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}, false); } else { window.attachEvent('onload', function(){ object[attribute] = val; }); } } Rationalist A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage - it does not need a regretful hankering about the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.Bertrand Russell Ye Of Miscellaneous Faith
The Australian Bureau of Statistics classification of religions is a fascinating few pages. No Religion - about 15% of the population, according to last year's census - contains only 4 subgroups: Agnosticism, Atheism, Humanism and Rationalism. No Objectivists or Ayn-Randians in sight.
This is pretty unimaginative when you consider the options available for Other Religions (0.4%). Some public servant has patiently allocated unique codes to everything from Chinese Ancestor Worship to Druidism; although Australian Aboriginal Traditional Religions have all been lumped together.
It's the last chance catch-all at the bottom of the Miscellaneous Religions section that's interesting - the Religious Groups, code 6999. While the Census Bureau officially frowned on people listing 'Jedi' as their religion at the last census (see post from June 22), and threw 'Jedi' into the Religious Groups bucket, just look at some of what it explicitly includes there: The Aetherius Society (Flying Saucer Group), The Builders of the Adytum, The Inner Peace Movement.
The Australian Government recognizes The Flying Saucer Group, and not the Jedi!? May the force be with them, they know not what they do...
posted by Rationalist at 12:34 AM  The Judean People's FrontPedophile Catholics have been thankfully absent from the news lately, but there was a funny postscript to one of the last TV news stories about them, on Sydney Channel 10 as I remember. There was some story about how the Melbourne Catholic establishment had protected child molestors, dismissed victims, the usual stuff. Then the news went on to other stories, and right at the end, the announcer said something like, 'The Australian Catholic Church would like to clarify that the earlier news item about child abuse was referring to the Roman Catholic Church'.
Let us not go into the morass of almost every Christian faith believing that they alone are the true Catholic faith - the most prominent being the Church of England regarding herself as the English Catholic Church, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and nothing to do with those oddballs in Rome.
But spare a thought for the Australian Catholic Church - not only have the Roman Catholics gone and devalues the brand, as it were, but the Australian Catholic Church is very, very obscure. I can't find them anywhere on the net, 'Australian Catholic Church' is synonymous with the 'Roman Catholic Church in Australia'. They must have a massive complex over all this - if are any members are out there, do email me and tell us about yourselves.
I know the Australian Catholic Church exists because it is listed in the Australian Bureau of Statistics list of Christian religions, and I know it is obscure because it is right as the very very bottom with the 'Other Christian' religions, way below the mainstream 'Catholic Church in Australia', right at the runt of the list with the Millenial Dawnists and the Father Divine - Peace Mission Movement.
posted by Rationalist at 12:22 AM Just shove it
Who do you think said this?"... we want to assist in shutting down the sweatshops where these garments are made by workers who get paid very little and work in atrocious conditions."
I'll save you the suspense because you'll never guess - the speaker is one Richard Stanwix, Nike corporate security manager in Australia, on the occasion of a police raid on a suburban Sydney market that was selling fake Nike tshirts for A$7. Our tax dollars at work.
Some poor worker gets a few cents for sewing a tshirt and some guy selling off a trestle table at the markets makes a few dollars. This subverts the way things are supposed to work, which is that some poor worker gets a few cents for sewing a tshirt and Nike makes heaps of dollars. Nike know all about sweatshops, of course. A Google search for 'Nike' and 'sweatshop' turns up over 12,000 hits, not all of them the famous sweatshop email.
posted by Rationalist at 12:20 AM Gods and Monsters
How many articles do you read about the War on Terror, and how many of them are actually saying something important and saying it well? Salman Rushdie, risking another fatwa, takes Muslims to task for being too obsessed with rote anti-Americanism to meet Western tolerance and support with any morality of their own. It's been said before, but never so well:Some of us have been listening out for something else: the emergence of a genuine Muslim polemic against the harm the terrorists are doing to their "own people." The war against Islamist terror will only be won when Muslims around the world begin to believe that fanaticism is a greater evil than that which they believe the United States to embody -- an evil, moreover, more damaging to Muslims, more socially, economically and politically destructive, and possessed by the nightmare vision of the Talibanization of the planet. After nine months during which it has been repeatedly stressed that most Muslims are not terrorists, but ordinary, decent human beings, it would be good to point to the birth of an international Muslim movement against terrorism. Unfortunately no such movement has emerged, nor is there the slightest indication that it may yet do so.
posted by Rationalist at 1:53 AM Somebody Bless America
How entertaining! Mass outrage and harrumphing about the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturning a 1954 law adding the words "under God" to the pledge of allegiance. I Pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This is recited every morning in public schools in the US (in the US, public are schools are schools for the general public, unlike British public schools) which goes some way to explaining to the rest of us why Americans visibly stiffen their backs and place their hands on their hearts at any whiff of their flag or anthem.
Much religious demagoguery and hyperbolic overreaction has ensued, and one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the sheer inability of a majority of Americans to even comprehend that some of their fellow citizens simply do not believe in any God at all.
