About Polly Unsaturate

A lady of leisure. Working interferes with my hobbies, so I dont do it.

Vestments of the Devout

Posted on Thu, 13 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

The phrase “devout Catholic” appears so often in the news bulletins recently that it has started to intrigue me. The words just seem to go together like, well, any phrase where two words almost always appear together.

It seemed worth seeing how many instances there were on the Internet. Google.com came up with about 353,000, modest by Google standards. “Devout Christian” has only 452,000, suggesting that the Catholic Church does indeed hold sway over the reportedly devout.

“Devout Muslim” has 237,000, catching up fast with the RC showing (and putting the residual 99,000 unspecified Christians well into the deist devotion also-ran camp.) Buddhists 65,500, Hindus 30,100, Jews 36,500.

(Doh. “Devout jews” with an s actually gets 37,200, whereas “devout Catholics” with an s only gets 96,000. Buddhists now have a whopping 96,600. What is Google playing at? Surely the s should bring up all the singular devotees and add some more? But wait “devout catholics” is now bringing up 96,600. I suspect Google is playing silly buggers and giving me whatever number it feels like.

Taking the quote strings off exposes even greater devotion. Devout Catholics are up to 1,750,000, with the singular devout Catholic at 1,730,000. I begin to suspect that Googling is not much of an exact science. Shouldn’t Google at least replicate its own results when you repeat a search less than a minute later?)

“Devout atheist” even brings up 30,200. Quite an impressive tally, especially for a phrase being used almost purely ironically. In your face, Rastafarians, with a mere 612, or Jains, with your miserly 434 devotees.

In fact Adherents.com has the top three (real-world – rather than Google) belief systems as:

# Christianity: 2.1 billion
# Islam: 1.5 billion
# Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion

.
(Mild W00t. Those Red-A t-shirt sales could be onto a winner after all.)

The BBC suggests that the Catholic Church claims 1,086 billion adherents. Its dominance of Googled Christian devotion is certainly disproportionate.

I am still no closer to understanding why Catholics are pretty well always said to be “devout.”

Maybe the “devout” word is disproportionately associated with Catholics and Muslims because these religions’ USP involves having a personal God who needs lots of sycophancy to stave off tendencies to random smiting?

Sometimes, of course, the phrase is used to portray any Catholic as incapable of doing wrong. This applies only in exact reverse to Islam. Devout Muslims tend to be seen as fanatics.

Naturally, this post can’t appear without at least one reference to the crimes of those Catholics so “devout” that they joined the priesthood. In case this is a surprise to anybody, see Catholic Action’s.

The numbers of victims are huge, according to Joan Smith, writing in the Independent, in January

Three years ago, a report commissioned by the American Catholic church admitted that more than 10,000 children, most boys, had been abused by priests.

I make that one for every 35 “devout Catholic” posts picked up by Google.

Of course, if it wasn’t for their families’ sincere “devotion” to the Church, these kids would never have been put in such a position and the priests would never have escaped unchallenged for decades.

Extinction

Posted on Wed, 12 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

You might be a tad depressed by today’s news item frrom the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Here’s an extract from their press release:

Life on Earth is disappearing fast and will continue to do so unless urgent action is taken, according to the 2007 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
There are now 41,415 species on the IUCN Red List and 16,306 of them are threatened with extinction, up from 16,118 last year. The total number of extinct species has reached 785 and a further 65 are only found in captivity or in cultivation.

Obviously, for creationists it’s a simple matter to solve. Just pray loads to the big guy to create another few thousand species. That’s bound to work. And anyway, humans are above the animal kingdom aren’t they so we probably don’t depend on biodiversity to survive. Etc.

Unfortunately, for the rest of us, who are pretty confident that this world is all there is, it’s not so easy to face the the news that, for instance, “apes, corals, vultures, dolphins are all in danger” or that “99% of threatened species are at risk from human activities.”

There’s an interactive map that links to case studies of some dying species on your continent.

Fun, not. Sorry.

Satano-Christian link farm

Posted on Wed, 12 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

There was a link to an anti-Harry Potter blog in a post on the New Atheist blog a while back – 27 July, in fact. It takes me a while to catch up…

But it was still too good to pass up. Although it’s pretty obviously a joke. Well, I mean a deliberate joke here. Although that would be a pity, because it would be much funnier if it wasn’t.

The site is called Exposing satanism Here’s a representative sample:

I have heard many bad things about these books and movies, there would be countless instances of witchcraft, cursing, brewing of drugs made by boiling alive babies pulled from the earth, sexual congress with goats and many more things not fit for young readers’ and viewers’ eyes, but what I found was much worse still than I had feared.

(I haven’t seen Harry Potter 3 yet, but the goat thing suggests a change in style of several orders of magnitude.)

I’m just smugly thinking to myself “All very amusing but it’s a bit too over the top to be a credible parody” when I spot a link to something called Christian Resources Net Directory with a suggestion to vote for this site as a top Christian site.

“What a spiffing wheeze!” I think, momentarily transported to an alternate 1940s boarding school universe. “I will vote for this fine parody site as my top Christian site.”

Gratifyingly, on CRN this is indeed Number One, with an impressive number of votes (5462), although I must confess that my own inept attempts at keeping the right Firefox tab open increased the total by 3.

What other gems hide behind that CRN list of links to Christian sites? I try “creation vs evolution”. Only one link and that it is the Answers in Genesis This concept would work very well if you are trying to do a homework assignment with questions like “Name the band that Phil Collins used to be the drummer of?” Otherwise, it’s quite difficult to see what use it would be so I’ll skip it. I don’t know enough about Genesis to even frame any more questions. It’s just not my style of music.

What about cults? That has an impressive 6 category entries. (Impressive because most categories have 0.) Bah, the first two are links to the site that took me there in the first place. Skip them.

