South Carolina Fossils

Christopher Hitchens was right: Religion Poisons Everything.

From The Daily Beast:

When eight-year-old Olivia McConnell was perusing a menu at a restaurant that features all 50 of the official symbols of her home state of South Carolina, she noticed a glaring vacancy. South Carolina has a State American Folk Dance, a State Grass, a State Opera, even a State Lowcountry Handcraft, but—no offense to square dancing, Indian grass, Porgy and Bess, or sweet grass baskets intended—McConnell thought something was missing: a state fossil.

Let me stop right there.  Along with those official state symbols there are some others:

• Official State Reptile: the Loggerhead Sea Turtle
• Official Hospitality Beverage: South Carolina Grown Tea
• Official State Dance: The Shag

An official Hospitality Beverage?  Ok, let's get back to The Beast:

The third grader at Carolina Academy wrote a letter to her state lawmakers, Rep. Robert Ridgeway and Sen. Kevin Johnson, in a bid to give the woolly mammoth that honor. Olivia has sound reasons behind her nomination: One of the first discoveries of a fossil in North America was that of a woolly mammoth’s teeth, dug up by slaves on a South Carolina plantation in 1725; all but seven states have an official state fossil; and, most adorably, “Fossils tell us about our past.”

Sounds like Ms McConnell is an intelligent, insightful third grader.  Ridgeway and Johnson's bill passed the House 94-3 but it was stopped in the Senate and that ole time religion:

Sen. Kevin Bryant, a pharmacist and self-described born-again Christian who has compared President Obama with Osama bin Laden, voted to sustain a veto by Governor Nikki Haley of funding for a rape crisis center, and called climate change a “hoax,” proposed amending the bill to include three verses from the Book of Genesis detailing God’s creation of the Earth and its living inhabitants—including mammoths.

Of course he's a climate science denier.  Anti-science in one direction inevitably leads to anti-science in many others.  According to the Senate Journal, these are the verses from Genesis:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

That's Genesis 1:30-31, I believe.

After the bill was ruled out of order by the state's Lt Governor, another Senator objected to it.  Of course he's in not favor of teaching evolution unless you "teach the controversy" along with it From the Post and Courier:

The South Carolina Education Oversight Committee met Monday to review and approve the new set of science standards that the Department of Education will begin implementing by the fall of 2014 for students. Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, argued against teaching natural selection as fact, when he believes there are other theories students deserve to learn.

"Natural selection is a direct reference to Darwinism," Fair said after the meeting. "And the implication of Darwinism. is that it is start to finish."

Fair argued South Carolina's students are learning the philosophy of natural selection but teachers are not calling it such. He said the best way for students to learn is for the schools to teach the controversy.

"To teach that natural selection is the answer to origins is wrong," Fair said. "I don't have a problem with teaching theories. I don't think it should be taught as fact."

Oh, so he's one of those guys.

So instead of celebrating a historical fact (that one of the first fossils found in North America was in deed found in South Carolina) and a scientific one (need I elaborate on this point?), and in doing so encourage an insightful 8 year old, faith poisoned the prospect - all to defend a scientifically indefensible position (that "evolution is 'just a theory'.")

Hitchens was right.

Jerry Bowyer Gets Some Feedback

Remember this blog post from a few days ago?

That's the one where local Pittsburgh conservative pundit Jerry Bowyer stumbles (embarrassingly) as he takes on Christopher Hitchens (who's dead and can't defend himself) regarding Christ's virgin birth.

Well, some readers at Forbes.com have given Jerry some feedback.  Not all of it good.

As of the writing of this blog post, there was a smattering of comments supporting Jerry, like this one:

I see the Secular Nazis are coming out of the woodworks to attack Jerry Bowyer. I think Hitchens was an interesting guy who had legitimate complaints against Mother Theresa and others but he was also one of the most arrogant Marxists around. He was far from the “genius” he and other Left-wing Nazis claimed him to be. I wonder which is harder to conceive: The virgin birth or that inanimate matter spontaneously formed living beings, something which scientists have never been able to replicate or prove and never will replicate or prove.

But for the most part the comments ran this one:

What did I just read here??? I mean, and guy who believes in the Unicorn proclaimed himself to be smarter than Hichens??? Ok mate, keep on dreaming..

Or this one:

Vapid!

Seriously Jerry? Don’t try to write anything like this in the future. It makes you look silly.

