religion
pharyngula | January 19, 2011I don't really need to comment on this story, do I?
A vial containing blood drawn from Pope John Paul II shortly before he died will be installed as a relic in a Polish church soon after his beatification this year.
It's as if they aren't even trying to avoid the connection to voodoo, vampirism, and blood magic.
pharyngula | January 18, 2011An interesting letter has been unearthed. It reveals that the Vatican was officially instructing its clergy to hide pedophilia cases from civil authorities.
Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature."
Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, "must be meticulously followed." Any bishops who tried…
pharyngula | January 18, 2011The Republican governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has moved on a little bit from the 1950s — he made a speech on Martin Luther King Day in which he declared himself colorblind and the governor of all the people of Alabama. How nice! But then, unfortunately, he had to ruin it by making a few exceptions.
But if you have been adopted in God's family like I have, and like you have if you're a Christian and if you're saved, and the Holy Spirit lives within you just like the Holy Spirit lives within me, then you know what that makes? It makes you and me brothers. And it makes you and me brother…
pharyngula | January 15, 2011Here's an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense.
The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it's fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor:
A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.
That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and…
pharyngula | January 15, 2011Jackie Trebesh and her daughter attended a Catholic church presided over by "Reverend" John Kelly. One weekend she was surprised when they were both denied communion. She was in for a further surprise: when she left the church, she was pursued by a Santa Rosa County deputy, pulled over, and given a warning for trespassing, at the request of the priest.
What do you think her crime was?
According to Trebesh, she learned the reason she was denied communion was because someone at the church had seen the daughter dispose of the host, as it is called, improperly in the church parking lot.
"The…
gboustead | January 14, 2011
Yesterday, I went on Facebook. Not an unusual activity for someone my age. Or for someone my parents’ age, which I still haven’t gotten used to. But that’s not the point of this.
Several of my “friends” had statuses mentioning "Ophiuchus", whatever that is. One girl’s panicked reaction to this unpronounceable phenomenon had received enough attention to elicit ten of my peers to "comment" on it.
So, I did what any self-respecting person would do. I decided if nineteen-year-old girls were fascinated by it, it was probably just as important as Justin Beiber and Twilight.
But when I went on…
pharyngula | January 14, 2011It's good to see the old traditions kept alive. The Romans were fond of monumental marble architecture, formal public ritual, and deifying their emperors after their death, and look at the Vatican: monumental marble architecture, formal public ritual, and now the rapid beatification and expected canonization of their popes. Unfortunately, none of the popes have had the wit and humor to appreciate the custom, as Vespasian did, and laugh on their deathbed, "Alas, I think I'm becoming a god saint."
So one dead pope, John Paul, is about to be officially beatified, which means the Catholic Church…
mikethemadbiologist | January 13, 2011If you haven't heard by now, Sarah Palin compared criticism of her to "blood libel", the disgusting medieval falsehood that Jews used Christian blood in religious rituals. While some have chalked this up to paranoia, I don't think that's correct (besides, Palin's paranoia stems from the bursting of her narcissistic bubble). Because there's an increasingly tendency among fundamentalists to view themselves as Jews. Now, this might sound odd, since they seem to have some difficulties with the Judeo part of Judeo-Christian. But they do see themselves as new and improved Jews. Some…
pharyngula | January 10, 2011I know that many people read the suicide note of Bill Zeller — it's terrible story of an intelligent young man who was racked with internal demons, and who finally ended his life. The primary causes of his torment were memories of sexual molestation, but there was also another significant factor: his family's fundamentalist religion, which provided him no comfort and was apparently more of a straitjacket to limit family interaction. He wrote this:
I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional,…
pharyngula | January 7, 2011Senator Grassley launched an investigation into the finances of religious organizations, after reports of abuses — you know the sorts of things that are common, like obscene salaries to ministers, active politicizing from the pulpit, etc. The Grassley report has been released, with a dull thud.
According to the review, many of the ministries operate multiple non-profits, with the leaders drawing some form of compensation from each of them.
