Not Impressed By the “Power of Prayer”

This past week, Bill Donohue took a break from complaining about perceived slights to his religion of choice, and posted something more inspirational, entitled The Power of Hope and Prayer. He tells of a family whose newborn son had a heart disease, but who was cured thanks to hope, prayer, and the best medical care that a Fox News anchor’s salary can afford.

Here’s a sampling of what Donohue has to say about the power of prayer:

[…] Bret and Amy were not alone—they were one with the Lord. Bret’s prayer was quintessentially Catholic: he was not angry with God—he thanked the Lord for the gift of his son and asked for his help. But most of all, he did not despair. By praying for Paulie’s “recovery that will follow,” he evinced optimism and hope.

Jesus said at the Last Supper, “You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy.” How can this be? […] New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan put it in a way that really drives home the essence of Jesus’ words. He explored what he called “the theological reasons for laughter.” Why are people of faith happy, he asked. “Here’s my reason for joy: the cross. You heard me right: the cross of Christ!” The death of Jesus was not the last word. His resurrection was. After Christ was crucified, Dolan says, it “seemed we could never smile again…But, then came the Sunday called Easter! The sun—S-U-N—came up, and the Son—S-O-N—came out as He rose from the dead. Guess who had the last word? God!” […] It is a theology grounded in hope, and hope is the natural antidote to despair.

When Pope John Paul II died, I happened to be at the studios of the Fox News Network in New York City. I knew he was dying, but I had no idea that I would be the first guest to go on the air when he passed away. When asked by Shepard Smith what my thoughts were, I answered, “On the one hand, great sorrow. On the other hand, great joy. Sorrow that he’s no longer with us. Joy that he’s with God, with his Lord.”

For those who skipped past that, he basically says that prayer makes people happy and gives them hope. Basically, pretty standard inspirational-chain-email stuff.

I can’t help noticing that he fails to mention any kind of medical benefit or, indeed, any benefit to the patient. All of the benefits he mentions could, it seems, be provided equally well by prayer to Krishna, or a sacrifice to Dionysus, or even by meditation.

People can get these benefits of Donohue’s religion even if they’re not true. It’s enough that people believe them. In other words, from everything Donohue has said, Jesus might as well be an imaginary friend.

If he’d left it at that, I wouldn’t have bothered writing this. But he had to throw in some digs at atheists:

The Baiers are practicing Catholics. What would they have done had they been atheists? It must be tough going it alone, and indeed the evidence shows exactly that.

Note that he doesn’t actually mention what any of this evidence might be.

And in case you were wondering about ellipses, above:

Jesus said at the Last Supper, “You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy.” How can this be? It is not something atheists can grasp. It eludes the secular mind. New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan put it in a way that really drives home the essence of Jesus’ words. He explored what he called “the theological reasons for laughter.” Why are people of faith happy, he asked. “Here’s my reason for joy: the cross. You heard me right: the cross of Christ!” The death of Jesus was not the last word. His resurrection was. After Christ was crucified, Dolan says, it “seemed we could never smile again…But, then came the Sunday called Easter! The sun—S-U-N—came up, and the Son—S-O-N—came out as He rose from the dead. Guess who had the last word? God!” There is probably nothing more baffling to an atheist than this “theology of laughter.” It is a theology grounded in hope, and hope is the natural antidote to despair.

I know that Donohue has been around long enough, has spoken to enough atheists that this can’t be dismissed as simple ignorance. He’s going out of his way to insult a class of people with whom he doesn’t agree.

And coming from the guy who throws a fit every time someone dares point out some bad about his religion, that’s pretty rich.

The Blaze Warns of New Threat to Christian Televangelists From Atheist Roku Channel

Over at Glenn Beck’s The Blaze (so you know it’s sane and rational), Billy Hallowell warns, “Do Christian Televangelists Have Something to Fear? Atheists Reveal New Effort to Impact Culture”.

By this he means that American Atheists have announced that they’ll be launching an atheist TV channel for the Roku set-top video-streaming box. So yeah. I have a Roku, I’m happy with it, and I expect it’ll be something like The Young Turks or one of the more popular cable-access-ey YouTube channels.

But the headline asks whether Christian televangelists have anything to fear. From what? From one Internet streaming channel on one device, somehow sneaking past your kids’ defenses and indoctrinating them into godless atheimism and satanic debauchery or anything? Well, I suppose that’s something to worry about. I mean, it’s not as if there are any religous channels on Roku already, is it?

