Category: apologetics

If religion gets some credit, does it also get some blame?

October 18, 2015 • 11:41 am

This question is inspired by various talks I’ve heard the past few days at the Atheist Alliance of America conference.

We all know that theists are constantly touting the good things that religion does: inspires charity, gives people comfort in time of need, and so on. They have no problem imputing these things to religion. But that brings up a question, one that I’ve probably raised before:

Why are religionists so eager to give religion credit for inspiring people to do good things, but then so loath to blame religion for inspiring people to do bad things?

I’ve long thought that the claims of people like Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan—that religion cannot be and is not behind any acts of violence or malfeasance—is pure bunk.  One example: Christian faith-healing that kills children, and the tendency of extremist Islamists to kill apostates, infidels, and blasphemers. Such act are inconceivable without religion. But at any rate, what kind of logic gives credit to religion for prompting good acts but denies religion blame for prompting bad ones?

An updated Pascal’s Wager: Just as bad as the old one

October 1, 2015 • 10:20 am

I am continually told that I should not engage in philosophy without professional credentials in that area, even though I am now co-author with a Credentialed Philosopher™, Maarten Boudry, on a peer-reviewed philosophy paper. But this credential mongering loses force when I see real professors of philosophy engaged in lucubrations that are so transparently dreadful that even a biologist can recognize them as tripe. Even worse—these  lucubrations often appear in places like the New York Times.

I refer in particular to “The Stone” column, which for reasons unaccountable continues to publish the philosophical musings of Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a frequent subject of criticism on this site. Besides teaching introductory philosophy at Notre Dome, Gutting is even rumored to get paid for his NYt contributions. It is a crime against philosophy then, that he has earned not only column space but money for his latest “advance” in the philosophy of religion, “Pascal’s Wager 2.0.”

I needn’t refresh readers here on Pascal’s Wager or the many reasons why it’s bogus (go here for a comprehensive introduction). Among its problems are the diverse array of gods on which one must wager, forcing you to choose one (if you guess wrong, you could fry); the notion that any reasonably smart god could see that your belief is based purely on expediency and self-interest; and the indubitable fact that it’s nearly impossible to force yourself to believe in something you find improbable.

Gutting apparently realizes all this, and proffers his own version of Pascal’s Wager. But in the end it’s no better than the original version. Pascal’s Wager 2.0 differs by taking God out of the picture completely, asking nonbelievers simply to accept something Bigger than Themselves instead of just being atheists who rejects anything supernatural.

The trouble with the piece involves what Gutting considers “Bigger than Oneself”. Throughout the essay, it wavers between simply accepting a philosophical or ethical worldview, which many atheists have done anyway, to belief in an unspecified Beneficent Power (clearly supernatural), to accepting religion itself. Gutting can’t even keep his argument straight. In the end, though, Gutting seems to settle on Pascal’s Wager as asking atheists to accept the possibility of the supernatural, even though he touts no heavenly reward for such belief. Instead, the reward is simply more satisfaction with one’s life on Earth.

But before we get to Gutting’s New Clothes Wager, I present the only good bit of the article: the author’s tacit admission that doubt about religious truths is growing:

I don’t claim that my version of the wager argument is a faithful explication of what Pascal had in mind. It is, rather, an adaptation of the argument to our intellectual context, where doubt rather than belief is becoming the default position on religion. But I do think that this version avoids the standard objections to the usual interpretations of the wager argument.

Yes, it avoid the standard objections to the usual interpretations of Pascal’s Wager, many of which turn on the assumption of an afterlife. But it replaces them with other objections: namely, that Gutting can’t decide what we’re supposed to wager on.

First, he says that we doubters should embrace a “doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference.” In other words, he challenges atheists to believe something that we want to believe, which in Gutting’s case is a Beneficent Power:

I propose to reformulate Pascal’s wager as urging those who doubt God’s existence to embrace a doubt of desire rather than a doubt of indifference. This means, first, that they should hope — and therefore desire — that they might find a higher meaning and value to their existence by making contact with a beneficent power beyond the natural world. There’s no need to further specify the nature of this power in terms, say, of the teachings of a particular religion.

