Apathy Sketchpad

This month, I’m awarding the title of Crackpot to Father Sean McDonagh, and to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, whoever they might be. He has decided, based on scripture, that you can’t use GM wheat for the Eucharist. Which is fair enough, you might think, but… well, there’s really very little non-GM wheat available. It’s about the most artificial plant there is. Even if God created man, man created things like poodles and bread-wheat.

But even so, all this was done before Jesus supposedly lived, so let’s grant him that God picked a man-made crop, and let’s even grant him literal trans-substantiation (albeit because it’s irrelevant rather than because it’s even remotely reasonable). The mental acrobatics he must have done before this made sense are enough to win him the award:

Fr McDonagh quotes from Canon Law 924, section two, which stipulates: “the bread must be wheaten only, and recently made, so that there is no danger of corruption.”

But he says that genetically-engineered wheat is not “made solely from wheat” because of protein added to make it resistant to a weed killer. “For example, people who suffer coeliac disease are unable to absorb gluten, a protein found in wheat. Eating even small amounts of wheat can make them ill.

“In recent decades, it has been possible to extract the gluten from wheaten bread so that people can eat bread without endangering their health. Despite the fact that gluten-wheat poses a health threat, which can often be serious, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith stated in a reply in 1982 that, ‘the local Ordinary could not permit a priest to consecrate special gluten-free hosts for the communion of coeliacs’,” writes Fr McDonagh.

So your theory is that God, in his infinite wisdom and compassion, gave loads of people a medical condition that means they can’t eat wheat, and then required them to eat wheat every Sunday? That regular wheat can literally become the body of Jesus but GM and gluten-free wheat can’t? What part of that is supposed to make sense?

And even ignoring all of the above, basically allow him to invent his own reality, he’s still wrong — because gluten-free wheat is “made solely from wheat”, just with a bit taken out, and the whole analogy is nonsense in any case.

How shitty a person do you have to be to expect people to eat poison for God?

I feel now like I may have been a bit harsh on the Church of England. Obviously I don’t think it should remain Established a moment longer, and naturally my ideal world wouldn’t include it, but…

Well, first of all, it’s at least trying to be progressive. They ordain women, much to the chagrin of Anne Widdecombe, a woman so conservative she even objects to equal rights for women, and gay people (although they do ask them not to actually have sex, although in fairness that’s as much the government’s fault for failing to legalise gay marriage as such). If there really has to be an Established church (which there clearly doesn’t) then I’d rather it be them than most of the others.

And what happens?

A breakaway sect of Anglicanism (a phrase I never imagined I’d have to type — cake or death, anyone?) forms, designed to keep those dirty gays out. And people (like the aforementioned Tory notjob) desert the Church for the safety of Catholicism, where of course there is no danger at all of anything remotely resembling liberalism, progressivism, or any form of acknowledgement that it’s not the middle ages or that making stuff up is different from research. These people usually justify their actions by saying things like “you can’t just ignore the parts of the bible you don’t like”, while wearing cotton-polyester blend. So either you’re being selective, and therefore will need to either stop being a sexist homophobic bigot or find a better reason, or else you’ve got to accept the whole bible, including all the really fucked-up stuff with rape and murder and slavery and so on and so forth. Honestly I’d be happier if they just came right out and said “I think homosexuality is wrong and I won’t be a member of any church that supports it”. They’d be flat out wrong, but at least they’d be honest. When did palatable become better than honest?

If all this is right, then to say the C of E is doomed because it’s losing people is like saying that a cancer surgery patient is doomed because they’re losing cells. If enough of the fools abandon the ship then the Church may even end up being a force for good.

Of course, I’ll still want it disestablished.

(There are some really fucking weird versions of Cake Or Death on Youtube…)

This hasn’t been a great couple of weeks for Christianity in Britain. We learned that the Church of England is suffering because young people aren’t interested and the people who are are dying of old age, and we learned that Cliff Richard has decided to pitch in to help, presumably because he is almost uniquely placed to sympathise with that plight. His contribution is to publish a book of his favourite Bible stories, including the story of how God killed everyone in the world except for one family and then regretted it, the story of how God murdered all the innocent first-born sons in Egypt despite having “hardened the Pharaoh’s heart” to ensure he wouldn’t release the slaves, the story of how God masterminds and helps with the genocide in Jericho, the story of Solomon, who was granted wisdom and then went off to worship someone else, and the story of how God had his own son tortured to death to “pay for” sins committed by other people according to rules God devised in the first place. I can see how that will help.

Also trying to help is the Church Army, who want to hook youngsters into the faith by analogising it to Doctor Who. They point out the many similarities between the Doctor and Jesus, and the storylines in the show and in the Bible. And there are many similarities, although frankly almost every single one of them is pathetic. They say

The Tardis was considered to represent a Church by being an ordinary object that points to something higher while the Doctor was likened to Christ in his willingness to sacrifice himself for others.

What? You could liken The Brittas Empire to the Bible if you’re willing to go that far.

My favourite Christian reference is the kenotic storyline in the episode called “The Chameleon Arch”, which is a machine that takes away all the Doctor’s powers and renders him human. It is a clear nod towards Philippians 2.6-11, where the incarnation is described as God “emptying himself”.

