It’s a watch!  It’s complex, it has to have been designed!

The Intelligent Design crowd, in their never-ending and yet never-succeeding quest to demonstrate that ID is not creationism in disguise for political purposes, dig themselves even deeper into their hole.  They protest, yet again, that theirs is not a “God of the Gaps” theory of evolution.  It’s a so-complex-it-is-improbable-to-be-natural argument.  And, yes, apparently that is not “God of the Gaps.”

It’s Intelligence of the Gaps, because instead of saying “We don’t know how it works, so it has to be God,” ID says “It is too complex and improbable therefor it has to be a Designer.”  See the difference been the Design Inference and God-of-the-Gaps?  I don’t.  But then, I am not as smart as William Dembski who wrote a whole book about the subject.

Evolution News and Views (sic) pleads yet again that the scientific world just doesn’t understand the intricacies of their breakthrough, but they could if they just weren’t so stubborn about needing to have a causal phenomena described in less-than-vague terms!

When I was back in high school and studying experimental design, one of the elements required in developing an experiment was a little beastie referred to as an independent variable.  The independent variable is something that can be measured and it is the variable that the experimenter manipulates in order to measure the effects of said manipulation in order to test if the manipulation had an effect on the dependent variable.  Key word is “measure.”

The reason that ID is not science is that the independent variable is not measurable because it is inferred and not defined.  The “I” in Intelligent Design is stated to be “not necessarily God because if we said that then our whole Academic Freedom bleat would be exposed as Creationism.  It’s not Creationism because the “I” could be a Super Alien outside of the natural bounds of our universe.

That’s not God of the Gaps!  No, sir!

Once Again, We Make a Special Pleading and You Really Need to Listen This Time! by Jonathan M.:/>

Historical scientific inquiry often employs a method of reasoning known as the abductive method of inference to the best explanation from multiple competing hypotheses. This methodology asks, “Given what we know about the explanatory efficacy of the various competing hypotheses, which cause best explains the evidence we observe?” In all of our experience of cause and effect, we know that complex and sequence-specific information, when it is traced back to its source, uniformly originates with an intelligent cause. Therefore, when we find complex and sequence-specific digital information encoded in the hereditary molecules of DNA and RNA, the most plausible candidate explanation — given what we do know about the nature of information — is that it also originated with a source of intelligent agency.

Can I just raise an objection to that paragraph? We don’t know that complex and sequence-specific information uniformly traces back to an intelligent cause. I am not even sure how Jonathan is defining “sequence specific,” however we can observe a lot of complexity in the universe that is not traced back to an intelligent source.

He is kind of saying that none of nature is natural, is how I read it. It all goes back to some sort of designer.

Also, did you know that neither DNA nor RNA are “digital?” Nope, it’s a true fact. RNA and DNA are complex sequences of protein chains arranged as single- and double-stranded helixes (respectively.) While the proteins can be identified I don’t see how they create discrete units. They are molecules, and not digital.

And here’s the demonstration that lets you know that ENV is as incredulous as Ray Comfort, who is a creationist.

Is it a “god-of-the-gaps” argument to infer that Francis Collins’s book was crafted by an intelligent designer? Does a forensic scientist commit an “arson-of-the-gaps” fallacy in inferring that a fire was started deliberately rather than by natural causes?

Francis said he wrote his book, the arsonist discovered gasoline and a match. It is pretty hard to stretch either of those examples to try to make a naturalistic cause emerge.

Intelligent Design is dependent on fallacies and inaccuracies and all the special pleading doesn’t make it science.

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A sign at Seattle Pride.

I am going to keep this purposely vague and not name names.  The reason is that I want people to read this and examine whether or not they should take a look at what they do and write online.

When I first got involved in active atheism I was an enthusiastic blogger; posting and sharing and putting up on Facebook my thoughts and comments about what my favorite bloggers and writers and activists were saying and doing.  I wrote my own original posts and was happy when some of them got shared and linked to, and I was happy that I was gaining a small amount of notoriety.

But now, I am having a hard time staying excited or interested in the atheist blogosphere because of the ever-increasing level of vitriol that is being directed between fellow atheists.  Skeptics and atheists are being vilified for things they write and say in public that just aren’t good enough, or that they are going too far, or something else that they have done.

