ABC, ECHR and Abortion

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland did not sufficiently protect the constitutionally guaranteed right of a woman to have an abortion (if her life is endangered) through adequate legislation. Of course, this is not the way in which the media reported it. From headline reports to opinion pieces, almost all commentators on the verdict got it wrong. People on both sides of the abortion debate rushed to make their voice heard. On the right you had Youth Defence who opined that the verdict was "intrusive, unwelcome and an attempt to violate Ireland's pro-life laws". On the left you had CNN who carried the headline "Court condemns Irish ban on abortion". The core of the ruling centres on Article 40.3.3 of the Constitution which states:

The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.

This article was introduced into the constitution by means of a referendum in 1983. 27 years later and despite a Supreme Court ruling on the issue in 1992, the government has still not introduced legislation as the constitution clearly promises to guarantee women the right to have an abortion if their health is threatened.

 Of course, once people start reading more into a story than is actually there, you end up with all sorts of crazy shit coming out such as the Youth Defence article above. Look, we signed up to Europe in 1973 and reinforced this commitment through various treaties such as Maastricht and Nice and Lisbon. We are also signatories to the UN and European conventions on human rights, the latter of which is the document which founded the European Court of Human Rights at the centre of this story. We chose to be involved in a unified Europe and current economic conditions not withstanding, we have been better off because of it. It is, therefore, just a little bit preposterous to suggest that the EU shouldn't safeguard the rights of its citizens.

Leaving aside the current case for a moment, the recent media storm brings the topic of abortion back into the public sphere once again. On one level, people have to realise that the debate over abortion is never going to go away, at least as long as religion exists. On the other hand, the government must put legislation in place which safeguards the rights of all citizens. Also, the key points of the legislation must be based on reasonable conclusions made from concrete evidence. There are several issues which combine to make abortion the social hot-button that it is. By taking each one in turn, however, it is possible to determine a reasonable approach to the overall issue.

The first and most important issue is the point at which life begins. The pro-life movement usually begin from the position that life begins at conception and therefore any abortion results in the death of a person. Unfortunately, these people cannot proffer any substantive evidence to back up this claim. Even those who use their religion to guide their view on abortion (the majority of pro-lifers) cannot rely on their religion to back them up. Anyone looking to the bible for an answer will only find this:

For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul

 This would mean that life begins when the blood begins to flow which is day 22. However, despite claims from some god-botherers to the contrary, we don't make laws based on the bible. We use, or at least should use, medical criteria to decide medical matters. In this case, a reliable existing method for determining when life begins. We have a defined criterion for when life ends, the cessation of brain activity. Therefore by mirroring this, we have a solid basis for determining when life begins, which is 9 weeks after fertilisation. Given the normal course of events for a woman when determining whether or not she is pregnant, an upper time limit of 2 months would be a reasonable starting point in determining a window for legal abortions.

The next most important question is that of the health and the rights of the mother. At its most basic level, this argument, which is the basis of the recent court case, deals with the rights of a woman to safeguard her own health. There is no easy solution to this problem. In most cases, you have two patients with conflicting interests which you have to try and balance between speculative and definitive diagnoses. The one thing I will say is that it is the first duty of the attending doctor to act in the best interest of the mother since she is his patient. Each case should be reviewed on an individual basis where a panel of doctors can review all the evidence. In the end, though, I think that if there is a real risk to the health of the mother that abortion should be permissible. After all, we are humans, not salmon, nobody ever intended for us to expend our lives for the sake of offspring.

Another issue which requires treatment is where the act of conception itself involves some degree of trauma for the mother, i.e. rape, incest etc. I know that the pro-lifers consider all life to be sacred, regardless but what compassionate person would condemn a woman to carrying with her a living reminder of an unspeakable act. That's torture whatever way you want to dress it up.

There are so many more other issues but those above are the ones which, if not the most important, are certainly the ones which attract the most attention. The issue as a whole is delicate and for a lot of people involves suffering and heartbreak but it is something which we must debate with a clear head and even temper.

I have to say, though, that the most disturbing aspect of the abortion debate is the argument against abortion that is promoted by some groups is nothing short of disgusting. There are quite a few people out there, who argue that, if abortion were legalised then women would be lining up to get them. They reason that abortion is a temptation and women, who seek to live a promiscuous life without consequence, use abortion as a means to maintain that lifestyle. That's just batshit crazy. It is based on an utterly perverted view of women and the people who argue in this fashion are usually men (though not always) and more often than not Christian. The Bible has always forwarded the view that women are sinners and bereft of redeeming qualities but this is nuts. For most women, having an abortion is often the worst day of their lives and the worst decision they'll ever have to make.

Finally, this whole story has reminded me, to a certain extent, of the debacle surrounding the opening of pubs on Good Friday this year. There is a certain argument to be made in this regard and with censorship in general that personal choice should be considered. If you are a "good" Christian, then I'm sure that you wouldn't drink on Good Friday, just as I'm sure that you wouldn't get divorced or have an abortion or watch porn or anything else that your mythology forbids. The fact that you wouldn't, though, doesn't mean that anyone else shouldn't. We're not all Christians and we're not all bound by the strictures of your mythos. There's no reason why we should live by Christian morals or even respect them. As Ricky Gervais so neatly stated earlier this week:

You are entitled to your own opinions. But not your own facts.

Christianity and the Subversion of Myth

In my last post I touched briefly on the subject of syncretism, the tendency of new mythologies to build themselves from the remnants of their predecessors. There is nothing inherently sinister about syncretism; it's merely a method of relating the tenets of the new mythology in terms that adherents of the old one will understand. Christianity has for the most part, however, distorted syncretism beyond an attempt to convey a message and Christians have tried to rewrite history from their own faith. The most common examples of this are: Christmas (which I have mentioned previously), the idea that all modern laws stem from Christianity and that the United States was founded as a christian nation. Naturally this is complete bullshit. The following examples will show that Christianity is as someone recently stated "old wine in new bottles".

Moses

Moses being central to both the Jewish faith and Christianity is the perfect place to begin.  The story of the birth of Moses is outlined in Exodus 2:1-3

And a man of the house of Levi went and took as wife a daughter of Levi. So the woman conceived and bore a son. And when she saw that he was a beautiful child, she hid him three months. But when she could no longer hide him, she took an ark of bulrushes for him, daubed it with asphalt and pitch, put the child in it, and laid it in the reeds by the river's bank.

It sounds like a plausible story until you read the story of Horus, son of Isis and Osiris in Egyptian mythology, 1700 years previously.

The battle between the two resulted in the death of Osiris, but before he died Osiris had impregnated his wife, Isis, goddess of wisdom and beauty. Isis in turn gave birth to Horus, the falcon-headed god of kingship. When Seth learned that his brother Osiris’s offspring had been born, he sought to kill the baby Horus. Isis prepared a basket of reeds to hide him in the marshland of the Nile Delta, where she suckled him and protected him, along with the watchful eye of her sister, Nephthys, from the snakes, scorpions and other dangerous creatures until he grew and prospered.

Of course the story of Horus remains an influence on Christianity, just compare the depictions of Isis and Horus with that of Mary and Jesus.