Well, this may not be the teachings of a particular religion, but it’s certain belief in something supernatural, and that’s clear. This Power is not only a “power”, but a “good power”, and is “beyond the natural world.” In other words, it’s supernatural. That makes it religious. And the benefit is more happiness in this world (granted, a goal to be desired):

The argument begins by noting that we could be much happier by making appropriate contact with such a power.

But wait—maybe the power isn’t supernatural or religious after all!:

Unlike the traditional versions, this wager does not require believing that there is a God. So the standard drawbacks of self-deception or insincerity don’t arise. The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually.

Well, if it doesn’t require believing in a God, what is this Beneficent Supernatural Power? It sounds suspiciously like a God to me. But Gutting says that other stuff can also be Beneficent Powers. It is here that he goes off the rails by touting philosophy, meditation, and ethics as manifestations of that supernatural Power. Note the waffling here (my emphasis below), in which “religion” suddenly expands to encompass philosophy, ethics, and meditation. These, despite Gutting’s claim, are not “things beyond the natural world”, though some are not “knowable” (I presume he means “derivable”) via science:

The wager calls for some manner of spiritual commitment, but there is no demand for belief, either immediately or eventually. The commitment is, rather, to what I have called religious agnosticism: serious involvement with religious teachings and practices, in hope for a truth that I do not have and may never attain. Further, religious agnosticism does not mean that I renounce all claims to other knowledge. I may well have strong commitments to scientific, philosophical and ethical truths that place significant constraints on the religious approaches I find appropriate. Religious agnosticism demands only that I reject atheism, which excludes the hope for something beyond the natural world knowable by science. [JAC: atheism doesn’t totally exclude the acceptance of something beyond the natural world knowable by science; it claims merely that we lack evidence for that.]

. . . But we can decide for ourselves how much worldly satisfaction is worth giving up for the sake of possible greater spiritual happiness. And, it may well turn out that religious activities such as meditation and charitable works have their own significant measure of worldly satisfaction. Given all this, what basis is there for refusing the wager?

In what world must we suddenly construe meditation, charitable works, ethics, and philosophy as “religious activities”, or accept some Power to practice them?  I accept Gutting’s proposition that one may find greater happiness by establishing a connection with something greater than oneself, even if that thing be the physical universe in all its splendor. Indeed, that is Sam Harris’s message in his book Waking Up. But that is not the same thing as establishing a connection with a supernatural Beneficent Power.

One interpretation of Gutting’s garbled message is that he thinks that even if we nonbelievers establish connection with nonreligious stuff like philosophy and ethics, we will be rewarded by the Big Power for making that connection, and that’s why we should believe in the Big Power. Alternatively, he may feel that we can’t achieve spiritual satisfaction without believing in the supernatural. But these interpretations are belied by Gutting’s own words (my emphasis below):

I don’t claim that my version of the wager argument is a faithful explication of what Pascal had in mind. It is, rather, an adaptation of the argument to our intellectual context, where doubt rather than belief is becoming the default position on religion. But I do think that this version avoids the standard objections to the usual interpretations of the wager argument. It does not require belief and isn’t an attempt to trick God into sending us to heaven. It merely calls us to follow a path that has some chance of leading us to an immensely important truth.

We can argue (but I won’t here) whether particular philosophical and ethical paths, or charitable work, constitute “truths”. It may be true in the scientific sense that such connections make us happier, and that charity will make its recipients happier, But the nature of Gutting’s “immensely important truth” remains elusive. Nevertheless, in the paragraph above Gutting clearly says that his argument does’t require “belief”. This is in strong contrast to his earlier claim that to get these spiritual benefits we must make contact with a supernatural beneficent power. In other words, we must make a James-ian leap of faith. But it takes no leap of faith to, say, try meditating or working in a soup kitchen as a way of establishing a greater connection with something.

In the end, Gutting founders on his own belief in God, unable to fully replace it with the kind of secular humanism that he also construes as “religious.” His equivocation leads him to produce a muddled and confusing essay. And he got PAID for something that would probably get the grade of C in an introductory philosophy course.

I’ll close with something that Maarten Boudry, my Belgian philosopher co-author on our paper, said about Gutting’s essay:

I wonder if Gary Gutting, rather than signing a contract with the NYT, would accept the remote possibility of receiving a handsome monetary reward, to paid by an invisible Editor whom he has never met and never heard of, and who may or may not exist.

