religion
gregladen | December 12, 2010
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pharyngula | December 11, 2010This time, it's the Vatican. Wikileaks has released documents related to the Irish priest scandals.
Pope Benedict refused to allow Vatican officials to testify in an investigation by an Irish commission into alleged child sex abuse by priests, according to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, The Guardian newspaper reported.
Benedict was also reportedly furious when Vatican officials were called upon in Rome, The Guardian reported Saturday.
The Murphy Commission of Inquiry into sexual and physical abuse "offended many in the Vatican," according to a cable dated February 26, 2010…
gregladen | December 9, 2010Which is very handy if you are a Department of Motor Vehicles desk clerk who hates Teh Gay. Or a Senator.
Thomas Demartini does or did work for the California DMV in San Francisco. A while back he refused to process a change of gender on the license paperwork for a transgender person. That apparently caused a bit of a stir but he kept his job and, apparently, was never retrained. Or maybe he was.
Anyway, when Amber Yust, recently transgendered herself, applied for the male to female change in status with the DMV, and she ended up with the same anti-gay desk clerk, things got weird.…
pharyngula | December 9, 2010I can't understand a word that's written in this article, but I like the cartoon.
Somebody should make a similar one for moderate Christians…they can tut-tut over murdered abortion doctors, they can make excuses for pedophile priests, they can go in a voting booth and pull the lever against gay rights, but an atheist puts up a billboard that says you can be good without gods, and zowee! Screaming fits on Fox News!
pharyngula | December 9, 2010I used to always give my spare change to the Salvation Army at this time of year — there they were, ringing their bell outside the grocery store, so sure, I'd give a little. That changed when I learned about their anti-gay policies, though…and now there's another reason to spurn the Salvation Army.
The Salvation Army says it refuses to distribute Harry Potter and Twilight toys collected for needy children because they're incompatible with the charity's Christian beliefs.
The policy has alarmed a Calgarian who volunteered to sift through a southeast warehouse full of unused, donated items…
gregladen | December 8, 2010Christians fear werewolves and wizardry. Oh, and vampires. A Canadian Salvation Army center throws away Harry Potter and Twilight toys that are donated to them, rather than passing them out to kids for Christmas or even giving them to a different charity with less hypocritical standards. "The Salvation Army is based on Christian principles, so these things are not in line with those" says a Salvation Army officer, though guns and other toys of violence are, if the local ministry likes. People who work in the local ministry where this was discovered throw the Potter and Twilight toys away,…
gregladen | December 7, 2010I did a little (very little, very short) newsroom debate on Fox 9 with a guy named Tom who appears to represent conservative Christians regarding the question of "Does Christmas have place in schools?" I quickly add that even though that was the planned focus of the discussion, it was quickly revised to be "Oh, no, not just Christmas, but Kwanza and Hanuka and stuff too." That particular bit of backpedaling is, of course, ingenuous and annoying, because nobody from Hanuka or Kwanza is trying to force their religious holidays into public schools, only the conservative Christians. So if we…
pharyngula | December 7, 2010It's another of those horrible stories of an ignorant fundie family with a sick child who could be easily cured by modern medicines, but they chose to treat him with the uselessness of prayer…and guess what happens? They're now the proud parents of a corpse.
The media doesn't help. They give a voice to all the frauds saying things like, "Our teaching is to trust Almighty God for everything in life: for health, for healing, for protection, for provisions, for avenging of wrongs" and "The result was not what they wanted because our faith is imperfect at times. But God is perfect." And then…
pharyngula | December 4, 2010Bad news out of Germany: they've been investigating cases of priestly child abuse, and found lots (159 priests, 15 deacons, 96 religion teachers and six pastoral employees implicated so far), but they also found evidence of a systematic cover-up by the Catholic church.
Germany's Catholic Church systematically covered up cases of sexual abuse within its own ranks for several decades, according to an expert study commissioned by the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising.
The lawyer heading up the investigation, Marion Westpfahl, said at a press conference on Friday that the available records…
jrosenhouse | November 29, 2010As a way of easing our way back into regular blogging, let's take a quick look at what Michael Ruse has been up to. This was posted at HuffPo on October 28:
Neither I nor the well-known philosopher Philip Kitcher believes in the existence of God or in the claims of the major (or minor) religions. I don't know how he would describe himself, but I say I am an agnostic or skeptic. In truth, when it comes to the basic claims of Christianity and the others, I am an atheist.
