American Nuns > Vatican

I think it’s time for a new schism.

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella organization which involves 80% of U.S. Catholic sisters, is having the hammer brought down on it by the Vatican for not being a pack of bigoted assholes. I wish that were an exaggeration:

The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”

Yeah, I’ll bet they say things like, “A mother of four should not be left to die of pregnancy-related causes.”

The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.

Yep. Women who support universal health care need to STFU, while old guys in fancy robes, who would rather let Americans die by the millions of preventable causes than tolerate birth control coverage, are the “authentic teachers of faith and morals.”

“I’m stunned,” said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice lobby founded by sisters. Her group was also cited in the Vatican document, along with the Leadership Conference, for focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping “silent” on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Oh, yes. Oh fucking yes. The nuns care too much about alleviating poverty, and not enough about demonizing gays or attacking women who think they get to control their reproduction.

Oddly enough, I don’t even recall Jesus saying anything about homosexuality or abortion. This is the guy who hung out with a bunch of single men and a woman of ill-repute. He did, however, have some strong opinions about how we treat the poor.

Sisters, you all are so much cooler than your church. Break away from those ridiculous bigots. Start your own religion: the Church of Actually Giving a Shit About Humanity. All the Catholics who are horrified at the Church for their homophobia, misogyny and support of child-raping priests but who keep making noises about “social justice” and “ritual” will have a better place to give their money and time. The ones who want their religion to be more focused on persecuting gays, letting pregnant women die, and preaching against using condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, can fend for themselves.

You’re better than they are, and they’re not even trying to hide how threatened they are by that. Let those assholes rot.

Puah Institute, what is that I don’t even.

You may have heard about the medical conference in Israel that’s banning women from speaking at the event? Specifically, the gynecology-focused conference where women aren’t allowed to speak on stage?

The annual Innovations in Gynecology and Halacha conference of the Puah Institute for Medicine and Halacha is scheduled for Wednesday. Some 1,000 men and women are expected to attend the conference, which is geared to the Modern Orthodox and haredi Orthodox communities. Male and female participants are separated by dividers in the conference hall.

The conference has been held for the last 12 years, but this marks the first time that the absence of female speakers has become an issue. Women do not serve as speakers, according to the organization, in order to insure the participation of the haredi Orthodox, who are generally wary of medical advancements in fertility treatments.

Their rationale is this:

1. Haredi don’t like to see women speak to male audiences.

2. Haredi are ambivalent about fertility treatments.

3. The Puah Institute wants Haredi doctors to attend this conference and learn about advancements in fertility treatments, therefore,

4. Women must be strictly separated from men at the Gynecology & Halacha Conference.

Notice that no one is trying to keep women from seeing men speak on stage. It’s fine for female doctors to sit in the audience while men make presentations. It’s the question of male doctors watching presentations by female doctors on stage that’s a problem.

Am I missing something here? If letting women show themselves in public is such a problem for Haredi men, then…maybe, Haredi men should not be gynecologists? Think about this for a second: if it’s “immodest” for a man to see a woman speaking on stage about medical advancements, then how is it the least bit acceptable for a man to put his hands on the private parts of a woman whom he may have just met that day?

It occurs to me that if Haredi men followed through on their “modesty” requirements and just left gynecology to female doctors, this conference wouldn’t be an issue.

(Yes, I know: when they talk about “modesty,” they’re really talking about keeping women in the kitchen, which means female doctors are only tolerated because of secular pressures.)

All that said, though, the controversy is totally worth the trouble, owing to this hilarious fauxpology from Puah:

“We are sorry that instead of appreciating the great advances we have merited to see in women’s health in general, and in particular within the religious sector, as a result of our conferences, there are cynical, aggressive elements who try to block us by using the prevailing public ambience,” the organization said on its website. “These elements are riding on the back of the Puah Institute in order to advance their personal agenda.”

Shorter version: “You bitches are just JEALOUS! Waaaaah!”