Factions are being drawn up and held, and no one in the other factions can say or do anything good once they have made a misstep, or said something that is unsatisfactory.  Blog networks nip and bark at each other, and their members say “They aren’t part of us!”  You probably know which ones I am referring to, of course, but you may draw your own conclusions.

When I asked to be considered for inclusion in one of the blog networks, I was asked how I felt about the rift between that network and another one because they wanted to know where I stand.  I responded that I had friends in both networks and I could give two fucks about the spew.

I can understand a bit about how this all works.  Humans being what we are, tend to identify with groups, and in order to strengthen solidarity within the group then creating “out groups” is a natural tendency.  My problem is, that with all the scientists and skeptics involved in atheism there should be a recognition of this tendency and a desire to correct rather than control this method of building solidarity.

I know more than a few atheists that want no part of the entire enterprise any longer.  I am losing interest in atheist activism, myself and can find little motivation to do much more than make swipes at religion and the way that it affects society.  Beyond this, I want to do little else; because I am finally starting to see that it is not religion that makes society shitty.  It is people.  We can’t help it because we are self-interested and altruism is a weaker force than self-interest.

I am certain that there are swarms of atheists who are in the closet and don’t want to come out of it because of what they are seeing in all the atheist movements.

I want to be clear that I am not blaming anyone in particular.  I also want to be clear that I don’t absolve myself of any blame.  I have been just as wrong in this as anyone I am thinking about now.  What I want is for atheists to stop “grading” each other, to stop “hating” each other and to stop accusing each other.

Let’s get on with our lives.

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Human suffering. Where is the payoff?

Suffering in this world is supposed to be part and parcel of hating this life so that we can love the next life.  It is a reminder that we don’t really belong here, that this is the staging point for the next life, the real life, the one for which we are created.  We are put here as a testing ground, to see if we are the sort with whom God would want to cavort for eternity, or if we are the sort who should be watched from afar, with glee, as we writhe in eternal agony.

Whoever loves his life will lose it; and whoever hates his life in this world, will preserve it for everlasting life. (John 12:25, from the Nice Testament.)

As the pro-lifers who are opposed to abortion even if the pregnancy places the life of the mother, the host, in danger stress; it is a selfish denial of destiny for a woman to place her life above the life of a fetus.  The ideal Christian life is one of denial of earthly pleasures.  We shouldn’t have sex for the sake of enjoyment.  We should only do it if it means that a baby can come out of it.  We should abstain from any sort of sexual pleasure if it doesn’t leave open the possibility of the fertilization and implantation of an embryo.  No masturbation, no sodomy, no contraception.  That would be love of this life over the next, and God doesn’t like that.

(While it may be fitting to ask how both this verse from John and the “eat drink and be merry” verse from Ecclesiastes can be in the same “Literally true with no contradictions” Holy Bible, I would rather leave that for you to ponder on your own. )

We are supposed to loathe this life, to be “in the world, but not of it,” to look beyond this world and into the next where we presume that the lessons painfully learned in our time as corporal beings will help us to appreciate all the more the bliss of the next (if we believe properly.)  Not so fast, wrote the late Elizabeth MacDonald in her journal as she wasted agonizingly away in her terminal illness:

This reminds me that Elizabeth once wrote in her journal that sometimes she wished that there was a life after death, so that we could be together again and share in the time that was lost here. But she simply rebelled against the idea, because that would mean that all the suffering that she was enduring was done with a purpose, that someone had planned and then executed the plan to make her suffer. And the plan was such that she would be forced to look on what we had known together as not the important thing, because that she was going to lose. So she would have to begin despising that, because that wasn’t part of the plan. Something else was. And at that she simply balked and could not get her head around it. If our joy and love was not the real thing, and if that was to be cut off by her suffering and then her death, then whatever came could not be good, not good as we could understand that good, and this she was not prepared to say. And I am grateful that she could not.

Does God “have a plan for us?”  I certainly can not accept that.  Did God “have a plan” for Savita Halappanavar?  Does God have a plan for anyone who is in the final stages of cancer?

One of the hideous aspects of Christianity is that it takes away from this life because it doesn’t consider this world to be the “real” one, and we are just supposed to wait it out.  We are supposed to accept suffering and our limitations in alleviating it, because if we do much to enjoy it we are demonstrating a lack of faith and it may cause us to go to Hell where we will be properly schooled.

For eternity.

