Agylen

By way of Charlie Stross, I came upon The Cthulhu Tract, which can be amusing if you are a fan of HPL and have ever seen a Jack Chick tract.

I wonder whether PZ Myers knows about it

Vatican opposes de-criminalising same sex unions -Times Online: “The Vatican has said it opposes a European Union proposal for a United Nations declaration formally condemning discrimination against homosexuals, which it claims would ‘de-criminalise’ same sex unions.

Monsignor Celestino Migliore, the Holy See’s permanent observer at the UN, said the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church forbade ‘unjust discrimination’ against homosexuals. However outlawing discrimination by means of a UN declaration meant that states which did not recognise same sex marriages would come under pressure to do so.

All countries of the European Union have signed a draft declaration drawn up by France, which currently holds the rotating EU Presidency, condemning “discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity”. France is due to submit the draft declaration at the UN General Assembly on 10 December, the sixtieth anniversary of the UN declaration of human rights.

Over 80 countries in the world currently outlaw same-sex relations, with punishments range from short prison sentences to life imprisonment and even death by execution.”

Let me see if I get this right: 80 countries discriminate unjustly against their citizens on the basis of their sexual orientation alone. The EU wants to stop this, at least verbally. The Vatican, on the other hand, opposes this resolution, basically because it thinks it would put pressure on some of the discriminators.

The point is that the proposed resolution does not endorse same-sex marriage in any way. So the Vatican does not want the UN to condemn states who harass, imprison, torture and kill homosexual, because it thinks doing so would put undue pressure on states who do not recognize gay marriage, including those states, such as Italy, who signed the declaration?

Are you fucking kidding me? Can there be an organization which is more abject, twisted and morally disgusting than the Catholic Church?

Well, I guess one could reply that any church or any form of organized religion is similarly despicable, and one would have a point, I’m afraid.

For those who do not speak Italian, the title is a bad pun on the name of Monsignor Migliore. “Migliore” is Italian for “better”.

Wow! I thought the WSJ was a serious, reputable journal, and that you had to have some intelligence, insight, and decency to be allowed to get your words published on it.

That seems not to be the case, if any idiot with an axe to grind, like Daniel Henninger, can simply write down a list of fallacies and non-sequiturs, depicting an alternative universe that has no basis in reality, and still get published.

Witness this column, where he can do no better than to blame atheists and secularists, and the war they are supposedly waging against Christmas, for the current financial meltdown. As if your poor, wrecked, fucked-up, war-mongering country, had not been run for the past eight years by a gang of corrupt, self-professed Christians, whose ideological pillars were evangelical faith and unbridled laissez-faire.

And now, when you are so deeply in shit because of these people and of the evangelical base that contributed to elect them, you Mr. Henninger have the gall to ask for more of the same? You are so completely out of your mind, Sir!

Also, you claim that “responsibility, restraint and remorse” were the ballast that stabilized free markets, and that somehow religious people possess these qualities in larger quantity than no-religious ones.

Bullshit! I say.

The only quality that the people governing financial institutions and big companies have ever exhibited is remorse. Naturally, some of them, show some form of remorse after the damage is done and exposed. Witness Ken Lay (a good Christian, by all accounts).

They seldom, if ever, demonstrated responsibility, and only the force of the law taught them some restraint.

Blaming the descent of secular values from the North onto the good, old religious values of the South for this situation is blaming the victim for the crime, which just adds insult to injury. The reason why restraint was lost is not because of a supposed decadence in moral values fostered by the “war on Christmas”. It’s because the gang of thugs you elected for governing your country, Mr. Henninger, lifted all forms of regulation in order to benefit their cronies, creating the biggest example of a privately-run socialist state in the process. A state where profits are private and losses are public.

And all of this while lighting up Christmas trees and going to church every Sunday.

… putting up with things that annoy you, as someone said. It’s easy to be tolerant of things that do not offend you or your most cherished beliefs, but the real litmus test of tolerance is being able to suffer others mocking something that you hold as sacred.

Sadly, Roman Catholics and their bozo-in-a-funny-hat jefe supremo, El Papa Ratzo, usually fail this test, as exemplified once again by the recent brouhaha raised around an art exhibit held in Italy, where a statue of a crucified frog is on display. The silly Pope itself wrote a letter calling for censorship of the frog and the head of the local council even started a hunger strike. Too bad for them, I guess, as the museum board voted to keep the frog on display until the end of the exhibit and not bend over backwards to please the would-be censors, as too often happens in Italy and elsewhere. Kudos to them!

