Why Dont You Blog?

In what must be one of the longest waits from confession to absolution on record, the Vatican has forgiven John Lennon for saying the Beatles were bigger than god (or more popular than Jesus, or something) according to the BBC.

This was a mildly jokey casual remark made in the early 1960s, by a man who’s been now dead for decades. Has the Catholic Church been fretting about it ever since?

The BBC has a 1960s clip that shows some of the aftermath of the Beatles’ bizarrely notorious jokes about their huge success in the USA.

In this clip, a reporter with an impeccable old-style “BBC” accent talks about US fundamentalist baptists with the barely disguised distaste of someone who’s spotted another guest eating a fly at a dinner party.

The implication is that the UK saw the extreme US responses to the Beatles’ remarks as symptomatic of a strange and backward American culture. Beatle atheism was more or less taken for granted in the UK. The tolerant attitude of UK religious believers is also taken for granted. The BBC reporter could clearly assume that even UK churchgoers would see US bonfires of Beatles merchandise as exotically bizarre.

This was 40 years ago.

You certainly can’t imagine science teachers thinking that Intelligent Design should have an equal billing with Evolution in the biology curriculum, forty years ago.

The world can’t be a sci-fi novel. If it were, the hero would surely have detected by now that time is running backwards.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 5% [?]

More on the theme of how we trivialise children (sorry) but one of the news items doing the rounds today is how a “Father loses career after slapping unruly daughter” (many headlines are a variation of this, so I will stick with the Telegraph). Basically, the story goes:

A father’s career as a community worker has been brought to a halt after he was given a police caution for slapping his unruly teenage daughter.
Jim McCullough, 44, spent 15 years building up a reputation as a football coach in Benchill, Manchester, and had dreams of branching into sports development.
But his hopes foundered the day he struck his 13-year-old daughter, Jess, for “terrorizing” one of their neighbours.
Jess reported the incident to police and despite later retracting the complaint her father was arrested. He later accepted a caution, not realising how it would blight his career.

Now it does have an element of comedy about it (not least of which is how is voluntary work considered a career?), but there are some issues that strike me as valid. As you can imagine, there are elements of the media that have used this to highlight how crazy our laws are now - I mean if you cant beat your own kids, what can you do? I am sure there are lots of people who think slapping your 13 year old in the face when they do something you don’t approve of is acceptable - but I dont.

Basically, this “pillar of the community” lost control of his own child to the point at which he had to hit her to try and control her. Is this someone suitable to look after the children of others? I wouldn’t let him coach my daughters…

Greg Davis, from the United Estates of Wythenshawe centre, where Mr McCullough did his voluntary work, said: “We have lost an experienced youth worker and men like him are worth their weight in gold. There is clearly a need for better legislation”.

This is odd. What changes to the law is Mr Davis calling for? Should adults be allowed to beat teenagers? Or only one the ones who do voluntary work for the council? Why dont we make legislation allowing people in positions of authority the power to anything they want to children - oh yeah, that’s called the Catholic Church isn’t it…?

Interestingly, despite the doom and gloom of the headlines it is not all that bad:

But his police caution would require him to have an enhanced CRB check, and it would then be left to a potential employer to decide whether he should be taken on.

It hasn’t taken away his career, whatever career he had. It just means if he wants to have access to vulnerable people he needs to undergo a more thorough check.

How is that a bad thing?

Popularity: 17% [?]

Popularity: 17% [?]

The fashion for apologising for things that happened many centuries ago has now hit the Vatican, which is about to publish a book saying it might have made a bit of a mistake, according to the Times and Telegraph .*

According to the Telegraph,

In 1307, King Philip IV “the Fair” of France, in desperate need of funds, ordered the arrest and torture of all Templars. After confessing various sins their leader, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake.

And the Church quickly declared them all heretics. The new -found paper supposedly shows that pope Clement dissolved the Templar Order but said they weren’t heretics. Though the evidence for their non-heresy seems quite unconvincing, by the standards of the day, considering how little it took for a hedge-witch or a dissenting peasant to get tortured and killed for heresy (by both Catholics and Protestants) over the next few hundred years. It is tempting to suggest that the surviving Templars must have still had a fair bit of that Holy land wealth left with which to buy a relatively favourable judgement.

