COMMENT re: Melanie McDonagh Wants No Catholic Bashing
Indeed and this is what she is reacting to:
“Tanya Gold, in Tuesday’s G2, pretty well summed up every prejudice going, other than the one about him being a Nazi. She summarised the charges thus: “Joseph Ratzinger has colluded in the protection of paedophiles and the deaths of millions of Africans.” Mmm. She says he said that bishops shouldn’t notify the police about allegations of child abuse under pain of excommunication. And that he gave an easy ride to Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of a religious order, a sex abuser. And, most seriously, the Pope caused countless Aids deaths in Africa by upholding the church’s prohibition on condoms, even saying that they may aggravate the problem. She concludes: “Don’t tread on the corpses.”
This sort of thing is very similar to Nazi propaganda about the Jews. Why should anti-clericalism be regarded as a morally acceptable form of hatred? Specifically – how is it superior to anti-Semitism?
Marie-Therese O’Loughlin that letter out only happened once.it was MC and PJ,although CB was there as were two others MD,TR,but it was the top two who wrote as most of the rest couldn’t write anyway.do you remember we were handed old shoes worn by many over the years once a year from that shoe cupboard and had to wear them weather they fitted or not they never took into account that we were children so our feet might have grown, No such thing as what shoe size we were, we were forced to wear them which resulted in bleeding heal’s and painful feet.which would effect all of us for life.I still have nightmares.
“Do you remember we were handed old shoes worn by many over the years once a year from that shoe cupboard”
Firstly, thanks for that information re the letter. I cannot decipher who M.D. and T.R. are, by their initials?
Yep, I remember clearly getting every year horrible old shoes and toe-lo’s, as we called the latter – and plastic sandals – during the summer months. The summer sandals, etc, were tied in pairs and piled up in a big heap in a very small cupboard opposite Ms. D’s room. I know from a lot of survivors that they subsequently suffered feet problems because of having to wear grossly inadequate foot-wear throughout their young lives.
The large shoe-room (the one I was locked in for hours upon end), right next to Our Lady’s dormitory, housed all the new patent leather shoes and hornpipes that children wore for their communion and confirmation. They were faithfully returned to their respective shoe-boxes after the duration of their special holy days. Children attending court sessions also received shoes from staff members, from this room – which they instantaneously had to return after their appearances in court.
You would never see La la’s hanging out of the small cupboard in search of appropriate footwear. They wore only the very best- sized shoes from the posh shoe-room.
I remember as a child distinctly having to polish all the children’s shoes in the rec – in summer, and in winter – in the yard. Newspapers were laid out in a large space and I polished and polished away over a hundred and fifty pairs of shoes with the help of a handful of other children. We just took it for granted that this was the kind of thing children generally did. We became experts – the prison numbers of children had also to be refreshed on the insides with a special black marker. I know that there was a time when children had to wear hobnailer boots – so we should have considered ourselves lucky in that sense that we escaped by a mere scrape that prisoner boots era.
I remember going into a dreadful tantrum because my communion hornpipes, that were bought especially for me by a host family, were suddenly snatched from me by a staff member, the moment I returned back to the institution, after a week-end out with the host family. I was flogged black and blue by the head honcho for the outburst. This family were big- time into the clothes business and they showered me with handmade beautiful frilly clothes and they too were all confiscated upon my return to Goldenbridge. The pets were to be seen by me afterwards wearing them and oh, how oftentimes, I pulled at their aeroplanes, which were hovering neatly over their swelled heads and caused disarray.
BTW, Bridget S, is a pseudonymous name – am I correct? I personally refuse to hide behind another name anymore – as people in the blogosphere world have the propensity to abuse one and try to rip one even further apart – and it simply compounds unjustifiably the pain and trauma that one suffered as a child. I do not have to worry any longer about people trying to out me as a victim/survivor of institutional abuse. I am proud to stand up and be counted. There is so much fear within most victims/survivors of institutional abuse and I feel that they are still enslaved by their pasts. Why should they feel beholden to their loved ones and hide their pain to safeguard their loved ones security – because in the end it is a false security that is being passed on to them. The truth is better in the end as it sets one free.
I have B&W to thank for being able to express myself as the person I am – now. I would thoroughly recommend to all ex Goldenbridge institution comrades that they should feel free to be themselves and not be what others in their lives might want them to be. We may have been part of the judicial system when we were children, through no fault of our own – but we do not have to always remain criminals or slaves – to ones’ families or the world at large.
Marie.the Dept of education have granted a licence to bully survivors out of Dublin even in many case’s out of Ireland by giving Grants to so called services for survivors within Ireland ,take the aislinn, unless you are prepared to Do as your told ,be quiet, sit in so called drawing class, or dare not have any idea’s or opinions of your own,Places like the aislinn were clever’ly set up for the Church,Christian Brothers, Sisters of Mercy>NO MERCY
Goldenbridge was a brutal concentration camp ,all industrial prison camps were set up to distroy the children of ireland ,which the dept of education and the so called government allowed the so called religious orders to do their dirty work which they carried out with a passion. Justice for Irish Survivors of those brutal regimes.