Unless you count

Those are just the religious channels that were added in May and June 2014 (Sources:1 2 3 4 5 6)

Yes, how can Christians possibly compete with one atheist channel? They’re obviously doomed. Doooooooomed.

Water Is Wet. Dog Bites Man. Answers in Genesis Maligns Atheists.

Terry Mortenson has a blah blah blog post, ironically posted under “Thoughts“, and favorably linked to by loser-to-science Ken Ham, that opens thusly:

Over the years the American Atheists have been having some serious problems with social behavior at their national convention. So they have developed a code of conduct for the 2014 conference. It is interesting to observe the things they tolerate (e.g., many kinds of sexual immorality) and the things they will not tolerate (e.g., lack of social etiquette). It should also be noted that Christian conventions do not need to post such a code of conduct because the attendees have been redeemed by the grace of God and gladly submit to His code of conduct in the Bible.

But in an atheist worldview, these atheists have no basis for this code. In their view there is no God and therefore no moral absolutes.

This is straight from atheist bingo, right next to the one about atheists eating babies. The idea that you need an invisible father figure to tell you whom not to stick your baby-making bits into has been around since before this selfsame invisible father figure created the world 6,000 years ago. But these days, it’s usually considered ever so slightly gauche to so blatant about it.

Can we put the immoral atheist, along with the lazy Mexican and the hook-nosed Jew, in some box marked “Bogus stereotypes: do not use”, and padlock the box and then encase it in cement and dump it in the ocean?

Apparently not.

Anyway, Mortenson continues:

In a related news item, the University of Virginia hosted a conference on February 10, 2014, involving top leaders of six secular colleges and universities to discuss the topic of sexual misconduct among college students. This is a vexing problem. Research shows that 20% of college women at secular schools have been sexually assaulted, but only 12% of the victims report the incident. But given the depravity of man and that these schools are dominated by evolutionary thinking that destroys any basis for moral absolutes, this behavior is not surprising.

My first thought was that while it’s appalling that 20% of women at these schools have been assaulted, and shameful that 88% of such assaults go unreported, Mortenson gives us no reason to think that Christian schools are any better. After all, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from the ongoing Catholic pedophilia scandal is that if you got raped, it’s probably your fault for looking attractive and slutty and stuff, and that God hates people who rock the boat.

So if 20% of women at secular schools have been assaulted, what’s the figure for Christian schools, where demon evolution isn’t taught?

Let’s bear in mind also that in the past week or so, we’ve had the story of Bob Jones University shutting down an investigation about sexual assaults on campus, which certainly looks as though the investigators were about to uncover something that would make the school look very bad.

There was also the story of Patrick Henry College (“God’s Harvard”) blowing off allegations of sexual abuse.

And just for good measure, we’ve had the news of Archbishop Roger Mahony withholding information from police in an investigation into sexual abuse.

Mortenson can rail about evilution allowing child rape, but it doesn’t seem as though God’s law is much better.

If I have to choose between the tribe that says it’s not okay to rape women and also allows two men to have consensual anal sex in the privacy of their hotel room; or the tribe that pretends that rape doesn’t exist, and if it does exist, it’s the victim’s fault; then I know which one I’m going with.

The Indian and the Ice: When to Believe Something

Imagine a woman living in India in the 18th or 19th century[1]. Her cousin, the sailor, has just returned from a trading voyage and, after being suitably plied with food and attention, tells his audience about distant lands where it is so cold that water becomes as hard as wood; you can break off a piece of water and hold it in two fingers.

The woman doesn’t believe him. His story seems utterly fantastical. In her experience, water is never hard. It’s always liquid or gas. As much as she wants to trust her beloved cousin, he’s also a sailor, just like the ones who have passed through town in the past, talking about mermaids and six-headed serpents.


[1] I got this analogy from The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten, by Julian Baggini. He, in turn credits it to David Hume’s On Miracles, though I gather that the analogy of the Indian and the ice didn’t actually appear in On Miracles, but rather arose out of criticism of that work.

Clearly, the Indian woman is wrong: there is such a thing as ice. But I’d argue that she’s wrong for the right reason: being too skeptical, rather than too gullible. And this is one of those cases where reality turns out to be weirder than she could imagine.

Forming an accurate understanding of the world is a balancing act: I don’t want to admit too many untrue ideas, but I don’t want to just disbelieve everything, because I also want to admit true ideas. And I also don’t want to spend my life on the fence about everything. So I use rules of thumb, which don’t always work. And so sometimes, I’m wrong.