It’s such an odd mix and it makes no intelligible sense.  On the one hand, all we really need to do to go to Heaven is to be saved by the blood of the lamb, while at the same time we are supposed to observe all of these laws and rules that take the fun out of life.

Between you and me, I think the whole enterprise is made up and imaginary by people who like to use the threat of eternal damnation to control us.  Forcing us to accept suffering is but one of the tools of the trade.

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I couldn’t comprehend the horror that the children in the Kindergarten classroom were facing as a gunman was shooting at them and killing them.  I still can’t.  I thought about these little kids who just that morning had been sent to school to learn their ABC’s and the basics of education, just this morning  had been sent to build group social skills to be with their friends, just this morning who had been dropped off to giggle, play and learn had their lives cut short for no comprehensible reason.

I took my lunch break and in the tv break room at work the television was showing a scene of kids being rushed out of their school and it sunk into me where they had been and what had happened and I tried with little success to suppress a sob that came from deep within me.

I love children. I love to play with them. I love to watch them as they explore and learn about their environment, I love to see their wide eyes when they run across something new and unexpected and ask their questions that reveal the way that they think as they learn to process information and try to figure out how things relate to them.  I love to see them retain their innocent love of life as long as they can, because this is, on the whole, a hard and cruel life that we have to navigate as adolescents and adults.

I love to see children laugh, and play and get silly and make up their own games.  I have three children of my own, I have a grandson and I have the son of a very close friend who I love to spend time with.  And this boy is in the age group of some of the kids who were senselessly murdered today by an insane man with a gun.  I couldn’t stop thinking of this boy, and what it would be like for him to witness such a horrible act of seeing his friends die and realizing that once that madman pulled the trigger his friends will never be coming back.  And I started crying  because of the sudden realization that they would have that horror and death can strike so quickly and change things forever.

I am thinking of the parents of the children who were killed.  I am thinking of the families of the adults who were killed.  I am thinking of the people who live in that town who know that the kids they saw playing in the playground just yesterday will never be coming back. I am thinking of the kids who were murdered and whose lives were ended before they could begin.

All of this brings me great sorrow, but even more deeply, I am having trouble dealing with the fear and the hurt and the terror of the kids who witnessed this and survive and wondering how they will get through this.  I am sure that by now they are in bed, either crying or dreaming and screaming and their parents are trying their best to comfort them in whatever way they can.

Right now I am so sick of our culture of easy access to guns that makes it easy for a man like this to be able to do what he has done, and I am going to write more about that in a separate post.

For tonight, I am just going to try to make sense and cope and think about the kids who lost their friends and how terrible it is for them to realize that they aren’t coming back.

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Of course, Romney thinks it is a joke and a punchline, this concern about rising ocean levels so we couldn’t expect much better from him.  ”Anne, what’s that noise?”  ”Oh, it’s just some poor people drowning, Dear.”  ”Will you please shut the window?  I am trying to figure out how to convince voters that cutting taxes on the wealthy and raising spending on defense is going to balance the budget.”  ”Sorry, dear.  I had thought you might like some fresh air.”  ”I am the head of the household, Prettycakes.  Let me do the thinking.”

ScienceDebate.org is getting very frustrated about the candidates’ lack of attention to the science behind global warming, because as Superstorm Sandy followed Irene by only a year there is every indication that the weather will continue to provide ever more dangerous storms in some parts of the country, droughts in others, and the understanding that the diminishing Arctic Ice Cap is a contributory factor in the intensity of storms, the earth can’t continue to wait while politicians ask their pollsters rather than the weatherman which way the wind blows.

It is global warming.  What seem to be modest rises in the global average temperatures represent wild swings in a functionally dynamic system.  Energy seeks equilibrium.  Warm air expands and pushes into cold air, and increasing the amount of energy in warm air creates faster motion.  More energy in storms leads to stronger storms as sure as warm air rises and creates minor turbulence in your dwelling.  More energy is being retained by the atmosphere than escapes because carbon in the air acts as a blanket, which is where the term “greenhouse effect” is generated.  Greenhouses trap more energy from the sun than can escape, creating natural heating.