 

It’s like Phyllis Schlafly let her cat dance on her keyboard!

According to ThinkProgress, Crazy-Eyes Bachmann is the first occupant of the GOP Clown Car to sign onto the FAMiLY LEADER pledge (no, I am not making up that random non-capitalization), a little manifesto for The Handmaid’s Tale with a wee side of V for Vendetta theocracy.

I have found a copy of the full text of the pledge, and I’ve read it so you don’t have to. Here are some selected highlights!

Faithful monogamy is at the very heart of a designed and purposeful order – as conveyed by Jewish and Christian Scripture, by Classical Philosophers, by Natural Law, and by the American Founders – upon which our concepts of Creator-endowed human rights, racial justice and gender equality all depend.

Yeah, that same Jewish and Christian scripture that portrayed powerful patriarchs with multiple wives and hordes of concubines. “Natural Law” just means they want more juicy sperm-meets-egg goodness. The “American Founders” would have to be some weird secret society I’ve never heard of, as our Founding Fathers weren’t really concerned with “family” “values.” We’ll see what these idiots mean by “racial justice” and “gender equality” in just a moment.

Mr. Frothy-Mix: Maximum wrong in minimum word count.

Santorum gives us his thoughts on why liberals care about marriage equality:

“The reason the left has gone after same-sex marriage is because it’s a two-fer,” Santorum said. “When you redefine marriage, you cheapen marriage. You make it into something less valuable, less special … [and] it is a sure bet that will undermine faith.”

Liberals advocate for marriage equality because it cheapens marriage AND it undermines faith?

That’ll be news to my local LGBT group who are full-throatedly in support of civil marriage equality and who are mostly church-going Christians.

Maximum fauxpology in minimum word count.

Di Tzeitung, the Brooklyn Hasidic newspaper that Photoshopped Sec. of State Clinton from an important photograph, expects us to swallow this:

The allegations that religious Jews denigrate women or do not respect women in public office, is a malicious slander and libel. The current Secretary of State, the Honorable Hillary R. Clinton, was a Senator representing New York State with great distinction 8 years. She won overwhelming majorities in the Orthodox Jewish communities in her initial campaign in ’00, and when she was re-elected in ’06, because the religious community appreciated her unique capabilities and compassion to all communities. The Jewish religion does not allow for discrimination based on gender, race, etc. We respect all government officials. We even have special prayers for the welfare of our Government and the government leaders, and there is no mention of gender in such prayers.

Boilerplate spin-doctoring, how dare you accuse our religion of sexism, our peeps totally voted for Sen. Clinton for both her terms, and so on.

In accord with our religious beliefs, we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status. Publishing a newspaper is a big responsibility, and our policies are guided by a Rabbinical Board. Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.

Now let’s parse this out a bit.

In accord with our religious beliefs, 

Because religion has been invoked, we are supposed to turn our brains off and accept that it’s all nice and fine. We wouldn’t want to criticize a religion, now would we? It’s not civil. We need to watch our tone.

we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status.

They do publish photos of men, however, so erasing the women from those images simply acts like they shouldn’t exist. Out of sight, out of mind.

Publishing a newspaper is a big responsibility, and our policies are guided by a Rabbinical board.

The newspaper avoids responsibility by invoking the Rabbinical board, while trusting that we not dare criticize the board for its editorial policies.

Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, 

It’s fine to publish pictures of men, but images of women are immodest. Because they’re women, after all.

and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention.

How does one define “disparaging to women” so that acting like they weren’t there doesn’t fit?

We apologize if this was seen as offensive.

And they close with the classic, never-fails faux-pology! They’re so sorry they tried being quietly misogynistic and got called out for it.

Hats off, Di Tzeitung! Packing that much bullshit into so few words takes a lot of practice!

Those liberal atheist professors are coming for your sweet Christian babies!