Altruistic or Cult claims to be:

Confronting the altruistic values of Christ to the Seventh-day Adventist Church while recovering from their delusive power strugglings of falsified teachings

Huh? Does that have a meaning? In the site preface, the language is no closer to English:

This book is being printed of necessity for all such as it may pertain to, and to all others of public freedom of speech and expression; believing and advocating these liberties as equalitarian, and further refuting the idealist concepts and butcherings of the Way, Truth and Life of Jesus Christ – the authentic Christian’s Saviour, Master and Friend.
Like most cults, Seventh-day Adventist cultic practices have identical terminological definitions similar to doctrinal prerequisites – but diction them abstractedly different in contextual realism and verity to Biblical interrogations and conductive evaluation – signifying an astringent and interpretive critical analysis from Biblical unmixtured sequencing and paradynamical reasoning of common sense.

The literary reference here must be that baffling spam that floods your email inbox with random collections of verbs and nouns to trick you into opening a Trojan attachment, while convincing the spam filter that it’s a real email because it uses words that are in the dictiionary. (Some of them anyway, although maybe not as the same part of speech.) Oh, bugger. I realise that I’ve already gone to this site and of my own free will. I’ve probably opened my PC to yet another incursion.

What about Bible – The real world then? Wasn’t that the name of a TV “reality” programme? The Biblical version, perhaps disappointingly, doesn’t stick a load of teenagers in a shared flat and watch them argue about the interpretation of Leviticus 17:4.

The page just has a quote from Revelations and a few links to other similar pages with even less content. They all have shedloads of Google-Ads though, maybe to trick unthinking Christians into assuming that these are in fact the site content. It’s clearly meant as a parable, then. It’s saying “Welcome to the real world, kids. It’s run by Mammon.”

Charmed as I am by the idea of Ex-witch Australia, it hasn’t had a post since January. Its posts start with the quaint “G’day” just in case you doubt its antipodean ex-witch authenticity.

Watchman Fellowship is so visually busy it’s hard to see what it’s about. It’s got a montage of celebs with cultic associations and a list of their names. Is it dedicated to saving celebs from cults, then? No, its “mission” statement says it’s an

independent, nondenominational Christian research and apologetics ministry focusing on new religious movements, cults, the occult and the New Age.

The most common request Watchman Fellowship receives is for advice on how to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with friends and families who are members of cults and new religions. We are also often asked for recommendations on the best resources to prepare for, or use in, evangelism. In response, we’ve created these special sections linking to some of our best resources to help you in reaching out to friends and loved ones.

There follows a list of “sections” on “Witnessing to Jehovah’s Witnesses”, “Witnessing to Mormons”, “Understanding those in the New Age” and “Recovering from Spiritual Abuse.”

Witnessing to Witnesses? It’s got to be a tongue twister. Not that I can’t improve on the original. Try saying “Witness witless witnessing to witless Witnesses” aloud a few times. Fast. Ha. Couldn’t, could you?

Bloody Hell. You have to buy these special sections to find out what’s in them. And there I was admiring the almost uniquely altruistic lack of Google Ads. But I didn”t pay enough attention to the forest of other ads lost in the jumble of the page. (I have to say “almost unique” beacuse the antipodean former magic user seems advert-challenged, to his/her credit.)

Which topic brings me neatly to a link at the bottom of the Bible-the Real World page. A link to the Top 1000 Christian Sites. Top thousand, that was. The heart sinks as the mind boggles.

JCSM’s Top 1000 Christian Sites is a free, traffic sharing program. We welcome the best Christian sites in the world, so we can bless them and share traffic with them.
Join for free or visit one of the sites below, today!

There aren’t a thousand, yet mercifully. The lowest ranked site is in the 109 position. Its stats make depressing reading indeed. It would possibly constitute cyber-bullying to actually post its url here but I have to tell you that its average weekly number of page views is 0.1. Its total number of page views EVER seems to be 3 and it’s not a new site.

Well, you will be pleased to note that Christian-esque charity exists even in the cold rationalist heart. I clicked.

Best friends forever

Posted on Tue, 11 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

What is it about dogs? The evidence suggests that the human race is bent on getting revenge on the dog species for our traditional fear of wolves.

A true horror story involving a 5-year-old girl and an abused dog that killed her has made chunks of the news unwatchable since New Year’s Eve. This story has come to an end with the acquittal of her grandmother for negligent manslaughter but “killer dogs” still remain an issue.

Dog fighting is an underground activity for which dogs are specifically bred and “trained” Banned dogs sometimes get seized, whenever there is spurt of public concern. The dogs usually get killed, unsurprisingly, given that they have been turned into blameless homicide machines. In that particular story, it is claimed that:

Two dogs, described as dangerous by the USPCA, training equipment and manuals were seized in the Village area.
The raids followed information received after a recent Spotlight/Panorama programme.
The 17-month investigation uncovered 15 illegal dog fighting gangs in Northern Ireland.

15? In Northern Ireland? Population? According to Wikipedia, it has the population of reasonable-sized city, 1,710,300.

I suppose dog-fighting is a minor misdemeanour in a place where murder and kneecapping are everyday experiences. Still, 15 dog-fighting gangs seems a high number for what you would hope was very much a minority interest, given that they would also need a pretty sizeable supporting population of willing attenders at dog-fights.

I am not suggesting the Northern Irish are any more psychopathic than the general population of the UK, here. Where I live, the number of dogs that exist solely to look brutal when snarling at the leashes of would-be “gangstas” almost defies belief.

I don’t want to go down the route of rightly-discredited Freudian bullshit here but I will anyway. The way that people use dogs speaks too loudly about their own feelings about being male or female. Or, more precisely, their fear of not being “masculine” or “feminine” enough to fit the current stereotypes.

The cupiditous-moron-model female carries about an offensively “cute” mini-child dog, with a bow on its head. She’s saying “Look at me. I’m so cute and cuddly and loving. And I’m so appealingly childlike that I carry round a living teddy.”

The would-be-tough-brute-model male drags around a creature that looks as if it’s been dragged up from the Hammer-horror pits of hell. He’s saying “Look at me. I’m so macho and tough that only I can handle this rabid cur. I’m basically an animal myself.”

Yes, it’s tragically pathetic, but I also suspect that it shows why getting ever greater control over human reproduction is potentially very dangerous. We are basically not a very rational species.

