The Spectacle of Faith

As you may have come to realize I am not particularly fond of religion. In fact I'm not that fond of anyone telling me what I can or can't do. Although I know I'm not perfect and if I'm proven wrong then I'm happy to be corrected.

However, when an organisation tries to dictate how I, my friends or my fellow man should live their lives based on something so questionably bogus as the Bible and/or the rules they've made whilst listening to the voices in their head, well its hard not to question why anyone takes them seriously.

See I quite like politics for exactly the reason I don't like religion. Even when I don't agree with someones political point of view I know that through debate and discussion we the people can vote and fight to change laws and bills to suit the needs of the majority. I believe something similar is what Sam Harris means when he talks of a "Science of Morality".

When the organization tries to enforce their bronze-age doctrine on society behind the veil that they are the voice of an omnipotent creator of heaven and earth and their views on what is right and wrong cannot be questioned, well this starts to look an awful lot like a dictatorship. A dictatorship that spans ordinary political boundaries.

Then we hear that at the same time that this organization spins its "infallible" lies, it has been trying to cover up the rape and torture of innocent young children to protect the guilty, and not the innocent, so that the organization can continue to prosper, you have to ask why isn't society trying harder to bring these sick individuals to justice.

When it comes to anything else other than religion we the people stand up together as one and say that is not right, we do not want this in our society, and we put these people before the judicial system.

Josef Fritzel, Gary Glitter, Fred West, Baby P, Shannon Matthews, Jaycee Dugard are all names that we recognize because of their relation to child abuse scandals in recent history.

What is the difference between these stories and the Catholic Church?

Nothing is happening to the Catholic Church.

Below are some links for those who want to read up on just who truly horrible the Catholic Church really is:

For Years, Deaf Boys Tried to Tell of Priest’s Abuse

Pope May Be at Crossroads on Abuse, Forced to Reconcile Policy and Words

Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys

In Abuse Crisis, a Church Is Pitted Against Society and Itself

Abuse Case Offers a View of the Vatican’s Politics

Bring the Pope to Justice

A Woman’s Place Is In The Church

The Great Catholic Cover-Up

We Can't Let the Pope Decide Who's a Criminal

The Pope Is Not Above the Law

Tear Down That Wall

The pope should stand trial

Ratzinger is the perfect pope

GOD! I need a beer.

Life on Earth Arose Just Once

A great article by Tina Hesman Saey of Science News on the proof for one of the central components for the Theory of Evolution.

One isn’t such a lonely number. All life on Earth shares a single common ancestor, a new statistical analysis confirms.

The idea that life forms share a common ancestor is “a central pillar of evolutionary theory,” says Douglas Theobald, a biochemist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. “But recently there has been some mumbling, especially from microbiologists, that it may not be so cut-and-dried.”

Because microorganisms of different species often swap genes, some scientists have proposed that multiple primordial life forms could have tossed their genetic material into life’s mix, creating a web, rather than a tree of life.

To determine which hypothesis is more likely correct, Theobald put various evolutionary ancestry models through rigorous statistical tests. The results, published in the May 13 Nature, come down overwhelmingly on the side of a single ancestor.

Read the Article