Miscellanea Agnostica

Late last week, a cache of documents released from UK archives revealed that then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered a cover-up of the arrival of extraterrestrials, because it would incite a panic in the population.

Or did he?

Certainly that’s what the Ufologists have decided; they’ve blasted the news of this shocking revelation to the Internet (such as this from the International UFO Congress, with a WebCite cached version). Unfortunately, the real story here is far less certain and less shocking than these folks would have you believe, as has been reported in the (UK) Telegraph, for example (cached version):

The former Prime Minister allegedly banned reporting of the “bizarre” incident, off the east coast of England, for half a century amid fears disclosures about unidentified flying objects would create public hysteria.

He is said to have made the orders during a secret war meeting with US General Dwight Eisenhower, the then commander of the Allied Forces, at an undisclosed location in America during the latter part of the conflict.

Even then-General and later President Eisenhower was in on it! Wow! This is incredible! Proof positive of a multinational conspiracy to prevent the people from knowing about extraterrestrial visitors!

But as they say so often in infomercials … “But wait, there’s more!”:

The allegations involving Churchill were made by the grandson of one his personal bodyguards, an RAF officer who overheard the discussion, who wrote to the Ministry of Defence in 1999 inquiring about the incident after his grandfather disclosed details to his family.

According to the series of letters, written by the guard’s grandson who is now a physicist from Leicester, a reconnaissance plane and its crew were returning from a mission over occupied Europe when they were involved in the war incident. …

Apart from telling his daughter — the scientist’s mother — about the incident when she was nine, the bodyguard, who was “greatly affected by his experience”, only disclosed the details to his wife on his deathbed in 1973.

The scientist, also an expert in astronomy who said he developed software for use in “spacecraft thermal engineering”, was told years later by his mother.

So, let’s see if we can follow this. The documents in question were not written by Churchill or Eisenhower. They were not even written contemporaneously. Instead, this allegation took a circuitous path over the course of several decades. The bodyguard overheard the remarks, but did not take part in the conversation in question; he told his daughter about it, an unknown number of years later; she told her scientist child an untold number of years after that; the scientist then inquired with the government about the supposed incident.

Somewhere in all of this, the reliability of this story appears to have gone off the tracks somewhere. That’s not to say that everyone in this “train of recall” is lying about it, nor even that any single person in this chain lied. At any step along the line, the story — which was apparently discussed only in hushed tones — might have been misheard or misunderstood. The “telephone game” provides an example of how honest people hearing a story, then relaying it, can produce an altered account after even just a few “hops” — and without any intention to deceive, at any point. This story, then, is not really “evidence” of much of anything (except maybe that Ufologists are easily excited about stuff that doesn’t really help them.)

That said, even if Churchill had — as the tale implies — ordered a “cover-up,” this hardly constitutes proof the Earth had been visited by extraterrestrials, or that Churchill or Eisenhower were aware that it had happened. They might well have been “in the dark” about the affair, and only ordered the cover-up, if they did, out of uncertainty and caution, rather than out of certain knowledge and malicious intent.

This wouldn’t be the first time the UFO community has made way too much of supposed “government cover-ups,” and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Photo credit: otisarchives1.

Some Australian Pentescostalists have absconded with education in Queensland, and have begun a laughable effort to swindle school children there into believing absurdities, such as that humans and dinosaurs had once coexisted. News.Com.Au reports on their campaign of ignorance (WebCite cached article):

Primary school students are being taught that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together and that there is fossil evidence to prove it.

Fundamentalist Christians are hijacking Religious Instruction (RI) classes in Queensland despite education experts saying Creationism and attempts to convert children to Christianity have no place in state schools.

Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell.

The Pentecostalists stooped to incredible absurdities in order to withstand any objections that might be thrown at them, such as in the following story:

A parent of a Year 5 student on the Sunshine Coast said his daughter was ostracised to the library after arguing with her scripture teacher about DNA.

“The scripture teacher told the class that all people were descended from Adam and Eve,” he said.

“My daughter rightly pointed out, as I had been teaching her about DNA and science, that ‘wouldn’t they all be inbred’?

“But the teacher replied that DNA wasn’t invented then.”

Really, these people have no shame … and no minds of their own, either.

Hat tip: Unreasonable Faith blog.

Photo credit: dewalt.