Not all that clear, I’m afraid. I thought that was a sub-par and rather silly bit of technobabble which had to be tolerated to tell what was, in the event, a damn good story. A story which, incidentally, really didn’t bear more than a passing resemblance to Jesus’.

We saw the Doctor persuaded to save a family of Pompeians in one of the most recent episodes, surely a reference to Genesis and Abraham’s bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

I’m not at all sure it is a reference to that. It’s just a good dramatic theme. Nobody should read anything into the fact that it’s come up more than once. You might equally well argue that the fact that Biblical themes can be independently rewritten by a gay atheist suggests that they’re made up. Besides which, there’s shitloads of Bible and rather a lot of Doctor Who. Certainly there are parallels — but that just makes it more pathetic that these people are using such crap examples.

I don’t really know if Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor (as if that’s a real name) was tryong to help when he made a terribly dull speech entitled “Faith In Britain: A Personal Perspective”, which is buried somewhere on this webpage that’s sufficiently poorly designed that I can’t link directly to it. This is from the same lecture series as the previous winner’s speech. He says, for example, in this speech that

Only a modern person would think that religion is a private matter, something the individual does in his or her solitude

which presumably makes Jesus a “modern person”, since Matthew 6:6 says

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I don’t mind that, of course. Ignorance of what the Bible says is what keeps Christianity going. What annoyed me was this bit:

I would want to encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem because the hidden God is active in their lives as well as in the lives of those who believe.

He must be very well hidden.

Why can’t he “encourage people of faith to regard those without faith with deep esteem” because we’re smart enough to reject nonsense even when it surrounds us? Because we’ve managed to develop morality without been spoon-fed it by a book of made up rules? Because we’ve got enough confidence in our convictions to go against the flow and stand up for what we don’t believe in? If a Christian were to tell me that they regard me with deep esteem because of something God did, I would find that patronising and offensive, and I’d say so.

He also says this:

What did we do to generate unbelief? We spoke too easily about God, we spoke perhaps in the wrong way and we treated God as an idea rather than a living mystery to be approached in silence and prayer rather than in the arguments of the mind. If Christianity gave European thought the impression that God can be conceptually determined and pinned down and proved as a hypothesis, then it is hardly surprising that there has been resistance, as science and culture have developed, to worshipping this idea of God. We as Christians need to examine what we might have done to give people a misleading view of God. Faith in Britain might be improved by a deeper grasp of the mystery of God on the part of believers.

Now, I may have got the wrong end of the stick here, but to me that reads “whatever you think God is like, you’re wrong. He’s not like that, nor is he like anything else in particular, because he’s fundamentally mysterious and can’t be pinned down or rigorously defined. Of course, that doesn’t stop him existing and it doesn’t stop us knowing how he feels about gay people and stem cells.” If that is what he means, then he’s a moron.

It’s for largely this reason that I’m not sure Religious Crackpot of the Month is really viable any more. I think clearly all these people require recognition, but they can’t have it because it was this month that I read

The primary cause of unhappiness in Britain is not lack of material wealth but a loss of faith in God and religion, a group of MPs says today.

Apparently, there’s a report out by a group of all of five MPs who

argue that if values related to relationships, responsibility, trust, self-esteem and potential – all with their roots in the Judeo-Christian beliefs that once underpinned Western legislative philosophy – were to have greater emphasis in society, everyone’s wellbeing would improve.

So I did what I always do: I found the report. It turns out that the document, called “Faith In The Future” (the same pun, you’ll note, as the government used for their document), is available from a group called Theos, and it is to Theos that I award this month’s Religious Crackpot trophy.

Theos seem to be quite large and well established. They have a website that looks very professional (although it is in fact crap — it doesn’t even have an RSS feed), and describe themselves as

a public theology think tank which exists to undertake research and provide commentary on social and political arrangements. It aims to impact public opinion about the role of Christianity in society.

They go on to say

It was launched in November 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor.

You probably know what I think of those endorsements.

Its first report “Doing God”: A Future for Faith in the Public Square examined the reasons why faith will play an increasingly significant role in public life.

They call themselves a “think tank”, although that’s a bit rich unless you count quoting the Bible as ‘thinking’. Really, they’re just a load of antidisestablishmentarianists hell-bent on reversing the work done since the Enlightenment in secularising society:

what Theos stands for

Society is embarking on a process of de-secularisation. Interest in spirituality is increasing across Western culture. Faith is on the agenda of both government and the media. In the arts, humanities and social sciences there are important intellectual developments currently taking place around questions of values and identity. Theos speaks into this new context. Our perspective is that faith is not just important for human flourishing and the renewal of society, but that society can only truly flourish if faith is given the space to do so. We reject notions of a sacred-secular divide.

And they’ve released quite a lot of frankly rather impenetrable literature about how secularism is bad, but they don’t really understand what it is. They can’t really tell it from atheism:

We can, though, at least make some assumptions. In a seriously secular country, the vast majority of people wouldn’t believe in God, however vaguely. Few would claim to belong to a religious group. And nobody would pray. What would be the point?

No. It’s entirely possible to be religious and secularist at the same time. Take this speech by Barack Obama (which I’ve copied from Dwindling in Unbelief):

We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded.

Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion.

But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham. We would do so because we do not hear what Abraham hears, do not see what Abraham sees, true as those experiences may be. So the best we can do is act in accordance with those things that we all see, and that we all hear, be it common laws or basic reason.