A funny but telling argument against God’s existence

September 25, 2015 • 1:30 pm

I’m reading the book shown below (click on the link to go to its Amazon page), a useful summary of nonbelievers’ responses to religionists’ arguments for God. The book has done quite well since it came out a year ago; its author is an ex-Muslim who now heads The Atheist Republic, a support group and resource center for heathens.

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Navabi’s argument #2 is “God’s Existence is Proven by Scripture.” That’s a common claim, most obvious in the arguments that Jesus really existed and that his deeds were real—simply because the Bible tells us so. Navabi’s refutation occupies five pages of the book, but is more economically expressed in this cartoon sent me by reader Paul D:

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Q.E.D.

Praying for your team to win: how does it work?

September 25, 2015 • 11:00 am

In January of last year I reported a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute showing that a sizable percentage of American sports fans think that supernatural intervention occurs in sporting contests (50%), pray to God to help their team (26%), think that their favorite team has sometimes been cursed (25%), and perform rituals (like wearing the appropriate colors) that they think will help their team.  All of this, of course, invokes either God or the supernatural.

Here’s a breakdown of the data, showing that, on all counts, football fans (U.S. football!) are more faith-ridden than fans in general:

supernaturalforces_in_sports

So here’s my question.  Let’s take a traditional football rivalry involving teams from religious states, say, a game between Louisana State University (LSU) and Texas A&M. Surely there are many fans—and players—at that game praying for a favorable outcome. But of course what outcome is “favorable” depends on what team you favor.

Then ask those fans who admit to praying how they think it works.

If they claim that they don’t think it does work, then ask them why they’re praying. In such a case they can’t offer the usual excuse that their prayers are simply a form of meditation or one way-communication with God, for that simply doesn’t make sense.

If they claim that praying does work, then ask them how it’s supposed to work.  Presumably God Himself doesn’t really care about the outcome of the game, but somehow responds to the totality of prayers. How does that work?

Does He simply count up the number of prayers on one side, and then let the team with the most “votes” win? If that were the case, the home team would nearly always win—unless you count remote prayers before a television set! Or does the quality of the prayer or the piety of the prayer-giver also matter? And does God affect the entire outcome of the game (presumably He would, since He knows all things in advance), or just weight the results, like causing one team to have more incomplete passes or interceptions?

Yes, I’d love to see those who pray for their teams answer these questions, but I don’t know of anyone who ever has. But one thing is for sure: this practice assumes—as does all prayer—that God is a huge egomaniac, propitiated by toadies who ask him for something.

 If anybody knows of interview of individuals who pray for their teams, I’d be delighted to hear about it.

The Atlantic ponders a weighty question: Did early hominins have souls?

September 21, 2015 • 9:15 am

Among the category of Articles That Should Not Have Been Written, this one is prominent. It’s “Did Neanderthals have souls?” by freelance writer Ruth Graham, and her piece is in The Atlantic.

The question of when, and in which species, hominins were “ensouled” is of interest mainly because it’s so dumb, showing not only the conflict between faith and fact, but the silly issues that theologians get paid to grapple with. As shown in the recent book by Julien Musolino, The Soul Fallacy: What Science Shows We Gain by Letting Go of Our Soul Beliefs, there’s not the slightest bit of evidence for a soul. Although a bit repetitive, the book is certainly worth reading, especially for its copious evidence that the mind is a product of the brain and that there’s no bit of “consciousness” that can be detached from the brain and exist separately.

Nevertheless, many theologians not only assert that there is a soul, but that humans are the only species that have one. That, for instance, is the official position of the Roman Catholic Church, which accepts that humans did evolve, but also that we’re distinct from all other species by virtue of our ability to be “ensouled”. Exactly when this happens during embryonic development is not clear, but the ability to be ensouled itself must have arisen during human evolution. And that raises the question of when that ability arrived in our lineage, a question activated by the recent discovery of Homo naledi. (Theologians always need new grist for their mill.)

Such is the subject of Graham’s piece, which would be okay if it mentioned the evidence against souls. But it doesn’t: it simply buttresses the superstition mongers who find the evolutionary arrival of souls is an intriguing and viable question. But that question is completely unanswerable, not only because we almost certainly don’t have souls, but because the concept of a soul is itself so nebulous that we wouldn’t know what kind of evidence to accept. Should we take ritualistic burial of the dead? (H. naledi may have deposited the dead in a burial chamber, but some ants do the same thing) Religion itself and worship of deities? Language?

