Emma Jane, Richard Dawkins, Paul Toohey, and Christopher Pearson bringing up the rear ...

(Above: the thoughts of " ". Link below).

It's been a long time since Emma Jane aka Emma Tom - fondly known to the pond as " " - scored front billing on the whirling fickle finger of featured highlights in the Weekend Oz, but there she is sitting triumphantly on top of the heap known fondly to the pond as unsanitary landfill with Uncertainty principle trumps wars of religion.

Posturing as an uncertain agnostic determined to have it both ways, Jane seeks a measured, balanced approach:

Fanatical Christians and fundamentalist atheists are like a couple of kids bickering in the back seat during a long car drive.

As US presidential candidates make shrill demands for the teaching of creationism in schools, British pit bull atheist Richard Dawkins accuses non-evolutionists of being stupid, insane or wicked.

Wicked? Well actually when Dawkins made that remark, he put a tidy rhetorical irony in parentheses, at least according to the meme doing the rounds on the intertubes:

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that). “Put Your Money on Evolution” The New York Times (April 9, 1989) section VII p.35

So Jane is being a tad naughty with another ironist's irony.

But that's a distraction from a bigger question. How upsetting - how bickerful, so to speak - is it to read such an obvious statement of truth, since anyone who doesn't accept the scientific evidence to hand for evolution (let's leave belief alone, along with wicked) is either ignorant, stupid, or insane.

That this happens to include a number of current Republican candidates for the presidency of the United States is neither here nor there ...

Anyhoo, Jane spends some time in the rest of her piece mocking Christians and their beliefs, and hopefully this will see her spend an eternity writhing in the fires of hell.

The column gives all the signs of having satirical intent, or comedic value, but tends to Venn into vague, vacuous, insipid inanities ...

Worse, having it both ways, and trying to break the egg in the middle, is way less fun than trolling of the Christian kind, offered up yesterday by Simon Smart in God's truth, believers are nicer.

That offering produced a spectacular 397 comments (at time of writing), with scribblers sent demented by bald statements like this:

On every measurable scale, religious Americans are more generous, more altruistic and more involved in civic life than their secular counterparts.

And more inclined to bomb the shit out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but never mind, it's really just another chance to demonise poor old Richard Dawkins:

After reading their (Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) works, you'd swear that religion makes you immediately abandon rationality to become an inward-looking extremist. What Putnam's book does at the very least is to bring a bit of balance into the conversation.

Yep, it seems Smart's greasy, queasy Christianity - come on atheist partners, accompany your partner to church and improve your survey scores - is at one with Emma Jane's agnostic uncertainty.

Meanwhile, Paul Toohey has made an astonishing discovery about Michele Bachmann, as he reacts in his piece to the news that Mayor Bloomberg has decreed no political speeches, and no religious leaders on hand at the official 9/11 ceremony, in The day America said no to God:

Kooky Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said last week that Hurricane Irene and the preceding earth tremor felt across north-east USA were God’s way of telling America to get its financial affairs in order.

Kooky? Dammit, that must mean Toohey is an angry atheist of the Dawkins kind:

She later half—said she was half—joking. Bachmann never jokes, least of all about God. Nor do most Americans. The American God sometimes has a way of coming across as a gun pointed in your face: quite serious; not funny at all.

Dammit, clearly Toohey hasn't been reading Smart ranting about the folksy neighbourliness of Ned Flanders Xians.

What's worse, Toohey quotes the Catholic priest resident at St Peter's the oldest Catholic church in New York down near Ground Zero which copped a little collateral damage on the day (and a fine old building it is):

“I’m sure Europeans and Australians think Americans are crazy when it comes to religion,” Madigan tells me. “And they are.”

Crazy? Dammit, and now there's a priest sounding just like an angry Dawkins.

But if you've lasted this long, you might be wondering why there's no mention of Christopher Pearson, always a Saturday regular, and that's because Clergyman's long road to resolution is incredibly sordid and reveals way too much about the Catholic Church and Christopher Pearson, way more than you ever need to know before you get your ticket punched for hell.

It's all about the intricate politics and sordid couplings of priests in Adelaide, and bizarrely Pearson's piece is supposed to act as a kind of insurance for Archbishop John Hepworth, who hit the Oz with his revelations in Abused Archbishop John Hepworth ready to forgive.