From what I gather – the dept of health also gives monetary support to Aislinn Centre.
I found the Aislinn Centre to be very stifling and not conducive with healing or good concentration that is so much required for educational studies. As the institutional gang mentality was forever in existence and if one did not adhere to their criteria one was instantly psychologically squashed and put down by the gang.
My biggest gripe, also, is that the main Goldenbridge figures like Christine Buckley, et al, have the monopoly in encountering other ex- Goldenbridge inmates when they come from all over the globe – as Aislinn Centre – during off-peak education hours becomes then a meeting place for them to catch up on old times. Those who do not belong to the cosy cartel are completely frozen out. The inside groups, only, have the privilege of catching up on old times and those of us (including moi) who have been given the cold shoulder are left wondering how their old Goldenbridge inmates are getting along. It is so grossly unfair. Yes, the government has given C.B. carte blanche to act in this very unhealing way.
Yeah, someone ought to bring that fact home to Sr. Helena O’ Donoghue. A sister of mercy who has not got one iota of the reality of the harshness of the regime that existed there.
I still dread to read the Ryan Report as I can already visualise what she has to say pertaining to the children’s lives in the ex-convict women’s refuge. She never stepped a foot inside GB and she had the audacity to tell the CICA that the regime was not overly abusive or harsh or stuff akin to that effect. She sheltered Sr. X. throughout the whole sordid inquiry saga, thinking that she was going to come out of it clean. Alas, they both got their comeuppance at the end of the day.
“But now the leading books are probably those of Michael Martin…”
Martin himself recently endorsed a new book edited by atheist John Loftus:
From Dr. Michael Martin, professor of philosophy emeritus and author of The Case Against Christianity, and Atheism: A Philosophical Justification: “John Loftus and his distinguished colleagues have certainly produced one of the best and arguably the best critique of the Christian faith the world has ever known. Using sociological, biblical, scientific, historical, philosophical, theological and ethical criticisms, this book completely destroys Christianity. All but the most fanatical believers who read it should be moved to have profound doubts.”
From Dr. Dale C. Allison, Jr., author of Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters: “Forget Dawkins. If you are looking for a truly substantial, well-informed criticism of the Christian religion, this is your book. Defenders of the faith will do believer and unbeliever alike a disservice if they do not rise to the challenge and wrestle with the thought-provoking arguments of Loftus and company.”
Paula Cerni writes: The New Atheists therefore tend to dismiss such forms as irrational, which is no explanation at all. Instead, religious phenomena should be explained in an all-round manner involving everything else that goes on in society.
Which leads me to suspect that she has yet to read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon – and would benefit significantly by doing so.
Edmund Standing’s article on the extreme irrationality of the modern incarnation of conservative ideology in the U.S. concludes:
Conservatism is not based on lunatic principles, religious fundamentalism, or pseudo-science. However, that’s the kind of American conservatism that is once again rearing its ugly head following the election of a Democratic President. This is shameful and deeply embarrassing, and doesn’t bode well for the future of sensible conservatism in the US.
I must say, the implication that conservatism has a major component that is sensible and rational, made in the first and last sentences of this paragraph, is not born out by any actual evidence – and I think that evidence is not just missing from this particular essay, but that it is simply missing. I agree that not all conservative thinkers are fundamentalist Christians and science deniers, although it should be noted that many conservatives who don’t deny evolution do deny other science, such as the evidence for anthropogenic global warming, or evidence that shows same-sex attraction is a normal part of the bell curve of not just human but mammalian behavior. But as far as I have ever seen, all conservatives are people of decidedly non-sensible and non-rational faith.
I mean this not in the wishy-washy sense the phrase “people of faith” is usually used, but in the concrete sense that all conservatives have beliefs which they accept and adhere to not only without evidence which supports those beliefs, but in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. (Many liberals also have faith-based ideological beliefs, of course: But that’s not the matter at hand.) Even conservatives who reject fundamentalist religion and avoid reflexive anti-science and anti-intellectual positions tend to have equally unsubstantiated and counter-evidential convictions about one or more of the following conservative ideologies: the magical power of the free market to cure various ills, the private sphere is always and in every way better at solving problems than government, American exceptionalism, a Randian view of human nature as independent and self-created, a whole host of convictions about how much better things were in various past eras (a.k.a. Golden Age-ism, or rose-colored hindsight), sexist assumptions about gender roles (and various is-ought fallacies associated with claims about gender and sexuality, usually where the “is” part is distorted to begin with), and so on. Even just the knee-jerk, reflexive judgment that change is automatically bad – which seems to be a key motivation behind a conservative ideological bent even if one doesn’t want to call it a “belief” per se – seems to be faith-based.