Here are the questions, discussed by Graham, that the concept of a soul raises for its adherents:

The broader issue is what happens to the soul of anyone born before Jesus Christ. Surely Moses and Abraham, for example, made it to Heaven. But how? The short answer, according to many theologians, is they trusted in God’s promises about the coming of a savior. They wouldn’t have known the specifics about Jesus Christ of Nazareth, but they could have had a general faith that a Messiah was on his way.

A related question is what happens to modern people who never had the chance to hear the message of Jesus Christ. Again, most Christian theologians allow for salvation on the basis of a kind of orientation toward God. Here’s how the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council addressed the problem in 1964, for example:

“Those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.”

That last sentence is the kind of opaque theobabble that the Vatican regularly emits.

These are prime examples of the silliness of theology, which answers these questions by simply making stuff up. It always amazes me that educated people can even bother themselves with these questions, much less write screeds about them. (See, for example, the book The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters, by J. P. Moreland, or the article in Psychology Today by physician/researcher Robert Lanza, “Does the soul exist? Evidence says ‘yes'”, which takes as evidence the existence of subjective experience.)

To some theologians, the question of whether H. naledi has a soul comes down to this: “Was the species descended from Adam and Eve?” Since the scientific evidence shows that H. sapiens could not have descended from only two individuals, this question is already nonsensical. But creationist Kurt Wise (remember him?) sees it as answerable, and with a “yes”:

Creationists are already arguing over the naledi discovery. Kurt Wise, the director of the Center for Creation Research at Truett-McConnell College, told the evangelical World magazine that the fossils do represent a fully human species.

But the equally fundamentalist group Answers in Genesis, headed by Ken Ham, disagrees, claiming that H. naledi wasn’t descended from Adam and Eve. They were just apes!

These fossils, like so many others before them, may reshuffle the “family tree” that evolutionists are constantly drawing and re-drawing in their efforts to create for us a history apart from God. But they will not re-shuffle the truth about human history or what it means to be human. We know that God created man and land animals the same day without evolution. We seriously doubt the original owners of the Dinaledi bones [H. naledi] were among the descendants of Adam and Eve, as the preponderance of the evidence suggests they were animals, one of the variations that developed among apes. They most certainly were not any sort of evolutionary intermediate.

This is ludicrous, of course, because we’re still apes, and we’re certainly animals! Here we have two fundamentalist Christian groups disagreeing, with no way to settle the issue. Instead of suspending judgment pending a good definition of the soul and a way to demonstrate its existence, they just make stuff up. This is not science but wish-thinking, and it’s no way to settle issues. And remember, this is in principle an empirical question: it’s about religion asserting what’s real, not simply dealing with meanings and values. So much for those who bang on about religion not making any claims about reality.

But of course even more liberal theologians accept souls, and thus still must deal with the evolutionary question. Graham continues:

Even the many Christians who accept that the world is much older than 10,000 years find that the problem can still provoke. But it’s not necessarily cause for despair over the fate of the naledi soul. British pastor Mark Woods, a contributor to the online publication Christian Today, wrote recently that the naledi burial site raises intriguing suggestions for Christians about the existence of the soul. If this primitive group went to such lengths to bury their dead, he argues, it “shows they knew that death was not an absolute ending, and that those who had died were still, in some way, present.”

That’s a theological way of saying what scientists have been arguing all along. As Lee Berger, who led the discovery in South Africa, put it, “We are going to have to contemplate some very deep things about what it is to be human.” For some, it’s a matter of eternal life and death.

Re the first paragraph, we still don’t know whether the cache of H. naledi skeletons represents some kind of ritual, much less any behavior suggesting that those dead were considered “sacred.” Some ants remove their dead and put them in a “death pile.” Does that mean that ants have souls, too? There’s no evidence that the naledi dead were buried: they could have simply been removed to a specific location in the cave—and really, we don’t even know that for sure. And even if they were buried, this could have been just to avoid stench and contamination. Finally, even if they were buried deliberately for spiritual reasons, that doesn’t show H. naledi KNEW that “death was not an absolute ending.” It showed at most that they believed it. Here pastor Woods is mistaking belief for fact.