Given the current state of right wing victimology, I would assume some on the right would see this comment as an attempt to limit Jerry's 1st Amendment rights.

Since he's no longer with us, I'll let Christopher Hitchens (by way of this comment on Jerry's Forbes piece) defend him his position on Mary:

I’ll grant you that it would possible to track the pregnancy of the woman Mary who’s mentioned about three times in the Bible and to show there was no male intervention in her life at all but yet she delivered herself of a healthy baby boy. I can say—I don’t say that’s impossible. Parthenogenesis is not completely unthinkable. It does not prove that his paternity is divine and it wouldn’t prove that any of his moral teachings were thereby correct. Nor, if I was to see him executed one day and see him walking the streets the next, would that show that his father was God or his mother was a virgin or that his teachings were true, especially given the commonplace nature of resurrection at that time and place. After all, Lazarus was raised, never said a word about it. The daughter of Jairus was raised, didn’t say a thing about what she’d been through. And the Gospels tell us that at the time of the crucifixion all the graves in Jerusalem opened and their occupants wandered around the streets to greet people. So it seems resurrection was something of a banality at the time. Not all of those people clearly were divinely conceived. So I’ll give you all the miracles and you’ll still be left exactly where you are now, holding an empty sack.

(In case you missed it, Jerry's just been hitchslapped)

You can read the full debate transcript here.

Local Conservative Pundit Jerry Bowyer Makes A Boo-Boo...

...and misreads Christopher Hitchens all at once.

A complete surprise, huh?

Here's Jerry:

It’s a clever line. When Christopher Hitchens used to slam Christianity he did it with style. “If we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and all our morals…and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at that point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.”

The line employs a sharp edged bathos: End of civilization drama counterpoised with a sneer at that most-despised bit of pre-modern Christian dogma – the virgin birth. Religious people gasped, and aggressive atheists snickered, but I just sat there wishing that Christopher Hitchens knew more history.

And I sit here wishing Jerry had done his homework and not set up a straw man argument.

Here's what Hitchens actually wrote (Jerry, it's on page 96 of Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great.  If you don't have a copy, I can lend you mine):

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with. Our evolution has been examined "backward," with life temporarily outpacing extinction, and knowledge now at last capable of reviewing and explaining ignorance. Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come "first." But as Sam Harris states rather pointedly in The End of Faith, if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Marquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.

A careful writer would have pointed out that the thought experiment is actually from Sam Harris, not Christopher Hitchens (though I am sure the latter agreed with it wholeheartedly).  Here's Harris from page 23 of The End of Faith:

What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear? Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can’t make heads or tails of their contents. We have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there’s that business about growing food and building shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When in this process of reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths, if they are indeed true? By reading the Bible? Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity— like the “fact” that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduk’s sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our resurrected world? Yahweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death? Or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others in that it was actually written by the Creator of the universe?

See? It's all there, Jerry.  Which leads us to the next point.  A careful writer would not have omitted the Marquez reference.  Though in doing so it makes it possible for the rest of Jerry's piece to be about the necessity of hope at "the end of civilization" and not some solid epistemology after a "collective amnesia":

When our civilization did indeed collapse – when the Goths tore the gates of Rome from its hinges and mobs of tattooed warriors raped and pillaged their way across what had formerly been the civilized world...

And so on.  How convenient.

Indeed the rest of Harris paragraph is about knowledge - what knowledge we'd need and how to separate Yahweh from Shiva.  How would we "know" which one is "correct"?  No way for us to tell.  And for the purpose of humanity's survival in that hypothetical, unnecessary.

Which brings me back to Hitchen's use of Harris' hypothetical.  It's in the chapter of God is not Great devoted to the "argument by design" explanation of the existence of God.  Hitchens is making the point that when taking an honest look at science:

...all this will be further clarified if we are modest and patient enough to understand the building blocks of nature and the lowly stamp of our origins. No divine plan, let alone angelic intervention, is required. Everything works without that assumption.[Italics in original.]