I don’t know whether Edmund Standing considers himself a “sensible conservative” or not, but he claims that such creatures exist. Until I see some evidence to that effect, I will accord claims of their existence and nature the same weight and respect that I give claims about the existence and nature of unicorns, orbiting teapots, and God – that is, none at all. I will agree, though, that more and less irrational conservatives clearly do exist, and that the less irrational conservatives are indeed being given a bad name by their more irrational fellow travelers. I just see no reason to lament this fact; instead, we should celebrate it, if true.
I say this because of the recurring pattern of conservative faith beliefs and their influence on policy. Standing alludes to half of this pattern by noting that the lunatic fringe of conservatism is “once again rearing its ugly head,” but I think the other half of the pattern must also be noted. Yes, when out of power, seething resentment at the rejection of their world view (which always seems to go hand and hand with fervent faith beliefs) brings the even uglier face of conservative faith to the forefront: The fevered, hate-filled, paranoid conspiracy theory ravings of today’s Birthers and Tea Partiers are really not significantly different from those of yesterday’s Birchers (q.v. the John Birch Society). But what is missing from the pattern Standing alludes to – and what his assertion that there are sensible conservatives seems to neglect – is that when they *are* in power, American conservatives enact a radical agenda based not on the lunatic fringe ideas, but on the faith-based ideological convictions held by so-called “sensible,” non-crazy conservatives: Deregulating the financial sector and cutting taxes on the rich as a presumed financial stimulus has everything to do with free market faith beliefs and nothing to do religion – and the results of basing policy decisions on those demonstrably false faith-based convictions speak for themselves. In reality, the people with less insane but still faith-based and insupportable conservative beliefs aren’t really all that moderate in their beliefs or actions when you look more closely, and the credit they are given for being “moderate” and “sensible” in comparison to the real loonies seems to be a large part of what gives them cover to push an agendas and policies that are anything but moderate in the harms they cause.
Thus, I think it is a profound mistake to lament that so-called “sensible” conservatives are tarred by association with the lunatic fringe of conservatism: Rather, we should lament that the lunatic fringe of conservatism makes the still quite irrational and counter-evidential ideological beliefs of the less lunatic conservatives seem more palatable. If the idiot rantings of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Tony Perkin and Orly Taitz and Michelle Bachmann and so on and so forth actually start harming the Republican party instead of giving cover to supposedly “sensible” Republicans to advance a not-at-all-sensible political agenda driven by faith-based beliefs that are “merely” false and harmful rather than transparently ludicrous, that’s all to the good.
George Felis’ letter says everything that need be said about Edward Standing’s article. I would just add that contrary to Mr Standing’s view that this conservative irrationality stems from the election of Barack Obama, these folks have been around for a very long time, since the days of Leo Strauss and before. They were the backbone of support for Reagan, Bush 1 and especially Bush 2, as well as being a huge thorn in the flesh of Bill Clinton. So, nothing to do with Obama except that they will continue to be an enormous danger to our democracy during his term(s).
And not only that, but essentialism, and reaffirming the project of modernity, and all sorts.”
I take it that you are meaning us to sneer at ‘reaffirming the project of modernity’ etc. This can only mean that you have a philistine reaction to all forms of philosophical discussion. ‘Reaffirming the project of modernity’ is exactly what your website seems to be trying to do, and Habermas, who is discussed in the article, is one of the chief contemporary opponents of the sort of nihilistic post-modernist nonsense that you rightly oppose.
Marie T O’laughlin >one reason CB is —–giving privilage’s —as she also had in goldenbridge could be her daddy from nigeria was at trinity collage and is high up in nigeria with the government there she must have made a fortune with all our names on her list for funding same with Mr waters ,while survivors are homeless, depressed,alone some still in -mental hospitals,,have had no help at all.why is it barnardos >salvation army-have to pick up the pieces survivors who might come over from abroad are not welcome at ashlinn nova or avoca house,the government and religious ,hide behind those groups.WHAT COWARDS.the ____-solicitors.ashlinn,nova.soca uk. one in four.all have made a fortune {survivors got noting)
“while survivors are homeless, depressed and alone. Some are still in mental hospitals and have had no help at all. Why is it that Barnardos and the Salvation Army have to pick up the pieces?”
Yeah, because the government does not really give a damn about victims/survivors of institutional abuse. It does not think that it is its duty to pick up the pieces of their lives. It thinks that it has done its job properly by setting in place such services as Origins, which is a part of Barnardos, RIRB and the Education Finance Board and CICA and counselling services.
It is very sad indictment to know that there are many homeless and mentally ill survivors who have been left out in the cold. I know of some Goldenbridge inmates who are living in dire straits in London and their siblings go to Aislinn centre – and not once were they ever asked how their sibling was keeping.
