The Orca's Thumb

More of the same; the deeper they dig into the Irish Catholic Church, the filthier it gets. The latest news is a revelation from the senior cleric in Ireland.

Cardinal Sean Brady, primate of all-Ireland, admitted he was present at meetings where two abused teenagers were made to sign vows of silence.

Although being part of a cover-up, helping to conceal the truth about this monster by compelling the victims to silence, he shows no guilt, saying “Frankly I don’t believe that this is a resigning matter.”

Why? Because he was only following orders.

Check your history books. Where and when did we hear THAT excuse before?

Citing a “sophisticated campaign” on the internet (congratulations, Michael Nugent and all the gang at Atheist Ireland), the Irish government is going to reconsider their blasphemy law.

Dermot Ahern, the justice minister, is proposing that a vote to remove the criminal offence of blasphemy be held as part of a planned series of referendums this autumn, writes Stephen O’Brien.

Good news indeed.

Word from New Zealand is that a religious sect — which believes in prayer over vaccinations – may be responsible for the deaths of over one hundred children from measles.

It has been proven over and again that prayer does nothing to heal disease over the placebo effect, while vaccinations have saved hundreds of millions of people.

That is simple math even my 3 year old daughter understands.

The Ministers of Parliament in the UK have decided that homeopathy is a waste of the National Health Service’s money.

Homeopaths get taxpayer support in the UK to the tune of £4M per year (and probably more), money which goes to prescriptions and four homeopathic hospitals — hospitals which I assume are incredibly tiny, so that their cures are stronger *cough*

Anyway, the taxpayers’ money is being wasted because homeopathy is pseudoscientific nonsense. It’s water, pure (ha!) and simple, and has no efficacy beyond that of a placebo. Myriads of tests have shown this beyond any reasonable doubt. And, in fact, homeopathy is dangerous because it can divert people away from taking real medicine, which can have very serious repercussions.

Fifteen hundred years ago, Constantine, who murdered his own wife and children, started the Christian religion.

From that day to this that religion has been the greatest curse that ever afflicted the earth.

This religion teaches that 6,000 years ago God made the first man out of dust – not even mud – and the first woman out of a bone; that God cursed the whole human race because a snake made the woman eat an apple; that God had a son by another man’s wife, and that he had this son murdered in order to keep himself from sending all the human race to hell.

This son taught that any man who did not believe that piece of ignorance and priestly lying would go to hell and burn eternally in fire and brimstone.

The Bible, in which these things are taught, favors drunkenness, murder, slavery, lying, stealing and lechery.

Unfortunately, those words are not mine. They were written by Charles Chilton Moore, a newspaperman from Lexington.

And he published that in 1900.

On top of the child abuse scandals in Ireland and Germany, there is a gay prostitution scandal in the Vatican right now.

Funny, because when I went to visit the Vatican a few years ago, and noticed all that garish, gaudy excess and all the men wandering around in flamboyant dresses, I couldn’t help but joke about opening a brothel for gay priests there.

It can cause riots and economic mayhem. People die over a sense of offended propriety. And whose fault is that?

You know what I’m talking about. Almost all religions have odd proscriptions that are taken with extraordinary seriousness by their followers — they are markers for who belongs in the group, and who is the outsider. Violate them, especially if you knowingly violate them, immediately marks you as The Enemy, and justifies taking any action against you.

The Muslim outrage about cartoon portrayals of their prophet was a recent example. It’s utterly ridiculous; I can see where immigrant populations would be extremely sensitive to further marginalization, and might see disrespectful stereotyping as a sign of deeper conflicts, but the response was excessive, irrational, and destroyed any possibility that a legitimate grievance might be taken seriously. If you’re rightly upset that your ethnicity is being associated with terrorist bombings, it is insane to react by throwing bombs.

But ultimately it’s not just about protecting people who look like you from illegal discrimination; it’s about enforcing a whole body of idiosyncratic, peculiar laws as if they are representative of broader human concerns and rights. They aren’t. They’re just silly.

It’s also about defending practices sanctified by patriarchal religious beliefs that are simply odious to anyone with a civilized, grown-up appreciation of a universal morality. Morality cannot be restricted to privileging one ethnic group, one religious belief, one sex…a rational morality has to be constructed around an appreciation of all human beings’ right to justice and equal treatment. Many of the portrayals of the prophet Mohammed are intended to openly disrespect specific practices endorsed (or at least, uncritically accepted) by members of the Muslim faith that violate the rights of a much larger subset of the human race than just believers in Islam.

This is one of the serious purposes of sacrilege: to tell people that their beliefs are barbaric or wrong. One of the purposes of blasphemy laws is to silence critics of long-hallowed principles of discrimination — and one of the most common is the practice of patriarchal domination, where one sex is told over and over again that they are in charge and must be given special favor, and the other is told over and over that they are weak, they must submit, they must obey. The Abrahamic religions are rife with this evil myth, and we have to be free to challenge it.

Another reason for sacrilege is to assert our freedom from superstition. There’s a proscription against portraits of Mohammed? How absurd. We defy such arbitrary restrictions on our freedom, whether it’s a demand that we treat crackers with respect or a demand that we do not render images of some guy, and we violated them, because we can. Any of us can pick up a sharpie and scrawl out a picture of Mohammed. Go ahead. Do it yourself.

Remember, people will fight and die because they want to stop you from doing something so trivial and harmless as sketching what you think Mohammed looked like.

That’s stupid and wrong, and it is their problem, not yours.

The Canadian government offered to contribute several million (of tax) dollars to the construction of a youth center in downtown Winnipeg, which sounds like a wonderful, useful idea… except for the fact that the group building it has this as their mission:

To impact every young person in Canada with the person, work and teachings of Jesus Christ and discipling them into the Church.

They also openly admit to their plans:

Sharing the person of Christ with every young person within our target group in Canada (5.4 million youth). This will require the development of new strategies, as well as strengthening existing efforts.

And here is another nice twist to the story:

Roughly one in 100 youths contacted by the organization — 17,010 out of 154,192 — “responded to the opportunity to become a Christian,” said the report, which identified “the aboriginal youth community” as a “prime area for development.”

It’s not just those cranky atheists who are outraged at the funneling of money into Christian evangelism — it’s an ethnic issue, and Youth for Christ knows it.

People seem to have forgotten that Canada and the US were actively ripping children away from their native parents and boarding them up in schools where they were taught the “White Man’s Ways,” which usually involved religion in some way or another.