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.

At the end of his oil spill speech last week, Obama got into some god talk – quite a lot of it, as a matter of fact. He told us about that pretty custom, “The Blessing of the Fleet.” He explained that what’s so pretty about it is not that it works, because it doesn’t, but that we have goddy company while we drown or choke on oil.

For as a priest and former fisherman once said of the tradition, “The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always,” a blessing that’s granted “even in the midst of the storm.”

The blessing is that he is with us, standing by and refusing to help, watching us as we struggle and gasp and flounder and kick, like the poor birds in the oil.

Remind me why that is a blessing, exactly? Having an all-powerful witness who could help but doesn’t, watching?

Sometimes the insult is just too god damn insulting.

One more thing about Mooney and the jollification at the AAAS last week. Mooney keeps talking about dialogue between religion and science, bringing religion and science together. But what actually happened at the jollification, and what Mooney asked about there, was religious people and scientists talking. That’s a different thing. Obviously religious people and scientists can talk any time, and it’s unexceptionable that they do. But the fact that religious people and scientists talk to each other doesn’t mean that religion and science are somehow getting closer together, or even having a dialogue.

Oh don’t be silly, you may say; that’s what they mean – by “bringing religion and science together” they mean religious people and scientists talking to each other. But is it? I’m not so sure. I don’t think it is. I think we’re supposed to think that the two are sort of the same – that accomplishing the one is accomplishing the other.

Maybe this is a good thing, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a sop to believers. Maybe the idea is that if religious people and scientists get together and talk, religious people will get the idea that science isn’t so scary after all, without science having to make itself a little bit more like religion. But on the other hand, maybe it works the other way; maybe the idea is that if religious people and scientists get together and talk, then BioLogos will somehow become part of science, and pretty soon it will be part of the curriculum, and…

Hold my hand, I’m scared.

There’s another thing. It wasn’t actually a dialogue on science and religion – it was a Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion. How did ethics get in there? What’s ethics got to do with science or religion? Why didn’t they throw in ballet and literary criticism while they were at it?

Is this true?

A London council was at the centre of a religious row last night after it announced it had dumped Christian prayer in favour of poetry readings at the start of council meetings…The vast majority of councils choose to start meetings with Christian Prayers while a handful of other local authorities begin with other faiths.

Is that true? Most councils start meetings with prayers?

It sounds crazy. Anybody know the facts?

The Texas Taliban Republican Party really is a hoot. Their new platform wants to set up an Inquisition, take the suffrage away from women and Nigras, send Jews to Iceland to do sumpin about that there volcano –

Okay, I’m lying. No all the platform wants to do is, for instance,

restrict citizenship to children born in the United States whose parents are citizens

That’s all – it just wants to repeal the 14th Amendment, that’s all. You know – the one that was passed in the wake of the Civil War, that undid the infamous three fifths rule in the Constitution and the equally infamous Dred Scott decision. And you know what else that particular red-hot idea would do? You do if you’ve seen the latest News item, because I spilled it there already. Look at it. It would make the current president a non-citizen according to Texas. I find that fascinating – it makes my blood run cold.

The platform would also like the reinstatement of laws banning “sodomy,” and to make gay marriage a felony. A felony! With jail time!

I’m canceling that vacation trip to Lubbock right now. I don’t think I would feel cheerful there.

When “education” consists of nothing but studying one book, then not much is learned.

For thousands of years the way that ultra-orthodox Jewish children are taught has changed little and is based almost entirely on study of the Torah – the Jewish Bible.

But now a group of leading secular Israelis wants to force the ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, education system to modernise and adopt standard subjects like maths, science and English.

The reason, they say, is that thousands of Haredi students are unable or unwilling to participate in wider Israeli society and are becoming an increasing economic burden.

“Participate in wider Israeli society” looks a lot like “get a paying job.” The BBC is apparently reluctant to spell that out (why?) but it seems pretty clear that if all you have ever “studied” is the Torah, then nobody is going to hire you except someone who wants Torah-knowledge and has the money to pay you to provide it, which once again implies a job or some other source of income in the background. In short if everyone in a given society learns nothing but the Torah or the Koran or Harry Potter, then no one will be doing anything that produces material wealth, and all the Torah scholars or Potter scholars will sooner or later starve to death. In short there is something just a tad self-indulgent about infinite Torah-frotting unless one is already, like Mr Bingley, in possession of a large fortune.

The rabbi acknowledges that most of the boys he teaches will never work or participate in “wider” Israeli society – dedicating themselves instead to a life of religious study.

“We try to keep the way we’ve been doing things for generations – for hundreds, even thousands of years,” he says. “It’s the same idea of studying the Talmud, an explanation of the Torah. We see the success, the great success and don’t want to change a thing.”

