Child Abuse: More Catholic Monkey Business

Ampleforth Abbey.
"'Appalling' sexual abuse over 40 years."

Child abuse inquiry: School 'reputations put before abuse victims' - BBC News

Shocking, horrific, disgusting, abhorrent, are all adjectives one hears all too often in relation to revelations of another religious institution where child abuse was a routine and accepted part of the culture. None of these adjectives would be too strong to describe the contents of the report published today^{PDF [Warning! Explicit and distressing contents]} of the enquiry into the abuses of boys at two Catholic schools, Ampleforth and Downside School, both run by the semi-autonomous charity, English Benedictine Congregation (EBC).

The executive summary to the report states:

Baptist Minister in 'Gay Cure' Child Abuse

Gary Wiggins
Charged $21,000 to 'beat the demons out' of gay teens

Texas Authorities Shut Down Boys Camp Run By Baptist Minister Accused of ‘Ex-Gay’ Torture - OutSmart Magazine.

Got a teenage son who is showing signs of being gay? Don't worry! For $21,000 a year, Gary Wiggins, a recovering alcoholic and former drug addict, and a born again Baptist minister, will beat and abuse the evil demons out of them - and use them as free labour in his lawn-care and removal companies; the teenage boys that is, not the evil demons.

Last week, authorities in Burnet County, Texas, USA rescued eight boys aged between 10 and 17 from a religious 'gay cure' camp run by Wiggins. The camp, the Joshua Home, Bertram, Texas, was raided following an investigation into allegations of abuse, neglect, labor violations, fraud, licensing violations, and human trafficking. The investigators believe Wiggins may have been using the boys illegally for a lawn care service and moving company.

Origin of Stonehenge Builders

Stonehenge

Source: English Heritage

Strontium isotope analysis on cremated human remains from Stonehenge support links with west Wales | Scientific Reports.

I have previously written about Stonehenge and the other mysterious monuments and earthworks in Wiltshire, especially about what little we know of the builders, their society and culture and particularly about their god(s) of whom we know nothing.

Now, due to the painstaking research carried out by archaeologists from Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, UK, we are perhaps just a little closer to knowing just a little more about who the people who built Stonehenge were.

It's Not Just the Catholics!

Pastor Harry L. Thomas. Conviction Christian.

Largest Christian music festival founder busted with 18-year prison sentence after molesting five children.

As though to prove the Catholic Church doesn't have a monopoly on child sexual abuse by priests, the senior pastor and founder of the Come Alive New Testament Church in Medford, New Jersey, USA has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for molesting five children.

Pastor Harry L. Thomas, now 74, is also the founder of one of the largest Christian festivals in the USA, Creation Festival, and Come Alive International, a missionary organisation. He was arrested in DEcember 2017 and charged with amolesting 4 children over a 16 year period. He pleaded guilty to raping and sexually assaulting young girls in February and admitted to a fifth offence. The plea bargin included a non parole agreement.

In 2003 Thomas served as an advocate for two church members, Raymond and Vanessa Jackson, accused of starving and neglecting four foster children in their care, setting up the now-defunct website, savethejacksons.org in their support. Vanessa Jackson received a seven year sentence for her part in the mistreatment of the children.

Zombie Insect Made Mad for Sex - By a Fungus

Cicada infected with Messospora fungus.

Photo credit: SuperStock

Parasite fungus sends insects on sex spree by loading them up on drugs | New Scientist

Here we have a very nice example of a host being controlled by a parasite, exactly as I discussed in my latest book, The Unintelligent Designer.

This time, it is a cicada which is controlled by fungi of the Massospora genus.

When infected by these fungi, the victims appetite is suppressed but their sex drive is heightened to the extent that males will spend all their time trying to mate, even with other males. To make it worse for the cicadas the fungus actually castrate them by making the end of their abdomen fall off when they first try to mate, replacing it with a fungal 'plug'.

Another High-Ranking Catholic Resignation

Philip Wilson. Former Archbishop of Adelaide

Archbishop Philip Wilson resigns after sex abuse cover-up - CNN

A brief update on the article of a month ago concerning (now former) Archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, sentenced to 12 months detention (incorectly reported by CNN as 6 months although he will probably serve only 6 months of the 12 month sentence), probably in his sister's house. The court is due to rule in August on the suitability of his sister's house as a detention centre.

At the time of his conviction last May, he continued to protest his innocence and refused to resign his position in the Catholic Church. As recently as last week he was saying he would not resign, pending the outcome of an apeal.

The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the ID Hoax [Update]

$10.75 (£8.45, €9.25) Paperback. $5.95 (£4.55, €5.10) Kindle

How can the malaria parasite, with its hugely complex life cycle and all the internal complexity of its single cell possibly be described as intelligently designed when whatever it was 'designed' for - apparently making people sick, killing children and making more malarial parasites - could have been achieved far more simply?