If dogs had the level of rationality that we (often mistakenly) imagine that humans have, they would be cursing those ancestral wolves who traded life with their own packs for the easy pickings they could get from allying themselves to our species.

Does anyone else feel unnerved seeing our species gaining more and more control over what our descendants become, when they see what a dog’s breakfast we’ve made of the humble dog? In this context, there was a very short Sunday Herald article by Dawkins that I really have to take issue with. He was makinga point that the association of Hitler with eugenics shouldn’t in itself stop us contemplating it. He said that

But if you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability? Objections such as “these are not one-dimensional abilities” apply equally to cows, horses and dogs and never stopped anybody in practice.

There are two points here. Firstly, humans generally do breed selectively and always have. We just use criteria of appearance and similarity of interests, etc., to make those “choices.” These choices are already often bad enough. But at least, nature mixes up our DNA to throw up unexpected results. It’s evolution in action.

But, as a more specific argument against even greater deliberate human control over reproduction, I am suggesting that the evidence of the dog, in itself (bred now for its bizarre appearance or its assumed willingness to fight, rather than its herding skills) answers this question well enough.

We are humans. Even the brightest and most well-meaning of us have only the vaguest idea about the long-term consequences of our actions. Our own species is quite disturbed enough already.

Commenting on excuses

Posted on Mon, 10 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

In case commenting on comments isn’t pleasingly toroidal enough for you, this post is a comment on the BBC’s comments on its own coverage of the McCanns. (A piece by Peter Horrocks, head of TV News)

As someone who watches way too much Lawn Order for their own good, my immediate response to the Madeleine story was a mite cynical from the start.

My cynicism deepened as the parents became a media attraction for the whole world. There was huge public engagement in praying for Madeleine’s safe return. The parents got an audience with the Pope and attended services all over Europe. Sunday attendance of any number of Catholic churches was massively boosted by appealing pictures of a wide-eyed three-year-old girl stuck on their noticeboards and invitations to join in praying for her safe return..

I was appalled at the idea of belief in a god who must be an almost inconceivably evil bastard if he could easily save a three-year-old from a horrific fate but was too selfish to do it unless lots and lots of people asked him really really nicely.

But then I’m an atheist so I could hardly have an interest in people believing in a divine being that was at least as humane as the average non-omnipotent “sinner”. We all know god hates amputees. Maybe he feels the same aversion to 3-year-old girls.

The British media has turned this into a ubiquitous daily concern. Until a couple of weeks ago, the family have been presented as saints, who made a simple mistake. Every non-development of the case has been filtered through the wider families or the parents’ odd profesional spokespeople.

The xenophobia shown in the British media’s contempt for the Portuguese justice system has added another unpleasant aspect to the whole show. It is assumed that the Portuguese police are comedy Clouseau figures who couldn’t solve a crime that took place inside a police station without framing an innocent devout Catholic pair of English doctors. The Portuguese media was portrayed as completely irresponsible, when they first suggested the police line of enquiry might take that this turn. By the British tabloids. Yes, really. I did say the British tabloids.

Now the pendulum has swung wildly in the opposite direction. The formerly-sainted McCanns are now treated as fair game for public pillorying. The sound of the media desperately covering its own back is almost making an audible swoosh.

Even the BBC is in there, trying to justify its coverage in a pretty comical way. This piece tries to meet the critics who claimed that following the McCanns home in a helicopter and showng them on pretty well every news item, even when there is no news, is pretty unjustifiable. Their excuse is the extra millions of people who’ve watched the news because they have followed the story avidly. (Yes, obviously, that must include me.)

Debates about whether theyâ€™ve been treated in particular way because theyâ€™re of a certain class, for instance, is just speculation – individualsâ€™ own views. People are entitled to their own views, but I donâ€™t think that should form part of our news coverage.

I donâ€™t think we have been biased in favour of them. In particular weâ€™ve stressed all along, but especially in the past few days, how important it is not to refer to them by their Christian names. Thereâ€™s a danger in over-familiarity. I know that many other TV and radio networks have been absolutely extraordinary, always talking about it in terms of sympathy and their feelings.

So what he is saying is that the fact that this is a professional couple has nothing to do with the more or less completely sympathetic coverage? Come on. Please. Does anyone believe that? Other children go missing on a distressingly regular basis but the cases get nothing like this level of coverage. If you doubt the class basis of the UK media concern, see the Observer’s May article as an example.

On the front page of most newspapers yesterday, the family portrait of the McCanns testifies to the image of middle class stability. No single parent – more easily accused of fecklessness – here. Gerry McCann is a cardiologist, his wife a GP. Exercising responsibility is ingrained in their respective professions. Yet the voices of critics challenging the McCanns’ considered decision are already being heard, fuelled by hindsight

This was basically saying – in unbelieving horror – people have even dared to challenge doctors’ right to leave their toddlers alone in a strange hotel room. That article goes on to say “Which of us hasn’t made mistakes with our kids?” and to claim, in contradiction of the evidence, that it would be OK, or at least a borderline case, under UK law. Obviously not for feckless single parents, of course, but these ARE doctors.

Another strand in the coverage is the McCann’s Catholicism. They are almost always referred to as “devout” Catholics. So obviously they couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong as Catholics don’t ever commit crimes… Their very Catholicism is in itself a mite eccentric by the UK’s social standards.

Very few people in the UK go to Church regularly. By Christian standards, Catholics are better attenders than Protestants but even Catholics don’t normally go to Church every week, let alone every few days. Young science professionals are particularly unlikely to attend any Church. Which makes it odder still that the family’s Catholic adherence has been a very central theme of the whole event. And that prayers – so blatantly proving ineffective – have been central to the exhortations to the public.

Returning to the BBC editor’s piece, the claim that the BBC didn’t call the parents “Kate” and “Gerry” is odd. This cannot by itself characterise the BBC coverage as completely objective. I love the “particularly in the past few days” bit. The writer is basically saying – well we may have been uncritically pro-McCann-family until the Portuguese police started “liking” them (in the old NYPD-Blue-speak). Now we’re afraid that we’ve backed the wrong horse, along with the rest of the media, and we’re stepping back a bit from our previous viewpoint.

