Grateful to God for Rape: Extreme religious madness knows no bounds

Very little surprises me when it comes to the stupidity that flows from the mouths of the most religiously infected. But I must admit I was taken aback by a comment posted to a story in USA Today.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2012-09-07/bishop-sex-abuse-coverup/57689558/1

The story reports the conviction of Bishop Finn of Kansas City.  Seems he knew about priestly child molestation and/or a child porn collecting priest, and covered it up.  Nothing new there when it comes to the Cat-Hole-Lick Church.  But one of the comments left by a devout Catholic woman, a medical doctor, floored me:

 “ If I had not been sexually assaulted by a Carmelite priest in the past, I would be fully protective of the Church...”  “I am grateful to God that I had that sad experience, since it helped me to realize that there are some clergy that are abusing their position in the priesthood.”  Dr. Rosemary Eileen McHugh

Now, read it again.  Understand what’s going on there.  This woman was raped or molested by a priest and is grateful to her god for it.  What that means is god was the agent behind her being raped; he caused it or influenced it, or suborned it.  Catholics believe that all things occur because of god’s agency.  All things good and all things bad are part of this super being’s plan. Romans 8:28 “God causes everything to work together for the good.”

Thus, part of the plan this psychopathic mythical god thing has for this woman was being raped by a priest in order to help her “... realize that there are some clergy that are abusing their position.”.

Hmm, well, if this is true then perhaps all the children molested by priests all over the world are also the beneficiaries of her god's brilliant plan for their enlightenment. How nice for them.  How grateful they should be. Thank ya Jeezus!!!  I imagine the church is happy to have her thanking god .  It must beat taking the rap for it all alone. 

Of course there is an alternative.  Maybe, just maybe, her being victimized at her god’s direction wasn't necessary for her to come to the realization that priests take advantage of religiously cowed children because they are easy targets. Maybe her god could have just provided her with a newspaper from any country on the planet that has had the priest scandal...which is virtually  all western countries. Maybe she could have stumbled across such a story on her own.  

But this is way too logical for someone who is up to their neck in religious doctrinal idiocy.  The only way she can cope with the trauma now, and keep her connection to the very organization she was victimized by,  is by trying to put good face on the tragedy, assigning a “purpose” to her being violated.  It justifies her continued faith in her god's plan and protection.   It all makes as much sense to a rational person as someone thanking Zeus for being shot in the head for the purpose of teaching them that bullets hurt and some people are violent. 

This level of convoluted non-reasoning; this dependency on supernatural myth and this need to give “meaning” to the wanton act of a sexual predator is the only way she can salve her anguish and continue to justify her faith in an omniscient beneficent god thing that is anything but beneficent.  It transcends stupid. It goes beyond obscene. It verges on utterly insane.

Of Mars, Mysticism and Man

If you haven’t seen this animation of the Mars rover landing entitled “How to get to Mars,” do yourself a favor and spend six minutes in complete awe.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/XRCIzZHpFtY?rel=0

It boggles the mind: so much technology, such intricacy of systems, each being dependent on the other to function precisely as designed, remotely, millions of miles in space, in order for the mission to succeed. One faulty part, one badly printed circuit, one miscalculation of timing, one erroneous assumption and failure would be all but guaranteed.  

As I watched the animation I marveled at how far we have come as a species.  It makes it that much more baffling how, in this century, with these advancements, men's minds can still be enslaved to ancient myth, make believe and superstition. How is it possible that such a large proportion of our planet’s most advanced species can continue to reject the truths of evolutionary theory, of ancient earth, the reality of global warming for which the greatest minds have provided concrete and objective evidence, just as they have provided the greatest feats of technology ever known?

How does a resident of this world, in this century, turn their backs on the very people who have dedicated themselves to the unveiling of the mysteries of the universe?  How do they reject reasoned people who have devoted their life to scientific studies; demonstrated their breadth of knowledge; tested their hypotheses with methods that are neutral and uninfluenced by a preferred agenda; and provided results that are supported by varied and independent scientific disciplines and proven by the very real benefits with which their knowledge has endowed the human race? 