Like other atheists and skeptics, I’ve been accused of being closed-minded. The analogy of the Indian woman and the ice is just the sort of thing a critic could point to. More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and all that.

But for every such nugget of implausible truth, there are several metric tons of bullshit. The Indian sailor’s story of hard water sounds, to the woman, just like other stories about six-headed monsters, centaurs, mermaids, and floating mountains. And so she’s right to reject it, at least until such time as good evidence comes along.

The cost of believing too much is measured in money and in human lives. Tim Farley keeps a running tally at What’s the Harm?. The cost of believing too little seems, to me, much lower. So it’s a chance I’m willing to take.

What If You Meet God When You’re in Trouble?

I was recently asked, what if I got in an accident, and while I was lying in the emergency room, I saw God. Or what if a loved one got hit by a bus, and God appeared while I was waiting for the ambulance to show up. Would I believe in God then?

I might. But it would be for the wrong reasons.

Basically, this is a variant on “There are no atheists in foxholes“, in that it’s a type of conversion that occurs when one is in trouble.

The thing is, I want to know the truth about whether there are any gods. Which is to say, I want to have good reasons for what I believe on the topic. But what it boils down to is, how can I figure out whether a given proposition is likely to be true or not?

So the “will you believe when you’re in trouble?” argument is “Oh, sure, you don’t believe in God now when you’re in your right mind and thinking straight. But what if you get a revelation while you’re stressed, harried, and/or aren’t getting enough oxygen to the brain? Then would you believe?” I don’t think I need to point out the flaws in this argument, when it’s put this way.

I mean, if I suddenly started hearing the voice of God, I like to think that I’d go to a psychiatrist to see whether a dose of Thorazine can make him shut up: the simplest explanation for my hearing voices would be schizophrenia, not the all-powerful ruler of the cosmos taking a sudden interest in my life.

But what if God exists, and only appears to people in dire need? In that case, I might not be thinking straight at the time of the revelation, but I could still look back on the events afterwards and see whether I still have good reason to believe that the god I met was real. If all I got from the vision of god was platitudes like “it’ll be okay”, the simplest explanation would be that I hallucinated the event, perhaps from stress. That goes double if the god didn’t speak in audible syllables, but were simply a wordless voice in my head.

But okay, what if God gave me verifiable information that I couldn’t have come up with on my own, like “your girlfriend’s been shot; she has a .22 caliber bullet lodged between her third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, on the dorsal side”? (Feel free to come up with a better example.)

For one thing, I’d want hard evidence that this is really what happened. Human memory is notoriously unreliable; I’d trust video recordings and photos a lot more than my recollection. I’d want to see video of me telling the EMTs in the ambulance that there’s a bullet lodged between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, or at least an EMT report with “bystander says that…”, followed by X-rays or a doctor’s report that confirms what I said. The more specific the “diagnosis” from revelation, the better. Of course, even if we could establish that I somehow received information through mysterious channels, that still wouldn’t establish that it was a god who gave it to me (as opposed to, say, telepathic aliens, or whoever’s monitoring the Matrix-like world that I inhabit).

But if, after a few years, I started telling the story of how God told me where the bullet was, and I told the EMTs, the simplest explanation would be that I was misremembering: perhaps “God” had simply told me that “it’s going to be okay”; then at the hospital I saw the X-rays showing the bullet; and after a few years, my mind conflated the two events to make the event seem more astounding than it was.

Now, some people may say, “well, if you demand that much evidence, then of course you’re never going to believe in God!” But I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. I bet that a lot of the people making this complaint wouldn’t believe in unicorns just because they saw one at a time of stress. And say what you will about unicorns, but they’re more plausible than gods, since they don’t violate the laws of physics.

So really this last argument comes down to “I can’t muster the evidence that would convince you, so you need to lower your standards, because you really ought to believe in God.” Sorry, but no. I try to keep an open mind, but as the saying goes, if your mind is too open, people will stuff it full of garbage.

Congratulations, Matt and Tracie

Matt Dillahunty and Tracie Harris hosted the last episode of The Atheist Experience. Most of the show was taken up by a caller named Shane, arguing about morality.

