New York Times officially opposes stupid rules of Catholic hospitals

December 9, 2013 • 6:00 am

Just a quickie: the editorial column of the New York Times ( i.e., the opinion of the paper’s editors themselves) has come out against Catholic hospitals in the U.S. which, on Church orders, restrict medically-mandated abortions.  The column, “When bishops direct medical care,” rests on a lawsuit filed the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a Michigan woman whose water broke at 18 weeks. Standard procedure in such cases is to induce abortion to remove the fetus (which is nearly always doomed in such cases) and prevent infection. The Catholic hospital she was in, however, obeyed their bishop’s directive and sent her home—twice.  When she returned a third time, feverish from an infection produced by Catholic “medical care,” she miscarried.

As the Times notes, the interesting aspect of the case is that the woman is suing not the hospital, but the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—the big guys with the hats who give the orders:

The A.C.L.U. is arguing, on her behalf, that having issued the mandates and made them conditions of hospital affiliation, the conference is responsible for “the unnecessary trauma and harm” that Ms. Means and “other pregnant women in similar situations have experienced at Catholic-sponsored hospitals.”

This is one of those cases, like polygamy, where the need for social cohesion and individual autonomy overrides religious freedom.  I find it horrifying that Catholic doctors and hospitals would rather see a mother and fetus both die than remove a doomed fetus. This would not occur, of course, without the religious dictate that considers a fetus as a full person with a soul. And, of course, mothers and fetuses have died in such situations.  What kind of morality is that?

The Bishops, as usual, make themselves look worse by trying to claim that they’re being persecuted. They should just learn to shut up in such cases:

In a statement last Friday, the president of the bishops’ group, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, said that the religious directives did not encourage or require substandard medical treatment. He also portrayed the case as an attack on religious freedom — the same unpersuasive argument the bishops are making against the new federal health care law’s requirement that all plans include contraception coverage.

The first part of this is, of course, a lie: the directives do encourage substandard medical care—care that endangers two lives instead of one. The second part is misleading, for religious freedom ends when it takes away a woman’s right to live. Thankfully, the Times doesn’t waffle in its view:

Allowing religious doctrine to prevail over the need for competent emergency care and a woman’s right to complete and accurate information about her condition and treatment choices violates medical ethics and existing law.

The bishops are free to worship as they choose and advocate for their beliefs. But those beliefs should not shield the bishops from legal accountability when church-affiliated hospitals following their rules cause patients harm.

It is this kind of behavior that will doom the Catholic church. Unwavering in its dogma, even in light of changing secular morality, and holding stands that are ridiculous (as when they oppose HPV vaccination for women, implicitly arguing that getting cancer is better than having sex), the Church will eventually be forced to alter its stands—or wane to being a small sect. Can there be any doubt that the official stands of the Catholic church are evil and immoral? Those who remain Catholic are complicit in this evil, even if they oppose some Church dogma.

h/t: John

Snow boots

December 9, 2013 • 5:24 am

We had about a 2.5 inches (6+ cm) of snow in Chicago yesterday, and my squirrels’ water dish is frozen.  (Of course I replenish it regularly; what do they drink in winter?).  But boots are still the fashion accessory of the day, although you want your oldest, most beat-up boots:

photo 142

Crazy cyclists: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME

December 9, 2013 • 3:53 am

by Matthew Cobb

This popped up in my Tw*tter feed yesterday, from experimental evolution ace Richard Lenski (@RELenski). It’s not new, but it is scary.  Here’s the picture Richard re-tweeted:

And yes it is real. In 2006, mountain bikers Hans Rey and Steve Peat decided to ride their bikes along a narrow ledge of the cliffs of Moher in Ireland. These massive cliffs have a sheer drop of 600ft down into the pounding Atlantic – they featured in David Lean’s epic film (did he make any other kind?) Ryan’s Daughter. There’s more detail of the trip, along with some pics, here. I’ve reproduced a few, plus a nausea-inducing video.

And remember folks, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!

The good news: Frank Bruni calls out U.S. politicos for pandering to religion

December 8, 2013 • 10:30 am

The good news is the op-ed piece by Frank Bruni in today’s New York Times, “The Bible as bludgeon.” It’s an eloquent indictment of the unjustifably large role of religion in American life, and the need for politicians to profess Christianity to get elected to any office.