How do so many prefer to gravitate toward the polar opposite of these keepers of the flame of human advancement, investing their money and trusting their very lives to purveyors of nonsense and ghost stories who promise them that science is a tool of Satan; and that being sprinkled with holy water, doused in a river, mumbling prayers of praise, or being blown up in an act of terror is a good thing that makes an invisible super-being happy...which is all that matters?

How can so few of these people whose physiology is the same as yours and mine lack the drive to learn, explore, question, and advance beyond medieval precepts, while happily consuming and enjoying the fruits of the labors of the very people they distrust and reject as Satan’s henchmen at worst, or deceived by Satan at best?

There are religionists who attribute to “God’s grace” man's ingenuity, the beauty of the scientific method, scientific discovery, and drive to question that which was once taken on faith.  Interesting how religion tries to co-opt science, and give their god credit for man’s scientific advancements when religion and their god are the very antithesis of science.

But that gambit is debunked by the Bible itself, the "inerrant testimony" that corroborates the fallacy promoted by their religious shaman. If, as Genesis states, their god punished his creations and their off spring for all eternity just for attempting to gain knowledge, then surely god didn’t want humans to have it.  Clearly knowledge is the purview of god and not man and their god meant to keep it that way.  Nothing in scripture revises or reverses god’s admonishment and punishment for that first taste of knowledge. Those religionists, like Gregor Mendel, who sought knowledge did so in spite of their religious affliction, not because of it.

Thus, those who now dare seek knowledge, who dare to explore and discover the secrets of the universe and disseminate that information to humanity – secrets and information that was once thought to be understood only by, and attributed to their God, are challenging their god’s omniscience. 

The result?  Never read scientific tomes.  Never investigate, never challenge, never accept as true any information that contradicts scripture. Distrust scientists and the educated.  What was the full realm of understanding of the universe of 1^st century cultists, or Bronze Age nomads best remain unchallenged, lest god be made angry, or worse - made irrelevant.

I’ll proffer that one-hundred years from now the Mars landing technology will be viewed as quaint.  Just about the same time the remnants of religion will be seen as a hold over from man’s most pitiful stage - it’s minority adherents seen as mentally infirm.  Then will Man finally understand he has met god, and it is them.

Going back to God? Advice to an atheist in pain

I received the following from an atheist friend on Facebook - a young atheist, with an atheist spouse and two children well on their way to becoming freethinkers.

“I’ve been under enormous stress lately; the tragic loss of loved ones, anxiety ... stuff.  How do I cope with this without blaming "God" or wanting it to help me? I was raised Christian so I keep finding myself wanting to make god somehow a part of it and it isn’t making it easier since I am well aware that it doesn’t exist. I really just need some advice on how to do this while keeping it real!” – J.

My response:

Dear J.,

So sorry you've had to go through so much.

I assume you've been getting professional attention for your anxiety. If you haven’t then I encourage you to do so because there is no reason to suffer with medical science’s advancements. That said, I won't attempt any Psych 101 with you. 

As for the God thing ... relax. It is perfectly normal.  The religion meme runs very deep in humans. It will often reemerge in times of stress over powering your reason and logic. Having the inclination to ask “god” for support, or blaming it for your situation is not uncommon during periods of high stress and loss among otherwise rational non-believers who were indoctrinated early and raised in religious doctrine. How easy it is to wish there was really a comforting god to appeal to to relieve the pain; or a heaven at which to shake your fist, vent your anger, and demand answers for some perceived injustice.  It certainly would be cathartic and comforting.  You'd be doing the same thing if you were an Indian atheist raised in an ultra religious Hindu family - except the god/s in question might have a trunk, fangs or multiple appendages.   

I personally don't experience the god blame/appeal syndrome because I was fortunate to not have religious parents, thus virtually no religious upbringing.  But people like me are the minority in this country.

On the other hand, if you weren’t seeking help for your anxiety and instead opted to rely on “God’s intervention;”  or were blaming a mythical god for your problems instead of rationally reflecting on their natural cause and how to address them, then you would have justification for concern.   By virtue of your inquiry clearly that's not the case. You are aware that only reason, reality, and the effect of chemical reactions on the brain are in charge right now. Only time and a rational approach will heal and comfort.  

Right now your challenge is to get the anxiety managed professionally. If you do you’ll feel better and that specter of concern over backsliding into religious self deception will evaporate as gods always do when exposed to the light of science and reason.

