Category Religion

Catholic Church 99 44/100% Pure

BillDo has a post in which he plays down the Catholic priesthood’s image problem:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the findings of the 2011 Annual Report on priestly sexual abuse that was released by the bishops’ conference; the survey was done by a Georgetown institute:

The headlines should read, “Abuse Problem Near Zero Among Priests,” but that is not what is being reported.

According to the 2011 Official Catholic Directory, there are 40,271 priests in the U.S. The report says there were 23 credible accusations of the sexual abuse of a minor made against priests for incidences last year. Of that number, 9 were deemed credible by law enforcement. Which means that 99.98% of priests nationwide had no such accusation made against them last year. Nowhere is this being reported.

If that’s his standard of purity, then I’m sure Bill would have no problem drinking a glass of 99.98% water and only 0.02% urine, right?

The thing is that very few men in general are child abusers. The question (or one question) is, does the Catholic clergy contain more child abusers than the population at large?

I wasn’t able to quickly find child-abuse statistics for the United States, but I did find the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics for violent crime in 2010, which shows an aggregate of 27.8 forcible rapes per 100,000 victims. The FBI defines “forcible rape” as:

The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will. Rapes by force and attempts or assaults to rape, regardless of the age of the victim, are included. Statutory offenses (no force used—victim under age of consent) are excluded.

So the numbers are not directly comparable: the report Donohue is quoting concerns itself only with sexual abuse of minors, while the FBI’s number covers all rape. The FBI’s 2010 number excludes sexual abuse of males, while BillDo emphasizes that in the report he’s quoting, “almost all the offenses involve homosexuality“. And BillDo calculates the rate per offender while the FBI counts the rate per victim, which means that BillDo’s number tends to undercount priests who abused multiple victims, compared to what the FBI counts.

Having said that, BillDo’s figure of 9 credible accusations and 40,271 priests works out to 22.3 per 100,000, compared to the FBI’s 27.8 per 100,000. So the number of pedophile priests seems to be in the same ballpark as the number of rapists in the US as a whole. That seems pretty bad, especially for a group that presents itself as the guardians of morality.

BillDo also ignores, as usual, that the Catholic church’s problem is not so much one of having rapists in its ranks — any large organization is bound to have some — but of covering up its members’ crimes. The abuse itself can be blamed on individual priests, sure. But the coverup is a problem for the organization.

Easter

This weekend is Easter, at least by the calendar used in most of Christendom, so I thought it might be worth taking a look at the central message of Christianity.

The story in a nutshell: way back in the beginning, Adam and Eve, the first two humans, ate a fruit that God told them not to. As a result, every human is born with Original Sin. So God sent his son Jesus to Earth as a sacrifice, to atone for humanity and rescue us from Hell.

Where to begin? Leaving aside the many problems with the Adam and Eve story (like why God put that tree in the garden in the first place, without so much as a child-proof lock on it), and ignoring the question of whether it’s a literal story or a metaphor, there’s original sin: how does it get transmitted from parent to child? I’m guessing it’s not genetic, or else Christians would be pushing for research into bioengineering, so that we could one day have a generation of chilren born without original sin.

Or is it passed down like a title of nobility, or a debt? That is, it’s not a thing or a substance, but more like a contract that affects how God behaves toward us? If original sin is like a debt, then it seems unfair of God to hold us responsible for something that Adam and Eve did.

(By a fortuitous coincidence, while I was writing this, two Jehovah’s Witnesses came to the door, so I took the opportunity to ask some of the questions in this post. They didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t heard umpteen times before, and offered no good explanations, so I can proceed as planned, without major revisions.)

At any rate, God decided not to fix the problem right away, but to let a few thousand years (or more) elapse before doing something about it.

And what a solution he came up with! He decided to have a son (who may or may not be himself, depending on whether you accept the doctrine of the Trinity or not, and how you interpret it) to be executed. This was to be construed as a blood sacrifice: sacrificing his son (or himself) to himself. This would somehow make things all better by allowing him not to send people to Hell.

The hell that he created, or at least subcontracted to Satan. Because God wanted there to be a hell in which the people descended from the people who disobeyed God would be tortured forever.

So how exactly does that work? Or, as comedian Doug Stanhope put it,

Jesus died for your sins. How does one affect the other? I fucking hit myself in the foot with a shovel for your mortgage. I don’t get it.

If God wants to forgive people, why can’t he just forgive them, without having to kill his son? If it’s to create a loophole in the law that every sin requires a sacrifice, then the law is stupid and he should have just repealed it.

If sinful people can’t get into heaven, why does God insist on sending them to hell? Why not just obliterate them, so that at least they don’t suffer? If there has to be a hell, for whatever reason, why doesn’t he reform it and get rid of the gratuitous torture?

