Should Religion Be Exempt From Criticism

“I look forward to the day when violence done under the influence of religious passion is considered more dishonorable, more shameful, than crimes of avarice, and is punished accordingly, and religious leaders who incite such acts are regarded with the same contempt that we reserve for bartenders who send dangerously disabled people out onto the highways.

I also look forward to the day when pastors who abuse the authority of their pulpits by misinforming their congregations about science, about public health, about global warming, about evolution must answer to the charge of dishonesty. Telling pious lies to trusting children is a form of abuse, plain and simple. If quacks and bunko artists can be convicted of fraud for selling worthless cures, why not clergy for making their living off unsupported claims of miracle cures and the efficacy of prayer?”
Daniel C. Dennett Co-director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University

And the Catholic Church keeps asking for free speech to be censored.  And the Republican religious right wants to put people in jail for blasphemy and other religious/church crimes.  The future is indeed going to be interesting…and maybe deadly.

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Catholic Church Investigators: Children Were Castrated

Dutch government inspectors were aware in the 1950’s that the Catholic Church was castrating young boys and doing it without informing parents…and surely against the boys wishes.

Young boys were being sexually abused by Catholic priests and if they complained to authorities they were involuntarily placed in Catholic run psychiatric institutions and castrated to ‘help’ their homosexual feelings or behavior.

A committee was set up by the Catholic Church itself in 2010 when the abuse scandal broke. It is said to have identified some 800 priests and monks in the Netherlands who were actively abusing children in a 40 year period from 1945 to 1985.

Among other things it found was that church officials, bishops, and lay people were aware of the evil going on in the church and church institutions, but failed to take action

This committee is now under fire for glossing over many incidents and not giving proper weight to the allegations and incidences.  One politician  involved in the original inspection, Vic Marijnen,  was even elected as prime minister of the Netherlands in the 1963.

This politician had tried to get charges dropped against several Catholic priests accused of child sexual abuse.

So again we have the ‘universal church’ showing just how holy and spiritual the Christian religion really is.  Apologists for the Church say it’s not the church, but the humans involved.  However it has been proven that this crap is known by all members of the organization all the way up to the Pope and they all try to wiggle out from under any responsibility, and hide it as much as possible.  This Church is evil from top to bottom (talking church executives, priests, bishops, etc…not congregations) and why any moral and righteous citizen would want to listen to or join with these evil people is beyond me.

The Catholic Church has a very long history of murder and assassinations, priestly misconduct, slave holding, Popes having mistresses and little boy companions, priestly homosexual pimping for the hierarchy, in short they are the least compliant to the supposed  will of God of all the Christian denominations.

They are currently behind the American Republican parties assault on women’s right to control their own sexuality, reproduction, and bodies.  In attempts to control African reproduction, the Pope lies about the effectiveness of condoms in controlling the spread of AIDS.

Polls have consistently found that 90% or more American Catholics use birth control in defiance of Catholic dogma…I suppose the Pope is worried that there won’t be enough little Catholic babies to take up the slack.  Catholics are responsible, at least in part, for the overpopulation of the earth.

They are evil..from beginning times to now.

Parts adapted from DutchNews.nl

http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2012/03/catholic_church_abuse_inspecto.php

Republicans Don’t Care If You’re Raped

Those darn ol’ Republicans are at it again trying to make abortions illegal in another state…it’s because they care so much for the little folk…  Not

“Florida state Rep. Charles Van Zant (R) is starting 2012 with yet another radical effort to ban all abortions in the state unless the woman’s life is in danger. Declaring that “the Legislature acknowledges that all persons are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that first among these is their right to life,” the Florida for Life Act would essentially (and unconstitutionally) make it a felony to perform an abortion except when a physician meets very specific circumstances. The Florida Independent reports.”

This is all brought about by Evil Christian religion and ruthless sycophant politicians who don’t really care for their constituents.  The British call them Arse lickers, some politely call them brown nosers, lackeys or toadies…I go along with the Brits.

Doctors would face a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Raped or molested you say…tough sh_t.

