I’m reading Ronald Conte’s laying down of the law more calmly and thoroughly, and along with the vicious brutality of it, another thing that strikes me is the plain stupidity. It doesn’t jump out at you at first, partly because the vicious brutality takes up most of your attention, but also because the sober language obscures it; but after awhile it becomes more salient. It is just stupid. There’s nothing to it but repetition and insistence. He says the same thing over and over, interpersed with popes saying it. It’s just a long long string of stupid assertions – which if heeded of course can ruin people’s lives.

This is the bit I was reading when the stupidity started to waft off the page like a smell:

In the Phoenix abortion case, the abortion was willed as a means to save the life of the mother; saving a life was the good intended end. And the circumstances were such that the abortion resulted in the good consequence that her life was saved. However, the end does not justify the means. Intrinsically evil acts are never transformed into good acts by intention, no matter how noble, nor by circumstances, no matter how dire.

See? It’s just dumb. Does not; are never; no matter how. Sonorous, and stupid. It’s not like that. It’s not like “that is intrinsically evil the end,” because it depends. It isn’t just yes or no, good or evil, haram or halal. It depends. It depends on exactly the kinds of things that were at stake in the Phoenix case, and just dully saying it doesn’t for thousands of words is stupid.

Every knowingly chosen act without exception is subject to the eternal moral law. If a physician decides to directly kill a patient, whether a prenatal patient, or a terminally ill elderly patient, the act is murder under the eternal moral law.

Aaaaaaaaand I have again hit my limit. That’s enough of Ronald Conte for now. He and people like him talk steely but moronic effluent about “the eternal law” while not caring in the least about real problems of real people with real lives. It’s the banality of evil all over again – the guy isn’t thinking, he’s refusing to think, he’s just self-importantly reciting Doctrine.

Good night.

Jen McCreight has a second Most Influential Female Atheist contest, and I’m nominated again, which is my reward for being notoriously obnoxious, which I would be even without a reward, but rewards make it even more fun.

But other sweller more influential people are also nominated, and you get three votes, so vote. Allow me to put in a plug for Maryam Namazie, who rocks. They all rock, but allow me to put in a plug for Maryam anyway.

It’s sad about Denis Dutton. ALDaily is all in black.

Denis was a friend to B&W, from very early in its career – about three months into it, I think. He added it to Favorites, and soon after that he started linking to articles. He helped B&W get an audience.

It is melancholy that he’s gone.

The US Army requires its soldiers to have something called “spiritual fitness.”

The US Army distributes a mandatory survey called an SFT, which stands for “Soldier Fitness Tracker”.  The purpose of this survey is to measure an individual soldier’s competency in four areas, Emotional, Social, Family and Spiritual.

Yes really.

Here is what they tell someone who scores badly in that last area:

Spiritual fitness is an area of possible difficulty for you. You may lack a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. At times, it is hard for you to make sense of what is happening to you and others around you. You may not feel connected to something larger than yourself. You may question your beliefs, principles, and values. Nevertheless, who you are and what you do matter. There are things to do to provide more meaning and purpose in your life. Improving your spiritual fitness should be an important goal. Change is possible, and the relevant self-development training modules will be helpful.

Extraordinary, isn’t it? The dreaded gummint instructing people in how to have a sense of meaning and purpose? The gummint imposing a particular sense of meaning and purpose on a very captive audience?

This is very trivial, but quite funny in a way. Remember “steph” who derailed the “F word” thread last week with endless passive-aggressive rambling about gnu atheism and New Zealand? And then suddenly at the end went all cuddly and we can get along? No, you probably don’t, because you probably stopped reading that thread when she derailed it, and quite right too.

But if you do, you might be amused to learn that she didn’t really mean the cuddly part. She derailed someone else’s thread – some theology type – to say how horrible I am. Apropos of absolutely nothing. I mean, it’s like a clown suddenly appearing in the middle of a sober newscast. Wha?? Truly funny.

as someone who doesn’t subscribe to any camps or societies (apart from being a member of NZ Green Party and Greenpeace..), what do you mean by the atheist ‘Camp’? Are you suggesting a ‘camper’ as one who would affiliate themselves with the likes of the religious ignorances of Dawkins and co and well as the obnoxious rhetoric of the apparently notorious ‘Ophelia Benson’

Etc etc etc.