Victims/survivors are terribly frightened of those who have severe problems as they are reminded of their own weaknesses and the fact that they have had to pull themselves up by their own strings throughout their whole lives. The government too is also frightened of people who were in industrial schools and looks to the abuse groups, you have mentioned to sort out their problems. Unfortunately, though, a lot of them are not emotionally mentally psychologically capable of dealing with the gargantuan problems of their counterparts. It is a vicious broken wheel that is slowly going around and around and when the holes show sticking plaster is placed on them – but the plaster soon wears thin and becomes frayed with the continual futile spinning. There is nobody there to really stop the wheel and see that it should be replaced with a new wheel.
I’m troubled that you have taken the side of vaccine promoters in this debate. Your site encourages women to see themselves as whole, to overcome the societal brainwashing that harms them, to become free, self-guided people who embrace truth and expose falsehoods.
Yet you are unaware that the supposed success of vaccines is based on falsehoods, bad science, coverups at the highest levels of research, and plain old patriarchal exploitation.
Vaccines have caused untold misery to women and children ever since they were created. They are part-and-parcel of Big Medicine’s hatred of anything natural, anything female, anything indigenous or traditional. Vaccines violate every natural immune system and create new and frightening diseases that attack our own tissues relentlessly. I’m shocked that you are unaware of this, but blindly promote them as “one of the great success stories of modern medicine”.
Are you unfamiliar with tetanus vaccines ‘contaminated’ with HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) that caused miscarriages and sterility in Mexico, South America and Asia? Google Ahka Tribe miscarriages.
Are you unaware of the link between smallpox vaccination campaigns in Africa and the sudden appearance of widespread AIDS? Google the documentary ‘The Origins of AIDS’ which clearly reveals this connection. This information has been buried by the Medical Mafia which, like most patriarchal religions, is anti-woman and anti-child.
I find it unbelievable that you make no mention of this anywhere on your site!
Do you not see the links between the increasing rates of autoimmune diseases (which strike women many times more often than men) and the parallel increases in vaccination?
Are you ignorant of the detailed research showing proof of vaccine involvement in many illnesses? Google SV40, the monkey virus that has contaminated the polio vaccine from its inception. See Dr. Rebecca Carley’s site; she is a Court qualified expert in VIDS (vaccine induced diseases). Look at the documents on her site proving that the Medical Mafia, governments, and vaccine manufacturers all know what happens when we are vaccinated. They all have financial and ‘ecological’ reasons for continuing these slow death programs.
Overall, this was a good review. I did not agree with the criticisms of “new atheists” leveled by Paula. For example:
“Reductionism is a major weakness of the New Atheist literature – the recent spate of popular anti-God books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others – that D’Souza is responding to. By and large, this literature reduces religion to processes inside the brain. But studies of the brain will never tell us why our evolved capacity to believe in things unseen often takes religious forms. The New Atheists therefore tend to dismiss such forms as irrational, which is no explanation at all. Instead, religious phenomena should be explained in an all-round manner involving everything else that goes on in society. Human sacrifice in ancient civilizations, for instance, was, among other things, an instrument of social and political power, a military technique and a method of population control. If such civilizations explained their own actions to themselves the same way they explained the movements of celestial bodies – through religious myths – it’s because it made the best sense to them in their circumstances. Such phenomena, therefore, aren’t purely irrational, but understandable in their context. In abstracting from that context the New Atheists eschew a full scientific understanding of religion.”
How ironic. It’s actually Harris and Dawkins who are being superficial and eschewing a science-based explanation for religion (presumably D’Souza’s “goddit hypothesis” is not guilty of the same sort of “reductionism” with respect to science). Harris is currently conducting scientific research on religious belief, which while it does “merely” study the brain, will surely move us closer to a “full scientific understanding of religion”. Also, I’m guessing it’s no coincidence that Harris and Dawkins were cited as “new atheists”, but not Dennett, whose book Breaking the Spell consists entirely of advocating for a “full scientific understanding of religion”.
Concerned woman, are you unaware of the difference between causation and correlation? So when you refer to ‘a link’ between smallpox vaccination campaigns in Africa and the sudden appearance of widespread AIDS, you are actually simply talking about two things that happened at roughly the same time (if they did – I doubt that smallpox vaccination didn’t begin in Africa until the 1980s). Several other things also happened at the same time in Africa. Google ‘things happening Africa’ – you’ll see what I mean.
The bit about vaccines causing untold misery to women and children is simply nonsense, I’m afraid. Do you have any idea of the rates of infectious disease before vaccines were developed, or of the mortality rates? If you did you couldn’t think such a thing.
