Thoughts of a Freethinker

A group in Rochester which holds music events at various places in the city had booked the local Catholic Cathedral. They had held other secular events there paying the Catholic Church. Then the local Bishop learned an event already booked was the Rochester Gay Men's Choir. The church said it could  not host this event. There you have one of the main reasons Catholic numbers are dropping. As  one Christian pundit put it, "June is judgment month."  It's the month some Christians enjoy because they can point their fingers at others and call them SINNERS. As a priest who recently, "We are criticized for judging people and policies. Jesus gave that authority to St. Peter. He passed it to us. We are authorized to judge others." It's so funny it is show-business comedy material. What makes it even funnier is the way those "authorized" to judge others decided they get a better deal than those of us lessors. The community musical event zeroed out by th...

The Catholic News Agency  reported and lamented that young women are reversing a long-standing trend are leaving the faith more than young men. Previous cohorts found men left in larger numbers than women. The link went on to suggest a technique to con women back to the Catholic Church. Another reversal of poll numbers is that older women were reluctant to self-identify with the term "women's liberation." The has had a negative connotation. Today's young women have no trouble self-identifying themselves with the term. One would have to think the willingness to identify with that term and the increasing popularity of abortion rights are linked. Both, of course, linked in turn by the overturn of Roe and the dark Forced Birth politics in several states.   The right's solution is to say to women, "We're really on your side. It's just that you must not save your life by getting an abortion." The link claims their are a gazillion single women looking f...

The right wing, especially Forced Birth, has had lots of money to fight gay and abortion rights. It has had more money than liberals until recently. It had the Presidency for four years. It has the Supreme Court. Why doesn't it have the Presidency and big House and Senate majority now? It comes down to one huge mistake. The right forgot women have the right to vote. As we speak, there are indications the left will continue to take seats in Congress and probably the Presidency. This opportunity for the left would not have opened up if the right had given one ounce of thought to women voters. By taking rights away from women a sleeping  giant has awakened. The irony is it was in plain sight since day one. For centuries, male clergy have talked about the concept of "order" God had in mind when he created the universe. The disorder, or the random selection which explained evolution, was atheist thinking, done by those who would spend eternity in hell. Why would God, an orderl...

A couple of decades ago there was a much discussed book, Bowling Alone.  It included a lot of questionnaire data on how much people interacted with each other. The groups I was involved with at the time treated to book as a very important work addressing what was thought to be an important problem, loneliness or spending too much time alone. I bought and read the book and was not impressed. It had was seemed to me arbitrary bits of data that were mostly meaningless. For example, it said "community" among a group of friends was better if they gathered at a locally owned cafe than if they gathered at a chain like McDonalds.  Now other sociologists are talking about being alone and that it implies something less happy than being with people. Reference to declining church membership is noted as one  reason people do not interact with others as much today as they did in the past. The authors admit nothing much can be done about church membership because it requires beliefs tha...

Banning women from the pulpit is a huge issue. It is no different than banning black people, handicapped or any other category of humans who some group in power decided to toss aside. There are women continuing to work inside the Catholic church and inside other denominations trying to open them up to women clergy. Some denominations, Methodists and a branch or two of Lutherans and Covenant, allow women pastors. To  those women and men still toiling inside the Catholic Church who think it is going to change, you are wasting your lives. If male dominated denominations were given these two choices, admit women to the clergy or crash and go out of business, they would choose the latter. In fact, they are in the process of doing just that.   I read whatever I find about why women in some denominations are banned from the pulpit and why in others they are OK. There are denominations where convention votes approved women. I understand Methodists approved women some voting syste...

Conventional wisdom is that having a brother or sister makes a child somehow better off. Further, the child of a one-child family is somehow flawed. Research shows this  not to be true. Economics tells us couples can choose between quantity of children and "quality" of children. The word "quality" refers to how much money is spent on a child. More money spent yields, in this context, more quality, although of course it has little to do with "quality" in a broader sense.  When I was a child on the farm, children did farm work or housework and contributed to the family income. This meant in most cases children yielded profit to his/her parents. Economists called them "producer goods" just as were tools and machinery. Later, we all know, families came to live in cities and children became "consumer goods" like cars and TV sets. This doubled the expense of children, less income and more expenses. The number of children people fell rapidly a...

