Cristina Odone is there, announcing to a breathless world that She is Praying for Christopher Hitchens. Well good, because that is the first thing that leapt to my mind, of course – will Cristina Odone be praying for him?

While condemning the intolerance of religious organisations, he shows zero tolerance for believers: a person of faith must be a fanatic, or a fraud. (Mother Teresa, according to his book The Missionary Position, was both.)  He refuses to consider the evidence of religious do-gooding, found in the Catholic Church’s AIDS clinics in Africa, Anglican schools in Asia, and Jewish charities around the globe. He is determined to persecute Pope Benedict XVI, and would like to see him arrested on his forthcoming visit to Britain.

Mother Teresa was both. It’s not that she must have been, it’s that she was. Hitchens didn’t say “persons of faith” must be fanatics or frauds and therefore “Mother Teresa” was both; he investigated “Mother Teresa” in an effort to find out if her actions matched her reputation, and found out that they did not.

And Hitchens is not determined to “persecute” the pope, unless by “persecute” Odone means “tell the truth about.” It would be stupid for Hitchens to be determined to persecute the pope in any other sense, because it’s stupid to be determined to do the impossible, and Hitchens is about as unstupid as anyone alive. It’s impossible to persecute the pope, because we can’t get at him. He’s protected by layer upon layer upon layer of immunity and holiness and specialness and law and guards and bubble cars. We can’t get at him to tell him to his face that he’s doing bad things. (Yes there was that woman last Xmas, but all she managed to do was tip him over for a second. That’s not great for an elderly fella, but it’s not persecution.)

Hitchens is of course determined to see the pope prosecuted – and so he should be. The pope has real temporal power, and he uses it; he uses it to protect criminals and keep crimes out of the hands of secular law enforcement and rebuke countries that take law enforcement into their own hands. The pope should be subject to prosecution for, at least, heading an organization that abets criminals.

As for Hitchens – I hope medical science can keep him around until he reaches the pope’s current age, at least.

Simon Jenkins wrote the stupidest article I’ve seen in some time for Comment is Free. I’m sure he’s not stupid, but the article is.

A “mammoth of research” is about to rise behind London’s St Pancras station, a biomedical centre costing £600m and housing about 1,250 “cutting-edge” scientists. Ask not its value. Science jeers at the idea. The UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation has already been dubbed a “cathedral of science”, justified by faith, not reason.

That’s just the first paragraph. Look how stupid it is. What are those quotation marks for? Who is being quoted? Who “dubbed” the biomedical centre a “cathedral of science”? Anyone? Apart from Simon Jenkins? What on earth does he mean “justified by faith, not reason”? He doesn’t say, he just goes on with very tired familiar “ooh I hate science” boilerplate.

This business of inventing quotations and implying that somebody is saying things when in fact it’s you who’s saying it reminds me of the Times story last year that said “there are fears” about Does God Hate Women? when there weren’t, it was just that the reporter thought there could be and so she might as well say there already were, without actually adducing any.

The last paragraph is striking too.

I share Rees’s glory in the wonder of science. I wish the wonder could be taught in schools, which still prefer to be kindergartens for lab technicians. But science research is one lobby among many. The BBC should not lavish it with favours against less-fashionable claimants for its platforms. One thing is for sure, Rees’s subsidies must come from taxes on the professions he most despises – banking and finance. I bet no one devotes a research grant or a Reith lecture to them.

Now why would anyone have a somewhat skeptical attitude toward banking and finance these days? I can’t imagine, can you? No indeed, it’s science that deserves all the opprobrium for being so fashionable, and pointless, and theiving, and faith-based, and money-grubbing, and cathedraly.

Now that the Desmond Tutu moment is in the past, let me say, on the other hand, notice that Josh Rosenau linked to YNH just last Saturday – long after it should have been blindingly obvious to any reasonable person that it was not a truth-telling or fair or decent blog. He did partially admit that, but he linked anyway.

You’re Not Helping has been on a roll lately about that latter point, rightly criticizing various folks who criticize such calls for prayer without offering any alternative. While I think YNH has lately become less helpful than they used to be, their highlighting of the work being done by Mississippi Atheists, and of opportunities to donate to ongoing Gulf efforts by groups including the Audubon Society and Unitarian Universalists, certainly do help. If you want to help folks out in the Gulf, those are good places to start.