Hang in there; you've got a camel friend in NH.

- Hump

If there were a God, we’d have to kill it.

Readers of The Atheist Camel Rants Again!  will be familiar with the chapter on “Faithicide,” a term I use to describe the gradual destruction of superstitious religious belief by reason and rationality in the scientific age.  In that chapter I dismissed “deicide,” the act of god killing, because it makes no sense since you can’t kill what does not exist.

But what if a god/God did exist and proved itself to be real?  How would we react?
I’ll proffer that it depends on the god’s persona. If it is a hands (or trunk, or tentacles) off god, who created us and lets us live out our lives as independent beings unfettered by its irrational  threats and demands; perhaps a fun loving kind of being that finds our behavior amusing or disgusting, but nevertheless nonjudgmental-  perhaps asking only for an occasional acknowledgement and thank you now and then I’d have no problem with it. Acknowledge and move on.

But if the supreme being in question was the Judeo-Christian God, and its persona is accurately portrayed in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments - what then? That’s something else altogether.

Then we would know this God’s personality in its entire minutia.  Its jealousy, its rage, its unpredictable nature, its sadistic side, its propensity for genocide ... mass extinction even. We’d know about the lies it has told, the cruelty of tests of allegiance, the punishments for supposed wrongs that it knew we would commit.. We’d have hundreds of examples of inconsistent behavior and contradictions.  Indeed the thing killed its own child to make some convoluted point of some sort and to placate itself.

If that wasn’t reason enough to feel disgust and revulsion for it, worst of all is the threat of an eternal punishment so horrific that it exceeds all human experience... eternal torture by fire.  Oh, not necessarily for the worst among us, for those people have an escape clause readily available to them.  No, they can opt out before they expire and live for an eternity among the righteous and God loving, or those who confuse fear and terror for love.

No, this irrational God would punish the best among us, the most intelligent and productive: the peace makers; those who have made our lives better and longer; people of conscience and rational ethics; even those who have opted to abide by this God’s earliest edicts, from five-thousand years ago and not his updated ones.  All of them are in for a never ending world of hurt.

If it were true as written in the god thing’s second edition that all those who do not love this God of vengeance and horrors; all those who see it as a tyrant and an oppressor of unimaginable power, with a psychosis that would make humanity’s worst mass murderers seem petty by comparison will face eternal excruciating unrelenting pain -  then we would have only two choices:  Acquiesce to its tyranny, or fight it to the death.

Where scientists never before bothered to contemplate the supernatural, many of them, and our freethinking brethren, would now kowtow to this God’s demands.  But many more would turn their attention toward one objective...find a way to destroy it.  An underground movement, an army of partisans, dedicated to freedom of thought, rationality, fairness and conscience battling not only for the freedom to live life free from omnipotent oppression and irrationality, but for the freedom and right to die and fade into oblivion without pain and fear.
.     
If there were a proven God of the Bible in all its horrendous glory man would be compelled to stop killing each other. The thinking among us would turn our undivided attention to find a way to kill this God monster ... once and for all. I’d volunteer to come up with the secret hand shake and motto.  Maybe “Death to the God Thing: Live Free and Die Like a Human.”  

Vacationing camel, or Lazy camel

One of those two things are for sure...possibly both.

But the Hump is taking a not so well deserved sabbatical during the dog days of summer.

Watch for a new blog article next week.

Stay cool.

Christian apologies: Always too little too late

It took the Catholic Church almost  four hundred years to admit it was wrong and apologize for the persecution of Galileo.  In 2000 Pope John Paul issued an apology for the Church’s role in the persecution of Jews; the mass murder of heretics; the Crusades; and their various manifestations of religious intolerance.  

Over the past ten years the Southern Baptist Church apologized for their endorsement of slavery.  The Lutheran church apologized for Martin Luther’s vicious anti-Semitic screeds. The Methodist church apologized for a preacher that led a massacre of Native Americans during the Civil War. The Mormons apologized for their sect’s murder of innocent settlers in 1857 at the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah. 