SOME PEOPLE ARE NOT RELIGIOUS. It's hilarious how some other people just don't get this. The WSJ counters that "God is the generic name for the monotheistic Deity" while a Salon author offers helpfully:... nonmonotheistic religions believe in Gods rather than God, but, contrary to the appellate court's interpretation, they are not excluded from the Pledge's formulation, since those who believe in more than one God still believe in at least one. (They could, moreover, add their own personal "s" to the pledge without anyone noticing -– or caring.)
(I am not linking to Salon Premium articles, since unless you are a subscriber, you are not able to read them.)
So, if you are an American Hindu, pick your favourite God. and here is the Pledge of Allegiance in Hindi.
When people can for any reason no longer indulge their own personal prejudices, the standard reaction is to blame 'political correctness', and politicians have obliged by describing this decision as 'political correctness run amok'. One rejoinder:
Nor has it been commented upon that the Republic's keen sense of political correctness apparently extends to everyone except the godless. Even those of the Muslim faith are treated with more compassion than the skeptic. Fortunately for them, the Republic's sanction and promotion of religion is largely harmless. Etching "In God We Trust" on our currency is not quite the same as the Taliban butchering infidels in Afghanistan. Luckily, most atheists are highly civilized people and are able to look on the antics of their Christian brethren with a laughing eye. In fact, watching the boobs in Congress stumble over one another to be first to the podium to decry the court's decision is an amusing spectacle in itself. Obviously these politicians are simply milking this welcome opportunity to show off for their hometown church groups, a tactic that they -- I almost said pray -- that they hope will, at the end of the day, translate into a nice Election Night windfall. How many of the drunken, lascivious boors in Congress do you suppose really bend their knee at night, or mutter a prayer of thanks before dinner? I doubt you would find more than a handful.
... Originally, the Pledge, composed by socialist Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, ran: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." According to Baer, author of "The Pledge of Allegiance, A Centennial History, 1892-1992," the idea of "equality for all" had to be scrapped, presumably because the state superintendents of education were opposed to equality for women and minorities.
Since it was penned in August 1892, Bellamy's oath has been tampered with twice. In 1924, despite the author's protests, the National Flag Conference changed the phrase "my flag," to "the flag of the United States of America," seemingly so that godless communists could not hijack the Pledge and make it their own. And again in 1956, during the height of the Cold War, the Knights of Columbus, a usually harmless Catholic organization of grown men with swords, pressured Congress to include the phrase "under God."
With hypocrisy and bombast for all, Christopher Orlet, Salon Premium
At the moment, the US appears far from indivisible, under God or just freestanding. The matter of who, if anybody, they should be indivisible it in itself somewhat divisive:
...there are many inconvenient facts about the Pledge decision that its legions of detractors are simply ignoring. Here are some of them: Significant numbers of Americans simply do not believe in God. Other Americans may embrace a kind of spirituality that involves more than one god, or some spiritual entity entirely different from the conventional God, who does not answer to that particular name. Even some of those who do believe in God -- whether spelled with an uppercase or lowercase "G" -- may feel strongly that this belief is a matter between themselves and that God, and not something that should have anything at all to do with the U.S. government, the public schools it supports or avowals of allegiance to the Republic, the government and the flag made in those schools. ...
... If there's a political consensus in the U.S. to say, "The majority rules, and the majority believes in God, so the rest of you should just stand by quietly while we haul our God into the daily Pledge of Allegiance," then let's acknowledge that squarely, rather than pretend that no one is excluded by the choice. But anyone listening to the words of the Pledge itself -- "One nation, under God, indivisible ..." -- will sense, as I did every time I recited it in my public elementary school (at a time when you couldn't "opt out"), that in fact they prescribe a unity of belief. If you happen not to believe God exists, then you stand as an implicit violator of that unity: You aren't part of that "one nation"; you have fractured the indivisible.
God stoppers, Scott Rosenberg, Salon Premium
At least its driven the pedophile Catholics off the news pages. Some fun times ahead, I'm sure.
posted by Rationalist at 1:41 AM May the faith be with you (not)
News from the non-believers:
"If we don't start, very soon, to replenish our ranks with young people, our future will be dim."
This is not a Catholic Priest worrying aloud, but a Secular Humanist. I suspect that like minded young people today are just secular humanists, not Secular Humanists, and who can blame them? The above is from an article on the American Atheists web site investigating the thorny debate "over whether the promotion of secular humanism should involve "bashing" religion, or whether we should only focus on presenting humanism in a positive light."
(Conclusion: bash at will.)
If you want to know what atheism would be like if it was an organized non-religion, look no further than Watching by nightCatholic Bishops carry a crosier, or shepherds's staff - albeit often an elaborate, ornate and expensive-looking one - to symbolize their responsibility as successors of the Apostles, and to remind the like-minded that Jesus said, "I am the good shepherd."
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "The Church is, accordingly, a sheepfold, the sole and necessary gateway to which is Christ. It is also the flock of which God himself foretold that he would be the shepherd, and whose sheep, even though governed by human shepherds, are unfailingly nourished and led by Christ himself, the Good Shepherd and Prince of Shepherds, who gave his life for his sheep.