And ‘we the people’ just bend over and take it with a smile.   😐

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Catholic Pedophiles On The Lose Again

BBC news Europe is reporting on another Catholic scandal.  I think we can now safely assume that the Catholic Church employees are molesting young children all over the world.  And probably ever since the church was formed well over a thousand years ago

If you’re Catholic don’t let your children out of your sight while in your church. You might want to consider leaving the Catholic Church altogether.  They are definitely not the Holy Place you thought they were.

From the BBC website here:

“The report estimates that 10,000-20,000 minors were abused in the care of Catholic institutions between 1945 and 1981, when the number of Church-run homes dropped. In the years between 1981 and 2011, several more thousands suffered at the hands of priests and others working for the Church.”

That’s an amazing number of children abused.  I guess up there near the Arctic Circle they don’t have much else to do.

And, once again it was not the church revealing the culprits…it was an independent commission investigating complaints against the church.

Shame Shame

My emphasis on the BBC clip.
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Atheist Blogger Up For Adoption

Hey all you Catholics out there…I’m a lonely atheist and I want to be adopted by one of the Catholic followers of Bill Donohue.   Come get me!!!

Bill, I tried your website and all methods of contacting you seem to be down 😦  so you’ll have to come here to get me.

To those of you who are wondering whats going on…Bill Donohue, Catholic apologist extraordinaire, and writer for the ‘Catholic League’ has challenged his followers to ‘adopt an atheists‘ so that they can make us ‘see the light’–so to speak.   To let us know what we are missing by denying God.

Catholic Sexaholics Are Still Going Strong

“A new series of reports into Irish Catholic dioceses on Wednesday revealed horrific child sex abuse by priests and mistakes by Roman Catholic Church authorities in dealing with them.

Some of the cases detailed by the Church’s own child protection watchdog occurred as recently as August 2010, and the Irish republic’s Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald warned that still more abuse could be revealed.”

The story of Catholic priest’s sexually assaulting young boys (primarily) just keeps on giving.  So far the Irish seem to have the record for the most, and the most horrific, treatment of young human males in modern times…and I’ll bet they would also hold the same record in olden times too. The Catholic Church has almost always been ‘misbehavin’, in many ways, throughout its long history.  That they still have members is a miracle.

Right now I’m wondering how far this college child sex scandal will go…

Catholics And Porn…Again. Does It Ever End?

From the New York Times, October 14, 2011

“KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Roman Catholic bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Robert Finn, and the diocese he leads have been indicted by a county grand jury on a charge of failure to report suspected child abuse in the case of a priest who had been accused of taking lewd photographs of young girls.

The indictment is the first ever of a Catholic bishop in the 25 years since the scandal over sexual abuse by priests first became public in the United States.”  My emphasis

More proof that the Catholic hierarchy just doesn’t get it.  They think and act like they are above all secular laws

Much of Religion is Falsifiable

Fal si fi a ble
“Able to be proven false, and therefore testable; as, most religious beliefs are not falsifiable and therefore outside the scope of experimental science”  Webster’s revised unabridged Dictionary

 The Christian religion makes many falsifiable claims about itself. It likes to tell its members that prayer is answered and is effective in curing sicknesses and helps in almost any situation.  Your pastor or priest or rabbi will not tell you about all the studies that have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that prayer is totally useless, other than as a ‘positive thinking’ or placebo exercise.

Those unlucky people who have had an arm or leg amputation, have never had their prayers answered to regrow said limb…in all of earthly recorded history.

Those two undeniable ‘facts’ completely falsify the Christian claim that prayer does work.  So I wonder why this is?  It seems that Christians would have caught on by now.  Remember Texas Governor Perry having his little prayer meeting trying to get some rain in the state to relieve a terrible drought?   The fires broke out and Texas has had the worst fire season ever…way to go god.

1.  Prayer is a falsifiable claim of Christianity. And it has been proven false.

Since the 1600’s or so science has been relentlessly working on many many projects that have inadvertently invaded the claims and assertions of religion.  Other than the people who write for the Biblical Archaeological Review the scientists whose field is archaeology, paleontology, biology, geology, physical anthropology, or radiometric dating do not work to try and prove the Bible…nor do they work to disprove it.  They simply do their job and report what they find without prejudice.

