% of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse of a minor, and as much as 27% of American women report a history of childhood sexual abuse (to quote just a pair of statistics he uses), therefore, Catholic priests aren’t that bad. Which means…

Certainly the safeguards against paedophilia in the priesthood are now among the tightest in the world. That won’t stop a steady trickle of scandals; but I think that objectively your child is less likely to be abused by a Catholic or Anglican priest in the west today than by the members of almost any other profession.

He doesn’t mention any statistics on any other profession. So kids are more likely to be raped by your local policeman, college professor, grade school teacher, construction worker, farmer, dentist, carpenter, plumber, doctor, or whatever than your local priest? Brown hasn’t shown any evidence at all that that is the case. And I think he would have an even tougher job trying to demonstrate that rapists in these other professions do it while carrying out their duties, or while wearing a uniform of propriety in quite the same way priests do.

As for this claim that priests now have tight safeguards…I haven’t seen any evidence at all of that. The Catholic church doesn’t seem to be cleaning house at all, nor does it have any history of doing so; the pattern has been to hide and protect abusers in their ranks, until they are dragged out into the light by secular investigations.

And then Brown goes ahead and lists a series of reasons why the pattern of Catholic abuse has been regarded with an especially deserved horror. Doesn’t he even read what he writes?

So why the concentration on Catholic priests and brothers? Perhaps I am unduly cynical, but I believe that all institutions attempt to cover up institutional wrongdoing although the Roman Catholic church has had a higher opinion of itself than most, and thus a greater tendency to lie about these things. Because it is an extremely authoritarian institution at least within the hierarchy, it is also one where there were few checks and balances on the misbehaviour of the powerful. The scandal has been loudest and most damaging in Ireland, because it came along just at the moment when the church was losing its power over society at large, and where it was no longer able to cover up what had happened, but still willing to try. Much the same is true in the diocese of Boston which was bankrupted by the scandal.

Hmmm. Andrew Brown is a member of a beleagured institution, journalism, which by his own argument should have just as large a proportion of people who carry out child rape in the execution of their responsibilities as do Catholic priests. I think he therefore has a responsibility to turn whistleblower and report all of his colleagues who have gone out to interview children and abused their authority to obtain sex. Surely, the Guardian must be harboring nests of pedophiles that the newspaper protects by shuffling them out to distant assignments when their crimes become excessive.

Stop protecting child-raping journalists, Brown, and come clean. You’ve convinced me, they must be just as bad as the Catholic priesthood.

I get email

I suppose it’s nice to know I’m not forgotten, but it’s still a little weird that I occasionally get email from Bill Donohue, just out of the blue. Like today.

secular sabotage

PZ,

Just to let you know, I did not forget you when I wrote “Secular Sabotage.” You made the cut the old fashioned way–you earned it.

Bill Donohue

I don’t know what prompted that, but it is good to know that I have a reputation for working hard. I wouldn’t want to be thought to be a mere welfare heretic, coasting along on handouts from theological anti-patronage, you know.

Bring me the heads of Penn and Teller!

Bill Donohue has a new target: he has taken out an ad in Variety, demanding that Penn and Teller be fired, because they’ve been irreverent and sacrilegious towards the holy Catholic church.

On August 27, Showtime, owned by CBS, will feature a vicious assault on Catholics. In the season
finale of Penn & Teller’s show, they “take on the secretive inner world of The Vatican, the holy city of
Catholicism and home of the Pope.” How do we know it will defame Catholics? Because on the
show’s website, it says so: There is a Showtime Advisory for “Graphic Language, Adult Content.”

If Showtime posted that warning about a show on Islam, Muslims would brace for the worst (and so
might CBS). But Muslims need not worry: it’s not all religions that Showtime likes to trash–just
Catholicism. Indeed, Showtime is currently working on a show, “Revelation,” that promises to be at
least somewhat respectful of Protestantism.