Despite the popularity of 'The Shepherd and His Flock' references in the popular media, very few writers take the next step, which is to refer to the individual Catholic faithful themselves as, er, sheep. Collectively, it's a lovely metaphor; a Good Shepherd tending, sheltering, protecting all of you. Singly, it's not generally considered too complimentary to be referred to as a sheep. Walk up to someone in a pub and call them a sheep, and Catholic or not, they'll probably deck you.
According to The Sound of Nazis
Perhaps it's the fault of the Sound of Music, but modern culture finds the combination of nuns, priests and Nazis irresistable. Early last month, a NYT article (see post of May 06) accused the Vatican of Stalinist repression of dissent within the Church - "Like the Communist Party circa Leonid Brezhnev, the Vatican exists first and foremost to preserve its own power."
Today, the Vatican hit back. "A leading Latin American cardinal considered a possible successor to Pope John Paul II has attacked the American media for what he called Stalinist and Nazi tactics against the Catholic Church in the coverage of the sexual abuse scandal."
It would appear that, according to Godwin's Law ( "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress."), the Vatican has just Facists 1, Democracy 0
Yesterday, June 4th, was the thirteenth anniversary of the Tianamen Square massacre.
In April 1989, students had begun a prolonged demonstration and sit-in in Tianamen Square after the unexpected death of progressive party secretary Hu Yaobang. Workers, intellectuals, and civil servants join the students to stage a hunger strike and demand democratic reform and an end to official corruption.
Mao Tse Tung had not been merely theorizing in his famous dictum, that 'all power comes from the barrel of a gun.' On May 19, martial law was proclaimed. On June 4 1989, on the command of Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping, 40,000 members of the 'People's Army' marched into Beijing, and crushed their own people.
What warped and evil 'leaders' were these, to order the murder of the bravest and brightest of their own future? Tanks crushed protestors sleeping in their tents. A BBC report said that, "In Tianamen, one hundred students linked arms and faced the tanks. They were shot down. Then another hundred linked arms, and they were shot down."
Is it prudent, to stand in front of a tank? To us now, perhaps not. China hand Harrison Salisbury, in his 'Tianamen Diary', observed at the time,
"I am amazed by the people. They don't seem to be frightened by the tanks or the firing. Almost as thought they couldn't conceive that the army has chosen them as its target."
The exact casualty count is unknown, but estimates range up to 4,000 dead. Nevertheless the Chinese Government denied the massacre, eventually allowing only that a few counter-revolutionary rebels had been killed when they attacked the loyal People's Liberation Army. The PLA, of course, were just carrying out orders.
The anniversary was entirely ignored by the media and why not, western countries are all making far too much money in and out of China to care. While you're waiting for democracy, why not have a Coke? In a lucky coincidence, June 4th was also the day of China's first FIFA World Cup appearance, thus distracting both China and the world from memory of the unfortunate incident. ABC radio reported that near Tianamen Square itself, large outdoor TVs had been set up and huge hordes of students had gathered to chant patriotically and cheer the People's Soccer Team.
One Beijing student interviewed about the events of 1989 said, 'I have already forgotten them.' He probably never even knew about them. China was beaten 2 - 0 by little Costa Rica, so there's some justice.
* * * * *
Americans en masse have been completely ignorant of the World Cup save for occasional bleatings about how unsophisticated and low tech soccer is (although, so is basketball). They were therefore not watching earlier this evening when the US team really fired and unexpectedly beat highly ranked Portugal, thus depriving themselves of one of life's rare and genuine pleasures.
This is when your national team is the rank underdog, but you watch the whole game anyway, bravely hopeful, and - they win! What do you bet, now they've had a scent of 'Win, Win, Win for America!", that there'll be a lot more American soccer fans tomorrow?
Being the underdog in any team sport, quite natural to us Australasians in all but a very few things, is of course massively culturally alien to Americans. When you think of it, Americans don't seriously play national team sports with anyone. American Football is called American football because nobody else plays it. Only Cuba and Japan play baseball, pale imitators. They probably play Canada at Ice Hockey, but that's about it. Basketball? They send that up-themselves prima donna multi-billionaire sponsor's Wet 'Dream Team' to each Olympics and are really pleased when they win! Duh...
You could argue, like Out to pasture
Two old war-horses of the faith both returned home today, after hard campaigns in infidel lands.
The Dalai Lama left Sydney this morning, ending his 10 day tour of Australia. I don't know about Sydney but in Melbourne he reportedly stayed at the 5-star Marriott - it would appear he's no ascetic. The SMH reports: "The immediate appeal of the Tibetan leader's uncomplicated recipe for happiness and inner peace says much about a Western culture which believes itself to be spiritually starved.
Yet His Holiness's core message - at least when tailored to his mass- market Western audiences - is decidedly secular, with truisms of tolerance, knowledge and compassion as its staple tenets."
Sounds lovely, sunshine, light and lotus blossoms all around. Tolerance, knowledge, and compassion! Am I the only person to see an odd irony in people requiring a major religious figure to point out to them the obvious - and treating it as a profound spiritual insight when he does?