And yet Jerry misuses it to muse on about the "truth" of Mary's virgin birth.  Had he done his homework and wanted to challenge Hitchens on the "truth" of Mary's virgin birth Jerry Bowyer could have done after this paragraph in God is Not Great (page 23, for those of you keeping score):

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When his mother, Mary, was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child of the Holy Ghost." Yes, and the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danaë as a shower of gold and got her with child. The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother's flank. Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree watered by the blood of the slain Agdestris, and laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis. The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia. For some reason, many religions force themselves to think of the birth canal as a one-way street, and even the Koran treats the Virgin Mary with reverence. However, this made no difference during the Crusades, when a papal army set out to recapture Bethlehem and Jerusalem from the Muslims, incidentally destroying many Jewish communities and sacking heretical Christian Byzantium along the way, and inflicted a massacre in the narrow streets of Jerusalem, where, according to the hysterical and gleeful chroniclers, the spilled blood reached up to the bridles of the horses.

Compare that to Jerry's argument about the status of women in Western Civlization:

If Jesus was God and Mary bore Jesus, then Mary must be the ‘theotokos’, the God-bearer. Thus began something that changed the view of women in the Western world, elevating them to previously unheard heights. First Mary, and then by extension all virtuous women. A thousand years after Mary bore Jesus into Palestine, she bore Chivalry into Europe.

That would be the same Chivalrous Europe that destroyed many Jewish communities and sacked Christian Byzantium during the Crusades.

Mother Teresa, Saint or Fraud?

The iconography of Mother Teresa took a bit of a hit this week with this report that:

A study conducted by Canadian researchers has called Mother Teresa "anything but a saint", a creation of an orchestrated and effective media campaign who was generous with her prayers but miserly with her foundation's millions when it came to humanity's suffering.

And here's what they did and how they did it:

Researchers Serge Larivee and Genevieve Chenard from the University of Montreal's department of psychoeducation, and Carole Senechal of the University of Ottawa's faculty of education, analysed published writings about Mother Teresa and concluded that her hallowed image, "which does not stand up to analysis of the facts, was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media campaign".

According to Larivee, facts debunk Teresa's myth. He says that the Vatican, before deciding on Teresa's beatification, did not take into account "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding ... abortion, contraception, and divorce."

For instance:

According to the study, the doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. They say that the problem was not a paucity of funds as the Order of the Missionaries of Charity successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Researchers said that when it came to her own treatment, "she received it in a modern American hospital".

But this is nothing new.  Anyone who's read Christopher Hitchens' book on her (and yes, it's called "The Missionary Position") already know this.

Then there's this piece of his from 2003:

This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for "the poorest of the poor." People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the "Missionaries of Charity," but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell's admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

Eric Blair was certainly right about that!

Have a good day, my friends.

On The Dignity Of The Family

From the NY Daily News:

Pope Benedict XVI denounced gay marriage in his annual “State of the World” address Monday, going so far as to say the same-sex nuptials threaten the future of humanity.

In the speech, the pope, 84, unleashed what some consider being his strongest tirade against gay marriage, saying it is among conventions that “undermine the family” and “threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself,” Reuters reported.

“Pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and woman,” the pontiff said.

“This is not a simple convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society,” he continued. “Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”

You can read the entire document here.

It's curious to me how he can, on the one hand, defend the "pride of place" for "the family" and condemn "policies which undermine the family" while at the same time undermine the criminal investigations into the rape and torture of children.

For background on that, I turn to Christopher Hitchens:

In 2002, I happened to be on Hardball With Chris Matthews, discussing what the then attorney general of Massachusetts, Thomas Reilly, had termed a massive cover-up by the church of crimes against children by more than a thousand priests. I asked, why is the man who is prima facie responsible, Cardinal Bernard Law, not being questioned by the forces of law and order? Why is the church allowed to be judge in its own case and enabled in effect to run private courts where gross and evil offenders end up being "forgiven"? This point must have hung in the air a bit, and perhaps lodged in Cardinal Law's own mind, because in December of that year he left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with a subpoena seeking his grand-jury testimony. Where did he go? To Rome, where he later voted in the election of Pope Benedict XVI and now presides over the beautiful church of Santa Maria Maggiore, as well as several Vatican subcommittees.

In my submission, the current scandal passed the point of no return when the Vatican officially became a hideout for a man who was little better than a fugitive from justice. By sheltering such a salient offender at its very heart, the Vatican had invited the metastasis of the horror into its bosom and thence to its very head. It is obvious that Cardinal Law could not have made his escape or been given asylum without the approval of the then pontiff and of his most trusted deputy in the matter of child-rape damage control, then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Developments since that time have appalled even the most diehard papal apologists by their rapidity and scale. Not only do we have the letter that Cardinal Ratzinger sent to all Catholic bishops, enjoining them sternly to refer rape and molestation cases exclusively to his office. That would be bad enough in itself, since any person having knowledge of such a crime is legally obliged to report it to the police.

