Upon this rock
Why do I frown on Blair’s adult-onset Catholicism? Why do I think it’s reprehensible for informed adults to join the Catholic church? Because the Catholic church is a reactionary cruel woman-hating bullying organization run by men and based on mythology, that’s why. If you join the Catholic church as a reasoning adult, then you are signing up to and endorsing that organization, just as if you joined a neo-Nazi party or the Taliban or any other organization. It makes no sense to disagree with many of its most vehement and public positions and yet join it anyway. Jimmy Carter, to his credit, left The Southern Baptist Convention when it announced a new woman-subordinating stance; if he gets credit for that then Blair gets uncredit for joining the unregenerate Church of Peter.
A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church. The girl, aged nine, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, became pregnant with twins. It is alleged that she had been sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather.
And in any case she was sexually assaulted by someone, because she’s pregnant, and nine-year-olds can’t give meaningful consent to sex, much less to pregnancy and motherhood.
The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday…The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil’s TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law…However, doctors at the hospital said they had to take account of the welfare of the girl, and that she was so small that her uterus did not have the ability to contain one child let alone two.
So the archbishop thinks that ‘God’ wants a young girl who was used as a sex toy to bear twins despite the fact that her body is too small to make the attempt safely – so the archbishop thinks ‘God’ is a moral monster. Well I tend to agree with him, but that’s why I think human law is not ‘above’ but better and also a great deal safer than the putative law of God. The archbishop of course does not know what ‘the law of God’ is or might be if there is such a thing; he merely pretends to, and then pretends that his own pretence is ‘above’ human realism and reflection.
Grown-up reasonable people have no business joining such an outfit. In fact they ought to be leaving it in disgust, not stumbling along to join it.
This is monstrous. Good for those doctors.
And now I’m envisioning the pro-life defense of this madness: “But the baby doesn’t DESERVE to die because of what it’s father did! The mother’s suffering is horrible, but DYING is worse!”
With absolutely no thought to whether or not the mother “deserves” to bear the burden of turning these fetuses into children, of course.
Yes, OB. Well said.
Where’s Kees asking OB what’s her rational basis for giving a damn about this little girl?
I completely agree. Whenever you compare joining the Catholic church to joining a neo-nazi party (which I sometimes do) people react as if you’ve just proposed guillotining kittens for entertainment.
How is it still considered respectable for people to join an such a reactionary organisation?
In the case of the nine year old raped child, dying would have been the likely outcome for all three of them, deserved or not, worse or not.
I completely agree, OB. This puts Blair’s ‘I just happen to believe’ in the right frame. Having joined this bunch of moral pirates is bad enough, but to have done so in such a public way, is doubly outrageous, because automatically, as a prominent figure, he tacitly endorses everything this monstrous organisation says. And his ‘happening’ to believe something else about gays is not only a shameful cop out, but a way of ‘keeping faith’ with his warped masters in the Vatican. To look at something good and call it evil takes religion.
What a shameful thing for these idiot men in frocks to say. People should leave in droves because of this sort of moral bankruptcy. They should leap to their feet in outrage that their leaders have said such things about the rescue of a child. I simply cannot understand.
(Neil Bishop, don’t tempt fate!)
Apparently, the church has now excommunicated everyone who had anything to do with the abortion, including her mother (yes!), except for the child, since she is too young to be responsible for the actions taken by her mother and her medical team! There, that’s exactly how mercy works! See here. Sick bastards!
This was the comment I read in an earlier report that I thought was really disgusting:
“But Marcio Miranda, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in northeastern Brazil, said the girl should have carried the twins to term and had a cesarean section.”
I believe I read it on the BBC website, but can’t find it now. This was taken from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29515505/
Sorry, Ophelia, I didn’t notice that your original link was to the excommunications. You hadn’t mentioned it in your text. This is a step further than I had thought they would really go. It’s quite beyond reason.
You know, while we’re being outraged by the Roman Catholic Church in Brazil and elsewhere – considering the Pope’s global assault on human rights – we ought to remember (I know, I know, this is not the subject of this thread) Edmund Standing’s report on the offences against the human rights of ‘guest workers’ (now, there’s an terminological problem!) in Saudi Arabia.
Religion seems to live a charmed existence – no one dare call it life. Protests for Hamas, but not for the doctors and nurses and the mother in Brazil (and no thought for the little girl)! Protests for Hezbollah and no protests for the 8 million (8 million!) guest workers in Saudi Arabia, many of whom are little more than slaves, and many of whom are less than slaves! (The population is listed on countryreports.org as 27,601,038. Does this include the slaves or not?) And we are not supposed to criticise Islam? Or the Roman Catholic Church? Or religion? Perhaps it is not only god who hates women. (Many of the Saudi slaves are women.)
