Catholic Church is at it again and Iran doesn't fail us either

There was an opportunity, and senior Catholic Church management grabbed it. As is routine in Catholic agitprop, disasters are being used to ruminate about God's punishment for human failings (aka 'sins'). Well, the Love Parade (a pretty pointless commercial music festival in Germany) recently translated into 21 deaths and hundreds of injured people. Official investigations are still ongoing as to who should be held responsible for these deaths and injuries.

Well, God man and Salzburg's archbishop Andreas Laun said in a commentary the following (the translation is mine and, as you know, I'm not a certified interpreter, so check for the original German language text here): 'The Love Parade and the participation in it, leaving aside its disgusting imagery, are objectively a kind of insurrections against the Creation and God's order. They are sin and invitation to sin.' As our God man knows, there has been public uproar in the past when his organization decided that this and this or she and he had been sinful or sinners and deserving of God's punishment. This time then he's a bit smarter and leaves open the question of whether the deaths are God's punishment for the young people's participation in the Love Parade (really nothing much other than an open air music festival). Instead Mr Laun goes on ruminating about why people reject the idea of a punishing God. He concludes eventually that there is a punishing God and that God punishes out of 'love'. We should not then reject the idea that what happened in Duisburg, including the 21 deaths and more than 500 serious injured Love Parade attendees, might be God's punishment. That is what true love, Christian style, might well require. Mr Laun can't understand why we can't see the world by his light...

Remains just one question: Why ain't God busy punishing his pedophile earthly representatives and those in the church hierarchy who cover(ed) their tracks? Why is God busy with young people going to a musical festival? Odd chap indeed. Strange, strange priorities.

Well, as to our all-time God favorite, the Islamic Republic of Iran (different God, you might note, same principle), is busy trying to hang an 18 year old kid, Ebrahim Hamidi, alleging - demonstrably falsely I might add - that he's engaged in same sex acts. Boggles the mind as ever. I can never decide whether North Korea or Iran are my all-time favorite caricatures of states (well, after that all-time winner, Vatican 'state').

The lesson to be learned from it all: Where there is a God there is cruelty. Try atheism for an ethical alternative.

'Unnatural' sex and its naturally not so bright opponents

This thing about 'unnatural' sex has been bugging me for a long time. For those of us who are trained to think about what we mean when we say certain things the term 'unnatural' carries no normative weight. For those who think less (either because they quite naturally or culturally cannot think a great deal due to a lack of gray brain matter or lack of education) about what they mean when they say that something is 'unnatural', the 'unnatural' charge routinely leads to demands that certain behaviours or products be outlawed.

Let me look at two examples just from this week, one from Uganda, the other from Jamaica, quite naturally both examples involve Christians on a crusade against gay sex. So, here we go:

Dr. James Nsaba Buturo is the Ugandan Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity. He announced this week that any attempt by donor agencies to have the country legalise 'unnatural' sex (and homosexual sex in particular) will fail. He went on to say that the government is prepared to fortfeit any [sic!] amount of donor money if that meant accepting homosexuality. I'm a consequentialist, so when someone says something like 'no matter what', which is what Dr Buturo's 'any' implies, I know I am seeing someone not too deeply rooted in reality. For the sake of the argument: what if someone gave Uganda enough money to resolve the problem of poverty among its people for good, offered in addition free education, state-of-the-art free health care to everyone living in Uganda etc, provided that consenting adults be permitted to engage in 'unnatural' sex if they so wish. Any government minister who would be prepared to sacrifice the well-being of the people in such a case for the sake of fighting 'unnatural' sex is obviously a nutcase. Consequences be damned is very Christian, of course, but it also not very smart.

Anyhow, I digress, I really meant to write about the 'natural' and the 'unnatural', and that I will do, but let me first give you the second example. We owe it to a Christian 'Senator' in Jamaica. I don't know Jamaica too well, so I presume Senators are not overly well educated people relying on tax hand outs for a living while preaching hate. So, without further delay, in her own words, Jamaican Senator Hyacinth Benneth: "For many persons that push a radical homosexual agenda it is claimed that homosexual behaviour is natural for them. That particuar [sic!] group has been quite successful in advancing their cause by using the rights based approach. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist but I have not seen where homosexual behaviour has been conclusively shown to be natural. In fact the dominant scientific opinion has been that no one can conclusively show that homosexuality is natural."