There are about 9,000 late term abortions in the U.S. each year. This is a very small percentage of the total abortions but they are an important part of women's health care. The  reasons for these abortions include child pregnancies, dead fetuses and other very complicated circumstances. In a perfect world we would know about each case. Since we cannot do this, we are left with the right wing's explanation women have these expensive and difficult abortions for fun. This is not true but because the topic is so sensitive and not discussed much in public the right has had the upper hand.  It is popular among Forced Birth operatives to rail at late term abortions. There is this popular game of demanding how many months along a pregnancy can be to "allow" abortions. This is ridiculous on its face because the mantra of Forced Birth is the one fertilized cell in a human being. If this is their rock certain position, there can be no difference whatsoever between an abortion ...

The Baltimore Diocese  announced a dramatic reduction in the number of churches. To justify this, it also made known that attendance at masses has plummeted. It was down before covid, it has not come back to the levels before covid. The Diocese told its members money from the sale of the empty buildings and property will stay in the Diocese and is not part of sexual abuse settlement which was for many millions of dollars. The number of parishes will drop from about 61 to 23. There will be about 30 locations for worship and offices. The pews were 20% full before covid and now are 9% according to the Diocese website. While some of the decline can be attributed to a 10% drop in the population of the City of Baltimore proper, the Diocese includes some suburbs which, mostly, have not suffered as much population loss as central cities. The Diocese of Baltimore is the oldest one in the U.S. While times have been tough for downtown churches in big cities everywhere I've not heard of a retr...

A controversial Face Book post says a stillborn baby cannot be baptized. Church officials say a still-born baby can be given a funeral, but a fetus cannot be baptized. I'm going to assume this is correct. That a fetus cannot be baptized is inconsistent with the Catholic opinion that a fetus from the moment it is one fertilized cell is a "human being." If it is a human being, it has sinned and needs to receive the ritual of baptism. Apparently, there is on rule for "human beings" when they are one cell and another after they are born. This makes no sense. Either one cell is a human being, or it is not.  This, of course, leave out the thousands of sperm cells swimming about in a male's body. No one knows, as far as I have read, some are not duplicates. But we all know when there are several children born to the same man and woman each child is different. They are not clones. This surely must mean the sperm cells and female eggs differ one from another. The ...

Anti-abortion whacko, Randall Terry, is  running again for President. If you have not heard of him or do not remember, it's worth a little time to review who he is and what he does for a living. Terry has made a living for decades by going to cities with abortion clinics and getting local people to pack the sidewalks blocking access. He founded Operation Rescue. He has been in jail many times and uses these jail visits for fund raising. While I was Mayor of Fargo, ND, he visited for just a day or so. The newspaper quoted him as saying his pockets "were bulging" (with money). He was married to a woman for several years and had several children. I assume he was gone a good share of the time. Then he married a younger aide. After that he converted from being a Protestant evangelical to Catholicism. This was convenient because he could then get his first marriage annulled and pretend he was never married or divorced. The Terry technique of physically blocking sidewalks or rig...

A Forced Birth writer  advised Trump to discuss abortion as little as possible but brag he appointed the anti-women Supreme Court majority. The writer thinks this will soften the political damage. It is, of course, what every Forced Birth politician is doing. So far as I can tell, it is not working.  Biden was told early on what I have always thought. It was to come down clearly on one side or the other and ride out the consequences. Otherwise, experience has shown, you lose votes from both sides.  Trump, not the brightest lightbulb on the block, should have interviewed candidates to the Supreme Court personally. He should have looked at candidates until he found those who vowed not to overturn Roe but to talk about overturning Roe. While talking like that they should also have said they were determined to overturn Roe while actually they had no intention of doing so. If he had done that he, and the Republican Party, would be in much better shape today. This "honesty" thi...

I've been saying here for years, the goal of Forced Birth is to identify and monitor every pregnant woman and investigate all pregnancies that end before birth. When a woman reports she had a miscarriage, Forced Birth wants to look at her cell phone to see if she searched for information about abortions. Now we see this effort beginning . Well, actually there have been local examples before. This new effort to track pregnant women is the final step, the greatest accomplishment yet, in Forced Birth politics. A decade or so ago, there was a facade that women were not the cause of abortion. The cause was "the abortion industry" that tricked women into having abortions.  Slowly, Forced Birth has been forced into admitting its goal all along is the control of women. Religion has been picked off the shelf as a reason to oppose abortion even though it is not in the Bible. This whole thing about monitoring women reveals the control motive. Is it necessary to monitor pregnant wome...

