Religious Atrocities in the Age of Transparency

Daniel Dennett at the 17. Göttinger Literaturherbst, October 19th, 2008, in Göttingen, Germany. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sooner or later, every atheist blogger writes about religious atrocities (e.g., clergy sexual abuse). Howls of protest sound from religious readers as they insist that the behavior in question would have happened without religion and that it is unfair to characterize it as religious in nature. And while we acknowledge that i is true that something like sexual abuse certainly takes place outside of religious organizations, we also point out that it is the religious who continue to insist that they are morally superior to the rest of us. We may also address how clergy are put on pedestals and children are taught to trust and respect them in ways that we rarely see elsewhere. Sure, the teacher or Scout leader occupies a position of respect, but few can threaten one with hell for failing to keep a secret quite as convincingly as a priest.

Cepheus (Bitchspot) has been writing his Horror Show Sunday series for some time. In today's post, one about a Christian pastor's arrest on allegations that he sexually assaulted a 16 year-old girl during a private prayer session, he asks an important question:

So what do we do about this? I don’t know that there’s anything we can do, mostly because the people we need to convince not to trust these preachers are exactly the people who fall most heavily under their sway. If the flood of sex abuse cases in the media isn’t enough to keep parents from leaving their children with religious workers, I have no idea what is.

I suspect that this is one of those questions that almost every atheist blogger has asked. It screams out for a satisfactory answer.

I left a comment on Cephus' post in which I said,

The question of what we do about this is a great one. For now, I think that posts like this are an important part of the answer. We need to keep informing people that this crap continues to happen and that it happens more frequently than many realize. I consider spreading the word about this sort of thing to be an important public service.

I had something in mind when I wrote that: a YouTube video of Daniel Dennett's presentation from TAM 2014, "Can Churches Survive the New Transparency" (I've included the video below).

Daily Show Mocks Exorcism

I love The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and the clip below is an example of why. The clip reminds viewers that the Catholic Church is still performing exorcisms. I know you knew that; I'm not sure the entire audience did, and so I think that was an important contribution all by itself. The part where the traditional exorcist is trying to explain what is wrong with Skype exorcisms is fantastic, and so is the part where the guy doing Skype exorcisms agrees that doing exorcisms via Twitter would be "ridiculous." Love it!

The Daily Show
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My hope is that clips like this - even if they are entirely staged and neither of the priests featured take what they said seriously - will help more people recognize that one form of exorcism is as silly as the next and that the underlying belief in demons that guides these archaic rituals is absurd too.

To be sure, some will try to dismiss this as anti-Catholic. But this seems like an unfair allegation given that clips like this are merely holding up a mirror to reflect Catholic beliefs and practices. Accurately communicating what a group believes is hardly a form of bias.

Sadly, the belief in demonic possession and the practice of exorcism are not something we can afford to dismiss as mere jokes. Exorcism is a barbaric practice that causes real harm. I hope that mocking it and continuing to highlight its absurdity will help to hasten its demise. In the meantime, we also need to do more to protect people from those who would use it against them.

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Reducing Spam Comments

no spam! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I made a change to the commenting system here today. I'm not sure this will affect any of you, but I wanted to let you know about it just in case.

The Intense Debate commenting system appears to use a low-quality spam filter, and I've been seeing a sharp increase in the number of spam comments lately. This led me to disable what they call "guest commenting" to see if that would help. What this is supposed to do is require people to login using credentials from one of the following services before they can leave a comment: IntenseDebate, Wordpress, Facebook, or Twitter.

Since it seems like almost everyone commenting here (except the spammers and a few trolls) is already doing this, I'm hoping there won't be much of an impact.

The Atheist Community is Dead; Long Live the Atheist Communities

Flags of Coalition of the Radical Left supporters in a coalition rally in 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If is is true, as I believe it is, that atheism begins and ends with the lack of god belief, I suppose it makes sense that most atheists who write blogs will eventually address topics other than atheism. After all, how many times can one explain that one does not share the god belief of the majority? How many times can one criticize religious belief or promote atheism without repeating oneself? Sure, many of us could devote more time to supporting other atheists in various ways, but it seems almost inevitable that we will branch out to other topics (e.g., church-state separation, humanism, science education, skepticism, the importance of free expression in democratic societies). And as we do so, we are likely to experience the pull to comment on the behavior of other atheists as they do the same. Perhaps the narrowness of atheism assures that we will end up encountering and then dealing with atheists whose opinions differ from our own on a number of topics and whose tactics for addressing the issues they value will be quite different from our own.

Free Speech on Campus

US Secretary of State, Ms. Condoleezza Rice, speaking on climate change in Washington DC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My views on the importance of free expression and what threatens it have evolved over time. I do not have to go back more than a couple years to find posts I wrote on this topic with which I now disagree. This is one of the strengths of freethought - we can (and do) change our minds as a result of new experiences, knowledge, and the like. Not being attached to any particular dogma makes this much easier to do.

I've recognized that some of the more serious threats today come not from the political right but from the political left. I've discovered that some atheists are not just willing but eager to silence those who disagree with them on certain socio-political issues or do not share their priorities by resorting to public shaming, shunning, and intimidation (e.g., campaigns to get people fired for saying things they don't like). And I've seen massive changes taking place at institutions of higher learning that have been toxic to free expression (e.g., the idea that protecting students from hurt feelings is a vital part of the university mission).

In an editorial addressing the recent trend of public figures turning down requests to deliver commencement addresses at universities over concerns that students would protest their appearance, the Los Angeles Times' Editorial Board acknowledged that students have the right to protest the selection of graduation speakers, adding:

Still, the cascade of canceled speeches is worrying for several reasons. First, there is the uncompromising nature of the opposition: the demand that a speaker agree 100% with the protesters. This insistence on doctrinal purity is antithetical to the notion that a university ought to be an environment in which students, far from being protected from opposing views, are challenged to engage with them.