As if the Roman Catholic Church didn’t have enough problems, especially with misbehaving clergy, an Italian magazine has exposed priests in that country attending gay clubs and having sex in churches. The (UK) Telegraph reports on this Panorama magazine exposé (WebCite cached article):

A journalist from Panorama, a conservative weekly news magazine owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, used a hidden camera to film interviews with three gay priests, who introduced the journalist to the gay clubs they apparently frequent, and allowed the journalist to film their sexual encounters with strangers, including one in a church building.

One of the priests, a Frenchman identified only as Paul, celebrated Mass in the morning before driving the two escorts he had hired to attend a party the night before to the airport, Panorama said.

The Panorama article (in Italian) is available online (cached version). The Catholic Church responded in a conflicted, paradoxical manner. On the one hand it denounced the priests involved and ordered them to quit the Church:

The Catholic Church in Italy, still reeling from the paedophile priest scandal, responded on Friday by ordering homosexual priests who are leading a double life to come out of the closet and leave the priesthood.

On the other hand, it denied the men filmed in the magazine exposé were Catholic priests:

The Vatican did not comment on the Panorama investigation, but a senior source said: “This is the usual silly season rubbish to attract readers during the quiet summer months.

“There is no proof that the people involved are from the clergy.”

This story has similarities to one that recently came to light in my own state of Connecticut, as a Catholic priest in the Nutmeg State has been charged with embezzling upwards of a million dollars from his own parish, spending it on various escapades in New York City, among other places (cached article).

In the Connecticut case, it was the archdiocese of Hartford that caught on to the priest’s antics and turned him in to the authorities — likely because they think he had stolen from them. But in Italy, the Church refuses to acknowledge the scandal. They remain delusionally in denial concerning the moral collapse which is rapidly consuming their organization. The facts speak for themselves, even if the Vatican refuses to accept them.

For a while now the Vatican has been promising to issue new guidelines for handling clerical abuse claims within the realm of Church law. The unspoken implication behind the Holy See’s promises has been that the procedures would change for the better … that is, by tightening accountability of all involved and declaring that accusations should be relayed to local civil authorities. But one of the things the Vatican is most famous for is its reluctance to change; thus, it’s no surprise that its newly-announced guidelines are really not much more than a restatement of the status quo. The New York Times reports on this latest piece of evidence that the Catholic Church is in the throes of a moral collapse (WebCite cached article):

In its most significant revision to church law since a sex abuse crisis hit the United States a decade ago and roared back from remission in Europe this spring, the Vatican on Thursday issued new internal rules making it easier to discipline priests who have sexually abused minors.

But in a move that infuriated victims’ groups and put United States bishops on the defensive, it also codified “the attempted ordination of women” to the priesthood as one of the church’s most grave crimes, along with heresy, schism and pedophilia.

Note here the effort at diversion: In the midst of responding to one issue, the Catholic clerical abuse scandal, the Vatican couldn’t resist getting a dig in at another — completely unrelated — issue, that being the (potential for) ordination of women. How obvious … not to mention juvenile!

Of course, the Vatican is denying reality and misrepresenting the nature of this document:

In a statement, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the changes were a sign of the church’s commitment to addressing child sex abuse with “rigor and transparency.”

There is, in fact, nothing “rigorous” about this, and nothing has been done to enhance “transparency.” Bishops are still free to shuffle clergy around and allow abusers to prey on new victims, even when their wrongdoing is known. There is no accountability for the hierarchy. None whatsoever. That was the case before, and it remains the case now.

Photo credit: missliz.

I think I’ve been too lenient on the Roman Catholic Church, over the past couple weeks. I posted just a little while ago that it seemed the Pope might have been just a little more contrite about the clerical child abuse scandal that’s plagued his institution for the past 10 years or so and has reached full-boil since late last year. Clearly, I underestimated the R.C. Church’s hypocrisy. You see, a couple weeks ago, Belgian authorities raided Church facilities looking for documentation concerning this scandal within their country. The Vatican responded by throwing a tantrum. Der Spiegel reports on the raid and the Church’s furious reaction (WebCite cached article):

But now that secular investigators have decided to take action, [Pope Benedict XVI] has condemned the “surprising and regretful” circumstances of the Belgian raid. In a message of solidarity with the bishops in Belgium, Benedict argued in favor of cooperating with the secular justice system, but he insisted on the church’s right to conduct internal investigations.

Benedict’s allies in Rome wasted no time in ensuring that relations between the Catholic Church and the secular world took another turn for the worse. The Italian bishops’ newspaper Avvenire sees the desecration of the graves as a “brutal act that strikes right at the heart of the church.” Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone — the second most powerful man in the Vatican — expressed outrage at the fact that it was possible to hold venerable bishops for so long without food or drink, “as if they were children.” Not even under communism were church officials treated as poorly, he said.