Theos can publish all the inane sophistry they like, but the bottom line is that God doesn’t exist and even people who think he does can’t agree (in the case of Murphy-O’Connor, even with themselves) what he’s like or what he wants, and even those who feel they have a clear idea of both of these things can’t offer even the slightest shred of evidence or indeed any good reason to listen to them. So until Theos can prove that God exists, they will remain a sectarian group of crackpots trying to further Christianity’s already excessive influence on British politics.

And that’s just not on.

This week, the following things came to my attention:

• The MoD released a huge box of UFO-related files to the National Archives. Inevitably, they are being referred to as “Britain’s X-Files”. The Guardian have read through a load of them and reported some of the better ones. This is my favourite:
  

  At quarter past midnight on Christmas Day 1985, three police officers in Woking were surprised by a white light descending on the Horsell area. The officers were worried their report would not be taken seriously, because Horsell Common features in HG Wells’s War of the Worlds as the place where the first Martians land. The account reads: “Genuine report. Two competent officers slightly embarrassed.”

  Presumably the third officer is either incompetent or really thick-skinned.

• The Vatican’s astronomer said that it is okay for Christians to believe in aliens. He even suggested that they might be free from original sin. All of this would seem to raise one important question, which is “why on Earth do the Vatican employ an astronomer?” (I presume his job is mostly just to look out for moving stars and follow them.)
• The trailer was released for the new X-Files film.

Is it some kind of theme-week, or is the news just a publicity stunt for Fox?

According to the Telegraph, a shrine in France has been officially recognised by the Vatican.

Notre Dame du Laus, which already draws some 120,000 pilgrims each year, was formally acknowledged by the Vatican after three years of research into its credentials by a team of theologians, historians and psychologists.

Its ‘credentials’ are that a young shepherdess claims to have seen the virgin Mary appear there. So the options are:

1. this really happened, or
2. she is a nutter.

There’s surely no chance she’s a nutter, is there?

The shepherdess was described by one observer as the French champion of apparitions, because she saw the Virgin Mary around 2,500 times over 54 years – averaging once a week.

That’s okay, then.

So many people are worried about the future … but I think that a fundamental concern of all of our people at this present time and one which we ourselves as Christians must take very seriously is that concerning the future of human life itself.

Oh, shit! What’s happened?

This text is taken from Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s Easter sermon this year. I’ve copy-pasted most of the sermon into this blog-post: I encourage you merely to skim it.

The beliefs which we have previously held, and the standards by which we have lived throughout our lives and by which Christians have lived for the past 2000 years are being challenged at this present time in ways in which they have never been challenged before!

This is getting less and less scary by the sentence.

The norm has always been that children have been born as the result of the love of man and woman in the unity of a marriage. That belief has of course long been challenged. However I believe that a greater challenge than that even faces us – the possibility now facing our country is that animal-human embryos be produced with the excuse that perhaps certain diseases might find a cure from these resulting embryos.

“Excuse”? He says that as if scientists basically just love nothing more than fucking about with genetics to create monkeys with four asses, and just use the possibility of curing disease, saving lives and generally improving humanity’s lot as an “excuse”.

No matter how hard some Catholics try to hide the anti-science rhetoric, they never seem to quite manage it, do they?

What I am speaking of is the process whereby scientists create an embryo containing a mixture of animal and human genetic material. If I were preaching this homily in France, Germany, Italy, Canada or Australia I would be commending the government for rightly banning such grotesque procedures.

However here in Great Britain I am forced to condemn our government for not only permitting but encouraging such hideous practices.

Any moment now, he’s going to tell us what’s wrong with the idea, rather than just emoting about it…

Our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has given the Government’s support to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which, more comprehensively, attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular Bill.

“Sanctity”? Ah, then it’s just an ideological objection to research that could save lives and advance human understanding of ourselves? That doesn’t count as a reason, and that right there is why he won this month’s award.

With full might of government endorsement, Gordon Brown is promoting a Bill that will allow the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos. He is promoting a Bill which will add to the 2.2 million human embryos already destroyed or experimented upon. He is promoting a Bill allowing scientists to create babies whose sole purpose will be to provide, without consent of anyone, parts of their organs or tissues.

Not babies, embryos. Do please get this right, or else you have no credibility at all. After all, why listen to his opinion if he doesn’t understand the science behind it? We’re talking about cell cultures, here, not fully-formed human beings.

Edit: the Bill also allows for the creation of “saviour siblings”, however, since the cells taken from these children to save their siblings are from the umbilical cord which is cut off anyway, I can’t imagine what his objection to that could be.

He is promoting a Bill which will sanction the raiding of dead people’s tissue to manufacture yet more embryos for experimentation. He is promoting a Bill which denies that a child has a biological father, allows tampering with birth certificates, removing biological parents, and inserting someone altogether different. And this Bill will indeed be used to further extend the abortion laws.

I can’t imagine that any of this is correct, but since the only news coverage this Bill has had has centred around the whining of scientifically and legally unqualified clergymen, it’s really hard to be sure. Certainly “the raiding of dead people’s tissue” is illegal under at least two different Acts, one of which is very recent (I have a donor card and it would still be illegal to use my tissues for research without my prior consent) so I can’t for a second believe that this provision really extends to anyone who hasn’t consented. And “tampering with birth certificates” is almost by definition illegal. Perhaps this Bill will allow people to alter the details on them in some pre-approved way, and perhaps O’Brien thinks that that’s too much and constitutes “tampering”, but without explaining what the Bill actually allows that he objects to, he might as well be just making things up.