The arrogant and ignorant notion that virtue is the exclusive preserve of the religious is as old as formal religion itself. This attitude seems to be lessening among the severely devout, so it is a pity indeed when the non-devout take it up. People know, themselves, what's needed and what's good to do. They shouldn't be intellectually cowed into requiring it to be validated by a spiritual leader, even one as seemingly benign as the Dalai Lama.
Bertrand Russell, in his 1927 essay, Why I am not A Christian, stated:
"A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage,"beating the Dalai Lama to that particular insight by seventy-five years.
Russell was a rationalist and an atheist, yet had a fine grasp of morality:
"The first and greatest change that is required is to establish a morality of initiative, not a morality of submission, a morality of hope rather then fear, of things to be done rather than things to be left undone. It is not the whole duty of man to slip through the world so as to escape the wrath of God. The world is our world, and it rests with us to make it a heaven or a hell." 1916
"Moral codes which are irrational, and have no basis except in superstition, cannot long survive the habit of disinterested thinking. But if a moral code seems to promote human well being in this terrestial existance, it has no need of supernatural sanctions. Kindliness and intelligence are the chief sources of useful behaviour, and neither ir promoted by causing people to believe, against all reason, in a capricious and vindictive deity." 1944
"More and more people are becoming unable to accept traditional beliefs. If they think that, apart from these beliefs, there is no reason for kindly behaviour, the results may be needlessly unfortunate. This is why it is important to show no supernatural reasons are needed to make men kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness." 1947
"Kindliness and tolerance only prevail in proportion as dogmatic belief decays." 1953
* * * * *
Pope John Paul has returned to the Vatican from a trip to several Eastern Orthodox countries. He is so ill it is distressing to see him, immobile and barely animate, like those statues of Fatima that get carted around everywhere.
But, Christ suffered, and the spirit is willing even if the flesh is weak, and the recent journey was motivated entirely by John Paul himself. As the NYT commented, (link requires registration), "These days, the pope is focused on the kinds of special projects embraced by former presidents or honorary chairmen of the board."
The elderly become far-sighted, and, ignoring the stinking mess in his own back yard, the Pope went forth to mend feelings, after the Great Schism in the mid-eleventh century between Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Churchs.
Unfortunately, this drive was not met by equal enthusiam from the Eastern Orthodox heirarchy. Who can really blame them? If you were a spiritual leader right now, would you want to unite your faith with a bunch of reactionary sexual disfunctionaries?
"Patriarch Maxim, leader of the Orthodox church in Bulgaria, echoing his counterparts in Georgia and Ukraine, did not bend to the pope's overtures. Maxim, 87, stiffly assured the pope that unity would come as soon as Christian truth was accepted by all as "preserved and proclaimed by the Orthodox Church."
Orthodox leaders did not raise the pedophilia scandals with the pope, but they, too, had read the newspapers. "We discussed it in our seminaries," Archimandrite Sioniy, rector of the Orthodox seminary in Sofia, said as he stood in the monastery awaiting the pope. "If Catholic priests could marry and have families, as we do, then perhaps the problem would not be so great.""
* * * * *
One danger of being 'spiritually starved' is that any old faith might rush in to fill the vacuum - even one profoundly at odds with your own self-worth. For example, women in the Sydney Anglican diocese have hit the stained glass ceiling. "Sydney is one of only a handful of Anglican dioceses in the country that ban the ordination of women as priests, following the general synod vote 10 years ago allowing the practice."
The Newcastle Anglican diocese, some mere 100 miles north of Sydney, does allows women priests. Talk about a Great Schism - what changes, when you drive across that cartographical boundary? Surely, ordination of women is either a theological abomination, or it isn't. You'd think that'd be fairly clear cut within the same church. Perhaps the Catholic way is not so bad - you only have one guy making the rules. posted by Rationalist at 9:41 PM Versions of Hell
"For centuries, [suicide] would have been considered a mortal sin by Catholics. Early on, many believed suicide was a one-way ticket to Dante's version of hell, a sizzling sulfur pit where those who killed themselves writhed alongside other sinners in never-ending agony. For hundreds of years, funeral Masses and burials on consecrated ground were prohibited because of this.
"But in 1983, church officials rewrote canon law, opening a door to forgiveness, both from God and the church."
"...at least 16 Catholic priests, 12 in the United States, have killed themselves since 1986 amid allegations of child sexual abuse."
Perhaps they should have kept the old rules?
The suicide rate for victims of priestly abuse is unknown.
With more Catholic priest sex scandals breaking every week, a story needs an edge to stand out from the pack. Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland had a long-term consensual homosexual relationship with another adult, which would barely raise eyebrows in the church today, O Tempora, O Mores! He then made his big blunder, which was to pay his ex-paramour nearly half a million to keep quiet, out of, presumably, the poor box. The Archbishop singularly failed to get value for the Church's money, since the entire world is now gaping at this sordid episode.
What happened to the good old days, when you paid people hush money and they stayed hushed? The Church has the right to sue the Archbishop's ex-lover for breach of his confidentiality contract, but do they have the stomach for it?