Essentially, then, the Church has reasserted that it is above the law of the land in all the countries in which it operates … a principle which it had asserted in the Middle Ages, often successfully, but which over the centuries — especially after the Reformation — it had been forced to concede.

Apparently, that all went out the window, when Belgian authorities decided to investigate the R.C. Church as it would have any other institution that may have victimized Belgians. That can’t be permitted, in the eyes of the Vatican.

But while the Church rages and fumes and stamps its feet that it’s being investigated by secular authorities over accusations that it may have victimized people, the Church has a completely opposite view of secular authorities, when it is a possible victim of a crime. The archdiocese of Hartford, here in Connecticut, called on the state to investigate and prosecute a priest who may have embezzled money from the Church, as the Hartford Courant reports (cached):

A well-known Roman Catholic priest who stole $1.3 million from the Sacred Heart parish over seven years said he “had grown to hate being a priest” because the Archdiocese had given him the “worst church assignments” where he would “have to fix problems made by the previous priests,” according to his arrest warrant. …

Waterbury [CT] police launched an investigation after the archdiocese came to them May 27 and said it had uncovered unauthorized payments from church funds to accounts held by Gray and other suspicious transactions, according to the affidavit, which was prepared by Waterbury Police Detective Peter Morgan.

So the Roman Catholic Church is more than happy to ask those evil “secular authorities” to help them out when they need it … but not willing to cooperate with them when their own misdeeds are being reviewed.

I can only think of four words to describe this: Hip. Oc. Rih. See. You know … the tendency to say one thing but do another? You know, that all-too-common human compulsion, which the founder of the Church’s own religion — Jesus Christ — himself, in the flesh, and in clear, unambiguous terms, specifically ordered his followers never, ever to engage in? Yeah. That “hypocrisy.”

Is anyone now not clear on what a festering sewer full of assorted putrid vermin the Vatican is?

Photo credit: Homini:).

As of just over a week ago, Australia has a new prime minister, Julia Gillard. Shortly after taking office she revealed she is an atheist. The (UK) Daily Mail reports on this revelation (WebCite cached article):

Australia’s new Prime Minister has revealed she does not believe in God.

Julia Gillard told ABC radio in Melbourne that she was not prepared to go through ‘religious rituals’ for the sake of appearances.

Ms Gillard added: ‘I am, of course, a great respecter of religious beliefs, but they are not my beliefs.

‘For people of faith, I think the greatest compliment I could pay them is to respect their genuinely-held beliefs and not to engage in some pretence about mine.

There is a fervent religionist constituency in Australia — which had strongly supported the prior P.M., Kevin Rudd — and which will, no doubt, try to undermine her. I’m glad that she’s made her beliefs (or lack of them) known publicly, though; there aren’t many world leaders who possess the courage to run counter to theists in their countries. I wish her the best of luck!

Photo credit: maxmilne.

Perhaps as a way of diverting people’s attention from the clerical child-abuse scandal that’s been plaguing his Church for a long time now, Pope Benedict XVI has decided that the world is just too “secular” for his taste, and is establishing a new wing of Vatican bureaucracy in an attempt to correct that problem. The AP via Google News reports on his new missionary effort (WebCite cached article):

Pope Benedict XVI is creating a new Vatican office to fight secularization and “re-evangelize” the West — a tacit acknowledgment that his attempts to reinvigorate Christianity in Europe haven’t succeeded and need a new boost. …

Benedict said parts of the world are still missionary territory, where the Catholic Church is still relatively unknown. But in other parts of the world like Europe, Christianity has existed for centuries yet “the process of secularization has produced a serious crisis of the sense of the Christian faith and role of the Church.”

The new pontifical council, he said, would “promote a renewed evangelization” in countries where the Church has long existed “but which are living a progressive secularization of society and a sort of ‘eclipse of the sense of God.’”

The Pope and his minions appear to believe that “secularization” has caused Europeans (in particular) to have become unaware of Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church … in spite of the fact that Christianity is nearly two millennia old and for some 15 or 16 centuries was by far the dominant religion of the occidental world. I’m not sure what the folks at the Vatican think happened, to make everyone suddenly and magically “forget” about something so deeply ingrained in western culture … but it seems they think it has.

