Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1913

Illinois Group’s Billboard Targets Senator Dick Durbin for His “A” Grade from Atheist Lobby

When the Secular Coalition for America decided to create election voter guides several years ago, there was some internal discussion about whether that was a good or bad idea because we didn’t want our reputation (the “atheist lobby”) to hurt candidates who supported our values. That thought was quickly laughed off, though. Like we have that sort of power!

Turns out we have that sort of power.

If you drive through central Illinois right now (near Exit 72 on I-55), there’s a billboard sponsored by the Lake County Right to Life Committee, Inc. targeting Senator Dick Durbin who just received an “A” grade from the SCA:

Talk about scare tactics… the group is implying that voters shouldn’t support Durbin because he “worked with atheists” against religious freedom without even specifying what he did. For what it’s worth, if Durbin worked with atheists, in any sort of meaningful way, that’s news to me. It’s more like his positions and those of the SCA were simply aligned.

On another note, can you imagine if the word “atheists” was replaced with one describing any other religious group? “Durbin worked with Jews…”? It’d be completely unacceptable.

At least Durbin is considered one of the Democrats’ safest seats in the upcoming election. The billboard won’t affect him. But it’s great to see that SCA’s voter guide is having even a negligible effect in the race. Now, if only the SCA could convince more Secular Americans to vote in their best interests, we might get somewhere…

As far as I know, this is the first time the SCA’s grades have been used in a billboard campaign like this.

I asked Lauren Anderson Youngblood, the SCA’s Director of Communications, for her reaction to the billboard and she told me this via email:

It’s unconscionable that in this day and age “atheist” is still the third rail in American politics. Our founders took great pains to ensure that the United States would be a secular democracy. Sen. Durbin has demonstrated his commitment to our nation’s traditional secular values with his support for legislation based on reason, logic and science. His “A” grade on our scorecard is something all Americans — regardless of their religious beliefs — should be proud of. It illustrates his commitment to representing all of his constituents, not just those with whom he happens to share religious views.

I also spoke with Bonnie Quirke, the President of the Right to Life Committee, and asked her why the group put up the billboard. She explained:

“We wanted people to know that Mr. Durbin got that endorsement, and some of us might feel that that’s an infringement on our religious liberty. That that’s the next step.”

Despite the wording there, she wasn’t saying the endorsement itself was an infringement, but rather that Durbin’s votes in the future would be. (I think she’s wrong, of course, but that’s a separate issue.)

She added that the billboard just went up this week and it’ll be there through next month’s elections.

(Thanks to @MichaelRuyle for the image)

A Closer Look at the Vatican Document Guiding the Synod on the Modern Family (Part 3)

This is Part Three in a four-part series about the Vatican document Instrumentum Laboris, meant to be a working guide for the upcoming Synod of Bishops focusing on the challenges of modern family life in Catholicism. You can read the other parts here: Part One, Part Two.

…

Welcome back to Instrumentum Laboris. Today’s selection deals with “The Pastoral Program for the Family in Light of New Challenges” — basically the section in which the bishops tell priests and other on-the-ground parish officials how they ought to treat ordinary Catholics. Should be interesting…

Chapter I: The Pastoral Program for the Family: Various Proposals Underway

This chapter is basically the place where the bishops write about some of the programs they’ve seen or heard described in Catholic parishes around the world. There’s a huge section devoted to “marriage preparation,” which I suppose makes sense if your major concerns are divorce, remarriage, same-sex unions, and contraception (and how to make sure Catholics know all of these things are bad). Then there’s a comparatively tiny bit on “familial spirituality,” which as far as I can tell seems to refer to efforts to get families to act Catholic by going to Saints’ Day celebrations or saying the rosary.

But first comes marriage preparation.

The bishops observe that “in many cases, couples give little attention to pre-marriage programs”… but they never actually ask why. They dismiss it with some remarks about “strongly secularized areas” and “mixed marriages” and priests who treat the courses as “an obligation.” But the problem I remember from my own marriage-prep courses is the same problem I’m finding with this entire document: the Catholic hierarchy has no interest in listening to the people they’re trying to serve. Even here, as they try to fix the problems with marriage preparation, the bishops are asking more celibate men what young married couples need. That’s never going to work, guys.

