The cardinal did not mention
Oh the self-admiring moral bankruptcy of the Catholic church…
It’s doing a conference on AIDS this weekend. It’s as obstinate and evil as it’s been all along.
A Vatican cardinal opened an international conference on AIDS by strongly defending the church’s two-pronged strategy against the disease: education of consciences and mobilization of Catholic health resources for patients.
That is not a strategy. People can be infected by their partners, so educating consciences is not good enough. A woman can be entirely monogamous and still be infected by a non-monogamous partner – obviously, and as everyone knows – so prattle of conscience is just conceited obfuscation.
“Educating people to avoid high-risk behavior, when based on solid moral principles, fully demonstrates its effectiveness and translates into greater openness toward those already affected by the virus,” the cardinal said.
“When responsibility for one’s own behavior is affirmed, in fact, there is greater awareness of the connection with the rest of the community and greater sensitivity toward those who suffer,” he said.
Blah blah blah – it’s just more conceited self-congratulation. It does nothing to prevent infection.
The cardinal did not mention the question of condoms in AIDS prevention. In previous days, the Vatican newspaper ran two articles saying condom campaigns were unsuccessful in stopping the AIDS epidemic; one article said condom campaigns had increased the possibility of AIDS infection by promoting a false sense of security.
Bastards. Demons. Fiends.
How can you care that much about wasting semen?! HOW?
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The birthplace of pedophilia speaks!
This is an example of what’s so wrong about Natural Law as a basis for morality. God has created everything in nature for a purpose, and the purpose of genitalia is procreation. Thus, using condoms thwarts this purpose and is therefore morally wrong. Easy, huh?
Now what exactly is the purpose of the middle finger, I wonder?
Oh the self-admiring moral bankruptcy of the Catholic church…It’s doing a conference on AIDS this weekend.
Isn’t that a bit like the foxes holding a conference on henhouse security? Crazy bunch of AIDS enablers…
An unbiased and impartial article then?
Aaaand here we go AGAIN with that familier chestnut. Yes, we know about paedophile priests. We noticed. We get it. Yes what they did WAS unspeakable and the level of incompetence and downright ineptitude shown by various bishops was almost unbelieveable.
But… it happend. We can’t change that. We can’t go back. Much as I would like to give every athiest a hug, a lollypop and a promise that life will be nice and fluffy from now on and that no one in the church will ever do anything bad again I can’t. In just the same way you can’t make that promise for anyone Not in the church. Teachers for example.
Note as well that statistically in terms of the proportion of abuse cases the priesthood is one of the safest professions. Now before you cough up your own kidney in outrage I would encourage you to go and do the research – actually do the research instead of use the same poorly researched slogans and arguments that were made by other people who have never attempted to string an academic argument together. You may find the results of proper academic studies by secular universities suprise you.
Please – feel free to hate the church because you are bigoted. That is your right. Feel free to hate us because you don’t agree with us. Again that is your right. But at least do us the common courtesy of having a reasoned argument and not just spouting sensationalistic genralisms which you cannot prove (such as “Those solid moral principles that our priests demonstrate to children every day” the present tense implying it is happening now) which amount simply to the old time rabble rousing preceding the natural culmination – witch hunting.
and yes – we did that too…
Shurely “moral principles” and “responsibility for one’s own behaviour” = using condoms to protect one’s self and other people.
No? OK, perhaps I’m the one that’s blind and arrogant, wilfully, callously and lethally irresponsible, and stuck like a limpet to a breathtakingly idiotic ideology.
Perhaps HolyJoe could point us to some of that research. I’d also be interested in his opinions on the subject of Ophelia’s post.
Well, yeah, Holy Joe. It’s just bigotry to hate the Church. No thinking person could possibly have a reason that isn’t rooted in prejudice.
So I can’t hate organisations that promote homophobia, sexism and cover up the crminal activities of it’s members. Got it.
Holy Joe, take a long look in the mirror before you criticize anyone. Respect, admiration, that good stuff, is earned. If your history speaks poorly of you others are justified in their contempt.
HolyJoe-
Surely it is relevant, when the church is speaking of its leading role in morality, to show that they do not do a good job of (shall we say) “practicing what they preach?” While the rapes that have been reported were in the past (a necessary condition to have been reported and investigated), the cover-ups are current examples of their moral leadership and what they mean by personal responsibility. The Pope himself has blamed non-priests for priestly behavior- personal responsibility indeed.
If you prefer, I can give an example closer to the current discussion. They are lying when they claim that condoms lead to more AIDS and a false sense of security. There are no competent studies that establish their point, but they continue to make the claim. They have been told that they are wrong and they continue to make the claim. Morality and personal responsibility: ur doin it rong.
