Category Archives: Activism & Advocacy

Scott Rose: What’s The Real Reason The Catholic Church Wants To Keep Gays Oppressed?

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The Catholic Church is the world’s single largest anti-gay hate group. If we are to minimize its pernicious influence, we must educate societies about the Church’s financial motivations for keeping gay human beings oppressed.

The Church’s business model depends on the cheap labor of priests and nuns, without whom the bullying theocrats at the top of the Church hierarchy would not be able to continue living their lavish and decadent lifestyle.

How does the Church intimidate gay people into signing up for lifetimes of poverty, hard work and (ostensibly) celibacy? By socially stigmatizing gay human beings and driving young gay people to despair about their chances for satisfying adult domestic lives, the Church as good as tortures young gay people into signing up to be priests and nuns. The fall-off in the number of young people signing up for lifetimes slaving for the Church corresponds almost precisely to the gradually increasing social acceptance of gay human beings. The Church knows that and — at the expense of gay people’s basic human rights — is lashing out in attempts to protect its business interests and historical business plan. . .

Not only is the Church wrong to poison minds against gay people, it is doing so at least in part to distract from its crimes of child rape and child rape cover ups.

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Quote: Sam Harris

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Sam Harris, Ph.D. (born 1967)
Neuroscientist, Author, and Outspoken Atheist

The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy — or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution — one of the wealthiest on earth — that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever Church teaching holds sway — leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to Church-run orphanages only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set to whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.

Jonathan T. Pararajasingham: God and Logic – Why Reality Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Them

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In examination of the God hypothesis, we must first look to define reality, logic, existence and truth.

There are two ways to think about reality. The first is the “observable universe”, which is everything we will ever perceive through the senses. The second is “total reality”, which may include other realms, dimensions or the multiverse. We currently only glimpse total reality by the use of pure mathematics. When we examine reality, we find it to have certain properties; everything consists of matter or energy which follow fixed, consistent laws of nature which are mathematically describable.

Logic is derived from reality. In a sense, we made up the concept of “logic,” which follows the fact that the laws of nature are consistent and fixed, where matter is extremely well behaved in following such laws. Matter and energy can be thought of as logically describable. In this way, “logic” describes “reality” with ultimate precision. Various methods of verification (perception, testability, consistency, evidence and logic itself) support the logic of total reality. These methods have been placed in greater frameworks we now call science and mathematics, which are methods used to uncover the logic of reality. Essentially, logical methodology uncovers logical reality. Even total reality follows pure mathematics, which is intrinsically logical. Because of all this, we think of logic as a good thing simply because it describes reality so precisely.

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Let’s Stop Voting in Churches

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A Baylor University study just published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion found that having a church in clear sight can influence people’s answers to questions. Co-author Wade Rowatt pointed out that the “important finding here is that people near a religious building reported slightly but significantly more conservative social and political attitudes than similar people near a government building.” The Baylor study confirms an earlier Stanford University study that shows the same effect when looking specifically at how people’s voting place influences their vote. Stanford researcher Jonah Berger said, “Voting in a church could activate norms of following church doctrine. Such effects may even occur outside an individual’s awareness.”

Since polling place influences the vote, governments and election boards should do all they can to find neutral voting locations. And it would seem very unlikely that churches would be chosen if neutrality were the aim. Why not use schools, courthouses, firehouses and the like instead?

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Republican Racism is an Air Raid Siren, Not a Dog Whistle

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To point: white conservative populists have disdain for non-whites, see them as lazy, outside of the polity, and as rightful targets for appeals based on symbolic racism. In the eyes of the Right, “those people” are not “real Americans.” They never can be. . .

. . . To defeat President Obama, the Republican Party is wallowing in white racism in order to win over racially and economically insecure white voters. However, Gingrich and company are doing this overtly. There is little subtlety. . .

Sadly, matters may be so dire that the white identity politics of years past are now “new school” rather than “old school.” To marshal that fear, insecurity, and anger one does not need nuance, sophistication, or dog whistles. White conservatives can put such feelings on blast and gin up the psychological wages of white fear, white anxiety, and white rage to try to defeat Barack Obama.

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