Miscellanea Agnostica

Once again, I have to report on yet another example of “the Religion of Peace” displaying its true colors for the world to see. The (UK) Independent reports a mob of Muslims — enraged by the possibility that someone had dared dis their almighty prophet — threw a colossal, violent tantrum, ripping through a neighborhood in Lahore, Pakistan and burning down a hundred buildings (WebCite cached article):

Hundreds of people in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore ransacked a Christian neighborhood today and torched dozens of homes after hearing reports that a Christian man had committed blasphemy against Islam’s prophet, said a police officer.…

The incident started yesterday when a young Muslim man accused a Christian man of committing blasphemy by making offensive comments about the prophet, according to Multan Khan, a senior police officer in Lahore.

A large crowd from a nearby mosque went to the Christian man’s home last night, and Khan said police took him into custody to try to pacify the crowd. Fearing for their safety, hundreds of Christian families fled the area overnight.

Khan said the mob returned today and began ransacking Christian homes and setting them ablaze. He said no one in the Christian community was hurt, but several policemen were injured when they were hit with stones as they tried to keep the crowd from storming the area.

I must congratulate the world’s Muslims on their ability to keep up their angry, violent religionistic immaturity. It’s an incredible achievement. Well done! You all must be so proud.

Oh, and it’s behavior like this that makes the rest of the world sleep so well at night, knowing Pakistan has nuclear weapons at its disposal. Yep, it’s positively heart-warming and reassuring to know this. No doubt!

Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images, via The Independent.

Tags: arson, blasphemy, burning, childish, immature, immaturity, Islam, islamism, islamist, islamists, juvenile, lahore, lahore pakistan, muslim, muslims, pakistan, religiofascism, religiofascist, religiofascists, religionism, religionist, religionists, religious violence, riot, riots

During the height of her popularity in the 1980s — in the wake of her having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 — Mother Teresa was arguably the most famous Roman Catholic on earth (rivalled only by Pope John Paul II). In 1995, when the late Christopher Hitchens penned a book critical of her called The Missionary Position, it seemed to have come out of nowhere.

In spite of some favorable literary reviews of his book, Hitchens was widely excoriated for having dared take on a poor, frail old woman who was viewed, by most people, as a living saint. The book was frequently dismissed as a product of Hitchens’s presumed irrational hatred of all things Catholic, and not as the product of research into what she’d actually been up to, backed up by primary-source material.

Well, nearly 2 decades later, it seems Hitchens hadn’t really been that far off target. The (UK) Independent reports that some academics have assessed Mother Teresa’s career, and agree she wasn’t much of a champion of the poor and the sick (WebCite cached article):

The late Mother Teresa’s saintly image has been called into question by researchers conducting an in-depth study of her life.

Mother Teresa may have spent the vast majority of her 87 years looking after the sick and poor, but researchers from Montreal and Ottawa universities have now raised questions over the ‘dubious’ nature of her care, as well querying her “questionable” political contacts.…

Writing in the Journal of Studies in Religion/Sciences after analysing around 300 documents surrounding Mother Teresa’s life, Dr Serge Larivie and Dr Genevieve Chenard say they have uncovered details that compromise the Albanian-born nun’s saintly image.

They claim that many of the ‘missions’ set up by Mother Teresa were unfit for their inhabitants, calling them ‘homes for the dying’ due to their poor hygiene and a shortage of food, care and medication.

The researchers believe a lack of money cannot be the reason for the poor conditions however, as Mother Teresa raised hundreds of millions of pounds during her lifetime, although much of that money apparently appears to have vanished into several ‘secret’ bank accounts reportedly kept by the nun.

The researchers also questioned why, despite openly offering prayers and medallions bearing depictions of the Virgin Mary, Mother Teresa provided no direct or monetary aid to victims of a number of natural disasters in India.

Dr Larivie says: “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Teresa’s works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?”

The researchers went on to query Mother Teresa’s politics and political contacts, accusing her of accepting a financial grant from the brutal Duvalier dictatorship, which is deemed responsible for the murders of over 30,000 Haitians between 1957 and 1986.

But Mother Teresa had more political allies other than brutish tyrants like François and “Baby Doc” Duvalier; infamous banking swindler Charles Keating was also among her associates. Yeah, those were the sorts of people she made time for, and counted as her friends and supporters. Yuck.