So, don't blame me, blame Dr Buturo and Ms Benneth for today's rant on nature.

Ms Benneth is probably unaware of the fact that there is no dominant scientific opinion on the naturalness or otherwise of homosexuality. The reason for this is that this issue is not a scientific question to begin with. It's a matter of what you mean when you call something 'natural'. In science EVERYTHING that is physically possible by necessity is considered a natural thing. Anything governed by the laws of nature is natural. So, for that reason alone there can't be a body of scientific opinion on the naturalness of homosexuality anymore than there can be a body of scientific literature on the naturalness of any number of other things that are happening within what the laws of nature permit (namely: everything that is physically possible). So, dear Ms Benneth, your claim about the views of 'science' on the naturalness of homosexuality (wrong as it is even in fact), also aims to take comfort from the wrong people. It's akin to someone saying in response to a question such as what is the proper way to lay pipes in a housing estate? that there is a consensus opinion of theologians on the matter. It makes no sense, and even if theologians had views on how to lay pipes in a housing estate they're not really competent to claim particular expertise.

What does this mean? Not too much. Gay activists, do not rejoice too quickly. A lot of crap happens in nature. Crocodiles eat tourists in the Australian Northern Territory just about every year. Very much a natural thing, but still it's not nice. Men (usually) rape women. Natural. People drive cars. Natural. People fly to the moon. Natural. People kill each other in genocides. Natural. People bake cakes. Natural. You get the drift, I'm sure.

What we could do now, of course, is to change our definition of natural. Say, we could add a bit of Christianity and dump an imaginary God into the equation. What the claim about the naturalness of homosexuality then means is that homosexuality is a violation of a normatively understood (human) nature. Of course, this has even less to do with science - poor Hyacinth, how did you manage to get all of this so badly wrong... - This, after all, is what really motivates our Ugandan and Jamaican crusaders. There's a lot of irony in this one, too. After all, if anybody is unnatural, God is. The God these folks have invented hovers above the laws of nature, this God even makes laws of nature. Now, if anything is unnatural, God is. Funny enough, they're not going on about outlawing God or God's unnatural behavior (say, 'miracles'). Nope, they aim to punish people who do things within the laws of nature that their imaginary (and all-powerful, and all-knowing, and 'good') God cooked up in a couple of days. So, if anything, even on their own perspective, it's probably not a good idea to question God's laws of nature and the conduct that happens as a result of God's magnificent work (including, of course, genocides, rapes, and other such niceties). If I was God, I certainly would be pretty miffed if my underlings (sorry, my chosen one's) would question my grand scheme of things.

There's other problems with 'nature'. We have seen already that so many things 'go' in nature that are clearly bad, that it is obvious to anyone other than Ms Benneth and Dr Buturo that nature is probably a bad yardstick to measure any kind of behaviour against. There's a logical reason for that, too, it's called a naturalistic fallacy. A naturalistic fallacy occurs each time when someone derives normative conclusions from a matter of fact. You can't do that. You always need normative arguments and analysis to achieve that feast. So, gay activists, from the fact that homosexuality occurs in nature it follows that it is natural. It does not follow that it is good. The same is true for ice cream, the new Boeing Dreamliner, sunshine and other such things.

What Ms Benneth and Dr Buturo REALLY are trying to sell to the unsuspecting public is a normative (as opposed to a scientific) understanding of nature. Ie they have decided that certain things in nature are bad and they label them unnatural. We can probably all agree that there's plenty of things in nature that are not nice. The thing is though, Dr Buturo and Ms Benneth need to argue their case. Some of their ilk have argued that homosexual sex is unnatural because it is not leading to reproduction. That is, the homosexuals' use of our sexual organs is unnatural because it doesn't lead to breeding. So, in that sense then some guy sticking his penis in another guys bum is an abuse of the penis (and presumably the bum), because the sperm is wasted in the wrong spot so to speak. Well, there's several problems with this: 1) Most heterosexual sex acts involving the penis and the vagina (or other orifices of the heterosexual sex partner) do not lead to reproduction. Should we outlaw those, too? 2) Why should we accept the argument that our bodily organs serve only one purpose and no other. After all, we are using our tongue to lick stamps these days, as well as ice cream and any number of other things. What is the natural function of the tongue in these circumstances? And, who is to decide? Hyacinth and her buddy from Uganda? 3) Why should we accept the idea that sex serves only one purpose, namely to breed? I mean, why can't we accept the novel idea that sex (hopefully more often than not) is kinda FUN, Ms Benneth and Dr Buturo? As you can see, your claim that some kind of conduct or other is unnatural alone won't cut it. In fact, if anything, it is begging the question.