I've been to Mexico a few times and wish I could spend time there now. The most memorable visit was decades ago when wife and I drove all the way through Mexico to Guatemala. I found the rural areas of south part of Mexico to be exotic places. I spoke a little Spanish back then and tried to engage rural people along the road in Spanish but came to realize many spoke local Indian languages. This remains the case today in the State of Hildago where the story in the link unfolds.  Small villages had huge Catholic churches when I was there. I wondered then, and wonder today, how these were built is areas where terrible poverty seemed the norm and what kind of Catholicism prevailed in these areas seemingly little changed by the invasion of Europeans. Today, Protestant evangelicals are chased around by a version of Catholics. This link  sheds a little light on the history and current events in these areas. According to the link Catholicism has merged with existing local religions s...

The Vatican is issuing new guidelines for seeing Mary and Jesus on toast and in broken windows. This has been going on for a long time. The Vatican has spent time, meaning money paid to staff, dealing with these. Can it keep on shoveling money at people's imaginations? The answer came out today. No, it cannot shovel more money into fake sitings of Mary. The ruling is somewhat complex but mostly it means the Vatican will no longer put its stamp of approval on these imaginary hoaxes. The Vatican needs to be clever, however, in dealing with these imaginary sitings. There are thousands of people whose only link to the denomination is a leaky faucet somewhere that is believed to be the tears of Mary. A most clever part of this entire saga has been that the Pope has declared long ago sitings of Mary that still draw big crowds are to be considered historical events. Recent claims are to be disregarded. This makes no sense except as a business deal. A part of the new policy is that the ap...

I always wished one or two traditional and long-standing world faiths would step forward and challenge the frequent endorsement of Christianity. I've asked some if they would like to do so. Those I have talked with say, no, they have enough trouble navigating the prejudices of U.S. society to stick their heads out in this way. When a group came up with the Satanic Temple I wondered if the court system would treat them as a legitimate religion or laugh them off. I'm sure laughing them off was the first temptation. If the criteria for a "legitimate religion," however, is not very high. Apparently, the Satanic Temple is qualifying , or at least making progress.  On the Satanic Temple's website it says merely it is a "religious organization." It does not go on to say it believes in some invisible being but says it believes certain things. One of the things is believes is that a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy. The belief, then, is opposite of th...

If it can come to a small place like Plains, Georgia, maybe it can come anywhere. Enlighted thinking is infiltrating the South. This church disaffiliated from the Southern Baptist Convention. Now it has stuck its finger in the eye of the SBC by the unthinkable, a woman as pastor. This woman sounds like an interesting preacher. She has been divorced and now is raising two children. I wonder if she lives in Plains. My wife and I spent most of a day in Plains several years ago. It is not a prosperous place, several boarded up stores. Driving around it is clear there is a part of town that is mostly where black people live and another where they mostly do not. There seems to be only one tiny restaurant where food was served in the kind of self serve hot pots we use in our own kitchens. There were no servers, a lady who seemed in charge walked around and looked at your plate and gave you a bill. There was several antique stores and Carter souvenir shops. When I saw the Carter administration...

Understandably, churches are experimenting with new ways of persuading people to attend. One is to shorten the church service. As a preacher in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod recently in his podcast, the Bible does not say what is to be included in a service, in what order or for how long. I'm sure every reader has his/her own opinions about church services. Way back, we had a close friend who had, at age 50, gone back to college and become a Lutheran minister. After she returned to our neighborhood we would ask her what it is like to be a preacher and her stories were fascinating. I remember mentioning we did not like a new practice at the time in our downtown Presbyterian church where the minister would stop the service and say, "Now, everyone greet your neighbor." People would shake hands with those around them and mumble something. I always wondered if everyone washed their hands. We told our friend the preacher we felt guilty not wanting to do this. "Don...

For as long as I can remember, I have read that people with religious convictions have better mental health, better careers, fewer divorces, fewer suicides and so on. The link says therapists should get religion, convert patients and make patients mentally healthy. The link concludes more religious therapists is an answer to today's growing mental health problem. Today, the percentage of people in the U.S. who identify as atheist, agnostic or no religious affiliation is approaching 50%. In Europe it past 50% a few years ago. Of those who remain religious, some are of different religions. This raises the question, can people "choose" to be religious? If people "choose" to be religious, what religion are they to choose? Further, do we have any data that says people who were not religious but found religion have lower suicide rates? A hypothetical example of the problem is this. If you are a Christian and data showed you would be happier and have better mental heal...

As the Trump trial focuses on whether or not he used a condom when cheating on his wife, there are those who long for a return to the way politics used to be." The link refers to modernity as a "shipwreck." Then the author goes on to talk about what he remembers as the past U.S. and what was good about it. We can't think about "who we were" versus "who we are" without thinking about winners and losers. Who we were included slavery and segregation. There is a conventional wisdom that the impulses to put Christianity into government were good ones but the past version put limits on how far this point was pushed. Reading books about the time of slavery makes me wonder whether there ever was a U.S. where there was a limit on how far Christianity can be drilled down into government and whether there exists any such limit now. The last two large books I've read about the time of slavery were by authors who searched every source available for news ...