I suspect these findings won’t rehabilitate Hitchens in the eyes of those who despised him. I also suspect they won’t convince Mother Teresa’s devout Catholic admirers into rethinking their devotion to her. They will, instead, dismiss them as the product of the Evil Secularist Elite that supposedly infests higher education in North America. (As though there’s no such thing as a conservative or religionistic college anywhere to be found.) After all … why put up with inconvenient facts, when you can rationalize some way to ignore them?

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: calcutta, catholic church, charity, charles keating, christian, Christianity, christians, christopher hitchens, francois duvalier, kolkata, mother teresa, Religion, roman catholic, roman catholic church, the missionary position

The Roman Catholic Church’s continual effort to pin blame for the worldwide clerical child-abuse scandal that’s dogged it for over a decade now on anyone and everyone but itself, continues apace. This time, one of the leading lights of the Church, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana — who happens to be among the contenders for the papacy — proudly declared that his own continent’s fierce intolerance for homosexuality somehow protected it from that scandal, hence, the his implication that homosexuality itself is somehow responsible for “priestly pedophilia.” He made this announcement during an interview on CNN (WebCite cached article):

When Amanpour asked Turkson about the possibility of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal spreading to Africa, he said it would unlikely be in the same proportion as it has in Europe.

“African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency,” he said. “Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society.”

This is, of course, totally false. Sexual orientation and sexual fixation are unrelated:

According to the American Psychological Association, “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.”

CNN offers video of Turkson’s appearance on Christiane Amanpour’s show (cached):

So not only is this claim counter-factual on its face, it also fails in another way: It says nothing about the Catholic hierarchs’ ongoing cover-ups of the abuse by its clergy. Does Turkson seriously contend that “gayness” somehow forced the world’s bishops to repeatedly shuffle priests around in order to protect them, and worked to ensure the abusers would never be prosecuted? Maybe the Cardinal and some other Catholics are willing to go with that, but the thinking world knows how utterly asinine such a contention is.

Once again, I can’t help but ask when this fucking bullshit is going to stop? When, exactly, are the supposedly-godly men who run the Catholic Church going to “man up” and take responsibility for their own behavior? I don’t see it ever happening, until lay Catholics decide they’ve had enough, and take control of the situation. They could easily do so if they wished, using the power of the collection plate: Starving the Church for donations would coerce its hierarchs into changing their behavior. That the world’s Catholics haven’t done this, shows they support the hierarchs’ behavior and approve of the Church’s criminality.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Hat tip: Secular Web News Wire.

Tags: africa, cardinal peter turkson, cardinal turkson, catholic child abuse scandal, catholic church, catholic clerical abuse scandal, excuse-making, gay, gays, ghana, homosexual, homosexuality, homosexuals, peter turkson, priestly pedophilia, priestly pedophilia scandal, roman catholic, roman catholic church, vatican, vatican city

This is such an old story, I almost don’t want to blog about it any more. The Islamic world’s inherent and pervasive immaturity continually rears its head, every time something happens that Muslims think is an insult to their religion. All too often, that immaturity results in people being killed, simply because too many Muslims cannot, and will not, control their fury and rage over what they perceive as affronts to Islam and its founding prophet. The AFP via Yahoo News reports on the latest example of people being killed because of this juvenile murderous impulse (WebCite cached article):

Islamists demanding the execution of bloggers they accuse of blasphemy clashed with police in Bangladesh for a third straight day Sunday, and at least four protesters were killed when police opened fire.

Up to 3,000 protesters, including students from religious schools known as madrassas and supporters of the main opposition party, barricaded a highway at Singair in the central district of Manikganj, police said.

The protests, and the killings that resulted, have been brewing for some time:

The violence broke out as 12 small Islamic parties, backed by the largest Islamic group Jamaat-e-Islami and main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, called a nationwide strike in protest at Friday’s police action against Islamists.

Four people were killed, three in police shooting, and about 200 injured during Friday’s protests by tens of thousands of Islamists demanding the hanging of bloggers whom they say blasphemed Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

Tensions have risen over allegedly anti-Islamic blog posts by Ahmed Rajib Haider, who was hacked to death last week near his home in Dhaka.

In recent weeks Haider and fellow bloggers had launched massive protests demanding a ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami, and the execution of its leaders for alleged war crimes in the 1971 independence struggle against Pakistan.