There are a couple of outside-the-box ideas that might or might not work, like assigning a “mentor couple” to the young marrieds or making parents of engaged couples take in-law preparation courses. Topics like conflict resolution and communication skills are a particularly welcome addition, in my opinion. But what they don’t ever consider is encouraging priests to actually ask married or marrying couples what challenges they face, what concerns they have, and what they feel like they want to know. Maybe they think the questions would be too difficult.

I can’t say that inspires a lot of confidence.

They also don’t consider the possibility of getting proactive on the aforementioned domestic violence problem by introducing couples to red flags for abuse. Perhaps if you’re going to tell people that divorce is an utter impossibility, to say nothing of the many children you expect them to raise, you have a responsibility to help couples evaluate the likelihood of abuse going in. Add in the far greater emphasis placed on “special recognition” for “those who faithfully remain with their spouses” than on a person’s right to leave if they’re being abused and degraded, and it almost makes me think they may not be too serious about their “supportive action” for abuse victims.

Given that a high proportion of domestic violence incidents have women as victims, and given everything else we know about the Catholic Church, it’s a bit rich that the document references “places characterized by a somewhat sexist cultural tradition.” No, really. It actually says that, in a context that makes it pretty clear the bishops don’t believe they’re talking about themselves.

Moving along briskly, the “familial spirituality” part lists all the different religious events families can participate in, notes that families who attend these pilgrimages and festivals are closer and happier and more bonded, offers neither definitions nor evidence to support such claims, and encourages individual parishes to support and publicize such events. Sorry ’bout your families, non-religious people. Should’ve gone to visit a saint’s shrine or venerated a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Chapter II: The Pastoral Challenges of the Family

The first part of this chapter actually made me feel a bit of hope for the whole messy document, because, after all the “perfect Catholic family” cheerleading in prior sections, especially throughout that last chapter, it acknowledges reality:

Some responses show how, in cases where the faith of family members is either weak or non-existent, both the parish and the Church in general are not seen as supportive. This probably comes from a mistaken idea of the Church and her activity due to socio-cultural circumstances, especially where the institution of the family itself is in crisis. In these cases, the ideal of living as a family is viewed as unattainable and frustrating instead of as a possible means for learning how to respond to one’s vocation and mission. Often, when the lay faithful sense the great distance between the ideal of family living and the impossibility of achieving that goal, the couple’s crisis in marriage and the family gradually becomes a crisis in faith.

I would argue that people suspect a lack of support from the Church in general based on an entirely accurate idea of the Church and her activity, but setting that aside, this is spot-on. Finally, they understand that their unattainable ideals of Catholic perfection discourage and alienate mere mortals! Finally, they’re willing to look at the needs of the non-ideal Catholic family, where pilgrimages to saints’ shrines just won’t cut it! Surely that’s what this is about, right? Surely now they’ll get serious about offering advice that’s not tailored to suit the shiny, happy Catholics?

Many respondents point out that a crisis in faith can either lead to failure or be taken as an opportunity for growth and an occasion to discover the deeper meaning of the marriage covenant. In this way, the loss of a sense of meaning, or even the breakdown within a family, can be the means of strengthening the marriage bond. Families, willing to offer support to a couple in this difficult situation, can help them overcome this crisis.

So a crisis in faith can lead a family to overcome the crisis, thereby becoming the ideal Catholic family, or they can fail. Presumably failing means losing faith entirely.

Pretty harsh on the nonbelievers, don’t you think? Keep in mind that some of the faithful will have atheist friends, relatives, parents, children, or spouses who are atheists. The bishops are calling their loved ones failures. Pastoral care, everybody!