As for Lee Berger’s statement, I still think it’s silly to ponder “what it is to be human”, at least on the basis of his discovery (he headed the team that found H. naledi). Let Berger first answer the slippery question of what we mean by “fully human”—and that, of course, is completely subjective. If we invoke specific things like behavior or brain size, yes, we can in principle get an answer. But that’s not what many secularists mean: they are surely talking about the subjective beliefs and attitudes of hominins, and that question is almost impossible to answer.

And it becomes completely impossible to answer once we begin invoking theistic concepts of the soul. If the human soul is a requirement for being “fully human,” and the soul is an idea without an iota of supporting evidence, then the question will linger forever in the domain of theology: a discipline that cannot truly answer its questions, but pretends to do so by confecting solutions.

As for Graham, it was her journalistic responsibility to point out the lack of evidence for souls, and certainly to quote someone who thinks the whole question is nonsensical.  By quoting Berger in her last paragraph as almost supporting souls, Graham simply keeps the question alive. If we’re going to talk about “what it means to be human”, let’s get tangible about the question, honest about its subjectivity, and dubious about our ability to find answers.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Ben Goren: is there free will in Heaven?

September 19, 2015 • 10:15 am

The last time Ben Goren wrote a post on this site, it really twisted the knickers of the ID-ers (particularly Vincent Torley) who frequent the creationist Uncommon Descent site. I thought it was time to twist them a little more, so we’re following up “Why doesn’t Jesus call 9-1-1?” with a new post on the topic, “Is there free will in heaven?” That may sound like a funny question, but do remember that, to many Christians, heaven is populated by souls, and the soul is supposed to be what runs our mind on Earth. Herewith, Ben Goren, who is apparently afflicted with Alliteration Syndrome.

The Flip Side of Free Will

by Ben Goren

Regular readers are by now fairly familiar with Jerry’s assurance of the importance of recognizing the reality that we lack free will — as well as where the regular commentators specifically situate.

But all our debate occurs within a secular assemblage. We all agree: no gods grace our globe. Alas, we are almost alone; most support supernaturalism: Christians, chiefly. For them, free will fits a different function, superbly summarized by Terry Gilliam in his timeless classic, Time Bandits:

Should you absent our sane sanctuary and encounter an evangelizing ecclesiast who proffers profundities on allegorical autonomy, consider countering with a couple of queries:

Is there evil in Heaven? And also free will?

If nay and yea, free will engenders no evil. If yea and nay, what need we needless will? And if even Heaven has evil, why wish it?

Of course, sophisticated sophists supply replies. Frequently, free will itself is slaughtered on the hereafter’s altar…after which it wends its way to the world and wearies us once again with weapons-grade divine indifference.

A believer responds to Ben Goren

September 6, 2015 • 8:30 am

Ben Goren’s post on “The one question a Christian can’t answer” (aka “Why didn’t Jesus call 9-1-1?”) got lots of comments: over 150.  One of them, a long screed critiquing Ben’s essay, didn’t appear. It was by a religious reader called “Nixak”, clearly Jewish, and I decided to put it as a standalone post. It’s an object lesson on the mentality of the True Believer, and I will leave it to the readers to comment. I particularly enjoyed point #2, which shows how some people can believe in a God who’s basically a jerk. The justification for evil is also interesting.

First of all- Ben’s premise assumes that the God [Yah] of Creation, NEVER answers anyone’s prayers. I personally know that’s FALSE! But of course if you’re a non-believer, you’ll never put it to the test, so exactly how could Ben know??

2nd} Most folks, even most ‘religious’ folks, call on the Lord using the wrong name. So if you call on Him using the wrong name, why do you expect for Him to respond to you?

3rd} Many folks, including the ‘religious’, conflate the idea of ‘Miracles’ w MAGIC- thus think you can just call on ‘Jesus’, & the Lord will just go ‘poof’ out of thin air like some ‘fairy’ out of a ‘fairy tale’ & save you. Yet there’s nothing in the Bible that says that’s actually how the Lord [Yah] really works.