One of my interests lately has been people who leave what we commonly call "religious cults." That term does not necessarily have a universal definition but using it describes behavior that is extreme. A young man who, with his wife, left the cult with no name, often referred to as "2 X 2", now interviews other people who have left controlling cults. His own former cult, "2x2", is hard to explain because it is so very different from anything we normally encounter in Christianity. But he is now interviewing some former members of a group we all know of, the Amish.  Within the last few days, he has posted two long interviews with a young couple who have been shunned by their Amish group in Northern Missouri. The couple explained the inside of life within their Amish group. They have a store which is patronized by tourists and local non Amish so they are remaining in the same house and community where they are under a sentence of shunning. Their former Amish ...

One of the peculiar things that has happened since Roe was overturned is states trying to stop women from leaving an anti abortion state for abortions. Texas has a vigilante law giving citizens a bounty for turning in women. Other states like Alabama have been passing laws requiring their own law enforcement to apprehend women and doctors. I could not understand why few were pointing to the commercial implications of banning the rights of people in one state to travel to any other state. The Republican Attorney General of Alabama is trying to ignore the legal rights to do business across state lines and claim women to make appointments for abortions then travel out of state to obtain them are engaged in a "conspiracy" to break Alabama laws. He has charged a woman and her doctor.  I'm reminded of the history that eventually brought about our Constitution. As I recall, when what is now the U.S. was a group of colonies a problem came along about commerce between businesses i...

There are lots of views about "nones", those who answer the question "What is your religion?" with, "none." Christian political operatives like to say, "These are people struggling with their faith. They are Christians but will not admit it." I heard a former President of American Atheists say at a convention I attended, "The nones are all ours. If not ours whose are they?" The percentage of people who identify as nones is growing rapidly. Questionnaire results, however, do not show a large increase in those who self-identify as atheists. Sociologists in the link tried to figure out why atheists polled so much lower than nones. We have to remember that studying religion is studying the culture and the culture is changing constantly. It always has so we would assume it will in the future as well. Thus, study of peoples' religious beliefs will be changing constantly in the future.  It turns out far more people say they do not believe ...

Countless times a theme is repeated in comments here and articles by Christian pundits. It goes something like this, "Atheism has no purpose. It has no values. It has no future." These have a grain of truth, atheism is not telling people about the future or guaranteeing anything. If it has a message it is enjoy your life. Within denominations there is a claim they will find their way forward. But it will be necessary to change in certain ways. These changes seem impossible. That is why the message in Christian denominations seems bleaker than the "message" of atheism.  Even though in my long life there have been several tension-filled times when the future was unclear, the Vietnam War being one, today's world is perhaps more exciting and interesting than any other. It is made even more interesting because I am retired and the internet allows one to poke inside institutions to see what is going on. For example, inside the Catholic church there are priests pointin...

To an outsider, it seems like the same thing is happening across the Christian landscape in all denominations. One faction of the faith is becoming more conservative, made up mostly of older members and distancing itself from others. Liberal factions, like the Methodist church, charge ahead reflecting modern views and a sort of "suburban" set of young parents who are church goers. This probably applies to the huge Catholic denomination but its size and hidden statistics make it difficult to sort out what is happening. Prominent Catholic columnist Ross Douthat is also trying to figure all this out. He notes that Pope Francis' efforts to broaden the denomination's appeal has not stopped the decline in numbers. Francis has not been successful either in eliminating the desire of some factions to worship the fetus and hold Latin mass. Thus, Douthat concludes, both the conservative and liberal factions will continue on even after Francis is gone. Even if conservatives are a...

I've been sparring with on-line comments about abortion for over a decade and several arguments to justify anti abortion have been run up the flagpole. All readers have heard the one which claims each fetus has "unique DNA." After it was pointed out the sperm cells from the same man and eggs from the same woman differ it was hard to continue arguing the DNA thingy. Before that were "unique fingerprints" and so on. None of these held water. Apparently, Force Birth "big thinkers" realized they needed to make a claim that was not testable and thus could not be refuted. Someone came up with "you can prove the fetus is a human being by using philosophy." Somewhere, apparently, is a person or two who went through a series of assumptions and came up with the conclusion the fetus is a "human being." I've asked but not received the sources.  One of my critics on this blog sited a young professor of philosophy in a small college who made ...