Now, 1307 is 700 years ago. The Vatican could teach any existing government a thing or two about keeping politically sensitive secrets.

What is the point in this? Given that the Templars were monk-knights, they shouldn’t even have any direct descendants who could accept an apology for wrongs done to their 175th generation-back ancestors. It’s obviously a soundbite thing. The Templars’ much-vaunted “secrets” have been attracting publicity again, in the silly da Vinci Code movie for a start.

Just in case, some people might be put off the Catholic Church because it did wrong in the 14th century, it’s going to apologise and set the record straight. It doesn’t cost anything. It’s not like they are going to make France hand back any of Phillip the Fair’s ill-gotten gains is it?

Much as I hate these ritual apologies to people who don’t exist any more, on behalf of the people who wronged them, but also don’t exist any more, why stop there? Why not apologise for the Crusades and the things the Catholic Church rewarded the Templars for doing? It wouldn’t make any more sense but at least it would show the beginnings of a sense of moral responsibility.

* (Look I don’t read these papers in real life. Honest. But, they are online….)

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

You might think the Catholic Church had enough to worry about with the laughably huge sums its having to drag from the contributions of the faithful to pay out to kids abused by its minions, but the Pope seems to be going for “the best defence is offence” strategy.

The Pope has been spraying papal bull^^^ in all directions, making some mockery of the concepts of ecumenical fellowship.

Protestants
In Sunday’s Observer, Will Hutton compared the Pope’s recent pronouncement on Protestants to the tribally offensive behaviour of drunken Orange marchers, pissing on the Wigan train while shouting anti-Catholic rants. He referred to the Pope’s

Popularity: 35% [?]

Popularity: 35% [?]

The latest entry from the Department of Missing the Point Completely is by Fr. Robert J. Carr and titled “Making Fool’s For Satan.” (Big hat tip to the Friendly Atheist)

In a nutshell, Father Carr has decided to rant against the Blasphemy Challenge but obviously has not been guided by his invisible friend as he does so. As a result, he not only misses the point about the challenge, but seems to get a bit confused over the whole issue of belief and what the Christian church teaches (or at least did when I went to school). Friendly Atheist has done an excellent job of fisking the (ahem) article so I wont do that here, but there are a couple of points I want to pick up on.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Popularity: 33% [?]

The Vatican has told people not to give money to Amnesty International. You might assume the Catholic Church was disturbed that charity money might be flowing in other directions than into its own overstuffed coffers but no, it’s more than that.

Amnesty seems to have said abortion was OK in cases of rape or incest. Hardly a “woman’s right to choose” argument. More of a “victim’s right not to spend the rest of their life paying the price for someone else’s crime” argument. I’d be very surprised if you can find more than one in a hundred non-Catholics in Western Europe who would disagree with Amnesty on that, no matter how “pro-life” they were otherwise.

According to the BBC, Roman Catholic Church’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace

’s president, Cardinal Renato Martino, described abortion as “murder”.
“And to justify it selectively, in the event of rape, that is to define an innocent child in the belly of its mother as an enemy, as ’something one can destroy’,” the cardinal said.

Let’s forget the mother for a moment - let’s think of the “innocent child”. What child would benefit from having a mother who doesn’t want him or her? What child would want to find out his or her father is a rapist? In any case, who is going to feed, clothe and nurture this child?

The Church? Well, it has orphanages or it can sometimes find adoptive “good Catholic” parents.. (If it weren’t for the horror stories about how some nuns and priests have abused the children in their “care”, you might almost think this would be the preferable option to being brought into a life where your parents favoured guilt-inducing ritual sufficiently for church adopotion agencies to accept them. Ah, they definitely wouldn’t be gay though. Well that’s a relief, then. Although it seems that you could never be sure the local priest wasn’t a paedophile…)

Hang on a minute, I momentarily imagined that trying to fight against torture and political imprisonment and so one might represent the Christian values that they tell us atheists we lack. No, clearly, the rights of the foetus, however created, outweigh the human rights of living men, women and children.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Popularity: 20% [?]