The Catholic constitution
‘The Confraternity of Catholic Clergy’ attempts to throw its weight around.
The Confraternity of Catholic Clergy (a national association of 600 priests & deacons) respond to the sacrilegious and blasphemous desecration of the Holy Eucharist by asking for public reparation…We find the actions of University of Minnesota (Morris) Professor Paul Myers reprehensible, inexcusable, and unconstitutional. His flagrant display of irreverence by profaning a consecrated Host from a Catholic church goes beyond the limit of academic freedom and free speech.
Unconstitutional? How’s that?
The same Bill of Rights which protect freedom of speech also protect freedom of religion. The Founding Fathers did not envision a freedom FROM religion, rather a freedom OF religion.
Clever; we’ve never heard that before. But however fresh and original, it’s still stupid and wrong. Freedom of religion of course does include freedom from religion. Freedom of religion necessarily includes the freedom to say No to all the choices on offer; it even includes the freedom to say No to any possible choices. If it doesn’t it isn’t freedom of religion, it’s freedom among religions, which is a much smaller and pettier freedom.
In other words, our nation’s constitution protects the rights of ALL religions, not one and not just a few. Attacking the most sacred elements of a religion is not free speech anymore than would be perjury in a court or libel in a newspaper.
No; wrong again. Our nation’s constitution does not protect the rights of religions. Religions don’t have rights; rights are not things ascribed to abstractions or institutions, they are ascribed to people or people and other sentient beings (animals). Rights are connected to the ability to experience something. Religions don’t have rights. Individual believers have rights; religions do not. And as for the second sentence – that’s just a flat-out absurdity. It’s simply obviously not true. Clearly the priests would like it to be true, but it isn’t true, because the US is not a Catholic dictatorship.
[P]ublicly burning copies of the Christian Bible or the Muslim Koran, especially by a faculty member of a public university, are just as heinous and just as unconstitutional.
No. These guys just can’t get their facts right. Burning copies of the Bible or the Koran is not unconstitutional. It just isn’t.
Individual freedoms are limited by the boundaries created by the inalienable rights of others. The freedom of religion means that no one has the right to attack, malign or grossly offend a faith tradition they personally do not have membership or ascribe allegiance.
Oh, godalmighty…These poor schmucks are so delusional. No, no, no, you saps, the freedom of religion does not mean that no one has the right to ‘malign or grossly offend a faith tradition’ unless they belong to it. Jeezis. I, for one, have the right to malign your horrible faith tradition, that does its best to prevent women from being able to limit how many children they have, that does its best to prevent men from wearing condoms during a raging pandemic of a lethal STD. We all have that right. And people like you telling us we don’t just motivates us to exercise that right all the more. If you stopped trying to force everyone to genuflect to your particular piety, we wouldn’t take the time to play with crackers. But as it is – well gee, bring out the Cheez-whiz.
Right on! Do you think they will get the point?
Probably not! I don’t suppose they read B&W much.
If I do not have the freedom to not have a religion — wow, that’s just an awkward construction no matter how you try to word it — then I obviously must have a religion.
Wow. Freedom IS slavery. At least in HolyCrackerLand, anyway.
To take their stupid argument somewhat seriously, it’s difficult to see what harms to individuals result from burning a Bible or Koran. Their two examples, perjury and libel, directly harm a person’s rights to due process and livelihood (assuming the libel in question is a. untrue and b. connected to their work). How, exactly, does burning (or driving a nail through) a Bible harm anyone? It may hurt a believer’s feelings, but by that logic there should be an indefinite gag order on John McCain because he’s said things that probably hurt Barack Obama’s feelings.
I will now shower to remove the stupid.
OB: “Clever; we’ve never heard that before.”
You really haven’t heard the “freedom of” not “freedom from” before?
How have you managed to evade that old argument:
http://atheism.about.com/od/churchstatemyths/a/freedomfrom.htm
Sightly off-topic, but all this palaver about catholic vegetarian cannibalism reminded me of this:- http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=129208&title=flesh-in-the-pan
Really, though, who is this Confraternity of Catholic Clergy? As far as I can tell, the infamous Catholic League is almost entirely composed of the perpetually apoplectic Bill Donohue and his persecution complex (which, admittedly, is big enough to require its own organization – and probably a substantial addition to his home). Is there a legitimate organization behind this absurd press release, or just a handful cranky priests (or one)?
I jest, but I’m also curious. Upon minimal reflection, it occurs to me that actual Catholic priests don’t so much have guilds and unions and “confraternaties” and such – they have a (notoriously rigid) hierarchy. They don’t belong to a club, they are assigned to a diocese, and no organization speaks for them but The Church – or, in actuality, some bishop or other. So who or what is this CCF, really? Does Donohue have a second, even more official-sounding sock puppet to feed his vast menagerie of pet peeves?
(And yes, I am aware that I hit the “liquify” button on the metaphors in that last sentence. It’s late. Pureed metaphor is a lovely bedtime drink. Much better than warm milk. G’night!)
A group of theists can come out with this pile of monomaniacal drivel and they have the audacity to acuse atheists of being arrogant.
Keith, I’ve heard of it, a lot – I was being heavily ironic. (Joe Lieberman is one bore who is fond of saying that. God I hate Joe Lieberman.)
OK can PZ pass me the next set of communion wafers. Having being baptised a catholic I guess I can say and do whatever I want. Of course my membership of the church may be in doubt after I told the Chinese Evangelical Christians that no I didn’t “believe in Jesus” last night.
‘…no one has the right to attack, malign or grossly offend a faith tradition they personally do not have membership or ascribe allegiance.’
How would that even work? If you malign or grossly offend a faith tradition then presumably your allegiance is ambivilent at best and your membership likely to be rescinded.
Besides, surely every religion which asserts its unique ownwership of ultimate truth offends every other religion which claims the same?
And I’m sure a lot of satanists are grossly offended by RC’s comments on their dude, not to mention all those exorcists…
“In other words, our nation’s constitution protects the rights of ALL religions, not one and not just a few. Attacking the most sacred elements of a religion is not free speech anymore than would be perjury in a court or libel in a newspaper.”
Wait a minute. To partake of a Catholic Mass involves asserting a belief in the divinity and ressurection of Christ. Both are expressly rejected in the Quran. You cannot BE a Catholic without ‘[a]ttacking the most sacred elements of’ Islam, nor can you accept the infallibility of the Quran without publicly attacking the core concepts of Christianity.
The stupid, as they say, it burns.
Meanwhile, as OB’s post copies from the CCC’s own press-release, there are only 600 of these whackos, who are doubtless too dim to get anywhere in the hierarchy, and so have formed their own club of stupid. Little things like basic logical consistency are clearly beyond them, let alone historical knowledge of the US constitution.
But, as usual, their underlying attitudes reflect the free pass given to organised religion the world over to be as stupid as it likes.
“Wait a minute. To partake of a Catholic Mass involves asserting a belief in the divinity and ressurection of Christ. Both are expressly rejected in the Quran. You cannot BE a Catholic without ‘[a]ttacking the most sacred elements of’ Islam, nor can you accept the infallibility of the Quran without publicly attacking the core concepts of Christianity.”
Well, of course. What they really mean is that secularists need to shut the fuck up and leave religion alone.
Once the mean bad atheists are out of the way, the religionists can drop the facade of interfaith cooperation and go back to calling each other subhuman monsters and crusading against each other the old-fashioned way.