I think I should petition the Italian government to prohibit the display of crucifixes in public places: seeing an image of a man tortured and killed in the most horrible way deeply offends my sentiments, so it’s my right to demand that it be censored, right?

I also would like certain vignettes that appeared in a certain Danish newspaper to be censored as well, not to mention the display of beef in supermarkets, as it deeply offends Hindu religious sentiments.

You can read more about the whole affair on Pharyngula. Minor nit: Bolzano (Bözen in German) is actually in Italy, not Germany, though in a region where the majority speaks German, so the confusion is understandable.

As this very scientific poll shows, half the residents of the Vatican are atheists? Who’d have thought?

Via: PZ Myers.

There is a man of power in the world, who is a raving lunatic, a racist, a homophobe, and a religious fanatic. If things go according to the will of his followers, he might soon be at the command of a nuclear arsenal.

Did somebody in the audience say “Ahmadinejad”? No, sorry, I was referring to Mike Huckabee.

The Raw Story | Huckabee: Amend Constitution to be in ‘God’s standards’: “‘I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,’ Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. ‘But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that’s what we need to do — to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view.’”

(Via PZ Myers.)

Massive Gas Cloud Speeding Toward Collision With Milky Way: “A giant cloud of hydrogen gas is speeding toward a collision with our Milky Way Galaxy, and when it hits — in less than 40 million years — it may set off a spectacular burst of stellar fireworks.”

Looks like we’re safe, as “the cloud will likely strike a region somewhat farther from the Galactic center than our Solar System and about 90 degrees ahead of us in the Milky Way disk.” And we’d have at least 20 million years before starting to worry.

Even if this is the case, though, it’s impossible not to feel awe at the way the cosmos, far from being an orderly, peaceful, and predictable place, is full of chaos and violence on a scale that cannot even be fully understood. Witness the recent discovery of a gigantic beam of matter ejected from a massive black hole and smashing into a nearby galaxy, literally tearing it to pieces like the jet from a garden hose tears apart an ants’ nest.

You might think that those planets that are being hit by such phenomena are not hosting any kind of civilization, or that their inhabitants are not protected by a loving god, or that it’s all part of god’s plan, which we cannot know.

Or you might think that we’re the lucky ones who get an opportunity to live for a brief (on the time scale of the Universe) instant of time, thanks to random chance or contingency, and nothing is pre-ordained or in any way predetermined.

Guess which one I think is the sensible opinion to hold.

… and the world would be a much better place if that obstacle was removed, regardless of what a certain bozo in a funny hat says.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Pope says family promotes peace: “‘The family is the first and indispensable teacher of peace,’ the Pope told worshippers at St Peter’s Square in Rome.

The pontiff said that ‘whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community’.

Pope Benedict has made defending the traditional family a priority.

The Vatican opposes granting legal recognition to gay and unwed couples, though the Pope did not touch on such controversies directly in his New Year prayer on Tuesday.

‘Everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman… constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace,’ he said.”

I guess the people killing themselves in the streets in Kenya, Pakistan, Palestine these days are not doing so because of sectarian hatred that is very often grounded in religion. No, they must be fighting for gay marriage, evidently.

The real shame here is that Pope Ratzi can say such boldfaced lies and yet most politicians and so-called intellectuals—at least here in Italy— are applauding him. Personally, he makes me want to puke.

Three Wise Men are just a legend, says Archbishop of Canterbury | the Daily Mail: “During an interview on Radio Five, the Archbishop of Canterbury dismissed the well-known version of events as legend saying: ‘Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t tell us there were three of them, doesn’t tell us they were kings, doesn’t tell us where they came from.

Oh, really?

‘It says they are astrologers, wise men, priests from somewhere outside the Roman Empire, that’s all we’re really told.’

Oh, really?

Turning to the topic of when Jesus was born, he said it was ‘very unlikely’that there was snow.

Oh, really?

He said there was no evidence of animals present – a popular theme of Christmas cards.

Oh, really?

He dismissed the idea that the star of the North stood still in the night sky – because stars just don’t behave like that.

Oh, really?

For good measure, he added Jesus probably wasn’t even born in December. He said: ‘Christmas was when it was because it fitted well with the winter festival’.

Oh, really?

Next time the good Archbishop will tell us that maybe the virgin birth is a legend too… oh wait, he alredy did! What’s left then, the resurrection? After all, there’s just as much proof that Jesus rose from the dead as there is for his birth in a manger. It’s all a bunch of unsubstantiated myths, so why not get over it once and for all?

… and his name is Mohammed.

You can call him Jesus, if you like, it’s just the same old shit.