Yet both Kitcher and I persist in trying to make a space for people who are religious, in the sense that we both want to…
pharyngula | November 29, 2010Stevie Johnson, a player for the Buffalo Bills football team, dropped the ball in a catch that would have won his team a game. I have to commend him for some consistency, though — most players just credit their good catches to the Man Upstairs, but not Stevie: he got on Twitter and cussed out his god.
I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO...
I've learned from this, at least. Stevie Johnson really likes exclamation points, and you can chew out god using Twitter. Who knew?
Meanwhile, over in…
pharyngula | November 27, 2010Although citing the Bible seems to be a way to fast-track bad science papers to publication. In yet another example of a journal letting bad Bible interpretations pass for science, a paper titled "Newer insights to the neurological diseases among biblical characters of old testament has been published in the Annals of the Indian Academy of Neurology. It isn't new or newer, it doesn't offer any insights, and the title isn't even grammatical. Among its inventions is the idea that Sampson was autistic because he was violent and had odd dietary habits, that Isaac was diabetic, and that Ezekiel…
gregladen | November 26, 2010Americans and citizens of some of the most Islamic countries tend to agree that it is a force acting on the side of good. Many Europeans say the opposite. There is a rough correlation between the religiosity of a country and how much religion is revered (duh) as a primarily good thing.
This poll was conducted in connection with the upcoming debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blaire. The overall results, combining answers across countries, indicates that a slim majority of humans are rather suspicious of religion's value as an ethical or moral compass.
pharyngula | November 26, 2010Tonight, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens will debate on whether religion is a force for good. I'd love to hear Hitchens on that subject, but Blair? That's almost as comical as having Hitchens debate Bush on the subject. The newspapers are relying on two tools to promote the event. Hype:
Together, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens are two of the great British thinkers on religion.
Wait, Blair…isn't he the simpering me-too former prime minister who was our American lackey in the UK? The one who converted to Catholicism, an act that clearly marks him as mentally deficient? Hmmm.
Oh, well…
pharyngula | November 25, 2010What is wrong with people? It's just a frackin' book!
A 15-year-old girl has been arrested on suspicion of inciting religious hatred after allegedly burning an English-language version of the Qur'an — and then posting video footage of the act on Facebook.
No. It is obscene to start jailing people for destroying their own books, simply because some oversensitive wackos think it is magical. Apparently, this girl burned it on school property, though — call her on creating a fire hazard. But not for contradicting someone's delusions.
And the kooks defending the arrest aren't helping their own…
pharyngula | November 25, 2010There's a campaign of sorts that's beginning in the UK, in which Christians are urged to stand up and announce that they are not ashamed to believe in a zombie redeemer who will protect them from his flaming torture pit deep beneath the earth. In a way, I'm sure it's very nice for them personally to sustain that kind of self esteem, but really…they should be embarrassed to believe in such absurd nonsense.
At least they're mostly doing no harm. The action they're calling for is for everyone to pray harder.
Please pray for the Not Ashamed campaign and especially that the official launch next…
pharyngula | November 24, 2010John Fiala is a bad man, and he's also a Catholic priest. I've got a flood of email telling me I ought to highlight the case because he's a priest who forced a boy to have sex with him at gunpoint, and later tried to hire a hit man to kill him. What he has done has been awful and evil, but, you know, it's not an indictment of religious belief.
Fiala is simply nuts.
If his religious order did cover up his crimes (and that is one of the charges here), then it is evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Catholic church, but that's still an open question — from the accounts I've seen, he was…
gregladen | November 23, 2010This is interesting at so many levels, but I thought you might find it pertinent to the ongoing discussion of whether or not we should assume that a person is good because they are very very religious, or check our wallets frequently and wear body armor when near them because they are very very religious.
Michael Brea is a bit actor who has had roles in TV shows you may have heard of ("Ugly Betty" being one of them). He was heard by a neighbor chanting religious phrases at his mother and demanding to know if she believed in god while he hacked at her with a ceremonial Freemason's sword.…
gregladen | November 22, 2010Morals, values, and integrity. And sex-for-tuition.
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pharyngula | November 19, 2010Scientists are often accused of cruelty towards animals, and there are some experiments that do cause pain…but at the same time, what we can do is very tightly regulated and scrutinized, with every experiment requiring rather thorough justification, and in every case that I know of, the investigators themselves are greatly concerned about minimizing suffering, even without the watchdogs of animal care and use committees hovering over them. And need I mention that scientists actually accomplish something useful in their animal work?
If animal rightists want to focus right now on a widespread…