The government of Bangladesh has been trying to pacify the santimoniously-enraged childish Islamists by cranking up the censorship:

The government has warned of tough steps against those who incite social tension, and urged newspapers and blogs not to publish defamatory writings against the Prophet Mohammed.

It has cracked down on anti-Islam blogs and also given police protection to some bloggers in the wake of Haider’s murder.

Keep it up, crybaby Muslims. By all means, please continue killing people because people blasphemed against your almighty deity, and insulted your blessed prophet. Continue raging, fuming, blustering, rioting, smashing, burning, and murdering because you haven’t got the maturity to handle the fact that not everyone else believes what you believe.

Also, I cordially invite you to keep stomping around demanding that your dour, uncompromising religionism — and the metaphysically-propagated immaturity that goes along with it — be “respected” by everyone else, regardless of whatever horrible things you may have done in its name. Yes, this means you should continue telling us … as the giant head did in The Wizard of Oz … never to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

Yes, that’s right. I want you to keep indulging your murderous immaturity. I want you to keep providing the rest of the world with ongoing examples of what is wrong with being enslaved by primitive metaphysical thinking. I want you to keep showing us your barbarism so we won’t forget what metaphysics can do to people.

Oh, and just to egg you sniveling little babies on a little more, I’ve included a couple of anti-Islam cartoons in this blog post. Please, use their presence here to justify yet more riots and killings in the name of preventing your religion and your prophet from being “dissed” by this cynical, cold-hearted, godless agnostic heathen.

Photo credit, top: AFP, via Yahoo News Singapore; middle & bottom photos, Jyllands-Posten, via Assyrian International News Agency.

P.S. I am, of course, being facetious when I say I want Muslims to keep throwing tantrums — even if what they’re doing proves the point I’ve been making for many years. I’d much rather they become mature and learn to live with the fact that not everyone believes what they do.

Tags: ahmed rajib haider, bangladesh, bangladesh national party, blog, bloggers, blogging, blogs, dhaka, Islam, islamist, islamists, islamofascism, islamofascist, islamofascists, kamaat-e-islami, killing for islam, killing for muhammad, killings for islam, killings for muhammad, manikganj, Manikganj bangladesh, muslim, muslims, protest, protests, religifascist, religiofascism, religiofascists, religionism, religionist, religionists, singair

I’ve blogged a number of times about ultra-conservative Jews in Israel targeting women as sub-human. They appear to believe — as do a lot of conservative Muslims, and Christians — that women are to be neither seen nor heard, and are not to be treated as human beings.

What’s remarkable is that ultra-conservatives have commandeered the government of Israel to do their bidding in order to keep “the Weaker Sex” in its place. The Hartford Courant reports on some arrests of women who insolently dared to thwart ultra-conservative sensibilities (WebCite cached article):

Israeli police detained 10 women, including a rabbi from Bloomfield, at one of Judaism’s most sacred sites on Monday for wearing prayer shawls, which Orthodox tradition sees as solely for men, a spokesman said.

The incident at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City highlighted the divisions between the more liberal streams of Judaism and politically powerful Orthodox groups that traditionally limit the role of women in prayer.

The Western Wall is administered under strict Orthodox ritual law, which bars women from wearing prayer shawls or publicly reading from the holy scriptures.

Among those held was Debra Cantor, rabbi of B’nai Tikvoh-Sholom in Bloomfield, and Susan Silverman, a reform rabbi who is a sister of American comedian Sarah Silverman.

I’m curious as to precisely what awful thing the ultra-conservative Jews think will befall their country, if some people with two “X” chromosomes stand before the Western Wall. I really don’t get it. It’d be nice if someone could explain it to me — but somehow I doubt it will ever happen. Seriously, what is the problem with women wearing prayer shawls, and praying, on that spot? Anyone?

This just goes to show that it’s not just Christians or Muslims who think poorly of women and want to repress them. Most religions, in fact, don’t seem to want women around — in spite of the fact that they’re 50% of the population.

Photo credit: Reuters, via the Hartford Courant.