Could it be — rather — that the occidental world, and Europe in particular, are actually fully aware of Christianity’s existence and its nature, and have made a conscious and rational decision to reject it, based on its far-less-than-stellar history?

As for myself … if the Pope and his religionist minions want me to convert to Catholicism, they’re going to have to make me do so.

Photo credit: Catholic Church (England and Wales).

The Roman Catholic clerical abuse scandal has erupted a few times over the last decade, and especially during the last year — in a cascade of revelations beginning with the release of the Ryan Report just over a year ago — but elsewhere, scandals of a similar nature have been dealt with for much longer, and are getting closer to a resolution. An example of this is the Canadian residential schools scandal. The abuses of the period in question came to light some time ago, and the Canadian government has been working on compensating victims for over a decade. The question — for all that time — has not been whether or not the Canadian government and the churches who operated the residential schools did anything wrong, but over what kind of compensation would be provided to the victims, their survivors, and the rest of the native peoples.

CTV reports on what victims said at a hearing before a commission set up to address this matter:

Hundreds of aboriginals gathered in Winnipeg Wednesday to share their stories of abuse suffered during years of living in Canada’s disgraced residential school system.

The hearing was the first in a series of seven national events being run by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which aims to document the physical and sexual abuse and other horrors endured by children at residential schools across Canada.

While there’s still a lot of debate over this effort in Canada — including victims who think not enough has been done, and others who think it’s going to cost the country too much — the fact is that a resolution is being worked out. The same cannot be said for the Roman Catholic Church, which continues to evade its guilt and its responsibilities, and continues to view the scandal dysfunctionally, as a spiritual attack upon it by the forces of Satan, rather than as a catastrophic moral and ethical failing of its own making. The Vatican ought to watch what’s happening in Canada, and be ashamed of themselves for not being as willing to admit fault and change its ways.

Photo credit: Canada’s World.

Pope Benedict XVI has come one tiny step closer to contrition over the Catholic clerical abuse scandal, and asked for forgiveness, as the New York Times reports (WebCite cached article):

Addressing the sexual abuse crisis from the seat of the Roman Catholic Church before thousands of white-robed priests, Pope Benedict XVI on Friday begged forgiveness, saying the church would do “everything possible” to prevent priests from abusing children. …

The pope did not outline specific actions that the church would take to combat abuse, as many had hoped — and as Benedict had pledged at an audience in April. Nor did his remarks go much beyond what he had already said in a letter to Irish Catholics in March and in a private meeting with victims of sexual abuse on Malta in April.

But it was the first time that Benedict had asked forgiveness for the crisis from St. Peter’s Square, the heart of the church itself, and on an occasion focused on priests.

Even so, the Pope could not help but try to evade responsibility for everything that happened:

The pope said the Devil was behind the scandal, saying it had emerged now, in the middle of the Vatican’s Year of the Priest, because “the enemy,” or the Devil, wants to see “God driven out of the world.”

“And so it happened that in this very year of joy for the sacrament of the priesthood, the sins of priests came to light — particularly the abuse of the little ones,” the pope added.

So you see, once again, the Vatican’s thinking implicit behind everything that’s happened … this is not really a failing of the Church and by the Church. It is, instead, an external affliction, imposed on the Church from outside it, by the Devil; in other words, it’s part of an ongoing spiritual struggle between the godly Church and the Forces of Darkness, and it’s the clergy who are its real victims (having popped up during the Year of the Priest). The “little ones” or children who were abused, are merely incidental players in this drama, in the Vatican’s eyes.

So while I can say the Pope has become more contrite about this scandal than he has been in the past, by not accepting full responsibility for it, I cannot really say is truly 100% contrite yet.

Photo credit: Catholic Church (England and Wales).

I blogged a couple years ago on this, and again a few times since, but it bears repeating: Religious violence is not limited to the sphere of the Abrahamic faiths. Sure, we tend to associate “religious violence” with things like the Crusades, the killings of abortion doctors, the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and the Palestinian conflict, and so on. We sometimes assume, therefore, that religions outside of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic realm are “peaceful” by contrast. That India is home to famous pacifists like Mahatma Gandhi and the Jainist religion may fool us into thinking that country, with its Hindu majority, is not prone to religious violence.

But that’s just not true.

Several people were recently convicted for their roles in a Hinduism-motivated honor killing there, as the Washington Post reports (WebCite cached article):

No one in this village visits Chanderpati Banwala’s home, which stands at the end of a lane full of sleeping buffaloes and overturned wooden carts. The boycott began three years ago when her son eloped with his sweetheart, a neighbor from his clan.