Further it seems that Labour MPs are not to be allowed a free vote on this Bill and consequently are denied the right to vote according to their conscience – a right which all other political parties have allowed.

This Bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.

You know, I’m not at all sure that it does. The cardinal never bothers to explain precisely what this attack is — possibly this is because he’s preaching to a group of Catholics, so he knows they’ll all support whatever he says because they have deferred their opinion-forming to a group of bigots in Italy, but even so he must have known (indeed, intended) that it would end up in the newspapers, or else he’d have talked about this “Pascal Mystery” nonsense that Christians are usually so keen that we discuss this time of year — but it’s clearly rubbish.

I think it was in A Devil’s Chaplain that I heard this argument explained best, but I can’t remember so here’s my attempt. I’ve used a different visual metaphor, so it’s not plagiarism (this is what they tell me at uni).

If you had enough paper, you could construct a really giant family tree which includes everything which as ever lived (on Earth, at least). Clearly people have certain rights, and grapes do not, but on this tree there would be an unbroken chain of links between the Pope and the grapes crushed to make his communion wine. The very concepts of “human” rights, “human” dignity and “human” life are nonsense when we realise this, because it implies that somewhere on that family tree you could draw a line and say “these are human; these are not” — but wherever you draw that line, there will be almost no difference between the last generation excluded and the first included. The intermediate stages have died out since, so we are left with a clear gap between “humans” and “animals”, and anywhere we choose to draw the line in that gap is effectively the same. This is very convenient for religious types who believe in “the sanctity of human life” and that God gave “humans” dominion over “animals”, that “animals” can be killed for meat but “humans” cannot even if they want to. The Bible is very clear on this, not least because it was written by people who didn’t know about evolution. (I am assuming for the sake of argument that everyone involved in this discussion accepts evolution. Anyone who doesn’t shouldn’t be allowed a say because they’re too ignorant to have a meaningful opinion.) When people start making animal-human hybrids, this gap will start to fill up with new creatures and we will be forced to reassess the situation.

This is, of course, a good thing: right now Christians (including former Presidential candidate Duncan Hunter) are using this ridiculous line drawn on a family tree to say that a single fertilised egg cell is “human” and therefore has full rights, whereas a primate (er, the monkey kind of primate) is an animal and doesn’t count. That’s clearly moronic, and so this arbitrary “line on a family tree” method of doling out rights clearly isn’t sufficient. There is (and/or has been) a continuum of different beings on Earth, and we need a method for granting rights and protection that reflects that. We already have it, to some extent: toddlers aren’t allowed to buy alcohol, 14-year-olds aren’t allowed to have sex, vote, or buy a house. The mentally ill have their rights curtailed for their own good. And equally, we allow you to be needlessly cruel to bacteria, insects and plants, but not to mammals or reptiles. Some people who claim to be vegetarians eat fish — so apparently fish are deemed insufficiently self-aware to get any rights, whereas cows are smart enough that they should be left alone. Clearly we do accept that some creatures have more rights than others and that it isn’t a simple, binary “human or not” question. Except, of course, when it’s convenient for the Church that we do not.

In some other European countries one could be jailed for doing what we intend to make legal.

Well, yes, but loads of countries have different laws than us. In Germany, there’s surprisingly little free speech when it comes to the Nazi regime (which seems almost perverse but I imagine they know what they’re doing). In Greece, Tetris is illegal if you play it in a cybercafé. And if you count Turkey as part of Europe, then there’s even stranger examples.

In some other European countries, France say, it would (quite rightly) be illegal to run a Catholic school. Hasn’t mentioned that one yet, has he?

I can say that the government has no mandate for these changes: they were not in any election manifesto, nor do they enjoy widespread public support. The opposite has indeed taken place – the time allowed for debate in Parliament and indeed in the country at large has been shockingly short.

Maybe that’s because it basically isn’t all that important in real life?

One might say that in our country we are about to have a public government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion – without many people really being aware of what is going on.

Many excuses are being made for this present legislation, particularly that cures will soon be found for various diseases which afflict mankind through this legislation. Rather the opposite seems to be the case when cells required for ongoing investigation into cures through medical science can take place through cells obtained in other ways from human bodies and certainly not through the creation of animal-human embryos.

I cannot refute this lase sentence as I cannot make any sense of it.

I contend that matters of such concern to the peoples of our countries should not be left quite simply to a vote by members of Parliament. Along with my colleagues in England and Wales and my brother Bishops here in Scotland I would maintain that the establishment of a single permanent statutory national bioethics commission is something which would indeed bring considerable benefits. As I indicated recently in a letter to the Prime Minister: “This would appear to be the only way that the issues raised by the swiftly developing biotechnology industry can be adequately discussed and weighed up in a body which engages with public concerns and informs the government and parliament on matters which will continue to raise such unimagined and complex ethical questions”.