Obama - Hail the Messaiah

I hope you will forgive me for being my usual cynical self, even when it comes to the one who can walk on water and offers change that we can believe in. I am always fascinated by how low the standards are in terms of expectations when it comes to the USA. I mean, fair enough, Bush has been an unmitigated nightmare, arguably he and his cronies ought to be prosecuted on more than one count (don't expect the one who walks on water to hold his predecessor and his cabinet responsible for the war crimes they presided over, for lying to the world in order to get a coalition of the willing together to topple Saddam... and the list goes on and on and on).

Still, I am puzzled why anyone could think Obama is a terribly progressive character. Better than Bush, yes, but what kind of yardstick is that? Why is the world celebrating him as if he was some kind of Messiah. Leave that poor sucker alone. He speaks like a midwestern US preacher, isn't reality based (God guides him), and by continental European standards he's at best a conservative. Is that a crime? No, far from it, but surely that kind of deal doesn't justify the hype and the quasi-religious elevation of this guy. It might surprise you to learn that Mr Obama goes to the loo, just like you and I (at least when he isn't walking on water and offers change that we can believe in).

In fact, being slightly more realistic about what can reasonably be expected of him might help him from a too steep fall from grace when people discover that ... well, he's just human after all.

Oh yes and before you go on and on about African American and that this shows everyone can be anything in the USA. You might want to have another look at his social class background. That should settle that question fairly quickly, too. Sure, if you come from a privileged family and you end up doing law at Harvard, you probably can be anything in America, even if you are African American, provided your competitors hail from a party that is politically dead in the water. Yep, if those conditions are met you can beat your geriatric competitor and his barbie doll companion by a small margin...

I might regret having written this in a minute or two after posting it, but this completely unjustified attempt at using a wealthy Harvard law graduate who's become US President as evidence that the country isn't fundamentally class based, is intellectually dishonest, no matter how much we like to enter into a quasi-romantic relationship with him and the rest of his family.

Other than that, good success to you Mr Obama. Our neighbours to the south could have made a choice far far worse... after all, imagine Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the Presidency of the USA!

The Crown of Creation at work - another one of those days

It's been another successful day in the life of the Crown of Creation. To refresh your memory ... then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." As you might recall, God is omniscient, omnipotent and God happens to be 'good'. Well, no big surprise then, that on the sixth day of genesis God had a look around and "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good". Very good indeed it was!

Well, let's see how our perfect Creator's work has panned out. Hey, why not check simply today's almost certainly glorious news to see how wonderful God's good creation is doing?

USA: Ethnic minority women die in Los Angeles and New York hospitals, respectively, because nobody attends to them in her dying moments. People see one of them lying on the floor and walk carefully around her.
PHILIPPINES: A gay guy cuts off his lover's penis because he suspects his lover might have slept - oh horror - with a woman.
GERMANY: A bunch of guys kidnap women and keep them as sex slaves in their flat, renting them out as prostitutes, make them sleep in dog cages and walk them around on a leash in the flat.
ISRAEL: A bulldozer driver rampages in Jerusalem and kills a whole bunch of people.

Yo God, thanks for nothing. If that's the best you can do, seeing your omnipotence, omniscience and 'good'ness, I kinda wonder whether you really exist, or, if you exist, whether you really are omnipotent, omniscient, indeed, I can't help wondering whether you're a good guy. But hey, that's just me.

Homo sapiens sapiens - Civilisation discontinued

More random stories from Pangloss' best of all possible worlds... incontrovertible evidence of a good, all-knowing, all-powerful God in action.