The Resurrection

The next most important theme in Christianity is the resurrection. The resurrection is central to Christianity for a number of reasons, the promise of life after death, the divinity of Jesus and the claim that the resurrection is what separates Christianity from other religions. Except that it doesn't. The concept of a life-death-rebirth cycle is one of the most widespread themes in pre-Christian mythologies. For those unfamiliar, the simplified version of the idea is that Jesus was born, grew up, was crucified, waited 3 days and then came back to life.

Similarly in Norse mythology, in the Hávamál, there is a story told about the discovery of runes by Odin. According to the story, Odin is eager to learn the wisdom of the runes to give him power in the nine worlds. He therefore sacrifices himself to himself (not inventing another personality for himself was kinda inconvenient) and is hung from the world tree Yggdrasil for nine days and nights (the number 9 being of particular importance to Norse mythology) and is finally pierced in the side by his own spear Gungir. He later returns to life having gained this new knowledge. Sound familiar?

Similar stories can be found in many other mythologies, including but not limited to Osiris (Egyptian), Orpheus (Greek), Mithras (Zoroastrian), Tammuz (Bablyonian) and Zalmoxis (Dacian).




Miracles

Miracles are the lifeblood of Christianity in general and the Catholic church in particular. For 2000 years, the evangelisation of pre-christian cultures has been driven by the revelation of "holy" people who have been tools of God in showing their fellow people the way. Even today a past history of attributable miracles is a necessary step on the path to sainthood. It pays the church to recognise some unexplained events as miracles and when it comes to Jesus, miracles have to be plentiful. Unfortunately, Jesus seems to be just a tribute act, recreating "miracles" which had already been documented hundreds and sometimes thousands of years before.

The marriage feast of Cana
Widely recognised by Christians as the first miracle performed by Jesus, the marriage feast of Cana features the miraculous and seemingly impossible feat of turning water into wine. It might seem impossible for the son of a Jewish carpenter but not for the Greek god Dionysus who pulled off the same trick at his marriage to Ariadne in Greek mythology.


Lazarus
Bringing people back from the dead must surely be a miracle, unless of course you've got a defibrillator handy. Still though, Jesus managed to bring Lazarus back by just speaking to him, just as Asclepius had done for Hippolytus in Greek mythology centuries before.


The Feeding of the Multitude
This is a difficult one to sift through for several reasons. Firstly, as can be seen in other stories, the Bible can't even seem to agree with itself. In the gospel of John, 5000 people are fed from five loaves and two fish with 12 basketfuls of leftovers. In Matthew's gospel though, 4000 people are fed from seven loaves and two fish with seven basketfuls of leftovers. The numbers are not that important since, like the rest of Christian numerology, they relate to observable phenomena of the time. The five and the seven both relate to the number of visible celestial objects in the night sky - 5 planets and the sun and moon for a total of seven. The twelve represents the zodiac while the two fish represent the constellation Pisces. Astrologers have stated that this is the age of Pisces which began around 1 CE and will end around 2150.
Other aspects of the story mirror the story of Horus in Egyptian Mythology. Horus is known as the distributor of loaves in Egyptian mythology and his city of Annu or Heliopolis is known as the place of multiplying bread. Also Horus is aided in some stories by Taht who in stories of Ra is "the word made flesh". Taht in stories of Horus is represented as a boy who brings food to Horus to be distributed just as the young boy does in John's gospel.


There are many more examples of this throughout Christian mythology but this post is long enough already. The most important realisation to be gained from all this, though, is that, in the words of one biblical scholar:

We are faced with the inescapable realization that if Jesus actually lived in the flesh in the first century A.D., and if he had been able to read the documents of old Egypt, he would have been amazed to find his own biography already substantially written some four or five thousand years previously

 When you come to understand the area and time in which Christian myth was born you begin to understand the forces that shaped it. Israel at one point in history was in a position so central in the known world that every major civilisation surrounding it had some varying degree of influence. The mythology of Christianity is built from components of its geographical and temporal predecessors including Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Dacian, Sumerian, Babylonian and Zoroastrian.

The Bible is a Chinese whisper, the last written omnibus of an oral history which stretches back thousands of years. The stories themselves are an attempt to understand the world but we have moved on in the last 2000 years and some of the questions they pose have been answered while others have changed. All that remains are fairy stories and outdated social guidelines. If you really want to pass on stories with a moral compass to your children, I suggest the Simpsons box set instead. It'll probably be cheaper in the long run.

Who said atheists can't bring peace and love?

I'm really starting to get into the Christmas spirit at the moment. That may sound strange coming from an atheist but then I always have to laugh at the news stories this time of year talking about "The war on Christmas" or the furore over using Happy Holidays instead of Happy Christmas. Really it's just another example of christians, particularly American christians trying to rewrite history by suggesting that if it weren't for their pokey mythology then people wouldn't have any reason to celebrate in December. Of course this is bullshit. 

I've said it before but I'll say it again, there is nothing new or original contained in christianity. Every holy day observed by christians can trace its roots to some earlier tradition. Here in Ireland, St. Brigid's day is celebrated on the 1st February on the same day as the old Celtic holiday of Imbolc. Halloween is celebrated on 31st October, the same day as the Celtic festival of Samhain. Christmas of course, is a modern incarnation of the celebration of the winter solstice which can be found as far back as 3100 BCE in Newgrange. Even the trappings of Christmas such as holly and mistletoe have origins which predate christianity.

In any case, the point of this post is about sharing the love this time of year. Most of all, I love hearing Christmas songs, particularly the crooners (although that can be from playing too much Fallout 3). My favourite, however is one that was released just 3 months before I was born and has the best message of them all:

"No hell below us, above us only sky, ... nothing to kill or die for, no religion too" 

I can't think of a better sentiment.

"Persecution" of Christians

Last week, Channel 4's excellent documentary series 4thought.tv ran a week long series asking whether christians in Britain are being persecuted. Of course, this is not the first time that the word persecution has been thrown out by christians but lately it seems to happen with increasing frequency. Vatican-oriented news agency Rome Reports has just released a new report which "shows" that christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world.

The report opens by suggesting that 7 out of 10 people cannot freely practise their faith and that christians are the most persecuted religion. What an amazing blinding flash of the obvious. There are approximately 2.1 billion christians worldwide. There are 500 million more christians than the next biggest group, muslims. It stands to reason that if you select a group on the basis of a universal characteristic (i.e. religion or in this case religious persecution) that the composition of that group will be greatly influenced by the composition of the entire population. Simply put, there are more christians persecuted because there are more christians. I'm sure that if you looked at the next most persecuted group it would be muslims.

Of course, the most telling thing about the whole report is that it was conducted by a catholic group called "Aid to the Church in Need". If instead, the report had been conducted by the RAND corporation or the CATO institute then people would sit up and pay attention, but a christian group talking about christian persecution, not so much.

Another factor in the "persecution" of christians highlighted in the report is that religious persecution is necessarily a function of religious conflict. Religions are like spiritual encyclopedia salesmen, eagerly trying to flog their own worldview while disparaging all rival products. It's no different than any other white goods.

The report in this case highlighted 21 out of 194 countries which it analysed for religious persecution. Naturally the countries on the list include Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and China. It is noted, however, that the cause of persecution can be split into two categories: political and religious. The first one, we are already familiar with; countries with a despotic regime rarely tolerate anyone who speaks out against it. The second category is persecution by other religions and this is really a situation caused by christians themselves. When a country has a majority religion or a state religion like Saudi Arabia or Iran the people there may not take too kindly to missionaries invading their country and telling them that their deeply held beliefs are bullshit. This is something that christian missionaries have been doing for centuries. They have manipulated indigenous cultures into destroying their cultural heritage for the sake of some theoretical promise of an eternal life by eating crackers which are the body of a dead guy.