What all these apologies have in common is they came between 400 and 140 years after the fact. The victims of those atrocities and wrongful persecutions are all dead and benefit not a sou from their crocodile tears of guilt or admission of wrong doing in the name of their god.  Apologies to the long dead wronged fixes nothing, purges the guilt of their religious delusions and fanaticism not a bit. Whether it is heart felt admission and request for forgiveness, or if it’s a cheap throw away, a ploy, a transparent PR play for some kind of redemption and acceptance I don’t know, and I don’t care. 

But what is clear is that they haven’t learned a damn thing.
- The majority of Christian sects continue to condemn homosexuality as a sin, as a deviant behavior of choice and relegate them to second class citizenship. 
- They continue to subjugate women to the whims of male dominated denominations; continue to invoke ancient biblical precepts to exercise control over women’s reproductive systems.
- They continue to sentence to death by AIDS third world peoples by condemning condoms.  

- They continue to deny the reality of climate change claiming god wouldn’t permit his planet to be destroyed by his creations. 

-They continue to perpetrate the lie of Creationism which flies in face of overwhelming scientific evidence and modernity.

-The Catholic hierarchy continues to pay lip service to condemnation of massive priestly pedophilia, engaging in a culture of cover-up and denial ten years after a papal promise to end it.

Will their apologies and corrective adjustments to these crimes against humanity ever be forth coming?  Oh, yes... it will come eventually. When they can no longer justify with myth that which science has proven; when the evidence for their failure to reason is blatantly obvious, so heinously horrific, and widely condemned; when their unsupportable apologetics falls on the deaf ears of the millions of apostates who have come to reality, civility and science; when their lies and denials and devotion to myth becomes more of a burden than they can bear in the face of truth - then the apologies will flow.

The only question is when: four hundred years, one-hundred and forty years, fifty years?  No sense holding our collective breaths.  We are all their victims and we will be long dead before it comes.  If history tells us anything religionists don’t relinquish their apologies readily. Their lack of honesty just doesn’t permit it.   

Dealing with death: How does an atheist cope?

An atheist friend recently experienced the loss of three friends and family members over a short span of time and asked me for advice on how an atheist deals with loss. I suspect that when he was a believer the rituals and dogma provided comfort. But now, without the support structure of an imaginary afterlife, hope for future reuniting, and a “meaning” for the loss he is grasping for a reasoned substitute to ease his pain. 

I don’t think I’ve ever considered this before. I don’t mean dealing with death, I’ve done that, been there. I mean considered how differently freethinkers and theists deal with the grief of loss.

How easy and comforting it must be to imagine ones dead loved one running in a sunlit field in the afterlife – eternally young, physically perfect, ecstatic, and being chased by their equally ecstatic childhood cocker spaniel.  Or surrounded by a few generations of previously deceased relatives who embrace them and welcome them to eternal life and introduce them to their angel friends.  Or dressed in a white robe, glowing with contentment as they spend eternity fawning over their man-god and telling him what a wonderful god he is, like an eternity in Disneyworld, except they have to give Mickey oral everyday, forever.  Wonderful.

Heaven, Paradise, Valhalla, the Happy Hunting Ground, the Underworld, the Land of the Dead, the Spirit World, all have always held out the promise of eternal life as a way to avoid coming to terms with the ultimate new experience, the finality of death.  Nothing in a thinking person’s quiver of reasoned thoughts can compare to, or compete with it.  All we have is reality and for us that is quite enough.

It’s enough for me to know the deceased person loved me and I loved them. Enough to know the pain of illness has subsided. Enough to know their contributions to the world will live behind them and their progeny will carry on.  Enough to know that the cycle of life is unstoppable, inevitable, and is shared by all living things. It’s enough to know that the oblivion of death is no more fearful than the oblivion that was pre-life.  I take comfort in that, we all should.

I had no magic bullet of reason that would spare my atheist friend his burden of grief.  All I could do is tell him that while there would always be a hole, hollowness, in his life that those people once filled, that in time it will shrink. Oh, it’ll always be there, but the depth of grief he is feeling now will gradually be supplanted by wonderful memories of what those people brought to his life, and he to theirs. That is the gift they, we, leave behind.

 Let your sadness run its course. Time is the great healer. The brain is a marvelous thing that way.   I wish theists could appreciate the beauty in the simplicity and reality of that.
[ dedicated to my friend G. David.]