With Archbishops, big money, and gay sex already in the plot, one would think it totally unnecessary and gratuitous to additionally introduce the Nazis into this story, but somebody has. The Cold War is over, but the Nazis live on - the villians we have to have - still popping up in our commentaries nearly 60 years after VE day.
"Always remember Godwin's Law: In any argument about serious matters in controversy, someone will eventually invoke the name of Hitler or the Nazis. At this point, all useful content has gone out of the discussion and you might as well drop the subject. Godwin's law was invented to describe interactions on the Internet, but I've noticed it also holds true in real life."
More from our first story.
"How can a priest be both an abuser and a nurturer? Psychologists call these seemingly dual personalities "splitting," according to A.W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and former Benedictine monk who has studied sexuality and priests for decades.
"Sipe and others say that priests maintain their double lives much as German doctors accused of experimenting on humans during World War II.
"Researchers discovered that the doctors developed a coping mechanism, flipping their personalities on and off like a light switch. At work, they were mad scientists. At home, they were doting fathers. There was no crossover.
"Sipe said he often sees the same "splitting" among priests who abuse children. They can be among the most dedicated servants to God, he said. But when they choose to flip the switch, they are predators, manipulating children only to fulfill their sexual desires."
How gloomy all this...imagine being Catholic all the time. Unless there's any irresistable news, I think we need a Catholic-free week. I have some interesting stuff about Religion and Mathematics. Coming soon.
posted by Rationalist at 10:10 PM A Wonderful Life
We learnt yesterday that, "Dispensationalism is a predominant belief among fundamentalists". Creationism, of course, is the predominant belief among Christian fundamentalists, and one person uniquely qualified to comment on Creationism was the late Professor Stephen Jay Gould, reknown palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist. Professor Gould died last week, after battling lung cancer for many years.
"Although always an adversary of Creationism, in later life he grew tired of the war of intellectual extermination being fought by extremists on both sides of the religion/science divide, and wisely urged forbearance."
From an otherwise rather catty obituary in the right-wing National Review Online.
Here's Professor Gould's political opinion of creationism, taken from an interview in 1996.
"Creationism is still with us. Do you think it's a permanent feature of the landscape?
"As long as there are millions of people who believe it and have lots of money. What's permanent, in geological terms? But as long as our society is organized this way, yeah, I think it is. Because it's not an intellectual issue. It's an interesting phenomenon of American socio- cultural history. As long as you have this enormous pluralism within Protestantism, as long as some of our traditional divisions like rich and poor, north and south, and rural and urban persist, you're going to get this hard-line fundamentalism. And it's never going to be majoritarian, though it might be locally, but it's gonna be at least locally potent."
"A Harvard professor since the age of 26, Gould attacked that classic image of the "march of evolution". His version of evolution was messier. It had jerks and spasms, went backward and forward, and sometimes fell over sideways.
In 1972, he and colleague Niles Eldredge offered a modification of traditional Darwinian theory, something they called "punctuated equilibria". The evolution of species wasn't always smooth and steady, they argued, but could occur in bursts shaped by historical chance.
Some people see the world as divinely created, and others perceive it as the result of an orderly natural process. But for Gould, this was a planet of accidents, of lucky breaks, of biological lotteries.
If you started the whole process over from scratch, he argued, you would wind up with something totally different."
Reuters, 25 May 02
In other words, "We [humans] are here because we are here, not because we have to be here."
In his own words:
"Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again."
In addition to butting heads with both Creationalists and traditional Darwinists, Professor Gould was for good measure also a rationalist, a Marxist, and very much an individualist.
"Stephen Jay Gould, who died on Monday, belonged to no particular scientific sect and founded none. Almost all his battles were fought on his own. But the happy elegance of his style and the bewildering range of his interests allowed him to recruit the sympathies of every benevolent, well-read humanist to his various causes. No wonder he was hated so. He was the scientist for the rest of us.
He gave as good as he got in his long feud with the "Darwinian fundamentalists," as he called his opponents. This term, an inspired piece of polemical mudslinging, showed that what his own invective lacked in quantity, it made up in quality, since one of the defining characteristics of the sociobiologists he was attacking was their rather Victorian atheism, and their conviction that the worst sort of human being in the world was a fundamentalist Christian.
It's hard to think of any scientist who has managed to combine Gould's professional excellence -- for you do not get to be a senior professor at Harvard by being an industrious windbag -- with his gifts as a popularizer. ...
Perhaps the person he most resembled in this was Bertrand Russell, who also spent his professional life on subjects of arcane difficulty, increasingly isolated from the activities of his peers, and who earned his living with high-class journalism and popular histories. Russell, who won an unlikely Nobel prize for literature, was the better stylist (and the bigger fool, as reading his essays on current affairs makes clear today). But both men managed to make hard thought look easy and fun."
Well-informed passion - we need more of it.
posted by Rationalist at 12:12 AM Americana
The Cold War is officially over. Yesterday, at the Kremlin, George Bush and Vladimir Putin signed an arms-reduction agreement. The US is going to buy Russian oil and ignore Russian human rights violations. Now, all we need is for US commentators to learn how to say NUCLEAR, not NUCULAR, and the free world will improve even more.