COMMENT re: Melanie McDonagh Wants No Catholic Bashing
Indeed and this is what she is reacting to:
“Tanya Gold, in Tuesday’s G2, pretty well summed up every prejudice going, other than the one about him being a Nazi. She summarised the charges thus: “Joseph Ratzinger has colluded in the protection of paedophiles and the deaths of millions of Africans.” Mmm. She says he said that bishops shouldn’t notify the police about allegations of child abuse under pain of excommunication. And that he gave an easy ride to Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of a religious order, a sex abuser. And, most seriously, the Pope caused countless Aids deaths in Africa by upholding the church’s prohibition on condoms, even saying that they may aggravate the problem. She concludes: “Don’t tread on the corpses.”
This sort of thing is very similar to Nazi propaganda about the Jews. Why should anti-clericalism be regarded as a morally acceptable form of hatred? Specifically – how is it superior to anti-Semitism?
Marie-Therese O’Loughlin that letter out only happened once.it was MC and PJ,although CB was there as were two others MD,TR,but it was the top two who wrote as most of the rest couldn’t write anyway.do you remember we were handed old shoes worn by many over the years once a year from that shoe cupboard and had to wear them weather they fitted or not they never took into account that we were children so our feet might have grown, No such thing as what shoe size we were, we were forced to wear them which resulted in bleeding heal’s and painful feet.which would effect all of us for life.I still have nightmares.
“Do you remember we were handed old shoes worn by many over the years once a year from that shoe cupboard”
Firstly, thanks for that information re the letter. I cannot decipher who M.D. and T.R. are, by their initials?
Yep, I remember clearly getting every year horrible old shoes and toe-lo’s, as we called the latter – and plastic sandals – during the summer months. The summer sandals, etc, were tied in pairs and piled up in a big heap in a very small cupboard opposite Ms. D’s room. I know from a lot of survivors that they subsequently suffered feet problems because of having to wear grossly inadequate foot-wear throughout their young lives.
The large shoe-room (the one I was locked in for hours upon end), right next to Our Lady’s dormitory, housed all the new patent leather shoes and hornpipes that children wore for their communion and confirmation. They were faithfully returned to their respective shoe-boxes after the duration of their special holy days. Children attending court sessions also received shoes from staff members, from this room – which they instantaneously had to return after their appearances in court.
You would never see La la’s hanging out of the small cupboard in search of appropriate footwear. They wore only the very best- sized shoes from the posh shoe-room.
I remember as a child distinctly having to polish all the children’s shoes in the rec – in summer, and in winter – in the yard. Newspapers were laid out in a large space and I polished and polished away over a hundred and fifty pairs of shoes with the help of a handful of other children. We just took it for granted that this was the kind of thing children generally did. We became experts – the prison numbers of children had also to be refreshed on the insides with a special black marker. I know that there was a time when children had to wear hobnailer boots – so we should have considered ourselves lucky in that sense that we escaped by a mere scrape that prisoner boots era.
I remember going into a dreadful tantrum because my communion hornpipes, that were bought especially for me by a host family, were suddenly snatched from me by a staff member, the moment I returned back to the institution, after a week-end out with the host family. I was flogged black and blue by the head honcho for the outburst. This family were big- time into the clothes business and they showered me with handmade beautiful frilly clothes and they too were all confiscated upon my return to Goldenbridge. The pets were to be seen by me afterwards wearing them and oh, how oftentimes, I pulled at their aeroplanes, which were hovering neatly over their swelled heads and caused disarray.
BTW, Bridget S, is a pseudonymous name – am I correct? I personally refuse to hide behind another name anymore – as people in the blogosphere world have the propensity to abuse one and try to rip one even further apart – and it simply compounds unjustifiably the pain and trauma that one suffered as a child. I do not have to worry any longer about people trying to out me as a victim/survivor of institutional abuse. I am proud to stand up and be counted. There is so much fear within most victims/survivors of institutional abuse and I feel that they are still enslaved by their pasts. Why should they feel beholden to their loved ones and hide their pain to safeguard their loved ones security – because in the end it is a false security that is being passed on to them. The truth is better in the end as it sets one free.
I have B&W to thank for being able to express myself as the person I am – now. I would thoroughly recommend to all ex Goldenbridge institution comrades that they should feel free to be themselves and not be what others in their lives might want them to be. We may have been part of the judicial system when we were children, through no fault of our own – but we do not have to always remain criminals or slaves – to ones’ families or the world at large.
Marie.the Dept of education have granted a licence to bully survivors out of Dublin even in many case’s out of Ireland by giving Grants to so called services for survivors within Ireland ,take the aislinn, unless you are prepared to Do as your told ,be quiet, sit in so called drawing class, or dare not have any idea’s or opinions of your own,Places like the aislinn were clever’ly set up for the Church,Christian Brothers, Sisters of Mercy>NO MERCY
Goldenbridge was a brutal concentration camp ,all industrial prison camps were set up to distroy the children of ireland ,which the dept of education and the so called government allowed the so called religious orders to do their dirty work which they carried out with a passion. Justice for Irish Survivors of those brutal regimes.