HolyJoe-
To cover another one of your points; teachers (your example) are established as moral leaders. They are subject matter experts with skills in transfer of knowledge. They do have profession standards of behavior and are expected to adhere to them. When they do not the community is outraged and the district administrators are expected to deal with it fairly, justly and quickly without covering it up- or we hold them responsible for their behavior too.
Priests, from the Pope on down, DO claim to be moral leaders and DO claim to be ‘holier than thou.’ They claim to have God’s ear and special powers dispensed directly to them due to their worthiness. I have no need to “do the research” because my point is that its not that more of them or less of them do this on average, its that people who claim to be what they claim to be do it at all. So, when they (any one or any small fraction of them) commit the crimes, they are, and should be, held to a higher standard of what was expected before the crime and what is expected afterwards. That is, it is particularly reprehensible that people who claim to represent God rape children in any numbers. It is just as outrageous that other people, who claim to be even closer to God, will hide and protect the first group, threaten the victims and lie to the public and the authorities. The Popes and Cardinals and Bishops seem to prefer the childhood distraction of “Johnny did it too!” along with the classic ‘blame the victim’ gambit.
We are not impressed with this moral leadership. It may have been somewhat progressive 2000 years ago, but it is due for a makeover.
Another thing. What I feel towards the church (all of them) is not hatred. It is sadness at the general waste of lives and disgust at the behaviors of those who deserve it. I have known and worked with pastors who are fine people doing their best to follow the stated mission. Unlike many church-folk (not you I’m sure) who do hate easily and often and in very general ways, I do not. We (to the extent that I speak for anyone other than myself) only expect you to live up to the common standards of decent behavior. When church folk claim to have a higher standard, we just point out that they don’t meet either standard.
Witch burning is just another example of the general failings. No need to go into that old business again. But wait- that’s happening today in Nigeria by church leaders too, isn’t it? (see articles on this site by Leo Igwe if you’re not aware of this)
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OOPS- Teachers are NOT established as moral leaders…
BTW Holy Joe, playing the anti-Catholic bigotry card in response to legitimate criticisms of the church is an insult to all those Catholics who really did suffer discrimination and violence because of actual bigotry.
Joe:
Well let’s see, shall we?
The Catholic church lies about the effectiveness of condoms at incalculable cost in suffering and lives for the sake of a highly dubious bronze age moral principle. They use their considerable resources to promote this moral principle over the one I suspect most atheists would prefer: that we should all try to do what has been demonstrated to harm people, other organisms and stuff the least. I’m not saying that’s an easy principle to apply in practice. I’m not saying that harmfulness or otherwise of some activities is perfectly understood.
I am saying that the Catholic principle that condoms are always and automatically wrong is directly opposed to that principle of doing least harm. We all know, of course, that if everyone were celibate or monogamous then AIDS would be much less of a problem. But we also know that preaching about it does not make it so. Condoms are simply the best weapons we have against AIDS and no respectable study says otherwise. This is not opinion or bias, it is simple bald fact, easily demonstrated and confirmed.
So the conclusion that the Catholic church is embodied by bastards, demons and fiends can only be considered biassed in the favour of not harming people. I admit it: I’m kind of biassed in that direction myself.
I wrote two responses to this post yesterday, and both of them went off into the ether when I pressed a key — what key? Who knows, but away they went!
It’s good to have a resident catholic to smack around a bit, so, Holy Joe, take a bow. But while you’re doing it, do you mean to suggest that you don’t think critically about the Vatican’s decisions and deliberations? Never? Ever since 1930, since they were forced into it by the Anglican Lambeth Council which accepted forms of “artificial birth control” — as Hans Küng reminds us — the Vatican has been reacting blindly, and as a consequence its sexual ethics is completely messed up. The RCC couldn’t be seen as agreeing with apostate Anglicans after all. So Pius IX retorted almost at once with Castii Conubii (Chaste Marriage), which essentially repeats the old “natural law” line that sex is solely for reproduction, and, while it has unitive value, it only has this in the context where conception is a possibility. It’s as if they were all sitting around at the mad hatter’s tea party trying to think of the most idiotic way of understanding what having sex means, and that’s a mite difficult for anyone who has never entered that state. But the libel about marriage has lasted a long long time. John Paul I, before he was murdered (as I believe), seemed likely to put Humanae Vitae on the back burner, and revisit the question of birth control. However, where would all the church’s members come from, if women weren’t kept in a kind of permanent adolescence?
I know there are a few brave catholics who are prepared to stand up to the Vatican force 10 storm and consider their beliefs critically, but the Vatican is so much in control — infallibility is a great perk, it means that no one can argue with you — that they are instantly recognised as apostates and in clear and present danger of excommunication. Indeed, excommunication is just what the Vatican has threatened against the president of the Philippines for supporting birth control. Imagine the president being held to ransom by the church. This makes it, in my view, unwise to elect catholics to public office, since they can always be got at by a foreign power whose view of the world is so regressive as to put even people like bin Laden and Sayyad Qtub to shame.