The notion that the US govt. could have 'connected the dots' and warned the complacent pre-Sept 11 world of the impending attacks really blasted the many US political blogs into a tizzy of partisan denial and accusation. When there was no more to write about whether President Bush could easily or could not possibly have done more, these great sages turned on each other, criticizing what so-and-so had writen about whether... boring, boring, boring.
But they illustrate perfectly a wonderful description from the late Stephen Jay Gould (more about him later).
... "Punditry's fundamental error: the fatuous notion that a head-on rush at the biggest questions will automatically yield the deepest insights."
While we're here, let's have a belated two cents worth. Certainly the major turf wars between the US intelligence agencies that are preventing them from leveraging each other's information have got to be dealt with. But be honest. Be very honest. If someone had gone into print on Sept 10, warning that crazy Arabs were going to attack the world's number one superpower, invade the world's richest city, topple a couple of the world's tallest buildings, then go and hide in a cave... you'd have written them off with the rest of the doomsday nutters.
I have not visited the US for some years now, but it seems to have changed markedly, according to the figures at least.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2002, 62 percent of Americans are either overweight or clinically obese.
According to a Gallup Poll taken in March 2002, "46 percent of Americans describe themselves as 'born-again' or evangelical."
That means that a minimum of 8 percent of Americans are both evangelical and overweight/obese.
In other words: of any and every thirteen Americans, at least one is a fat Evangelical. Is this true? What's happening over there, guys?
posted by Rationalist at 10:39 PM Dispense with senseSalon, which first alerted us to those peculiar Evangelical travellers, the Dispensationalists (see post of 15 May) has In the news today:The Pope has just visited Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan, population 7 million, has an entire 120 Catholics. (120, not 120 thousand or anything.) For the mass, in a sports stadium, they had to ship in rent-a-crowd local Muslims and foreign visitors. Statistically, out of 7 million people, you can almost certainly find 120 who believe in anything.
His Holiness is now in Bulgaria, where there are enough Catholics for someone to have even set up a snazzy site, www.popeinbulgaria.com, to cover the event. I love the Net, how else can an atheist in Sydney watch live video coverage of the Pope at the Sofia Hilton?
I know why he went there, too. Bulgaria must have seemed about as far as you can get from the US, where no less than an Archbishop has just toppled off his perch. The former Archbishop of Milwaukee has resigned, ostensibly because he has reached 75, but hurriedly too, because of the news that he had a long-term relationship with another man 20 years ago, then paid him US$450,000 of church funds to keep silent; which evidently did not work.
In a nice bit of niche marketing, the Bible Society in Australia has today released a Surfer's Bible (for real surfers, not Net surfers).
posted by Rationalist at 12:25 AM If only...Give control freaks an inch and they'll take a mile. Australian Prime Minister John Howard is currently visitng China grovelling for trade agreements. The timing's great since it allows him to simultaneously snub the Dalai Lama, who is currently visiting Australia (and what a pity we can't make it a permanent swap!).
But this isn't enough for China's Thought Police, who ventured to suggest that Australia should ban the Dalai Lama from visiting altogether:
"Mr Howard was quick to the Dalai Lama's defence when questioned at the Chinese Communist Party school, about why governments like Australia allowed His Holiness to tout anti-China policies, under the cover of religion. In his most direct and forceful language on the topic so far, Mr Howard told the audience of Communist officials that just as Australia respected China's values and political system, so too should China respect those in Australia.
"As evidence of the differences between the two countries, Mr Howard cited the 1950s referendum that allowed the Australian Communist Party to stay operational. That was despite the fact, Mr Howard said, that then and now people did not support the Communist party because most believed in a different ideology."
"He said it was wholly consistent with Australian tradition to allow someone like the Dalai Lama to visit. "He comes as a spiritual leader and he comes as a person who does not offer any offence to the laws of Australia."
"It would not be consistent with the traditions of Australia to ban entry to such a person," he said in reply to a question after a speech to the Communist Party's Central Party school in Beijing. "Australia ... allows the free movement of people in and out irrespective of their political philosophies and their beliefs," he said."
What effrontery from these Communist officials, to presume to tell Australians who we should ban from entering our own country. How dare they? Who do they think they are? What year do they think this is?
China wouldn't dream of trying that on the UK or the US - if Australia wants to be regarded as a grown-up country then we have to make it clear that China can just keep its totalitarian snout out of our affairs, and full marks to Mr Howard for doing this. (As far as I can remember, the only person recently to be denied a visa to Australia on character grounds was professional nutcase and Holocaust-denier David Irving.)
China, of course, has always regarded any international comment on its own activities, such as running down its own citizens with tanks, as unwelcome and unwarranted interference in her domestic affairs. I think it's time the world did interfere big time in Chinese domestic affairs. If we are to be accused regardless of, 'touting anti-China policies, under the cover of religion,' then we might as well do it.
The Chinese persecute those of unapproved faiths and have banned all but the party-approved Christian churches. Try setting up an Our Lady of Fatima sect in Chongqing and see where it gets you. China has Communists, she has Atheists, and we know that Satanists can't be far behind. So, what more do all these evangelist do-gooders need, and where are they when we really need them?