I have to agree that the human rights of christians in the countries listed in the report are being seriously infringed. The thing is though, so are the rights of all the other people living in those countries. Countries where religion takes over rarely tolerate dissent. Atheism too can lead to it, just look at Stalinist Russia. (Oh and a note to all the people who like to point out the tendency of atheism towards despotism, remember that at the top of the list of despots is Hitler, who was a Catholic.)

I would like to suggest to all christians out there that like to complain about religious persecution to remember these incidents:

• Firebomb used in Florida mosque attack

• Child starved to death for not saying amen at meals 

• Funeral of slain Marine picketed by baptists

• High school students prevented from accessing information on gay rights 

• Councilman threatened with lawsuit for being an atheist 

• Gay couple "arrested" by Mormon church guards

• Family Research council launches petition to have equal rights activist fired

Ok, so there are no deaths in the stories above, but persecution is persecution, whatever form it takes. And before anyone says that christianity doesn't lead to terrorism have a look at the picture below because it's one that we should never forget.

And if anybody out there doubts the obvious connection to christianity maybe this Spanish easter parade will help.

Finally, I leave you with a quote from Johnathan Swift who perfectly describes the reason behind the repeated claims of persecution that are heard so often from christians:

I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.

Well that about wraps it up for God!

In my post on Stephen Hawking's new book "The Grand Design", I suggested that the attachment of religious people to the Big Bang theory as proof of God was unreasonable since there were other plausible explanations for the origin of the universe. It now seems that the cyclic universe idea maybe more than just plausible and may in fact be the probable origin of the universe.

The evidence comes from the preprint of a paper by Roger Penrose detailing his research into conformal cyclic cosmology. Penrose began researching the idea when he started to view the inflationary (Big Bang) theory from a thermodynamical perspective. Since the entropy of the universe tends to increase in the time-forward direction, Penrose reasoned that it must necessarily decrease in the time-backward direction. He proposes that the extremely low entropy at the moment of the big bang indicates that space and time were not created at that point but merely mark the start of a new "aeon" in the history of the universe.

The evidence for the theory comes from the analysis of CMBR or cosmic microwave background radiation. Using the Wilkinson Microwave Background Probe (WMAP) and the Boomerang balloon data in Antarctica, Penrose and his team have found concentric circles in the CMBR data consistent with shockwaves (see below) from previous Big Bang events.

Of course, for the god-botherers who argued so vehemently against Stephen Hawking and regard the Big Bang as the ultimate proof of God, this is going to be a tough one to reconcile. If the evidence for this theory increases (and there's no reason to think it won't) then modern deists who rely on the First Cause argument to defend their faith are going to have some serious 'splainin' to do. Of course the emergence of evidence has never slowed down their beliefs before so who knows, they may just adapt this new revelation to fit within their iron age fairy-tales anyway.

Scientific Evangelisation

I have said before that although people are entitled to believe whatever they want, I find evangelisation and proselytising insulting and offensive. It seems strange then that I should wish to engage in evangelisation myself. In the last week, however, I have become increasingly obsessed with the genius of John Boswell's Symphony of Science. 

Boswell is a musician who has stitched together interviews, soundbites and documentary clips to create music videos designed to inspire people about science and the world around them. When I watched these for the first time, the experience was nothing short of revelatory. To see the great minds of science like Dawkins, Feynman, Sagan and Hawking showing the enthusiasm and passion for the wonder of nature which I have come to share is truly remarkable. I encourage everyone who reads this to watch the video and explore the site and hopefully you'll come away with a deeper understanding and admiration for the beauty of the universe.

Grand Designs and all that follows.

Having approached Stephen Hawking's new book "The Grand Design" with a sense of restrained excitement (i.e. taking it slowly to savour the full benefit of his insight), I have to say that now that I am finished, it was worth the wait. When the book was released back in September, it received a wide variety of reactions. In Ireland, the feedback was mainly negative, due mostly to the god-botherers of the nation. 

The charge against the book was lead by none other than David Quinn of the Iona Institute. His article, as usual is full of quote-mining and bad logic. One of the best examples of this is the mention of Professor Antony Flew, who Quinn points out was de-converted from atheism because of the complexity of DNA. However, since Flew was a professor of philosophy of religion and wrote his book on DNA during a period of mental decline, he was hardly in a position to comment, as anyone would be having received a classics degree and spent his academic career teaching philosophy. 

The real problem with this backlash against Hawking is that it is a sign of a far more fundamental issue festering just under the surface. This issue is the age old God of the Gaps idea. In practice, this argument has two distinct lines of reasoning, both of which are flawed, which are posited by catholics worldwide as the "proof" of the truth of catholicism. 

The first line of reasoning deals with the classic interpretation of the "God of the Gaps". This argument assumes the form: "Science cannot explain why X exists. Therefore God must have created X." This is the type of statement which Stephen Hawking refuted in The Grand Design. With specific regard to the origin of the Universe, Hawking shows by means of a crash course in quantum theory, QED, special relativity, general relativity and M-theory that it is possible, at least on a theoretical level to explain the origin of the universe without the need for God. He does not say that there is no God or that God is not a possible explanation for the origin of the universe but merely that there are credible alternative explanations which can be used without resorting to God.

The line of reasoning above is something that I get hit with quite a lot, particularly when revealing myself as an atheist. More often than not it is used with another type of argument, the cosmological argument, more commonly known as the First Cause argument or Uncaused Cause argument. The argument as outlined by Aristotle is as follows:

1. There exists movement in the world.
2. Things that move were set into motion by something else.
3. If everything that moves were caused to move by something else, there would be an infinite chain of causes. This can't happen.
4. Thus, there must have been something that caused the first movement.
5. From 3, this first cause cannot itself have been moved.
6. From 4, there must be an unmoved mover.

Proponents state that God is the unmoved mover or the uncaused cause. However, there are at least two major flaws with this argument. The first problem is that point 3 precludes the possibility of infinity. We don't know what happened before the Big Bang. It's perfectly reasonable to imagine that the Big Bang that created this universe was caused by the destruction of a previous universe and continues back in time inifinitely so that the universe can be seen as a cycle of expansions and contractions with each contraction resulting in a singularity which explodes into a new universe. The second flaw in the argument is that the unmoved mover concept is an evasion. As Stephen Hawking states:

It is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. In this view it is accepted that some entity exists that needs no creator, and that entity is called God.

The how and why of the creation of God is still left unanswered, not to mention the fact that the "it just is" implication of the argument is an intellectual dead-end.

The second line of reasoning which stems from the God of the Gaps argument is usually used as a consequence of the first. That line of reasoning is what I call the "all that follows" argument. Well, to be fair, it's not so much an argument as it is a philosophical position of people who tend to use the God of the Gaps and First Cause arguments to defend their faith. The basic premise of the position is that if they can hold to the idea that God exists then everything that they have since developed in their religion must be true. An example of this is that from God follows the nature of God (i.e. since God is love and there is love in the world then God must have created the world). Of course this argument was spectacularly shot down by David Attenborough when he raised the issue of the Loa Loa parasitic worm:

My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy.