This also increases the temperature of the water in the oceans, which add fuel to the fury of hurricanes and storms and it all just keeps on building, while the oil companies spend money to buy politicians who will prevent any action.  Insurance companies are not so happy about this.  If you want to ask a corporation about whether or not there is truth to the science behind global warming, don’t ask a carbon producer.  Ask the people who have to pay to clean up the mess.  Insurance companies are vested in reducing risk so they can retain profit.  From Bloomberg/Businessweek:

On Oct. 17 the giant German reinsurance company Munich Re issued a prescient report titled Severe Weather in North America. Globally, the rate of extreme weather events is rising, and “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” From 1980 through 2011, weather disasters caused losses totaling $1.06 trillion. Munich Re found “a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events in North America for the past three decades.” By contrast, there was “an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe, and 1.5 in South America.” Human-caused climate change “is believed to contribute to this trend,” the report said, “though it influences various perils in different ways.”

Global warming “particularly affects formation of heat waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity,” Munich Re said. This July was the hottest month recorded in the U.S. since record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The U.S. Drought Monitor reported that two-thirds of the continental U.S. suffered drought conditions this summer.

Granted, Munich Re wants to sell more reinsurance (backup policies purchased by other insurance companies), so maybe it has a selfish reason to stir anxiety. But it has no obvious motive for fingering global warming vs. other causes. “If the first effects of climate change are already perceptible,” said Peter Hoppe, the company’s chief of geo-risks research, “all alerts and measures against it have become even more pressing.”  “It’s Global Warming, Stupid,” by Paul Barrett, Businessweek, November 1, 2012

Paul Douglas, longtime KARE 11 meteorologist and Republican has this to say at Huffington Post:

Climate change is real, as I’ve tried to describe in previous posts here, here and here. Last Monday I warned ourAlerts Broadcaster corporate clients of an historic storm brewing for the Northeast. By Wednesday, October 24^th, five days before landfall, I started sharing our increasingly dire forecasts with Huffington Post readers. We called for a record hybrid storm unlike anything the Northeast had ever witnessed. If anything, Sandy was more extreme than even my worst-case scenario.

I don’t like making these calls. It drives me crazy to see the effects of climate change going on all around us, to see the devastation, and all I can do is react — warning people to get out of harm’s way. It’s time we do more as a nation than react, late, and after the fact. It’s time we wake up and act.

Fact: we already have the technology and the entrepreneurs to slowly transition beyond coal, natural gas and oil. What’s lacking? Vision. And the political courage to do the right thing. Not just for today’s press release, next month’s unemployment numbers or the next quarterly shareholder report, but for the Americans who come next; those stuck with cleaning up our dirty little fossil fuel hangover.  “Sandy’s Legacy? Vote as if future generations depend on it.”  Paul Douglas, Huffington Post. 11/02/2012

Paul Douglas is no wild-eyed liberal enviro-wacko, either.  He’s a conservative Christian, frustrated with the Republican Party’s embrace of campaign money over science.

Global warming is happening.  It is wreaking havoc, it is destroying lives.  The Arctic Ice Cap melt is more than about protecting polar bears, it is about reducing the mediation of global temperatures.

If denialists were being honest about their skepticism, they would spend more time learning the science and less time polluting the comments sections of articles about climate change with stupid comments like this:

Gee, Michael, you’re right.  Let’s change our entire lives and destroy our economies on the chance something might happen in the future.  You know what else might happen?  Martians might invade.  Wooly mammoths might come back and stampede in Central Park.  Everyone on earth might grow two feet taller.  Yet, I’m not going to prepare for all these things.

Dolt, expanding the economy with new industries that solve the problems does not destroy as surely as do the megastorms that have been battering our coasts.  It’s global warming, Stupid.

Yeah, I am going to vote for Obama.  It’s a half-a-loaf vote.  We just need to put pressure on his administration to push for stronger global warming and science (in general) education so that people know what the hell is happening in the natural world because of human industrial activity.  You can’t fix what you don’t understand.

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I heard John Prine once tell that he would be a substitute grandchild for some of the senior citizens in the neighborhood.  They would take him to movies, to the drugstores and amusement parts or he would just hang out at their houses and talk to them, and listen.

He loved seniors, and he wrote this song based on the experiences he had with them.

I think old people are pretty damn cool, myself.

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Greg wrote the book initially as a project for a blogathon, on a lark.  He wrote a chapter per hour, just to see if it could be done and to raise money for some charity or another.  He did it, and decided that he liked the story, but that it needed some re-write in order to be a more entertaining book in its own write.

