The “Holy See,” not for the first time, had nothing to say. Not a peep. About?

about reports that the Archbishop of Philadelphia, Cardinal Justin Rigali, this week suspended 21 priests pending investigation into allegations of child sex abuse.

Oh that. Well…what can it say? “We didn’t tell them to.” “It wasn’t our idea.” “Don’t look at us.” “It’s the parents we blame.” “Philadelphia is a very secular place.”

No doubt it will say all of those in good time, but it doesn’t like to be rushed.

The suspension of the priests on Tuesday follows on from the findings of a Philadelphia grand jury which last month indicted three priests and one lay teacher on charges of rape, assault and other felonies related to minors, mainly in the late 1990s. The damning grand jury report also concluded that 37 priests remained in ministry “despite solid, credible accusations of sex abuse”.

Well…um…well it’s the filing system you see, along with the thing about canon law. Put the two together and it does tend to slow us down, to the point that it takes us an average of three centuries to investigate any particular act of child-rape. We’re sorry, but you do get a lot of value out of us all the same, so go away and stop bothering us, you secular bastards.

Paul Sims did an interview for the Catholic Herald, and wants to know what people think. (At least he did; the post is a couple of weeks old now.)

Ed West sets the scene for Herald readers.

Last month two groups of people met in a church in central London to discuss gay adoption, abortion and religious schools. On one side were representatives of Catholic Voices, on the other a group from the Central London Humanist Group.

The point, says Paul Sims of New Humanist magazine, was “to experiment with the idea of Humanists and Catholics sitting down and engaging with each other on contentious issues in a cordial manner”.

Yes but (I’ve said this before, I’m sorry for the repetition) Catholic Voices are not just “Catholics” – they are a self-appointed PR group formed to defend the Vatican’s views:

a bureau of Catholic speakers able to articulate with conviction the Church’s positions on major contentious issues in the media.

Talking to them is not the same thing as talking to a generic or random group of Catholics; it’s talking to a group whose purpose is to defend views chosen and handed down by other people. It’s hard to think of a category of group it is more pointless to talk to when as Paul said

the point, as I explained in a piece in the current issue of New Humanist, is to experiment with the idea of humanists and Catholics sitting down and engaging with each other on contentious issues in a cordial manner.

Catholic Voices won’t be engaging with humanists on the issues. They will be defending the church’s positions on those issues, which is the opposite of “engaging.”

Do you play with Google Earth enough? I’m not sure it’s possible to play with Google Earth enough. I’d forgotten to install it until fairly recently, so I’m still excited about it…Then again I doubt that I’ll get less excited about it as time goes on.

Check out the Amalfi coast some time. Or Capri. Or Norway and those notorious fjords. Or Vancouver. Or Stockholm. Or Paris. Or Edinburgh. Or Cornwall.

At the moment I’m working on the Yorkshire Dales. I took a little break there about an hour ago. I went to Gunnerside, in Swaledale; found a very local but blue-lined road partway up a moor to the west of Gunnerside, and just traveled along it pausing to do a 360 every few yards. Staggering!

Aikin and Talisse (potentially startling many readers of 3 Quarks Daily) argue that religious belief is morally wrong.

The thought is frequently associated with Bertrand Russell: The worship of anything is beneath the dignity of a rational creature.  That is, we argue that worship is immoral.  Consequently, for any type of religious belief, if it requires one to worship anything, then it is intrinsically immoral.  The argument turns on the claim that any conception of worship that’s worth its salt will involve the voluntary and irrevocable submission of one’s rational faculties to those of another.

That idea resonates with me, whether I know how to defend it or not. It addresses what I dislike about “faith,” even (or possibly, sometimes, especially) the liberal kind. I dislike the hierarchical aspect, the (at least implicit) demand for submission, the abdication.

The challenge we pose to religious believers is to formulate a conception of worship that at once makes worship distinguishable from lesser attitudes and actions (such as praising, thanking, appreciating, admiring) and yet non-submissive.  We think that there is no such conception.  That is, any conception of worship that does not involve morally objectionable submission will be indistinguishable from, say, thanking, praising, and admiring.  But the religious believer holds not only that God is entitled to thanks, praise, and admiration; the religious believer holds that God (uniquely) is entitled to worship.  Yet worship is morally wrong.  Hence so is any mode of religious belief which requires it.

That works. It’s quite possible to admire, praise, and thank other people, and still be on a footing of equality. Of course it is, and what a hell life would be if it weren’t. I enjoy admiring people. But worship? Hell no. That would be wrong. If we really do have an overlord who demands worship…we’ll just have to say No.