Shane claimed that since he’s a human sinner, his moral sense is unreliable, which is why he follows God and God’s perfect morality. Tracie asked how Shane came to the conclusion that God is good, if Shane’s moral sense is unreliable. This led to the following exchange:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WrfWs52Kjk0

As Tracie correctly points out, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, omni(or even just reasonably-)benevolent god out there, then every time there’s a rape, that god either causes that to happen, or stands by and allows it to happen. Shane starts saying that the victim in this case is as evil as the rapist (I’m pretty sure this is an instance of the “all have fallen short of the glory of God” doctrine, by which it doesn’t matter whether you’re Albert Schweitzer or Adolf Hitler: both are scum in God’s eyes), and Matt hangs up on him, calling him a “piece of shit”.

Anyway, congratulations to Matt, Tracie, and the whole Atheist Experience team, since this got picked up by Raw Story, AlterNet, and even Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.

I thought the exchange was pretty much par for the course: they’ve had lots of theist callers who make despicable claims like this. So I’m not sure what happend this time, but hey, the show deserves all this attention and more.

At any rate, I went looking through the comments to see what the Beck fans (is there a name for people who read The Blaze? Surely not Blazemongers) had to say.

Witness1974
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 2:55am

The first thing a Christian has to come to terms with is the fact that he or she needs to be saved from the wrath of a Holy God. People who merit God’s mercy, of which there are none, do not need to be saved.

tonykeywest17
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 2:28am

No son of adam is innocent . ALL deserve death and HELL. If God in his justice leaves men to what the deserve – who are you to question him.

sisserydoo
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 7:45am

Human beings make distinctions between sin, God does not. In God’s eyes, all sin is sin.

This seems to repeat Shane’s point: that the rape victim is evil, and deserve’s God’s wrath. I rebut it thus:
Flipping the bird

john vincent
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 12:26am

God did not direct a plane into the twin towers; He did not light the match which caused a house to burn down, killing all inside; He did not order young Adam to kill children in a Conn. school; […] He certainly did not order a raping.

Commander8080
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 11:24am

The caller got it wrong. God does not interfere with mans free will. Therefore, if a person rape or does evil to another, God will not stop the act because he loves us so much not to interfere with our free will.

God may not have directed the 9/11 attacks, or the rape in question here. But if he exists, he did sit by and allow them to happen. This is Tracie’s point.

DogTags
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 8:22am

The hosts presented a false choice: God either sends rapist or stands back and does nothing. Implying that God is not good who would do either. What they ignore is that God didn’t create robots but moral agents who he gave the choice to obey or to do evil.

This is the old “God won’t interfere with free will” apologetic. The problem is, if you see a rape being committed, the rapist wants to exercise his free will to rape the victim, while the victim wants to exercise her free will to just go about her day. Whether you interfere or not, someone’s free will is being violated.

Big_John
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 9:54am

all the evil actions of men, as well as every good action, was foreordained by God so that everything that happens on this earth has a good purpose behind it.

So child rape serves a greater good, so God sitting back and watching it happen is somehow the right thing to do. But neither God, nor this commenter, can be bothered to explain what this greater good is.

AntBrain
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 1:09am

I think it’s laughable that an atheist promotes the idea of child rape as being evil. It just so happens that social evolution has engineered a construct that pretends child rape is immoral … but if child rape could be shown to improve human survival, the atheist is stuck.

azitdad
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 10:42am

Whoever ‘Shane’ was, he was no Christian. Christians don’t think like that.

Ah, good old No True Scotsman. I’ve missed him.

sdd757
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 7:53am

I’m really getting sick of this whole argument. God does not just break in and stop crime and evil. If miracles happened everyday then they would not be miracles.

I wonder if we should apply the same principle to the police: “You can’t expect the cops to try to solve every crime they hear about, because then law enforcement wouldn’t be, you know, special.”

I’m not saying that all of these comments are representatives of all theists. But Tracie is right: either God causes bad things to happen, or stands by and allows bad things to happen, despite both knowing about them and being able to prevent them. If anyone else did that, they’d be acting immorally. But the running theme in these comments is that God has to be good, so they come up with excuses for why our usual moral reasoning or standards of civilized behavior don’t apply in this case.

And once again, congratulations to The Atheist Experience. I have no idea why this particular segment was picked up by so many sources all of a sudden, but I hope it helps spread the word about a good show.

Hookers and Blow and Trimmed Sideburns

Somehow, by pinballing over the Internet, I ran across a post entitled Sexual Immorality and Five Other Reasons People Reject Christianity. It’s a rather odd list; if I were to make a Top Six list of why people turn away from Christianity and become atheists, it’d look very different from this.