Re: Aislinn
From what I gather – the dept of health also gives monetary support to Aislinn Centre.
I found the Aislinn Centre to be very stifling and not conducive with healing or good concentration that is so much required for educational studies. As the institutional gang mentality was forever in existence and if one did not adhere to their criteria one was instantly psychologically squashed and put down by the gang.
My biggest gripe, also, is that the main Goldenbridge figures like Christine Buckley, et al, have the monopoly in encountering other ex- Goldenbridge inmates when they come from all over the globe – as Aislinn Centre – during off-peak education hours becomes then a meeting place for them to catch up on old times. Those who do not belong to the cosy cartel are completely frozen out. The inside groups, only, have the privilege of catching up on old times and those of us (including moi) who have been given the cold shoulder are left wondering how their old Goldenbridge inmates are getting along. It is so grossly unfair. Yes, the government has given C.B. carte blanche to act in this very unhealing way.
“Goldenbridge was a brutal concentration camp”
Yeah, someone ought to bring that fact home to Sr. Helena O’ Donoghue. A sister of mercy who has not got one iota of the reality of the harshness of the regime that existed there.
I still dread to read the Ryan Report as I can already visualise what she has to say pertaining to the children’s lives in the ex-convict women’s refuge. She never stepped a foot inside GB and she had the audacity to tell the CICA that the regime was not overly abusive or harsh or stuff akin to that effect. She sheltered Sr. X. throughout the whole sordid inquiry saga, thinking that she was going to come out of it clean. Alas, they both got their comeuppance at the end of the day.
I preordered the 50 Voices of Disbelief book, but I have no idea when I will get it… :(
“But now the leading books are probably those of Michael Martin…”
Martin himself recently endorsed a new book edited by atheist John Loftus:
From Dr. Michael Martin, professor of philosophy emeritus and author of The Case Against Christianity, and Atheism: A Philosophical Justification: “John Loftus and his distinguished colleagues have certainly produced one of the best and arguably the best critique of the Christian faith the world has ever known. Using sociological, biblical, scientific, historical, philosophical, theological and ethical criticisms, this book completely destroys Christianity. All but the most fanatical believers who read it should be moved to have profound doubts.”
From Dr. Dale C. Allison, Jr., author of Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters: “Forget Dawkins. If you are looking for a truly substantial, well-informed criticism of the Christian religion, this is your book. Defenders of the faith will do believer and unbeliever alike a disservice if they do not rise to the challenge and wrestle with the thought-provoking arguments of Loftus and company.”
http://sites.google.com/site/thechristiandelusion/Home/blurbs
Paula Cerni writes: The New Atheists therefore tend to dismiss such forms as irrational, which is no explanation at all. Instead, religious phenomena should be explained in an all-round manner involving everything else that goes on in society.
Which leads me to suspect that she has yet to read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon – and would benefit significantly by doing so.
Edmund Standing’s article on the extreme irrationality of the modern incarnation of conservative ideology in the U.S. concludes:
I must say, the implication that conservatism has a major component that is sensible and rational, made in the first and last sentences of this paragraph, is not born out by any actual evidence – and I think that evidence is not just missing from this particular essay, but that it is simply missing. I agree that not all conservative thinkers are fundamentalist Christians and science deniers, although it should be noted that many conservatives who don’t deny evolution do deny other science, such as the evidence for anthropogenic global warming, or evidence that shows same-sex attraction is a normal part of the bell curve of not just human but mammalian behavior. But as far as I have ever seen, all conservatives are people of decidedly non-sensible and non-rational faith.
I mean this not in the wishy-washy sense the phrase “people of faith” is usually used, but in the concrete sense that all conservatives have beliefs which they accept and adhere to not only without evidence which supports those beliefs, but in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. (Many liberals also have faith-based ideological beliefs, of course: But that’s not the matter at hand.) Even conservatives who reject fundamentalist religion and avoid reflexive anti-science and anti-intellectual positions tend to have equally unsubstantiated and counter-evidential convictions about one or more of the following conservative ideologies: the magical power of the free market to cure various ills, the private sphere is always and in every way better at solving problems than government, American exceptionalism, a Randian view of human nature as independent and self-created, a whole host of convictions about how much better things were in various past eras (a.k.a. Golden Age-ism, or rose-colored hindsight), sexist assumptions about gender roles (and various is-ought fallacies associated with claims about gender and sexuality, usually where the “is” part is distorted to begin with), and so on. Even just the knee-jerk, reflexive judgment that change is automatically bad – which seems to be a key motivation behind a conservative ideological bent even if one doesn’t want to call it a “belief” per se – seems to be faith-based.