I quite agree that it raises complex ethical questions, however I would add the following:

• Raising questions is in all cases a good thing. The questions were still there and deserving of answers before this raised them, and anything that makes people think about them can only advance mankind. The idea that raising questions is objectionable is an inherently religious one, and I don’t think that cardinals are remotely qualified to weigh in on them — least of all ones who don’t know the difference between a baby and an embryo.
• Complex ethical questions have complex answers, and “ban it ban it ban it” is not a complex answer. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to something that raises awkward questions and goes vaguely against the teachings of the Bible. It may be that, after a complex investigation, it turns out that the best thing to do is to ban it, but until you have a better reason than that, you don’t get a say.

Of course, “the establishment of a single permanent statutory national bioethics commission” might be a good idea (as long as we’re spelling “establishment” with a small ‘e’), but it depends on how much money it would take compared to how much it would cost for Parliament and the existing ethics commissions to do it (and the comparative results thereof) — and I can’t imagine cardinals have any useful information to base that call on.

Our voice must be heard and that voice must be listened to especially by the members of Parliament who will soon vote on this issue in the House of Commons.

As best I can figure, “our” in this sentence appears to refer to a group of bishops, a group who already have far too much say in Parliament.

Sadly many members of Parliament do not seem concerned – or rather are in a certain ignorance of what is going to happen.

Spot the hypocrisy. Go on. Have a go.

In January of this year our Catholic Parliamentary Office wrote to all of Scotland’s 59 members of Parliament asking them how they intended to vote. As of today only 9 have bothered to reply. Over three weeks ago Bishop Philip Tartaglia of Paisley wrote to Gordon Brown urging him to allow all his MPs a free vote – as of today he has not even had an acknowledgement!

Our Church, and I personally, have, I think, done all the ‘right things’. We have responded to the consultation document; we have sent letters to all of Scotland’s Members of Parliament; we have written to the Prime Minister; we are speaking publicly about what is going on in our name and in our country. Further, I recently signed a letter with other Church Leaders which concluded: “This Bill goes against what most people, Christian or not, reckon is common sense. The idea of mixing human and animal genes is not just evil. It’s crazy!”.

I’ve noticed that while the word “reckon” appears in that quote, the word “because” does not.

Until that sentence, there was always a chance I would forgive him. But come on. “The idea of mixing human and animal genes is … evil” — why? Why is it evil? What is even remotely evil about it? Who gets hurt? What possible Bad Thing will happen as a result? Ah, you see, but that’s not what “Evil” means if you’re religious. If you’re a Christian, then Good is Whatever God Decides Good Is, and Evil is Everything Else. And “the idea of mixing human and animal genes is … crazy!”? Well, surely you have to actually understand the reasons (note: not excuses) for doing it before you get to decide whether or not it’s a crazy thing to do?

I would have said that persecuting homosexuals was evil. I would have said that blocking attempts to introduce life-saving contraception into Africa to promote your (very profitable) religion was evil. I would have said that believing that what is very obviously just a little disc of bread was, in strict point of fact, the literal body of a 2000-year-dead man was crazy. I would have said that talking to an invisible wizard who doesn’t exist and expecting a reply was crazy.

If you want to tell me genetics research is “evil” and “crazy” then you’re going to have to provide some kind of an argument. Especially if you’re going to preach this way to the general public and then demand a vote. You’re effectively trying to dictate policy.

Today as we celebrate in the resurrection the triumph of life over death I urge you to ensure that life continues to triumph over these deathly proposals. I know that many of you have already made your views known to your members of Parliament. I ask you to continue to do that.

No! Do some sodding research, and then you can make your views heard. Has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason there hasn’t been a vote is that it would be a waste of time? Personally, I think the idea of an elected government (rather than simply having a referendum on everything) is so that we can have a number of trusted people, with expert advisers, making informed decisions instead of an angry, illiterate mob making lowest-common-denominator, religiously motivated, knee-jerk, tabloid, reactionary arbitration on everything from science to the economy. Guess what? It turns out the world is actually quite complicated, and you can’t govern justly by applying a bunch of rules from a book or “what [you] reckon is common sense”! Common sense doesn’t apply to complex situations. If it did, there would be no universities.

It’s a bit old now, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to blog as part of my apparently ongoing project to document and mock everything the new, crazy Pope says and does wrong from the moment of his appointment to shortly after the moment of his death, after which (much as he thinks otherwise) he will not say or do anything.

He was not-very-recently scheduled to give a talk, on the subject of… er… nothing very much, at La Sapienza university, but the talk was cancelled after large numbers of scientists complained. They said the Pope shouldn’t be allowed to talk at a now-secular (the university having been founded by an earlier and probably saner Pope) research institute after What He Said About Galileo. Eventually the talk was reorganised for a later date, and the Pope tried to claim the triple-whammy of association with the university, victim, and victor. Personally I think he came out of the whole thing looking like a twat, but then that’s much the way he went in so no harm done.

For those who missed it, the now-pope, 17 years ago and long before he was pope, defended the Catholic Church’s treatment of Galileo way back when. (For those who missed that too, Galileo pointed out that the Earth orbits the sun and not the other way around. The last Pope, John Paul II, was happy to admit Galileo was right, as to be fair is the new one, but where Benedict XVI loses my respect is that he condones the actions of the Church at the time when they banned all his books, forced him to recant and locked him in his house until he died.)

Of course, the Church was quick to leap to Ratzinger’s defence:

The Vatican has dismissed some of the protestors [sic] as anti-clerical activists, and have said that others have misunderstood Benedict’s remarks, made 17 years ago.