What success? At whose expense? Who provides the meals and the roof over the head? Who pays for all this success?

Well how nice for Toronto – unlike poor sad deprived Britain, it gets to have Zakir Naik telling it what’s what.

Zakir Naik, founder of online Peace TV in Mumbai, India, tops the bill at the Journey of Faith Conference, July 2-4, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. It is being described as the largest Islamic conference ever in North America. In videos on YouTube, Naik advocates death to homosexuals and to Muslims who leave the faith…“This guy has absolute hatred for the West,” Tarek Fatah of the Muslim Canadian Congress said Friday.

And homosexuals and apostates, apparently. I bet he’s not much of a feminist, either.

“What we want him to preach here is peace. We want him to talk about how we can live and coexist with non-Muslim communities,” said Rageh, the imam of Abu Huraira Centre. “I would not invite anybody who has problem with this message.”

Hmm. It sounds as if Rageh may have mixed up his file cards.

Remember Kees? I mean “Kees”? The troll who appeared in February-March 2009 pretending to be a naive observer who had just discovered moral relativism by watching a tv documentary about a South Pacific island where the men (prepare for a shock) ran everything?

Who then revealed himself (by emailing a lot of commenters here to urge them to escape my dictatorship, and using a revealing email address) to be the same as one “Bernie Ranson” who had staged a similar extended charade at Talking Philosophy more than a year earlier, in January 2008?

Remember him? (He claimed to be male, and I think that particular claim is true.)

I’ve been reading some of his comments from those two encounters. They’re very interesting, in a way, though in a more usual way they’re utterly boring. They betray an odd and inexplicable (from a stranger) obsession with me. Obsession and hatred, of course – people don’t do this kind of thing out of friendship. He makes much of my putative lying and hypocrisy, my censorship and dominance, my evasiveness and general shiftiness – all this after days and days, and thousands of words, trying to argue him into reasonableness. All very odd. Remember?

I was reading through his comments because I was reminded of him. I was reminded of him by a newish blog that made its debut a couple of months ago and has made a specialty of (cough) criticizing four bloggers in particular. I’m one of them; the others are far more illustrious than I am. The language and mood of this blog is very reminiscent of “Kees”/”Bernie Ranson” – though it could just be the language and mood that are common to all enterprises of this kind. Then again, I’m not familiar with enterprises of this kind, so I don’t know. It seems very eccentric, because it’s time-consuming without really being rewarding. B&W is time-consuming too, but it’s rewarding. A blog that does almost nothing but shout at four bloggers in increasingly obscene terms seems as unrewarding as it could be.

This blog is anonymous of course. You may have seen another anonymous troll who turned up here on Monday. I was suspicious of it because it had just started a blog two days before it turned up; because the new blog sounded a good deal like the above-mentioned anonymous blog; because this troll seemed peculiarly interested in B&W and me for someone who appeared from nowhere. Within about three days the troll had done quite a few things to confirm my suspicions.

I don’t know that any of this has anything to do with “Kees” and “Bernie Ranson” but I think it might. I think that, for one thing, because I find it hard to believe that there are all that many people who are weirdly obsessed with me. Why would there be? I’m a very small player, after all; why would guy after guy after guy after guy work up a foaming hatred of me? I know of a couple of others (non-anonymous) as it is; I think it’s far more likely that there’s one more rather than two or three or five more. Still – it’s a very busy blogger/troll, I must say. Full marks for industriousness!

The poor Irish bishops aren’t getting the deference they’re used to.

But Mark Kelly, director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), dismissed the bishops’ call. “The ICCL seriously doubts that the Irish Catholic bishops retain sufficient moral authority to pontificate on the Civil Partnership Bill,” he said.

And the ICCL isn’t the only one.

The Union of Students in Ireland said it was extremely disappointed the bishops were resisting equality for same sex couples. President Peter Mannion said: “While USI respects the viewpoint of the Catholic Church we do not agree with it. Objecting to the implementation of equal rights for Irish citizens may be seen as an absence of moral conscience.”

Omigod he said the bishops lacked a moral conscience! That’s gotta sting.

Aengus O Snodaigh, Sinn Fein justice spokesman, said he rejected bishops trying to pressurise politicians. “The Catholic bishops’ time would be better spent getting their own house in order rather than seeking to interfere in the work of the Oireachtas.”

Pow! Boom!

And about time too.

If you’re in London, or say maybe Dorking, or St Albans, or High Wycombe, or what the hell, Manchester, or Bristol, or Norwich, on Sunday, get yourself to Hyde Park for the rally against sharia and religious laws in the UK.

Swell the crowd. Bring a friend; bring your dog; bring an inflatable doll. Show the New Statesman that sharia is not wanted.

Make up the numbers. Tell your friends. Turn up.