Do you want these people teaching you morals?

One of the commenters on a thread in Pharyngula said

By the way, the RCC [Roman Catholic Church] protected the priests who were raping children and spirited bishops like Cardinal Law who conspired to protect the priests out of the country so they could not be prosecuted.

Another responded with delivered this blast about the history of the Roman Catholic Church:

Actually, it’s worse even than that. The Vatican has had an official policy of concealment since 1962. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, none other than Pope Benedict XVI himself, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was responsible for its coordination and the Vatican policy of non-cooperation with law-enforcement. Since the State of the Vatican City is sovereign under international law, the Papal Nuncio is regarded as an ambassador and his official office/residence in a country is subject to the diplomatic doctrine of extraterritoriality. In several countries, the Roman Catholic Church has concealed documentary evidence of child rape by storing documents in the Papal Nuncio’s residence, out of reach of any search warrant.

I guess reputation is everything.

Another points out:

The Catholic Church protected pedophile priests from the consequences of their actions, shuffling them from parish to parish. When he was Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Ratzi the Nazi was instrumental in deceiving the laity by protecting child-molesting priests through his role as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This Guardian article details how Ratzinger asserted the Church’s right to keep sex abuse hearings secret and out of the hands of secular authorities.

The molestation of children by priests was enabled and protected by the entire church hierarchy, going all the way to the Pope himself.

To a Catholic, raping children is okay, but molesting a cracker, that warrants the death penalty!

Did any of the Catholics attaxcking PZ protest the culture of silence in the church that enabled the molestation? Did any of them leave the church? If not, then the clear implication is that the widespread rape of children by priests did not dissuade Catholics from their allegiance to the church that allowed the rapes to happen.

The Guardian article:

Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had ‘obstructed justice’ after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church’s investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret.

The order was made in a confidential letter, obtained by The Observer, which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001.

It asserted the church’s right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected as John Paul II’s successor last week.

Lawyers acting for abuse victims claim it was designed to prevent the allegations from becoming public knowledge or being investigated by the police. They accuse Ratzinger of committing a ‘clear obstruction of justice’.

The letter, ‘concerning very grave sins’, was sent from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that once presided over the Inquisition and was overseen by Ratzinger.

It spells out to bishops the church’s position on a number of matters ranging from celebrating the eucharist with a non-Catholic to sexual abuse by a cleric ‘with a minor below the age of 18 years’. Ratzinger’s letter states that the church can claim jurisdiction in cases where abuse has been ‘perpetrated with a minor by a cleric’.

The letter states that the church’s jurisdiction ‘begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18th year of age’ and lasts for 10 years.

It orders that ‘preliminary investigations’ into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger’s office, which has the option of referring them back to private tribunals in which the ‘functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests’.

‘Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,’ Ratzinger’s letter concludes. Breaching the pontifical secret at any time while the 10-year jurisdiction order is operating carries penalties, including the threat of excommunication.

The letter is referred to in documents relating to a lawsuit filed earlier this year against a church in Texas and Ratzinger on behalf of two alleged abuse victims. By sending the letter, lawyers acting for the alleged victims claim the cardinal conspired to obstruct justice.

Daniel Shea, the lawyer for the two alleged victims who discovered the letter, said: ‘It speaks for itself. You have to ask: why do you not start the clock ticking until the kid turns 18? It’s an obstruction of justice.’

Father John Beal, professor of canon law at the Catholic University of America, gave an oral deposition under oath on 8 April last year in which he admitted to Shea that the letter extended the church’s jurisdiction and control over sexual assault crimes.

The Ratzinger letter was co-signed by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone who gave an interview two years ago in which he hinted at the church’s opposition to allowing outside agencies to investigate abuse claims.

‘In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offence of paedophilia is unfounded,’ Bertone said.

Shea criticised the order that abuse allegations should be investigated only in secret tribunals. ‘They are imposing procedures and secrecy on these cases. If law enforcement agencies find out about the case, they can deal with it. But you can’t investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10 the priest will get away with it,’ Shea added.

A spokeswoman in the Vatican press office declined to comment when told about the contents of the letter. ‘This is not a public document, so we would not talk about it,’ she said.

Now here’s a good book!

I’d like to read this one.

Can you sue God’s publishers?

Gay man sues Bible’s publishers for causing harassment: Powell’s book blog, Monday, Item 3.

Bradley LaShawn Fowler, 39, has filed lawsuits in a Michigan federal court against Zondervan Publishing and Thomas Nelson Inc., claiming some editions of the Bibles those companies put out specifically declare homosexuality to be sinful, which has led him to suffer discrimination, emotional pain and mental instability.

