1. Pope's 'morning after pill' speech criticized

Comment #83677 by Teapot_Believer on October 30, 2007 at 10:17 pm

Another thing, please guys give reasons for your claims. So far I haven't been able to read one single post arguing why the pope's views on contraception are wrong.

I have read a little on the matter, and I can say that the way Catholics and Evangelicals support their opposition to non-natural contraception is slightly different. While the second ones resort to scripture to make their points, the first ones don't depend so heavily on the bible. Catholics tend to use logic and argumentation to support their views; at least they do it more often than Evangelicals.

I read an article in Spanish written by a priest in which he speaks his mind on this issue. He begins by inviting the reader to think about an ideal situation that contributes to a better perpetuation of the human race in qualitative terms. The author concludes that this ideal can only be accomplished in a family composed by biological parents where love lasts through thick and thin. He says that all children should be warmly welcomed when they are born in the aforementioned situation. If this is true, then contraception, whose purpose is to prevent babies from being born, is wrong. Why? Because if one of them is born by accident then that child won't be as warmly welcomed as s/he deserves.

However, the most striking part is about to come. It is about contraceptive pills. He first starts by supporting natural contraceptive methods. He says that these demand sexual control from the couple because they know that they won't be able to have sex on specific days. According to him, this is beneficial because both are shaping their respective personalities and refuse to become dominated by their sexual instincts. Then, he takes on contraceptive pills by claiming that a woman who takes them has refused and failed to shape her own personality because she has chosen not to restrain herself sexually. That woman, according to him, is a person who cannot control her sexual impulses and has a distorted vision of sexuality. Therefore, those women and those men who wear condoms are slaves of their own biological instincts.

I think this should be the common opinion of the Catholic church. If this is about run-of-the-mill contraceptive pills, imagine what these folks think about the MA pill.

2. Pope's 'morning after pill' speech criticized

Comment #83665 by Teapot_Believer on October 30, 2007 at 8:35 pm

Comment #83603 by Mango on October 30, 2007 at 3:28 pm
It's always odd to hear about countries like Chile that are more socially progressive than the U.S.

Yes, but I think this will be for a short time. The Socialist party has stayedin power for almost 18 years. Despite Bachelet's progressive position on the MA pill, her popularity has plunged these last months due to poor country management. It is very likely for the right wing people to seize the executive power in March 2008 (date in which Bachellet's government ends), and they are staunch Catholics.

By the way, Michelle Bachellet is agnostic at least.

3. Argentine Church Faces 'Dirty War' Past

Comment #71076 by Teapot_Believer on September 17, 2007 at 7:06 pm

And in Chile things were not any different.

The Chilean Army aided by the right wing killed and tortured several thousands of people to rid the country of Communism. I don't know whether the Catholic church promoted this, but surely it did nothing to prevent it.

4. Review of Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion

Comment #66865 by Teapot_Believer on August 31, 2007 at 9:56 pm

"He overlooks the big theologians altogether in favour of some pretty low-key, unknown figures."

Sorry ma'am, but are Anselm and Aquinas low-key, unknown figures today?

5. Scientists should unite against threat from religion

Comment #65002 by Teapot_Believer on August 22, 2007 at 3:27 pm

Comment #64939 by Bizarro Dawkins on August 22, 2007 at 12:51 pm

"I'm not quite sure that Sam is safe using this argument, especially considering the numerous cases involving those who doubt certain other so-called "scientific" paradigms being forced, not under threat of death but rather of academic homicide, to keep quite about their intellectual convictions. Galileo dared to challenge the beliefs accepted by the experts of his day, and he faced persecution. The exact same situation exists today except that rather than being burned at the stake, those who doubt evolution are simply ridiculed into silence or risk losing their careers at the hands of bullies such as Dawkins and friends."

There is a really big difference between nowadays' ruling paradigms and those from the Middle Ages. Let me give you an example. During the good ol' days of Scholasticism, Astronomy held an important place among Aristotelian scholastics. They thought that the "known universe" at that time was divided into two. On the one hand, we have the world above the moon where, according to these people, things were celestial, perfect, unchanging, and close to God. On the other, we have the sub-lunar world where nothing is constant, where things change, grow, get corrupt, move and eventually rot. Influenced by Ptolemian astronomy, they believed that the Earth was at the very center of the universe.

Why did they hold these beliefs? Did they do any research to corroborate their assertions? The bottom line of this is that scholasticism, the ruling paradigm at that time, was based on authority, a criterion nowadays deemed a logical fallacy. Scholastics had no evidence whatsoever to firmly claim that the world beyond the moon was celestial and close to God.

Now you're saying that Dawkins and friends are like today's authoritative scholastics in the sense that they silence dissident academics in the same way scholastics suppressed people like Galileo. If this is true, it is like saying that the Theory of Evolution primarily relies on authoritative criteria. Let me tell you that it is neither Mr. Dawkins nor anyone else who decrees that Evolution is true and unquestionable, but the mutually corroborating evidence that has supported it. If the worst came to the worst (meaning that evidence definitely proved Evolution wrong and at the same time people like Dawkins continued to support it authoritatively), the scandal in the academic community would be enormous. Please imagine the foul consequences of this event.

