British cardinal compares gay marriage to slavery

March 5, 2012 • 10:09 am

The first point I want to make is that when a Catholic cardinal compares gay marriage to slavery and abortion, other Catholics can’t disown that as an example of “an extremist view.” It’s a cardinal, for crying out loud! He’s mainstream!

Anyway, as the Independent reports,

Britain’s most senior Catholic has condemned gay marriage as an “aberration”, likening it to slavery and abortion.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien said countries which legalise gay marriage are “shaming themselves” by going against the “natural law,” and should not consider their actions “progress”.

He claimed same sex unions were the “thin end of the wedge” and would lead to the “further degeneration of society into immorality.”

In a series of controversial comments, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that if same sex marriage were legalised, “further aberrations would take place and society would be degenerating even further than it already has into immorality.”

Yeah, right.  Can you really imagine a society that allows gay people to marry would be substantially different from what we have now?  And as for the slavery thing:

He wrote: “Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that ‘no one will be forced to keep a slave’.

“Would such worthless assurances calm our fury? Would they justify dismantling a fundamental human right? Or would they simply amount to weasel words masking a great wrong?”

He has now defended his comments, saying: “I think it’s a very, very good example of what might happen on our own country in the present time.”

Does somebody really need to point out the substantive difference between slavery and gay marriage: that both partners in a gay marriage are in it of their own volition?  And what is the “fundamental human right” here? The right not to be offended by same-sex marriages? Apparently so, for O’Brien also said:

“We’re taking standards which are not just our own but standards from the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations where marriage is defined as a relationship between man and woman and turning that on its head. . .

“I think that it is time now to call a halt to what you might call progress. I do not call what is happening nowadays progress.

“I would say that countries where this is legal are indeed violating human rights.”

Well, Cardinal O’Brien, I’ve read the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights, and it says nothing about defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. What it says is this:

Article 16.

  • (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
  • (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
  • (3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Does that define marriage as a heterosexual couple? I don’t think so. You might interpret “men and women. . have the right to marry” that way, but one could interpret that as saying simply that both sexes have a right to marry.

It is an ineluctable fact that same-sex couples fall in love and want to marry.  The Catholic church finds that immoral because of words in a fictional book.  Increasingly, society is recognizing that there is nothing immoral in same-sex marriage, and the trend toward accepting that is simply going to continue. If Catholics hold the hard line, trying to buck that trend, they’re only going to lose adherents.  Stupid words, such as those of Cardinal O’Brien, just accelerate that loss.

Let’s see what Catholics say about this and how many of them decry it.  Were I a gay Catholic like Andrew Sullivan, I’d simply leave the Church and, if I needed God, worship somewhere else. So long as the Church officially considers homosexuality an abomination, and its practice a sin, there is no excuse for any gay person to remain Catholic.

More damage from religion: persecution of child “witches” by African Christians

March 5, 2012 • 6:18 am

You’ve probably heard that there’s an especially nefarious effect of some Christian sects in Africa: they have combined earlier superstitions with modern ones, and believe that some of their members are witches. Children are often singled out as being possessed, andm in a misguided attempt at “exorcism,” are beaten, tortured, and even killed. Watch this short but horrific BBC video of how a child was tortured and killed—in LONDON—after accusations of “Kindoke,” or witchcraft.

The relatives who tortured this child to death were recently found guilty of murder.

This case is not unique in the UK: see here (from The Ontario Consultants for Religious Tolerance) for more information.  Notice the statement reported by the BBC:

‘Detective Superintendent Chris Bourlet, of the Metropolitan Police leads Project Violet. a program to prevent religiously-motivated child abuse. Bourlet said: “the aim will be prevention, working with churches and communities – not to challenge their beliefs but to raise their awareness of child abuse.” A group of about five officers will gather intelligence on the problem and try and persuade churches to follow child protection procedures.’

“Not to challenge their beliefs”?  Really?  You shouldn’t tell them that children aren’t witches? That is, after all, the truth? This is the sort of accommodationism that leads to horrible consequences for peoples’ lives.”  Now I’m not sure whether telling them that their beliefs are wrong will help much, either, but maybe combining that with the assertion that if any child is so much as touched for being accused of witchcraft, there will be severe and immediate consequences.  Are we really supposed to “respect” those beliefs?

The practice is, of course, far more widespread in west Africa, where it wasn’t specifically regulated until recently. And it’s still going on, as the video above testified.  See also this BBC report on the practice in the Congo, which, though accusing a child of witchcraft has been made illegal, still leads to child abuse and expulsion from the home:

In 2010, Unicef reported 20,000 children accused of witchcraft were living on the streets of DR Congo’s capital Kinshasa.