 At the end of the day, the religious population of this country, or any country for that matter, can be split into two distinct groups. The first group is the faithful, the devout, the crazies. These people believe in the catechism of the catholic church completely and take everything on faith. They win, hands down, no rational person is going to piss up that rope. The other group consists of the ordinary religious, the moms and dads, the hypocrites. These people are the ones who support gay marriage and condoms and accept evolution and physics. These and not the first group are the really scary people. These people are the proponents of the gaps argument and these are the ones who need to make a choice about holding to some archaic 2000 year old mythology or embracing reality and the rules which govern it.

Finally, I was watching some old episodes of South Park recently, when I came across one quote, which, viewed in a new light, sums up the essence of the struggle between scientists working toward a solid explanation of our existence and the crazies rehashing a mixed bag of ancient mythologies:

The big questions in life are tough: why are we here, where are we from, where are we going? But if people believe in asshole douchey liars like you, then we're never going to find the real answers to those questions. You're not just lying to people, you're slowing down the progress of all mankind, you douche!

Catholics crack me up!

Unlike some people in the New Atheist movement, I don't think that religious belief is inherently dangerous. It can lead to fundamentalism and extremism but so can any philosophical position if you push it far enough. There are those people who depend on religion as a guide or at least a crutch to explain their lives and the world around them. That's just fine, people are entitled to believe whatever they want, including supporting Man Utd. Personally, I think the world would be worse off without religion because then the rest of us would have nothing to laugh at.

In particular, the recent mid-term elections in the US were a great source of comedy. In Nevada, you had Sharron Angle running for the Senate who believes that the US should pull out of the United Nations because of their liberal agenda and for being "the umpire on fraudulent science such as global warming". Thankfully she lost. In Delaware there was Christine O'Donnell who objects to cloning, stem cell research, evolution, abortion, social security and anything else that can't be explained to her in single syllable words. On the issue of stem cell research she said:

American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains

There's not really much else to say other than wow. Thankfully, she also lost.

None of these nutjobs really compare to this morning's nugget of brilliance from Bill Donahue, President of the American Catholic League. For those out there who are unfamiliar, the Catholic League is a group which professes to defend the rights of catholics in America. Their tagline is "for religious and civil rights". Already they're not off to the best of starts. I don't think that they understand civil rights to mean the same thing that the rest of us do. Particularly when they think that the only right gays should have is to occupy a jail cell. Bill Donahue as president pretends to speak for Catholics. Unfortunately for Bill's career aspirations, catholics already have someone to speak for them. He lives in Rome, wears a lot of funny hats and likes children ... a lot.

This morning he published his reaction to the election results in an article entitled:

Catholics decide the election

Apart from the obvious air of smugness about giving the Democrats a big black eye, there is a fair amount of rhetoric about the persecution of catholics and the unity of their social behaviour. There's nothing new in this. Most catholic writers employ this air of adversity and hardship in their articles which would give an uninformed reader the sense that Catholics are this persecuted minority, hiding their beliefs and meeting in secret. They seem thrilled that they have had such a large influence on the election results. 

As with a lot of religious people, the real problem with this view is reality. There are at the moment approximately 310 million people in the USA. Of these 22% are Roman Catholic. That equates to almost 69 million catholics. In terms of an identifiable social group (i.e. a group united by a single identifying characteristic) they are one of the largest equal to the total number of African-Americans and Hispanic Americans combined. As a religious domination they are the largest, equal in size to the next ten biggest religions combined. In no common sense of the word could you possibly describe catholics as a minority.

Look, Bill, if you're reading this, you probably won't be reading this because you're too busy getting ready to overthrow Ratzi but if you've been doing some egosurfing and stumbled across my little plot of the web by mistake, can you please give the whole persecution complex angle a rest. We're really not buying any of it. People like me who are atheist or other people who really do have to be careful about expressing their beliefs can see right through the act. Catholics have run the world (into the ground) for most of the last two thousand years and for most of that time minorities, particularly those with opposing views were violently suppressed. Before you decide to present yourself as a real victim, try talking to people who really are, you self-righteous wanker. Oh, and one more thing, in response to your obvious pride about the difference that catholics made in the election, here's something to hoist you with your own petard:

In his pride the wicked does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God

 Psalms 10:4

 

Clear and Present Danger

Here in Ireland, we're already far too familiar with the crimes committed by the catholic church. Rape, paedophilia, conspiracy, theft, I could go on but there's only so much space. Now it seems that murder and terrorism are to be added to this list. The publication of the Police Ombudsman's Commission Report into the Claudy bombings in 1972 has found that not only was a catholic priest directly involved in the bombing and other terrorist activities but that the catholic church conspired to pervert the course of justice and protected this priest from prosecution.

The really disgusting part of this whole tragedy was having to listen to Sean Brady being interviewed about the report, claiming that the church did not engage in a cover-up. Brady refers to one of the findings of the report to buttress his claim.

With regard to the role of the Catholic Church, when informed of the level of concerns others had about one of their priests, they challenged Father Chesney about his alleged activities, which he denied. In the course of this enquiry the Police Ombudsman’s investigation found no evidence of any criminal intent on the part of any Church official.

This point is negated somewhat by other findings of the inquiry, particularly this one:

The Police Ombudsman may only investigate and report on matters of alleged police criminality or misconduct. His responsibility in this matter is to reach a determination on the actions of police, not the State or the Catholic Church.

The pro-catholic media are at great pains to point out that the church did not commit any crime in this incident. The reason for this, is the indecisive nature of some of the report's findings. This is exemplified in these excerpts from the report:

There has been commentary in relation to the bombing of Claudy alleging police collusion with the State and the Catholic Church. The term ‘collusion’ has yet to be fully defined and while there are a number of authorities on the subject, there is no single accepted all encompassing definition. The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines the verb ‘collude’ as; ‘Come to a secret understanding; conspire.’

 However, collusion may or may not involve a criminal act.

 Crimes with which church officials, and others, could have been prosecuted include being an accessory after the fact as outlined in the Criminal Law Act 1997 which in turn is based on the Accessories and Abettors Act 1861. Since the catholic church, by their actions, prevented James Chesney from ever being prosecuted, such a charge could not be upheld. It would appear, though, that the church knew about the activities of this priest and wilfully aided his escape from prosecution.

The Cardinal said that he knew that the priest was a very bad man and would see what could be done. The Cardinal mentioned the possibility of transferring him to Donegal.’

Clearly the catholic church felt that murder and terrorism were not grounds for being removed from the priesthood as no disciplinary action was taken.

Of course this shouldn't really surprise anyone. Just a year after the events in Claudy a priest named Patrick Ryan refused a transfer to England and resigned from the priesthood. On 1st May 1988 Ryan was arrested by Belgian police as a result of intelligence that he was acting as the quartermaster of an IRA active service unit in Belgium. Police who raided the house where he was staying seized bomb-making equipment, manuals and a large sum of foreign currency. The case never went to trial as the extradition to England was denied on the basis of prejudicial remarks made in the House of Commons. Later in 1993, Ryan was tried in the Special Criminal Court on charges of receiving stolen goods. This incident raises the question: Why was the Church so eager to transfer this priest to England?

The cumulative impact of these incidents is troubling in the extreme. When the Organized Crime Control Act was passed in the United States in 1970 it defined organized crime as:

The unlawful activities of [...] a highly organized, disciplined association [...]