Likewise the field of genetics, although a relatively new science, it, along with other earth sciences, in just a few short years has made tremendous strides in defining our humanness and ancestry and giving us a sense of history that defies and falsifies what religion has been telling us for thousands of years.

What these sciences together have done is falsify most of the books of Genesis and Exodus.  We now have convincing scientific evidence that falsifies the stories that generation after generation was brainwashed with and told were true history.  From about 500+- AD when the Bible was canonized till the middle of the 20^th century, people who doubted the Christian religion and God were mostly without proofs of what they believed…not any longer.

Now we know where all of us humans came from…Africa…and most likely the Ethiopian area…and most likely about 50,000 + years ago.  Archaeologists and paleontologists have been saying this for years, and just in the last few years genetics and DNA has confirmed this. We have found proof that our ancestors mated successfully with Neanderthals.  There is new evidence (that is not fully confirmed yet), that our ancestors mated with some other ancient hominids.  The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable…we are not guessing anymore…we have the proof to back it up.

We don’t need a physical ‘missing link’ anymore…we can follow our history in the blood and DNA.  We are the last surviving representative of the genus Homo…which is estimated to be 2.3 to 2.4 million years old…we have really ancient ancestors, we can no longer deny this.  We are not related to a mythical ‘Adam and Eve’ or to the mythical sons of Noah.

2.  Adam and Eve is a falsified claim of Christianity…they are just a Biblical myth. ***

This is going to cost the Christian community a big case of heartburn.  Because of Paul inventing ‘Original Sin’ in the New Testament and placing the blame on Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.  ***There are additional falsified claims in Genesis.

Because of ‘Original Sin’ concept Christianity needs the first couple…badly.  The whole of the need for Jesus was Paul saying that through Adam and Eve’s disobedience and downfall, sin passed down to all of mankind, Jesus had to provide a blood-sacrifice to expiate the sins we humans all have.  Think of this…a blood sacrifice to a god…how insane and silly is that?

Does any of this sound suspicious and slightly familiar?  Didn’t the old civilizations in South America and the really old cultures in the Middle East, and elsewhere kill people as sacrifices to god or the god’s?  Blood sacrifices…like Jesus.

From Wikipedia:
“In Trinitarian Christian teaching, God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, sacrificing his first-born son to accomplish the reconciliation of God and humanity, which had separated itself from God through sin (see the concept of original sin). According to a view that has featured prominently in Western theology since early in the 2nd millennium, God’s justice required an atonement for sin from humanity if human beings were to be restored to their place in creation and saved from damnation. However, God knew limited human beings could not make sufficient atonement, for humanity’s offense to God was infinite, so God created a covenant with Abraham, which he fulfilled when he sent his only Son to become the sacrifice for the broken covenant. In Christian theology, this sacrifice replaced the insufficient animal sacrifice of the Old Covenant; Christ the “Lamb of God” replaced the lambs’ sacrifice of the ancient Korban Todah (the Rite of Thanksgiving), chief of which is the Passover in the Mosaic Law.

3.  The need for Jesus as a blood sacrifice for ‘Original Sin’ is falsified by the non-existence of Adam and Eve.

Most archaeologists and earth scientists have known for years that there was never any evidence of the Hebrews (a million + strong) living in and subsequently leaving Egypt.  Repeated surveys of the Sinai desert by the best scientists in their field has never found the slightest bit of evidence for the Hebrew passage and their camping out for 40 years. There are no Egyptian records or writings supporting the myth of half or more of their population leaving suddenly. This is a non-event…it has no scientific attestation at all.

4.  The truth of the Exodus and the supernatural events that follow in the myth has been falsified by over a hundred years of searching for the slightest evidence…and not finding any.

In the thousands of years of human history, magical or supernatural explanations of phenomena have never once been proved…and natural explanations have ALWAYS worked. Never the other way round.

There is more to all of this, but it’s past my bedtime. 🙂

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleontology
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/forensics.shtml
http://www2.estrellamountain.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/BioBookDNAMOLGEN.html
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/atlas.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution
http://humanorigins.si.edu/
http://www.becominghuman.org/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/human/human_evolution/index.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#Judaism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_violence.