However, what I simply do not understand is the widespread view that non-believers should hold this kind of nonsense in respect. Believers and unbelievers alike should ridicule the Vatican back into the stone age. When catholics speak on matters of public concern people should ridicule them off the public stage. It’s time we put these moral morons back into the cloister where the only harm they can do is to themselves. Of course, it goes without saying that they don’t have much left to do in the harm department. Just considering some of their recent pronouncements on the morality of abortion, euthanasia, or birth control is enough to recognise that these people don’t live in the real world anyway. They dream dreams of a perverted righteousness which no one but cranks and unbalanced people practice, and, for the rest, continue to do harm to the world.
What harm? Harm to women, whose freedom and responsibility for their own reproductivity is being restricted. Harm to the world which is already bursting at the seams with too many people, leading to greater poverty and suffering and eventually it may be to the destruction of the habitat on which we depend for life itself. Harm to the scientific project, by interjecting irrelevant considerations into the scientific enterprise, as though there is something reasonable they have left to say about the world which has delivered up its secrets, not to the religion, but to those who have learned to discipline their minds and their practices, by considering every statement fallible and in need of constant checking, and if need be, revision. Let’s give the Vatican turkeys short shrift. The do not deserve the attention they are given in the press. The pope still apparently merits widespread public attention. Why? He has nothing worthwhile to say.
The Church has been “educating” people in its “morality” for two thousand years, and the result is paedophiliac priests, the raping of nuns, lying statements, cover-ups and deceptions, contempt for the bodies and lives of women, right-wing dictatorships, the continuing oppression of the poor… And has it ever been any different?
This is just my immediate reaction to Ophelia’s post so if I am merely repeating others’ comments I apologise.
@HolyJoe: I’m not very interested in the question of pedophile priests. I’m more concerned about the RCC Inc Dons who covered it all up and continue to try to do so. But what really pisses me off about RCC is the Albigensian crusades. Compared to the crimes committed then by RCC what’s a little pedophilia between catholics? BTW; let’s see Armstrong explain that away as compassion in action!!
Off current topic but bound to be of interest to some of us here, has anyone seen the new post on Chris Stedman’s blog?
http://nonprophetstatus.com/2011/05/23/in-defense-of-anger/
He’s got Karla back again. The entire post is so filled with wrong that I’m beginning to suspect that it’s all a hoax, there is no Karla and it’s simply Chris playing tricks by writing accomodationist POEs to wind us up.
Whee, a genuine (apparently) apologist for the Vatican; what fun.
Holy Joe: yes I know it’s in the past and can’t be undone. I don’t actually rebuke the Vatican in order to undo the past. But as for “We get it” – well who’s we? Some of you don’t get it, to put it mildly – and as a matter of fact you don’t get it either. What there is to get is the glaring fact that being a priest turns out to be a dismal failure at inculcating even such basic moral instincts as would prevent one from raping children, and such as would motivate one to do whatever it took to prevent colleagues from raping children.
It’s very simple. The church claims to be god-inspired and hence morally superior. Its claim has been shown to be a very sour joke. That’s what you don’t “get,” despite your claim that you get it.
Thanks Sigmund – I hadn’t. Will read…
Oh urgh – it’s working – he’s winding me up! His preface is simply infuriating – all that aggrieved self-pity when he’s been working his ass off for “the atheist movement” for years and years and years, how dare people think he doesn’t “have the best of intentions concerning the atheist movement.” Honestly.
Man, Karla McLaren is dishonest. All that nonsense – that polemical rhetoric – about how totes reasonable her previous post was and how bat-loony the reaction to it was, when in fact her previous post was stuffed to the gills with hostile polemical vocabulary.
Both of them are busily engaged in throwing shit at new atheists and then waiting for the reaction and using that to throw more shit, all the while wrapping themselves in the mantle of Niceness. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.
Most of the critical comments on her previous post involved people pointing out her gross hypocricy. Now she’s moved on to a tactic of complaining that those of us in favor of a variety of different approaches to promoting atheism are being discriminatory to those like the accomodationists who think there should only be one strategy – theirs! It reminds me nothing so much as those religious groups who complain that enforcing a policy of non-discrimination against all members of society is not fair to them since they won’t be allowed to continue discriminating.
Gnu Atheists Unfair to Karla McLaren shock-horror! More at eleven.
Chris:
”I believe in lifting up diverse (non-polemical) perspectives […]”
”[…] go about raising their disagreements in a way that is civil […]”
”Work to be agreeable in your disagreements.”
”[…] respond in a manner befitting her measured and thoughtful tone.”