So, remember a month ago I wondered about this new Mystery Commenter who went by the name “Hammill” and whose central, indeed almost only, subject seemed to be the sadly naughty ways of the gnu atheists, and who showed a strangely excessive interest in me, and Jerry Coyne, and me again? Remember how I said it reminded me of someone? Remember how I said that someone was “Tom Johnson”/You’re Not Helping/William?

Well that’s who it is. I’ve been able to confirm it.

So?

So the discussion has been distorted by a guy with a known agenda and history posing as someone new and unknown. Someone who frowned gently in concern that people disagreed with Chris Mooney. Someone who worries about people “throwing around” the word “lies”…

Just look at the terms used to describe positions: unfair representation, misrepresentation, intellectual dishonesty. I think the terms “lies” and “deliberate distortion” have been thrown around in the past. I realize that much of that language stems from the “blood feud” you mention above, but the division seems great and very real. IMO the blood feud is getting in the way of actual progress.

That’s Tom Johnson, the guy who lied about that notorious conference where the notorious things he described didn’t happen. That’s YNH, who repeatedly said on his blog I was telling lies here. That’s Milton C, who told lies about me in comments here.

So?

So he’s saddened by the rough and tumble of the “blogosphere“:

Part of me almost wishes that the entire debate were taking place in a refereed journal rather than the blogosphere, due to the inherent incivility that the internet brings. Perhaps that could corral the personal disputes a bit and focus a laser beam on the core issues.

That’s YNH, who knows a thing or two about incivility on the internet!

He spent the months between July and January honing his skills, perhaps. He was a good bullshitter, for awhile.

There are much deeper issues at play in terms of communication than “stop being so loud” and “stop talking so frequently.” The issue seems much more nuanced and complex than this, perhaps by several orders of magnitude; however, I believe it often erroneously gets simplified down to the statement above, and the debate suffers because of it.

Sounds convincing, doesn’t he.

He didn’t, quite, to me, even then. People don’t usually talk that stiffly on blogs. He was hyper-correcting, as it were. And then where had he come from, all of a sudden? He seemed awfully familiar with the subject matter for someone unknown. But I was only generally suspicious. At first.

But so what?

So he poisoned the well, that’s what.

I appreciate this piece very much, Andrew. I’m a nonbeliever that is frequently ashamed to be associated with some of the vitriol that comes from our side of the aisle. We need more people, like yourself, to speak out for a positive, forward-looking kind of nonbelief….

….even if doing so only directs the vitriol in your direction. I’ve noticed the link above leads to site where you are being accused of not being a nonbeliever simply for your opinions on tone. Furthermore, some of the vitriol and invective (ignorant, arrogant, immoral, unethical, bitter, bullsh@t, etc.) directed at you is disturbing. Include the discussion about what to call “pseudoatheists” like yourself and the message seems clear: the goal is to marginalize you and bully you into not seeking to take nonbelief in a positive direction.

“The link above” is, of course, to B&W. I loom large in his pantheon of hate-objects. He’s doing his little bit to swell the chorus of hatred against the evil gnus, and he’s doing it in a mask, because all his previous masks got covered in excrement which won’t wash off.

And not just once. Another opportunity presented itself, and there he was, all eager for the treat:

I can agree with much of the substance coming out of the gnu atheist community but cringe mostly at its delivery. At times the rhetoric and invective makes me embarrassed to even be associated with them, however tangentially, as a nonbeliever.

Same old thing. That was when I really suspected he was TJ, and I confronted him:

We’ve seen this kind of thing before.

Will you be shyly confiding in “Rob” about your experiences at conservation conferences soon?

Who are you?

As far as I know he hasn’t commented since. Sad for him. But he’s had plenty of effect, there’s no reason to doubt that. That bolus of antignu hatred is larger than it would have been without him.

Update: and see Paul W’s comment on the stranger thread. Says it all.

PBS showed a Tribute to Motown at the White House last night. I thought I would watch just a minute of it, but I got pulled right in.

I’d kind of forgotten Dancing in the Streets. That was stupid. Martha and the Vandellas. Yeah.

A couple of thoughts on the hunting of the snark.

One thought is that I always wonder why the focus is so exclusively on the evil gnu atheists. To put it another way, I always wonder why the standard is so double. I wonder why the filter has only gnu atheist-shaped holes.

I wonder why the sustained activities of “Tom Johnson” are ignored in favor of shining a spotlight on something someone said five years ago. Gnu atheists are sometimes irritable, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes rude. “Tom Johnson” is a malicious misogynist liar who put great energy into attempting to smear several chosen gnu atheists. Why so much heavy breathing about the former and nothing at all about the latter? It’s not because the latter is irrelevant – he’s an enthusiastic partisan in the “gnu atheists are horrible” campaign. He is in fact the source of a lot of specific “gnu atheists are horrible” claims.