I think that definition applies to the catholic church quite nicely. They have demonstrated a continued disregard for the legal system and a willingness to subvert the laws of the state at every turn. It's hardly surprising given comments like this one:

No court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined.

That quote was from USCCB president Cardinal Francis George speaking on Judge Walker's ruling on Prop 8.

It's time that the people of this country woke up to the activities of the church and decide if there should be a place for it in the future of our country.

What I've been saying all along!

I have in the past described certain sectors of the Catholic Church as fascists, particularly those activists who push to have catholic principles turned into legislation. There are a growing number of catholics both in the hierarchy of the church and among its lay congregation that would like to enforce catholic views on the general population. I have also been conscious of Godwin's law and thus have tried to stick to the official definition of fascism without straying into dealing with Nazi Germany. The fact remains that using the term fascist brings with it an implication of exaggeration and extremism. It was interesting, therefore, to find this video on the web which proclaims that to protect civilisation that only Catholics should be allowed to vote.

The video is pretty scary stuff. He begins by differentiating between those who study candidates and examine issues and those who don't. He then goes on to say that those who study the issues and have society's best interests at heart should only be allowed to vote. He doesn't seem to grasp that there are those of us out there that study the issues and the candidates but disagree with Catholic teaching on the subject. We too are acting out of the interest of a better society and I have to say that one founded on progressive principles, freedom, human rights and reason is far better than one founded on outdated superstitions and protecting child rapists.

This video should have a particular resonance for Irish people after the controversy on Good Friday this year. To clarify my argument against the law on pub closures and other measures that this idiot and others like him would propose: Yes, if you consider yourself a Catholic then you shouldn't drink on Good Friday, have an abortion, get divorced, use condoms or get married to someone of the same gender. Those are the rules of YOUR religion though, not mine. Those of us who are not catholic should not be bound by them.

**Additional**
The video above has since been pulled from both You Tube and the source website. In a video response the author blames the takedown on the abuse he received from "Angry Atheists" regarding the content of the video. He suggested that only faithful catholics should get to vote and that a catholic dictatorship was the optimal form of government. He rightly got his ass flamed from some pissed off atheists and people who have a problem with bullshit. Gee, I wonder why anyone would have a problem with a catholic dictatorship.

Cosmic Justice

Sometimes, you come across those news stories that really put a smile on your face and brighten your day. Like this one, for example.

Irish nuns sue Morgan Stanley over bond

The long and the short of the story is that famed investment brokers Morgan Stanley have lost €6m invested by The Holy Faith Sisters which they are now seeking to recover. I don't have much more to say than HAW HAW! It's about time an institution with a history of child rape and covering up child rape gets some karmic payback. 

On a separate note though, six million Euro was lost by Morgan Stanley. Really? Six million? Whatever happened to a vow of poverty. How much taxpayer money was pissed away paying for compensation of clerical sex abuse when the catholic church had this kind of scratch all along?

I've gotta go now, its very hard to type when you're laughing your ass off!

Failure of nerve - the difficulty in debating religion

In his book "Profiles of the Future" Arthur C. Clarke wrote that predicting the future is a dangerous business, especially when your predictions are limited to science and technology. The pitfalls of prediction can be grouped into two distinct classes according to Clarke, failure of imagination and failure of nerve.

Failure of imagination is the more intangible of the two since it deals with the ability, or lack thereof, of prognosticators to predict the emergence of technology for which there is no current scientific basis. Clarke highlights the discovery of X-rays by Roentgen in 1895 as a prime example of this, but for me the best example of failure of imagination lies outside the realm of science and in the world of science fiction. One of my favourite sci-fi authors is Robert Heinlein, who most people will probably only be familiar with through Starship Troopers. 

Heinlein had a wonderful imagination but he was, unfortunately, not born with the gift of foresight. His novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, depicts the return to Earth of a man whose parents had been the first astronauts to visit Mars. A human raised by Martians, he returns home and finds that he doesn't fit into either society. Set in a futuristic earth, the novel is incredibly detailed but the most advanced piece of communications technology is a telex machine. The novel, having been written before the invention of the silicon chip, could not possibly have predicted the widespread proliferation of the home computer or the development of the internet.

Failure of nerve, on the other hand is far more common and represents the failure of people to anticipate the emergence of a new technology even when all the relevant facts are available. One of the better examples of this is the opinion of Professor A.W. Bickerton who in 1926 wrote:

The foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments. Let us critically examine the proposal. For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15180 calories ... The energy of our most violent explosive - nitroglycerine - is less than 1500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth ... Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible ...

There are quite a few errors in the professor's assertion, chief among which is the failure to realise that if nitroglycerine only contains 1/10 the energy needed for escape velocity then that simply means that you need ten times the weight of payload in fuel to achieve escape. It does highlight, however, the means by which a person's resistance to an idea can blind them to the basic facts about it.

The same problems are encountered when people's religious ideology dominates their opinions. Several high profiles scientists and players in the evolution-creation controversy have commented on the difficulties they encounter in debating creationists. Eugenie Scott, director of the National Centre for Science Education, coined the term "Gish gallop" as an example of how Duane Gish, former VP of the Institute for Creation research, quickly presents arguments and then changes topic thus denying his opponent a chance to respond. Other high profile creationist debaters such as Ken Ham and Kent Hovind employ similar tactics to beat down their opponent or to have the semblance of having triumphed in the debate.

The real problem with debating creationists and god botherers is not their debating tactics, though, it is the way in which they see the world in the first place. To have a proper debate it is necessary to see your opponents side of the argument. You may not agree with the position but for the purposes of the debate and in order to better argue your own position, you should at least be able to understand what they're talking about. This characteristic is absent in committed religious people, I have found.

Although I am deferring to Scott Adams yet again, I think that in this case another of his 32 illogical ways to argue can best simplify the problem:

6. GENERALIZING FROM SELF

Example: I'm a liar. Therefore, I don't believe what you're saying.

 Fundamentalists assume that the way in which they see the world is the way others see the world just in a different shade or flavour.

The biggest example of this is, of course, Darwin. Evolution has for the lack of a better word, evolved, since the days of Charles Darwin. The contributions of scientists such as Gregor Mendel, JBS Haldane and Oswald Avery as well as modern evolutionary scientists such as PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley have expanded Darwin's theory and enhanced our understanding of the process of evolution and the world we live in. To explain this progress a little better, here's David Attenborough sticking it to the creationists.

In contrast to the vast array of accumulated evidence on evolution, the creationists have ... the bible. The trouble is that because creationists have based their entire argument on one single book then they automatically assume that evolutionary scientists have done the same. They constantly attack Darwin and The Origin of Species as if it were the only source of evidence. A short list of books by creationists illustrates the point:

• Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Philip E. Johnson
• Darwin's Black Box, Michael Behe
• Evolution: Good Science? Exposing the ideological nature of Darwin's Theory, Dominic Statham
• The Case Against Darwin: Why the evidence should be examined, James Perloff
• Darwin's Mistake: Antediluvian discoveries prove: dinosaurs and humans co-existed, Hans J. Zillmer and Tracey Evans

 A deeper and scarier delusion on the part of fundamentalists is that there is no such thing as atheism. These people are only able to see the world in different shades of belief. The idea that someone could say: No, I don't believe in any religion or deity is so alien that they reject the possibility outright. Instead they choose to label atheism as a religion as shown in this excerpt from Ken Ham's view on the Copenhagen Declaration:

Recently, atheists met at a conference in Copenhagen and released what they call their “Copenhagen Declaration on Religion in Public Life,” which really means they released their statement of faith and their declaration against Christianity. Their declaration is reprinted below and indented, which is interspersed with my translation (not indented) on what they actually mean. These atheists think they can indoctrinate the public by their statements, but many are awake (and hopefully this blog post will help even more people to awaken) to their agenda to indoctrinate the public in their anti-God religion.