Karla:
”[…]not about specific people, because that’s not civil.”
”There are ways to use anger that are non-polemical, non-directed, and most importantly, non-oppressive.”
”A subset of the anger I witnessed contained no respect, no boundaries, and no rules.”
”[…] it is the precise behavior I objected to in my post.”
Karla’s tone may be measured and thoughtful, but the things she says are conceited and presumptuous. But pointing that out only produces that ”See, how uncivil!” response. They’ve created a ”head I win, tails you lose” situation. All they have to do is start by declaring themselves civil and measured and non-polemical and so anybody who thinks they aren’t is just gnasty.
Well even her tone isn’t measured and thoughtful! That’s just bullshit, frankly. Her tone in that April piece about gnu atheists was very heated and dogmatic.
There’s something deeply exasperating about the way Stedman keeps posting articles that are obviously nasty smears while announcing that they are wise and thoughtful.
Of course it’s happening now. You know that, we all know that. Sorry, Joe, I don’t wish to victimise you, but you really are talking hogwash. Now, at this very moment, a priest is sodomising a boy, a priest is raping a nun. Now, at this very moment, a Muslim girl is being killed for wishing to choose her own husband, or for wearing a short skirt. Now, at this moment, a woman is getting AIDS because the fucking Catholic Church says that condoms are wrong. Now, at this moment, a pregnant woman is dying because the fucking Catholic Church says that abortion is always wrong.
To deal with the second point first, there is no cure for AIDS that the ‘Catholic health resources’ can deliver. At best there is retroviral drug therapy which can slow the rate of progress of the disease, but it is too expensive for the majority of the world’s infected people, and if not properly administered can make the global situation worse by facilitating the appearance of drug-resistant viral strains.
However, ‘education of conscience’ is encouraging. It should be a simple matter for the Catholic Church to show that the risk of contracting AIDS: a. is less for Catholics than for non-Catholics, and b. for Catholics, diminishes with frequency of attendance at Mass and other church activities.
Perhaps Holy Joe could oblige us all here.
I read “The Ancestor’s Tale” a couple of years ago and enjoyed it immensely so I decided to add Richard Dawkins to my Twitter feed. That brought me to this article. I am extremely disappointed. While I agree with all the points made in this post, the manner in which they are presented is, frankly, offensive. If Mr. Dawkins is the planet’s most visible atheist, it is no wonder that so many people think we are evil. I stopped reading Skeptic magazine because it came accross as smug, conceited and “smarter than thou” but this is far worse. When you stoop to name calling, you lose all credibility. This is absolutely abhorent.
Hello Peter. What, specifically, do you find offensive, and on what grounds? Ophelia didn’t mention any names, unless you are extrapolating something from “Vatican cardinal” and “Catholic Church”.
to holy joe,
i was raised a catholic. my father was an active member of the church who sired 8 chillens. he beat the shit out of the boys and fucked his daughters. the parish preist was to our house often for meals and talk. da was considered a good catholic by our community. fuck u sideways and all other defenders of an amoral, corupt and just plain-fucking-wrong-about-anything-that-matters criminal organization
Note as well that statistically in terms of the proportion of abuse cases the priesthood is one of the safest professions.
If you are a peadophile yeah, the priesthood is a very safe job.
About 51% of sexually predatory priests (that we know of) target victims between the ages of 10 to 14. The Catholic Church does not consider it peadophilia as per the last Bishop’s report if the victim is older than 10.
Everybody else operates on the DSM definition – which is when the victim is thirteen or younger.
Think about that when you look at the stats.
Oh, and Joe, that’s without even getting into how the Church covered up for peadophile priests for so long, or that we know of cases where the victims were sworn to silence by church superiors – only for the perpetrator to be moved to another community, where parents weren’t wise to him.
Here’s the thing that makes me sick with you Joe. Your only real response and anger is for us atheists who happen to point it out.
Peter, if YOU were the planet’s most visible atheist, not a single person would care.
@crybaby peter:
Why is that, Peter? Obviously if someone had no other argument than name-calling then that argument wouldn’t be up to much. But that is plainly not the case here. What’s so abhorent about people getting cross about awful things? I find it hard to see a problem with calling bad people bad names but if you can explain why I should be ashamed of myself, please enlighten me.
Peter perhaps doesn’t get the connection between the last passage I quoted and the three epithets that followed. This is the connection:
They are saying untrue things that will prompt people who believe those false things to take actions that will cause themselves and other people to get infected with AIDS and die a horrible death, usually leaving orphaned children behind in dire poverty and helplessness.
That is the connection. That is an evil, despicable, atrocious thing to do.
Holy Joe,
“Please – feel free to hate the church because you are bigoted.”
My hatred for the church has nothing to do with bigotry – my hatred is entirely rational.