How often do you read words like this in a major newspaper?

You can make a successful run for political office in this country without an especially thick résumé, any exceptional talent for expressing yourself, a noteworthy education or, for that matter, a basic grasp of science.

But you better have religion. You better be ready to profess your faith in and fealty to God — the Judeo-Christian one, of course. And you better be convincing. A dust-up last week in the 2014 race for a United States Senate seat from Arkansas provided a sad reminder of this, showing once again that our ballyhooed separation of church and state is less canyon than itty-bitty crack.

Bruni’s referring to an incumbent U.S. Senator from Arkansas, Mark Pryor, who is running for re-election in 11 months.  Pryor is worried, as he’s losing ground to a charismatic Republican, Tom Cotton. What do you do in America when you need more support in the South? Profess religion, of course! And so Pryor made this campaign ad (TRIGGER WARNING: Unctuous religious rump-osculation):

That’s pretty disgusting, and I bet that non-U.S readers will be amazed at it.

But of course the Republicans struck back, noting that Pryor wasn’t religious enough: that he’d made a comment earlier that the Bible “is not really a rule book for political issues.” O heresy! Such is American politics, soaked in religion.

Bruni abhors it, and rightly so, for, as he notes, 25% of Americans aren’t Christians, and “nones” and outright atheists are growing in numbers:

As full of insight and beauty as the Bible is, it’s not a universally and unconditionally embraced document, and it’s certainly not a secular one. Yet it’s under the hand of almost every American president who takes the oath of office.

It’s in classrooms, some of which teach creationism. The Texas Board of Education has been withholding approval of a widely used biology textbook because it presents evolution as more than just a theory. Thus, in the nation’s second most populous state, whose governor essentially kicked off his 2012 presidential campaign with a stadium rally for tens of thousands of evangelicals, religion is trumping scholarship, at least for now.

“So help me God.” “Under God.” “In God We Trust.” Perhaps we’re meant to register these ubiquitous phrases as unspecific inspirations, vague recognitions of an undefined higher power, general appeals to generous living. But they’re rooted in a given religious tradition and are arguably the gateways to the Arkansas ridiculousness and to the overwrought accusations of a “war on Christmas” that herald the holiday season as surely as Frosty the Snowman and Black Friday do.

. . . The centrality of religion in this country’s birth and story can’t be denied. And shouldn’t be. And having the Bible at inaugurations honors tradition more than it offends pluralism. But using the Bible as a litmus test for character betrays the principles of religious liberty and personal freedom, along with the embrace of diversity, that are equally crucial to America’s identity and strength. It also defies the wisdom of experience. How many self-anointed saints have been shown not to practice what they preach? How many of the ostentatiously faithful have fallen? Theirs is an easy pose, and sometimes an empty one.

There is more in Bruni’s piece; read it. And while Pryor’s osculation of faith is disquieting, the fact that Bruni calls him out for it, and calls out the entire electoral system as well for its obsession with religion, is good news.

I will live to see the day of a woman President (I suspect that will be January of 2017). But I am positive that I won’t live to see an atheist President. I’m hopeful, though, that the grandchildren of my contemporaries will.

h/t: Greg Mayer

The good news and the bad news. I: The bad news

December 8, 2013 • 7:00 am

First, the bad news—so that you won’t be left fuming after you get both pieces of news. The two “pieces” are pieces of journalism that just appeared. I’ll post a much better piece in a few hours.

For some time now, Salon has been publishing pieces excoriating New Atheism, its Horsemen, and other atheists. I’m not sure why this site does that, but it’s definitely been noticed.  And Salon’s most recent article on atheism, “What Hitchens got wrong: Abolishing religion won’t fix anything,” by journalist Sean McElwee, continues the tradition. It’s dreadful, and fails on four counts: it is gratuitous (a postmortem attack on Hitchens—do we need another one?), it says nothing new, it is mean-spirited, and many of its claims are wrong.  Because of that, I won’t dissect it in detail, but we need to see what kind of attacks keep on coming. Here are its main points (indented quotes are from McElwee):

1. New Atheists think that all suffering comes from religion.

The fundamental error in the “New Atheist” dogma is one of logic. The basic premise is something like this:

1. The cause of all human suffering is irrationality

2. Religion is irrational

3. Religion is the cause of all human suffering

That syllogism is obviously wrong, even logically, and we all know it. But who among atheists has said religion causes all human suffering? Name one person!  Our contention is, of course, that it causes a great deal of human suffering, but that some suffering will remain even when religion is gone. That’s because some humans are malicious or uncaring, because there are inequities in society, and because some “evil” is simply the workings of nature. But who can deny that nonreligious societies like Sweden or Denmark have less suffering than, say, Yemen or Saudi Arabia?