[...] The suit against Zondervan cites a specific passage of the company’s 1982 and 1987 editions, 1 Corinthians 6:9:

“Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral no idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders.”

Fowler claims the term “homosexual” was edited out of the 1989 and 1994 editions.

In addition to campaigning to get the churches’ free tax ride rescinded (why pay their salaries so they can insult us?), maybe we can make this a class action suit. And one for women.

Ontario premier supports award to Henry Morgentaler

Premier McGuinty speaks up:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said Tuesday he supports the decision to award abortion crusader Dr. Henry Morgentaler with the Order of Canada.

McGuinty, himself a Catholic, appears to be the first premier to address the issue publicly. His stance opposes that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has said he would have preferred to have seen the award bestowed on someone who unifies Canadians.

“I know that Dr. Morgentaler has been seen as a controversial figure, but I believe in a woman’s right to make a very difficult decision,” McGuinty said.

“And if she makes that difficult decision and chooses to have an abortion, I want her to be able to do that in a way that’s safe, in a way that’s publicly funded. So I know it’s divisive, but I think it’s important.”

Living a lie: “I was a gay priest”

Mark Vernon, now a philosopher, writes about the damage that it does to someone to hide their innermost self. For three years, with a tolerant environment, he was a discreetly gay priest. He writes…

“One of the paradoxes of the row over homosexuality in the Anglican church is that there have been, are, and always will be gay priests. Many gay priests. I know. I was one.”

Scientology’s crushing defeat

Read Tony Ortega’s article about how and why the money-making sham cult $cientology decided to pay a judgement of almost $9 million to Larry Wollersheim.

Anonymous Canada pickets Scientology's Toronto office

Wacky religion wants its magic biscuit back

With credit to one of the commenters on the Pharyngula post: “It’s a frackin’ cracker!” Absconding with a magic biscuit is compared to a hate crime.

Seattle scene

Here’s what you might see in Seattle these days:

"Imagine no religion," how peaceful it would be

This image was stolen from Pharyngula: “Godless advertising.”

Dembski: the failure that keeps on failing

Evolved and Rational points out that Bill Dembski is “The failure that keeps on failing.”

By asking where is the “god speak” in a biology textbook, for goodness’ sake, BillDumb has shown us (yes, old news) that ID is all about shoving god into science and down the throats of innocent children; thus destroying science education in the process. What BillDumb was too stupid to realize is that there is no “god talk” nor “atheist talk” in the theory of evolution itself. God isn’t mentioned in the description of the theory of gravitation, and yet we don’t see IDiots demanding to know where the “theo” is in gravity. There is no mention of religion in the weather forecast either and nobody claims that god is involved in weather cycles. Yet, the IDiots don’t seem to have a problem with those damned godless meteorologists!

It’s a good rant.

Missionaries

more funny cat pictures

Debunking evangelism since the 1670s

Some people are saying that the recent exchange between scientist Richard Lenski and conservative religious apologist Andy Schafly reminds them that rational thinkers have been debunking religious illogic since Baruch Spinoza’s writing the 1670s.

Below are a pair of letters exchanged between the philosopher Baruch Spinoza and a young friend who had converted to an evangelical form of Catholicism (so evangelical that the young man almost sounds like a modern day Evangelical Christian, especially at the end of one paragraph in which he tells Spinoza, “Give in, turn away from your errors and your sins; put on humility and be born again,” or in another place when he compares the evidence for the truth of his beliefs with the evidence that “Julius Caesar lived,” or when he writes of the “wretched and restless life of Atheists”).

Their exchange — on the topic of Christianity versus Spinoza’s philosophy — parallels today’s feisty (at times fiery) debates…

Read it all.

Don’t read this if you’re hungry

Is this helpful?

more funny cat pictures

My cat isn’t coming home every night, so how can I give her her antibiotics properly? Is someone else feeding her? Or is she living on rodents? Is that new cat in the neighbourhood scaring her away? Sigh.

Henry Morgentaler gets Order of Canada

On the good side, bishops are outraged.

The CBC says,

Governor General Michaëlle Jean has named a leading abortion rights crusader as a Member of the Order of Canada, news that has outraged anti-abortion groups….

Morgentaler, a trained family physician, argued that access to abortion was a basic human right and women should not have to risk death at the hands of an untrained professional in order to end their pregnancies.

