Catholic Church punishes homeless

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Michael

The Catholic Church doesn’t seem able to do anything good these days. Between promoting the spread of disease by telling people condoms are immoral to covering up child rape scandals (or is it “petty gossip? I forget), the Church appears to be actively trying to harm the world. Not that this is anything knew, but the media has obviously been hopping on the band wagon a lot more recently. I hope it continues, such as is the case in this deplorable tale of evil.

[Maine Gov.] Baldacci decided to hold the spaghetti feed after learning last month that the Catholic Church had withdrawn funding for Preble Street’s Homeless Voices for Justice program because of Preble Street’s support for same-sex marriage.

…

Homeless Voices for Justice lost $17,400 for this year and will lose $33,000 that it expected for its next fiscal year. All of Wednesday’s donations will go to the statewide advocacy group, which works on issues that affect the homeless.

Baldacci is a Catholic himself, but he isn’t so blinded by religious dogma that he can’t recognize the difference between right and wrong. He has helped to correct an ugly act and bring attention to an evil, petty organization that cares more about its bigoted agenda than helping out human beings.

But maybe the best part of this is that he isn’t up for re-election. While I would like to see him continue as governor (he is constitutionally prohibited from doing so), it’s so nice to see him acting based upon what he thinks is right, not simply what is politically convenient. In fact, he began his tenure as governor by claiming to be against same-sex marriage – which was a lie to help get him elected – but once he faced no consequences for the truth, he approved a bill for equal treatment in Maine (which was struck down by bigots helped illegally by non-taxed political donations from the Catholic Church). This doesn’t make him a great man necessarily, but the waning months of a person’s time in office are often the best because they reflect what that person actually thinks and wants.

Filed under: News, Same-sex marriage | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

More church attacks on atheism

Posted on April 5, 2010 by Michael

The Catholic church has been trying to blame atheism for its sordid state as of late. No, it couldn’t be the molestation of children or the sickening excuses by people like Bill Donahue.

“You’ve got to get your facts straight,” Donohue said, addressing sex abuse victim Thomas Roberts. “I’m sorry. If I’m the only one that’s going to deal with facts tonight then that’ll be it. The vast majority of the victims are post-pubescent. That’s not pedophilia, buddy. That’s homosexuality.”

This is one of those times where what’s being said is just so below grade, so convoluted that it doesn’t only deserve no respect, but it deserves no real response.

And it couldn’t be the pope referring to charges of child rape as “petty gossip“. I mean, it’s just massive cover ups that caused foreseeable harm to thousands of children around the world is all.

No, no. It’s all that damned secularization.

In recent decades, however, the Church in [Ireland] has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society.

Not good enough for you? Where’s the dirty A-word? We know what he means, but he isn’t saying it! How about this?

“As we can see by the sheer passion and virulence of the atheist – they seem to hate the Christian God – we are not dealing here with cool philosophy up against faith without a brain,” Dr [Sydney Anglican Archbishop Peter] Jensen told worshippers.

This is another way to demand undue respect. You aren’t being nice enough to us!. As if they deserve niceness for being so hostile towards science and reason. They ought not expect “cool philosophy” when all they have to bring to the table is tortured apologetics for an evil book and an evil institution.

“Atheism is every bit of a religious commitment as Christianity itself.

“It represents the latest version of the human assault on God, born out of resentment that we do not in fact rule the world and that God calls on us to submit our lives to him.

“It is a form of idolatry in which we worship ourselves.”

What I really want to know is when are atheists going to stop beating their wives?

That whole distracting argument is irrelevant. Atheists don’t believe in God, thus anything someone thinks God declared at one point doesn’t really breed resentment. It can’t. What does, however, breed resentment is people actually trying to argue this irrelevant bull instead of addressing the issue of child rape.

The guy goes on to trot out all the normal canards used against atheists: Stalin, Pot, Hitler, and now apparently abortion. Blah blah blah. He doesn’t get it, nor can he make a coherent argument. For example,

Dr Jensen went on to say in his sermon that religion can be an “even more dangerous” form of idolatry than atheism if incorrectly interpreted.

“Here, too, religion can simply be the power game under a different guise … Atheist or religious person – we all need to be reconciled to God and give him our lives,” he added.

Isn’t that fun. Shortly after saying atheism is a religious commitment, he actually contrasts atheism and religion – and atheists and religious people – effectively cordoning them off as separate notions. He’s right to do that, of course. It’d just be nice if he had any idea why that is so.