I was among the chosen few to get the email with a digital version attached, requesting a review.  I asked him for an .epub version that I could read on my nook.  After a few attempts at conversion he found one that works and displays nicely on the screen of my old-fashioned e-reader (that’s something that people used to read in the days before Tablets,)

I didn’t like the way that it started, frankly, but I promised Greg that I would read it and so I soldiered on through to the good parts.  I found it to be full of clichés until he moved past the preliminaries and into the story.

Mallow is a mercenary with training as an anthropologist, hired to solve the mystery of a disappeared anthropologist last seen in the Congo many years ago.  No trace left behind and no clues except for the anthropologist’s wife who was found mysteriously upon a tour boat and unable to communicate what had happened to her.  Mallow is accompanied by another anthropologist, Pat, who knows more than he does, but slowly reveals the secrets given her by the foundation that hired them both.

There is lots of mystery here, and perhaps the most mysterious is the possibility of the existence of a lesser great ape that has not yet been captured either in vivo nor on camera.  Sungudogo is a smaller version of a gorilla, we think, but we don’t really know much about it other than from myths, legends and lore and some stray hairs subjected to DNA testing which indicates that it was a twig from the primate branch that had budded off from the human/chimp line 9 million years ago.  This was the beast that the disappeared Phillip Dietrich was seeking when he so weirdly disappeared without a trace.

This is the part of the story that paid off for reading through.  Laden takes us through The Congo, its jungles and bush.  He takes us to meet pygmies and villagers and describes their customs and their languages.  He writes about the journey as if he had taken similar journeys through Africa himself.  And, he does it so well because he has been there and lived there and written about it with the keen eye of a trained anthropologist.

I am not going to give any spoilers here, but I found several surprises that I deeply enjoyed reading and would like to say that for a first, self-published novel this one is worth downloading and reading on the bus to keep your mind of the fact that you are on your way to work.  It’s a pulp fiction book that engrosses the reader, except that it is available in byte form.

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Perhaps, I am oversimplifying, but liberals saw that the U.S. government was not doing what it should be doing and the conservatives were all about being “tough on crime” and if a few hippies got their heads cracked open to protect the American Way of Life, well so much the better.  We had peace marches in the streets and on campuses, and at Kent State the National Guard used live bullets to quell what they considered to be a potential riot.  The government under Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had coördinated bombing raids in Cambodia to cut off supply lines for the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong, killing hundreds of innocent Cambodians as collateral damage (unfortunate, but they were determined to have Peace With Honor.)

A war we had joined as “military advisers” when the French realized that they had to give up their Viet Colony to a rebellion whose leader was a Harvard-educated Ho Chi Minh who originally wanted a government “of the people” based on the U.S. Constitution but instead was driven to seek military assistance from China and the Soviet Union because of our alliance with the French, a war which had gone from being South Vietnam’s war against the North Vietnamese to being our war against the NVA and the Viet Cong who were defending their homeland, had become Our War against communist aggression.

I was opposed to this war.  I was eleven years old, and I hadn’t yet learned about the game of world empire that the United States was playing in defending its foothold empire in South East Asia, but I was against the war because of the casual way that the U.S. Army was treating the lives of the civilians whose freedom it was supposed to be defending and I saw news stories of Lt. William Calley and the My Lai Massacre, and I was against this war.  I was against this war because Neil Young and Steven Stills were against this war.   I was against this war because my oldest brother was against this war, and my oldest sister was against this war.

English: Senator George McGovern speaking at the Richard M. Nixon Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California during his book tour (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1972 Senator George McGovern emerged from the mêlée that was the Democratic Party nomination process as the candidate who was most vocal about stopping the war.  Our family was on our way back from a vacation in Mexico and were staying at a motel in Texas when the delegates “from the great state of” were still duking it out at the Democratic National Convention to make a final decision as to who would be the nominee to run against Richard Nixon and the tally finally locked the nomination for McGovern.  (Anybody remember when the national party conventions weren’t pre-determined?)

I was all in for McGovern, because of the war.   McGovern is only known to most people who have heard of him as the loser of one of the most lopsided elections in the history of the Electoral College.   I  was heartbroken and disbelieving as a saw the results of the election being announced state-by-state and it seemed to me that the country had chosen war over peace.