Morgentaler’s clinics were constantly raided by his opponents, and one in Toronto was firebombed. Morgentaler was arrested several times and spent months in jail as he fought his case at all court levels in Canada.

His victory came on Jan. 28, 1988, when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada’s abortion law. That law, which required a woman who wanted an abortion to appeal [have her doctor present her case: the woman never got to see them and there was no appealing their decision] to a three-doctor hospital abortion committee [available only if the hospital had one and if it ever met], was declared unconstitutional.

The old abortion committee system provided uneven and uncertain access to abortion for desperate women. Only about one-third of hospitals had working committees and some of those never approved an abortion.

And statistics are on our side:

In “BTC [Blog the controversy?]:Fine day for a debate“, Aaron Wherry writes

Angus Reid surveyed the Canadian public just a couple weeks ago. Here’s what they found.

Fully 46% of Canadians think abortion should be permitted in all cases. Another 19% think it should be permitted, but with unspecified restrictions, 22% would limit it to cases of rape, incest or in order to save a woman’s life, and seven percent would allow it only when a woman’s life is at stake.

If you put the question to Canadians in terms of legality, only five percent say abortion should be outlawed. Three percent aren’t sure. No less than 91% of Canadians think the law should allow abortion in at least some form.

Henry Morgentaler left regular medical practice because of the suffering he saw among unwillingly pregnant women. He made it known that he was doing abortions. He was acquitted by juries who agreed with his defence that he was preventing suffering among his patients. His acquittal was overturned by a judge and he was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Morgentaler, a concentration camp survivor then in his fifties, suffered a heart attack in prison and completed his sentence under medical care.

He is a fighter. He defied the law in order to change it. His clinic was illegal not because he was doing abortions but because he didn’t have a hospital committee to approve his decisions. The law that allowed a judge to overturn a jury conviction was struck down and Morgentaler became the only person in Canada to have a constitutional amendment named after him.

The law requiring hospitals that did abortions to have committees to which doctors presented the cases of their patients was struck down in January, 1988. Abortion is now a decision between a woman and her doctor. The law governing abortion is now the Canada Health Act.

His opponents apparently live in blueprints instead of houses, since they equate a fertilized egg with a baby, apparently on religious grounds about “souls,” since logic certainly doesn’t do it. When he was in the news more often, his file of death threats per month was inches thick. (Canadian doctors have been shot at, shot, and murdered.) His Toronto clinic on Harbord Street was fire-bombed in 1992. Way to capture the high moral ground, folks!

Unlike Dr. Morgentaler, people who are fighting against all abortions all the time are struggling to make Canada a worse place.

Illegal abortion has consequences. Whole hospital wards were closed when victims of septic abortion stopped filling them. Studies of those days put it as the major cause of hospitalization and death in pre-menopausal women. (My mother, in for appendicitis, shared a room with a woman who died while the nurses treated her with contempt and told her to stop complaining about the pain.) The saddest tales from those days are of the children orphaned because their mother couldn’t afford one more mouth to feed.

New York Times, “The abortion orphans”

CLARA BELL DUVALL WAS A 32- YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF FIVE WHEN SHE DIED OF AN ILLEGAL ABORTION IN 1929.

“The image of her in her casket is seared in my brain,” said Linn Duvall Harwell, who had just turned 6 when her mother died.

The hospital listed the cause of death as “pneumonia.”

She used a knitting needle.

She had a son and four daughters.

“She was a beautiful mother,” says Mrs. Harwell. “That must be understood. She was loving and affectionate. We were poor and it was 1929 but we were cared for. The minute she died, it all changed.”

“I can’t help but think how my life would have been different,” says Gwendolyn Elliott, who is a commander in the Pittsburgh Police Department. She was 5 when Vivian Campbell, her mother, died in 1950; she and her brother were raised by their grandparents. When she was 18 and ready for college, she tried to cash in some bonds her mother had left her and was told she needed a death certificate. And there it was, under cause of death: the word “abortion,” followed by a question mark.

The abortion orphans may be the shadow of things to come. Those of us who believe that abortion must remain legal are flailing about for a way to make vivid what will happen if it is banned once more. We have had the right so long that we have forgotten what the wrong is. Meant to evoke bloodstained tables and covert phone calls, the term “back alley” does not resonate for women who grew up with clean clinics and licensed doctors.

I have read interviews with people whose families fell apart, where brothers and sisters were split up and sent to orphanages or foster care after their mothers died of illegal abortion. Thank God for Dr. Morgentaler!