Rosenau, like so many critics of explicit atheists, likes to portray himself as part of The Nice Faction, but his Niceness tends to desert him when it comes to explicit atheists.

And Massimo Pigliucci linked to YNH last Thursday, which is also long after a reasonable person should have concluded that Here Be Bullies.

Are the New Atheists the New Martyrs?

He should feel stupid about that link now. G Felis (thinkmonkey) offered him the opportunity to say it was a mistake, but he (Pigliucci) didn’t take it. Neither he nor Rosenau has bothered to withdraw the endorsement of a blog that has now admitted telling large falsehoods about people it was angry with. So that’s what they’re like.

I wrote this about eight years ago for “In the Library.” It hints at why I hope Christopher Hitchens stays around.

Christopher Hitchens is a standing reproach to people who write the odd essay now and then. He is like some sort of crazed writing machine, he seems to average three or four longish essays a day, along with reading everything ever written and remembering all of it, knowing everyone worth knowing on most continents, visiting war zones and trouble spots around the globe, going on television and overbearing even noisy Chris Matthews’ efforts to interrupt him, and irritating people. And what’s even more painful is that this torrent of prose is nothing like the torrents of people like Joyce Carol Oates or Iris Murdoch, badly written in proportion to the torrentiality – no, this is a torrent of learned, witty, informed and informative, searching, impassioned history on the hoof. If Hitchens is a journalist then so were Gibbon and Thucydides.

Unacknowledged Legislation is a collection of essays on writers in the public sphere, as the subtitle has it. The essays are many things, but one of the most noticeable is that they are unexpected. The essay on Philip Larkin for example entirely declines the opportunity to express easy outrage, and instead digs much, much deeper. The one on Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice wonders why she didn’t mention Mill’s autobiography and then at the fact that she seems unaware of the element of caricature in Dickens’ Hard Times. ‘When the utilitarian teacher M’Choakumchild – perhaps a clue there? – tells Sissy Jupe etc.’ Hitchens misses nothing.

Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation, Verso: 2000.

Belgium isn’t having it. Very good.

Belgium and the Vatican are on a collision course after the Holy See accused the Belgian police of using communist tactics in their paedophilia raids on Catholic bishops last week…

The Belgian Foreign Minister, Steven Vanackere, underlined the Belgian judiciary’s independence from the Church and its freedom to investigate.

“It’s good to [keep in mind] very important principles of the state of law. [There are] very elementary principles of having a separation of powers and accepting that the judiciary has to do its work,” Mr Vanackere told RNW. “That’s crucial for every democratic state.”

And that’s all there is to it. The Belgian government is the right body to investigate crimes by priests; the church is not. The church has a vested interest, and we already know what that interest is: concealment, protection of its own reputation for holiness and all-over goodness, impunity.

That panel set up by the church doesn’t see things that way. But it’s out of luck.

Belgium insisted Monday in a dispute with the Vatican over credibility that Belgian law enforcement authorities — not the potentially biased Catholic Church — will investigate sexual abuse cases involving clergy.

A panel created by Belgian bishops 12 years ago to look into abuse cases disbanded on Monday, saying last week’s seizure of its 500 case files rendered its existence pointless. Its chief, Peter Adriaenssens, accused authorities of betraying the trust of hundreds of victims and using his group to tap into information and testimony from abuse victims.

The chief of a church-appointed panel accused the Belgian government of using the testimony of victims. What did Mr Adriaenssens plan to do with the testimony then? Put it in a vault? Seal it in amber? Lose it?

Belgium’s government doesn’t appear to be concerned about having pushed the panel to the sidelines, despite an outburst from the Vatican that Thursday’s police raid was an unprecedented intrusion into church affairs.

“I respect Peter Adriaenssens, but his commission was created by the Church,” Glenn Audenaert, head of Belgium’s judiciary police, said after last week’s police raids. “That commission cannot start a prosecution. Only the justice department can.”

That’s the way to tell them.

Is it okie dokie for Muslim men to have concubines?

Why of course it is; what a silly question. Evry fule kno that.