"The number and types of entities, including private airports and aircraft leasing companies, raises concerns about the use of the church's tax-exempt…
pharyngula | January 7, 2011It's because it is the absolute bottom floor of any descent into crepitude. That's all I can conclude from looking at the fate of various cable television channels: they all seem to start out well with commendable goals, and pretty soon they're all selling out to the cheapest, sleaziest advertisers and producing the worst shows they can imagine, all to pander to the lowest common denominator. Look at The Learning Channel (you won't learn anything watching it anymore), the History Channel (yeah, if your idea of history always has Nazis in it), and the SciFi channel, which now isn't even trying…
pharyngula | January 6, 2011I know you've been wondering about the answer to these questions: Does Poop Smell in Heaven? How about before the Fall? Now you can get answers.
The answers are:
Nobody poops in heaven.
If you're a young earth creationist, nobody may have pooped during creation week, but if they did, it didn't stink.
If you are a theistic evolutionist, then poop did smell.
All I can infer from that is that the more godly and fundamentalist you are, the more likely you are to be constipated.
pharyngula | January 5, 2011I know the excuses already. The cowardly assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, who murdered Governor Taseer in Pakistan was an outlier, a freak, a weirdo, and we atheist bastards better not try to demean religion by associating a rogue individual with it. Can we spit in contempt on an entire culture instead?
Taseer was buried in his home town of Lahore. The 66-year-old was assassinated yesterday by Mumtaz Qadri, one of his police bodyguards, after he had campaigned for reform of the law on blasphemy.
Qadri appeared in court, unrepentant, where waiting lawyers threw handfuls of rose petals over him and…
pharyngula | January 5, 2011The Mount Soledad Easter Cross has a long and contentious legal history. It's a 43-foot-tall concrete cross standing on public land, initially erected by Christians, and used as the focus of Christian religious ceremonies, and is clearly intended and used for a sectarian religious purpose. It is clearly a violation of the separation of church and state to use public land to promote a specific religion, yet a federal judge ruled that "the memorial at Mount Soledad, including its Latin cross, communicates the primarily nonreligious messages of military service, death and sacrifice," and decided…
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Jerry Coyne has just heard that Chris Mooney has an article in Playboy — I knew about this a while back, and have a copy of the text. I didn't mention it before because it isn't online, and it's dreadfully dreary stuff. The entire article is a case of false equivalence: he cites scientists like Einstein and Darwin writing about a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world, and then tries to slide a fast one by…the idea that this means science and religion really are compatible. Well, science and spirituality. Well, spirituality is all about the believers. It's a slimy game relying on the…
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Don't ever call atheists militant, except where they do something like this. A governor in Pakistan has been killed for opposing blasphemy laws.
Interior minister Rehman Malik said the killer was a member of Mr Taseer's own security team, who quickly confessed to the crime and who had apparently worked for the governor on five or six previous occasions.
"He confessed that he killed the governor himself because he had called the blasphemy law a black law," Mr Malik said.
"He has confessed his crime and surrendered his gun to police after the attack," he told reporters.
That's militancy.…
pharyngula | January 4, 2011Standing in line to swap fluids and disease by swilling from the same cup was going to get someone in trouble, eventually — and now it's happened. Catholics in New York have been exposed to hepatitis A through sharing Jesus' blood.
All the practitioners have been asked to get tested and vaccinated right away.
There is no word on who broke the ugly news to Jesus, but you just know that guy is like a major vector for all kinds of nastiness, so he's probably used to it by now.
pharyngula | January 3, 2011The CNN Belief Blog continues to blaze a vapid trail of inanity through the wilderness of insanity called religion. They have just published 11 faith-based predictions for 2011. Why? I don't know.
To open 2011, CNN's Belief Blog asked 10 religious leaders and experts - plus one secular humanist - to make a faith-based prediction about the year ahead.
Have a faithy prediction of your own? Share it in comments.
Here's what those in the know are predicting:
Wait, what? "Those in the know"? Don't they mean "those who don't know, but believe really, really hard"?
What follows is a lot of…
pharyngula | December 30, 2010The British government has been getting a bit mother-henish lately, arresting people for cruelty to religious texts, and clearly has it in mind to provide special legal protection for a certain class of books. My first thought would be that that is insane, books are mere objects that are easily replicable, and providing for a special privilege that we don't also grant doorknobs or transistor radios or light bulbs is absurd. But a man named Eugenio has a better idea: we need to leap on the sacred book bandwagon.
I am therefore writing to you today to request that legal protection be accorded…