One of the most nefarious of the witch hungers is Helen Ukpabio, a Nigerian Christian “witch hunter”, and founder of Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries who was profiled in 2010 in The New York Times (see also Hemant Mehta’s post on The Friendly Atheist)  Her organization makes films like “The End of the Wicked” (from which this clip is taken):

As the NYT notes,

Ms. Ukpabio’s critics say her teachings have contributed to the torture or abandonment of thousands of Nigerian children — including infants and toddlers — suspected of being witches and warlocks.. . .

Those disturbed by the needless immiseration of innocent children should beware. “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” follows Gary Foxcroft, founder of the charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, as he travels the rural state of Akwa Ibom, rescuing children abused during horrific “exorcisms” — splashed with acid, buried alive, dipped in fire — or abandoned roadside, cast out of their villages because some itinerant preacher called them possessed.

Their fellow villagers have often seen DVDs of “End of the Wicked,” Ms. Ukpabio’s bloody 1999 movie purporting to show how the devil captures children’s souls. And some have read her book “Unveiling the Mysteries of Witchcraft,” where she confidently writes that “if a child under the age of 2 screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan.”

Ukpabio of course denies that her preaching about possession and the need for exorcism cause any harm. Referring to an anti-witchcraft film, “Saving Africa’s witch children”, which documents the abuse:

She said the children’s gruesome scars and wounds, shown in the documentary, are not real — or perhaps they are real, “but there are many ways children can get maimed.” And if the injuries are the result of witchcraft accusations against the children, she said, those accusations could not have been made by Pentecostal Christian preachers, but by charlatans.

As if she doesn’t know what would follow from accusing children of being Satan’s minions and having the ability to cast spells on and kill others.  Watch the clip above and see what kind of respond you think it would inspire!

This is what happens when you combine two superstitions, and empower the indigenous one with imported Christianity.  Those who say they “don’t care what people believe so long as they don’t foist it on the public schools” must consider that “what people believe” leads to the deaths, torture, and explusion of innocent children. Compared to that, creationism is small potatoes.

If you wish to donate money through PayPal or your credit card to help these victimized children, here are two charities that seem reputable.

h/t: Grania

Sunday lolz: Mittens vs. Mr. Burns

March 4, 2012 • 12:14 pm

UPDATE: I have posted the picture with the correct answers at the bottom. It appears that many of you got most of the answers right, and, in retrospect, they do seem pretty obvious! Two people got all the answers right: Cliff Melick and Lou Jost.  Congrats.

___________

Via Mad magazine (my favorite reading as a young lad), reader Ray, and then Matthew Cobb, we have this quiz. I’ve snipped out the answers, so guess below. I’ll post the answers later.



A podcast avec moi

March 4, 2012 • 12:13 pm

Last Friday I did a short (15-minute) podcast on Skype with Steve Platek, professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College, editor of Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience and co-editor of Evolutionary Psychology; he also is one of the editors of the evolution website This View of Life.

I can’t remember what I said, and I can’t bear to watch myself on video, but offer it for your delectation/amusement/repugnance.

“I’m cuddly, too!”: Purity Bear saves you from secks

March 4, 2012 • 9:13 am

Via Religion Poisons we have this amazing video.  At first I thought this was a joke, but it’s real! To see the organization that promotes this execrable video, go to the Day of Purity website.

The Christian influence here is palpable (viz., the cross in the last scene).  A friend who watched this made the following observation:

The girl is portrayed as the temptress, just like Eve.  Adam just couldn’t resist her cunning enticements. Then we had all that incest, and a bunch of geriatrics procreating and a massive flood that killed everyone except a chosen few, blah blah, and now we are doomed to go to hell.  All this because of that slut Eve!  If only Adam had Purity Bear by his side to warn him.  Our species could have been saved long ago and wouldn’t need jebus after all.

And, as far as I remember, teenagers who take purity vows are more likely to engage in sex and (for women) to become pregnant than teenagers who don’t.

Among the other things that religion poisons is the joy of sex, which, when practiced between consenting adults using proper protection, is one of the greatest (and safest) joys of life. It’s up there with food and wine—but even better since it’s also a bonding mechanism.

Dude shoulda gone in for coffee.

h/t: Diane G.

Free will: what do we do next?