The first condition is that if during waging of jihad the women who come with the enemy forces to support them are captured and the emir of the army distributes them, it is his discretion, we can keep them as concubines. Second, if we explore and find some market where slaves and concubines are sold and the sale is established as a social institution there, the women you buy from there will be concubine. Abducting a free woman to take her as a concubine or to sell a free woman is, I think, wrong…

Oh my, how liberal, how generous, how really fair and just and all that anyone can expect. If selling women is established as a social institution, then men can buy them, no problema. Just don’t abduct a free woman to rape her or sell her, that’s all. Agreed? Splendid. Let’s all go for a smoke.

Well, Templeton got its money’s worth out of overpaid Ron Rosenbaum. He’s already hard at work saying how horrible “new” atheists are. Man, $15,000 and two weeks in Cambridge all expenses paid and a library’s worth of new books, all to kick the “new” atheists, when so many people are willing to do it for fifty bucks! Templeton is nothing if not generous.

I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”—as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

Isn’t it sad? He could have said that without setting foot in Cambridge. One wonders exactly what Templeton is paying for.

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing.

And so on and so on and so on – the usual boilerplate. It’s all like that, and it’s a long piece. Ho hum.

I was looking for something else, and stumbled on a blog post commenting on my post on atheism and reasons.

It’s one thing to have reasons to be an atheist (I do) and a Jew (I do), another thing altogether to adopt some level of “observance.” You can have good reasons to be an atheist, and other good reasons not to be observant–i.e. not to focus on it, talk about it a lot, promote it.

Yes but I wasn’t talking about being observant, I was talking about not pretending not to have reasons. I was talking about treating one’s atheism as if it were accidental, for the purpose of othering atheists. I wasn’t saying or suggesting that one should focus on it, talk about it a lot, promote it; I was saying that when one is an atheist one ought not to play accidental-atheist in order to suck up to the majority and throw non-accidental-atheists under the bus.

Maybe you have other goals that would be thwarted, if you got on the “religion, baaaad” bandwagon.  For example, maybe what really matters to you is the environment, or poverty, or animals, and you think you can advance progress in those areas if you reach out non-divisively to both religious and non-religious people.

Which of course implies, as Mooney always does, that atheism – including atheism-for-reasons – somehow prevents “reach[ing out] non-divisively to both religious and non-religious people.” It doesn’t.

Finally, it’s a very bad idea to use the term “anti-atheist” for unobservant atheists who criticize “the new atheists.”  It echoes “anti-semite” and thus misleads badly.

No it doesn’t. It’s just a shortcut, not an echo.

There are people who really do despise atheists in the way that anti-semites despise Jews. Unfortunately, I come into contact with such people, and they upset me.  Critics of the new atheists (like Chris Mooney, like me once in a while) are nothing like them. The critics have reasoned complaints about a subset of atheists; they don’t despise or fear or denigrate atheists just for being atheists.  They’re not “anti-atheists.” So much for that.

I disagree; I think Chris Mooney is very much like that. His complaints are not all that reasoned (he never explains why atheism prevents “reaching out non-divisively to both religious and non-religious people,” for instance), and they are very insistent and repetitive, as well as often inaccurate. Not all that reasoned. And as for “so much for that” – and as for the “Duh” in comments – well, that’s not all that reasoned either.

More Vatican rage at being treated like people as opposed to quasi-gods.

On the same day that Belgian police raided church offices to seize documents in a sex abuse probe, the Vatican found itself in the courts of another country, this time the United States, trying to fend off attempts to interrogate the pope and other senior Vatican officials in another case involving clerical sexual abuse.

Vatican attorneys filed a brief on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Kentucky in the case of O’Bryan v. Holy See, opposing requests from lawyers representing three sex abuse victims for depositions of four figures at the very top of the church’s power structure…

Ratzinger, “the Vatican’s Secretary of State” (whatever the hell that means), the Inquisitor, and the ambassador to the US.

The requests, the Vatican lawyers argued, are “unprecedented – akin to a foreign plaintiff seeking a foreign court order compelling the depositions of the United States President, Vice President, Secretary of Defense and ambassador.”

No, more like akin to a foreign plaintiff seeking a foreign court order compelling the depositions of the CEO, the CFO, and two other executives of a corporation in a criminal case. Not legally, to be sure (I know, Russell!), but in reality. Corporations are a good deal more accountable than the Vatican is though.