But the marriage was short-lived. Village elders declared the relationship incestuous, a violation of ancient Hindu rules of marriage because the two were descendants of a common ancestor who lived thousands of years ago. As the couple tried to flee town, the young woman’s family chased them down and dragged them out of a bus on a busy highway. The groom, Manoj, was strangled, and his bride, Babli, was forced to drink pesticide. Their bodies were dumped in a canal. …

Despite pressure from villagers to remain quiet, Banwala took the case to court here in the northern state of Haryana. In March, five defendants were sentenced to death, the first time in India that capital punishment has been ordered in an honor killing.

This is, of course, far from anomalous:

Last year, officials in [the state of] Haryana recorded about 100 honor killings of young people caught in the war between clan, caste, culture and cupid. Banwala’s case is the first honor-killing trial to secure a verdict, although a similar trial is underway. In that case, four people are accused of beating and hacking a young man to death with sticks, sickles and scythes last year after he married a woman from a neighboring village, a relationship villagers also regarded as incest.

Unfortunately a lot of folks are unrepentant about this and consider “honor killings” of this sort a good thing and are openly advocating them:

In villages across northern India, the landmark verdict sparked an uproar, with clan councils fiercely defending prohibitions on unions within the same clan or gotra, a Sanskrit word, which each clan uses to trace its lineage. To these villagers, romantic love breaches codes passed down many generations.

“Manoj and Babli rubbed our village’s name in mud,” said Gulab Singh, a 60-year-old farmer, inhaling on a gurgling water pipe in a cattle shelter with other men in Banwala’s village. “For thousands of years, we have followed strict marriage rules. If my son transgresses these rules, I will kill him without a thought.”

The next time anyone suggests to you that it’s only the “religions of faith” (i.e. the Abrahamic religions) which are prone to religious violence, you can now explain otherwise. The truth is that all religions can cause things like this to happen.

Hat tip: Skeptic’s Dictionary.

Photo credit: ncracker.

Pakistan’s censorship of the Internet over its potential to convey “sacrilege” has extended to Twitter as well as Blackberry service. The Indian Express reports on this (WebCite cached article):

Pakistanis are hopping mad following the ban on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter and the blocking of Blackberry services in the wake of a controversy over a contest featuring blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Mohammed.

Some Pakistanis apparently aren’t happy about it:

Raza Rumi, the editor of a popular ezine, described the banning of Blackberry services as “absolute madness”. …

“The zealots want us to go back to the stone age. These decisions should be reversed at once. There are other ways of dealing with this issue and not by an absolute ban of connectivity in the 21st century. In any case, it is not easy to ‘ban’ stuff in this day and age.”

That’s true, but the fact is that this will inconvenience a great many Pakistanis, only to satisfy the juvenile lunatic Islamists in that country.

I’m not sure I can really be sympathetic with Rumi and others like him, though. The Pakistani government that he — and the rest of Pakistan — voted into office, is doing precisely what it was voted in to do. Perhaps he — and other Pakistanis — should not have voted those folks in? And maybe they should consider getting rid of those people at the next election?

I’m betting this will not happen, however; Pakistanis will probably continue with an Islamist regime. If that’s the case then even the little sympathy I might have for them, will have vanished entirely.

I hope these zealots keep up their insanely immature campaign of futile censorship, it provides me with a wonderful opportunity to keep posting incendiary images that defy Islam’s proscriptions.

The juvenile, raging hyperreligionists in Pakistan have expanded their Internet censorship. It’s not just Facebook they’re banning, but many other Web sites too. And it’s all due to “sacrilege.” The New York Times reports on this additional expression of Islamist immaturity (WebCite cached article):

Pakistani authorities broadened a ban on social networking sites on Thursday, blocking YouTube and about 450 individual links to Web pages over what it described as “growing sacrilegious content.”

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, or P.T.A., blocked YouTube after a special Internet monitoring cell within the agency determined that “objectionable content” was increasing, according to a spokesman, Khurram Mehran.

Because the government of Pakistan continues to rage and fume about “sacrilege” and continues to assume that everyone on the planet — Muslim and non-Muslim alike — is obliged to obey Islam’s metaphysical proscriptions on depicting Muhammad, the founder of their religion, I’ve added some incendiary cartoons to this post. The power of the Streisand effect is demonstrable, but these furious, irrational lunatics appear not to get it.