The fluffy ones are always so funny – pretending to be all Warm and Goodhearted and Sweet while actually brimming over with malice. Me, I just plain brim over with malice; it’s so much quicker that way.

Amir Afkhami, an American psychiatrist, gets to meet a “faith-healer” in Iraq and watch him doing his stuff.

The path of a faith healer is arduous, Mullah Eskandar told us, speaking in Kurdish. “Such a calling,” he said, “is best reserved for a religious and spiritual man.”

Right. Religious and spiritual because there is no actual knowledge or technical skill involved, and man because it’s women who get fucked up by misogynist religions and traditions. Totally makes sense.

He went on to recount his 15-year apprenticeship to a renowned senior healer, who taught him the basics of spiritual treatment and the essentials of Koranic law and prophetic traditions. His description reminded me of my own long and difficult years in medical school and residency training.

Except for the difference in the acutal substance of what you learned compared to what Mullah Eskandar learned.

“Over 80 percent of my patients are females,” he continued. “They struggle with insomnia, headache, depression and marital problems.”

Gee I wonder why!

“Ours is like your profession, which has both good and bad doctors,” he continued: “those who care about patients and those who are in it for worldly rewards.”

Nooooo, not exactly. The difference between good and bad doctors isn’t just caring.

The first patient to enter his reception room was a young woman in red flowing garb typical of the rural inhabitants of eastern Kurdistan…Like most unmarried Iraqi women, she was accompanied by family: a heavy-set, mustachioed father and a watchful mother.

The mother explained that the day her daughter became engaged to a relative, she had developed fainting fits, nightmares, foul moods and an inability to walk. Her family had consulted a general practitioner, who referred them to a neurologist, to no avail. She continued to faint at the talk of marriage — even became agitated at the prospect of her younger sister’s impending betrothal.

Yes. She doesn’t want the marriage. The way to cure her is to call off the marriage and let her run her own life.

But the mullah didn’t suggest that. He

began to chant a Koranic verse into her right ear, imploring God’s help and warning of the devil’s temptations.Then he explained that the young woman was possessed by a jinn, one of the race of evil spirits that the Koran blames for sowing mischief and illness in the world — in this case, spreading discord in the young woman’s family by disrupting her marriage. To banish the jinn, Mullah Eskandar prescribed a regimen of prayers, daily bathing and rosewater perfume. And he counseled the patient on the responsibilities of a daughter to marry and the happiness that awaited her once she had a family of her own.

It struck me that Mullah Eskandar’s rituals, particularly his reassuring counsel, appeared to mimic our oft-practiced supportive therapy in Western medicine. His authoritative opinion and his apparent empathy, coupled with his ability to realign the young woman’s vision to a more positive outlook, appeared to give her some degree of comfort immediately.

Well isn’t that sweet. The mullah conned the young woman into resigning herself to her horrible unwanted fate, and the American psychiatrist watched in cheery approval. The mullah talked away some of the young woman’s symptoms while leaving the cause entirely untouched, and the medical professional was impressed.

I’m not.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops insists on exactly the same murderous policy that the rebarbative bishop of Phoenix does. The CCB is very clear about it. The CCB doesn’t mess around.

“Surgery to terminate the life of an innocent person, however, is intrinsically wrong… Nothing, therefore, can justify a direct abortion. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.”

No circumstance whatsover, including the circumstance that the fetus is already doomed and will not survive no matter what, can make it licit to remove the placenta to prevent the woman’s death, since it is contrary to something that does not exist.

The bishops don’t know that there is such a thing as “God” or that it exists or ever has existed. They don’t know what the “Law” of that “God” is. They know nothing whatsoever about it. They know they’ve been told things, but anyone can tell anyone anything, and often does. Mere telling is not enough, especially when ordering medical workers to let patients die on the authority of the telling.

The putative law of the putative God is not “written in every human heart.” It’s not written in mine, and the bishops have no business saying it is. They’re bullshitting, and they’re doing it in aid of backing up a rule that would let women die when they could be saved, on the grounds that their fetus can’t be saved too.

Defenders of this revolting policy are bullshitting, if not outright lying, too: they are calling this policy a “right to life” policy, but of course it’s not, because the whole point is that it kills a woman and a fetus instead of only a fetus. That’s not “pro-life.” This policy results in the death of an adult, not life for a fetus.