Like this one, which I had forgotten about. Milton C, May 27 last year. I didn’t know at the time that Milton C was “Tom Johnson” and all the YNH bloggers and all the YNH sock puppets, who were many.

The Ruler of Comment Overmoderation whines about comment moderation. Hm.

The irony – it BURNS.

See? That’s the confirmed confessed liar who filled whole threads at The Intersection with tirades about new atheists under different names, thus creating an impression of lots of haters of new atheists, then did the same thing with his own brand new blog. He’s accusing me of “comment overmoderation” – which is something he had been accusing me of via the YNH sock puppets for several weeks by that time. It’s a pack of lies.

Then this, after I retorted.

idk, Ophelia. I’ve been a “lurker” here for some time, and I’ve seen you engage in ‘total banning’ on some people who have made comments that really didn’t get too offensive or inconsiderate but that you just took personally…but I’ve also seen you engage in ‘total banning’ when people have been purposefully inconsiderate and offensive, too.

Complete and utter falsehood. (How can one “see” people engage in banning anyway? All he had seen, of course, was himself saying that under different names at my place and at his place.)

That’s morally repugnant, if you like. It’s a good deal more morally repugnant than sometimes being irritable under one’s own name and for truthfully-stated reasons. Yet the shock-horror is reserved for the latter. I consider that peculiar.

The other thought is about this comment – #4 on yesterday’s –

Well, it’s certainly a little ironic that the very same bloggers who leaped to condemn Sarah Palin’s incendiary rhetoric (perhaps with justification) are quite content to use this sort of language. Wasn’t there a suggestion somewhere that people on the “accommodationist” side of this debate, should be called “Quislings”? It’s classy stuff.

That’s for me. If you google new atheist quisling, I’m the first result. I did it.

Or I did and I didn’t. I didn’t do it in a Sarah Palinesque way. I did it in a hedged way.

Here is another…can we say quisling? If they call us aggressive new atheists, can we call them quislings? Here is another quisling atheist moaning about how boring and boring the gnu* atheists are. It’s Caspar Melville of the New Humanist, I’m sorry to say – I like the NH.

The real irony though is that Caspar was so horrified by my morally repugnant remark that he invited me to write an article on the subject. In other words, he probably did think it was a bit much, but also probably not the nadir of verbal wickedness.

Jason Streitfeld says some very cogent things on the subject of public displays of atheism.

For atheists like me, there is one issue that matters most in all of this: the role of religious authority in society. I’m not saying atheists are concerned with this issue above all else. Not at all. They might be more concerned about global warming, say, or human rights violations in third-world countries. What I am saying is that, for many atheists, atheism is first and foremost about the rejection of religious authority. Public atheism is first and foremost about putting religious authority in its proper place. For us, to be a public atheist just is to deny that there is any objectively valid moral authority which religions could claim and to deny that religious authority is similar to, equal to, or in any methodological or philosophical sense compatible with scientific authority. If we cannot argue these points in public, then we cannot be public atheists in the way that is meaningful to us.

Indeed; and more: atheism is first and foremost about the rejection of religious authority, in an existing context in which religious authority is not just not rejected, not even just welcomed and embraced, but made all-but-mandatory. If religious authority weren’t always being shoved at us, it might seem otiose to bother rejecting it, but that’s not the situation we’re in – not in the US and not entirely in other parts of the Anglophone world either, let alone more frankly theocratic states. The pope thinks he has every right to order women to bear children they don’t want to bear, and to tell hospitals not to save the lives of pregnant women if it takes an abortion to do that.

News flash: The public already thinks atheists have no moral compass. People just don’t understand these issues, but they think they do. That’s the real problem: people are ignorant of their own ignorance. The public needs exposure to what atheists actually think–not in an inaccessible, academic way, but in a clear, practical and relevant way. Right now, they’re mostly relying on misinformation when they criticize atheists.

And, sadly, they’re getting even more misinformation, and old misinformation repeated and re-enforced, by some atheists. Even some atheists are telling people that atheists are rude, mean, intolerant, bullies, dicks – you name it.

Jean’s argument ultimately rests on the claim that people cannot learn what many atheists want them to learn, and that, at best, our efforts at education will be fruitless. This is what Coyne seems to be bothered about. It’s not just Jean’s conclusion. It is her argument that is so upsetting. Atheists like me are less willing to settle for the status quo. We are far less satisfied with the public’s current perceptions of atheism. Furthermore, we would rather give the public the benefit of the doubt. We are optimistic that the public can learn a whole lot more than Jean seems to think. Of course, atheists will continue to be misunderstood and misrepresented for a long time to come. But the discourse might move forward nonetheless. It certainly won’t help if we stop trying.