During the whole course of this event, there have been only the slimmest bases for anyone in the media to present anything as “truth”. This situation is basically unchanged now from a month ago, but the media pendulum has swung from “saints” to “demons” and will probably swing back.

Apart from anything else, would it be possible to find a judge or jury who haven’t heard so much about this case that their opinions have been formed long before they hear any formal evidence? There would be no chance for anybody to get a fair trial.

The book of latterday conmen

Posted on Fri, 7 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Recent UK news has become little but a catalogue of murdered children and murdering children, only varied by the occasional “dog-driven-crazy-by-morons kills child” story. With no wish to add any more to the world’s store of incoherent rantings, I can’t keep reading this stuff. So I turned to BBC International News and CNN for a wider perspective on the world.

But, I am distracted from a BBC “Catholic Church makes yet another huge payout to victims of priestly paedophiles” story by the astonishing CNN Lost Boys story.

The background seems to be that several hundred young men were driven out of a Mormon offshoot sect, apparently because they were postential rivals to the founder (one Warren Jeffs) in his apparent attempt to lay claim to biblical quantities of wives. (Jeffs is presently facing trial for being an accomplice to rape, for his part in arranging the marriage of a 14-year-old to her cousin. )

You might assume that being driven out of this sect couldn’t have a downside. As it turns out, this is indeed the case for a few “lost boys” who sued and got a fairly sizeable payout.

About a half dozen “lost boys” filed suit against Jeffs and the FLDS, saying they were thrown out of the FLDS community to allow older men to have more wives. The suit was partially settled earlier this year, with an agreement for a $250,000 fund to be created for housing assistance, education help and other aid to boys who leave the FLDS.

However, it’s supposed to be a bit psychologically destructive to get thrown out of this cozy cult world into the cold rest of the planet. (As opposed to getting brought up in it then? Come on.)
The pseudonymous “lost boy” interviewed by CNN

left behind three mothers and about three dozen siblings. Two of his sisters are married to Jeffs.

In Christopher Hitchens’ “God is not Great”, Hitchens took a fair bit of trouble to demolish the claims of the Mormon faith, pointing out, for example, that its founder, Joeseph Smith, was convicted of fraud a few months before he “discovered” the Book of Mormon.

This seemed something of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, when I first read it. Well, yes, it’s even more blatant nonsense than most religion, being too new to allow suspension of disbelief except among the terminally credulous. And it clearly lacks a supporting transcedental tradition of great artists and musicians. The Osmonds don’t quite cut it against Handel’s Messiah.

Surely Mormons do nothing more offensive than wear ill-fitting suits and monumentally unflattering haircuts, they knock at your front door and try to talk tripe? Act as a sort of voluntary global Public Records Office, albeit for their own demented purposes?

Didn’t all that being a wierd cult, with the elder males having dozens of wives stuff get dumped so that Utah could join the USA?Hmm, it seems not. The FLDS is only a offshoot cult but still couldn’t be anything but Mormon

Ther cult members are, of course, assailing their deity with extravagant pleas for their founder’s relaease.

“It will be very quiet out here all through the trial. I am sure they will be fasting and praying for his release,” says Engels.* “Most of them believe that God’s going to step forward and free him anyway and punish us ‘bad-doers.’ “

Given the utter uselessness of mass prayer – as evidenced by the massive Catholic engagements in exhortations to the deity to intervene in the Madeleine McCann case to bring her back to her parents unharmed – for once, it looks like there’ll actually be a conviction then.

(* No, it’s not the author of the English Working Class mysteriously returned from the grave. According to CNN, it’s “Gary Engels, an investigator for the state of Arizona, has seen many “lost boy” cases.”)

Authority figures

Posted on Wed, 5 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

The Angel (Archangel?) Rafael has commented on a blog post, here. There must be a good few thousand words in the comment, at least a dozen of which are connected.

Sadly. I can’t discuss what Rafael says as the translation from the angelic language to English seems to have passed through the Tower of Babel on the way. Unspiritual human requirements for comprehension – such as paragraph and sentence breaks – have been omitted. I assume that this is so that nothing as dull as grammar disturbs the flow of inspirition from angel to mortal.

I had to Google the “angelic language” to see if there was supposed to be one. There doesn’t seem to be a name for it. I had a vague idea it was called Adonic or something (based on thinking it’s in a poem by William Blake or Milton. Yes, I know they have less than nothing in common. And yes, it will almost certainly be neither of them and the language will be called elohimic. You’ll find no authority here, sorry.)

Although, no less an authority than one Ashley_StarFIRE seems confident of their knowledge, in a comment on a post about angelspeak on belief.net (As so often, the clue’s in the title. If you can find someone to take the bet, you could stake a fair sum on belief.net not being on Planet Humanism or Planet Atheism or the atheist blogroll.)

Angels do indeed talk together….. Furthermore, angels speak Hebrew, and their written language (and possibly also their spoken language) is known as ‘Angelic Script’ based on the formations of stars (angels are also referred to as stars) or the Alphabet of the Malachim (Hebrew for angel/Messenger).

Hence, angels speak Hebrew, then? (Or a spoken script – which is pretty impressive even for semi-divine beings, unless script doesn’t actually mean writing in the angelic sphere.)

You have to marvel at the certainty with which Ashley_StarFIRE holds forth on the tongues of angels.

Equally impressively, “GIRLS ALOUD star NICOLA ROBERTS” (a/c the Sun). a minor pop singer, of whose existence I was mercifully unaware until now, is holding forth in the Sun newspaper about crime and punishment. In a PVC catsuit.