Let’s see if I can force myself to read and comment on some of the horrible dogmatizing of Catholic theologian Ronald Conte. I could manage only about three paragraphs on the first attempt.

The subject of his anathema is “M. Therese Lysaught’s grave doctrinal error.” He notes that she points out that the fetus was doomed no matter what, that

it was not a case of saving the mother or the child. It was not a matter of choosing one life or the other.

Then he spends the rest of the long piece saying fuck that.

He quotes JP2 saying it’s disobedience to God’s law. He quotes the catechism. He insists on the (authoritarian and theocratic) claim that some acts are inherently evil no matter what the intentions and circumstances, period.

The intentionally-chosen act is the removal of the prenatal from the mother prior to viability, and this act is inherently ordered toward the death of the prenatal. The prenatal dies as a direct result of his or her removal. The inherent moral meaning of this act is the killing of an innocent prenatal. In other words, the essential moral nature of the act is murder. No creative explanation can change the fact that the death of the prenatal results directly from his or her removal and that this removal was intentionally chosen. The good intention to save the life of the mother, and the good consequence that one life is saved instead of two lives being lost, cannot change the moral object from evil to good.

Because it’s murder. That’s what “murder” means. It’s bad. The end.

In the Phoenix abortion case, the abortion was willed as a means to save the life of the mother; saving a life was the good intended end. And the circumstances were such that the abortion resulted in the good consequence that her life was saved. However, the end does not justify the means. Intrinsically evil acts are never transformed into good acts by intention, no matter how noble, nor by circumstances, no matter how dire.

It would have been morally good to let the woman die along with the fetus and leave four young children to deal with that however they could. Consequences are beside the point. Outcomes are beside the point. There was an unconscious undeveloped fetus with no plans or thoughts or memories or ties, inside the woman, therefore the woman had to be allowed to die and the fetus’s conscious thinking feeling siblings had to be bereft. Period.

Pope John Paul II taught that there is no room for ‘creativity’ in the moral determination of intrinsically evil acts; such acts are irremediably evil. In the case of direct abortion, we cannot find some creative explanation that would justify the act and save the life of the mother. We can only evaluate the moral object, and refuse to willingly choose any act of direct abortion, regardless of the cost, regardless of the cost, regardless of the cost.

Ok, that’s it, that’s all I can read.

A Catholic woman priest is trying to convince herself that the bishop of Phoenix didn’t mean what he of course necessarily did mean. She’s not having an easy time of it.

When I was a teen, I saw a movie that depicted a bishop, the brother of a pregnant woman, who loved his sister, but when the chips were down and it was her life or the baby’s life, the choice was his to make and he chose the baby. I will never forget how horrible I felt that his sister was powerless in this situation, and that the decision was her brother’s to make.

Quite – and in the bishop’s case, it wasn’t even a matter of choosing the baby, because that choice wasn’t available. It was a matter of choosing – insisting – that the fetus and the mother should die instead of the fetus only.

So today, here we are again, reflecting on the controversy surrounding the mother in Phoenix whose life was saved by the the ethical team at St. Joseph’s Catholic Hospital. As directive 47 indicates, one is obliged to save both lives, but if that is not possible then the moral principle is to save the life that can be saved. Surely, Bishop Olmsted of Phoenix is not implying that the hospital should have let the mother die when her life not only could be but was saved! Hopefully, Bishop Olmsted, Bishop Niederauer will clarify their positions in this kind of tragic situation when pregnant women’s lives are at risk.

Oh yes he is – that’s exactly what he’s implying, or rather, simply saying. He knows perfectly well that that’s the issue, because that is the issue. It can hardly have escaped his attention!

Mark Jones found the confirmation I was looking for, in the shape of the letter the bishop of Phoenix wrote to the president of Catholic Healthcare West. It is unbelievably disgusting.

He’s pissed off that the president of CHW told him that this is a complex matter on which the best minds disagree – not, as one might hope, because he thinks there should be no disagreement on whether or not a pregnant woman should be allowed to die along with her fetus rather than prevented from dying at the expense of her fetus, but because he is The Bishop.