Filed under: Atheism/Humanism | Tagged: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Pay your damn taxes

Posted on January 21, 2010 by Michael

As the upstanding citizen I am, I just finished getting through all my taxes. As it happens, I am getting money back, but I would have certainly paid up if that’s how the math worked out. Maybe I wouldn’t be doing that in January, but I would do it by April 15th. Paying taxes as they are due is just such a basic concept that one must be ignorant, stupid, or a crook to do otherwise. It turns out the Mormon Church is run by crooks.

The Mormon church worked to hide its involvement in the 2008 effort to ban gay marriage in California, telling the Proposition 8 campaign that it wanted “plausible deniability” in its connections with the movement, documents revealed in a California courtroom Wednesday show.

In the seventh day of testimony in the landmark gay-marriage trial in San Francisco, lawyers for the gay-rights side presented emails showing “close links between the Proposition 8 campaign and leaders of the Catholic and Mormon churches,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

Any reasonable person would have to conclude that this sort of political involvement demands the Mormon Church pay its taxes. Maine had this same problem with the Catholic Church recently. In both cases, no taxes will be rendered. It doesn’t make any sense. Ignoring for a moment that religious institutions generally should not be tax-exempt (except as they function as charities), if government is going to grant certain groups privileges, those groups should have to abide by the rules. They constantly and consistently do not do this. No one is saying “No! You can’t support cause X!”. Go ahead, support your bigotry or yearning for a theocracy. Just pay your damn taxes when you do it.

Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , , , | 10 Comments »

The sad state of science

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Michael

At least it’s sad among the public. There’s a new survey in Britain that confirms this.

In the survey, 51 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that “evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages”

A further 40 per cent disagreed, while the rest said they did not know.

The suggestion that a designer’s input is needed reflects the “intelligent design” theory, promoted by American creationists as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

Asked whether it was true that “God created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years”, 32 per cent agreed, 60 per cent disagreed and eight per cent did not know.

A third of people in Britain believe the world began sometime around the agricultural revolution. That’s inanity. These people do not believe with any reason, but with stupid, stubborn, ill-formed faith. The worst part is that some of the same numbers are reflected in the teacher population.

Interestingly, this article takes on the subject a little more directly. Rather than simply remain topical and report on the survey plus a few recent events, it ventures into some of the points in the creationism-evolution debate.

Paul Woolley, the director of Theos said: “Darwin is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause.

“The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.”

There is a tad bit of truth in what Woolley is saying, but not in his primary message. The choice is clear: either the world needs a designer or it does not. The answer is that it does not. Of course, that does not mean God does not exist. He very well may. That, unfortunately for theists, does mean God is a superfluous idea, whether he be a personal god or simply a deity.

Where Woolley gets it right is that people do perceive this choice and thus reject evolution. These people are known as “dumb”.

Prof Dawkins expressed dismay at the findings of the ComRes survey, of 2,060 adults, which he claimed were confirmation that much of the population is “pig-ignorant” about science.

“Obviously life, which was Darwin’s own subject, is not the result of chance,” he said.

“Any fool can see that. Natural selection is the very antithesis of chance.

“The error is to think that God is the only alternative to chance, and Darwin surely didn’t think that because he himself discovered the most important non-theistic alternative to chance, namely natural selection.”

Methinks the journalist is rather familiar with the issue and knew what questions to ask Dawkins. I almost want to say he simply quoted Dawkins from some writings not directly related to this article, but that would be irresponsible of me. At any rate, it sounds like we have some attempt at a tad bit of science education going on here. Natural selection is not chance. We don’t need to know that for the purposes of the article, but it is good to know, none-the-less.

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, accused Dawkins of evolving into a “very simple kind of thinker”.

He said: “His argument for atheism goes like this: either God is the explanation for the wide diversity of biological life, or evolution is. We know that evolution is true. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

“I’m an evangelical Christian, but I have no difficulties in believing that evolution is the best scientific account we have for the diversity of life on our planet.”

That’s a honker of a strawman. Dawkins argument is closer to this: God is necessarily complex. Complex things do not come about by chance. Either God came about by chance or he is the product of natural principles. If the answer is chance, then we’re just proposing the question we sought to answer. That is, we want to know how all this complexity (the Universe and all it entails) came to be. It cannot be random chance. By postulating God, we’re postulating something more complex. If the Universe cannot be chance, God cannot be chance. If the answer is natural principles, then he isn’t much of a God, is he?

Of course, there is another option: God is beyond Nature and thus neither chance nor the product of anything. At this point we’ve ventured into la-la land. This is blind guessing with no basis, no evidence. It may be true, but we have no reason to be postulating it, much less any reason to think it remotely reasonable. If God is beyond Nature, not only can we not study him, we cannot experience anything related to him. If we can experience him, then he is within Nature and thus we are able to study him. Of course, there is nothing in Nature which shows a link to some exo-Universe being, so let’s move on and discuss things that make sense.

Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

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