The Sun contrasts her with the new Home Secretary, not given to wearing PVC catsuits as part of her job, although the Sun presents this fact as if it reflects badly on her. As they do with the fact that she has a degree from Oxford. Straight from the Sun:

WHO WOULD YOU VOTE TO BE THE HOME SECRETARY?
Jacqui Smith
AGE: 44
EDUCATION: BA Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford.
POLICIES: Give yobs voluntary acceptable behaviour contracts.
CAREER: Home Secretary, 2007.
STYLE: Smart suits, but has flashed cleavage in the Commons.
Nicola Roberts
AGE: 21
EDUCATION: St Chadâ€™s High School, Runcorn.
POLICIES: Lock up criminals after first first offence, build more prisons.
CAREER: Joined Girls Aloud at 16 and topped charts.
STYLE: Miniskirts, high- heeled shoes,skintight PVC catsuits.

This is just to give you a flavour of the quality of the standard of political discussion in the biggest-selling newspaper in the UK. You may be confused as to how having an opinion on law and order qualifies you to challenge for the post of Home Secretary. Clearly, it’s so rare for a Sun reader to process a fully-formed thought that having any opinion at all would make Nicola Roberts well worthy of the job.

The actual interview with Nicola Roberts is so masterfully ironic that you suspect it was scripted by a Sun writer with a secret sense of humour.

Talking about a recent particulalrly horrifying murder, she is reported as saying:

And I blame TONY BLAIR and GORDON BROWN. We donâ€™t have tough enough laws â€” the people that did this to Rhys need to be locked up.

I imagined that murder had already been illegal for quite some time but I may have been misled here. In that case, we really do probably need a law against it. Well done on spotting a gaping hole in the UK legal system, Nicola.

And another one – nothing is being done to lock up people who’ve committed crimes that aren’t against the law:

….They are bound to have committed other crimes but no one can do anything about it because the laws arenâ€™t in place to get them put away…

Throughout this silly piece, the Sun’s suggesting that Nicola has some opinions on law and order, hence is more suitable to be Home Secretary than the implicitly over-educated and non-fun Home Secretary, who probably couldn’t sell a pop record to save her life.

So it’s nice that it says:

Nicola believes youngsters should be taught about politics at school so they learn how important it is in their lives.
She explains: â€œI was never taught anything about politics….

Who’d have thought it?

The horse might die

Posted on Sat, 1 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Two US bishops had to go to Kenya to be consecrated, because they felt that their local Anglican church was too liberal.

The two new bishops promised to “serve the international interests of the Anglican Church of Kenya, to serve clergy and congregations in North America under the Kenyan jurisdiction”.

That is probably going to be a bit difficult to put into practice. What are the international interests of the Church of Kenya. then? They seem to focus on not ordaining gay clergy in America. Which seems odd because you’d imagine Kenya had its own problems.

All the same, there’s something vaguely impressive in realising that homophobia is so much stronger than xenophobia in some Americans that they’ll hand control of their Church to a place that barely one in 50 Americans could find on a map.

No less an Anglican churchman than Desmond Tutu finds this identification of the African church’s main interest with opposition to gay clergy absurd.

He told the BBC World Service in May that the debate on gay clergy and same-sex marriages had become “an extraordinary obsession” for Anglicans.
The Church, he said, had “been fiddling whilst, as it were, our Rome was burning, at a time when our continent has been groaning under the burden of HIV/Aids, of corruption.”

It doesn’t seem to just be the African Anglican Churches that have this “extraordinary obsession.” A February meeting of the world’s Anglican archbishops, held in Tanzania, gave the US church until 30 September to stop ordaining gay bishops. Or else. (Or else what? The alternative seems to involve splitting the Anglican community.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury claimed to believe this demand would solve the matter.

He admitted the communique would “certainly fall very short of resolving all the disputes”, but said it would “provide a way of moving forward with dignity”.

Well, obviously, he means solving it/moving forward with dignity in the same way that I “solve” most of my problems – putting them off till a future date that will obviously never come….. 30 September, which is all of, oh, 29 days away now, by my reckoning.

I think the Archbishop of Canterbury may therefore possibly share my taste for my favourite religious parable as a guide for life. This is taken from my distant memory of reading the Idries Shah retelling of the Tales of Mullah Nasruddin. Nasruddin is a sort of Muslim trickster figure.

The Shah is impressed with Nasruddin’s magical capacities. He asks Nasruddin to teach his favourite horse to fly. Nasruddin promises to do that and says he’ll take the horse, teach him to fly and will come back in a year.

His friend says “Are you mad to agree to this? He’ll put you to death when he finds out you’ve tricked him.”

Nasruddin says “But it’s a year away. In that time, anything could happen. The Shah might die. Or I might die. Or the horse might die..”

The Archbishop obviously thought this anti-gay clergy horse would die between 20 February and 30 September. But instead, it’s racing (yes, I am dragging a lame metaphor to death) around the planet looking for other bigots.

*****************************************
Totally unconnected aside.

My other favourite Mullah Nasruddin story. (I’m going to have to elaborate some details here. It’s years since I’ve read this.)

Every day or so Nasruddin crosses the border between two countries. He’s leading a donkey that carries two panniers.

The customs guards know he’s up to something illicit. Every time he passes, the customs men take off the bags and pull the straw to bits, searching for whatever contraband he’s smuggling. Nasruddin always stands there looking smug. They have to let him go.

One day, after he’s crossed the border, he tells the customs guards that they won’t be seeing him any more because he’s made his money and is retiring from smuggling.

One guard begs Nasruddin to tell him what he managed to get through the border and how he’s managed to get the better of them every time.

“Well,” says the Mullah. “I was smuggling donkeys.”

(Don’t ask me what the religious moral of these stories is. I can’t even begin to guess. )

Has the best tunes?

Posted on Fri, 31 August, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

A post on Rupture the Rapture talked about atheist musicians being obliged to perform religious music and bemoaned the absence of atheist equivalents.

..Tenor voiced his frustration at the “dearth of music” heard at various humanist gatherings, conventions and the like. I may be wrong here, but what I believe Tenor is looking for is accessible music with a humanist bent – music that would be appropriate for such gatherings, but that is of such a nature that the audience could relate to and/or actually participate in. (Humanist karaoke?)…

I suppress a shudder at the prospect of an atheist equivalent of Christian rock. Please, no.