…

As Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict said that Galileo had turned out to be correct about the earth revolving around the sun, and that subsequent biblical scholarship had rejected literalist readings of texts that had been taken by the Church to deny this.

Nevertheless, he said, Galileo had been dogmatic and sectarian in his statements at the time, and the Church authorities had acted reasonably given the levels of knowledge available then.

So, his defence is that Galileo, though now-demonstrably and -clearly right, was too dogmatic for the Pope. So they banned his books and humiliated him and locked him in his house for questioning their beliefs, but that’s okay because he was a tad dogmatic. In any case, “the levels of knowledge available then” were the same as the levels of (relevant) knowledge available now: there was no proof that the sun orbitted the Earth. As such Galileo was surely perfectly free to doubt it, yes? No. It’s as if the Pope believes that the Church is free to demand that everyone follows their thinking on any issue right up until the moment that it can be definitively proved wrong and everyone agrees. Another fun paragraph from that article is here:

Nevertheless, there is no doubt but that the Vatican is extremely embarrassed by the incident, which will strengthen the hand of those who argue that religious belief and scientific enquiry are incompatible - a view rejected by those involved in science-theology conversations, but spreading widely among non-specialists.

That reads like it was written by one of those strange people who study theology as if it was a proper subject. The incompatibilities (or lack of them) between science and religion is a philosophical area — we can’t prove it. Sure, it’s easy to point out that science is based around the idea of questioning all knowledge and demanding proof of all claims, whereas religion is based around the idea of believing what you’re told, preferably without any proof, but some people will say that they don’t accept that and even though they’re obviously wrong, they’re not demonstrably wrong. They just have to chase you back until you hit an assumption (say, “logic holds” or “the universe exists”) and declare their assumption equally valid.

And I just bet that they’re using the phrase “non-specialists” to mean “atheists”. That’s what it usually means in this context: it’s the mindset that thinks you can’t disprove religion without studying it for years. It’s a bit like saying “you can’t prove π doesn’t equal four without checking every decimal place”. After all, the view they ascribe to “non-specialists”, “that religious belief and scientific enquiry are incompatible,” is the view held by Richard Dawkins, the esteemed biologist, professor for the public understanding of science, and author of The God Delusion. I think it’s fair to call him an expert in the field.

But they’ve decided what’s true and anyone who disagrees obviously just hasn’t studied hard enough. Damn those dogmatic astronomers!

The Catholic Church does a lot of things that are bad, but it also does some good. One of those things is that, particularly since the new Crazy Pope took over, it provides a never-ending stream of examples of all the bad things religion does. Here’s the latest one, and it might be the stupidest yet. This is what the Pope intends to do about the paedophilia scandals in the church (from the Guardian):

The Vatican has called on Catholics to atone for the sex abuse scandals that have engulfed their church in recent years by taking part in what may be the largest global prayer initiative ever seen.

Cardinal Cláudio Hummes told the Vatican’s official daily, L’Osservatore Romano, that every diocese in the world should name a priest to work full-time on the arrangements for the “perpetual adoration” of the eucharist. This would involve parishioners taking turns to keep a round-the-clock vigil in front of a consecrated host representing the body of Jesus.

The initiative has all the hallmarks of the thinking [sic] of Pope Benedict, and would certainly not have been launched in this way without his full support.Hummes, the head of the Vatican ministry for the clergy, said a letter had gone to “dioceses, parishes, rectories, chapels, monasteries, convents and seminaries” calling on them to organise groups of “adorers”. The aim was “to make amends before God for the evil that has been done and hail once more the dignity of the victims”, who had suffered from the “moral and sexual conduct of a very small part of the clergy”. He did not indicate how long he saw the adoration continuing.

The Times said a little more:

Cardinal Hummes said that the aim was to put a definitive stop to a scandal that … [he said] was exceptionally serious, although it was probably caused by “no more than 1 per cent” of the 400,000 Catholic priests around the world.

So that’s okay, then. Thousands of children have been abused, but the Pope has a plan. He’s going to have “a round-the-clock vigil in front of a consecrated host representing the body of Jesus*”. He’s going to ask people to watch bread. I can see that helping a lot, presuming it was the bread that was abusing all those children.

Partly I object to this because it’s moronic, but to be honest, that doesn’t matter. This represents a huge number of people who are, in all probability, going to do as he asks and keep a close eye on baked goods and think they’re helping. Not only is that time that could be better spent actually doing something, but by creating the (not very realistic) illusion of action it will discourage those people from really taking any in their remaining free time.

And to a point you have to respect it, because if the Pope really does believe that looking at food will solve the problem then he’s doing exactly the right thing, but then, if the Pope really does believe that looking at food will solve the problem, then he’s an idiot, so don’t feel you have to respect him more than you would a cucumber. That would mean he thinks that an all-merciful and all-powerful God will refuse to do anything about a spate of paedophiles in his own organisation unless enough people sit around “adoring” him for long enough. How many high-ranking Catholic officials have failed to point out how absurd that is?

It’s hardly worth sitting here trying to make the Pope look stupid. It’s like trying to make fire look warm.

He even has a silly hat.