If that’s not possible because God’s constitution doesn’t allow for amendments, then he’s either stupid or malevolent (and given that he decided to torture people forever, and for someone else’s crime, I’d be leaning toward malevolent, if I weren’t already leaning toward imaginary).

Basically, Jesus is a scapegoat. Scapegoats, you may recall, are animals or lower-class people upon whom the crimes of the community were laid, and who are then punished or killed for those crimes. The whole notion rests upon the notion that sin or crime or guilt is a substance that can be transferred from one person to another. If it did, we could talk to prisoners on death row and ask if they’d be willing to take on the additional guilt of, say, a hundred guys serving for pot possession, or a thousand parking tickets. But every advanced country, in particular the ones with the lowest crime rates, has recognized that this isn’t justice, but merely a salve that allows people to buy a guilt-free life, rather than having to live with the consequences of one’s actions, and having to think ahead and avoid doing things that might come back to haunt one.

In short, it’s not just that there isn’t a shred of evidence to think that the Easter story is true. It also doesn’t make sense on its own terms. The story of Xenu makes more sense than this, and that’s saying something.

Shit My Bible Says: Chariots of Iron

The book of Judges starts out with Judah finishing the job of conquering the promised land and wiping out its current inhabitants. At first, all goes well (“When Judah attacked, the LORD gave the Canaanites and Perizzites into their hands, and they struck down ten thousand men at Bezek.”).

But then (Judges 1:19):

19 The LORD was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron.

Stupid iron chariots, with their stupid stronger-than-God-ness! They’re always foiling God’s plans!

Maybe this is why we don’t see miracles like the parting of the Red Sea or the sun standing still anymore: there are too many iron chariots around, in the form of cars and trucks, so God can’t do his stuff anymore.

Anyway, this verse is the namesake of a wiki, a podcast, and I don’t know what all else.

What’s Three Orders of Magnitude Among Friends?

(Alternate title: “Numbers Mean Things”.)

The increasingly-irrelevant Uncommon Descent blag had a post today, commenting on an article in Science News.

Right now, UD’s post is entitled “Timing of human use of fire pushed back by 300,000 years”, but when it showed up in my RSS reader, it was “Timing of human use of fire pushed back by 300 million years“. This mistake survives in the post’s URL:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/human-evolution/timing-of-human-use-of-fire-pushed-back-by-300-million-years/

From skimming the Science News article, it looks as though a new study found evidence of fire being used one million years ago, pushing back the earliest-known use of fire by 300,000 years. So presumably the previous record-holder was 700,000 years ago.

The author at Uncommon Descent reported the 300,000-year difference as “300 million years”. But hey, what’s a factor of 1000 between friends?

To illustrate, imagine a student in school in 2012, writing a report about, say, e-commerce. At first, she dates the origin of e-commerce to 1994, when Amazon.com was founded. But upon further investigation, she finds an example of a company selling stuff on the Internet in 1987 and revises her report to say that e-commerce is 25 years old, not 18. That’s about the magnitude of what the scientists found.

Now, along comes UD and reports this as “Origin of e-commerce pushed back to 22,000 BC.” That’s the size of their mistake.

It’s easy to make fun of primitive people whose counting system goes “one, two, three, many”. But the truth is, we all do this to some extent. Imagine a newspaper headline that says, “Federal budget increases by $600 billion, including $300 million increase in NASA funding.” Did you think, “holy cow! NASA got half of that extra money!”? If so, I’m talking to you: you’re not counting “one, two, three, many”, but you are counting “ten, hundred, thousand, illion”.

At any rate, I still question the numeracy of whoever wrote that UD headline. If you’re going to spell out “million” in letters, it should trigger a reality-check mechanism in your brain that makes you ask, “Wait a sec. 300 million years ago. That’s the age of dinosaurs or earlier.”

Shit My Bible Says: Pharaoh’s Hard Heart

You remember the story of the Exodus, right? How the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and Moses asked the Pharaoh to “Let my people go”, but the Pharaoh was like “Nuh-uh!” and Moses had to unleash ten increasingly-horrible plagues on Egypt before the Israelites could pack up their stuff and escape?

So yeah, there are a couple of bits that don’t get mentioned very often.

Exodus 9:11-12 (the plague of boils):

11 The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils that were on them and on all the Egyptians. 12 But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the LORD had said to Moses.

Well, okay, maybe that was just a figure of speech. Maybe in the original Hebrew, the phrase “The LORD did X” is akin to “inshallah” in Arabic, and would have been understood by the people at the time as meaning something closer to “and it came to pass that X“.

So let’s look at another example, like Exodus 10:1-2:

1 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them 2 that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the LORD.”

Okay, so the “figure of speech” explanation doesn’t really work. Here we have God explicitly saying that he’s messing with people’s brains so that he can show off properly.