The fact that the article is titled "Atheists Outline Their Global Religious Agenda" shouldn't really surprise anyone. Nor should the fact that this view is not the raving of some lone lunatic. Conservapedia, the conservative translation of Wikipedia agrees with Ken Ham. Indeed a quote from Conservapedia attributed to "The Christian Cyclopedia" states:

It is not possible for a man to be an atheist, in the commonly accepted sense, in his innermost conviction. No amount of reasoning will erase from the human heart the God-given conviction that there is a Supreme Being; those who theoretically deny God's existence replace Him with something else.

No, no, no. With all due respect to the Christians out there, are you cracked? Beg, borrow or steal a dictionary and look up atheism. In the words of Scott Adams (damn twice in post):

 Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.

 As long this ideological roadblock exists in the minds of religious people, those of us interested in presenting rational arguments and a naturalistic explanation for life are going to have a tough time. To finish, a quote from one of my favourite shows, The Unit, which gets right to the heart of our problem:

A coward thinks that all other men are cowards and a thief believes all others are thieves.

And then there's really bad science ...

Following on from the developing scandal over autism treatments in Florida, Virology Journal has published a paper which is so ridiculous it makes the autism study seem like a Nobel prize candidate in comparison. The paper reports a case study by three paediatricians from Hong Kong who have discovered (at least in their tiny minds) the first recorded case of the flu. Unfortunately for science it wasn't in some archaeological dig or some previously forgotten tome, it was in the Bible. 

The authors analyse the case of a woman laid up with a supposedly febrile illness which is documented in no less than three separate gospels. The authors then proceed to perform a differential diagnosis of the condition from the admittedly flimsy evidence. It's the analysis though that really cracks me up.

 The doctors (I use the term very loosely here) open by saying that the analysis is difficult because there is only one symptom and no accurate quantification of the fever (what with the Fahrenheit scale not being invented until 1724). I guess in those days people had no word for "hot".

The first diseases that get knocked off the list are severe acute bacterial infections (i.e. septicaemia, endocarditis, E. Coli etc.). This is because the fever disappeared the moment Jesus placed his hand on the woman's forehead. So, Jesus had the ability to cure flu, leprosy, blindness and even death but not bacterial infections. I guess God didn't want to spoil the surprise of discovering antibiotics.

 The next group to go are autoimmune diseases like SLE and sarcoidosis since the Bible doesn't mention a rash. Really? I'm shocked that such a thorough medical text like the Bible would leave out a conclusive list of symptoms and patient history for such an important case of miraculous bullshit.

Cancer is next to go, for the same reason as bacterial infections. Gee, Jesus must have had to do extensive research to figure out which patients he could miraculously heal and those he couldn't.

The paper then goes far out into lunatic country and discounts modern epidemic viruses such as SARS and avian flu based on the lack of details that would have been mentioned if they were present. It's really amazing how three Chinese doctors can divine the mindset of some writer 2000 years ago to identify which details he (or she) would have included or not. That level of mad skill would warrant a paper of its own, at least in this journal.

The final (I can't even bring myself to type disease) "condition" that the authors rule out is demonic possession. The following is the relevant part of the discussion which I have reproduced so we can all bask in the insanity:

One final consideration that one might have is whether the illness was inflicted by a demon or devil. The Bible always tells if an illness is caused by a demon or devil (Matthew 9:18-25, 12:22, 9:32-33; Mark 1:23-26, 5:1-15, 9:17-29; Luke 4:33-35, 8:27-35, 9:38-43, 11:14) [1]. The victims often had what sounded like a convulsion when the demon was cast out. In our index case, demonic influence is not stated, and the woman had no apparent convulsion or residual symptomatology.

 Its funny that the authors gloss over the fact that they've just used the words demonic influence in a scientific paper. They seem to think that demonic influence is a perfectly reasonable diagnosis (although not in this case), which I suppose shouldn't surprise anyone given the overall tone of the paper.

All jokes aside, how did this paper get published? My theory is that the editor was either drunk, disgruntled or in a pranskter mood or all of the above, because no sane person could read this paper past the abstract without falling to the floor in fits of laughter (I know I did). If this is the level to which science has descended, then I'm off to burn my degree.

I may have been wrong ... again

OK, so I try not to make a habit of being wrong but at least I'm willing to man up and say so when it happens. With all the recent hubbub about the Prop 8 ruling in California I ended up reading the US constitution again looking for references to marriage. It was then when I came across the 10th amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The standard interpretation of this amendment is that all legal issues which are not explicitly the jurisdiction of the federal government remain a matter for the individual states to decide for themselves. It follows that some higher court may indeed rule that the Prop 8 ruling is none of the federal government's business and that the ban should stand. I hope not but it certainly seems possible. Having said that, the 14th amendment problem remains and the real legal question is how to determine a resolution between two conflicting parts of the constitution. In the words of Ned Flanders, that's a noodle scratcher.

Swing and a miss

David Quinn, head of the Iona Institute, has posted an article about the California Prop 8 ruling entitled "The redefinition of marriage". Mr. Quinn, for those of you who don't know, is a prominent god botherer who runs a 'conservative think-tank' aimed at defending marriage and families. In truth, Quinn is a dipshit who thinks that somehow he speaks for Catholics a la Bill Donohue. FYI David, catholics already have someone to speak for them, he lives in Rome and wears big silly hats. Normally Mr. Quinn is content to rehash the latest news stories from a catholic point of view, particularly those with an Irish interest. In recent months he has turned his attention to gay marriage, however, particularly with the passing of the Civil Partnership Bill.
Normally I'd be happy to ignore such people but this homophobic diatribe disguised as defending 'traditional marriage' and children is really starting to annoy me. This new piece was actually more amusing than annoying though. In it, he states that the problem with the California ruling is not that the opinions of the voters is being ignored nor that the realm of marriage is not the federal government's proper area (read the 10th amendment) but that the ruling dangerously redefines marriage (which of course is all part of a gay left-wing plot).

It was bad enough in 1950s America with the idea of a red menace without resorting to a new era of McCarthyism by terrifying dumb people about a pink menace.
Mr. Quinn's fatal mistake, is of course the beatuy of the US constitution (and the Irish one for that matter) which doesn't include a definition of marriage. The lawmakers who draft such documents are careful, intelligent people who treat the wording very seriously. It's not the first time that he has made such an error in his interpretation of the constitution. In an earlier post attacking Dermot Ahern, he comments:

But apart from the fact that the Constitution prevents him pressing on to full gay marriage ...

Clearly David Quinn has not bothered to read the Article 41.3.1 of the Irish constitution which states:

The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.

You will note that nowhere in this passage, or any other passage, are the terms marriage or family defined. 