At any rate, the last reason he cites is:

Now for the big one. Of all the motivations and reasons for skepticism that I encounter, immorality is easily the most common. In particular, sexual sin seems to be the largest single factor driving disbelief in our culture. Brant Hanson calls sex “The Big But” because he so often hears this from unbelievers: “’I like Jesus, BUT…’ and the ‘but’ is usually followed, one way or the other, with an objection about the Bible and… sex. People think something’s deeply messed-up with a belief system that says two consenting, unmarried adults should refrain from sex.” In other words, people simply do not want to follow the Christian teaching that sexual intercourse should take place only between and man and woman who are married, so they throw the whole religion out.

The easiest way to justify sin is to deny that there is a creator to provide reality with a nature, thereby denying that there is any inherent order and purpose in the universe.

Yes, I admit it: the real reason I’m not a Christian is that I want to have endless sex with depraved floozies while bathing in a swimming pool full of cocaine, and not trim my sideburns. What can I say? I have a weakness for cotton-polyester shirts.

I’ll add that I love to eat bacon, which is why I’m not Jewish. And I like to wash it down with hot tea with a splash of wine, which is why I’m neither Muslim nor Mormon. And having thetans turns mere masturbation into an orgy, which is why I’m not a Scientologist.

Hopefully these examples illustrate what’s wrong with Johnson’s argument: he’s arguing from the assumption that behavior X — in this case, various unspecified sexual practices — is bad because someone in authority arbitrarily decided that it was bad, and that the reason I reject that authority is that I like doing X too much.

Which is, of course, nonsense: if you’re like most people, you enjoy a cup of coffee or tea, or drink more caffeinated soda than your dentist would like, and this has nothing to do with your opinion of Joseph Smith, or any rejection of Elohim. Rather, it’s simply that drinking caffeinated beverages doesn’t do any real harm, and the benefits (including simple enjoyment of the taste) outweigh the downsides.

If you have, say, a shellfish allergy, then it certainly makes sense for you to stop eating shellfish, and maybe even to ask the people around you not to eat shellfish in your presence, depending how severe your allergy is. But saying that nobody should ever eat shellfish because my friend Lucille says not to is an unjustified imposition on people’s freedom. A moral rule should be based on the welfare of humans and other sentient beings — e.g., the enjoyment derived from eating a plate of scampi, the possible health benefits or drawbacks of eating shrimp, the pain of the farmed shrimp, and so on — and not simply “because Someone In Charge said so”. Accepting moral fiats from above is just lazy thinking.

(For more about Lucille, see the extended clip.)

If Johnson wants to argue that certain sexual behaviors cause harm to the well-being of humans or animals, and can back those arguments up with solid facts, I’m willing to listen. Heck, I can name a bunch of behaviors pleasing to the id that I don’t engage in, and I don’t think other people should, either. Rape is a no-brainer: no one wants to be violated, to be forced to do things against their will, and whatever pleasure the rapist might get is vastly outweighed by the victim’s desire not to be coerced. Cheating on one’s SO involves lying, which erodes the trust between people.

But a lot of Biblical moral rules are just given by fiat: why shouldn’t you eat clams? No reason. God just said so, that’s all.

Even when it gives a reason, as in Exodus 20:9-11, that reason is bogus: you should rest one day in seven because that’s how God did it. But hey, humans aren’t God. Maybe one in four, or one in eight would work better for humans. Too bad; that’s irrelevant.

I’ve run into the “you just want to sin” argument — or, more broadly, the “you reject my religion because you want to break its rules” argument — pretty often. Whenever I see it, I think: here is a person who hasn’t figured out a better basis for morality than “do what you’re told by the person in charge”.

No, Mr. Johnson. The reason some of us commit what you consider sins is not that we’re id-driven hedonists. It’s that we’ve looked at your system of morality and found it lacking. We can do better. Someday, I hope you’ll see that for yourself.

The Rise of the Nones

Due to a combination of laziness and everything blowing up at once at work, I wasn’t able to post about this earlier, so by now you’ve no doubt read all about the Pew forum’s poll report about the recent increase in the number of Americans with no religious affiliation, or “nones”.

You’ve seen this graph:

Growth of the Religiously Unaffiliated, from the Pew Research Center.