Tags: arrested, deborah cantor, israel, israeli, israelis, jerusalem, jew, jewish, jews, misogynist, misogynists, misogyny, prayer, prayer shawl, prayer shawls, sarah silverman, western wall, women

It appears the world of Islam still hasn’t gotten over the fact that some insolent American-Egyptian Neocrusader dared make a video that insults their religion and its prophet. The Washington Post reports an Egyptian court will ban Youtube in that country for one month, as a “punishment” for having hosted it (WebCite cached article):

An Egyptian court ordered a one-month ban on YouTube on Saturday, after it said the video-sharing Web site had failed to remove an American-made anti-Islam video.

Cairo’s administrative court ruled in response to a suit filed by an independent Egyptian lawyer. Judge Hassouna Tawfiq, who presided over the case, said the ban would also apply to other Web sites that circulated the video, including, potentially, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

This isn’t the first time an Islamic country has banned Youtube because it carried supposedly blasphemous or sacrilegious content; Paskistan has banned Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter & Blackberry over such whines.

This is actually pretty typical; the world’s Muslims commonly rage, fume, riot and kill childishly whenever they think someone has criticized their religion. They cannot, and what’s worse, will not, permit any “dissing” of their religion. Ever. Not even in spite of the fact that criticism of a religion and blasphemy never harms anyone and never can change the basic nature of the religion. If they want to believe in it, they can do so, and no one’s criticism or disrespect can alter that.

Wah wah wah, little Muslim crybabies. Grow the fuck up already!

As I always do in cases like this, I’ve added a couple gratuitous anti-Islamic cartoons just to illustrate the power of the Streisand effect (by openly and publicly decrying something, one calls attention to it at a time when otherwise it would have gone unnoticed or unremembered).

Photo credit, top: By PsiCop, based on “the Soup Nazi” from Seinfeld; middle left, Lars Vilks, via Wikipedia; middle right, K. Westergaard, originally in Jyllands-Posten.

Tags: anti-islam, anti-muslim, blasphemous, blasphemy, cairo, censor, censorship, chidlish, egypt, film, hassouna tawfiq, immature, immaturity, innocence of muslims, Islam, juvenile, movie, muslim, muslims, sacrilege, the innocence of muslims, youtube

It’s common for irrationally sanctimonious people to hurl the old reductio ad Hiterum — or appeal to Hitler and/or the Nazis — at people they dislike. I’ve been blogging about this childish tendency for years now. It’s been used here in the U.S. by ideologues of all stripes. The Catholic Church has hurled ad Hitlerums lots of times, too, such as against President Obama and against the mass media for reporting on the worldwide clerical child-abuse scandal that’s rocked it for over a decade now. The Pope himself has even declared atheism and secularism to be forms of Nazism.

And it seems they can’t help but keep doing the same thing. Der Spiegel reports that no less a prince of the Church than its doctrinal enforcer has decided to hurl an implied — yet exceedingly clear — ad Hitlerum at the Church’s critics generally (WebCite cached article):

A German archbishop is under fire for appearing to liken recent criticism of the Catholic Church to a Nazi-era pogrom. The cleric, Gerhard Ludwig Müller, had said that “targeted discrimination campaigns” against the church sometimes reminded him of a “pogrom sentiment.”

The doctrinal watchdog of the Catholic church, German Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller, has run into criticism from politicians for saying the church was being subjected to a “pogrom sentiment” because of its position on the ordination of women, same-sex partnerships and the celibacy of priests.

In an interview with the newspaper Die Welt published on Friday, the archbishop said: “Targeted discreditation campaigns against the Catholic Church in North America and also here in Europe have led to clerics in some areas being insulted in public. An artifcially created fury is growing here which sometimes reminds one of a pogrom sentiment.”

I was able to find the Die Welt article in question, but it’s in German (cached version). Note that Müller’s office — prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — is the same one that Cardinal Ratzinger held for over two decades prior to becoming Pope.

His use of the word “pogrom” is significant. While the word comes from Russian and was first used to speak of the harassment of Jews in that country in the wake of rumors that they’d been behind the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, “pogrom” has since become associated with any systemic harassment of Jews, up to and including the Holocaust wrought by the Third Reich. Archbishop Müller clearly thinks that criticizing the Catholic Church is the same as the “pogroms” which ultimately claimed the lives of millions of Jews. One cannot construe his accusation any other way.

Nevertheless, criticism is not wanton slaughter! It just isn’t. For Müller to say that is just fucking ridiculous.