After this opening gambit, the post really loses touch with reality and tries to argue that gay marriage is the start of a slippery slope towards the downfall of civilisation. While conveniently ignoring the fact that Holland, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Iceland, Portugal, Norway, South Africa, Sweden and Argentina have all legalised same-sex marriage without coming apart at the seams, he argues that if you legalise gay marriage then there is no legal basis for denying polyamorous marriage or a man who wants to marry his cat. 

This is a good example of the kind of straw man argument that David Quinn and other opponents of gay marriage are so fond of using. Clearly the opponents to same-sex marriage have reached the bottom of the barrel of baseless arguments and have resorted to hiding their suppositions in fearmongering and logical fallacies. Look David, we know that you're against gay marriage and we know why you're against gay marriage. The fact of the matter is that the days of Catholicism ruling the country is gone and using the same old religious bullshit to sideswipe the masses isn't going to work on the well-educated, literate, modern society we have today. So please, come clean about your bigotry, don't try to insult our intelligence with pleas to children's welfare and most of all, fuck off. 

By the way, to all religious people who want to use the polygamy argument in opposition to gay marriage, you might want to go back and read your bibles first:

If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. Exodus 21:10

 If a man has two wives, and he loves one but not the other, and both bear him sons but the firstborn is the son of the wife he does not love, when he wills his property to his sons, he must not give the rights of the firstborn to the son of the wife he loves in preference to his actual firstborn, the son of the wife he does not love. Deuteronomy 21:15-16

The problem with Catholicism is Catholics

I came across a website recently (today if I'm honest) which I regret I didn't know about before the Civil Partnership Bill debate. It's called Catholic Voice and right there you know there's something wrong because if there's one thing that Catholics (especially in this country) are not short of it's a voice. The website is well worth a look because it contains the best argument against gay marriage that I've seen to date. Well not the best argument logically obviously, the fact that it's on a Catholic website kinda rules that out, but it's certainly the funniest.

The primary focus of the site is a six-point analysis of gay marriage and the move to legislate it. So here they are.

Natural marriage is the foundation of a civilised society.

"Natural" marriage ... really? I'm sure we've all heard the 'homosexuality is unnatural' argument before and in the words of Oolon Colluphid, it's all a load of dingo's kidneys. Natural marriage, however is an exceptionally stupid idea. Since marriage is a social construct, one cannot define marriage as natural. In any case, since marriages have taken every form imaginable throughout human history, the idea of a stereotypical marriage let alone a natural one is laughable.

Same-sex unions, as pseudo-marriages, involve gravely sinful acts that are never defensible, and the very assimilation to marriage damages marriage itself.

There are so many problems with this sentence that it's hard to know how they squeezed them all in. First of all, how is a gay marriage a pseudo-marriage. As far as I can tell the only difference between a homosexual and heterosexual marriage is the prospect of having children. I know lots of straight couples who, through either choice or unfortunate consequences of biology, don't have children. Does that mean that their marriages should be considered pseudo-marriages? As for the gravely sinful acts, a civilised society, which Catholics always seem intent on protecting should not use any one religion as a basis for creating laws. We certainly shouldn't use the Bible at least, lest we end up with people being stoned to death for working on Sunday or laws that say slavery is acceptable. Finally, since when does allowing gay marriage damage the concept of marriage. Surely it's all the same except in the little rat maze known as a Catholic's brain.

The law is a great teacher, and it encourages or discourages behaviour.

 It's true that the law is a great teacher, it's just a pity that it can't teach these ignorant fucktards something about human rights. As for encouraging behaviour, well that's true too, but not in the way the author intended. Laws can often encourage illegal behaviour and create black markets for items through their prohibition, we've all seen The Untouchables after all. Passing a law which allows something rather than forbids, however, has the effect of legitimising that behaviour which is why the Catholics have a problem with the Civil Partnership Bill. The problem is though that legitimising gay marriage is kinda the point, we want to get across a message that it's OK to be gay and that gay people should have the rights to engage in a loving relationship and have that relationship sanctioned by the state just as straight people have had for thousands of years.


Government-backed same sex civil unions would encourage and normalise homosexual behaviour, and it would harm natural marriage, children, adults, and homosexuals themselves.

You know, I really hate it when people use technical terms in a non-technical sense, especially when they get it wrong. (Actually that's given me an idea for a new post) Normalise means to reduce the variation in a population by reducing irrelevant aspects. I suspect that the author means legitimise, in which case I suggest he/she buy a dictionary next time, but I've already dealt with that so let's move on. This point does clarify the last point to some extent, showing that the author means encouraging homosexual behaviour. The idea that someone would turn gay just because they can get married now is ridiculous, but the change does mean that more gay people will have the confidence to speak out without fear of bigotry and prejudice of the kind that Catholics are so eager to peddle. Gay marriage harms children, adults and the couples themselves, ... right. Harming children is a hard one to answer because it's hard to see how children come into a debate on marriage rights. If these people are worried about gay couples seeking adoption rights then, a) that's a different argument altogether and b) gay parents could hardly do any worse than the straight parents of all the teenage criminals getting banged up day in, day out, could they? Harming adults is even more curious since the only thing that gay marriage could harm in adults is the absurdly inflated sense of ego of religious people who consider themselves and their marriages superior to gay marriage. As for harming themselves, at least here the author is being truthful. A lot of marriages do involve some considerable degree of misery and unhappiness and the divorce rate is quite high, but then why would that be a reason to deny gay couples the right to marry.


The law should promote behaviours that are beneficial and prohibit (or at least not endorse) those that are destructive.

This point needs some translation into English (from bullshit) in order to understand it better. What this point actually says is that the government should do what I think is right because of some religion where ordaining women is a crime as serious as child molestation and homosexuals are evil. Furthermore, I and my religious cohorts should have our worldview promoted so that we can continue to cause misery and suffering to thousands of people worldwide. Seriously though, the argument actually calls for the prohibition of "destructive behaviours" without, of course, definining such a behaviour so that future laws should prohibit anything that Catholics don't agree with. Gee, there's a rational idea for you.

Therefore, the law should promote natural marriage, and it should provide no option for government-backed same-sex marriage or civil unions.

I can't believe that this dipshit uses the word "therefore" at the start of this point. The word "therefore" implies that you are drawing a conclusion but not even this raving lunatic could possibly think that the five points which preceded it formed any kind of body of evidence or coherent argument. As well as being complete bullshit, they don't follow any line of thought from one to the next. This argument reminds me of Scott Adams' book 'The Joy of Work' which I first read about ten years ago but keep going back to every now and again. One of the chapters (I can't remember which one) contains a brilliant section called "You Are Wrong Because..." which details 32 different logical fallacies and some examples. You can read the full list here. In this case, I could choose any number of logical fallacies but the most appropriate one is:

32. PROOF BY LACK OF EVIDENCE

Example: I've never seen you drunk, so you must be one of those
Amish people.

Anyone who thinks that this argument makes sense should have their head examined, but then again anyone who has a website like Catholic Voice in their favourites probably already qualifies. If you're going to argue against human rights don't use a textbook of prejudice and hatred as your source material and definitely pick some points that can't be torn apart in under, say, a minute.

The only thing worse than bad science is ... worse science

New Scientist has a worthwhile article by Jim Giles on a controversy developing in the States regarding a new treatment for autism.