Via Sullivan, Conor Friedersdorf asks why so many Americans come out of higher education with their religious faith considerably eroded. Apparently, Dennis Prager is all concerned that the university system is ruled by an evil cabal of liberal heathen professors using their vicious mind-controlling powers to churn out whole generations of left-wing secularists.

To me, there are better explanations for the fact that “the more university education a person receives, the more likely he is to hold secular and left-wing views.” One is that people who attend college leave home. That is to say, they leave their church, the community incentives to attend it, and the watchful eye of parents who get angry or make them feel guilty when they don’t go to services or stray in their faith. Suddenly they’re surrounded by dorm mates of different faiths or no faith at all. For many of these students, it turns out that their religious behavior was driven more by desire for community, or social and parental pressure, than by deeply held beliefs. Another reason education correlates with secularism is that secularists are more likely to seek advanced degrees, partly because they’re more focused than their religious counterparts on career.

Here we have two (not incompatible) theories: one, it isn’t necessarily the university that makes young people less religious, it’s the removal from the student’s sheltered home environment and sudden access to a diversity of beliefs. Two, the causal relationship is in the opposite direction. It’s not that education causes secularism, but that secularism on the individual level leads to more education.

There is further insight in the comments. For example:

Conor – you’re trying too hard! The negative correlation between education and religious belief holds up across countries, and the American phenomenon of traveling away home for college is much more prevalent here than in most other western countries where the same correlation can be observed.

The answer is much simpler. Education is a proxy for intelligence, and the more intelligent a person is, the less likely they are to hold religious beliefs.

Since education is a profoundly imperfect proxy for intelligence (particularly higher education in a country where attending university is prohibitively expensive for many people), I’m going to disagree with the second paragraph and instead focus on the first. It has indeed been observed that there is a very obvious negative correlation between educational attainment and religiosity, but it’s bigger than educational attainment. There is a major positive correlation between poverty/inequality, low educational attainment, and a whole host of social dysfunctions…with high religiosity. This is not to say that religion causes social problems (although one does have to wonder about the socioeconomic effect of teaching whole countries full of people that using birth control makes Baby Jesus cry), just that they tend to go hand-in-hand at the population level. I’m more inclined to think that poverty leads to social problems, and the insecurity of living in the midst of those problems leads to higher religiosity.

Thus, could it be (at least partly) that Americans who attend university are more affluent to begin with, and therefore tend to be less reliant on religion? It would be interesting to compare the data on the relationship between educational attainment and religious participation between wealthier students (whose parents can afford to send them to college), and poorer students (using scholarships and need-based aid to pay for school) and see what patterns emerge. It would also be interesting to investigate Friedersdorf’s first hypothesis and compare the data between students who attend school far away from home and those who either live close enough to commute or who go home every weekend. It would still be necessary in that case to control for household income, as out-of-state tuition and out-of-home living quarters both make higher education much more expensive.

Furthermore, there’s also the power of critical thinking; other commenters have described how their post-secondary educations gave them the tools to start thinking for themselves, whereas their religious upbringings focused on believing what they were told, even if it didn’t make sense. Those are the “ill-defined, superhuman powers to shape the minds of its charges” (in Friedersdorf’s words) which Prager apparently fears our university system wields.

Batshit of the Day!

Question: answered!

(Warning: clicking on the link is likely to make you hate your fellow Americans.)

Gee, it only took God 70 years to punish the wicked Japanese for Pearl Harbor. Old man’s losing his touch. I guess that means I won’t be punished for my premarital sex, heathenism and foul language until I’m well into my 90s, by which point I’ll be lucky to be alive anyway. No, no, wait, I’ve got it! God will punish my pro-choice arguing by giving my grandchildren cancer in their 30s. That’s the way it works, right?

Damn, you people suck so hard. We need God for morality like we need cotton candy for nutrition.

No, Scientology, you are not the underdog.

*blinks*

Your blogger just got finished with several hours of reading Lawrence Wright’s article on the Church of Scientology in the New Yorker, told mainly through the experiences of recent apostate Paul Haggis. (Note to self: trying to read a piece of that length all in one go just shows how pathetic my attention span really is. Where’s that online Adderall I keep hearing about?)