As a sixth-grader in northwestern Minnesota, I was one of only two kids in a class of 27 who were vocal supporters of George McGovern and as often as I explained my position on the election and defended McGovern as a man who had been to war and thought that this was a bad war against a man who had been to war as a Quaker(!) and sought only an “honorable peace”  because the United States had never lost a war and weren’t about to lose one on his watch.  But, simplifiers that they were (and I don’t think that politics have matured much beyond the sixth-grade level,) my support for McGovern was boiled down to one issue by them:

There was talk and rumor that McGovern supported the legalization of marijuana.  The other kids in my class could understand no other reason and that was how I was labeled for the remainder of the election season.  My principal overheard the other kids calling me “Marijuana Man,” and called me into his office because he was concerned and wanted to know why that was my nickname.  I think he was ready to call in my parents since he was obviously worried that at 12 years old I was already using drugs.  I wasn’t.

When I explained to him what was going on, he started laughing.  I don’t know what his political position had been in that war, but he thought it was a silly nickname, too.  But, it stuck with me until a year later when someone else decided that the word “Meek” was a clever play on my first name.

When a politician loses an election by such a margin, people forget all of the positive things about that person as he or she becomes the butt of jokes.  People don’t remember much about this man now, other than the 1972 election.  When, in August of 1974, Nixon resigned because of the details of the attempted cover-up of the burglary of the Watergate offices of the DNC headquarters and the revelations about the corruption of big-party politics and the dirty tricks the Committee to Re-Elect the President, I felt vindicated in my support for George McGovern.

In 2008 during the election cycle that led to the election of Barack Obama, retired Senator George McGovern spoke at the annual fundraiser for the Minnesota 67th Senate Democratic party.  I lived in a suburb way out of the district at the time, but I knew that I had to go and hear him talk.  I also wanted to buy a copy of his book about the 1972 election and get his autograph.

And he spoke, and he talked about the work that he and his spouse had been doing to promote education in Africa.  What he said may seem obvious, but it was a clarifier for a very important concept that teachers know and which the McGoverns worked to fix.

Hungry students don’t learn very well. 

In the complex poverty of certain portions of Africa (and, in the United States, don’t you know?) children are kept out of school so that they can work to help feed the family.  People have more children than they can support because they don’t know how many of them will survive long enough to work for the family and so an economic cost is a hoped for economic gain.  Parents needed to feed their children so they would keep them from school because of the higher need satisfaction of hunger, and while education is valued it is at a lower priority than finding food.  The McGoverns were supporting a program which promised the pupils and students a free breakfast and a free lunch.  With that economic concern taken care of and with achieving one very important need, the parents see the value in sending the kids to school.  And so, they send them.  The kids do very well with a full belly in school.

What he was talking about is also a very important lesson for American education, as well.  I lived in Dallas for a few years and knew a teacher or two who told me about kids who came to school dirty and starving because their parents either couldn’t or didn’t care to take care of them.  The kids were failing, but a few teachers used their own money to buy them breakfast and washed their clothes and let them use the locker rooms before school to get clean.  Their attention in class improved dramatically.  Two important needs were met by the teachers; personal and emotional.  Finally, someone showed them what it is like to have people in their lives who gives a shit about them and they responded.

Conservative “solutions” to the problems of education, focusing solely on the teachers ability to teach punish even those good teachers whose students are not able to concentrate and learn and don’t fix the problem.  NCLB (No Child Left Behind) is a fucked up way to punish schools for “not improving enough,” punishing schools for being in poverty zones.

It is because of George McGovern that I am a liberal, he was my most important influencer while I was growing up.  I learned from him that the value of a leader is not in being popular, but in trying to change the way that society views the hierarchy of needs. Poverty, not communism nor terrorism, is the enemy of a secure society.  He taught me that government can do good, and that a free-market benefits most from liberalism.  Labor can’t work when it is starved or can’t read.  Children can’t learn if they are itchy from dirty clothes and hair and are hungry.  The Invisible Hand fixes none of this unless powerful interests are interested in people as people and more than “human resources.”

George McGovern died, but more importantly he lived. I remember him as a man who worked for what he believed was the best potential for society and government, and how poverty and war are interconnected.  War is a function of economic failure, a struggle between competing interests over scarce resources no matter how much it is dressed in the garb of patriotism and security and “defense.”  Addressing economic issues as trading partners, true partners and not bullies will do more to address the causes of war than building more battleships or threatening nuclear war or invasion (as in the case of Iran.)

