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 ...