The first Religious Crackpot Of The Month this year goes to Patrick O’Donoghue. There are those who would prefer I call him “the Right Reverence Patrick O’Donoghue”, but I won’t be doing that. I think that people’s relative reverence and honourability is something they earn by their actions and not something they’re granted by their job titles. And, since this doesn’t appear to be 1992, I won’t be using the word “right” as an intensifier. Patrick O’Donoghue is shockingly ignorant, not least of the rules of chess: despite being Bishop of Lancaster, he is moving decidedly backwards.

He has earned this dubious honour by sending what the Guardian called “a 66-page document” to all the Catholic schools in his diocese, though I’ve found it and it is in fact a 68-page document with two blank pages at the end. (It’s a PDF; they recommend Foxit to read it. I don’t know what’s wrong with Acrobat Reader; possibly Adobe refuse to condemn abortion or something.)

He is by no means the only crackpot mentioned in the article — the Vatican body who endorsed his document must be at least as stupid as its author — but he is the most vocally insane of them all. So let’s be explicit about why he in particular is getting this award. (It is perhaps worth noting that if I had my way, this letter would never have existed as there would be no faith schools to receive it, although if I really had my way there would be no bishop to send it either.)

Normally I’d be saying that he, like most other winners of the prize, is placing religious teachings above basic safety advice, but in this case that would be being far, far too kind. The teachings he’s advocating are barely even religious — there’s not a single word in the Bible about condoms. This isn’t religion. Religion is when someone writes a book which, centuries later, is found and taken far, far too seriously. What we have here is a large organisation deciding that something is bad and dictating that all their followers will believe it too. This isn’t religion: this is cult behaviour (though there’s less difference than most people would care to admit).

Worse still, he doesn’t consider that he is putting it above basic safety advice because he disputes that condoms can prevent AIDS.

Parents must insist on continence outside marriage and fidelity in marriage as the only true and secure education for the prevention of AIDS. Parents, schools, and colleges must also reject the promotion of so-called “safe sex” or “safer sex”, a dangerous and immoral policy based on the deluded theory that the condom can provide adequate protection against AIDS.

Exactly why he thinks this is unclear. At no point does he bother to explain how a 120 nanometre wide retrovirus can penetrate seventy thousand nanometres of rubber in only a few minutes. This paragraph cites a book called The Truth And Meaning Of Human Sexuality as its only source, so I did a quick Google search and discovered that the book in question was published by The Catholic Library, and its full text is available on their website. To save you the bother of looking, the paragraph is a direct quote from the book (paragraph 139; as we know, Catholics believe that any sentence with a number is true) and the book doesn’t justify it any further either. Presumably they just believe unquestioningly whatever would best serve their agenda if it were true. (That, one might argue, is very much the idea of religion in any case.)

He also repeats the Vatican’s anti-Amnesty International stance:

Schools and colleges must not support charities or groups that promote or fund anti-life policies, such as Red Nose Day and Amnesty International, which now advocates abortion.

To be fair to him, he also suggests some non-abortion-condoning alternative organisations, but I can’t imagine any of them have the resources Amnesty do, and in any case, Amnesty International do not advocate abortion! He goes further, though (and I should mention for the sake of integrity that the ellipsis below represents a 38-page break, much of which I didn’t read):

Anything that evokes wonder and reflection about the fundamental questions of human existence in Science, English, or Art, for example, is an opportunity to teach the truths of the faith.

…

Under no circumstances should any outside authority or agency that is not fully qualified to speak on behalf of the Catholic Church ever be allowed to speak to pupils or individuals on sexual or any other matter involving faith and morals. Nor should a Catholic school or college ever refer a pupil to an outside agency for advice or counselling; such is the prerogative only of the parent.

That’s nothing more or less than indoctrination: under his system, a pupil in a Catholic school is not allowed to talk to anybody except Catholic representatives about any aspect of religion or emotion (or, probably anything except mathematics, and even then the distinction between the numbers three and one is probably taboo). This will lead to them being effectively brainwashed, exposed to only one ideology every day for 15 of their most formative years. He says in the Guardian that this is “absolute rubbish”, but then he would say that, because apparently he’s a total bastard who will say anything if he thinks it will get people on his side.

Like most religious crackpots, O’Donoghue utterly fails to understand the meaning of the word “secular”. Like the current incumbent Specifically Mormon Crackpot of The Year, he seems to think that it is itself a religion. He demonstrates this very neatly when he says “the secular view … may not be presented as neutral information”. The whole point of secularism is that it is completely neutral. It considers all ideas purely on their own merits, affording none any special treatment regardless of what various religions may say about them. O’Donoghue would presumably prefer the “woo” version of neutrality, where all ideas are given equal credit regardless of their relative merit. This system is in reality as neutral as giving poorer entrants in a competition a proportional head start so that all players have an equal chance of winning: clearly it benefits the worst and removes any incentive to improve, and only a really stupid sport would do that.

In fact, he appears to be falling into another brain-trap more commonly associated with quacks than crackpots: he’s adopted an Us And Them mentality. Creationists do this, by describing anything that contradicts creationism as “evolutionist”, including the Big Bang theory, geology and abiogenesis, which have nothing at all to do with evolution. Homeopaths call anything that contradicts homeopathy “allopathic”, including vaccines, chemistry, epidemiology and basic scientific methodology. Here, O’Donoghue would appear to be saying that anything which contradicts the Vatican’s random assertions is part of some “secular” conspiracy. Let me let you in on a little secret: there is no secular conspiracy. It just wouldn’t work. It’d be like herding cats. There is no “secular view”: secularism is not a religion, or an ideology or a political affiliation; it’s just a single idea (that religious teachings should be ignored wherever possible) with a name. Most secularists agree on other things too, but that’s largely because great — or at least, non-awful — minds are known to think alike.