The bishops go on to identify a whole host of “critical situations in the family.” Some of these are real issues that I think pretty much everyone could agree deserve attention and care:

sex trafficking and sexual exploitation of children;mental, physical, and sexual abuse, mostly of women and children (which the bishops blame on “a false culture based on possessions”);addictions to alcohol and drugs;parental neglect (though it’s hard to tell whether the bishops are referring to genuine neglect or “failure to bring up children in the way we find most appropriate”);the ramifications of misleading information on the Internet;war and interfaith conflict;the effects of economic instability, unemployment, and job insecurity upon the family;poverty and the plight of migrant workers;physical and mental illness.

But again, the Church talks out of both sides of its mouth here. They mouth platitudes about the ills of society while cutting off solutions with their theology. They call for laws to help working mothers balance workplace and familial responsibilities, but offer very few options to women who wish to avoid constant pregnancies. Likewise, they don’t offer a lot of help to poor families striving to limit their children in a context where ill health and lack of resources might make fertility tracking a good deal less reliable. They profess concern about people’s physical and mental health, but when preventative measures arise — whether it’s condoms for AIDS sufferers or gay-straight alliances to combat teen suicide — catechism wins over compassion every single time.

Then there are the other problems they identify, which are a bit more idiosyncratic:

sexual promiscuity (not defined, but presumably means “having sex while not married to one’s sex partner”);“a contraceptive mentality,” which leads to abortions;“methods of artificial fertilization”;addiction to pornography (most often defined, in Christian circles, as “any pornography use ever”)“many relationships which do not coincide with the idea of a traditional nuclear family”;media depictions that affirm and normalize such relationships;married partners who are not “open to life”;uncertain gender identity;lack of a father figure (a major cause of uncertain gender identity — citation not provided);reliance on conscience to determine whether something is right or wrong (I guess they want you to look it up in their book instead);individualism, which I think is a code word for “governments passing laws that allow individuals to decide whether or not they’ll have abortions or use birth control.”

That helpful list tells bishops what they need to make sure they’re against, and what to make sure their priests and parishioners are against, too.

Here’s a positive note, though: the one and only point in the document where the bishops acknowledge that the Church itself is one of its own worst enemies based on the way it treats lay Catholics, especially ones who struggle or fail to conform. I’ll just quote it in its entirety because it’s such a gem, and bask:

Responses from almost every part of the world frequently refer to the sexual scandals within the Church and, in general, to a negative experience with the clergy and other persons. Sex scandals significantly weaken the Church’s moral credibility, above all in North America and northern Europe. In addition, a conspicuously lavish lifestyle by some of the clergy shows an inconsistency between their teaching and their conduct. Some lay faithful live and practice their faith in a “showy manner,” failing to display the truth and humility required by the Gospel spirit. The responses lament that persons who are separated, divorced or single parents sometimes feel unwelcome in some parish communities, that some clergy are uncompromising and insensitive in their behavior; and, generally speaking, that the Church, in many ways, is perceived as exclusive, and not sufficiently present and supportive.

It saves so much time and energy when the bishops are so successful at critiquing their religion. They really ought to do it much more often. And maybe try taking their own observations to heart instead of scolding the laity for failing to drop their brains and moral compasses in the gutter before entering.

There are few solutions presented here, but one assumes the Synod of Bishops will discuss potential solutions to the thornier problems when they convene next week.

Chapter III: Difficult Pastoral Situations

This chapter begins by quoting a papal document, Evangelii Gaudium (“the joy of the Gospel”):

The Church is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open… where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems.

The chapter then goes on to identify certain groups of people for whom there is no place.

Okay, that’s not actually what it says. But it does identify certain people as living outside of the Church’s moral code and calls on priests everywhere to “bring them healing so that they might continue their journey with the entire ecclesial community.” That sounds like a vaguely tactful way to call out sinners who, barring major life changes, are cruising down the highway to hell.

Let’s look at a few categories in the Vatican’s field guide to sinners:

Cohabitation: Many couples choose to live together without benefit of marriage. For some reason, the Church seems particularly upset that these relationships don’t always end after a “trial period” but sometimes carry on indefinitely. The Church encourages prevention in this case: emphasize chastity before marriage to young adults, teach children to value commitment, and make sure the adults in the parish are setting a good example.