Remember that post about anonymous blogging? Now it can be told – the blog in question was called You’re Not Helping, and it has now flamed out – though that of course does not mean that the blogger is not still blogging somewhere else, and in fact I think it is. But it has at least admitted that it was one person and not several, and that many of its “commenters” were sock puppets. It has admitted that much of what it claimed was flatly untrue, which means it has informed us that everything it claimed could be untrue. I know from personal knowledge that a lot of it is – much of what it claimed about me is untrue.

It was weirdly obsessed with me. It called me a liar, repeatedly. I’m not a liar, as a matter of fact. It has just admitted that it is a liar. This is an improvement.

It says it’s 23 years old. If that’s true, I doubt that it’s Kees/Bernie Ranson, because that started too long ago – it seems unlikely that someone that young would spend more than two years dogging me.

It’s interesting that some accommodationists have taken YNH seriously in spite of obvious, not to say glaring, signs of its unreliability, to put it no more strongly. Interesting and not altogether impressive.

The Telegraph tells us

In a move designed to stress a commitment to the Catholic Church, the Coalition has decided that the former Conservative MP would represent a suitably high-profile appointment.

Why does the Coalition want to stress a commitment to the Catholic Church? Seriously – why? The Lib-Dems have no particular love for religion in general or the Catholic church in particular, that I know of, and the Tories are more likely to be friendly to the Church Established, aren’t they? And right at this current immediate now point in time, the Catholic church is not looking like a particularly respectable institution, so why does the Coalition want to stress a commitment to it? It’s a nasty child-raping law-avoiding self-protecting gang that considers itself “holy” and somehow in cahoots with “God” – so what is it about the Catholic church that the Coalition wants to stress a commitment to?

I would love to know.

The pope and the Vatican are trying even harder to get the whole world outside “the Holy See” to loathe and despise them for their passionate selfishness and territorialism and their shocking, persistent, hardened inability to take the real and horrendous damage done to Other People more seriously than minor inconveniences to themselves.

Pope Benedict has joined mounting Vatican criticism of raids by Belgian police investigating alleged child sex abuse, calling them “deplorable”…Pope Benedict’s criticism of the raids came in a message of support to Brussels Archbishop Andre Joseph Leonard, the head of the Belgian bishops’ conference. “I want to express, dear brother in the Episcopate, as well as to all the Bishops of Belgium, my closeness and solidarity in this moment of sadness, in which, with certain surprising and deplorable methods, searches were carried out.”

Just so the stalwarts around Hitler might have described the deplorable methods of the crude and vulgar non-German soldiers who liberated the death camps.

I mean that. Not that Ratzinger is another Hitler, but that this imbecilic and vicious loyalty combined with contempt for laws and police that are there to prevent child rape is just that – it’s imbecilic and vicious loyalty combined with contempt for secular, democratically constituted law enforcement and for laws that apply to everyone. It’s simply disgusting that Ratzinger still can’t get it right – still can’t learn to just STFU and take whatever is coming. It’s simply disgusting that he still thinks he and his gang deserve some kind of special holy immunity from investigation and prosecution.

On Saturday Vatican officials compared the raids and investigation into allegations of child sex abuse with the treatment of the Church under communist rule.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, described the detention of priests “serious and unbelievable”.

“There are no precedents, not even under the old communist regimes,” he said.

The cardinal alleged that the Belgian bishops were left all day without food or drink, although this was later denied by the Belgian authorities.

The Vatican has summoned the Belgian ambassador to the Holy See to voice its anger at the incident.

I hope the Belgian ambassador gave the Vatican an earful.

The pope is pissed off because Belgian police are investigating Belgian citizens over allegations of crimes against other Belgian citizens (who were underage at the time) along with concealment and perpetuation of those crimes. What business, exactly, does the pope have being pissed off about this? He is the head of the organization the suspects work for, but so what?

The Vatican has expressed shock at raids, including the “violation” of a cathedral crypt, by Belgian police investigating alleged child sex abuse.

Well that’s typical, isn’t it – they’re “shocked” about the “violation” of a crypt – an inanimate object – when they were never all that shocked about the repeated violation of living breathing feeling human beings at their hands. They have a sick, disgusting sense of priorities, and they can’t seem to unlearn it, even with the help of relentless public scrutiny and opprobrium. They seem to be unteachable.

The Vatican has summoned the Belgian ambassador to the Holy See to voice anger over Thursday’s raids.

