The Vatican

A Penn and Teller's Bullshit! episode about the Vatican, criticising the Pope for the Catholic Church's stance on issues such as condom use, protection of paedophile priests, homosexuality is now a target by the fundamentalist Christians in the US, who want to shut down the TV program.

I am against the stance of the Catholic Church's because the Catholic Church positions on these issues are not based on rational or ethical thinking, but on their desire to protect their personal interests, and on unreasoned acceptance of religious dogma.

1. Condom use

The Catholic Church condemns the use of condoms, and actively prevents countries in Africa which are hard hit by HIV/AIDS to allow people to get access to condoms. This means that a HIV infected husband cannot wear a condom to prevent infecting his wife. Also, this also prevents the world from introducing yet another unwanted child.

The reason the Catholic Church is against the use of condoms is because they BELIEVE that every sexual act should be done for procreation. That is fine if you are a believer. But they should not use their immense wealth to prevent others who are non-believers from getting access to condoms.

The Catholic Church believes that condoms prevent the transmission of life. In reality, for AIDS infected Africans, condoms actually prevents the transmission of death (from the infected husband to the wife). And the Catholic Church claims that it is Pro-Life!

2. Paedophile Priests

Recent news articles in the past few years has revealed that the Catholic Church has a secret history of child molestations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_sex_abuse_cases). However, the Catholic Church has been found to cover up almost all of these cases - basically protecting the priests instead of the children victims. In fact, the Catholic Church created a secret document back in 1962 that more or less said that in the reported cases, both the priest and his victim must keep this secret. If not, both parties will be subjected to ex-communication!

According to the Wikipedia article, almost 11000 cases of child sex abuse was reported against the Catholic priests. And in 81% of the cases, the victims were boys.

This statistic confirms a widely held truism that the Catholic Church has a large number of latent homosexuals.

3. Homosexuality

The Catholic Church, like most other religious organisations, are against homosexuality simply because of religious dogma. They keep claiming that homosexuality is against nature simply because it is condemned in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 in the Old Testament. However, modern science has shown that homosexuality is not only natural, but scientists have documented homosexual behaviour in more than 1500 species of animals. And humans are animals too.

The Catholic Church is even intruding into politics in many countries to try to prevent the overturning of laws that homosexuals are criminals simply by virtue of their sexuality. Ironically, outsiders have estimated that about 20% to as high as 50% of the Vatican parishioners can be closeted homosexuals. And yet, the church goes about actively promoting the view that homosexuals are criminals, and want to have homosexuals treated as second class citizens.

Here is a link to the Penn and Teller program. It is definitely worth a look:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=af6_1251568394

Caning Punishment

Recently, Malaysia sentenced a Muslim woman to 6 lashes of the cane for the offence of drinking alcohol (after already giving her a fine of 5000 ringgit - which is approximately S$2050). Today, I learnt that good sense had prevailed, and the higher authorities had rescinded the caning punishment.

New York Times article about woman being freed from her caning sentence:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/08/23/world/international-uk-malaysia-caning.html

The Independent article about the original caning charge:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/if-youre-going-to-cane-me-then-do-it-in-public-1775806.html

Caning Kartika just for drinking beer puts the Progressive Islam that former Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi was championing in a very bad light. She has already been fined RM5000. Subjecting her also to capital punishment is truly excessive.

And Kartika is actually a mother of 2 children. It just perpetuates the bad image that Islam already has, that it is misogynistic, barbaric, and backwards. And it is not as if she was being caned for an offence like manslaughter, drug peddling, inflicting violence on others, harming children etc. Her offence is that she was caught drinking beer! She was to have been flogged for an offence that did not harm any other person other than herself.

It just appalls me that the Malaysian Shariah courts wanted to cane this mother of 2 just to make her a "showcase" for Islam. The initial judgement to cane her simply shows that religious fundamentalism is making Malaysia slip back into the Middle Ages, instead of helping Malaysia progress with the rest of the world into the 21st century.

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While trying to find what other offences by women are punishable by caning in Malaysia's Shariah Court, I accidentally stumbled upon a video showing in absolutely horrific detail how a Judicial Caning in Malaysia is like.

Judicial Canings are meted out by the Federal Court, and can be served on both Muslim and non-Muslim males for over 40 kinds of offences (e.g. rape, illegal immigrants, drugs, violence etc).