I will say it again.  Given the atrocious behavior over the past few decades of the Vatican regarding its own sexually abusive priests, why should anyone treat any statement of sexual morality coming out of the Vatican with any credibility whatsoever?

I would think not raping the young boys and not sheltering those who looked the other way should be a bigger concern for the self appointed guardians of the family.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

From Vanity Fair:

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

From the New York Times:

Christopher Hitchens, a slashing polemicist in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell who trained his sights on targets as various as Henry Kissinger, the British monarchy and Mother Teresa, wrote a best-seller attacking religious belief, and dismayed his former comrades on the left by enthusiastically supporting the American-led war in Iraq, died Thursday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He was 62.

I had lunch with him once kinda.

His takedowns of his intellectual (or maybe even not so intellectual) opponents were so sharp they spawned a new word - the "hitchslap."

Like this one:



Or this one:




Or these:



The world is a little darker today.

More On Rick Santorum's Sex Crazie Positions

I realize his poll numbers are, at this point, in the low single digits (h/t to McNulty on this) and as such his chances of eventually sitting in the Oval Office are barely better than, say, mine, but sometimes you just have to clear away the scrub to see how the dung beetles are doing.

Our friend and former Senator Rick Santorum's been busy trying to gain the attention of social conservatives everywhere, and considering how badly his poll numbers are, he's even failing at that.

Let's start with teh gay.  Recently Lil Ricky was interviewed by Bradlee Dean in Minnesota.  From the Minnesota Independent:

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum appeared on controversial preacher Bradlee Dean’s radio show Saturday, stating his support for so-called “sodomy laws” and criticizing supporters of same-sex marriage rights.

“This is not about gay marriage, it is about changing what is right and wrong and fundamentally changing what people of faith can say and do in society,” Santorum said on Dean’s radio show. “The ultimate objective here is to drive faith out of the public square, to drive morality out of the laws of this country, to secularize our society with a different set of values.”

And:

Santorum said opponents of same-sex marriage rights are often characterized as “bigots.”

Well...if you're opposed to some of your fellow citizens being as free as you are and you're using your faith to bolster that opposition, I'd say that's bigotry.  It's not "not-bigotry" just because it's a faith-based value.

And now contraception.  From Thinkprogress:

Rick Santorum pledged to repeal all federal funding for contraception, during a recent interview with CaffeinatedThoughts.com editor Shane Vander Hart, arguing that birth control devalues the act of procreation. “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country,” the former Pennsylvania senator explained. “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”

For a guy who's looking to make the guv'ment smaller, he's certainly doing his best to give it the authority to exert more control.

I'll paraphrase Hitchens and say that all this only proves one thing, you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you'll just claim faith as your support.

And now what may be a Hitchens paraphrase:

The late Lillian Hellman was a ghastly piece of goods in numberless ways, but she did still have a percentage of courage and wit. At a campus event quite late in her life, when asked in a whiny way by a member of the audience "why have you not endorsed gay lib?" she paused briefly. Her thick and darkened spectacles were opaque. "The forms of fucking," she finally declared, "do not require my endorsement."

Missed This One...

It was Christopher Hitchens' (author of God Is Not Great: Now Religioun Poisons Everything) birthday last week and I am told that this is Holy Week.

As one small twig braced against the flood of religious news this week, I give you some of Hitchens' own thoughts on religion:


At 7:27 or so:

It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us waking and sleeping, who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, thought crime - just for what we think - who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick (as apparently we are) and then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true is to live as abject slave.

And then at the end:

You're better off thinking for yourself and taking all the risks and I might add all the pleasures that will come.

Happy Monday (I still hate Mondays!)

My Dinner With Hitchens

Ok, so it wasn't exactly dinner. It was only lunch.

To bring y'inz up-to-date, we'll have to start with Tony Norman's column. It's all about Hitchens, the well-known atheist, the well-known writer, and now the well-known esophageal cancer sufferer.

In the course of the column, Tony writes:

On a personal level, there are few intellectuals I enjoy more than Christopher Hitchens. When he taught at the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he was kind enough to invite me to a private reception for Salman Rushdie when that writer was under threat from the soulless theocrats of the Iranian regime.

