This Month’s Morons

Jesus Non-existent Christ, I seem to have a habit of leaving this blog alone for stupidly long stretches. Ah well, let’s see if I can get caught up in one simple post.

The Guardian has a completely (from what I’ve seen) worthless series on ‘Evil’. I’ve only read the first installment  and that’s all I will read, because as far as I can see it’s a totally vacuous piece of nonsense presenting itself as religiously balanced and even handed while in fact steeped in Christianity right up to the eyeballs. The first in the series, aside from misattributing Epicurus’ Dilemma to Hume, is saturated in the masochistic Christian idea that to consider ‘evil’, a nebulous term the author doesn’t even attempt to nail down, is to contemplate “a darkness in all our hearts”. The simplistic idea that extends the fact that, as humans, we are capable both of extraordinary kindness and extraordinary cruelty and individualises it down to the little angle and the little demon sitting on your shoulders. I don’t have time for it.

The UK is going to elect Police and Crime Commissioners (a new non-job) on November 15^th. Something that I’m sure a lot of people here would be rather surprised about given the amount of fuss being made about it (i.e. none whatsoever). This is so ridiculous I’ll have a full post explaining it later.

The public apparently can’t see the letters Prince Charles sent to the government. Now I’m something of a staunch monarchist, especially when I see the Americans working themselves into a lather with their equivalent, but this is predicated on the royal family not actually doing anything. I’m not going to bore you with my theories about monarchy, but it’s clear that Charles is in a position of quite spectacular unearned privilege. There is absolutely no way anyone in government would pay any attention to the gullible jug-eared chimp if it weren’t for the accident of his birth, exploiting that privilege by getting special attention from the government, even if he doesn’t realise that that’s what he’s doing, is one of the few things that would make me republican (in the anti-monarchy sense, of course).

Giles Fraser has an article which I suspect has been horribly mistitled by the Guardian, since it only mentions utilitarianism in the last paragraph, the rest of which is a rather innocuous piece on the importance of people focused morality. I can only assume from this piece that Giles has no idea what utilitarian moral theory is.

The Pope’s canonised some more saints, a practice I always find amusing since it fills the news articles with nonsense like “certified miracle”.

Hopefully this means I can forget about October now.

A Surfeit of Latin

So I saw a notice in my subscription box saying that the Pope was worried about Latin use. Naive and optimistic as I am I assumed that Ratzinger was concerned that the eternal and universal (for that is what Catholic means) might possibly have stuck to Latin, a two thousand year old dead language of interest only to antiquarians and roman tour guides, for slightly too long. Perhaps it had finally got through to the top the hierarchy, by the well-known trickle-up effect, that bloody no one speaks Latin anymore! It doesn’t surprise me that attendance is falling off if you only tell the pews “same time next week” in gibberish.

Alarmed by a decline in the use of Latin within the Catholic Church,

Oh.

Ah well, maybe expecting the church to become more modern might be rather silly.

Pope Benedict is planning to set up a Vatican academy to breathe new life into the dead language.

This is much more like the church we know and despise, not just suck in the medieval age, but determined to drag the rest of us there with them.

Apparently Pope Palpatine

Vader quote, not Palpatine… Ack!

is alarmed by the fact that Latin use is falling, even in the Church. I mean really, this is outrageous! Priests modernising? Not stuck in the past? We must put a stop to this!

Another thing that sticks in the Pope’s craw is the translation of delocalisation (obviously not a word in Latin) as delocalizatio. Apparently this is too easy to understand though.

it simply makes Italian and English words sound Latin, rather than being more creative with the language

Quite right, it’s not as though the Church is here to help its followers or explain things to them. You would think, with Church attendance the way it is the Pope would be more concerned with making the Church more accessible, rather than cutting it off behind layers of obsolete arcana and dead verbiage.

You might say this isn’t particularly important, and you might be right, but this approach is emblematic of the whole sorry, shambling mess that is the Catholic Church.

My Piece on A+

I don’t suppose I’ve ever been a ‘dictionary atheist’; I’ve always thought that atheism had to be either an expression of something (scepticism, humanism, disaffection etc.) or a wake-up call and path to something. A lot of people disagree though. I’m not sure why they disagree, but they do, they’ve attacked what they see as ‘mission drift’ which as far as I can see consists of atheists talking about anything other than religion or other superstitions. Misogyny should only be discussed when the Catholic Church is doing it, bad science is something creationists do not us, feminism is a dirty word, as is patriarchy. Because apparently positing a conspiracy where men deliberately plot to oppress women (even though that’s not what the patriarchy is) is insane, but claiming that evil priests are lying to children (even though many of them sincerely believe they are acting for the best) is perfectly self-evident.

As I said I don’t know why people disagree, I could hazard a few guesses but this isn’t the place. I will say though that I think we started to believe our own rhetoric. Think back to the good/bad (delete as appropriate) days when atheism was basically the ‘four horsemen’ writing books and debating, it was often said in these debates that atheism just means ‘lack of belief in god’ and that the speaker couldn’t represent all atheists. All of which was true, but for a lot of people we started applying this to capital-A-Atheism, or movement atheism if you prefer.

How did that work? What was the ‘movement’ about? Separation of church and state? Just saying “we exist!”? All worthy causes I’m sure, but this can’t work as a movement, people who agree on one thing can’t work together if that’s all they agree on. Yes we got Surly Amy and Greta Christina and Matt Dillahunty and JT Eberhard and we had Hitchens. But we also got The Amazing Atheist and Thunderf00t and Elevator-guys and people who take up-skirt photos and DJ Grothe (on a bad day). These people aren’t working for the same thing.

So I’m glad for what Jen McCreight, Rebecca Watson, Ophelia Benson, Surly Amy, Greta Christina have done (and the rest of the FTBorg I don’t have time to mention). I’m glad they stated the obvious about harassment and found a way to make the dipshits among us nail their colours to the mast. I’m constantly astounded at the level of abuse they get, and amazed by the bile they can weather. They’re doing so much more than I can, or probably ever will, and I’m so sorry for that.

But I can say this; thank you. Thank you for taking so much flak, thank you for doing what we all should have done so long ago. Thank you especially for Atheism+, somewhere where we can have the discussion we always should have been having; how we can make this world better. Because it’s the only one we’ve got.

Thank you for reminding me what atheism means.