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Did A Historical Jesus Really Exist

Did the Jesus who was supposed to be a God also really exist, or was he a mythical construct of people trying to get a religion off the ground?  The Christian religion arose in a time when people were inventing religions one after another.  There were hundreds of competing gods roaming around in the ancient times which Jesus was supposed to be born into.

The war of words and wildly different world-views between Christians and non-believers has been going on for nearly two millennia now, and may finally be coming to an end in our modern scientific age where the stories can be subjected to real investigation.

There is not the slightest bit of physical evidence to support a historical Jesus; no manuscripts written by him, no artifacts or works of carpentry, no surviving dwelling, nothing that is directly attributable to a man that was supposed to work magic and speak to hundreds or thousands of people, in a golden age of writing and recording the ancient world.

All the claims of a historical Jesus are derived from 2^nd. Hand writings—that is non-eyewitnesses to the events.  All writings about Jesus come well after he was supposedly crucified and the ones that made it into the Bible are purposely mis-identified in the Bible as Apostles, when in fact we don’t know who wrote them. There are no Roman records that detail Pontius Pilate executing a man called Jesus.  All source material about Jesus is derived from hearsay accounts and come well after his death.

Laying the Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Like, and John side by side we can see there are tremendous differences in the story.  These are not just “eyewitness” differences one would expect from different people seeing the same scene at the same time, they are fundamental differences that are not compatible.  What did Jesus say at the end? Did the women tell the Apostles that he was arisen–or not?  Who was at the tomb when the women came? Did the earth tremble and the sun go dark for three hours and graves spit out dead zombies?

We know the Gospels were written by anonymous authors and they were written from 35 to 70 years after his death.  We know they were originally written in Koine Greek, instead of  Aramaic, and that we only have copies of copies of copies instead of originals and we don’t even know for sure if we have the real words of the man—if he really existed.  We don’t have any secular writing that mentions Jesus…supposedly God Himself…that is contemporary to his (mythical) life.

All we have is hearsay…courts of  law do not allow hearsay as evidence, neither does modern scholarship, and we should not recognize the biblical writings as real evidence.  I don’t think an honest scholar can take any of the books from the New Testament as absolute ‘God breathed’ truth.

Now on top of all the above mentioned evidence is strong scientific circumstantial data that bears on the myth of Jesus.  As mentioned below in my blog post “Adam and Eve Are Dead…Finally” There is conclusive proof that Adam and Eve is nothing more than Biblical myth, and with no Adam and Eve around to commit “Original Sin” there is no need for Jesus to save us from their/our sin.  With no Adam and Eve, and no Jesus, we can just call the Bible what it really is…a book of fiction.  You know I’m right.  🙂

Lying for Jesus:
“What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church … a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.”  Martin Luther
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If Pregnant Don’t Go To A Catholic Hospital

“Would you ask someone else to die for your religious beliefs? A new proposal moving through Congress makes clear that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops apparently expects everyone to die for theirs. The same members of Congress who last week attempted to dial back the definition of rape to the nineteenth century now propose another change to federal law that is just as shocking: in a move long sought by the political arm of the Catholic clergy, hospitals would be permitted to refuse to treat women with life-threatening emergencies.”  Nancy Northup/HuffPo

If your pregnant and are having problems with your pregnancy, do not, under any circumstances, go to a Catholic hospital.  If you are the husband of a pregnant woman having problems, do not take her to a Catholic hospital.

And:

Last week Sierra Vista Hospital, in rural Southeast Arizona, abandoned its affiliation with the Catholic Carondelet Health Systems. One year into a 2-year trial period, reality apparently hit home. The hospital board could no longer ignore daily picketing by concerned citizens, growing discontent of physicians barred from delivering high quality medical care and mounting evidence that strict doctrinal enforcement undermines a community’s trust in its medical provider.
Barbara Coombs/HuffPo

It needs to be said again; if pregnant and having problems with that pregnancy…do not, under any circumstances, check into a Catholic hospital.  They dispense their medical care by reference to the Catholic Dogma…and the mother is a very second class person in case of problems.  Just like in the Church, the woman doesn’t count.

Remember, to the Catholics it’s Church dogma over Science and womanhood.
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