The other lesson that I take from recalling McGovern is that name-calling over irrelevancies is not new. My nickname as “Marijuana Man” while I was in sixth grade was due to an election forty years ago and had nothing to do with me, just what the other kids wanted to use to taint me.  Forty years ago, politics was just as nasty as it is now, and the pearl-clutching that people do nowadays if Joe Biden laughs about something stupid that a kid from Wisconsin posing as a Serious Thinker may say, or if someone calls me a “Moonbat” because I am a liberal is awesomely hilarious.

People will remember George McGovern for his lopsided loss in 1972 to a crooked politician drunk with power.  I remember him as the guy who chuckled in 2008 at my story of how I got the nickname “Marijuana Man.”

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Mary Prays for You (Photo credit: TheChristianAlert.org)

Defenders of the Catholic Church respond that the criminals the church protected were actually only practicing “ephebophilia” and so it really wasn’t so bad.  From a Star-Tribune comment at this article:

Actually Lakeliver, the main problem had been ephebophilia (not pedophilia) and while the Church was guilty, it was far less common there than in public schools. The latter hasnt really addressed the problem even today, either. Hmmm. Why doesnt the public school abuse make more news ;o) And if you think the Church scandal did more damage to America than 40% illegitimacy rates, or the tripling of child suicide or depression rates, well, you need less info from Ayn and Arne and more info from visiting nursing homes and shelters.

The context of the comment was that the Bishop of the Catholic Church, to whom the open letter was addressed, is expending great resources of the Church (tax-free wealth) to promote the amendment to the Constitution of the State which would prevent the legislature from ever allowing state-sanctioned single sex marriage.  Ever.  Unless a future vote removes the amendment.  The Catholic Church is using the power of the vote to enforce one of its own doctrines, one that has no secular purpose, on the grounds of defending a moral position that gay sex is wrong. (They claim it is to defend the traditional family as the best way to raise children, but that’s just absurd considering how many childless-by-choice couples there are.)

It’s the hypocrisy of claiming moral high ground that people find most abhorrent when the church has yet to assist law-enforcement agencies investigating child-rape.  A moral agency would defend young people who have been raped at any age below the age of consent, and what they have done is to subvert the law to protect their own.  They have so little regard for the secular state that they believe that when it contradicts what they want to do it doesn’t apply to them.

The commenter’s claim that there are other institutions where there is child-rape is a red herring because those institutions are not at the same time seeking to change a secular government’s ability to protect human civil rights when it comes to sexuality.

Church leaders knew what was going on and they covered it up, and their defenders claim that it really wasn’t so bad because the victims of the rapes were not children, but older adolescents.  Why is everyone making a big deal of it?  I don’t know, ask the rape victims.  Perhaps they would like to tell you how they feel about it.

Here is the story of Megan Peterson:

He asked me to take a seat on the couch and turned to fetch the book. It was at that point that I heard the sound of a pants zipper. I figured it had been left down by accident so I turned away. It was then that I heard him breathing heavily and coming towards me. When I looked back, he had his penis exposed and was touching himself. He asked me to touch him and I refused. Father Jeyapaul then told me that it was a sin if I didn’t cooperate. He raped me, both orally and vaginally.

After he was finished with me, he told me that I had to confess. I had always been taught how wrong it was to have pre-marital sex.  I felt as if I didn’t have a choice. So I did as he asked. Most mornings before school or in the afternoons following class, he would continue to rape me while I was in the confessional.  Then he would give me penance.

He raped her, and she was the one who had to confess.  Tim Lennon:

I first noticed SNAP when a came across a pamphlet in 1995. I thought, similar abuse happened to me. I began to remember being molested by a priest when I was thirteen. This prompted my participation in SNAP support groups twice a month for almost three years. After a while I became more focused on my family and dropped away from SNAP. Within a couple of years I became the father of twin girls who are now thirteen.

About two years ago new, horrific, memories came to me. Fifty years after my abuse I remembered being raped by a priest. These disturbing memories threw me for a loop. My emotional center was gone. Depression, fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, nightmares were overwhelming.

He was thirteen.  I wonder if that qualifies as ephebophilia or pedophilia?  Because, if it was the former then the rape wasn’t so bad and he shouldn’t complain.  The Church has been blaming society for its failings but has never accepted responsibility.  Oh, Mr. Ratzinger said he feels their pain and sorrow; but Catholic hierarchy is good at feeling the pain of the suffering, especially when their policies seek to enforce it.  Suffering is a treasure for Catholics, it reminds them of Jesus on the Cross bearing the burden for their sins, so we have to suffer even when we would rather die.