By the time the plague of darkness comes along, the Pharaoh is ready throw in the towel (Exodus 10:16-20)…

16 Pharaoh quickly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the LORD your God and against you. 17 Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the LORD your God to take this deadly plague away from me.”

18 Moses then left Pharaoh and prayed to the LORD. 19 And the LORD changed the wind to a very strong west wind, which caught up the locusts and carried them into the Red Sea. Not a locust was left anywhere in Egypt. 20 But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go.

…but God won’t allow a peaceful, if delayed, resolution, because he’s not done showing off yet.

The Plague of Darkness, comes along, and once again, the Pharaoh’s ready to give up: Exodus 10:24-28:

24 Then Pharaoh summoned Moses and said, “Go, worship the LORD. Even your women and children may go with you; only leave your flocks and herds behind.”

25 But Moses said, “You must allow us to have sacrifices and burnt offerings to present to the LORD our God. 26 Our livestock too must go with us; not a hoof is to be left behind. We have to use some of them in worshiping the LORD our God, and until we get there we will not know what we are to use to worship the LORD.”

27 But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he was not willing to let them go. 28 Pharaoh said to Moses, “Get out of my sight! Make sure you do not appear before me again! The day you see my face you will die.”

Finally, we get to the plague on the firstborn: Exodus 11:1-3:

1 Now the LORD had said to Moses, “I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here, and when he does, he will drive you out completely. 2 Tell the people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbors for articles of silver and gold.” 3 (The LORD made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and Moses himself was highly regarded in Egypt by Pharaoh’s officials and by the people.)

Moses then tells the Pharaoh what God told him about how he’ll murder the firstborn sons of Egypt, from the Pharaoh’s son to that of the most menial slave, and of all the cattle as well. (Is it just me, or is it funny that God can’t be bothered to tell the Pharaoh himself, even though the whole point of this exercise is to say, “Hey, look at me! I’m badass!”, but has to go through a human intermediary?)

At any rate, Exodus 11:9-10 then says:

9 The LORD had said to Moses, “Pharaoh will refuse to listen to you—so that my wonders may be multiplied in Egypt.” 10 Moses and Aaron performed all these wonders before Pharaoh, but the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go out of his country.

If anyone ever gives you that clichéd line about God not providing proof of his existence because that would violate people’s free will, point them at the story of the ten plagues. If there’s a more insidious violation of people’s free will than reaching into their heads and making them want different things, I don’t know what it is.

And I think this post just ensured that I will never, ever be invited to a Seder.

BillDo Didn’t Like the Reason Rally

The Reason Rally, billed as the largest gathering of atheists and similar heathens on the National Mall in history, was this Saturday. Naturally, BillDo got his panties in a twist, fell on his faiting couch, clutched his pearls, summoned his smelling salts, and generally carried on as he usually does.

He couldn’t complain that Christians are being singled out for persecution (where “persecution” means not being allowed to hit gays over the head) given that Taslima Nasrin devoted her time to criticizing Islam, and Greta Christina called out the Dalai Lama on Buddhist BS. So he had to settle for complaining about how “atheists always attack us more than any other religious group”.

But he also didn’t like Richard Dawkins:

The big draw was Englishman Richard Dawkins. He implored the crowd to “ridicule and show contempt” for people of faith. “Mock them, ridicule them in public,” he bellowed. Especially Catholics. Dawkins not only mocked the Eucharist, he advised the crowd to ask Catholics, “Do you really believe…that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ?”

Actually, that’s a fair question: does Bill actually believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, that it turns into the body of Christ? If no, would he please come out and say so publicly?

And if yes… WTF? I mean, seriously, WTF? Here we are, in the 21st century; we have the Internet and DNA sequencing and space probes and lasers and telemedicine and drought-resistant crops and wonders beyond measure, and he’s still holding on to primitive superstitions about bread magically turning into meat? ‘Da hell?

I’m sorry, but if you’re a grown-up and still believe in magic, you don’t get to complain when people point out how ridiculous that is. If you can’t grow up and join the 21st century, then at least try for the 20th.

Tim Minchin’s Pope Song — the Clean Version

Benny Johnson at the Blaze really didn’t like Tim Minchin’s Pope Song, which he played at the Reason Rally:

From the article and comments, it looks as though the word commonly referred to as an “eff-bomb” stopped Benny’s and his readers’ mental processes, rendering them incapable of hearing what the song actually had to say.

So for the benefit of all of these delicate flowers on their fainting couches, here’s my cleaned-up version of the lyrics:

Darn the bad person, darn the bad person
Darn the bad person, he’s a really bad person (repeat)
Darn the bad person, darn the pope.

Darn the bad person, and darn you
If you think he’s sacred
If you cover for another person who’s a child molester
You’re no better then the rapist
And if you don’t like this swearing that this person forced from me
And reckon it shows moral or intellectual paucity
Then too bad for you, this is language one employs
When one is cross about people having sex with children.