And how could such a design be explained as the work of a maximally good creator without abandoning science and falling back on a religious superstition including 'The Fall' and 'sin'?

Why do Giant puffballs produce 70 trillion spores just to ensure one or two become new Giant puffballs? Why does every cell in every chicken contain genes for making a dinosaur face and growing a penis only to have them overridden and made redundant? Why do some humans have tails and why do Christmas trees have seven times more DNA than you?

And why is almost all life on Earth dependent on the least efficient enzyme known?

These and many more examples of needless complexity, prolific waste, ultimately futile arms races and sub-optimal efficiency, all refuting the notion of intelligence and design in nature are revealed in my latest book, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, which reveals ID to be a hoax, deliberately intended to fool the gullible and scientifically illiterate.

More Holy Kiddie Fiddling

(Former) Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop of Washington.
"No recollection of abusing boys and men".

Cardinal McCarrick, prominent US Catholic, resigns over abuse claims | BBC News

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington, and ordered him to a life of seclusion, spent in prayer and penance following the emergence of more allegations of sexual abuse of boys and adults. He is to face a Church trial.

McCarrick, who is 88, claims no recollection of the incidents which last month, Catholic Church officials investigating the allegations described as 'credible'. His resignation means he will no longer have the titles 'Cardinal' and 'Your Eminence'.

Fraud of Turin Exposed as Fake - Yet Again

A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin | Journal of Forensic Sciences - Wiley Online Library

If it wasn't for the Catholic authorities, with the Pope's cooperation and approval, refusing to accept that what they have on display in Turin Cathedral is not the authentic shroud that Jesus was allegedly wrapped in but a Medieval artefact, possibly a deliberate forgery as this recent paper suggests or a prop used in Early Medieval Passion plays as British historian Charles Freeman convincingly argued, it would have been put into a museum drawer labelled Medieval European Religious Artefacts years ago.

And all this despite Catholic Bishop Pierre d’Arcis writing to Pope Pope Clement VII in 1390 to tell him that the 'shroud' was a forgery.

[The Shroud is] a clever sleight of hand [by someone] falsely declaring this was the actual shroud in which Jesus was enfolded in the tomb to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them.

Bishop Pierre d’Arcis,
Letter to Pope Clement VII, 1390

But here we are again with yet another scientific investigation and yet another conclusion that the Shroud of Turin is a forgery.

In fact, this discovery is not itself particularly new, being presented at the 66th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, February 17‐22, 2014, in Seattle, WA, USA and again at the 67th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, February 16‐21, 2015, in Orlando, FL, USA. However, it appeared in print for the first time here. Regretably, all but the abstract is behind a paywall:

Yet Another of Those 'Non-existent' Transitional Fossils!

A. afarensis juvenile foot DIK-1-1f.

DIK-1-1f shown in (clockwise from top left) medial, dorsal, and lateral views. To right, dorsal view of DIK-1-1f and the adult A. afarensis foot A.L. 333-115. Scale bars, 1 cm.

A nearly complete foot from Dikika, Ethiopia and its implications for the ontogeny and function of Australopithecus afarensis | Science Advances

Imagine, you're a creationist and you've spent hundreds of hours on the social media yelling at scientists and people who accept what science demonstrates over an over again as true beyond a shadow of doubt, telling them that there are no transitional fossils and that Charles Darwin said this would destroy his theory, and you keep being shown yet another example of a transitional fossil!

Maybe you've even spent hours indoctrinating your unfortunate home-schooled children that 'evolution' had been proved false because of this absence!

What do you do?

Creationists! Test Your Personality With This Simple Test!

Find out what makes you a creationist with this simple personality analysis.

Just note down the letter of the answer that comes closest to your reaction to everyday online experiences. No scientific knowledge is needed and you don't even need to know your holy book. Just be as honest as you can.

What could be simpler?

1. When you see the word 'evolution' in an online debate do you:
   
   1. Start typing stuff about the Big Bang, Atheism, life from nothing and evolution being a religion?

More Malevolence From the Malevolent Designer

Once it enters the cell, the parasite rotates to close the door it has opened. This movement also seals it into a vacuole, a sac where it stays and develops.

© Isabelle Tardieux

A new twist on how parasites invade host cells - CNRS Web site - CNRS

To get a proper perspective on the sort of creature creationists imagine they're worshipping, consider a man in your neighbourhood who obsessively invents and refines ways of making his neighbours sick and frequently killing them, indiscriminately at any age from babies to old people.

He doesn't just do this once but continually and isn't satisfied with just making them sick but tries to find ingenious ways to overcome any attempts his neighbours make to avoid getting sick or reducing the harm he's doing them. The methods he chooses to harm them are invisible to the naked eye; they get into them via their food, in the air they breathe, by being injected by blood-sucking parasites or in any number of ways that are hard to control or defend themselves against.