What will the upcoming show be like? On his Twitter page, Penn Jillette brags how he rips a Catholic
encyclical on sexuality: “I’m dressed as Darth with a condom c–k light saber.” He even boasts that
the show is “hardcore,” admitting that “we attack the Vatican.” From trashing The Last Supper to
mocking Catholic prayers, anti-Catholic bigots who feed on this kind of stuff will have a stomach full.

This is not the first time Showtime has featured a vile Penn & Teller show. In 2005, Mother Teresa
was called “Mother F—ing Teresa,” and her order of nuns were branded “f—ing c–ts.” The year after,
Jillette said on his CBS radio show that Mother Teresa “got her [sexual] kicks watching people
suffer and die.”

Just recently, Jillette took after me again in his usual foul way. That doesn’t matter, but what matters
greatly is his pathological obsession with bashing Catholics and their religion. There is no legitimate
place for this kind of frontal assault on any demographic group.

CBS/Showtime needs to send Penn & Teller a message and let them know that they have crossed
the line for the last time. This should be their final season. We know that they’ve been told before to
drop the Catholic bashing, and yet they persist. By doing so, Penn & Teller have effectively stuck their
middle finger right in the eye of CBS.

I can guess how Penn and Teller are reacting to this: with jubilation. They make a living by poking authority with a sharp stick, and there is no better response than a spittle-flecked denouncement from a pompous windbag who reacts to every slight with a flurry of press releases and angry demands.

Speaking of Donohue, he has a new book out: Secular Sabotage: How Liberals are Destroying Religion and Culture in America. I think his title is half right — some of us liberals do aim to diminish religion, but it’s rather silly to suggest we’re going to get rid of culture. We just hope to make secular culture dominant.

His book has been “reviewed” by his fellow-traveler and religious suck-up, L. Brent Bozell, and it does give you a taste of the absurdities within.

“Secular Sabotage” is serious business. Donohue insists the United States should be considered unequivocally a Christian country. Eight out of ten Americans consider themselves as such. Indeed – and I didn’t realize this – the United States is the most Christian country, in quantitative terms, in the world. “In fact,” states the author, “the U.S. is more Christian than Israel is Jewish.” And yet if this is so, why can’t we celebrate Christmas? Why can’t our children pray in school? How did we just elect a president who insisted the United States ought not to be considered a Christian nation?

Wait a minute…I’m a goddamned atheist, and I celebrate Christmas. Do we have goon squads that barge into religious people’s homes now and confiscate their Christmas trees and inflatable Santa Claus lawn displays? I don’t think so.

If Mr Bozell’s children need some instruction in religious liberty, they should sit down for a little talk with Uncle PZ. Surprise: they can pray their adorable little hearts out in school if they want. There is no law that says kids can’t have a little silent prayer on their own before the big test. The thing is, though, that the public schools — those government administrators and bureaucrats, don’t you know — aren’t allowed to tell you what to pray, what god to pray to, when to pray, or whether to pray at all. They’re supposed to stay out of your religious life altogether.

And President Obama got elected because he avoided offending people with religious sensibilities and has only said that the US is a secular nation with religious liberty. Again, what that means is that the government is out of the god business (or should be, ideally), and individual Americans get to worship or not worship as they want. It’s really not hard to understand, unless of course, you make a living by stirring up people’s outrage by pretending not to understand.

The rest of the review suggests that the big focus of the book is on the Gay Conspiracy. It doesn’t mention if any small-town college professors who brutalize crackers are talked about — maybe Donohue has realized that that whole escapade made him look absurd. If somebody gets their hands on it, let me know — he hasn’t bothered to send me a review copy.

Don’t pay full price for it, though. Wait for it to show up in the remainder bins. It won’t take long.

Booty!

Arrr, ’twas a fine weekend of pillage and carouse, and now we have returned to our lair, where we can gloat over our treasure. Here it be, a small portion of the swag we’ve won.

i-d637410fadfe5f93ff89036fd3d8deb0-booty.jpeg

I would like to thank the producers of Expelled and Bill Donohue for inspiring the American Humanists to toss me that shiny silver bauble, and me maties all around the world for the vast pile of cephalopodic geegaws growin’ in me hold.

Arrr.