March 4, 2012 • 5:42 am

In a comment on my post about Sam Harris’s new book (Free Will) yesterday, reader coelsblog said the following:

This whole conversation would be much, much more straightforward if people managed to accept that compatibilists really, really do reject “strong free will”. They are then wanting to have the next stage of the conversation; but that requires that non-compatibilists accept that compatibilism is indeed a rejection of strong free will.

I gather from the discussion, and most of the comments on free will here I’ve read in the past, that nearly all of us reject dualism and the idea that we could, at the point of a decision, have made any choice other than the one we did. Most of us are determinists, accepting that—save for some quantum blips that, even if they exist, can’t factor into free will—our decisions are controlled entirely by the laws of physics, and (if we had perfect knowledge) would be predictable, at least in the short term.

Given that we all agree on these issues, what comes next?

When thinking about this yesterday, it struck me that the “next step” here involves neither theologians nor philosophers, but scientists and experiments.  While philosophers have spent many pages trying to show that determinism is compatible with free will, there is no unanimity on how this “compatibilism” is supposed to go down (for an overview of all the different “solutions” that rescue free will from determinism, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s articles here and here).

I’m not sure where this philosophical lucubration has led, nor whether it constitutes “progress” in any meaningful sense.  I don’t think it’s lead to any increased knowledge about the world, and the average person is going to go on believing in libertarian free will anyway, since that average person doesn’t read about compatibilism. (You could respond that the average person doesn’t read about neurospsychology experiments on volition, either, but at least those experiments increase our knowledge of the world.)

Philosophers will kill me for this, but I think it’s time that free will be considered the bailiwick of neuroscientists and psychologists rather than philosophers.  (They’ll be angry, of course, because they protect their turf fiercely against amateurs like me who lack formal training in philosophy.)  Our real understanding of how decisions are made is going to come not from philosophy but from science.  Here’s where I think progress can be made:

  1. Find out how people really conceive of free will, and whether they’re dualists who believe one can actually choose freely among alternatives at any given moment.  Yes, I know some studies seem to show that many aren’t dualists, but I’ve read those studies and haven’t found them very convincing.
  2. If people are dualists, we need to tell them that there is no free will in the contracausal sense.  This is what I have been doing, and, to a large extent, what Sam’s book does.  Many here seem loath to do that; indeed, some have said that we have to keep the precious knowledge of determinism to ourselves lest it discombobulate the “masses”. I find that condescending and invidious: above all, we must speak the truth.  After all, rejecting contracausal free will does have practical implications, at least for the justice system, as well as for people’s scientific view of how their brains work.
  3. We need more psychological experiments like those described in Daniel Wegner’s book, The Illusion of Conscious Will (I like that book though it’s a bit overwritten), and like the Libet and Soon et al. experiments.  These studies—criticize them as you will—tell us something about how “decisions” are formed in our minds, where the neurons for those decisions lie, and about the time course of how we act.  Other studies like those Wegner describes tell us how people conceive of their agency when acting, and how notions of personal agency can be either increased or deceased by experimental manipulation.
  4. And finally, we need more studies of the brain.  How do diseases, injuries, or manipulations affect our notion of agency? What parts are responsible for the idea that we can really make choices? And, most important, what actually goes into play, neurologically, when we are faced with alternative actions and “choose” one?

While I don’t think advances in our empirical understanding of personal agency will come from philosophy (they can’t, for most philosophy is not empirically based), that is not to say that philosophical rumination on the problem of free will is worthless. It isn’t.  It’s helped clarify our thinking on the problem, particularly about the notion of determinism, though I don’t think highly of the many attempts philosophers have made to buttress compatibilism.  Those haven’t resulted in a widely agreed-on solution, and so we have many conflicting “solutions” with no way to choose among them. That, of course, is reminiscent of theology, and I think that philosophical treatments of free will have indeed paralleled theology in several respects (trying to prop up cherished notions, the production of many conflicting and irreconcilable “solutions,” and so on).

The value of philosophy in this area is to keep our thinking from becoming muddy.  But I think philosophy has, for the nonce, done all it can now on the free-will problem.  It’s time for the scientists to butt in.  And, maybe after science has made some advances, the philosophers can chew those over.

Oh, and one more suggestion.

5. Abandon the term “free will” and replace it with something like “the appearance of having made a decision.” That’s more value-free and less laden with the baggage of dualism. If we insist on using the term, then we should immediately say that “free will” is not contracausal and give our own definition of the term. But I’d prefer to deep-six those two fraught words. “Free” is just too misleading.

Of course I invite readers to either respond or give their suggestions for where the discussion about free will, and empirical studies of the idea, needs to go.