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 Matter of Freedom

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool liberal like me I have some good news that you’ve probably already heard: women in Belfast, and the rest of Ireland if they travel, can now get an abortion at the Marie Stopes clinic.

Let’s not get excited though, because the law concerning abortion is a bit convoluted and very strict in Northern Ireland. In fact there is already an investigation into the legality of the clinic by the Irish government. In Northern Ireland abortions can only be performed if the life of the mother is in danger and require the agreement of two doctors. According to the BBC there are between 30 and 40 abortions on the NHS every year in Northern Ireland, more humane at least than the neighbouring Republic of Ireland where there is an absolute ban on abortions. A state of affairs which unsurprisingly results in many Irish women travelling to the UK to get an abortion.

An unfortunately necessary bit of hardship which is just as shameful as the trip many British people take to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. When such a primary and fundamental right of all people, the right to decide what happens to your own body and your own life, can only be salvaged by travelling to another country then your government has failed. It has failed in the only real responsibility any government has, which is to maintain a decent standard of living for its citizens, basic self-determination is the bare minimum any human should expect.

Why is it Ireland (both Northern and the ROI) that is lagging on this issue? This will surprise nobody, but I blame religion. The same “curdled Christianity”, to quote Terry Pratchett, that values ‘life’ as a concept with no consideration of the conditions into which that life is born. The facile concept of ‘sanctity of life’, ignoring whether the mother (who is hardly ever mentioned I notice) feels capable of raising a child, wants to raise a child, can afford to raise a child or was even raped (I know some American Republicans will contest that rape can result in pregnancy, but I assure you it can).

But all of the above obscures the real issue, any reason or biological realities are irrelevant. Even if someone has what I consider a terrible reason for abortion (think up your own, I know you can) then it is none of my business, it is none of yours. Not your priest, not the government, not your God, no one has the right to make that decision except the one who has to live with the consequences either of abortion or pregnancy.

We are none of us qualified to make that choice except in our own case. But the Irish government, along with the Irish religious, feel they can make this decision for every woman in Ireland. Arrogant fools.

A Taxing Situation

This is weird.

So apparently in Germany if you’re religious, that is if you are “officially registered” as a catholic, protestant or Jew, then you have to pay an extra 8% on your income tax. Apparently this was to compensate the churches when religious property was nationalised in the nineteenth century.

What.

Really? The German government assists in collecting a tax for religious organisations. This is ludicrous, how do you possibly justify this level of absurdity? These independent, religious organisations are being funded by taxes. The Catholic Church, one of the richest institutions on the planet, which has more palaces and works of art than it does priests without a criminal record, is funded by a tax, levied by the German government, on its German adherents.

What the fuck.

I really don’t know what to say to this. Aside from a gut reaction against any government being such close bedfellows with religions, why would any of these organisations need this, why would they want this, how are they allowed to get away with this? Was the collection plate not enough? Did some church roofs need fixing, did some awkward families need bribing? What ever happened to “helping the least of my brothers”? Are you expected to fund your journey to heaven personally now?

Well it’s funny you should ask, because the Catholic Church in Germany is apparently denying the sacrament to any Catholic who wants to opt out of this tax, for whatever reason.

Unless they pay the religious tax, Catholics will no longer be allowed receive sacraments, except before death, or work in the church and its schools or hospitals.

Without a “sign of repentance before death, a religious burial can be refused,” the decree states. Opting out of the tax would also bar people from acting as godparents to Catholic children.

Now the sacraments don’t mean very much to me, I prefer my biscuits with a bit more substance to them, and a religious burial would be meaningless (besides I’d rather be cremated), however both to those banning these things and those who are being prohibited from participating in them believe that these ceremonies are important, nay vital, to the state and destiny of their eternal soul. Jeopardising that for the sake of some tax revenue you should have anyway seems rather petty to me.

Indeed the German bishops don’t appear to have read their Bibles very closely at all. I would direct their attention to the story of the moneylenders in the temple (Gospel of Mark, Chapter 11, Verse 15), or the parable of the rich man and the kingdom of heaven (Gospel of Mark, Chapter 10, Verse 25), also did Jesus not say to his disciples “that they should take nothing for their journey… no money in their purse” (Gospel of Mark, Chapter 6, Verse 8)? Wanting to take a commission for salvation is not a very Christian thing to do whichever way you slice it. So why are the German bishops doing this, aside from gibbering insanity of course?

Alarmed by their declining congregations, the bishops were also pushed into action by a case involving a retired professor of church law, Hartmut Zapp, who announced in 2007 that he would no longer pay the tax but intended to remain within the Catholic faith.

…

“This decree makes clear that one cannot partly leave the Church,” Germany’s bishops’ conference said last week, in a decision endorsed by the Vatican.

Unusually I understand the logic here, it’s completely ludicrous as all religious logic is, but I see what they mean. They worry that those who take issue with the policies of the Church, such as covering up child rape, will stop paying the tax but will continue to take the sacrament as presumably they still believe in the Catholic faith. What the bishops intend, I conjecture, is to intimidate those who would make such a move with the terrible punishment of not having a wafer on Sunday.

It’s blackmail, pure and simple.

And it won’t work. My money says that for every discontented German Catholic that this pacifies there will be at least two who are so disgusted by the actions of these bishops that they leave the Church entirely, not paying any of the Church’s tithes or taxes, since that is what’s so important to the bishops. Only time will tell if I’m right though.

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.