Still, I like the idea of a musical expression of humanism. I did a youtube search for atheist music. Hmm, most of it falls toward the Eastern-European-Heavy-Metal end of the spectrum but there’s plenty there. (I know there’s a well known atheist rapper but I couldn’t find a link and I remember getting distracted by the wonderful existence of genres like ‘nerdcore’ last time I tried it.)

In fact, thinking about “atheist music,” most music fits into this category. It’s not so much “atheist” as “nothing to do with religion” or inherently anti-religion in celebrating the things that organised religion tends to object to.

Sad to say, a lot of religiously-inspired music is pretty damn good. (Gregorian chants, Victorian hymns, Sufi chants, roots reggae…..)

I can’t see a problem with appreciating it as music and poetry. Music exists to move us and, among other things, it can express wonder and transcendence. Just because some people filter these emotions through religion doesn’t imply that we have to buy into their beliefs to appreciate their expression.

If everyone were to start only listening to music that precisely expresses their own beliefs, the world would be pretty silent.

(I obviously don’t like the idea but I’d have no problems recommending it to the people who think everyone else on the bus wants to listen to their tinny mono phonetunes.)

In any case, no one is put off Renaissance paintings because they tend to be brimming with biblical figures. Apart from anything else, we all understand that artists have to make a living. If you live in a world where the Church gives out most commissions, you paint the Nativity or write music for monks.

Atheism and morality

Posted on Thu, 30 August, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

This month’s New Scientist discusses God and morality. That link is more or less useless, though, unless you have a subscription. You have to buy the magazine to get more than the first few hundred words. (Or read this, written from the smug perspective of someone who can read it all.)

Referring to Dawkins and the many others who dispute that religion is the necessary source of morality:

Their views have recently been bolstered by evidence that morality appears to be hard-wired into our brains. It seems we are born with a sense of right and wrong, and that no amount of religious indoctrination will change our most basic moral instincts.

New Scientist doesn’t want to offend readers- atheists or theists – so the discussion is quite cagey, with a general suggestion that both religion and morality are mentally hardwired.

I followed their link to some 2005 Baltimore research by Gregory Paul that argues that societies with high rates of religious adherence are those that consistently have the worst social morality.

He concluded that countries with higher rates of belief and worship had higher rates of homicide, death among children and young adults, sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and abortion.

(New Scientist)

I like this paper so much, I’m going to post the abstract here and put the most salient bits in bold.

Large-scale surveys show dramatic declines in religiosity in favor of secularization in the developed democracies. Popular acceptance of evolutionary science correlates negatively with levels of religiosity, and the United States is the only prosperous nation where the majority absolutely believes in a creator and evolutionary science is unpopular. Abundant data is available on rates of societal dysfunction and health in the first world. Cross-national comparisons of highly differing rates of religiosity and societal conditions form a mass epidemiological experiment that can be used to test whether high rates of belief in and worship of a creator are necessary for high levels of social health. Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and antievolution America performs poorly.

Gregory Paul said that “In the United States many conservative theists consider evolutionary science a leading contributor to social dysfunction because it is amoral or worse, and because it inspires disbelief” This is fascinating. Who’d have thought that a scientific theory can be held accountable for people’s morality? “Sorry, Your Honour, but I was acting under the influence of the Second law of Thermodynamics.”

Van Jensen challenged Paul’s conclusions in another study, based on cross-cultural homicide rates research, arguing that dualistic theism – i.e. belief in God AND a Devil – is what you need to make a really murderous society.

There’s nothing really new in the argument that religion fosters immorality, though. Jensen refers to “Durkheimâ€™s hypotheses that religious passion, as a variable characteristic of nations, is a positive correlate of homicide rates.” In English, that means: the more fanatical belief, the more murders. That’s Durkheim, born 1858 – died 1917, by the way. Some messages just don’t get through.

There’s much more interesting information in the New Scientist article. Researchers have looked at the subject from the perspectives of psychology, evolutionary biology, brain chemistry and more. Every piece of research could spark a full-scale post here, with ranting &/or raving at will.

If you are interested in religion and morality, it’s worth getting hold of a copy of New Scientist and following the links to the actual research papers.

Shari’a family values

Posted on Thu, 30 August, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

It’s just over 6 months since Abdul Kareem got sentenced to 4 years in jail for blogging. There’s a website in support of him. You can also read a wikipedia entry although there is a caveat at the head of the page saying

This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality.

.. He was arrested by Egyptian authorities for posts on his blog that were considered to be anti-religious and insulting to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On February 22nd, 2007 in his native city Alexandria. Kareem Amer was sentenced to three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition and one year for insulting the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Not neutral? Maybe the very mention of the sentence contravenes “neutrality”. Presumably because no sane person would think this was OK?

(If only he had just been the officer in charge of a military unit charged with war crimes, he’d be free today.)

It’s one thing – and a very pleasurable thing it can be, too – to insult Baptist evangelists from the comfort of the Atheist Blogroll. However, if you live in the Middle East, challenging Islam in your blog posts is definitely hazardous to health .

The campaign website is maintained by Kareem’s friends who disagree with what he said about Islam but still uphold his right to express his views. Unlike his family apparently.

From the Kareem FAQs:

What did his family say about all this?
Days before the jail sentence, his family publicly disowned him, and his father called for applying the Sharia on his son by giving three days to repent, followed by having him killed if he did not announce his repentance.

Give them a bit of leeway for trying to protect themselves, as I imagine they are under a fair bit of pressure to distance themselves from their wayward freethinking offspring. But still. A father who thinks his son deserves a death sentence for publishing a few challenging words is definitely so far off the scale of harsh that you would need to invent a new scale. And he’d still fall of the edge.

Disappointingly, the only UK politician mentioned as having spoken out about Kareem is from the UK Independence Party*. Euro-MP Derek Clark, raised the case in the European Parliament.

If you live in the sort of country where you might get arrested or your dad might call for your execution, Reporters sans frontieres have a page about how to blog anonymously without putting yourself in the firing line of your state’s repression.
(You can’t say this blog doesn’t give out any useful information.)