In effect, you would have me believe that we will merely have to agree to disagree. But this resolution is unacceptable because it disregards my authority and responsibility to interpret the moral law and to teach the Catholic faith as a Successor of the Apostles.

His responsibility, that is, to order doctors to let a woman die. Because he is a Successor of the Apostles.

The decisions regarding life and death, morality and immorality as they relate to medical ethics are at the forefront of the Church’s mission today. As a result, the Church and her bishops have a heightened moral responsibility to remain actively engaged in these discussions and debates.

So that they can do their level best to compel hospitals to refuse to save the lives of pregnant women.

While the issues discussed in the moral analysis you provided are certainly technical and deeply philosophical, they are also foundationally “theological.” And the theology of the Catholic Faith, as concretized in the Code of Canon Law, dispels any doubt whose opinion on matters of faith and morals is decisive for institutions in the Diocese of Phoenix.

Me! Me me me me me me me! Do you understand? Me, the Bishop! My opinion is decisive! Not yours! Mine! I am the boss and you have to do what I say.

It goes on like that for four horrible pages. This from a church that protects priests who fuck children!

I feel dirty.

The ACLU letter to the administrators of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says something I hadn’t known, something quite staggering. The trouble is, I haven’t been able to find it anywhere else, so I can’t be sure it’s accurate. I would email the ACLU to ask, but they say they get too much mail to answer.

…just last week it was revealed that the Bishop of Phoenix threatened to remove his endorsement of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center – where, as discussed in our previous letter, doctors provided a life-saving abortion to a young mother of four in November 2009 – unless the hospital signed a written pledge that it would never again provide emergency abortion care, even where necessary to save a woman’s life.

 You see why that’s staggering. It says that the bishop demanded that the hospital sign a written pledge not to do an abortion even where necessary to save a woman’s life – the bishop explicitly demanded that the hospital let a woman die rather than do an abortion. I knew he’d been saying that in effect all along, but I didn’t know he’d been willing to spell it out himself.

[pause to say – fuck I hate these bastards. I hate them I hate them I hate them.]

At any rate, even without confirmation of that part, he said way more than enough. The Phoenix diocese kindly makes his saying available to us. It’s disgusting.

…earlier this year, it was brought to my attention that an abortion had taken place at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. When I met with officials of the hospital to learn more of the details of what had occurred, it became clear that, in the decision to abort, the equal dignity of mother and her baby were not both upheld; but that the baby was directly killed, which is a clear violation of ERD #45.

There was no baby. There was a future baby inside the body of the woman who was on the point of death. It wasn’t possible to uphold “the equal dignity of mother and her baby” because the mother had fatally high blood pressure.

In this case, the baby was healthy and there were no problems with the pregnancy; rather, the mother had a disease that needed to be treated. But instead of treating the disease, St. Joseph’s medical staff and ethics committee decided that the healthy, 11-week-old baby should be directly killed. This is contrary to the teaching of the Church (Cf. Evangelium Vitae, #62).

That’s just outright dishonest. A healthy 11-week-old baby is just that, it’s not a fetus of 11 weeks. Does the bishop consider a newborn infant a 9-month-old baby?

Not to mention of course that treating the disease without killing the fetus wasn’t an option, so it’s dishonest of this reactionary woman-hating theocrat to imply that it was.

The president of St Joseph’s hospital, Linda Hunt, pointed out that it wasn’t an option.

“If we are presented with a situation in which a pregnancy threatens a woman’s life, our first priority is to save both patients. If that is not possible, we will always save the life we can save, and that is what we did in this case,” Hunt said. “Morally, ethically, and legally, we simply cannot stand by and let someone die whose life we might be able to save.”

But that is exactly what the bishop is demanding that they do, and exactly what he is making a condition of the hospital’s “Catholic” status. You don’t get to call yourself “Catholic” unless you’re willing to let a woman die along with her fetus rather than kill the fetus to save the woman. (Notice that the bishop neglects to mention that the fetus dies either way. He’s not even demanding that they let the woman die to save the fetus, he’s demanding that they let her die to make a point.)

Dr. Charles Alfano, chief medical officer at the hospital and an obstetrician there, said Olmsted was asking the impossible from the hospital.