2. Hitchens was a hypocrite because he supported a war promulgated by a religious American president.  I kid you not:

But then [in the 2003 Gulf War] Hitchens decided that, in fact, bombing children was no longer so abhorrent, because these wars were no longer neocolonial wars dictated by economics and geopolitics but rather a final Armageddon between the forces of rationality and the forces of religion. The fact that the force of rationality and civilization was lead by a cabal of religious extremists was of no concern for Hitchens.

How many times is Hitchens going to be excoriated for this? Granted, I disagreed with that war, and with Hitchens’s stand, but it’s not the only stand he ever took. Must we agree with every opinion of people we admire?  At any rate, there’s no point in dragging Hitchens around the block for this once again.  And the fact that Bush was religious was irrelevant given Hitchens’s feelings about the Kurds.

3. The problems associated with militant Islam come from politics, not religion.  This contention is so common that it should be given a name. Here’s McElwee’s version:

Is not the best explanation for the Thirty Years’ War more likely political than religious? Might it be better to see jihad as a response to Western colonialism and the upending of Islamic society, rather than the product of religious extremism? The goal of the “New Atheists” is to eliminate centuries of history that Europeans are happy to erase, and render the current conflict as one of reason versus faith rather than what is, exploiter and exploited.

Bernard Lewis writes,

“For vast numbers of Middle Easterners, Western-style economic methods brought poverty, Western-style political institutions brought tyranny, even Western-style warfare brought defeat. It is hardly surprising that so many were willing to listen to voices telling them that the old Islamic ways were best and that their only salvation was to throw aside the pagan innovations of the reformers and return to the True Path that God had prescribed for his people.”

I have to wonder if Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris truly believe that eliminating religion will also make the Islamic world forget about centuries of colonization and deprivation. Without religion, will everyone living in Pakistan shrug off drone strikes and get on with their lives?

First of all, eliminating religion won’t fix the problems of the Middle East, though it will certainly help.  Those problems stem not only from dysfunctional theocratic governments, but also from oppressive dictators (viz., Assad), from institutionalized corruption, and so on. Those factors often have nothing to do with Western oppression.

But such problems also stem from the issue that Hitchens always singled out as critical in making a society dysfunctional: the economic disempowerment of women. That, of course, is embedded in Muslim doctrine. My own view is that we should argue against religion directly, for one can convert believers and those on the fence; but ultimately one must also try to create a more just and caring world, for it is people’s lack of security and their own dysfunctional situation that sustains religion belief. And working on both fronts has a salubrious feedback effect, for religion both creates and derives from dysfunctional societies. Hitchens, of course, recognized that (I believe he used Marx’s famous “opium of the people” quote), and was doing his bit to oppose dictatorship and foster equality whenever he could.

But the main problem here is that most Islamic violence is directed not at colonialist oppressors, but at other Muslims (e.g., Sunni vs. Shia). Or against Islamic women.  Or it comes from a religiously-motivated hatred of Jews: another religious problem.  Yes, colonialism plays some role, but if you read Lawrence Wright’s absorbing book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (highly recommended, and it won a Pulitzer Prize), you’ll see that the origins of Al-Qaeda and its predecessor the Muslim Brotherhood trace back not to colonialism by Western powers, but to resentment of the “secular” government of Egypt and the desire to spread Islam throughout the world. I wish more people who play the “it’s-all-politics” card would read that book!

In fact, McElwee goes further, arguing that:

4. No war was ever about religion; they were all “political.”

Religion has a tendency to reflect political and economic realities. Hitchens, in fact, has made ample use of this Marxist analysis, questioning religious experts whether it was Constantine or the truth of Christ’s words that were largely responsible for its breakneck spread. Constantine was, and his proclivities shaped the church. The doctrine of the Trinity was not decided exclusively by decades of intense debate; the whimsy of Constantine and political maneuvering between by Arius and Athanasius had a significant influence on the outcome.