How about - if an apparition of the Virgin Mary appears to some downtrodden plastic flower factory workers in, say, Taipei? Our Lady, as geopolitically astute as ever, commands that we consecrate the People's Republic of China to her Immaculate Heart. The Pope, grateful for any distraction from the gays and pedophiles, goes for it. The faithful and their hard currencies flock to the site. Blessings are beamed across the Taiwan Strait. Take that, party officials! Ah, if only. Come back Blue Army, all is forgiven... posted by Rationalist at 10:19 PM Stranger than fictionIt's 1947. WWII is over; but Cold War tension is mounting as the West eyes the impending Soviet menace. The McCarthyist communist witch-hunts are almost upon America. Thirty years earlier, in the dying ebb of another world war, an apparition had predicted the spread of communist evil - and prescribed a way out of the danger.
There is yet another secret - revealed by the apparition and placed by its only witness in a sealed envelope, it cannot be revealed to the world until 1960. No time to wait! Now, with the ideological threat of Communism creeping closer by the day, the CIA secretly funds the establishment of a sect devoted to spreading the anti-communist faith. It also funds the construction of their faux-Orthodox faux-Byzantine chapel at the place of the apparition, to taunt and tempt the suppressed Soviet hordes.
But sect members believe that sinister forces are colluding to prevent the rescue of millions of innocents from their godless state. Who is behind this? and what can this third secret possibly be?
Fast forward several decades. The third secret is revealed as... a massive anti-climax. But is it really the real secret?
This is from real life, of course, not a Robert Ludlum novel. The sect is the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima, and the Byzantine Chapel was built at Fatima. Blue is the color of the Virgin Mary's mantle, and conveniently color-coded to oppose the Red Army.
Whatever the Red Army may be. If you check out the Blue Army's own latest magazine, it gives this history:
"'We will be the Blue Army of Our Lady.' With those words, at St. Mary’s Church in Plainfield, New Jersey, Monsignor Harold V. Colgan founded the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima in October of 1947. Some say that our Founder declared: 'We will be the Blue Army of Our Lady against the Red Army.' Others recall that the sentence should end 'against the Red Army of Communism' or 'against the Red Army of Atheism' or against some other Red Army (see page 26). Regardless, the leader of the Red Army is known for sure: Satan ... "
Hey - Communists, Atheists, Satanists, we're all one and the same to these devout crusaders.
The CIA involvement is an neat angle. The French 'WHEN THE VIRGIN APPEARS' TV documentary, mentioned yesterday, was quite outright in stating that the CIA financed the startup of the Blue Army. Needless to say, there is no public record or reference to this to be found. It may just be an urban myth, thought it's credible, when you think of the Ostpolitik of those times - we'll never find out.
This was the era when, according to spy novels at least, both the US and the Soviets were secretly constructing exact replicas of Russian and American villages, the better to train undetectable deep cover agents. If you can do this, setting up a new sect from some of the most gullible faithful around would have been a snap. It may end up a bit woolly and out of control, but so do most of these bio-warefare experiments.
Like all Robert Ludlum novels, especially those also including the CIA, conspiracies abound. Almighty schisms have also appeared among the followers of Our Lady. Post Cold War, Gorbachev visited the Vatican, a status of Fatima visited Moscow, the score appears to be,
God: 1 Communist Atheist Satanists: 0
and the Blue Army, their enemy vanquished, are struggling for relevance, and, like Hollywood, to find a new Bad Guy.
But the surviving Fatiman Holier than thou
Never let it be said that I only mention bad things about Catholics, so three cheers for Patrick O'Donoghue, Roman Catholic bishop of Lancaster, who announced recently that, "he plans to sell his £1m official home - with magnificent wine cellar but no wine - and spend much of the proceeds on relieving the problems of the poor. ...
Bishop O'Donoghue described Bishop's House in Lancaster as a beautiful 16-room Victorian mansion. "But these are symbols of another era," he said. "I want to say to my people, and hopefully other people too, that the church is more than big houses which are status symbols from another era.
Bishop O'Donoghue is described as being a believer in "service not status". This puts him radically at odds with, for instance, his colleagues over the sea in Boston, where they may soon find themselves selling their church properties to fund compensation payments to sexual abuse victims.
Not everyone is 100% impressed. A Guardian writer
Welcome to East TimorWelcome to OddmentsMixed news lately, from the world of Catholics:Violent
In Maryland, an abuse victim has shot the priest who allegedly molested him.
"A man charged with gunning down a Roman Catholic priest had grown frustrated after being unable to get an apology from the priest, who he claimed fondled him over a three-year period, the man's mother said. Dontee Stokes, 26, shot the Rev. Maurice Blackwell after the priest refused to talk to him, police spokeswoman Ragina Averella said. Stokes was charged with attempted murder, gun violations and assault and was being held without bail.
"The shooting — the latest development in the sexual abuse scandal that has roiled the Roman Catholic Church — drew pained reactions from church leaders, with Baltimore Cardinal William Keeler saying he was ``appalled'' by the violence. Stokes' mother, Tamara Stokes, accused the archdiocese of mishandling her son's molestation allegations.