“Specifically the fact that he requested we admit the procedure performed was an abortion and that it was a violation of the ethical and religious directives and that we would not perform such a procedure in the future,” he said. “We could not agree to that. We acted appropriately.”

That’s close to a confirmation of the ACLU item. I don’t doubt the ACLU item, I just would like to see it in writing somewhere else.

Catholic News Service gives a slightly evasive account.

Amen.

 Josh Rosenau says my post on how gnu atheism can Help is an exercise in sugary saccharine vigorous self-back-patting, and also lacking in evidence. It’s nice of him to Reach Out, but his reading is rather sloppy.

If she’d said that these effects might well follow, I’d have no real argument. They might (and also might not, I don’t know). The initial claim that gnus have already rendered religion “not altogether intellectually respectable” strikes me as the weak point in this argument, though.

Yes but the claim is not mine. I didn’t claim that. My claim overall is pretty much that “these effects might well follow.” I didn’t say that gnus have already rendered religion “not altogether intellectually respectable”; I said

One thing gnu atheism is doing is relentlessly pointing out that religious belief is not altogether intellectually respectable. That means that religion no longer offers such a desirable kind of identity. It means the identity aspect is more mixed.

That’s a pretty hedged, undogmatic claim. It’s undeniable, surely, that gnu atheism is relentlessly pointing out that religious belief is not altogether intellectually respectable – that is precisely why we get shouted at, isn’t it? That’s why we are gnu? That’s why we are Not Helping? It’s debatable that that means that religion no longer offers such a desirable kind of identity, to be sure, but we have heard and read plenty of people saying exactly that, and lots of others implicitly acting on that conclusion. Why else is Karl Giberson so exercised about Jerry Coyne? And saying the identity aspect is more mixed – well is that a very dramatic claim either? I don’t think so. That, again, is what gets people pissed off, surely. We keep pointing out that religion isn’t %100 wonderful and Helpful and desirable.

Absent some sort of evidence that religion is less intellectually respectable now than it was 10 years ago, this first step in Ophelia’s logical chain fails, and the conclusions go with it.

The backlash is the evidence. The flood of books and articles and blog posts and Facebook updates and tweets all yelling with rage at the very idea that belief in God is fatuous. That’s the evidence. I didn’t say the effect was universal, and of course I don’t think it is. But it certainly exists.

Jerry Coyne also responds to Josh.

There’s another thing about the suggestion that Americans claim to be more religious than they really are for reasons to do with identity rather than belief, and how gnu atheism can Help.

It’s this. One thing gnu atheism is doing is relentlessly pointing out that religious belief is not altogether intellectually respectable. That means that religion no longer offers such a desirable kind of identity. It means the identity aspect is more mixed.

When you ask Americans about their religious beliefs, it’s like asking them whether they are good people, or asking whether they are patriots.

Yes, but now it’s also getting to be like asking them whether they believe in Santa Claus. It’s getting to be like asking them if they’re somewhat too credulous for a grown-up.

The “identity” is under pressure from that direction in a way that it hasn’t been in a long time, and the pressure will only increase. The internet has given argumentative atheism an ideal tool of persuasion, so it won’t just fade back into the woodwork in a few years. Gnu atheism will just go on chipping away at theistic epistemology, and the longer it does so, the less obviously desirable the religious “identity” will be. People will no more think it vaguely socially desirable to profess churchgoing than they will think it vaguely socially desirable to profess genuine belief in Santa Claus.

Americans tell pollsters they’re religious as all getout, very very very religious, as religious as it’s possible to be. But they’re not.

Beyond the polls, social scientists have conducted more rigorous analyses of religious behavior. Rather than ask people how often they attend church, the better studies measure what people actually do. The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.

Oh yes? Well if that’s true, it’s yet another reason gnu atheism is a useful and helpful thing. As gnu atheism spreads and seeps into the broader culture, people will begin to grasp that there’s really no good reason to want others to believe one is more religious than one actually is.

Religion in America seems tied up with questions of identity in ways that are not the case in other industrialized countries. When you ask Americans about their religious beliefs, it’s like asking them whether they are good people, or asking whether they are patriots…Asking people how often they attend church elicits answers about their identity—who people think they are or feel they ought to be, rather than what they actually believe and do.