Links:

• Time line from the Globe & Mail (leaves out the firebombing of his clinic)
  
• Henry Morgentaler bio from CBC
  
• Reflection from a young woman
• Secularism is a women’s issue
• Nicaragua’s abortion ban kills 110 women in less than 2 years

Expelled crawls into Canada

The notorious creationist movie has crawled over the border into Canada and garnered a few reviews.

The Straight:

Truth begins and ends with the title of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a semislick advertorial for “intelligent design”, the sanitized public mask of creationism, itself invented by Christians who think their God is too stupid to have come up with evolution on his own….

Various cranks, allegedly fired from academia for their outrageous anti-Darwinist queries, give the usual freedom-of-speech spiels. (The genuine questions raised here have to do more with the notion of tenure than science, but that’s too subtle for movie palaver.) And leading evolutionary thinker and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins—seen in several interviews—only gradually recognizes that he is being set up.

The National Post, “Science is not Philosophy,” by John Moore

Expelled is at its most risible when it tries to establish a direct line from Darwin to eugenics and genocide. Stein quotes from a passage in Darwin’s writing that appears to endorse the notion that for a species to thrive the infirm must be culled. He omits the part where Darwin insists this would be “evil” and that man’s care for the weak is “the noblest part of our nature.”…

The core of the religious complaint against evolution rests on a false syllogism: Darwin leads automatically to atheism which leads to a world without moral order; therefore science is the enemy of God. It’s a maddening false supposition because while scientists are free to believe in God (and an estimated 40% do) science itself remains neutral…

…just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you. It is equally true that when everyone insists you are wrong about something it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re engaged in an elaborate conspiracy. You could just be wrong.

The National Post, “Nature vs. nurture vs. Nikita Khrushchev,” by Chris Knight:

apparently lacking any decent footage of Darwinists in their natural (and naturally selected) environment, it uses old black-and-white clips of cops with billy clubs, schoolyard bullies, Berlin Wall builders, guillotine operators and (my favourite) Nikita Khrushchev banging a shoe. The message is clear: If you think life evolved from the primordial soup, you’re in some pretty bad company.

Expelled goes on to make the argument that Darwinism was a necessary though not sufficient condition for Nazi Germany — which, even if true, is like saying that having two arms is necessary though not sufficient to strangle someone; and I stand by my right to bare arms. Nonetheless, this spurious leap of logic lets the filmmakers unleash a torrent of Nazi newsreel footage. (Apparently, Darwinists can be both Communists and Fascists at the same time.)

Intelligent Design is not synonymous with the six-days-and-then-He rested liturgy of creationism, but it’s not far off. Proponents believe life is too complex to have arisen randomly, and the universe too unlikely for it to be a chance occurrence. (Although if life hadn’t arisen, we wouldn’t be making films about how unlikely it is.) DNA is a program, they contend, so where’s the programmer? Unfortunately, any theory that rests on the axiom “Well, somebody must have made all this!” lacks a certain scientific rigour, never mind experimental validation.

A few other fallacies are worth mentioning. Just because a scientist holds a belief doesn’t automatically make that belief scientific. And just because a theory is framed in scientific language doesn’t necessarily give it equal status with opposing viewpoints. The flat-vs.-round-Earth debate, for instance, doesn’t take place on a level playing field because one of the theories is wrong…..

Ultimately, however, what sinks Expelled is not bad science but bad filmmaking.

For more about the movie, visit Expelled.

Proper thanks

Techskeptic points out that we need to direct our thanks to the right place.

If I required surgery and lived though it without major impairment (or even with major impairment) I would first thank the EMTs who were trained and got me to the hospital. I would thank the incredible surgeons who fixed me in my time of great peril. I would thank the hospital staff and donors for making a facility that allows this incredible work to go on, work that has had tremendous effects on our lifespan. I would thank the medical pioneers who and the people who agreed to be test subject to advance medicine to a point where we can stop and start a heart, and replace it. We can fix problems in the brain due to millenia of trial and error. I would thank the medical institutions that teach new doctors to not only learn the tried and true methods but teaches them to be creative and improve on them and notice when something is wrong. I would thank Doctors who propose hypothesis that are not well accepted and then back up their claims with so much evidence that concensus must change. I would thank the parents and educators of these doctors and technician and administrators. I would thank the politicians who require oversight of healthcare workers. The reason those people survive dramatic surgery and disease is because thousands of people have put in millions of man hours to make surgery as good and safe as they are now.

Oswald Avery, bacteriologist, at the Rockefeller Institute