This is my favorite part:

I asked Haggis why he had aligned himself with a religion that so many have disparaged. “I identify with the underdog,” he said. “I have a perverse pride in being a member of a group that people shun.” For Haggis, who likes to see himself as a man of the people, his affiliation with Scientology felt like a way of standing with the marginalized and the oppressed. The church itself often hits this note, making frequent statements in support of human rights and religious freedom. Haggis’s experience in Scientology, though, was hardly egalitarian: he accepted the privileges of the Celebrity Centre, which offers notables a private entrance, a V.I.P. lounge, separate facilities for auditing, and other perks. Indeed, much of the appeal of Scientology is the overt élitism that it promotes among its members, especially celebrities. Haggis was struck by another paradox: “Here I was in this very structured organization, but I always thought of myself as a freethinker and an iconoclast.”

Church of Scientology, the underdog?

No. Just…no.

We could sit around in our armchairs and talk until we’re all blue in the face over whether Scientology’s belief system is more absurd than that of any older, more accepted religion. I am not interested in having that conversation. What I will point out is that one of Scientology’s most effective strategies—perhaps the organization’s central act of genius—is that it is so happy to be the new religion of the rich and famous. If we want to talk about its adherents being marginalized and oppressed, we can surely look at Sea Org volunteers, who are systematically controlled, abused and enslaved by the Church of Scientology. I’ll give y’all a hint: you don’t get to be the religion of the marginalized and oppressed when it’s the leadership of the Church that’s doing the marginalizing and oppressing.

Being a Scientologist in Los Angeles doesn’t make you an underdog. It just makes you another one of Those Assholes.

What I find most entertaining (and by entertaining I mean frightening) about the history of a group like this (see also: Mormonism) is that it takes so little substance to create a new religion. No miracles, no good works, no ancient relics, just come up with a weird story, put it out there, and wait for folks to start latching on. Once you get a critical mass of followers, they take care of the hard work of recruitment, indoctrination, and enforcement. It’s a perpetual feedback loop; a brilliant system. If I published Charlinder’s Walk as anything other than fiction, how many people would think I was a Prophet, and how would they determine who would be among the select few to survive the coming pandemic and start the world over again?

Let me paint you all a picture

A young-ish single woman who happens to run a blog is enjoying (enduring?) a grayish, quiet weekend in her house. Conscious that she has not been posting to her blog as frequently as she used to (she still blames the Internet for failing to supply her with interesting blog material), she heads over to one of her favorite science/skeptic sites, RD.net, where she finds two articles, this one and this one, which both essentially say the same thing. The message on both sides, though with somewhat different tone and intentions, is that atheists don’t have enough children. That we need to be more like religious people and have more babies, or else we’ll all disappear.

The blogger reads these articles, takes another sip from her drink, and yawns.

Don’t Make Us Uncomfortable, Yet Again

PZ Myers brings us the news that atheists are still being horribly cruel, militant, strident, and shrill to those poor, marginalized people of faith.

Look at this: a group of atheists attended a city council meeting to protest (politely, of course) prayer before meetings and ten commandments signs, and they were threatened with expulsion for the terrifying t-shirts they were wearing. They bore a slogan that other attendees complained about as “offensive”. That slogan was simply One nation, indivisible.

The phrase “Under God” wasn’t actually in the Pledge of Allegiance until the 1950s, when Sen. McCarthy succeeded in making the whole country shit their collective pants at the thought of us having anything in common with those godless Commies, but of course that’s one more thing we’re not allowed to say. It makes the nice god-fearing folk terribly upset to learn historical facts.

I’m inclined to agree with PZ; there should be no internal hand-wringing over atheists’ lack of civility. Anything we do short of stop being atheists is going to upset someone. They don’t want us to play nice and mind our language; they want us to disappear.