I don’t know whether Edmund Standing considers himself a “sensible conservative” or not, but he claims that such creatures exist. Until I see some evidence to that effect, I will accord claims of their existence and nature the same weight and respect that I give claims about the existence and nature of unicorns, orbiting teapots, and God – that is, none at all. I will agree, though, that more and less irrational conservatives clearly do exist, and that the less irrational conservatives are indeed being given a bad name by their more irrational fellow travelers. I just see no reason to lament this fact; instead, we should celebrate it, if true.
I say this because of the recurring pattern of conservative faith beliefs and their influence on policy. Standing alludes to half of this pattern by noting that the lunatic fringe of conservatism is “once again rearing its ugly head,” but I think the other half of the pattern must also be noted. Yes, when out of power, seething resentment at the rejection of their world view (which always seems to go hand and hand with fervent faith beliefs) brings the even uglier face of conservative faith to the forefront: The fevered, hate-filled, paranoid conspiracy theory ravings of today’s Birthers and Tea Partiers are really not significantly different from those of yesterday’s Birchers (q.v. the John Birch Society). But what is missing from the pattern Standing alludes to – and what his assertion that there are sensible conservatives seems to neglect – is that when they *are* in power, American conservatives enact a radical agenda based not on the lunatic fringe ideas, but on the faith-based ideological convictions held by so-called “sensible,” non-crazy conservatives: Deregulating the financial sector and cutting taxes on the rich as a presumed financial stimulus has everything to do with free market faith beliefs and nothing to do religion – and the results of basing policy decisions on those demonstrably false faith-based convictions speak for themselves. In reality, the people with less insane but still faith-based and insupportable conservative beliefs aren’t really all that moderate in their beliefs or actions when you look more closely, and the credit they are given for being “moderate” and “sensible” in comparison to the real loonies seems to be a large part of what gives them cover to push an agendas and policies that are anything but moderate in the harms they cause.
Thus, I think it is a profound mistake to lament that so-called “sensible” conservatives are tarred by association with the lunatic fringe of conservatism: Rather, we should lament that the lunatic fringe of conservatism makes the still quite irrational and counter-evidential ideological beliefs of the less lunatic conservatives seem more palatable. If the idiot rantings of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Tony Perkin and Orly Taitz and Michelle Bachmann and so on and so forth actually start harming the Republican party instead of giving cover to supposedly “sensible” Republicans to advance a not-at-all-sensible political agenda driven by faith-based beliefs that are “merely” false and harmful rather than transparently ludicrous, that’s all to the good.
George Felis’ letter says everything that need be said about Edward Standing’s article. I would just add that contrary to Mr Standing’s view that this conservative irrationality stems from the election of Barack Obama, these folks have been around for a very long time, since the days of Leo Strauss and before. They were the backbone of support for Reagan, Bush 1 and especially Bush 2, as well as being a huge thorn in the flesh of Bill Clinton. So, nothing to do with Obama except that they will continue to be an enormous danger to our democracy during his term(s).
Re your item “Oh no, not cryptonormativity
And not only that, but essentialism, and reaffirming the project of modernity, and all sorts.”
I take it that you are meaning us to sneer at ‘reaffirming the project of modernity’ etc. This can only mean that you have a philistine reaction to all forms of philosophical discussion. ‘Reaffirming the project of modernity’ is exactly what your website seems to be trying to do, and Habermas, who is discussed in the article, is one of the chief contemporary opponents of the sort of nihilistic post-modernist nonsense that you rightly oppose.
predictions for the date 07/06/2006
Marie T O’laughlin >one reason CB is —–giving privilage’s —as she also had in goldenbridge could be her daddy from nigeria was at trinity collage and is high up in nigeria with the government there she must have made a fortune with all our names on her list for funding same with Mr waters ,while survivors are homeless, depressed,alone some still in -mental hospitals,,have had no help at all.why is it barnardos >salvation army-have to pick up the pieces survivors who might come over from abroad are not welcome at ashlinn nova or avoca house,the government and religious ,hide behind those groups.WHAT COWARDS.the ____-solicitors.ashlinn,nova.soca uk. one in four.all have made a fortune {survivors got noting)
“while survivors are homeless, depressed and alone. Some are still in mental hospitals and have had no help at all. Why is it that Barnardos and the Salvation Army have to pick up the pieces?”
Yeah, because the government does not really give a damn about victims/survivors of institutional abuse. It does not think that it is its duty to pick up the pieces of their lives. It thinks that it has done its job properly by setting in place such services as Origins, which is a part of Barnardos, RIRB and the Education Finance Board and CICA and counselling services.
It is very sad indictment to know that there are many homeless and mentally ill survivors who have been left out in the cold. I know of some Goldenbridge inmates who are living in dire straits in London and their siblings go to Aislinn centre – and not once were they ever asked how their sibling was keeping.