Divorced-and-Remarried People: This situation is euphemistically called “canonically irregular,” but what it really means is that your civil divorce doesn’t count until and unless you get an annulment, so you’re still considered married to your first spouse. That makes your new marriage adultery. As if that’s not unsettling enough, you’re also not permitted to take Communion (which is kind of the centerpiece of every Catholic service). The bishops acknowledge that these couples may suffer greatly when this happens, but they insist: being excluded isn’t really a punishment, however it feels, and you’re still part of the Catholic community even if you’re visibly relegated to second-class status. Besides, there are always options — either reconcile yourself to being excluded from your community’s most important ritual, or never have sex with your new spouse again. So simple!

Divorced-and-Chaste People: Some people resign themselves to living sexless and single after their marriage breaks down. They are still able to take Communion. These “separated and divorced persons who remain faithful to their marriage vows call for the Church’s attention in their situation, which is often lived in loneliness and poverty.” Yikes. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Teen Mothers: The bishops want the Church to be extra nice to these young women, who could’ve had an abortion and didn’t.

Non-practicing Catholics Who Want To Marry In Church: Rather than being a cause for celebration — the prodigals return! — this is an annoyance for a lot of clergy because the couple usually wants the Catholic wedding for bad reasons: pretty wedding photography, nice atmosphere, Grandma will just die if they don’t get married in a church ceremony, and the like. Once the ceremony is over, no matter how welcoming the priests have been, the couple often doesn’t come back. The Church doesn’t seem to see this as an indication that Catholic teaching is in any way off-putting.

The Gay Couple: If priesthood were a video game, and sinners were the bad guys, the gays would be the level-nine boss. Quoting the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the bishops say “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.” In other words, they don’t even really count as families. Then the CDF goes on to recommend against “unjust discrimination.” Sure, no problem.

The bishops have a lot of concerns about the children of same-sex couples, as well as the children in gay-affirming societies more generally. They seem to fear sex-ed classes leading to some kind of gender apocalypse, where the idea of complementary sexes falls by the wayside and allows men to care for infants and women to become presidents — or priests. (The horror!) What’s more, there’s really no reason to deny adoption to gay couples if children don’t really need opposite-gender parents to develop healthily. To keep men and women firmly ensconced in their limiting sex-role stereotypes, the bishops recommend Catholic sex-ed programs “which offer young people an adequate idea of Christian and emotional maturity to allow them to face even the phenomenon of homosexuality.” (The either/or split between “homosexuality” and “emotional maturity” comes up more than once.)

Nonetheless, the bishops recommend that gay parents wishing to baptize their child Catholic for whatever reason be treated no differently than any other parents seeking baptism for their child, with extra support in cases where they believe “a reasonable doubt [exists] in the capability of persons in a same sex union to instruct the child in the Christian faith, proper support is to be secured in the same manner as for any other couple.”

Except it won’t really be “the same manner as for any other couple,” because the bishops note all kinds of reluctance and resistance to pastoral care for gays. Some respondents express a fear that, if they try to be accepting to gay people, they’ll be seen as condoning homosexuality — heavens forfend! Others worry about making a distinction between “good gays” (who approach their lives with appropriate levels of shame and concealment) and “bad gays” (the out-and-proud kind, the ones who dare to actually like themselves). Of course, those aren’t the terms used in the actual document, in which we’re reminded that we really probably shouldn’t use words like “gay” or “lesbian” at all, lest we confer legitimacy on those identities through our word choice.

Nothing says “we are a warm and accepting faith community” like trying to define somebody else’s identity for them… and then condemning them for it anyway.

A Book About Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible

I want Jerry Coyne‘s new book: Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible. Now. But apparently I have to wait several months since it’s not out till May…

Doesn’t mean I can’t pre-order it many times over.

Since Coyne has a new book, does that mean he has to change his blog’s name? Because I’m pretty sure that’s how the Internet works.