Singapore also practise the same kind of Judicial Caning, except that the sentences are harsher in Singapore. The minimum stroke in Malaysia is 1 stroke. In Singapore, it is 3 strokes. In Singapore, caning can also be meted out for traffic offences as well as homosexuality.

In the following video, you can see a prisoner being given 20 strokes of the cane by the Malaysian police.

Warning: The following video is very brutal, and is not for the faint hearted. You have been warned!

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5ab_1172940415

If you are interested, you can read about the kind of offences that result in Judicial Canings from the following site:

http://www.corpun.com/singfeat.htm

It is interesting to see that in the year 2007, Singapore meted out 6404 caning sentences. That is 120 canings per week!

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Personally, I am not against the use of caning as a deterrent to prevent crimes. (Although I did find the caning video extremely unsettling. It is not without reason that many Westerners find the caning sentences "barbaric".) However, I feel that the punishment must fit the crime. "Drinking alcohol" is a non-violent act, and harms no one (other than one self - and for that, you have to drink a lot). Inflicting caning for this "offence", especially to a mother of 2, just seems a bit excessive in this modern age. It is as bad as other Shariah punishments like the chopping of limbs for crimes like stealing. The practice of chopping of limbs as a punishment is downright barbaric.

Some one once said that since this is the law of Malaysia, then you must simply obey it and not question it.

Although this sounds logical, the truth is that laws are man made, and many laws are ill-conceived, vague, oppressive, and/or immoral. Consider the race laws passed in Germany after Hitler assumed power, in which people of "un-pure bloodlines" like Jews were sentenced to death. These were "the laws of the land". Yet who would defend such racialist laws today?

We are not sheep. We are capable of passing moral judgements. The whole progress of human liberty depends on courageous people who question and challenge immoral "laws". The chief impediment to human progress is the notion that one must not question anything.

Unfortunately, Islam is a religion whose holy book dictates that none of its contents can be questioned. Any Muslim who challenges the doctrines of Islam is branded an "infidel", in which the official punishment is death. It is precisely that Islam does not allow itself to be questioned that fundamentalist Islam has been permitted to thrive and grow. Moderate Muslims just dare not question the actions of Muslim terrorists such as suicide bombers and murderers who kill non-Muslim civilians, or the practices of other Muslim countries which deny women the same rights as men, because speaking up against their Muslim brethren is deemed "un-Islamic". However, by not standing up for reason and rationality, moderate Muslims allow the worst excesses of their religion to become mainstream and acceptable practices. And this simply leads to their religion becoming more and more out-of-step with modern progressive societies.

Bill Bryson's - A Short History of Nearly Everything

I have just finished reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything".

This book is EXCELLENT! Bill Bryson's book is very informative, very easy to read, and surprisingly, very funny! I chortled at many of his narratives about eccentric scientists. The human stories in the book made the story of science lively and engaging, something which a lesser writer would have killed or rendered dry as dust (think school science text books).

Highly recommended!

What if all atheists were to leave America?

One of the fervent exhortations by American fundamentalist Christians is to ask atheists to leave America. An example is the following letter to the editor:

Well, a YouTube video answers this question:

Source: The Reason Project

Proselytisation

While chit chatting with a friend last week, he told me that his 2 children (the son in Secondary 1, the daughter in Primary 5) have recently expressed enthusiasm for picking up Christianity as their religion. As my friend is a Buddhist, he is a bit concerned by this. He believes that his children have been influenced by their friends in school. It is not hard to imagine this happening in Singapore, as our schools are teaching in English, and Christianity is the dominant faith among English/Western societies. Children like to read English story books, and there are many Christian story books out there in the market promoting the religion. And children can be easily persuaded.

Personally, I do not have any problem with people taking up any religion of their choosing. If you like the tenets of a particular religion, and decide to commit to it, that's fine with me. However, I do draw a line if you then go about hounding other people into converting to your religion or into joining your religious group. I hate aggressive in-your-face proselytising, which is something that only the Christians practise.

For instance, in Buddhism, the Buddhist practitioners will simply give you the precepts and teachings of Buddhism, and let you read and study about the religion on your own time. You must choose to accept Buddhist teachings yourself (as Buddhism is all about personal effort. There is no deity who will grant you your wishes or forgive you for your sins). You do not see Buddhists accosting people on the road and haranguing them to convert them to Buddhism.