There again. Gnu atheism, by being gnu – outspoken, movement-like, shared, popular – will free some people to stop feeling they ought to be religious. It will make that option more available to a lot of people. There are atheists who think that believers’ desire to cling to their beliefs should trump items like that option, but I think those atheists are wrong.

I like the way David Barash puts the matter.

the National Academy of Sciences came out with a report titled Science and Creationism, which stated that “…science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each.”

…

 Pace the National Academy of Sciences, however, I do not demand that “science and religion be combined”—quite the opposite.  Rather, let’s acknowledge the truth: Science and religion overlap substantially, notably whenever religion makes “truth claims” about the world.  And when that happens, time and again, religion has a long track record of being simply and irretrievably wrong.

That’s good, isn’t it. It’s not that they ought to be combined, it’s that they do overlap. And when they do overlap, religion gets it wrong. That sums it up nicely, and cuts through the usual nonsense.

NOMA is merely another version of “God of the gaps” thinking, which employs the deity as needed to plug the temporary vacancies in our science-generated knowledge.  It seems to me that this is neither good science nor good theology, since—in the first case—reliance on the supernatural is simply inconsistent with anything remotely approaching a scientific world-view, and, in the second, such a God would necessarily shrink as our science-based knowledge grows, so that eventually, we’ll be left with a bunch of teeny weeny elfin godlings crammed into an oddly distributed array of little cavities in our otherwise expanding knowledge.

That sounds like the homunculus in the buttocks! In more ways than one.

The ubiquitous Michael Ruse has yet another post explaining about non-overlappings and the new atheists and atheism is religion. (Jerry Coyne has already explained what’s wrong with Ruse’s explaining.)

Ruse says another word for NOMA, favored by “those who work on the interface between science and religion,” is independence. He says it’s the position of the NCSE and also of him.

 It is also my position, as I argued in a recent book…Basically, I argue that science is inherently metaphorical, that today’s science has at its core the metaphor of a machine, that metaphors rule certain questions out of court—not wrong, just not asked—and that it is legitimate for religious people to try to provide answers.  Religious answers not scientific answers, about ultimate origins and purposes, about morality, and perhaps also about consciousness.

Science is not “inherently metaphorical” in any way that makes a real difference to anything. It’s not “metaphors” that make certain questions seem too meaningless to address. Of course it’s “legitimate” for religious people to try to provide answers, but that’s not the issue; the issue is whether the answers are any good or not.

Gould was not a believer and neither am I.  We both think that you can be an agnostic or atheist—I like the term skeptic.  We recognize that of course science and religion can conflict.  That was why we were in Arkansas.  But our argument—my argument, let me speak for myself—is that much that conflicts with science is not traditional religion…

That part just illustrates why Ruse is so irritating. He’s so lazy. He lazily uses the present tense about Gould and he lazily goes on talking about the two of them for no apparent reason, and then he suddenly decides to stop doing that, but instead of going back and re-writing, he just tells us to let him stop. What a buffoon! And that kind of thing is characteristic – slovenly uncorrected off-the-top-of-his-head notes treated as a finished article.

As so often happens with these sorts of things, those closest to each other are often the greatest enemies.  Freud called it the “narcissism of small differences.”…In the case of people like me, those who endorse the independence option, our fellow nonbelievers are scornful to an extent equaled only by their comments about Pope Benedict.  We are labeled “accommodationists” or “appeasers,” and reviled.

Dude – mirror.

He goes on to repeat his old claim that a conflict view of religion and science could get science in public schools in trouble with the current Supreme Court, a claim which seems very strained to me, although he’s right that with this court…well who knows.

Greta Christina points out what I’m always noticing – that there’s a mob of people out there calling atheists every kind of name and it’s pretty much always just for existing. The mob says it’s for being shrill strident mean fundamentalist rude zealous you can finish the song, but in fact by “shrill strident mean fundamentalist rude zealous” they really just mean atheist, period. Don’t ask don’t tell, know what I mean? The only decent atheist is a secret atheist.

And if these op-ed pieces and whatnot were all you knew about the atheist movement and the critiques of it, you might think that atheists were simply being asked to be reasonable, civil, and polite.But if you follow atheism in the news, you begin to see a very different story.

You begin to see that atheists are regularly criticized — vilified, even — simply for existing.