Friendly Atheist Podcast Episode 22: TAM2014: Skeptic Ink Bloggers

Our latest podcast guests are Vandy Beth Glenn, Beth Ann Erickson, and Rebecca Bradley from the Skeptic Ink network:

(from L to R) Vandy Beth Glenn, Jessica Bluemke, Beth Ann Erickson, Rebecca Bradley

Jessica sat down with them to talk about blogging in the skeptic/atheist community and their favorite posts.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you have any suggestions for people we should chat with, please leave them in the comments, too.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, get the MP3 directly, check it out on Stitcher, or just listen to the whole thing below.

And if you like what you’re hearing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon and leaving us a positive rating!

Atheist Pumpkin-Carving Contest

American Atheists is giving away a free ticket to next year’s National Convention in Memphis (and a year of free membership) to the winner of a pumpkin carving contest. And nothing says scary like a pumpkin that promotes godlessness:

The rules are pretty simple:

1. Carve a pumpkin with your favorite atheist-themed image. This can be our logo, another symbol related to atheism, faces of famous atheists, or whatever creative atheism-themed design you’d like.

2. Take two pictures: One of your pumpkin (preferably lit up from the inside), and another of yourself with your pumpkin, and email them to pumpkin@atheists.org no later than 11:59 PM Eastern on Monday, October 27. We suggest using an image-sharing service like imgur.com and sending us the links.

3. American Atheists staff will choose our top 5-10 designs.

4. Next, YOU and all your friends vote for the winner on our website! Online voting will take place Tuesday, October 28 through Thursday, October 30.

5. The winner will be announced on Halloween, Friday October 31.

Bonus points, I assume, go to anyone whose pumpkin isn’t smashed by the time Halloween ends.

Sheriff’s Office is Guided by the Five “C”s… Including Christ

The Humphreys County Sheriff’s Office in Waverly, Tennessee has an unusual logo, which it uses on both its official website and as the profile picture for the department on Facebook:

Nice words there: Commitment, Compassion, Courage, Communication… and Christ?

Do they only protect you if you’re a Christian? Is Jesus the Sheriff? Does Christ answer the phone if there’s an emergency? There’s just no reason to include a religious word on the official logo.

Maybe they couldn’t think of another C-word. I’ll fix that: How about Character or Competence? (Though neither word seems especially apt right now.)

I sent an email to the department asking what they plan to do. I’ll post a response once I receive it and pass this along to the Freedom From Religion Foundation if they don’t write back.

(Thanks to Virginia for the link)

Church-Sponsored Elementary School Bible Classes May Come to a Halt if Creationism is Being Taught

If you want to teach the Bible at a public school, it has to be done objectively, as literature, and geared toward students who can understand that distinction. Anything that suggests the book is factual crosses the line — and that happens all too often.

Which is why it’s especially disturbing to learn that several elementary schools teach Bible classes in North Carolina’s Rowan-Salisbury School System.

But maybe that’s not a problem.

Until you learn that the classes are sponsored by religious groups:

Local churches fund the bible teachers through nonprofit groups set up specifically to promote bible classes.

Oh. And the teachers present Creationism as a fact:

… including teaching a 7-day creation, giving students examples of “God’s plan” that “clearly” showed the universe was created with a purpose, and supposed examples of the bible predicting scientific discoveries, among other inappropriate teachings inculcating biblical beliefs.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation not only sent a letter explaining these problems to the District superintendent, but they also filed an open records request to figure out what exactly is in the syllabi and what material is used.

“It is appalling that the District would take away from instructional time to indoctrinate children in Christian dogma,” [attorney Patrick] Elliott said, calling on Rowan-Salisbury School System to put an immediate moratorium on the elementary school bible classes involving “young, impressionable elementary school students.”

Elliott wrote that the district’s ill-advised decision to offer elementary bible classes calls into question the legitimacy of the bible classes also being taught in the middle schools and high school. FFRF is asking the district to thoroughly investigate all such classes.

You would think that Christians eager to get the Bible in public schools would do everything in their power to make sure it’s being taught in a legally sound way. If this situation pans out as FFRF suspects, you have to wonder if it’s the result of complete incompetence or if it was purposely planned this way from the beginning.

