Jane Donnelly and I are in Poland today for the OSCE Human Rights Conference on Human Rights. This is the first time an Irish atheist advocacy group has taken part in an OSCE event. We will highlight the need for a secular Irish Constitution, education system and laws where the state is neutral about religion […]
Does God exist? An interview, a debate and an article
I’ll be discussing whether god exists today, Wednesday 21 September, on the Pat Kenny radio show on RTE in the morning, and in a debate at the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society in the evening. The RTE interview will be at 11 am with Pat Kenny talking to me and Miguel DeArce of TCD Genetics […]
Atheist Ireland meets Government Forum on Primary Education Part 2
This is a summary of the questions and answers part of the meeting last Tuesday between Jane Donnelly and I on behalf of Atheist Ireland, and the Department of Education’s Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector. We were questioned by the Advisory Group to the Forum, which consists of Chairperson Dr. John […]
Irish Government demands full cooperation from the Vatican
On Monday I analyzed how the Vatican, in its response to the Irish Government about the Cloyne sex abuse report, had said only that its Bishops should “cooperate” with the Irish civil authorities, and had failed to say that they should “cooperate fully”. Since then the Irish Government has twice highlighted this important distinction. On […]
Atheist Ireland meets Government Forum on Primary Education Part 1
Yesterday, Tuesday September 6, Jane Donnelly and I attended the Department of Education’s Forum on Patronage and Pluralism in the Primary Sector. We were there to elaborate on, and answer questions about, the written submission that Atheist Ireland previously made to the Forum. We were questioned by the Advisory Group to the Forum, which consists […]
Is the Vatican cooperating fully with the Irish Government?
The most significant sentence in the Vatican’s response to the Irish Government about the Cloyne Report comes on the second-last page, just before the concluding remarks. It says: “From the foregoing considerations, it should be clear that the Holy See expects the Irish Bishops to cooperate with the civil authorities, to implement fully the norms […]
Bishop Magee lied and deliberately misled, says Cloyne Report
How can we believe, without corroboration, anything that members of the Irish Catholic Hierarchy say in cases where it is in their interest to mislead us? That is surely the central question that arises from the Cloyne Report into the handling of allegations of sexual abuse
The Dublin Declaration on Secularism
The World Atheist Convention in Dublin in June 2011 adopted the following declaration on secularism and the place of religion in public life. Please discuss and promote it with your friends, the media and your politicians.
Vatican compares child abuse with ordaining women
Apologists for the Vatican have recently claimed that the Catholic Church does not compare sexually abusing a child with attempting to ordain a woman, but that it merely included both crimes in the same document as a procedural matter.
However, this is not true. A Vatican official has explicitly described the crimes contained in this document as being “on the same level” of seriousness. They are the “Delicta Graviora”, the crimes which the Catholic Church considers the most serious of all, and which are reserved to the Holy See for judgment.
In 2007, the Vatican published a pamphlet on Paedophilia and the Priesthood, written by Monsignor Raffaello Martinelli, an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and member of the editorial commission of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. This pamphlet explicitly states:
“The seriousness with which the Church evaluates and judges acts of pedophilia is shown by the fact that with a new law passed in 2001, the Holy See (and not the local bishops) decided to reserve the right to judge those crimes…
The fact that the Pope wanted to reserve to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — a dicastery of the Holy See — judgment of the acts of pedophilia committed by priests, shows that the Church considers those acts to be very serious, serious crimes on the same level of the other two serious crimes — reserved to the Holy See — that can be committed against two sacraments: the Eucharist and the holiness of confession.”
In 2010, with the updated document Normae de Gravioribus Delictis, the Vatican has now added the attempted ordination of women to this strange list of the most serious crimes of all.
And the direction of the comparison is not that they consider these theological crimes to be as serious as sexually abusing a child, but that they consider sexually abusing a child to be as serious as these theological crimes, to be judged by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which used to be the Congregation of the Inquisition.
For example, sexually abusing a child is listed not as a crime against the child, but as a crime against the Biblical commandment forbidding adultery. And attempting to ordain a woman attracts a more serious punishment than sexually abusing a child. This is the type of morality that results when people put theology ahead of reality.
Ethical issues should be evaluated on the basis of human rights, compassion, well-being and suffering, not on the basis of theological dictates from people who believe they are getting messages from the creator of the universe.
The resurrection of Jesus in the Bible
One of Atheist Ireland’s campaigns is to encourage people to read the Christian Bible and the sacred texts of other religions. The physical resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central tenet of Christianity. But the evidence for this extraordinary claim is nonexistent outside the Christian Bible, and contradictory within the Christian Bible.
In the earliest written Biblical reference, Paul says the risen Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at one time [1 Cor 15:3-8]. Yet in the earliest written Gospel, called Mark, the allegedly risen Jesus does not appear to anybody. A different writer later added that part [16:9-20] to the Mark story, with the risen Jesus saying that people who believed in him could safely drink poison.
The Gospels called Matthew and Luke, written a decade or more later, were the first to include the risen Jesus physically appearing to people. But in Matthew, this seems relatively commonplace, with the bodies of many dead people being physically resurrected, coming out of their tombs, and appearing to many people [27:52-53]. None of the other Gospels mention this incident.
Nor do the Gospels agree on where and how many times the risen Jesus physically appeared. In Mark he does not appear at all. In Matthew he appears twice, to the two Marys on a road [27:8-9] and to his disciples on a mountain in Galilee [27:16-17]. In Luke he appears three times: to a man and his companion on a road [24:13-32], to Peter in an unspecified place [24:33-34], and to his disciples and others in a house [24:36-53].
In John he appears four times: to Mary Magdelene who thinks he is a gardener outside his tomb [20:11-18], to his disciples twice in a house [24:19-23, 26-29], and to some of his disciples for breakfast after a fishing trip [21:1-12]. None of the Gospels include Paul’s remarkable claim that the risen Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at one time.
These fantastic and wildly inconsistent stories may have seemed convincing in more primitive times, written as they were as standalone stories in different places for different audiences, many of who believed the world was coming to an end within their lifetimes. They are no basis today on which to build a worldview about the nature of reality or how we should live together as sentient beings.