Hepworth told me there were two reasons he was talking to me about these matters. The first was that I was a columnist with The Weekend Australian and a Catholic convert who would not lightly write anything that might cast the church in a bad light. Even so, I could act as a form of insurance if he were to meet with procedural obstacles in his dealings with the archdiocese.

Insurance? After all the fuss in recent years, you still need insurance when dealing with the Catholic hierarchy?

Well the only amusing thing in all this is the way Pearson regularly manages to blame liberals for the ills of the church, when in reality it has been the conservative repressive hierarchy - encouraged by Rome - that's been willing to hide, deny, shirk responsibility, and otherwise reject news of the abuse that has flourished everywhere in the church, but notably in Ireland and the United States ... and speaking of worldly cities, Adelaide ...

This results in a kind of perverse Stockholm syndrome:

... it's worth noting that the Traditional Anglicans are people who felt obliged to leave mainstream Anglicanism for three basic reasons. They reject the ordination of women and practising homosexuals. Unlike many Anglicans, they're orthodox and will have no truck with the theological modernism of the ultra-liberals, which sees the resurrection as nothing more than a nice metaphor. Last, they are liturgical traditionalists who don't see the rites of the church as being in need of updating or as an opportunity for individual creativity.

Uh huh. Well in the spirit of Emma Jane, give me a nice Anglican clergyperson, and a cucumber and cheese sandwich (don't forget the cheese Gromit) any day of the week. Dammit Gromit and don't forget the crackers either ...

It's always amazing when you read the likes of Pearson rabbiting on about theological modernists who have no truck with stiff, unbending, unforgiving fundamentalists, as if being a member of a stiff unbending unforgiving conservative institution like Rome is the natural order of things.

Or worse reading traditionalists who blather on about, say the poems of Milton and the music of Bach, while seeing "individual creativity" as some kind of threat to the hive mind, which they imagine as being set in amber these past few thousand years ...

As for the rest of Pearson's piece, it's all about the internecine warfare between Hepworth, and the current players in Adelaide, Archbishop Phillip Wilson and vicar-general David Cappo (the latter routinely abused by Pearson for being too close to the Labor party).

From my time in Adelaide, I know the factionalism and the rucking will be brutal and hearty, and the funniest thing is that Emma Jane should seek to portray atheists as being up there with the hearty sports folk of the Catholic church.

Well it's a fact that in any ice hockey power play involving atheists v. institutional Catholics, put your money on the Catholics every time. They'll have the atheists up against the rink wall, and be pounding away thirty seconds after the whistle.

Just reading Pearson's numbing entry into the arcane world of the Catholic church in Adelaide proves the point.

Alternatively, perhaps Jane could speak kindly to Pearson, and explain that the institutional abuse allowed by the church for decades in archdiocese around the world is roughly equivalent to a couple of kids bickering in the back seat of a car ...

Alternatively, what a pity Hepworth can't follow the Groucho Marx dictum, repeated by the pond any half-baked chance that arises:

I sent the church a wire stating, "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CHURCH THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".

Sheesh, I know, I know it was "club", not "church", but surely the sentiment holds.

Otherwise you're off to a church that would accept Pearson as a member ...

And now a reading from Dawkins:

In any case, the belief that religion and science occupy separate magesteria is dishonest. It founders on the undeniable fact that religions still make claims about the world which, on analysis, turn out to be scientific claims. Moreover, religious apologists try to have it both ways, to eat their cake and have it. When talking to intellectuals, they carefully keep off science's turf, safe inside the separate and invulnerable religious magesterium.

But when talking to a non-intellectual mass audience they make wanton use of miracle stories, which are blatant intrusions into scientific territory. The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, The Raising of Lazarus, the manifestations of Mary and the Saints around the Catholic world. Even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and very effective they are with an audience of unsophisticates and children. Even one of these miracle amounts to a scientific claim, a violation of the normal running of the natural world.

Theologians, if they want to remain honest, should make a choice. You can claim your own magisterium, separate from science's but still deserving of respect. But in that case you have to renounce miracles. Or you can keep your Lourdes and your miracles, and enjoy their huge recruiting potential among the uneducated. But then you must kiss goodbye to separate magesteria and your high-minded aspiration to converge on science.

Amen and hallelujah ...

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