(Image via Shutterstock)

How Would Discovering Extraterrestrial Life Affect the World’s Religions?

According to Vanderbilt Professor of Astronomy David Weintraub, a majority of atheists believe in extraterrestrial life. That’s one of the revelations he discusses in his new book Religions and Extraterrestrial Life:

Specifically, he found that 55% of atheists believed in aliens while the number was lower for religious believers. Only 44% of Muslims, 37% of Jews, 36% of Hindus, and 32% of Christians felt the same way.

This is actually not a surprising claim.

While the book’s cover makes aliens look like cartoon-y works of fiction, the idea that there’s other life in the universe isn’t new at all. In fact, given the size of the universe and how relatively little we actually know about it, one could argue there’s a pretty good chance there are other forms of life out there that we just haven’t encountered yet. As Richard Dawkins said last week, “The idea that we are alone in the universe seems to me completely implausible and arrogant… Considering the number of planets and stars that we know exist, it’s extremely unlikely that we are the only form of evolved life.”

Meanwhile, if you’re religious, there’s reason to believe God specifically put humans on Earth because we’re his precious little snowflakes.

Evangelical and fundamental Christians are most likely to have difficulty accepting the discovery of extraterrestrial life, the astronomer’s research indicates. “… most evangelical and fundamentalist Christian leaders argue quite forcefully that the Bible makes clear that extraterrestrial life does not exist. From this perspective, the only living, God-worshipping beings in the entire universe are humans, created by God, who live on Earth.” Southern Baptist evangelist Billy Graham was a prominent exception who stated that he firmly believes “there are intelligent beings like us far away in space who worship God.”

I’ve said this before, but discovering life on other planets would arguably be the greatest threat to religion we’ve ever seen. It would just destroy the idea that we’re “special,” and it would likely confirm everything we’ve ever known about evolution (since aliens would have had to evolve just like we did).

Thinking about how various groups of people would take that news makes for a wonderful — and not even far-fetched — thought experiment.

We Understand That the “Fittest” Survive, but How Did They Get That Way in the First Place?

How do random mutations in our genes really create the kind of diversity of life we see in the world today? Charles Darwin certainly had no idea, since the genetic revolution happened long after he died.

Now, researcher and evolutionary biologist Dr. Andreas Wagner has written a book explaining how life can adapt in a way that’s much faster than simple random variations. It’s called Arrival of the Fittest:

In the excerpt below, Wagner explains the concept of the “Universal Library”:

Imagine standing in a room crammed with books from floor to ceiling. The bookshelves barely leave space for the door you see on each of the four walls. You start leafing through the books and realize that they all have the same number of pages. Each page contains the same number of lines. And each line has the same number of characters. But — this is strange — the books are full of gibberish. Each line of each page of each book contains mostly arbitrary strings of letters — “hsjaksjs…,” “zvaldsoeg…,” and so on — occasionally separated by spaces and punctuation. Only rarely do you find a meaningful English word — “cat,” “teapot,” “bicycle” — islands in a vast sea of more gibberish.

After a while you tire of these books, which do not make sense. You step through one of the doors and find yourself in another room just like the first one. It is equally packed with bookshelves that crowd in on four doors. And its books make no more sense than those in the first room.

Another door leads you to yet another identical room, and from there you begin to wander through room after room after room, and realize that you are in an endless maze of rooms, identical except for the books that inhabit them. These books form a library that is as gigantic as it is bizarre. As you wander through this library, you encounter fellow travelers who help you grasp the enormity of this place.

The rooms form a universal library, home to all conceivable books.

That is, its books contain all possible strings of characters — twenty-six letters and a few punctuation marks. Most of the strings are the nonsense you already read. But occasionally a book will contain a meaningful word, sentence, or paragraph. More than that, somewhere in this library dwell books that contain no gibberish whatsoever. Because the library contains all possible books, it also contains each meaningful book ever written. All possible novels, short stories, poetry collections, biographies (of people real or imagined), philosophical treatises, religious books, books of science and mathematics, all conceivable books written not only in English but in all languages, books that reveal everything that is true, but also spin terrible lies, books that talk about other books, about the library itself and where it came from, books, some true, others false, about your life’s story, how it began and how it will end, and the book you are reading right now. All of them are contained in this library — a library enormous almost beyond imagining.