You’ve heard that for the first time, Protestants make up less than half of the US population. That there are more atheists, agnostics, and none-of-the-aboves than before, and that organized religions are losing members. That the nones lean toward the political left. That according to Bill Donohue we’re all a bunch of selfish, self-absorbed brats. So let me mention something else.

According to Pew’s chart, 2.4% of Americans adults call themselves atheists, 3.3% call themselves agnostics, and 13.9% are nothing in particular, neither atheist/agnostic, nor members of an organized religion, for a total of 19.6%. But the report also notes that

many of the country’s 46 million unaffiliated adults are religious or spiritual in some way. Two-thirds of them say they believe in God (68%).

which means that 32% of the unaffiliated don’t claim to believe in God. If my math is correct, the atheists comprise 12.2% of the unaffiliated, and agnostics are a further 16.8%; so atheists and agnostics together make up 29.1% of the unaffiliated. So even if we assume that none of the atheists or agnostics believe in God (probably a good assumption for atheists, perhaps not so good for agnostics), that still leaves us with 32% – 29.1% = 2.9% of “Nothing in particular”s who don’t believe in God, which presumably makes them atheists, even if they don’t call themselves that.

The last time I wrote about the American Religious Identification Survey, I noted a similar phenomenon. Except that then, the discrepancy between “people who don’t believe in God” and “people who call themselves atheists” was significantly larger.

Two obvious possibilities present themselves. It’s possible that ARIS and Pew are measuring different things, and that the numbers they report are only loosely related. But it’s also possible that people who don’t believe in God are more comfortable calling themselves atheists or agnostics; that the stigma attached to those words is disappearing. The difference between the ARIS and Pew surveys is the sort of thing I’d expect to see if that were the case.

Atheist Contributions


James Osborne (1834-1881) was an early settler of Seattle, who opened the Gem Saloon (seen in the illustration to the left). His obituary said that “He maintained a reputable saloon patronized by the best citizens of the type that patronized saloons.”[1]

In addition, in his will, he left money to the city to build a civic building, provided that the city contributed matching funds. Unfortunately, he was so filthy rich (like much of the American west, Seattle was founded by a bunch of people trying to make a quick buck) that the city couldn’t afford to match the funds until 1927, when they built the Seattle Opera House (see also Speidel).

Speidel also tells us:

The will specified, for one thing, that his brother-in-law—who had thrown him out of the house once—was not to get “one thin dime.” It also stated flatly that he forbade anyone to take his body into—or even near—any church and there were to be no religious ceremonies conducted at the funeral.

Instead he asked that the funeral be held at Yesler’s Pavilion, that a competent brass band be employed to liven up the occasion, and that a good free-thinker like Judge I. R. W. Hall be paid one hundred dollars for the oration … and failing Judge Hall, that “either Thomas Burke or W. H. White will do.” The services were to end with burial in Lakeview Cemetery by the Ancient Order of United Workmen.

So that we can truthfully tell you that the “father” of our Opera House was an atheistic saloon keeper from the Skid Road.


[1]: William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits, Nettle Creek Press, pp. 72-73.

FFRF Ad in NYT

The Freedom From Religion Foundation ran a full-page ad in the New York Times today. The ad takes the form of an open letter to Catholics, urging them to “quit the Roman Catholic Church”.

Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club? Why are you aiding and abetting a church that has repeatedly and publicly announced a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization, and to deny the right of all women everywhere, Catholic or not, to decide whether and when to become mothers? When it comes to reproductive freedom, the Roman Catholic Church is Public Enemy Number One. Think of the acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, social evils and deaths that can be laid directly at the door of the Church’s antiquated doctrine that birth control is a sin and must be outlawed.

Right on cue, BillDo is offended.

The ad blames the Catholic Church for promoting “acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, overpopulation, social evils and deaths.” It says the bishops are “launching a ruthless political Inquisition” against women. It talks about “preying priests” and corruption “going all the way to the top.” In an appeal to Catholic women, it opines, “Apparently, you’re like the battered woman who, after being beaten down every Sunday, feels she has no place else to go.”

Bill doesn’t rebut any of these charges. Presumably he doesn’t disagree with them; he just thinks it’s impolite for the FFRF to point out these problems.

And then, just to prove what a class act he is, there’s this:

FFRF is led by a husband and wife team, Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker. Fortunately for Gaylor, her mother did not follow through on the advice she gave women in her book, Abortion Is a Blessing.

Oh, Billy! Will your furious tantrums never cease to make me giddy with schadenfreude?