This is not the first time that the words autism, vaccine and controversy have found themselves tied together, at least not on this side of the Atlantic. In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published an article in the Lancet which suggested a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autistic spectrum disorder. The paper itself showed no basis for making such a conclusion but that didn't stop Wakefield making a name for himself on the pundit circuit as an expert in legal cases against vaccine manufacturers. It turned out that Wakefield had been bankrolled by some of the litigants involved and his credibility was rightly destroyed. It took six years for the other authors of the paper to retract their conclusions and another six years before the journal itself retracted the paper. Unfortunately this wasn't enough to stop Wakefield from scaring the everloving shit out of an untold number of parents around the world. Here in Ireland, the fallout from the controversy resulted in a drop in immunisation rates to below 80% and in some areas to as low as 60%. This resulted in a vastly increased number of hospital admissions leading to the deaths of three children, while more were left seriously ill.

Now a father and son team, Mark and David Geier have taken a leaf out of Wakefield's book and ignited a new vaccine controversy. In this case, however, the danger lies in the Geiers' promotion of a new treatment for autism, which is so dangerous it's hard to believe that anyone has taken them seriously. The Geiers published an article in Medical Hypotheses in 2005 which suggested Lupron as a possible treatment for autism. Lupron is a GnRH analog which is commonly used in the treatment of cancers such as breast cancer and prostate cancer because it has the effect of lowering the testosterone levels in the body. As a result it is also used to treat cases of steroid abuse. It can cause serious side-effects, however, such as respiratory distress and can even lead to a higher mortality rate in prostate cancer patients who also have a risk of heart disease. The Geier theory is that mercury is a leading cause of autism and that in the body mercury binds to testosterone. Therefore if the testosterone level can be lowered, a similar reduction in mercury level can be achieved. Unfortunately for the Geiers, such a mechanism is wholly unsupported by the evidence and led to the American Academy of Pediatrics publishing this consensus statement.

Since the Geiers' paper many more institutes have weighed in on the controversy and all have concluded that there is no basis for linking mercury with autism. This should have put the final nail in the coffin of this whole sorry business. Does it ever really work that way though? Now the Geiers have convinced a group of doctors in Florida to start treating children using Lupron. Such a development is likely to grow before the relevant authorities or good science steps in. We can only hope that this happens sooner rather than later. The difficulty is that the trust placed in doctors by parents can sometimes be extremely fragile and a controversy like this is likely to do irreparable damage to that trust as well as put the lives of thousands of children in danger.

The lesson here is that doctors should follow the science and not their own opinions or their wallets. In the words of Rodney McKay from Stargate Atlantis:

Medicine is about as much of a science as ... voodoo.

Wherein the conspiracy is exposed

Yesterday's good news from California has already started to weed out the kind of homophobic bigoted assholes who supported this insane law in the first place. We shouldn't be surprised then that the group leading the charge of the intolerant is the Catholic Church. The US Catholic Bishops Conference has reacted to the ruling as a "misuse of the law".

The ruling centres on Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which states:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The highlighted parts of the passage above are the relevant ones. It seems pretty clear to me that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional on these grounds. Then again, maybe it's just me since I also thought that the above amendment would have prevented racial segregation laws but obviously not.

The Church's problem with the ruling is not a differing interpretation of the constitution. That would almost be acceptable. The Church's problem with the ruling is far more deep-seated. In the words of Cardinal Francis George, President of the US Catholic Bishops Conference:

It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage. No court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined.

 It's interesting to note that by uttering two simple sentences Mr. George has managed to get it wrong twice. Firstly, there are things in this world, such as truth and justice, which are not subject to popular vote. The fact that people believed the earth was flat two thousand years ago didn't make it so, nor does the will of the people justify the denial of basic human rights. Secondly, he manages to fall into the age-old trap of defining homosexuality as "unnatural" or "defying the law of nature". Tackling this level of lunacy is no small task and would take up some considerable column inches and so I direct you to PZ Myers post over at Pharyngula. In this post he responds to the firing of Kenneth Howell from the University of Illinois and puts some very large holes in the "homosexuality is unnatural" argument. Here is an excerpt which distills the debate into one nice simple rebuttal:

REALITY, huh?

Here's reality. A penis fits nicely in the hand, and a hand is usually better at stimulating the clitoris than a penis in the vagina, and our anatomy is such that our arms are of the right length to comfortably reach our genitals. Therefore, masturbation is a moral sexual act. We can extend this to point out that a man's hand can stimulate a clitoris and a woman's hand can stimulate a penis, and therefore, mutual masturbation, as is being practiced by tens of thousands of teenagers on this Friday night, is also a rightful act. There is no practical difference in anatomy or physiology between mutual masturbation between a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple, so these acts are also entirely natural.

 In the end, the happy consequence of this ruling is that it gives the Catholic Church another chance to show themselves for the homophobic fascists that they are. The sooner the world wakes up to this fact the better for society. In the words of Emile Zola:

Society shall not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Killing Science Softly

The BBC has reported that the Catholic Church has given £25,000 it doesn't have to a researcher in the University of Bristol to fund 'ethical' stem cell research. Professor Neil Scolding has decided to become a Vatican shill to get some funding to use adult stem cells to help cure multiple sclerosis.

Before you all starting lighting your torches and sharpening your pitchforks, I must say that developing a cure or even better treatments for a disease as debilitating as MS is very honourable and worthwhile. Attempting to do so using bad science isn't. The Catholic Church have realised that simply voicing their opposition to embryonic stem cell research isn't going to have the effect they're hoping for. Instead they have seized on the opportunity of these recessionary times by bending academics and researchers to their will with the temptation of lucrative research grants. 

The problem here is not the sponsorship of the Catholic Church although, that is worrying in itself. The real problem here is the attempt to steer research away from embryonic stem cells. I'm not going to go into the long version of the difference between embryonic and adult stem cells here but anyone who wants to can read more here. The basic difference between embryonic and adult stem cells is that embryonic cells are pluripotent meaning that they can be differentiated (made to change their basic shape and function) into any number of different cell types through instructions from DNA (in the case of a developing foetus) or external influences (in the case of an in-vitro experiment). Adult stem cells on the other hand are multipotent or oligopotent meaning that they can be differentiated into different cell types but not as many as embryonic cells nor can they replicate indefinitely as embryonic cells do. This difference is caused by the inherent purpose of each stem cell type. Embryonic stem cells are intended to grow a human from a group of blank cells using DNA as a schematic. Adult stem cells are intended as a short to medium term repair mechanism to replace the different cell types in a particular organ as they become damaged or die such as osteoblasts and osteoclasts in bones. 

As a result of this difference embryonic stem cells have a much wider application in disease research. In particular they can help to understand how diseases, which have previously been difficult to understand, such as cystic fibrosis behave and develop clinical models as a result.

The controversy of the use of terminated embryos in stem cell research has of course had some positive effects. The desire of some scientists to avoid such controversy has led to the development of induced pluripotent cells which use the delivery of genes to differentiated cells to achieve a pluripotent cell similar to an embryonic stem cell. This has already generated some breakthroughs, most notably this case study of sickle cell anaemia in mice.

The message to be derived from all of this then is twofold. Firstly to the Catholic Church, stop sticking your nose in where it doesn't belong and leave the science to good scientists who really are interested in saving lives. Secondly to scientists like Neil Scolding, your first duty is to the science. Any organisation like the Catholic Church who waves a carrot like that in front of you should start some alarm bells ringing straight away.