To get of an idea how large this library is, let us say that every book in it contains 500,000 characters. (That’s not very long — in the same ballpark as the book you are reading right now.) Excluding punctuation marks, there are 26 possibilities (A through Z) for each of these 500,000 characters. That is, there are 26 possibilities for the first character, 26 for the second, 26 for the third, and so forth. To estimate the number of books, we thus need to multiply 26 by itself 500,000 times. Mathematicians would write this number as 26 raised to the power of 500,000, or 26500000. This is a very large number, amounting to a 1 with more than 700,000 zeroes behind it, more zeroes than this book has letters. And far greater than the number of hydrogen atoms in the universe. It is a hyperastronomical number.

The deepest secrets of nature’s creativity reside in libraries just like this: all-encompassing and hyperastronomically large. Only instead of being written in human language, the texts in these libraries are written in the genetic alphabet of DNA and the molecular functions that DNA encodes.

…

Human books can capture entire universes — everything that human language can utter — but they have nothing on the chemical language of what may be life’s oldest library of creation, the one devoted to metabolism. Every one of the trillions of living things on earth can be described by human prose or poetry. But creating any one of them requires the chemical language of metabolism, the chemical reactions that create the building blocks of life and thus ultimately all living matter. The library’s chemical language can express life itself — all of it.

To date, we have discovered more than five thousand different chemical reactions that some organism, somewhere on our planet, uses to produce the building blocks of life I mentioned in chapter 2, the nucleotides that make up DNA and RNA, and the amino acids from which proteins are constructed. The reactions that occur in E. coli — more than a thousand — are among them, as are all known chemical reactions that take place in any bacterium, fungus, plant, or animal — including humans. When your body extracts energy from sugar or any other food, it uses such reactions. It also uses them when healing the few hundred skin cells covering a scraped knee, and when replenishing the millions of red blood cells that die every day.

…

… just as the universal library contains all meaningful books, the library of metabolisms contains all “meaningful” metabolisms — those that allow an organism to survive — and many more, because not all metabolisms are meaningful, just as not all books are. Some metabolisms cannot procure energy, or they fail to manufacture important molecules. These are like books where some chapters, paragraphs, or sentences are coherent but the book as a whole does not make sense. And many other metabolic texts are gibberish. These are metabolisms with disjointed reaction sequences dead-ending on molecules useless to life, the equivalent of books containing only meaningless character strings.

Arrival of the Fittest is in bookstores and online beginning today.

…

Reprinted from Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle by Andreas Wagner with permission of Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright (c) Andreas Wagner, 2014.

Vatican Flack Claims That the Church Is the Only Effective International Body Fighting Child-Raping Priests

I wonder what the Latin equivalent for chutzpah is.

A former Vatican spokesman has written, against the backdrop of the house arrest of a former nuncio being investigated for abuse of minors, that the Church is the only international body acting effectively against pedophilia.

I’ll bet that’s news to Interpol, to the United Nations, and to the international organizations advocating for victims of clergy rape.

In an op-ed published in the Italian daily La Repubblica Sept. 25, Joaquin Navarro-Valls commented on the house arrest in Vatican City of Jozef Wesolowski, the former apostolic nuncio to the Dominican Republic who was laicized earlier this year. He faces criminal charges under Vatican City’s civil laws. The house arrest of Wesolowski “is a very important penal action,” stressed Navarro-Valls, who was head of the Holy See press office from 1984-2006. Navarro-Valls emphasized that “the Holy See was legally fit and morally ready” to handle such an “extreme and shameful crime” thanks to a “legal rigor the Church has been maintaining against pedophilia for 20 years, ever since abuses first came to light.”

Say what, now? Moral readiness? Legal rigor?