Well yes one gets other benefits but they entail socializing with a lot of Catholics – joiner Catholics at that. What could be more hellish?!
Really: I would think Blair would much prefer to ‘identify’ with Labour people, political people, clever informed people – I can think of lots of groups that sound far more attractive than those whose defining feature is Catholicism. Ex-Catholics, nominal Catholics, as it were ‘ethnic’ Catholics, that’s one thing, but hanging out with people who are actively Catholic? Eeeeyuk! It really does surprise me that that would appeal to Blair.
High price to pay indeed.
Actually OB, most Catholics I have known have been outwardly hard to distinguish from anyone else, though the religion does demand certain sacrifices in return for the promise of salvation. So it can appeal to those with masochist tendencies.
Some seek the favour of Heaven by reciting Hail Marys while crawling on their bare knees over broken glass, and variations on that theme. But this case requires an order of clerical masochism well above that.
Personally, were I a priest, I would find excommunicating the members of this Brazilian medical team in violation of any tendency to empathy that I had. And there are, after all, certain central passages in the Gospels that encourage empathy.
Which, IMHO, shows where clerical priorities lie.
Blessed are those who don’t have that mindset.
No, no, you’ve all got it all wrong, the Church is just misunderstood… a bit like the way Charles Manson has always been misunderstood. It’s true that assisting in the abortion of an unborn fetus gets you excommunicated and ordering the systematic murder of millions of already-born people you hate doesn’t, but if you really understood the church you would see that it’s not an inconsistent attitude, rather it’s one that most accurately reflects the most cherished values at the very heart of the Church.
As OB says, there are a lot of ethnic or social Catholics around, people who were brought up as Catholics and for family reasons, go through the rites mechanically. I remember questioning one about her beliefs, and in reality, she was a pantheist.
However, to join the Catholic Church, as an adult, as Blair did, knowing what the Church represents, is a case for Dr. Freud or perhaps for Dostoyevsky.
Has anyone ever heard of Project Rachel? It operates in RC parishes in various parts of America. The programmes are for people who have had abortions. It allegedly sends out mixed messages. While it reaches out to women, it does so within the context of the Church’s centuries old doctrine that presents abortion as a serious sin.’ The programme has two parts: a support group which meets once a week and individual spiritual counselling with a priest.
“In a Catholic state we want to show we love the sinner and hate the sin,” said a Monsignor”connected to PR.
“In order to speak to ‘abortion’ today you have to offer a whole potpourri of services: physical and psychological,” said the Monsignor.
Priests apparently get lessons from other priests on post-abortion healing techniques.
On one hand it threatens to excommunicate and with the other it uses priests to sort out post abortion trauma.
Even the biblical name, ‘Rachel’ has a sinister connotation. The Catholic church will constantly remind those who have had abortions of the loss of their “children”.
There was a lucrative business to be had for generations in the RC church in Ireland, with respect of Magdalen laundries babies. Laundry profits, for the religious, was not enough for them – I guess!
Abortions never came into the equation.
My wife had hiked in the woods to an obscure lake and after two hours still couldn’t find the path through the woods to go back. She prayed and this is what happened. She said she was put in an ephoric state and her arm was lifted up like somebody was leading her. She was led through the woods to the main trail going down the mountain and her hand was dropped. She then made it down the mountain. How does that fit into your world view of secularism?
Hallucination?
Brought on by fear?
Since both of you were hiking together, I am assuming you must have been flying overhead and ‘shooting down’ on your wife, who, (in her euphoric state) was being guided, like someone was leading her.
“How does that fit into your world view of secularism?”
Go check urbandictionary, drive-by Turkeyshooter, and you’ll get your answer there as you know full well.
“Hallucination? Brought on by fear?”
More like ”jack ‘elatiom? brought on by fear. Turkey’s profile is profanity incarnate.
Secularism is a kind of Political Philosophy not a Worldview. Naturalism is the (one of the) Atheistic
Worldview(s).
turkey,
It’s not exactly magic for someone who walked into the woods to find their way out of the woods.
And throwing in a feeling of euphoria and certainty doesn’t make it any more amazing.
Well not to mention the obvious fact that what turkey says is pure hearsay. It’s just something turkey said – we have no way of knowing if he is telling the truth, and if he is, he has no way of knowing if his wife is telling the truth. As far as we’re concerned it’s just a claim, and not a very plausible one (to put it politely), so it has no effect on one’s secular world view one way or the other.