Summoned? Summoned? Who does he think he is? Okay he’s the notional head of the notional state to which the Belgian ambassador is the notional ambassador. But all the same – who does he think he is? What right does he think he has to “voice anger” over police investigation of crimes committed and concealed by his loathsome festering rot-riddled gang of theocrats?

The answer is probably sealed up in some crypt or other.

Hey – want to do something? Want to make a difference? Want to make all the horrid oil in the gulf turn into nice healthy salt water and plankton and plastic water bottles? You can do all that. Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston and all those people will show you the way.

First step is tomorrow, 10 a.m. where I am, whatever time it is where you are. That’s Setting Our Sacred Intention time.

We begin by setting our collective intention. Join Deepak Chopra to set our powerful vision and participate in a worldwide Intention Experiment with renowned author and journalist Lynne McTaggart. Explore how our collective intention, our voice and our commitment can impact the cleanup of the oil spill. And then we will be graced by Jean Houston who will share with us why this time matters and why we matter.

Next step is July 6, 5:30 p.m. where I am, you figure it out where you are. This is The Power of Sacred Prayer. (Not to be confused with The Power of Mundane Prayer.)

Our collective prayers and thoughts have the power to cause a profound shift on the planet. Pray with some of the most powerful spiritual thought leaders – Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith, Joan Borysenko, James O’Dea and more. Together we discover that we have the power to change the world.

So at about 6:30 p.m. my time on Tuesday July 6th (frankly I don’t care what time it is where you are) all the oil in and around the Gulf will suddenly crinkle up like tissue paper and then kind of dry out like an old orange peel and then it will just evaporate, in a non-toxic way, and that will be the end of that. All everybody has to do is re-stock the fish and other fauna, and everything is made whole. Just by all praying together at the same time. Way easier than trying to engineer a way to seal off the oil, and trying to mop up millions of barrels of the fucking stuff. Also prettier, nicer, more spirichal, and with fluffier hair.

See you tomorrow at 10 a.m. my time! Bring pastries.

First there’s Daniel Harrell’s essay for BioLogos explaining that Adam and Eve were really truly. The introduction (perhaps written by someone else – it’s not clear) says “science does not rule out the possibility of a historical Adam and Eve.” Wull, yes it does. A historical woman and man who were the only humans on the planet and lived about 4 6 thousand years ago? Yes it does. So does history.

Anyway, Harrell explains that we can decide that Eve and Adam were really truly in a different way from being created all of a sudden by god and then filled up with fake DNA to trick everyone.

Can we use “formed” and “breathed” to mean created through the long and continuous history of biological evolution (as were the other living creatures in Genesis 1)? If so, then perhaps “the Lord God formed the man” could be read emphasizing the novelty and uniqueness which humans inhabit.

Yeah, we can; sure. It’s a silly way to say that, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

But pesky sciency Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers said it’s silly to bother working out a way to say that Adam and Eve are really truly.

So the president of BioLogos, Darrel Falk, wrote to Dawkins to tell him he’d misunderstood. Dawkins answered to say oh no I didn’t. He didn’t, too. He was saying the second option, partially quoted above, was silly, not that the first one was. Of course the first one is – the first one is just “it was just like it says here on the page.” The point is that the contortionist one is silly too.

Now Darrel Falk is all weary and washed out, because here he is offering the middle ground and all these people stomp their foot and say No! we don’t want your damn middle ground.

He wants us to see there is middle ground between saying Adam and Eve were really truly in just the way the bible says, and saying there were no such people as Adam and Eve. He wants to make it a matter of negotiation and adjudication and splitting the difference, rather than a matter of getting it right. What should we do, bargain away a bit at a time? They lived five thousand years ago. Ten thousand. A million. No? Five hundred thousand? Sold! They were part of a group of forty humans. Sixty. A hundred. A hundred thousand. No? Ten thousand? Sold! They had parents and grandparents. They had ancestors going back ten generations. They had ancestors going back a thousand generations. No? Fifty? Sold!

And then that’s what goes in the textbooks, and that becomes the consensus? Or what? What’s Darrel Falk looking for? What kind of middle ground is he talking about? Epistemic? Political? Both at once?

It won’t do. Either way it won’t do. Even if it’s just political, it won’t work, because it will be so obvious when all the sciencey types go right on saying humans began to split from other apes some 6 million years ago whenever they’re not doing politics.

Another cunning plan breaks down.