Since then, we've broken bread at the now-defunct Crawford Grill, had a drink at the Warhol and exchanged pleasantries at various book signings.

I was there at the Crawford Grill. I broke bread (well, kinda - you'll understand in a minute) with Christopher Hitchens.

It was April of 2001 and he was in town promoting his Henry Kissinger book. That night, he was to read from the book at the Frick Fine Arts building and Tony, being the all around cool guy that he is, was kind enough to invite me along for lunch.

As I worked in the Frick Building at the time, I knew it would be a half hour walk to the now-closed Crawford Grill and while I can't recall exactly I think Tony gave me a ride to lunch. I do remember walking in with Tony.

I also remember that there was a bar was on the right as we walked in. It was 11:45 (am) Hitchens was already there.

When we walked in, he was sitting facing the bar and we could see his profile. Odd thing though - when we walked in he turned to to his left (we were on his right) to meet us and by...how...slowly...he...turned, I pretty much knew he was already completely plastered by that point.

There were five of us for lunch. Me, Tony, two other people I couldn't possibly remember even if you held a gun to my head, and Christopher Hitchens. We got a table and amid the copius cigarette smoke, the conversation was buzzing along very nicely without me. Film, politics (local and international) and Henry Kissinger were all topics of discussion. The lunch order was taken while we had our drinks. I remember I had a soda of some kind. Hitchens had already switched, I think, from a cocktail to wine.

When the food arrived, guess who's lunch order was lost?

Yea, mine. They ate but I didn't.

So that's why I can't exactly say I "broke bread" with Christopher Hitchens.

Later that night, after his reading from The Trial of Henry Kissinger, I stood in line waiting for him to sign my freshly bought copy. When I got to the head of the line, he looked up, smirked a bit and we chatted about lunch.

When he signed the book, it read "To David. Next time, lunch is on Crawford's."

Why Was Nothing Done?

From the NYTimes:

They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people.

This week, they learned that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received letters about Father Murphy in 1996 from Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, who said that the deaf community needed “a healing response from the Church.” The Vatican sat on the case, then equivocated, and when Father Murphy died in 1998, he died a priest.

In answer to the question at top:

Among the supervisors was John Conway, now the deputy administrator of workers’ compensation for the State of Wisconsin. Mr. Conway, the students and others collected affidavits from 15 to 20 former students about Father Murphy’s violations. They were granted a meeting with Archbishop William E. Cousins.

“In my extreme naïveté,” said Mr. Conway in an interview on Friday, “I told them the archbishop would take care of this.”

He said they were surprised to find the room packed with people, including several nuns and teachers from the school, two priests who said they were representing the apostolic delegate in Chicago, and Father Murphy himself.

Arthur Budzinski and Gary Smith, two more victims of Father Murphy, said in an interview last week that they remember seeing Archbishop Cousins yell, and Father Murphy staring at the floor. The deaf men and their advocates were told that Father Murphy, the school’s director and top fund-raiser, was too valuable to be let go, so he would be given only administrative duties.

They were outraged. They distributed “Wanted” posters with Father Murphy’s face outside the cathedral in Milwaukee. They went to the police departments in Milwaukee, where they were told it was not the correct jurisdiction, and in St. Francis, where the school was located, Mr. Conway said. They also went to the office of E. Michael McCann, the district attorney of Milwaukee County, and spoke with his assistant, William Gardner.

“A criminal priest was an oxymoron to them,” Mr. Conway said. “They said they’ll refer it to the archdiocese.” [emphasis added.]

The archdiocese and the Church as a whole did little if anything about Father Murphy. And as many as 200 boys were abused. By just one priest.

I'll give Christopher Hitchens the last word here.

It's the rape and torture of children.

Hitchens on RIck Warren

In case you missed it, Christopher Hitchens, our favorite "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay", has chimed in on President-elect Obama's decision to ask Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration.

Hitchens, of course, does not like the decision as can be seen in the coda of his argument:

But if we must have an officiating priest, let it be some dignified old hypocrite with no factional allegiance and not a tree-shaking huckster and publicity seeker who believes that millions of his fellow citizens are hellbound because they do not meet his own low and vulgar standards.