Victims/survivors are terribly frightened of those who have severe problems as they are reminded of their own weaknesses and the fact that they have had to pull themselves up by their own strings throughout their whole lives. The government too is also frightened of people who were in industrial schools and looks to the abuse groups, you have mentioned to sort out their problems. Unfortunately, though, a lot of them are not emotionally mentally psychologically capable of dealing with the gargantuan problems of their counterparts. It is a vicious broken wheel that is slowly going around and around and when the holes show sticking plaster is placed on them – but the plaster soon wears thin and becomes frayed with the continual futile spinning. There is nobody there to really stop the wheel and see that it should be replaced with a new wheel.
Re: your opinion on vaccines
Ophelia,
I’m troubled that you have taken the side of vaccine promoters in this debate. Your site encourages women to see themselves as whole, to overcome the societal brainwashing that harms them, to become free, self-guided people who embrace truth and expose falsehoods.
Yet you are unaware that the supposed success of vaccines is based on falsehoods, bad science, coverups at the highest levels of research, and plain old patriarchal exploitation.
Vaccines have caused untold misery to women and children ever since they were created. They are part-and-parcel of Big Medicine’s hatred of anything natural, anything female, anything indigenous or traditional. Vaccines violate every natural immune system and create new and frightening diseases that attack our own tissues relentlessly. I’m shocked that you are unaware of this, but blindly promote them as “one of the great success stories of modern medicine”.
Are you unfamiliar with tetanus vaccines ‘contaminated’ with HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) that caused miscarriages and sterility in Mexico, South America and Asia? Google Ahka Tribe miscarriages.
Are you unaware of the link between smallpox vaccination campaigns in Africa and the sudden appearance of widespread AIDS? Google the documentary ‘The Origins of AIDS’ which clearly reveals this connection. This information has been buried by the Medical Mafia which, like most patriarchal religions, is anti-woman and anti-child.
I find it unbelievable that you make no mention of this anywhere on your site!
Do you not see the links between the increasing rates of autoimmune diseases (which strike women many times more often than men) and the parallel increases in vaccination?
Are you ignorant of the detailed research showing proof of vaccine involvement in many illnesses? Google SV40, the monkey virus that has contaminated the polio vaccine from its inception. See Dr. Rebecca Carley’s site; she is a Court qualified expert in VIDS (vaccine induced diseases). Look at the documents on her site proving that the Medical Mafia, governments, and vaccine manufacturers all know what happens when we are vaccinated. They all have financial and ‘ecological’ reasons for continuing these slow death programs.
And you are helping them, Ophelia.
Confound the Unbelievers
By Paula Cerni
Overall, this was a good review. I did not agree with the criticisms of “new atheists” leveled by Paula. For example:
“Reductionism is a major weakness of the New Atheist literature – the recent spate of popular anti-God books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others – that D’Souza is responding to. By and large, this literature reduces religion to processes inside the brain. But studies of the brain will never tell us why our evolved capacity to believe in things unseen often takes religious forms. The New Atheists therefore tend to dismiss such forms as irrational, which is no explanation at all. Instead, religious phenomena should be explained in an all-round manner involving everything else that goes on in society. Human sacrifice in ancient civilizations, for instance, was, among other things, an instrument of social and political power, a military technique and a method of population control. If such civilizations explained their own actions to themselves the same way they explained the movements of celestial bodies – through religious myths – it’s because it made the best sense to them in their circumstances. Such phenomena, therefore, aren’t purely irrational, but understandable in their context. In abstracting from that context the New Atheists eschew a full scientific understanding of religion.”
How ironic. It’s actually Harris and Dawkins who are being superficial and eschewing a science-based explanation for religion (presumably D’Souza’s “goddit hypothesis” is not guilty of the same sort of “reductionism” with respect to science). Harris is currently conducting scientific research on religious belief, which while it does “merely” study the brain, will surely move us closer to a “full scientific understanding of religion”. Also, I’m guessing it’s no coincidence that Harris and Dawkins were cited as “new atheists”, but not Dennett, whose book Breaking the Spell consists entirely of advocating for a “full scientific understanding of religion”.
Concerned woman, are you unaware of the difference between causation and correlation? So when you refer to ‘a link’ between smallpox vaccination campaigns in Africa and the sudden appearance of widespread AIDS, you are actually simply talking about two things that happened at roughly the same time (if they did – I doubt that smallpox vaccination didn’t begin in Africa until the 1980s). Several other things also happened at the same time in Africa. Google ‘things happening Africa’ – you’ll see what I mean.
The bit about vaccines causing untold misery to women and children is simply nonsense, I’m afraid. Do you have any idea of the rates of infectious disease before vaccines were developed, or of the mortality rates? If you did you couldn’t think such a thing.