He wants teachers to discuss “the ’sacrament of marriage’” and to “insist that contraception [is] wrong”, all while criticising secularism for being insufficiently “neutral”.

I’ve not read the whole thing. I don’t think I could do that to myself. Luckily, the document (called “Fit For Mission? A Guide”) ends with a summarised list of “actions” for schools. Here are a few of them (word for word):

• Create/enhance respect for the doctrinal and moral truth safeguarded by the Pope and the Bishops
• Challenge TV broadcasts, films and books … that are disrespectful, suspicious and scornful of Christ and His Church.

It should be noted at this point that Jesus, being long dead by the time it was established, has never publicly endorsed the Catholic church and would in all probability loathe it as much as I do.

• Promote films and books that build up trust and enthusiasm for the faith.
• Ensure support is given to Chaplains so they can complete their role, including evangelisation and catechesis through proclamation of the Word.
• Provide opportunity for the governing body to discuss and pray about this document.

What the fuck? How will that help? Does he think God is going to personally reply and say “yeah, it’s not a bad document but I didn’t like the font”?

• Teach the Trinity
• Use the Core Curriculum of the Catholic Church

…whatever that is; Google doesn’t know.

• Teaching and Learning for the profession of faith
• Ensure active participation in the Liturgy is encourage [sic]

He actually considers liturgy a basic human need, presumably alongside oxygen and nutrition (assuming he doesn’t think those are “deluded theories” too.

• Teach the real presence from a Young Age [sic]
• Promote our call to holiness
• Ensure [not 'encourage'] regular prayers for vocations
• Ensure that no outside authority or agency … is allowed to speak to pupils … on … any matter involving faith and morals
• Ensure that pupils are never referred to an outside agency for advice or counselling
• Carefully scrutinise Year Planners to ensure they do not promote the services of organisations incompatible with the Church’s moral teaching
• Teach meditation on the Word of God
• Teach Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament
• Arrange weekly adoration of the Blesses Sacrament [sic]
• Teach Devotion to Our Lady and the Rosary

(It’s not mentioned whether this devotion should be weekly or not.)

• Ensure [not 'encourage'] meaningful memorisation of basic prayers
• Teach Devotion to the Saints

Honestly, those last dozen read like some kind of scary cult handbook. Because that is precisely what this document is. It is a guide to how to effectively hijack a child’s state-funded education and use it to brainwash them into your religion, thus ensuring a nice supply of minds (and money) in the future. That people would do such a thing is still shocking to me, and that they would then be widely thought of as good people is almost as bad.

You can email the team behind the report at Mission.Review@LancasterRcDiocese.org.uk. I intend to. (I will of course blog any and all relevant correspondence.)

Edit:

They also have something they call a “blog”, but is in fact just a boring newsletter powered by WordPress. The skin they’ve chosen for it was designed by a girl who “at an early age [decided for herself] that there are no gods or supernatural forces”. Presumably they will take more care than this when “scrutinising” those Year Planners.

According to the Pope, “spe salvi”.

This is the title of his latest infallible rant, and is a small nugget of Latin taken from the Bible, where it means “in hope, we are saved”, apparently. (As is my way I’ve linked there to the full rant, not the little snippets in the news.) So what does the Pope have to say for himself this time? Let’s take a look.

Here’s some from section 42, in-keeping with the Christian tradition of numbering all text:

The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism … If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.

Here, the Pope explains that mankind should not try to deliver justice or alleviate suffering. Presumably he thinks all laws should be repealed, all governments shut down, all charities disbanded (which would be a cunning way out of the Amnesty International-shaped hole he dug himself into all those months ago), and all peace talks immediately halted: they are presumptuous, after all, and grounded in the intrinsically false idea that mankind can and must create its own justice.

He really would rather live in the middle ages, wouldn’t he? He’s essentially saying that we should just sit back and watch the world go to hell in a handcart while we sit around being insufferably pious until the biblical “Last Judgement” rolls around and we all get to live forever in paradise. Which to be fair sounds like a terrific plan as long as we can rely on the eternal paradise bit actually happening.

The nerve of the man to accuse atheism of being “intrinsically false” when he believes an invisible wizard from space is going to individually judge everyone in the world and actually physically resurrect all the ones who’ve obeyed his arbitrary set of rules to live forever in an earthly paradise to which, presumably, the second law of thermodynamics does not apply. He criticises Marxism when his proposed solution is to sit back and do absolutely fuck all about the injustices and suffering in the world (many of which are created by his own organisation) and let an imaginary sky fairy fix everything with his magic wand.

I honestly think the Pope is one of the most dangerously insane human beings alive today.

Somebody explain to me why Catholics still exist. I can’t imagine what justification could possibly be given for supporting, even implicitly, this dangerous organisation when there are so many flavours of Christianity which don’t require you to listen to a word of the tripe spewed by the Vatican City.

Personally, I think Italy should demand the country back. Even if the Vatican refused, I think it’d be a pretty easy place to take by force.