I have suggested here many times, somewhat with togue in cheek, that Sunday School lessons include a factual history of Christianity. This could include other great faiths like Hinduism and Islam. This history would include that there have been hundreds, probably thousands, of religions in human history. All of the previous ones died. The gods people worshipped in these dead religions died when that set of believers died off. One fact of life that must have been true of all the dead religions is that their death, and the death of their gods, happened after they ran out of money. That is not to say believers or their shamans were out only for money, but money is and always has been necessary to keep gods alive. I have never read a better summary of the marketplace for religion than this one. The academic discipline called economics dates to 1776 when the book, The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith was published. Smith spent considerable time discussing the economics of Christianity. Smit...

When I was a student, I recall a female student from the deep South wondering if Democrats knew that by supporting integration of schools and universities they were going to lose all the Southern states? She was right about losing those states. Since then, both Democrats and Republicans have done OK at times. Right now, Democrats seem to have the edge. They stayed competitive by being champions of change instead of refusing to change. As a Democrat, I hope the party is still on a winning path by refusing to pander to religions.  Neither of the parties has much control over how its members think. Information and cultural ideas keep churning and changing the political landscape. I can't say I understand how it happened, but somehow Democrats ended up with more voters with a long view of our society and Republicans ended up with more of the short view people. When the Southern young woman predicted Democrats would lose the South, both the Democrats leaders, Kennedy followed by Johnson...

The Arizona Supreme Court had upheld its legality. Forced birth advocate had cheered. Now their cheering has ended. The old 1964 law has been tossed into the dust bin of history. It was a law which all but banned abortions. Carri Lake of Arizona, a fire brand anti-abortion Trump endorsing Republican, recently lightened up on her anti-abortion position. Abortion rights is walking across the deserts of Arizona.  One of the entertaining parts of the Forced Birth political groups is its newly acquired reservations about allowing states to determine abortion rights. Now commenters try to appear thoughtful and say things like, "Gosh, we were all for overturning Roe. But we really need to think about whether states should be allowed to grant abortion rights...."  Forced Birth has always been outright stupid about politics. They keep on insisting abortion prohibitions should be passed by governments. Once they wanted states to prohibit, now they want the Federal Government to prohibi...

A little history of corruption in the Catholic Church. Some years ago, Tim Dolan was the Bishop of Milwaukee. The diocese was hit with a huge bill for damages by molesting priests. Rather than sell off assets to pay the victims for the harm the diocese had inflicted on them, Dolan thought it would be clever to turn the Diocese's assets to a board that still oversees about six Catholic cemeteries. The board had not asked to the money. Eventually, courts saw through the shame and stopped Dolan. In the meantime, Dolan's clever manipulation reached Pope Benedict. Benedict himself was accused of hiding abuse by priests. Benedict was so pleased with Dolan's tricks he promoted Dolan to the prize diocese in the U.S., New York City.  The New York diocese, like many others, had a murky history. Former Bishops had received reports of priest who were child molesters but, instead of turning them over to law enforcement, had moved them around hoping they remained hidden. Then the dam bro...

If you believe Forced Birth is about "babies" you need to realize you are wrong. It is about controlling women. A right-wing religious podcast recently featured a religious leader saying "...put her down."  An interesting and rather unexpected twist in the explosion of the internet is the ability of whacko pundits to publish their views. The issue of women in the abortion decision was carefully controlled for decades. Both the Catholic and Right-Wing Protestant leaders declared a moratorium on saying the woman was responsible. The accepted version placed full blame on an obscure entity, "the abortion industry." I still see "the abortion industry" used as the villain but in these modern times it is impossible to control what is published. "Dig a hole..." can get the same number of readers as "the abortion industry."  Those original leaders who thought they could get away with calling the villain "the abortion industry...

Actors, athletes and politicians often stand before cameras and carry on about their god and their book, the Bible. It is unusual for any celebrity to use an interview, especially on a conservative site, to bash the foolishness of religion and highlight all the problems it has caused. Scottish actor Brian Cox was interviewed on a podcast call "The Starting Line." He said religion has sold humans a false story and contributed to their stupidity. Religion is contributing to events which could bring an end to humans being able to live on earth. The examples he gave are well known. Religion is at the heart of the killing going on in Gaza and Ukraine. It is deep in the college campus conflicts. How could anyone believe, as was widely believed after World War II, God had given the land now called Israel to the Jews. There is plenty of evidence Jews have lived in the area now called Israel continually since recorded history, but, apparently, so have Arab people of various religions ...