I'm sure some of you will have heard of the story already. For 24 years a woman was held captive by her biological father and continuously raped. Held in a windowless cell tract in the parental home she gave birth to anywhere between 5-7 of his children. He seemingly raped the girl for the first time when she was 11 years old. Remarkably, in that very same house the man's wife and grandparents lived. There were no less than 6 adults going in and out of the house. It goes without saying that they claim to have had no clue as to what was going on in that house of horrors. All of this happened in a small Austrian town... -

On a slightly - just slightly - more cheerful note, the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL has unearthed the rules governing stoning-to-death activities in 21st century Iran. Kinda cute. Basically the convicted evil doers (say someone who slept with someone other than her husband) will be dug in up to their waistlines. Then their heads will be covered, then finally the crowd can go about the stoning to death business. You know, I was always a tad bit worried that that just might be too easy a death for such a heineous crime. Indeed, that's what the religious authorities in that country seem to have thought, too. The problem is basically this: how can we ensure that people don't die too easily or too quickly, because someone uses too big a stone. Thankfully, and in true testimony to the creative spirit of the Iranian justice system, the size of the stones that people may throw during the various stages of the stoning-to-death festival, is strictly regulated. Little did Monty Python's know when they produced the LIFE OF BRIAN that their mocking of the stoning-to-death ritual actually reflected 21st century Iran.

Thank goodness, having been educated in Germany, I know my Leibniz, so I know, much like Voltaire's Pangloss, that none of this should take my eye of the big truth: This earth was created by God. God is good. God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. It is precisely for that reason that this is the best of all possible worlds. Praise the Lord, imagine how bad it would be on earth if our paradise hadn't been created by HIM etc etc etc

Stem cell wars - it's the science stupid!

The current uproar over new developments in stem cell research is nothing short of hilarious. What happened: scientists in labs in California/Japan and Wisconsin, using slightly different techniques, managed to produce pluripotent cells without relying on the destruction of 10-14 day old embryos in the process. Researchers have long been excited about these pluripotent cells as they can grow into all sorts of damaged or destroyed human tissue. In other words, the potential for medical breakthroughs using such cells is very substantial indeed.

The God squad has been vigorously (not to say viciously) opposed to the old-fashioned way of producing such cells, because embryos 10-14 days after conception would be destroyed in the process of extracting pluripotent stem cells. In God's mind this was terrible research, because according to God's representatives down here on earth these cell accumulations (called embryos) should be treated as if they were persons. Well, a few hundred cells don't display any of the dispositions we'd usually require to be present for a given entity to be called a person. God doesn't seem to know this. I tried to contact God for some time, but there doesn't seem to be any email details available to engage God in a discussion about God's views on embryo research. God's earthly representatives only refer to God's authority to explain why embryos - at whatever developmental stage - must not be destroyed. So, a serious argument about the ethics or otherwise of the matter could never be had, because the authority driving so much of the 'holy embryo' stance remains somewhat elusive.

As I write this the religious commentators claim that their ethical stance has been 'winning' on this matter, and science showing how 'right' they were all along. This is remarkable for several reasons:

• First off, it's highly unusual for this particular group of people to respect science at all - well, unless it supports their slightly warped view of the world (where evolution didn't take place, and where we humans - helped ever so slightly by, you guessed it, 'God' - popped into existence just a few thousand years ago). So I doubt they're well advised to suddenly pick scientific progress of the sorts explained above as proof of the truth of their ethical stance. After all, what are they going to do next time science contradicts their view of the world. Scientific truth is not really a pick-and-choose type activity. They can't have their cake and eat it, I'd think.
• Secondly, the research in question, good news as it is, suffers some serious drawbacks at the moment, including a higher risk of cancer in mice in which pluripotent cells that were derived by the new method were implanted. This drawback might be temporary, time will tell.
• Thirdly, most scientists working in the field still agree that we will not be able to progress significantly without some form of destructive embryonic research continuing. In other words, pretending that the ethics wars over the moral status of embryos have suddenly concluded due to a new 'ethical' method of producing pluripotent cells having been found is grossly misleading.

I am somewhat disappointed that those high-profile ethicists who campaigned in favor of destructive embryonic stem cell research (while there seemed no viable scientific alternative) have been awkwardly silent in their response to these new findings. The truth is, however, that the position they held at the time was correct. If scientific progress permits us now to achieve the same objective without destroying embryos, that's excellent news and should be applauded by them, too. The reason for this is not at all, of course, that the 'holy embryo' crowd was right all along, but rather, that crucial biomedical research can now progress much faster without God's earthly troopers interfering a great deal. That's great news and more than enough reason to applaud the new developments!

God is 'good', 'almighty' and 'all-knowing', isn't (s)he?

I wondered for awhile whether this is a real cheap shot, and not even an entirely original at that, and decided to go for today's blog entry anyway. While it is true that all monotheistic religions have in common one feature, namely intolerance (they believe their's is the only 'true' religion and every competitor's religion is bollocks), I think that not all of them also claim what the Christian religions have on offer re their God. Christianity makes the following claims about its God:


God is all-knowing (omniscient)
God is all-powerful (omnipotent)
Gods is good.