4th} It’s written: ‘My spirit [of the Lord Yah] will not allows strive w man’ [as w the ancients]- till the appointed time. This is a statement even most ‘religious’ folks can’t really grasp- let alone atheists. It means that the [Biblical] ancients had a whole nother level of relationship w the ‘Creator’ than most folks do today- even so-called ‘religious’ folks. Most folks today, even the ‘religious’, don’t really know how to call on the Lord’s name – or even what his real name is.

5th} Ben’s whole premise shifts blame onto the Lord [Yah] instead of the actual perpetrators. For the most part we [collectively] are mainly responsible for what happens to us as a whole- IE: If there’s evil in the World [& that’s definitely so], it’s because some of us [collectively] are GUILTY of perpetrating &/or exacerbating it, &/or allowing it to flourish in our midst.
An example: This is the 10th anniversary of the Katrina Disaster. Since hurricanes are called ‘Acts of God’, one might argue that the Lord [Yah] is ‘guilty’ for the devastation & loss of life. Yet there’s much more to the story- 1st, New Orleans is on the Gulf coast at the mouth of the Miss River, yet much/most of it lies at-least 10ft below sea-level. Just that alone made it especially vulnerable to hurricanes, yet N.O. City & LA State officials & city engineers, etc- decided to do Little to Nothing to resolve that problem. 2nd} Katrina actually missed New Orleans- it was NOT a direct hit. Those Levees should have held even w Direct hit from a Force 5 Hurricane [FYI: Katrina was a Force 3 Near MISS]. But someone decided to build those levees inadequately & it was known in key circles they were improperly built 3rd} The N.O. City, LA State, & US Govts failed to properly evacuate the city, & failed to adequately prepare food, shelter, supplies, medicines, etc for those who could NOT evacuate; even though it was known at-least 4 days in advance that New Orleans would likely be hit by Katrina [which at one point reached Force 4 – 5]. 4th} Too many people in NO’s 9th Ward had been too poor for far too long, of-course making the folks living there especially vulnerable to DISASTER. Yet the power elites, Govt officials, Biz community, etc; allowed those impoverished conditions to persist for decades. 5th} In the wake of Katrina many of these same ‘Usual Suspects’ saw Katrina as an opportunity to implement a whole-slew of long held ‘Disaster Capitalist’ Agendas, especially since so many ‘undesirables’, were effectively swept from New Orleans by Katrina. Thus it almost seems like many of these afore mentioned issues were deliberately left improperly addressed.
If any of these first 4 points had been dealt w properly by those in charge, & especially if all 4 points had been- IMO the death toll would NOT have been 1800, it may have been less than 180, may be even less than 18. So who should be blamed for this God, or the officials who did a ‘Heck of a Wacked Job’??!
– The same could be said re: the Fukushima disaster- Yes the Earthquake &Tsunami were ‘Acts of God’, yet Fukushima did NOT have to have a triple melt-down & go up in smoke. Those in charge made a series of bad decisions IE: building it in a known earthquake & tsunami zone, taking down the natural rock-cliff wall that was well above the height of the tsunami, known design flaws in the Mark 4 Reactors, etc- that made it a Disaster waiting to happen!

6th} Directly addressing Ben’s issue re: the Catholic Pederastic Priest scandal: First- Ben seems to presume that the Vatican actually is the Biblical Yah’s [or even the Biblical Yeshua’s] true representative on Earth- IMO that’s false! The Vatican has instituted a number of policies that serve as a back-drop for this scandal. Most obvious- Its celibacy policy- which is NOT even based on Biblical Scripture. These Pederastic Priests violate the 3rd & 7th Commandments as well as laws against lewd sexual activities, homosexual acts, & the Biblical warning: ‘Woe onto the Shepherds who mislead [& abuse] My Flock…’ FYI The 3rd Commandment against Taking the ‘Lord’s Name in Vain’- don’t mean don’t say G-d-damn. ‘It means don’t turn the ‘Lord’s Name into a Vanity’- but in Hebrew the word used actually means FALSE-HOOD &/or LIE!!! Thus ‘Don’t Turn [misrepresent] the Lord’s NAME into a LIE’- and obviously Priest who misuse their office to sexually abuse kids [mainly under-age alter-boys] have done exactly that! And ‘Woe unto the ‘Church’’ for making it a long-standing policy to protect abusive priests instead of their child victims!!!

I always wonder this: if religion didn’t exist, would people like “Nixak” fulminate just as insanely, but about another issue?