Australian Catholic Child-Abuse Archbishop Sentenced

Archbishop Philip Wilson

Archbishop Philip Wilson sentenced for concealing child sex abuse - BBC News

Archbishop Philip Wilson, the most senior Catholic cleric to be convicted of covering up child sex abuse by fellow priests, has been sentenced to 12 months detention.

The Archbishop of Adelaide, News South Wales, Australia, was convicted in May of covering up the child sex abuses of his friend and colleague, James Patrick Fletcher, and had been awaiting sentence by Adelaide magistrate, Robert Stone. In sentencing Wilson, Stone said he had shown no remorse.

More Pain for Creationists - The Evolution of Testes

Kidney (blue) and testicle (orange) position in elephants, seals and horses.

© Lehmann & Eberhardt/ Senckenberg

The evolution of testes | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Crisis? What Crisis?

Creationists frauds continually dupe their credulous marks with the absurd idea that 'evolution is a theory in crisis'. The reason is that this was a central dogma of the Discovery Institute's Wedge Strategy which aimed to spread enough dis and mis-information about science to cast serious doubt as to it's validity in the largely scientifically illiterate American electorate.

This was to be in preparation for the overthrow of the US Constitutional prohibition on an established religion and the establishment of a far-right Taliban-style Christian fundamentalist theocracy in the USA, complete with brutal Levitican laws.

It was of course nonsense; a lie intended to mislead for a political agenda. There is no such crisis in biological science and evolution continues to be the grand unifying theory underpinning much of biology, palaeontology and comparative anatomy and physiology, as this paper, published in PLoS Biology illustrates. It concerns the location of the mammalian testes and in particular why a group of African mammals have retained their testes inside their abdominal cavity instead of having them outside in a scrotum.

As the press release from Max-Planck-Gesellschaft explains:

Hypocrites For Jesus

Ocala Police Chief, Kenneth Gregory (Greg) Graham

Florida city challenges court ruling over police prayer vigil - The Freethinker

As though to illustrate the Christian sense of entitlement, the city council in Ocala, Florida, USA is defending it's beleaguered police chief after a US District Judge ruled last May that the prayer vigil he organised was in breach of the Establishment Clause.

In his judgement against Ocala Police Chief, Kenneth Gregory (Greg) Graham, Judge Timothy J Corrigan ruled:

The government cannot initiate, organize, sponsor or conduct a community prayer vigil. That is what happened here.

The Internet Apologists' Handbooks

Three new booklets by yours truly!

A humorous and provocative look at Internet fundamentalist apologetics. Most Internet apologists seem to know little of what they are promoting and nothing at all about what they are opposing and none of them seem to be able to understand basic ideas of probity, intellectual honesty, personal integrity or the difference between wishful thinking, assertions and actual evidence. Often, there seems to be a hidden agenda with very little evidence of an actual belief in the god being promoted, judging by the scant regard for anything by way of personal behaviour that the promoted religion teaches.

The Intelligent Designer Is Coming for American Babies!

Culex tarsalis

Vector competence of Aedes aegypti, Culex tarsalis, and Culex quinquefasciatus from California for Zika virus

Followers of my blog will recall how I have often commented on the efforts the putative Intelligent (sic) Designer puts into making life difficult or unpleasant for people.

In particular, the efforts it made to produce handicapped children by designing a virus which prevents normal brain development so babies who's mothers become infected with the virus are born with a condition known as microcephally and so will be mentally handicapped and dependent on others for their care, so blighting the lives not only of the victim but also those of the victims parents, siblings and maybe the entire extended family.

Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond Your Command

The Age Gap in Religion Around the World | Pew Research Center

A major new Pew Research Center report on Religion and Public life has confirmed that in very many countries, young people are less religious that their parents, often by a wide margin. This confirms the finding of other surveys that show younger people in the USA are now far less likely to identify with any religion, believe in God or to take part in religious activities.

This gap is seen regardless of the social or economic context of the country, showing that even where religiosity is high due to poverty and in countries that are overall highly religious. This is also true regardless of the predominant religion. This is not to say that there is a gap in all countries - in 63 countries there is no statistically significant difference - however, where there is a difference it is almost always true that young people are the less religious group. In only two countries were younger people found to be more religious that their parents - Chad (Muslim) and Ghana (Christian).

Darwin Creationist Award 2018 - Call For Candidates

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Christians Denying Human Rights in Northern Ireland

Pro-abortion demonstrators outside Belfast city hall.

Photo credit: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

Northern Ireland abortion law clashes with human rights, judges say | Guardian.

Northern Ireland, that most devout part of the UK where Christianity in its two main flavours - Protestant and Catholic - more so than in any other part of the UK informs legislation, is denying basic human rights for its citizens because religious dogma requires it.

The UK Supreme court today ruled that the law which criminalised abortion in Northern Ireland in almost all circumstances, uniquely so in the UK, is a violation of human rights and is thus itself illegal, being in breach of the Human Rights Act (HRA) which takes precedence over all other laws in the UK.