Or, to be more accurate, for existing in the open. For declining to hide our atheism. For coming out.

Quite. Mind you, some of the people who go in for this here vilification like to say that they have masses of examples of atheist evilness, but also that they don’t want to provide it, because the ferret ate their homework. But their lack of desire to provide examples doesn’t make them at all shy about smearing people. I find this fascinating.

What about Paul Sims’s question? Should atheists be talking to believers? Well sure. But should atheists be talking to Catholic Voices? That’s a different question.

Around the time of the Pope’s visit to the UK, I wrote a couple of posts on here (notably this and this) in which  I questioned the tone of the Protest the Pope campaign and the debate around Catholicism and the Pope…An unexpected outcome of my posts was an invitation from the Central London Humanist Group to take part in a small round table discussion with representatives of Catholic Voices, an organisation set up to argue the Catholic case during the Papal Visit.

I had a look at Catholic Voices. Until I looked, I was thinking it was just another friendly woolly group o’ believers and reacher-outers, and thus quite a reasonable outfit to have a nice chat with. But it’s not.

CATHOLIC VOICES is a bureau of Catholic speakers able to articulate with conviction the Church’s positions on major contentious issues in the media.

It’s a self-appointed PR outfit for the Vatican. Its mission is to defend existing positions. That means it’s pretty much exactly the kind of group or grouplet it is entirely pointless to have a nice chat with if what you want from a nice chat is some kind of rapprochement or ecumenical understanding or outreach or can’t we all get alonging. That’s a group that’s in the business of peddling dogma, so it’s hardly going to sit down with the editor of the New Humanist for the sake of genuine dialogue.

Paul Sims thought there might be some common ground.

There is agreement among secularists that change in the Catholic Church must come from within, and there can be no doubt that many moderate Catholics share secularist concerns on condoms, gay rights and child abuse (see the contributions of liberal Catholics Conor Gearty and Tina Beattie to our “An audience with the Pope” feature). If the Pope’s recent pronouncement on condom use was prompted by any kind of pressure, it seems more likely that it was from his own flock rather than his secular opponents. Is it not, therefore, useful to cultivate any common ground we might share with believers?

Yes, probably, but Catholic Voices isn’t “believers”; Catholic Voices is dogma-defenders, which is quite a different thing. I also don’t really think we should let people get away with claiming to be liberal Catholics. The term is an oxymoron. The Catholicism diminishes the liberalism, necessarily. The Catholic church is an emphatic, energetic, active enemy of liberalism, so liberals who stick with it are thereby compromising their liberalism. The Catholic church is an active enemy of secularism, of women’s rights, of gay rights, of non-theocratic morality, so liberals have no business supporting it.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted is helpfully forthright. He’s up front about the fact that the Catholic church is adamant that women must die rather than terminate their pregnancies. He’s also up front about his absolute rule over Catholic hospitals.

St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, Ariz., will be stripped of its Catholic status on Friday unless Catholic Healthcare West meets several demands outlined in a Nov. 22 letter from Bishop Thomas Olmsted…The issue stems from the 2009 decision by the hospital to authorize an abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman.

Catholics are not allowed to save a woman’s life at the expense of an 11-week-old fetus. They have to say No, and let her die. That is the Catholic way.

Olmsted wrote that St. Joseph’s hospital would need to meet several demands before the hospital could regain his support, including submitting to a diocesan review and certification “to ensure full compliance” with the Catholic Church’s moral teachings…CHW also must agree to provide its medical staff with ongoing training on the church’s ethical and religious directives regarding indirect abortions…

Olmsted wrote that CHW’s “actions communicate to me that [the hospital does] not respect my authority to authentically teach and interpret moral law in this diocese.”

How dare they. How dare they not respect a bishop’s authority to tell them to let a woman die instead of saving her life. How dare they not let a bishop run their hospital.

He added, “Because of this, I must act now” to ensure that “no further such violations” take place at the hospital and to “repair the grave scandal to the Christian faithful that has resulted from the procedure.”

The grave scandal to the Christian faithful is that a woman was not prevented from having a life-saving procedure. The grave scandal to the Christian faithful is that her four children still have a mother, which they wouldn’t have if the bishop had had his way. Grave scandal indeed.

Don’t forget: all faiths insist that compassion is the test of true spirituality.