Now I can move backwards and explain that last sentence. From the top:

It is theoretically possible to make an apparently bigoted remark that is also factually true and morally sound. Thus, when the Rev. Bailey Smith, one of the deputies of the late Jerry Falwell, claimed that "God almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew," I was in complete agreement with him. This is because I do not believe that there is any supernatural supervisor who lends an ear to any prayer.

In the same way, if someone publicly charges that "Mormonism is a cult," it is impossible to say that the claim by itself is mistaken or untrue. However, if the speaker says that heaven is a real place but that you will not get there if you are Jewish, or that Mormonism is a cult and a false religion but that other churches and faiths are the genuine article, then you know that the bigot has spoken. That's all in a day's work for the wonderful world of the American evangelical community, and one wishes them all the best of luck in their energetic fundraising and their happy-clappy Sunday "Churchianity" mega-feel-good fiestas. However, do we want these weirdos and creeps officiating in any capacity at the inauguration of the next president of the United States?

Hitchens points out that Warren views things much the same way:

It is a fact that Rick Warren, pastor of the Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., was present at a meeting of the Aspen Institute not long ago and was asked by Lynda Resnick—she of the pomegranate-juice dynasty—if a Jew like herself could expect to be admitted to paradise. Warren publicly told her no. What choice did he have? His own theology says that only those who accept Jesus can hope to be saved. I have just missed the chance to debate on CBS with one of Warren's leading allies and defenders, the Dallas preacherman who calls himself Dr. Robert Jeffress. In the opinion of this learned fellow, even though Mitt Romney "talks about Jesus as his lord and savior, he is not a Christian. Mormonism is not Christianity."

We've all read the good Reverend's views on homosexuality:

WARREN: The issue to me, I'm not opposed to that as much as I'm opposed to redefinition of a 5,000 year definition of marriage. I'm opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I'm opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I'm opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.

BELIEFNET: Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?

WARREN: Oh , I do.

God does not hear the prayers of Jews, Mormonism is a cult, "Gays getting married" is equivalent to incest, pedophilia and polygamy.

There's one more thing. When asked, "Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it? He answered:

If you're asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don't. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal, but I do also know metaphorical terms are used. Did God come down and blow in man's nose? If you believe in God, you don't have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it's fine with me.

So glad about that.

I'll let the popinjay have the last word:

As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. If he likes, he can oppose the idea of marriage for Americans who are homosexual. That's a policy question on which people may and will disagree. However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans—non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers—are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors.

Question? Comments? Remarks? Drop me an e-mail.

Reading...

I've just finished reading Elizabeth Holtzman's book, "The Impeachment of George W. Bush." I picked it up after delicately letting Al Gore's book, "The Assault on Reason" gently slip from my fingers. I picked up Gore's book after devouring Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great."

The first book I loved, the second, eh not so much. The third was in a class by itself.

I'll start with the last two and then end with Holtzman.

It can be an amazing experience to actually hear an author's voice in your head as you read. Whenever I read Vonnegut, for example, I can hear his scratchy Pall-Mall enhanced vocal cords quiver and speak.

This experience, however, can be a double edged sword (is that the right metaphor? I dunno). It does wonders for Hitchens. For Gore, eh not so much.

It's not that I disagreed with anything I read in Gore's book - far from it. It's an important work that everyone should read, no question. But while it may or may not be written by Gore alone, it certainly sounds like it's a work written by a committee all trying to sound like Al Gore.

It's an odd torture, of sorts. You know each page contains important ideas. But sitting through (and sifting through) the text...oh god. Not fun.

It's exactly the opposite for Hitchens. My main problem with that book is that he's written it almost as if it's the only book on the subject. There's no mention, for instance, of Bertrand Russell's great essay/book "Why I am NOT a Christian."

It seems incomprehensible to me that Hitchens, the product of Oxford University where he studied philosophy, could not have stumbled upon Russell's book at least a few times. His deconstruction of the "moral argument" for the existence of God (and in the book he spells it "god" by the way) is straight out of Russell. That was disappointing.

Hotlzman's book, while not written with the same polish as Hitchens', is still a gem. It outlines, in a style pointing towards the ever-boring, though highly precise, English that attorneys use in writing Motions, Briefs, Interrogatories and so on, all the reasons why George W Bush must be impeached. From the deceptions leading the nation to war, to the illegal domestic surveillance, to permitting torture, to leaking classified information, to the reckless indifference to human suffering after Hurricane Katrina, it's all spelled out. Clearly and succintly.

A good book.