I don’t care if calling the pope a bad person
Means you unthinkingly brand me an unthinking apostate, and
This has naught to do with other godly people
I’m not interested right now in scriptural debate
There are other songs and there are other ways
I’ll be a religious apologist on other days
And the fact remains that if you protect a single child molester
Then pope or prince or plumber you’re an evil malefactor.

You see I don’t care what any other person
Believes about Jesus and his mother
I’ve no problem with the spiritual beliefs of all these people
While those beliefs don’t impact on the happiness of others
But if you build your church on claims of moral authority
And with threats of hell impose it on others in society
Then you can expect some wrath
When it turn out you’ve been engaging in non-consensual sodomy with us

So darn the bad person and darn you, bad person
If you’re still Catholic
If you covered for a single child molester
Then you’re as evil as the rapist
And if you look into your heart and tell me true
If this stupid song offended you
With its filthy language and its disrespect
If it made you feel angry go ahead and write a letter

But if you find me more offensive than the possibility
The pope protected priests when they were abusing children
Then listen to me, this here is a fact
You are just as morally misguided as that
Power-hungry, self-aggrandised bigot in the stupid hat

Emphasis added to the important bits.

And just so there’s no confusion: curse words are bad because they make some people feel momentarily uncomfortable. Child rape is bad because it causes physical harm and psychological trauma, often for a lifetime, a lifetime that may be cut short because of the aforementioned psychological trauma. Covering up child rape is bad because it allows child rape to continue. And, of course, claiming to be in a position to decide what is and isn’t good, while covering up child rape, is the height of hypocrisy.

There is no way Minchin’s song is in any way comparable to what the Catholic church has done. And if you’re not angry enough at the church to swear, then what’s wrong with you?

Shit My Bible Says: Girl Cooties

Leviticus 12:2-5:

2[…] A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period. […] 4 Then the woman must wait thirty-three days to be purified from her bleeding. […] 5 If she gives birth to a daughter, for two weeks the woman will be unclean, as during her period. Then she must wait sixty-six days to be purified from her bleeding.

So ladies, the next time some guy treats you as inferior or compares you to livestock or something, don’t blame him. God himself says that you have cooties.

FFRF Ad in NYT

The Freedom From Religion Foundation ran a full-page ad in the New York Times today. The ad takes the form of an open letter to Catholics, urging them to “quit the Roman Catholic Church”.

Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club? Why are you aiding and abetting a church that has repeatedly and publicly announced a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization, and to deny the right of all women everywhere, Catholic or not, to decide whether and when to become mothers? When it comes to reproductive freedom, the Roman Catholic Church is Public Enemy Number One. Think of the acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, social evils and deaths that can be laid directly at the door of the Church’s antiquated doctrine that birth control is a sin and must be outlawed.

Right on cue, BillDo is offended.

The ad blames the Catholic Church for promoting “acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, overpopulation, social evils and deaths.” It says the bishops are “launching a ruthless political Inquisition” against women. It talks about “preying priests” and corruption “going all the way to the top.” In an appeal to Catholic women, it opines, “Apparently, you’re like the battered woman who, after being beaten down every Sunday, feels she has no place else to go.”

Bill doesn’t rebut any of these charges. Presumably he doesn’t disagree with them; he just thinks it’s impolite for the FFRF to point out these problems.

And then, just to prove what a class act he is, there’s this:

FFRF is led by a husband and wife team, Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker. Fortunately for Gaylor, her mother did not follow through on the advice she gave women in her book, Abortion Is a Blessing.

Oh, Billy! Will your furious tantrums never cease to make me giddy with schadenfreude?

Shit My Bible Says: By the Rivers of Babylon

Psalm 137:

1 By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
   when we remembered Zion.
2 There on the poplars
   we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs,
   our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
   they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4 How can we sing the songs of the LORD
   while in a foreign land?
5 If I forget you, Jerusalem,
   may my right hand forget its skill.
6 May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
   if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
   my highest joy.

7 Remember, LORD, what the Edomites did
   on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
   “tear it down to its foundations!”

Huh. Actually, that’s quite beautiful. A song of grief and loss, and trying to carry on in desperate circumstances.

Some of you may be old enough to remember Boney M’s version. Admit it, you started singing along with the text, above:
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/L9XDKNnE0ig?rel=0

(And for those who aren’t old enough to remember: um, there once was this thing called disco and, er, we’re not terribly proud of that.)

Update: Hold on. Alert reader me has just pointed out that I left off a bit off at the end:

8 Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
   happy is the one who repays you
   according to what you have done to us.
9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants
   and dashes them against the rocks.

Huh. I wonder why this part never made it into the Boney M song.