But this is completely different with Christianity. It is one of the tenets of Evangelical Christianity that to be a good Christian, you must spread the religion to non-Christians and convert them to the Christian faith. That is why the "proselytisation brigade" is almost exclusively comprised of Evangelical Christians. And by employing good marketing techniques, they are also very successful.

If you study the doctrines of Christianity, you will probably have no quibbles with the ethical aspects of the religion to do good and to do no evil. Philosophically speaking, the ethics and moral aspects of all religions, Christianity included, are simply elaborations of the golden rule:

Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.

If everyone follows the golden rule, we will all be living in a society filled with peace and harmony, despite our differences in race, language, or religion.

It is the superstitious aspects of Christianity that I have trouble with. And boy, are there lots of myths and superstitious beliefs in Christianity. Unfortunately, fundamentalist Christians are very aggressive in promoting their myths and superstitions as SCIENTIFIC and HISTORICAL FACTS. In fact, any criticism of the Christian Bible is treated by believers as a denigration and attack on their personal well being. The problem is that these believers do not feel the same way when they denigrate and attack the religion/belief systems of the non-Christians during their conversion exercises! What hypocrisy!

Examples of Christian mythology treated as SCIENTIFIC/HISTORICAL FACTS:

- That some deity created ADAM and EVE to lord it over the animals (reality: humans are animals too. Humans are really evolved apes).

- The concept of ORIGINAL SIN by humans eating from the Tree of Knowledge (reality: everything in Genesis is a fable and not history)

- The concept of JESUS being born of a virgin (reality: there is no such thing as a virgin birth in humans. Although parthenogenesis is technically possible, the offspring would be a female, and will never be a male. This is because a woman only possesses the X-chromosome. A man is required to supply the Y-chromosome for the X-Y chromosome pair to make baby boys. Thus, female virgins - should they exist - would only be able to give birth to daughters and never to sons. The reality is that Mary was never a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus).

- The concept that a loving deity must have someone DIE for the SINS of humans so that humans can be SAVED. What sins can a baby have? Besides, human parents usually exhibit unconditional love for their children - and will forgive their children transgressions when their children do wrong. Why can't this deity be like human parents and just forgive without exacting the penalty of DEATH by crucifixion for Jesus, or subject non-believers to everlasting burning in Hell?

- The concept that only believers will be saved, and non-believers will be doomed to eternal and everlasting punishment by burning in Hell forever and ever. (Reality: there are about 2 billion Christians, and more than 4 billion non-Christians, in the world. If the Christian theology is correct, then the majority of humans have been doomed by this deity to burn in Hell forever because they did not accept Jesus Christ as their saviour. What kind of deity is this that will submit the majority of humans to eternal punishment, and only allow a select group to be saved?)

- The concept that the god of the bible is an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent god. (Reality: if you read the bible, the god described in it is anything but omnipotent, omniscient, or benevolent!)

Indeed, the philosopher Epicurus said it best:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is not benevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?

The existence of suffering (also referred as the problem of evil) is the best evidence on why there is no such thing as gods - at least not the type which answer our prayers or interfere with our lives to fulfil some divine plan.

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Science has helped us to learn more about ourselves and the universe, and has helped demote many such religious beliefs into the realms of superstitions and myths. However, when children are not taught the facts, or are not nurtured from young to do critical thinking, they can fall prey to treating such myths as facts.

Richard Dawkins wrote a very good essay in his book The Devil's Chaplain titled Good and Bad Reasons For Believing. If your children are thinking of converting to any religion, it might be helpful to ask them to read Richard Dawkins essay, which can be found here:

http://www.siliconglen.com/news/2009/01/richard-dawkins-letter-to-his-ten-year.html

Children should also be told that it is perfectly fine to not believe in the concept of god or gods. In fact, most rational people, after examining all the available evidence, always come to the conclusion that there is probably no such thing as gods, and do not need to believe in such things. Indeed, humans are already good without god. There is no need to postulate the hypothesis that gods exist to explain the goodness in people.

The list of atheists include some very famous and renowned people. I am proud to associate with and consider myself part of this group:

Let's celebrate reason!