So … the good Archbishop threatens excommunication for anyone who assisted in the abortion. What is the problem? I would consider it an honor to be excommunicated from his reactionary organization.
“They took the life of an innocent,” Sobrinho told TIME in a telephone interview. “Abortion is much more serious than killing an adult. An adult may or may not be an innocent, but an unborn child is most definitely innocent. Taking that life cannot be ignored.”
There is no mention of the stepfather who, allegedly, over a number of years took the body of the child.
No outcry at all, vis a vis the damage that was purportedly done by him to the wee girl. It all about the church, the church, the church, and the damahge that has been visited upon it.
Methinks the church is afraid to say too much about child abuse as it cannot afford to open its mouth due to its own diabolical record in this sphere. There is presently a lawsuit out on the Vatican. So it must keep quiet. A shut mouth cathes no flies.
Will the stepfather who allegedly raped the child be also considered by the Church for excommunication? Or, is that only applicable to the mother and the doctor (who, in all probability) saved the child’s life.
It gets worse.
It is also alleged that the stepfather was also interfering with another older handicapped child.
news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090307/wl_time/08599188359800
I think we may be underestimating the force of turkey’s argument. Let’s not forget that a woman is said to have got lost in the woods, and then found her way out. What other explanation could there be but divine intervention?
I for one am entirely convinced. It would be foolish to persist in an atheistic belief system in the face of such overwhelming evidence. Much like turkey’s wife, I was lost but now I am found.
Turkey: my dear departed mother in law had one to top your (alleged) wife’s (alleged) story. She was constantly losing her glasses, and told me that every time she did, she just said a short prayer, “Lord, help me find my glasses.” Always, without fail, a short time later she would find them again.
A miracle every time, wouldn’t you agree?
This gave me an astounding vision of Heaven. There is God, sitting on his throne, pondering which his next universal move, when up comes this prayer. He responds: “Don’t tell me she’s lost her glasses again!”
Controlling any tendency on his own part to exasperation, he guides her to them. Then he resumes his pondering. “Now where was I? Ah yes. Those two galaxies, both teeming with life, that are on a collision course…”
“She was constantly losing her glasses, and told me that every time she did, she just said a short prayer, “Lord, help me find my glasses.”
Aye, Ian, St Anthony must have been off duty if she called upon the Lord to find her specs.
He’s yer man who deals in the restoration of things lost or stolen. 8-)!
What are you people, crazy? His eye is on the sparrow, remember? He can help everyone at once! He’s omnipotent! He can do anything! He can lift a sock too heavy for him to lift! He can look for 6.5 billion pairs of glasses all at one time!
Jeez, ye of little faith.
Oh, and let’s suppose that God does intervene to help people find their way out of the woods, or locate their missing glasses.
Then let’s remember the Black Death and the Holocaust.
God must have some weird priorities!
You’re all wrong in criticising the Catholic Church. You have completely misunderstood their difficult position in this case. You must realise that “The Church is very benevolent, especially with minors.”
http://catholicexchange.com/2009/03/07/116537/
I made above comment sarcastically. I usually avoid irony/innuendo etc in chat forums ‘cos it comes across very literally.
Since no believer wants to be caught at worship to an unjust god, those helped out of the woods or to find their glasses must have deserved it; ditto victims of the Black Death and the Holocaust. Difficult as it may be to swallow in the cases of the babies who died in those events. I wonder what the Catholic Church thinks of the cases in which pregnant women are (justly, of course) killed by their creator? Doesn’t that make him a bit of an abortionist?
Yes but that’s where mystery comes in handy. God’s reasons are ineffable and beyond our ken etc etc etc.
God’s raison d’être is doubtless indescribable and beyond our specsavers lenses etc etc etc. 8888-)!
So murdering an adult is less serious because the adult might not be “innocent”, whereas a fetus is?
This fetishizing of innocence is the worst part of Catholicism to me. Everything that a sane person would consider to make a murder worse–the capacity for thought, feeling, and agency of the victim–actually makes it less bad in the eyes of the Church. Because agency, thought and feeling are BAD things, as they might lead to sin. Something that cannot do or feel anything is better than something that can (i.e. the sinful pregnant woman or, in this case, girl). A lump of flesh, so long as it is technically alive and has human DNA, is more protected than a being with volition. Utter helplessness and will-lessness is prized above all. In fact, the pregnant woman is being punished for not being like a fetus: for having desires and acting on them. The fetus, incapable of doing anything and therefore incapable of disobedience, is what the Church wishes us all to be like.
Brilliant point, Jenavir.