This is very trivial, but quite funny in a way. Remember “steph” who derailed the “F word” thread last week with endless passive-aggressive rambling about gnu atheism and New Zealand? And then suddenly at the end went all cuddly and we can get along? No, you probably don’t, because you probably stopped reading that thread when she derailed it, and quite right too.

But if you do, you might be amused to learn that she didn’t really mean the cuddly part. She derailed someone else’s thread – some theology type – to say how horrible I am. Apropos of absolutely nothing. I mean, it’s like a clown suddenly appearing in the middle of a sober newscast. Wha?? Truly funny.

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Amir Afkhami, an American psychiatrist, gets to meet a “faith-healer” in Iraq and watch him doing his stuff.

The path of a faith healer is arduous, Mullah Eskandar told us, speaking in Kurdish. “Such a calling,” he said, “is best reserved for a religious and spiritual man.”

Right. Religious and spiritual because there is no actual knowledge or technical skill involved, and man because it’s women who get fucked up by misogynist religions and traditions. Totally makes sense.

He went on to recount his 15-year apprenticeship to a renowned senior healer, who taught him the basics of spiritual treatment and the essentials of Koranic law and prophetic traditions. His description reminded me of my own long and difficult years in

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops insists on exactly the same murderous policy that the rebarbative bishop of Phoenix does. The CCB is very clear about it. The CCB doesn’t mess around.

“Surgery to terminate the life of an innocent person, however, is intrinsically wrong… Nothing, therefore, can justify a direct abortion. No circumstance, no purpose, no law whatsoever can ever make licit an act which is intrinsically illicit, since it is contrary to the Law of God which is written in every human heart, knowable by reason itself, and proclaimed by the Church.”

No circumstance whatsover, including the circumstance that the fetus is already doomed and will not survive no matter what, can make it licit to remove the … Read the rest

Let’s see if I can force myself to read and comment on some of the horrible dogmatizing of Catholic theologian Ronald Conte. I could manage only about three paragraphs on the first attempt.

The subject of his anathema is “M. Therese Lysaught’s grave doctrinal error.” He notes that she points out that the fetus was doomed no matter what, that

it was not a case of saving the mother or the child. It was not a matter of choosing one life or the other.

Then he spends the rest of the long piece saying fuck that.

He quotes JP2 saying it’s disobedience to God’s law. He quotes the catechism. He insists on the (authoritarian and theocratic) claim that some … Read the rest

A Catholic woman priest is trying to convince herself that the bishop of Phoenix didn’t mean what he of course necessarily did mean. She’s not having an easy time of it.

When I was a teen, I saw a movie that depicted a bishop, the brother of a pregnant woman, who loved his sister, but when the chips were down and it was her life or the baby’s life, the choice was his to make and he chose the baby. I will never forget how horrible I felt that his sister was powerless in this situation, and that the decision was her brother’s to make.

Quite – and in the bishop’s case, it wasn’t even a matter of choosing the … Read the rest