"``All he wanted was an apology due to what had happened,'' she said Tuesday night in front of her home as family and friends stood around her holding candles and praying for Dontee's release."
Sick
Pedophile priest Rev. Paul Shanley, assessed nearly a decade ago as being "so personally damaged that his pathology is beyond repair.", reveals in a letter that he is himself a victim of priestly sexual abuse, from another priest in the Boston archdiocese:
"I, too, had been sexually abused as a teen-ager, and later as a seminarian by a priest, a faculty member, a pastor and ironically by the predecessor of one of the two Cardinals who now debate my fate."
Sicker
Not quite every underage sex partner of every Catholic priest was a victim - this one certainly didn't mind the attention,
(And a warning, if you are a prudish religious person who has come here by mistake from Google, go away to a nice Christian site now and don't read on.)
"The fact of the matter is, Catholic priests have given me some of the best blow jobs of my life....
... He sobbed and he shook and looked, there on his knees, like he was about to split into pieces. He, the priest, was vulnerable and ruined for that moment. And I, the 14- year-old, felt kind of thrilled and kind of like, what do you expect? You worship a naked man on a cross all day? This shit's bound to happen."
Poisonous
"Vatican Radio's forest of antennas north of Rome could be causing leukaemia with the high levels of electromagnetic radiation they emit, a report conducted for a public prosecutor said on Thursday. The findings, released by the Green party, reopened controversy over the antennas that began 2 years ago, when reports showed an increased incidence of leukaemia in the nearby town of Cesano.
"The antennas, some of which have a 600,000-watt capacity, caused a bitter diplomatic row in 2001, when former environment minister Willer Bordon threatened to cut off all electricity to the radio transmission centre. But last February an Italian court threw out charges against the Vatican, ruling the Vatican-owned site was outside the court's jurisdiction under a 1929 treaty.
"[Green Party head] Bonelli announced that his party will begin to collect compensation requests from the inhabitants of Cesano."
Good luck to them, but they'll need to get in line behind the child abuse litigants. If God is everywhere, why do we need Vatican Radio? The SMH, reporting the He who pays, prays
Day in court
A lawyer for Catholic man-boy love practicioner Rev. Paul Shanley, objecting to his $750,000 bail, "said the court should consider fitting Father Shanley with an electronic monitoring bracelet." Unless the bracelet beeps a warning whenever Father Shanley is within groping distance of anything in trousers, I can't see much use in it. Maybe someone can come up with an electronic male chastity belt.
In related news,
"Americans have become depressingly familiar with the sight of great men and women dragged before a judge or grand jury and answering questions with an eye to the finer nuances of law rather than the grand moral questions of social justice. On Wednesday Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston became the latest, and his answers in a court-ordered deposition were more befitting a businessman trying to dodge an insider-trading suit than one of the nation's highest-ranking churchmen."
A lawyer for Cardinal Law even argued, "that forcing the cardinal to answer questions under oath was a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state."
Hilarious! The Boston Archdiocese has depended heavily on the services of public liability insurers, public relations firms, and criminal laywers - evil instruments of the secular state, all of them. It's a bit much now, to argue that this is merely a church matter.
Things move from being church matters to state matters when there is a crime involved, and the crime began with the abuse of the first child decades ago, not with the Pope's statement mere weeks ago. The state's legal presumption of innocence is the only thing saving Cardinal Law's skin.
Were both the state and the Church to butt out of this issue altogether, we would be left with Cardinal Law facing the victims of his negligence before his God, whereupon - God being fair, wise and all-knowing - Cardinal Law would be in even deeper muck than he is now.
Novena Nirvana
Perhaps it was with this in mind that the Cardinal yesterday called for a Novena for reconciliation and healing for the Catholic Church, "acknowledging that the sexual abuse scandal has diminished the church's moral authority, weakened the faith of parishioners, and created mistrust toward church leaders."
Not being a Chrisian I was not entirely sure what a Novena is, apart from it being some kind of prayer. It wasn't that easy to find it explained clearly and concisely, either - Catholic information mostly assumes that you know stuff about Catholicism already, and that if you don't, you're too much of a heathen for them to bother explaining.
Nevertheless, I persevered and found out. A novena is a sequence of nine identical prayers, performed consecutively either privately or collectively, in order to obtain a specific blessing. If you want the history of them, see the Catholic Encylopedia.
So, in other words, a Novena complements the formalized, organized and generalized Catholic worship by providing a flexible, fast track way to focus prayers on just one specific outcome that you want. While some Novenas themselves appear pretty formal themselves and are said as Masses, others are strictly you and a direct line to the Almighty. Who is doubtless so worn down by your tenacity that on the eighth time He says, "OK, OK then, I hear you, you're really fixed on this, I'll get it done next time, promise, just stop bugging me."
You do not need to be a Cardinal to compose your own Novena, and if you give the Church enough money, she will say a Novena for you - much more effective than just doing it yourself! For instance, the Environmentally sound
Environmentalism could be joining the non-theistic religions of Bolshevism, Communism, and Nazism. A recent WSJ columnist thinks so, at least. |
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