* If you’re not from the UK, there is/was (?) a joke political party called the Monster Raving Loony Party (It’s alternative comedy- it’s not funny, to steal an old Ben Elton quote.) UK Independence Party are generally considered less serious and even less funny than the MRLP. UKIP tends to substitute comical zenophobia for the MRLP’s standard slapstick approach. Luckily, they are completely unelectable and spend their time in internal squabbles. It is enough of a shock that they must have a Euro-MP, let alone that he seems to have actually spoken sense in the European Union.

If it’s good enough for Dawkins..

Posted on Wed, 29 August, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

This blog has a special fondness for El Morya since Black Sun Journal brought him to our attention. So, what great news on Black Sun Journal that he has a MySpace profile and MySpace friends!

I wrongly assumed that these would be standard imaginary friends of the sort the Internet is full of – invented blog personae for internet marketing blogs that don’t seem to market anything as much as fill cyberspace with empty links to other linkfarms.

But oh joy, these are real blogs to cheer your heart if you are the sort of person who finds humanity too reasonable for your taste (There must be some people who feel that.)

The El Morya MySpace profile has the fantastic El Morya picture. A young looking 99, indeed. imagine you crossed Osama bin Laden’s standard mugshot with a Victorian Sunday school picture of Christ. The profile background sound is sounding suspiciously like Handel’s take on circus music as played on those call-centre answering machine loops that make you want to beat your brains out with the headset.

(Yes, my classical music knowledge is rubbish. It’s probably some tune that everybody recognises. Well, OK, I sort of recognise it. Pomp and Circumstance? Don’t mock. I’m trying to be musically erudite here.)

El Morya’s interests include not very inspiring paintings by Nicolas Roehrich Who? He’s not Raphael that’s for sure, although I seem to remeber that one of El Morya’s cronies is supposed to be Raphael, so you think they could have got him in to do the painting.

I had to visit his MySpace friends. Given a choice between reading the posts and looking at the friends’ profiles, this wasn’t a difficult decision. I decided to stick with the ones with human pictures.

A few bits that give the flavour.
Earthstone Co-creations:

My name is Jennifer Salness, and I am a energy healer, crystal intuitive & dealer, editor, podcast co-host, ETC. Multi-dimensional!

(The exclamation mark so perfectly encapsulates this site.)

Cindy

In my search for Truth of our origins, I have had some amazing spiritual experiences that has changed my life and view of God and the world forever. I believe in angels. I love to interpret dreams for Spiritual Growth and I practice Gendai-ki Reiki for energy Healing

Lauren other worlds

I am an artist, author, and life-after-death survivor, which might account for the fact that I am also a contactee, a mystic, clairaudient, clairsentient, and more. I have no doubt that we are each great souls having a human experience and it’s my mission to help others remember who they truly are, help others understand that we can learn through enlightenment rather than through pain, and also help eradicate the fear of death and any belief in separation from our own Truths. …..
My nickname is Walks Between Worlds. I’ve been to “the other side” too many times to count, my most extreme “journey” having lasted 3 days.

Look, I’m sorry to be pedantic but that isn’t a nickname. “Yozzer” is a nickname. I defy anyone to shout “Oy! Walks between Worlds!” when they spot a friend across the street.

Anyway, I’m getting bored with the human friends. (And I am becoming a tad embarrassed for my gender.) So I am impressed to see how many divine and mythical beings have MySpace profiles.
Heaven on Earth , Divine Union, Mary Hath Chosen and loads more.

Ah, God. Wow. See, there is a God. And, in the 21st century, even for the divine being, creating a MySpace profile is so much more convenient than carving words onto stone tablets. A lot of us have been feeling a spiritual void since the great Blog of the Gods has fallen out of existence, with no posts since July 11th, so I’ll quote the great man himself here…..

About me:
People call me by many names; Jehovah, Allah, Father, Yahweh, Adoni, Elohim, Ahura Mazda, Hashem, ECT…But most call me God. I’ve been around since before “The Beginning”. I’m a pretty nice guy when you get to know me. But be warned I do have a bit of a temper. A lot of People think that Evolution and science disproves my existence. But see if you got to read the full Bible youâ€™d know that I made several humanoid creatures before I settled on Adam and Eve. And the thing you call the big bang I called “Let there be light.” Anyways. Acknowledge me, Treat others as you want to be treated, be good and we’ll get along fine. Oh and to let you know Iâ€™m very busy you’re not the only planet I have to watch over you know. So sometimes my responses to prayers are slow and some time the answers are just no.

Who I’d like to meet: I already know every one. But not everyone knows me …

Wow, it starts off almost paraphrasing the the words of the old Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the Devil But in reverse. (Well, I thought so….)

Blimey God’s friend list is unsurprisingly even more star-studded than El Morya’s; Jesus, St. Michael, Saint Gabriel – Archangel, Archangel Raphael (Ah ha, the ascended Raphael isn’t the painter or the Mutant Ninja Turtle then, my bad), Zoroaster, Moses, Muhammed, the Peace of God be upon him, Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Peter, Saint Paul the Apostle, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Joseph, Shiva, GANESH, Tara, kuan yin, Krishna, Kali-Ma, Saint Germain, Babaji, ENKI, (who?) Tenzin Gyatso. (who?)

Is that A list or what?

Bible Hijacks Brains of Respected Scientists

Posted on Tue, 28 August, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Oh bugger. How easy it is to become the enemy….

This post on the Scientific Activist: Animal Rights Activists Hijack the Brains of Three Respected Scientists, the subject of which is a paper in Bioessays that suggests that cell cultures and computer modelling should replace more animal experiments.

It’s fair to say that this Scientific Activist blog post isn’t exactly supportive of the view point but it’s a reasonably argued post. It ends with this point.

As scientists, we should constantly be thinking about ways to reduce our dependence on animal research, and this paper does attempt to advance this cause. However, this should not be done at the expense of the science (and at the expense of human lives), and grossly oversimplifying the issue, as this paper seems to, does a service to no one.

Not so Pharyngula’s take on it.