The Catholic Church no longer has any moral authority over a secular state; whatever moral credibility it had has been surrendered by its minimizing and hiding of a series of crimes against young children. Whether they are children, or teens, they are still not of the age of consent; and if the story of Megan Peterson is common (which is likely considering how predators operate,) the victims were blamed and made to feel ashamed for being victimized.

The reason that I am so anti-Catholic is that its theology of suffering and blame fits with its narrative.  We are born sinners and have to be reminded continually that we are going to be punished, not for our willful sins but an Inherited Sin, inherited only because we are human and unworthy and two people thousands of years ago let their human curiosity get the best of them.

And for that, we have to suffer and “learn from it.”

Some years ago, the winner of a Pro-Life Essay Contest sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York was Anne Marie O’Halloran, from Maria Regina High School in Hartsdale. Her topic was euthanasia. Let me share with you some of her own words:

“One of the highest values this country holds is freedom. This has led to a situation in which individuals believe they have the right to live completely as they desire. Human beings are seen as limitless. They have the right to decide how they want to live and how they should die….Another quality prized by our culture is power. We believe, or rather, we would like to believe, that we can control anything and everything to ensure a safe and comfortable lifestyle….Our society has created a world in which it is always possible and always considered right to take the easy way out of problems, suffering and death. That way is completely against the example Jesus set for us; it is against Christian values. We, as Christians, must form a counter-culture. We do not pray for an easy, free or painless life and death. Rather we should pray for strength to sustain and understand the life God gave us to live.”

May more young men and women come to see what this student sees and says so well, that we are NOT the absolute masters of life and death. Only God is. May His gift of life be respected.

Jesus wants us to suffer?  That’s odd, because he said that he died to save us and if we have to keep on suffering just to make our little human brains understand just how awful that was for God, then what is the point?  He came to give us life, more abundantly, but fucking A are we going to pay, little dearies.  We have to pay for this abundant life, even though he supposedly paid.  What this means for us humans, though, is that when the men in the white collars, the red collars and the pointy hats tell us to bend over and grab our ankles and take it, we must remember that it is our lot.

Catholicism isn’t life affirming. Christianity doesn’t affirm humans, it affirms the Mercy of God and says that it is mercy we don’t deserve but we get anyway.  As humans, we are to accept things like rape as suffering that god allows and we are told that we can’t escape our suffering until God says we can escape.  We are told that our suffering miserable lives are a gift and that we are wicked to think that we have any say over how we choose to live it.  Sexual must be punished and have consequences, even if it was forced on us as children.  Then it is our fault.

The Catholic Church is the perfect place for sexual predators, because they can use their position to make us feel like we are at fault; we as humans are always at fault when faced with the power of The Church.

The Church has no moral authority over me.  I am not a Catholic, and it has no authority over the secular state unless voters are stupid enough to hand it over.  In order to pretend that the Church has moral authority, its defenders minimize the crime and the damage.  The excuses so far sicken me.  ”It was the seventies, a time of loose morals and priests just got swept up;”  ”they were not really little kids, and it is not as bad to rape adolescents;” “other organizations did it too!”  There is a whole list of their excuses here, but more importantly there are the reasons that they think they can get by with it:

Rule No 1:

Avoid any possibility of intelligent discussion or exchange of opinions. The point is to cut off anything approaching discussion and drown out all other opinions.

Rule No 2:

Guilt is good, as long as it’s someone else’s. When anyone wants to discuss taking responsibility for your own actions,  or lack of action, immediately change the subject to anything that enables you to point fingers of guilt, either at your accuser or someone else.  The more off-topic the better.

Rule No 3:

Exploit the undeserved respect accorded to religions and religious persons.  Quote scriptures, and treat any difficult questions you don’t want to answer as an attack on God, Jesus, charity and all that is good in the world.

Rule No 4:

Manipulate access to the media. The Vatican does this by whipping the media up into a frenzy about whether or not the Pope will issue an apology, meet with victims, or address a particular topic in an upcoming speech. All of which miraculously keeps the focus away from discussions of Vatican inaction and culpability.

Leave me alone, Catholic Church. I don’t need you, and my gay friends certainly don’t need to hear how much you “love them,” while you seek to prevent them from having what I have in the freedom to ask the state to marry me.

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