It’s long past time for the wizened princes of the Church to grow the hell up for the first time in their sniveling little lives and stop bellyaching and whining that they’re being criticized. They no longer run the world, and that’s just how it’s going to be, from now on. They can either be mature and accept it, or act like little crybabies and keep complaining about it. Yes, I get that they can’t help themselves; as Christians, they wish to feel persecuted for Jesus, so even though no one is trying to wipe them out, they nevertheless delude themselves into thinking it’s happening. But they don’t have any rational excuse for clinging to their delusion … no matter how much they think they’re entitled to.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Hat tip: Peter at Skeptics & Heretics Forum on Delphi Forums.

Tags: ad hitlerum, ad hitlerums, adolf hitler, adolph hitler, appeal to hitler, appeal to third reich, archbishop gerhard müller, catholic church, christian persecution complex, congregation for the doctrine of the faith, gerhard ludwig müller, gerhard müller, holocaust, nazis, nazism, persecution, pogrom, pogroms, presecution complex, reductio ad hitlerum, reductio ad hitlerums, reductio ad regnum tertium, reductio ad tertium regnum, roman catholic, roman catholic church, third reich, vatican, vatican city

One of the things I dislike about entities that commission independent investigations into their own affairs, is that all such probes can never be truly “independent.” No one ever can be sure the results of any such investigation won’t be subverted by the people who paid for it.

For example, here in Connecticut, this past summer we were treated to precisely this sort of debacle when state House Speaker Chris Donovan, then running in the Democratic primary for Congress in the 5th District, hired lawyer Stanley Twardy to “investigate” allegations that his campaign staff took campaign donations (otherwise known as “bribes”) in exchange for Donovan manipulating the legislative process on behalf of those donors. Not surprisingly, Twardy quite happily declared Donovan innocent of all wrongdoing. Quite laughably, he and Donovan expected the people of the Nutmeg State would swallow their steaming load of bullshit — but they didn’t, he lost the primary, and is now out of office.

Last year, the Roman Catholic Church in Germany commissioned just such a report into their own affairs. They pledged to allow their records to be culled to see how deep the clerical child-abuse scandal ran, in that country. But as Der Spiegel reports, they abruptly pulled the plug on this investigation (locally-cached version):

It was a major promise after a major disaster: In summer 2011, the Catholic Church in Germany pledged full transparency. One year earlier, an abuse scandal had shaken the country’s faithful, as an increasing number of cases surfaced in which priests had sexually abused children and then hidden behind a wall of silence.

The Lower Saxony Criminological Research Institute (KFN) was given the job of investigating the cases in 2011. The personnel files from churches in all 27 dioceses were to be examined for cases of abuse in an attempt to win back some of the Church’s depleted credibility.

But now the Church has called off the study, citing a breakdown in trust. “The relationship of mutual trust between the bishops and the head of the institute has been destroyed,” said the Bishop of Trier, Stephan Ackermann, on Wednesday morning.

The director of the KFN, Christian Pfeiffer, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the Church had refused to cooperate. At the end of last year, he contacted the dioceses twice in writing. He reminded them of their promised transparency and cooperation. He also asked them whether there was any indication that in some dioceses files had been actively destroyed.

The Bishops’ Conference, the country’s official body of the Church, was apparently unable to agree on any form of cooperation with the KFN.

Yes, you read that right: The bishops refused to comply with terms they dictated for how the investigation was to be conducted. They refused to communicate with, and cooperate with, a team they themselves hired for this task.

One can’t help but assume Prof Pfeiffer wasn’t turning out to be the obedient puppet they’d expected him to be, so after wasting his and everyone else’s time for a while — long enough time for them to destroy a lot of relevant documents, I’m sure — the bishops finally shut the “investigation” down entirely. Their pledge of transparency ultimately proved non-existent.

What person with half a brain is really surprised? I wasn’t, I hope you weren’t either.

Photo credit: dapd, via Der Spiegel.

Hat tip: Peter at Skeptics & Heretics Forum on Delphi Forums.

Tags: catholic child abuse scandal, catholic church, catholic clerical abuse scandal, child abuse, child abuse scandal, christian, christian pfeiffer, Christianity, christians, germany, inquiry, investigation, KFN, lower saxony criminological research institute, priestly pedophilia, prof christian pfeiffer, roman catholic, roman catholic church