He makes a point that I had not thought of before. If Satan is in charge of hell and people are sent to hell because they did the kinds of bad things that Satan tempts them to do, why would he treat them badly? Surely rather than making them suffer, Satan would reward those who followed his teachings?
In a recent post, I noted the fact that in many other countries, investigations of abuses in the Catholic church were undertaken nationally by government commissions because of the wide range of abuses that occurred and the large number of clergy and nuns who participated in them and the higher officials (bishops, archbishops, and cardinals) who helped in the cover ups. In Germany, an internal report that was commissioned by the church and conducted by three universities and was leaked to the press says that 3,677 people were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014. But given the limitations of the information accessible to the researchers, the actual number is likely to be higher.
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Nir Shafir is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire at the University of California, San Diego. In preparing to teach his class on Science and Islam he was looking at some books and discovered something about the illustrations that seemed a little off.
As I prepared to teach my class ‘Science and Islam’ last spring, I noticed something peculiar about the book I was about to assign to my students. It wasn’t the text – a wonderful translation of a medieval Arabic encyclopaedia – but the cover. Its illustration showed scholars in turbans and medieval Middle Eastern dress, examining the starry sky through telescopes. The miniature purported to be from the premodern Middle East, but something was off.
Besides the colours being a bit too vivid, and the brushstrokes a little too clean, what perturbed me were the telescopes. The telescope was known in the Middle East after Galileo invented it in the 17th century, but almost no illustrations or miniatures ever depicted such an object. When I tracked down the full image, two more figures emerged: one also looking through a telescope, while the other jotted down notes while his hand spun a globe – another instrument that was rarely drawn. The starkest contradiction, however, was the quill in the fourth figure’s hand. Middle Eastern scholars had always used reed pens to write. By now there was no denying it: the cover illustration was a modern-day forgery, masquerading as a medieval illustration.
In the US, the focus of outrage against the Catholic church has been on the abuses by priests and the cover ups by higher officials. In other countries, there has also been widespread reporting on the appalling abuses that took place in orphanages run by the Catholic church. Two excellent films The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Philomena (2013) were both based on true stories and the sheer cruelty of the nuns and priests involved is astounding.
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The recent charges of massive sexual abuse and cover ups by the Catholic church in Pennsylvania has opened yet another window on the sordid inner workings of the Catholic church. The latest is an accusation by a senior Vatican official Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò accusing pope Francis of complicity in the cover up of sexual abuse and calling for his resignation.
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As a scientist interested in the history of science, I have become acutely aware that much of the science ‘history’ we picked up in the course of our scientific training is largely folklore (what Richard Feynman referred to as ‘myth-stories’) and highly unreliable. Hence it is advisable not to make sweeping conclusions based on them. Via PZ Myers over at Pharyngula I came across an interesting article that looks at a recent discussion between Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro, where they use history to draw conclusions about the relationship of science to religion. You could not pay me enough to listen to these two people but Tim O’Neill, an Australian atheist who writes the blog History for Atheists: New Atheists Getting History Wrong did, and he has done a thorough analysis of the historical assertions made by both and finds them, especially those of Harris, utterly wanting.
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The senate in Argentina recently voted to not allow abortions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and the Catholic church was instrumental in achieving that outcome.
The Catholic Church lobbied aggressively against the legalized abortion bill. Every year, about 500,000 illegal and unsafe abortions take place in the country, and since the abortion rights vote, at least one woman has died from an attempt to perform an abortion on herself.
The pre-eminent leader of the Mormon church Russell Nelson announced that in future everyone should stop using the terms “Mormon Church”, “Mormons” and “Mormonism” when referring to the church or its members. Instead, the church should be called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” and the members as “members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” or “Latter-day Saints”. He said that even the abbreviation LDS should not be used. The church’s style guide has more.
I think Nelson is going to have a tough fight on this front. It would be like the Catholic Church asking to be referred to as the Roman Catholic Church and its members as Roman Catholics in future. Once people are used to calling an institution and its members something, it will be hard to change the usage.
Nelson said that his god had spoken to him and told him to tell the world all this. It would have been more likely to happen if his god had spoken directly to all of us. But he never does.
In response to the Satanists installing a statue of Baphomet on the grounds of the state capital in Little Rock, Arkansas in response to the installation of a Ten Commandments monument, Republican state senator Jason Rapert, a minister and lead sponsor of the law allowing the Ten Commandments monument, promised to have the Satanist statue removed, saying that it will be a “very cold day in hell” before a statue of Baphomet would be installed.
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Those wacky Satanists are at it again in their efforts to maintain the separation of church and state, targeting the inane practice of some legislatures to post monuments to the Ten Commandments on public grounds. Some people think that the lack of public religiosity is the cause of America’s descent into immorality and that reminding people about what their god expects of them will make their behavior better. There is so much that is obviously wrong with that view that I will not waste time dealing with it.
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