Once we’ve defeated the creationists (hah!), we’re going to have to manage the next problem: well-meaning but ill-informed animal rights activists. Nick describes a recent article that tries to claim we can reduce animal use in labs â€” and it even has a couple of respectable scientists signing on to that nonsense.

Hmm. Well it rather looks, from the bit I quoted above, as if Nick (assuming that refers to Scientific Activist) did accept that reducing animal use was a goal to aim for, rather than “nonsense”, but Toutatis forbid that Pharyngula blogged on something without reading the whole article. (I mean WhyDontYou blog would never dream of doing anything like that. Well, not very often… )

I’m not a biologist. In fact, my schoolgirl aversion to biology was based precisely on the fact that it involved cutting up dead creatures. So, I don’t know how far slicing up animal’s bodies – or genetically manipulating them so they exist only to exhibit diseases similar to the ones humans have and so on – are necessary for the furtherance of knowledge.

But, it better had be bloody necessary before it’s OK with me.

If that makes me an enemy of reason, that’s tough. “Respected scientists” must have had their “brains hijacked” because they suggest other more animal-sparing alternatives? Those of us who think they have a point are the enemies of science, almost as if we are the wimpier wing of the creationists?

Surely biology shows us that we are animals? Mammals? That we share most of our genes with other sentient beings? But we can just ignore this whenever it suits us and act as if we have a right to do whatever we like with other species.

This form of “atheism” is basically indistinguishable from the Judeao-Christian world view that everything else in the universe is just our plaything, just without the Jahweh figure directing the show. Yada Yada… He gave man “dominion over all the beasts of the field” and so on, to do whatever we damn well please with?

How come that bit of the Bible is still gospel to a lot of atheist scientists?

UK database of all kids

Posted on Mon, 27 August, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

The spread of the database-driven society proceeds apace. Today’s Times reports that

Senior social workers have given warning of the dangers posed by a new government register that will store the details of every child in England from next year.
They fear that the database, containing the address, medical and school details of all under-18s, could be used to harm the children whom it is intended to protect.

Not being a newspaper writer or a member of the Association of Directors of Childrenâ€™s Services, I don’t have an interest in claiming that the danger of child-abusers getting details is the biggest problem here. (After all, children have most to fear from people they know. ) But still, they have a point. Any database that has an estimated 33,000 users is going to be leaky as a broken sieve.

The database, which goes live next year, is to contain details of every one of the 11 million children in the country, listing their name, address and gender, as well as contact details for their GP, school and parents and other carers. The record will also include contacts with hospital consultants and other professionals, and could show whether the child has been the subject of a formal assessment on whether he or she needs extra help.

Every child in the country it says. So you have to love this bit:

….. information about the children of celebrities and politicians is likely to be excluded from the system.

Fairy godfather

Posted on Mon, 27 August, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Who is the godfather of the Internet?

Today’s Guardian Technology page identifies him as Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf, aka the godfather of the net, predicts the end of TV as we know it
Web guru foresees download revolution

But wait. What about

Mark Joyner, often referred to as the “Godfather of the Internet”

according to Articles about cable, dsl, etc?

Or Imperial College’s candidate,

… Imperial College alumnus, Donald Watts Davies, the Welsh computer genius regarded by many as the godfather of the internet.

Or Al Gore?

…Earlier today, Xeni spoke with former Vice President Al Gore, internet godfather and co-founder of Current TV,

(Phew, at least I know who Al Gore is. I have heard of Vint Cerf, but a name so unremittingly stunning would stick in the brain anyway, after one hearing. I have never heard of the others.)

Or this candidate on interandom

.. Carnegie Mellon Professor and â€œGodfather of the Internetâ€ David Farber

Or this from some sort of podcast scraper list:

Thomas Prendergast, CEO of Inetekk & creator ot the Veretekk Automated Lead Generation & Online Marketing System. .. Thousands know him as “The Godfather Of The Internet”…

From MQ magazine

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is considered by many to be the godfather of the internet.

There are loads more Internet godfathers but I got too bored and stopped collecting them.

How many godfathers does the Internet need?
What does it mean to be an Internet godfather?
Do they insist on being called don and putting horse’s heads in the beds of adherents of traditional media?
Or do they grant wishes, like fairy godmothers? I’ll take health, wealth and happiness if they’re still going. Though I’ve never heard of fairy godfathers. Obviously shoudl have paid more attention to the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson and Andrew Lang’s vari-coloured Fairy books. (That’s a link to Project Gutenberg if you want to make a liar of me and find fairy godfathers aplenty.)

There are so many questions here and I’m a bit stumped by not knowing what even a traditional godfather does. I have a fuzzy impression thay promise to bring up the child they are godfathering as a Christian or mafia member, or both, according to context Give a few gifts in exchange for the family’s votes in some Latin political systems? That’s about it.

Is there a godmother of the Internet? On safer ground here. I know what a godmother does. They grant wishes and turn pumpkins into coaches.

Well I found a paltry two candidates,

Takeaway media says

…according to Esther Dyson, the godmother of the internet, we may even see by 2100 the end of life’s only two certainties, death and taxes.

Well, surely a half-decent fairy godmother should be able to sort those little inconveniences out.

Flash Goddess names Lynda Weinman, although she seems unsurprisingly reluctant to claim the title, possibly because she’s not confident about her scullery-maid-to-princess skills.

Q How do you feel about being referred to as the “godmother of the internet”?
A. I’ve never heard myself referred to as that! It’s an uncomfortable and inaccurate label.

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Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$link is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 749

Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

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Deprecated: Creation of dynamic property WP_Term::$id is deprecated in /homepages/34/d43362328/htdocs/ydontu/blog/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 750

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Why Dont You Blog?

Challenging the Zeitgeist

Author Archives: Polly Unsaturate

About Polly Unsaturate

Vestments of the Devout

Extinction

Satano-Christian link farm

Best friends forever

Commenting on excuses

The book of latterday conmen

Authority figures

The horse might die

Has the best tunes?

Atheism and morality

Shari’a family values

If it’s good enough for Dawkins..

Bible Hijacks Brains of Respected Scientists

UK database of all kids

Fairy godfather

About Polly Unsaturate

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