Monday, 02 May 2011

• A Legacy of Death While Claiming the Moral High Ground

  

  Originally posted on Atheism Resource.

  I have been away for far too long.  I apologize for that.

  As many of you know I have been struck by a relapsing illness in the last few months.  My battle with anorexia got the better of me, landing me in the hospital in the middle of February.  Since that time I have taken a break from writing about religion.

  But I’m doing much better now and I had promised myself that today was the day I got back on the bull, as it were, and what better way to get back into the swing of things than by picking on an incredibly easy target: the Catholic Church.

  A Filipino Catholic bishop says a pending bill’s supporters are no better than “terrorists.”

  A former mayor of Manila believes the bill is “worse than martial law.”

  As I clutch my pearls I wonder what it could be.  The cynic in me wagers that it is more wailing about abortion, but it turns out that little portion of my brain is not cynical enough.

  …lawmakers are instead considering a “reproductive health” bill that would, in addition to forbidding workplace discrimination against pregnant women, use state funds to distribute condoms and initiate more sex ed in schools.According to the Manila-based Inquirer newspaper, the bill also encourages a two-child family, but offers no prohibition on having more kids. It does require all government hospitals to include a full range of contraceptive surgeries and methods, such as IUD, and forces couples to review family planning material before getting hitched.

  Condoms.  Distributing condoms, in the eyes of the Catholic church, is a form of terrorism.  Cynical though I am, I have nothing on these idiots.

  Sam Harris and other atheists have already made this point, but it bears repeating.  In countless third world countries, AIDS rages through the populations producing death tolls in the millions.  This is largely thanks to misinformation about AIDS spread to these nations by Catholic missionaries (in lieu of teaching them, y’know, science).  The problem they helped create is then augmented by the fact that the Catholic church wages war on one of the best ways to mitigate the transmission of HIV: condoms.

  Any sane moral person shudders at the prominent crimes of the Catholic church: namely enabling pedophiles to rape children (and then the attempts at justification or downplaying those acts later).  But this should also stain the Catholic church’s already tattered legacy.  It is the zenith of cynicism to have contributed to so many preventable deaths, all the while claiming to work out of love and in the interest of the preservation of life. It should be perceptible even to those credulous enough to be taken in by that lie, that the Catholic church gives primacy to its dogma above all else, including human life.  It seems that to the Catholic church that ‘life’ is a smokescreen to be waved around when it takes a break from helping the spread of AIDS to protect a clump of cells at all cost.

  Perhaps the most cynical of all is the use of the concept of ‘life’ as little more than a tool while simultaneously believing that you are preening atop the moral high ground.

  It bears repeating: irrationality leads to monstrous actions, regardless of intent, and nothing canonizes irrationality as a virtue but faith and religion.  You want a more moral world?  Fight the institutions that tell us that not only is irrationality not something to avoided, but that we need it.  Fight the Catholic church and all other faith-based religions.

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