But if there were no religion, there would be no conflict over the Trinity, regardless of the “political maneuvering” involved! Of course not all wars are religious, and there is always a secular element even when religion is involved, but to deny that religious beliefs motivate wars and conflicts is to deny reality.

I sometimes wonder if there is anything that would convince people like McElwee that religious beliefs contribute to violence. Or will they always find a way to construe things as “political”? I see that tactic as close to theology in its refusal to accept reality and its obsession with confabulating explanations when reality shows its unwelcome face. If you waffle hard enough, you can even see the Inquisition as “political”.

5. Atheists and rationalists don’t understand religion, and promulgate a simplistic caricature of it. McElwee quotes the odious Terry Eagleton on this point:

Similarly, within the church there are modernizers and reformers working to quash the Church’s excesses, no Hitchens, Dawkins or Harris needed. Terry Eagleton writes,

“Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.”

What McElwee ignores is that many, many atheists were once fervent believers, and understand religion very well. Think of the atheists who were once preachers or fervent Christians: Dan Barker, Jerry DeWitt, Bart Ehrman, John Loftus, Eric MacDonald, and so on. Did those people fail to understand religion? I don’t think so. And many readers of this site have testified to—”witnessed,” as it were—their former deep immersion in religion. (I should also note the recent survey that showed that UK Christians knew less about their faith than did UK atheists.)

And why do you have to be a believer to criticize religion? Do you have to be a Nazi to criticize Nazism, or a segregationist to understand and efface the evils of segregation? It seems to me that being an outsider gives one a certain advantage, at least in seeing and publicizing the harms of religion. Those in the asylum are often blinded to their delusion. And, at any rate, we have a distinguished roll of former religionists who are plenty well equipped “to understand what they castigate.”

That bit of obtuseness leads McElwee to his last inane conclusion:

6.  Atheists should shut up about religion because change is best made by the believers themselves.  Yes, that’s what he says:

Of course, I’m entirely aware of the problems in modern American Christianity. I have written an essay excoriating what I see as the false Christianity. But any critique of religion that can be made from the outside (by atheists) can be made more persuasively from within religion. For instance, it would hardly be the theologian’s job to point out that, according to The Economist, “Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated.” I’m sure scientists are well aware of the problem and working to rectify it. Similarly, within the church there are modernizers and reformers working to quash the Church’s excesses, no Hitchens, Dawkins or Harris needed.

This is nonsense.  First of all, nearly all pressure to reform churches comes not from religion or church doctrine itself, but from secular movements outside the church that influence believers. I am absolutely convinced, for instance, that some churches’ acceptance of gays and women’s equality comes from social movements outside the church. I also believe that kind of secular pressure is required if any reform is to take place.

But, most important, “insiders” aren’t working to reform the most invidious forms of faith.  How many Catholics in the Vatican are undermining its doctrines about sex, divorce, the sinfulness of gays, and the prohibition of birth control? Answer: none that I know of.  How many Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Iran are working to dismantle the pernicious doctrines of Islam? Are we supposed to sit back and let the Vatican fix Catholicism? If so, we’ll wait a long time!

If McElwee lived in Nazi Germany, he’d probably tell us: “Look, Rommel and von Stauffenberg are working to bring down Hitler. Call off the U.S. and British troops, call off the French Resistance, because any critique of Nazism made from the outside can be made more persuasively by members of the Nazi Party.”

The fact is that the “reform” of religion will occur much faster with pressure from nonbelievers, for many forms of faith have no internal motivation for changing.  And you don’t have to be a believer to see the harm.  If I were offered a plate of dog feces to eat, I wouldn’t be persuaded by the argument, “You can’t know whether it’s bad until you’ve eaten a lot of dog crap.”

McElwee goes on to espouse a form of NOMA, arguing that we need religion to tell us about the meaning of being human and how to live the good life, and, conversely, religion shouldn’t intrude on science. He’s right about the second part but not the first. Religion doesn’t have any more credibility about the meaning of life and the best way to live  than do the exertions of secular, humanistic philosophy in telling us how to live. In fact, religion is a substantially worse guide for life, because it relies on faith and fiction rather than reason and facts.

I see I’ve written too much again. But this stuff just keeps coming, and will continue, I suppose, until the memory of Hitchens has faded.