The status quo aspect is key. The mantra that atheists should be careful of what they say in public (and when in doubt, err on the side of saying nothing) is just more of the same. We already have that arrangement, and we think it’s a bad arrangement, and we want to Fix It. It’s the status quo, and we want to change the status quo, so that things will be better.

Tower Hamlets Council is shocked shocked by those anti-gay posters that appeared recently. So is the Mayor, so is Dilwar Khan, Director of the London Muslim Centre, so are the chairs of Rainbow Hamlets LGBT Community Forum.

Andrew Gilligan says some of the shock shock is bogus. Guess which part.

…the East London Mosque speaks with forked tongue. Yesterday, it was due to demonstrate its deep commitment to “standing together against homophobia” by hosting a gala dinner with one Uthman Lateef, a homophobic preacher who has stated: “We don’t accept homosexuality… we hate it because Allah hates it.”

Why does the East London Mosque say one thing while it means another? Because it can. Because it works.

There is a part of liberal white society which would rather ignore or deny the problem of extremism, hatred and bigotry in some parts of some Muslim communities. The lies give them a form of permission to do so.In that same council press release, the chairs of the Rainbow Hamlets LGBT Community Forum, a local gay group, condemned the anti-gay posters but added: “We also condemn those who use these incidents to create a moral panic and stoke up racist or Islamophobic sentiment. At present the people responsible cannot be accurately determined, but it is clear that whoever is responsible, they do not represent any of the local communities.”

Really?! It is clear? How can it be? How can that possibly be “clear”?

Well it can’t, and it’s obvious that it can’t, but the rainbow people apparently think they have to say it is, lest they stoke up “Islamophobic sentiment.” Apparently they find themselves stuck with having to toady to a group that lives next door to them and hates them with a lively and religious hatred.

I think I would move to Ealing, or perhaps Merton.

The pope has been telling doctors to straighten women out on something the poor deluded darlings are hopelessly confused about. What – that homeopathic “polio vaccinations” are real vaccinations? That their most important job in life is to have flat abs? That they have to be “spiritual”? No.

Pope Benedict XVI has urged doctors to protect women from the “deceptive” thought that an abortion might be a solution to social or economic difficulties or health problems.

Has he indeed. How, I wonder, does he know that that thought is deceptive? If a woman or a couple doesn’t have enough money to have a child, how is it deceptive to think that an abortion might be a solution to the problem? And what the hell does he know about it? He has all the money he needs, and he’ll never have to bear a child. He has no experience of being up against it in that way. How does he know he knows better what is and is not a solution than people who do have that experience?

As for health problems…well if the pregnancy itself is proving to be fatal, then an abortion in fact is a solution to that particular health problem. In that particular case, the pope is just lying when he says it’s not. What he means is that it’s a solution he won’t allow a woman to have, if he can prevent it.

Darrick Lim has been observing the inter-atheist wars. He has kind things to say about me. (Well that’s the important thing; do admit.)

Fellow atheists Jerry Coyne and Ophelia Benson jump into the fray with their own takes on DBAD. Both are known for taking off the gloves in anti-religion arguments when they deem it appropriate. As an evolutionary biologist, Coyne in particular has little patience for accommodationist views – the belief that science and religion can be reconciled and need not necessarily be at odds with each other. Along with another passionate – some may say ‘cantankerous’ – atheist, the biology professor and blogger PZ Myers (who runs the popular science blog ‘Pharyngula’), Coyne, Benson and other ‘Gnu Atheists’ are considered to be at the ‘meaner’ end of the attitude spectrum.

Ohhhh. That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. Mind you, Lim apparently doesn’t consider the putative meanness all that mean; I might not feel very w and f if he meant “meaner” completely literally. But this question of “exactly how mean are the gnu atheists really, when you look at them under a good microscope?” seems to have as many answers as there are people to ask the question, so whatevs.

Via Johann Hari:

In May 2008, a 15 year old Muslim girl tells her teacher she thinks she might be gay, and the Muslim teacher in a state-funded comprehensive tells her “there are no gays round here” and she will “burn in hell” if she ever acts on it. (I know because she emailed me, suicidal and begging for help). In September 2008, a young gay man called Oliver Hemsley, is walking home from the gay pub the George and Dragon when a gang of young Muslims stabs him eight times, in the back, in the lungs, and in his spinal column. In January 2010, when the thug who did it is convicted, a gang of thirty Muslims storms the George and Dragon in revenge and violently attacks everybody there.

Because why? Because of a stupid baseless prejudice. Because they eat their boiled eggs from the narrow end instead of the wide end, or is it the other way around. Because they like stripes better than checks. Because they like muesli better than shredded wheat. Because they watch football instead of tennis. Let them burn in hell!