By perfectly objective standards, the Catholic Church has created and perpetrated a decades-long, possibly centuries-long sex scandal involving the sustained assault on legions and legions of young children. Not only were tens of thousands of teens and preteens (or were there more?) sexually violated by the self-styled holy men whose so-called morality placed them above the flock’s suspicion; but a succession of archbishops, monsignors, and other spiritual “leaders” subsequently conspired to move the sexual deviants in their midst from parish to parish, allowing known rapists to make new underage victims.

Then, when the crimes came to light, the Catholic hierarchy went out of its way to both shield the perps from secular prosecution and to protect Church assets from civil lawsuits filed by the survivors.

And that’s still not all. Church spokesmen also habitually tried to parry the criticism by pointing the finger elsewhere — maintaining, for instance, that the press sensationalized and exaggerated the Catholic child-abuse epidemic (after a shocking exposé in the Boston Globe, Cardinal Bernard Law responded with “By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe“).

The worst of the Vatican-employed spinmeisters even blamed the victims: in an article for The Catholic Herald, Milwaukee archbishop Rembert Weakland wrote:

“Sometimes not all adolescent victims are so ‘innocent.’ Some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise.”

The Wesolowski case (he’s the former papal nuncio who, in a Catholic first, was recently defrocked and arrested by Vatican authorities on suspicion of serial child rape) does nothing to change the Church’s shameful record. By rights, the Catholic Church is the last freakin’ institution on Earth that may crow about one tiny first step in pursuing child-fucking clergy members, what with so much pain and suffering still unacknowledged, unaddressed, and uncompensated by the cadres of padres.

The tone-deafness of the Church is staggering. For instance, Navarro-Valls writes that

“Pope Francis’ decision [to prosecute Wesolowski] must be rightly appreciated, but it is noteworthy that it is the logical and coherent consequence” of a modus operandi that stretches back to the time of his two immediate predecessors.

You almost have to admire the audacity.

Navarro-Valls then emphasized that “the Church is the only communitarian and institutional body” that is “effectively acting” in order to eradicate pedophilia “both in canonical and penal law terms” as well as “in cultural terms.”

After reading the piece, still feeling queasy, I got in touch with the man who literally wrote the book on Catholic child abuse: Michael D’Antonio, who penned 2013′s excellent Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal. Here’s what he had to say:

“The Vatican has long claimed to be on the leading edge of the fight against pedophilia but it has, historically, confused its religious sanctions with actual legal efforts against this terrible crime. Spiritually speaking, the church considers the defrocking of a priest very serious. The rest of the world does not consider this action real punishment for the sexual abuse of children. In the rest of the world, sexual abuse is taken more seriously, not less, and is prosecuted as a violent crime punishable by longterm incarceration.

If the Vatican does indeed try Wesolowski in a criminal proceeding and he is found guilty, we will have to see what kind of punishment is imposed. I would have far more confidence in legal proceedings almost anywhere in the world. But let’s give them a chance. They may prove to actually be committed to justice.”

I also asked D’Antonio how the rape survivors he’s talked with see Navarro-Valls’ jaw-dropping statements.

“The survivors I know are very skeptical of the Vatican process and can’t imagine how it will yield real justice. The appropriate course would be extradition to the place where a crime took place and adjudication in that locale. The Vatican doesn’t seem to recognize the seriousness of these offenses. It is applying church administrative processes to a criminal issue and claiming that constitutes child protection. Once again they suffer from their isolation. Their “state” is populated almost entirely by male clerics. No women, no children, no semblance of a true nation.

Also, the Vatican possesses this unique status as a state organized to serve a religion and thus, presents the world with a strange kind of reality. In the case of sexual crimes committed by clergy, this reality is a bureaucracy filled with desperation where, I’m afraid, the denial is so deep that people may truly believe the distorted arguments they make in defense of the indefensible.”

May we believe a Catholic flack who claims that the Church has the “moral readiness” and “legal rigor” to prosecute the crimes that it has willfully turned a blind eye to a million times? Or would that be akin to believing that the Sinaloa Cartel is uniquely qualified to dispense justice against the drug traffickers, torturers, and assassins it has produced for decades?

(Image via Shutterstock)