These three claims form to a large extent the basis for the proposition that we should worship God. Of course, there's that tiny issue of not knowing whether God actually exists at all, but this is not at the moment of concern to me. Let's assume God exists, what does the world as it exists tell us about these three claims?

What does, for instance, the Holocaust during the Nazi regime in Germany, the genocides in Rwanda and elsewhere tell us about God? Indeed, what do millions of HIV infected newborns in developing countries tell us about God? What does the fact that God doesn't interfere when George W Bush claims to execute its wishes tell us about God?

Well, for starters, we would need to agree that the Holocaust really happened, and that it was a pretty horrendous thing (ie if you belong to the Holocaust deniers, we would have little to argue about; equally, if you think the Holocaust was kinda cool, we would have little to argue about either - this is not because I agree with you, but my first premise really is that the Holocaust happened and that it was a very bad thing). Equally, the genocide in Rwanda was a terrible event, and even with a lot of fantasy I can't see how one could conclude that millions of HIV infected newborns are a good thing. It's also probably fair to say that neither the Jews nor the Tutsis nor the newborns really deserved their fate.

Which brings me back to our good, all-knowing and all-powerful God. If God exists at all, it seems to me that it is not very likely to be either good (how could a good, omniscient, omnipotent being not intervene when such injustice is being perpetuated?). Or, perhaps it isn't omnipotent and omniscient (how could it not foresee what was going to happen and put a stop to it?). So, my main point is that these events and very many like them either demonstrate that God does not exist at all (because the claims made about it are untrue), or that God, if it exists, might actually be evil. Evil, because it had the power and knowledge of upcoming events like the Holocaust, Rwanda's genocide, the kidnapping, rape and murder of innocent children by pedophiles, (the list of human made atrocities seems kind of endless), or natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis and the like, yet it chose not to do anything about it.

Either of these two outcomes suggests that we should not worship this particular God, because God either doesn't exist or is not what we are made to believe (by religious leaders) that it is. A substantial religious cottaging industry has developed to explain this problem away (the theodizee problem, ie God and Justice). The most famous response to this challenge came from a German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz suggested a couple of hundred years ago in his Essais de Theodicee sur la bonte de Dieu, la liberte de l'homme et l'origine du mal : suivi de La monadologie that because God has all those attributes I have just mentioned it follows that this is the best of all possible worlds. If anything, we're less then perfect and for that reason unable to see how wonderful it all really is. Voltaire responds in one of my favourite works of enlightenment philosophy, his Candide. It's one of those books that I think one should have read before one hits the sack for good. - So, I am not really aiming to reinvent the enlightenment wheel here, but I thought it's worthy of repetition as those confronted by it (namely monotheistic religions making these three claims) truthfully had nothing to say in response.

A lot, in fact follows from this critique. For one thing, we should be suspicious whenever representatives of these types of religions tell us that this and that technology (stem cell research), or that this and that behavior (extramarital sex, gay or otherwise) is bad, because their God doesn't like it. Frankly, their God, if it exists at all seems to be a loser of such gigantic proportion that we have no reason to give a hoot at all. In fact, knowing that their God doesn't like something that we would like to do should encourage us to go for it (subject to no non-consenting parties getting hurt or harmed in the process, of course).

You can do something against violent gun crime in the USA

Yet another gun crime related carnage in the land of the free.32 innocent members of the university community at Virginia Tech University were gunned down by a shooter who seems to have subsequently turned his gun on himself and committed suicide. True to form born-again Christian George W Bush, President of that country and a true fanatic as far as the 'right' of US Americans is concerned to bear arms, goes on national TV. He goes on waffling about a good God (you might recall, the omniscient, good, all-powerful entity that somehow failed to stop this carnage), and grieving heavily with the families who lost their loved ones, yet failing to make any noise whatsoever about the need to control the all-too-easy access to guns in his country. In Virginia effectively everyone above the age of 18 can legally purchase handguns without any background checks whatsoever. Big surprise that in this society there's about one or two such slaughter events per year, yet nothing happens re gun control.
You can do your bit to change that situation by supporting organisations such as stop the nra (the nra is the national rifle association of america). Incredibly as it may sound, but some 30,000 US American die each year in that country from injuries inflicted by gun shot wounds.