Why does this theory still remain mainstream among most universities? Because of evidence; not authority or tradition, and this is why your parallelism is wrong. If the criticism coming from dissenting academics against Evolution was right, then the entire scientific community would adopt such views, no matter how weak-tempered those scientists are. Again, if the worst comes to the worst (meaning that Dawkins is definitely a bully who suppresses dissident views) your dissenting scientists must persist in pursuing their ideas. Does it make you angry when someone suppresses your ideas when you are strongly certain they are right, no matter how much others make fun of them? What does that anger trigger, determination or feebleness?

However, Mr. Dawkins is not a bully and I will tell you why. In his documentary "The Root of All Evil", he refers to an anecdote which took place in his undergraduate period (I think). An American professor came to England to deliver a lecture on a specific subject (I don't remember what it was). The point is that his lecture proved the ideas of one of Dawkins' teachers wrong. When the American professor finished his lecture, Dawkins' professor approach him and shook his hand saying: "I've been wrong all these years". I am completely sure that if Evolution was ever proved wrong, Dawkins would do the same thing.

6. I Don't Believe in Atheists

Comment #44394 by Teapot_Believer on May 24, 2007 at 1:43 pm

"It is by the seriousness of our commitments to compassion, indeed our ability to sacrifice for the other, especially for the outcast and the stranger, our commitment to justice—the very core of the message of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus—that we alone can measure the quality of faith. This is the meaning of true faith."

I agree that compassion and sacrifice for one another are essential to humans' well-being and further peace achievement. However, I disagree on how we become compassionate and devoted to others. Why do I have to resort to religious authorities to be aware and to practice those virtues? I strongly think that faith alone helps very little to actually practice those qualities. What's more, I think that in many cases faith fosters hypocrisy: you may read and listen to many believers talking about Jesus' teachings, but do they actually practice what they preach? This is why I think that reason is the best tool that can make us attain compassion and sacrifice. The understanding of the reasons why it is necessary for us to show concern for others and of the environmental and psychological forces that –we like it or not- rule over us, and our further conscious reflective thinking about those forces eventually and necessarily lead you to, on the one hand, feel pity and revulsion at acts of injustice and selfishness, and on the other, make a difference by behaving in the exactly opposite way people who haven't reflected on those forces behave. When you attain this, there is no need for supernatural entities.
There is another thing I disagree with. You're talking about the meaning of "true faith", which is based on the prophets' teaching of justice, compassion and self-sacrifice. If this was true, then Christianity wouldn't be a religion but a philosophical system of thought. What makes a religion be a religion then? I think it is the supernatural entities and actions. If you believe in the divinity of Jesus and in his walking on water, then you have faith. If you don't, faith is over! That is the meaning of true faith: it is the acceptance of the supernatural claims without questioning them. As I said before, if people accepted Jesus teachings of self-sacrifice and compassion even without question, and yet at the same time rejected his divinity, then Christianity would not exist as a religion but as a philosophy.
Another thing: the fact that the biblical prophets and Jesus preached on those virtues does not mean that they invented them. Evolution by natural selection clearly shows that altruism predates religion. In the natural world, altruism is everywhere: animals taking care of other species, chimps saving other chimps from drowning while failing in the attempt, etc. Whether religious people like it or not, we inherited those values from the animal world. The fact that somehow we share something in common with animals compels you to behave respectfully not only towards your fellow humans but also towards the environment, and this is something that some Evangelicals are not very willing to achieve.
And yet another thing: you chose some passages from the bible to back up your points. What criteria did you use to choose those excerpts? Did you cherry pick? Tell me, can I get some compassion, self-sacrifice towards my neighbor out of Old Testament books such as Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy?

7. Freethinking Ruins All Things

Comment #42786 by Teapot_Believer on May 19, 2007 at 3:03 pm

The world according to Larison:

- Germans are cold and standoffish and like drinking beer
- Caribbean girls are horny
- Italians are warm-hearted
- Brazilians are happy
- Russians drink vodka
- Mexicans sleep all day under sombreros after drinking tequila
- Scots drink whisky
-Freethinkers are biased and pursue "easy inquiry"
- Religious people are not biased and pursue real and true inquiry.

8. One side can be wrong

Comment #40763 by Teapot_Believer on May 14, 2007 at 11:23 pm

I couldn't agree more with these guys: a scientific theory like Evolution undergoes painstaking scrutiny. So far it has not been disproved. If ID is to be considered as such so as to be included in a biology class, it must also go through the same process with the same scrutiny level.

However, I believe that the best way to demolish creationism and ID should be based on the principles that sustain inerrancy, the belief that the Bible or Qu'ran is absolutely right on "scientific" matters. How do they know it is right? Because it is the word of God. If the tenets supporting inerrancy are demolished, the whole religious building crumbles to the ground. I don't know whether someone has already done this, but what I do know is that this endeavor is more scholarly than scientific and needs to be attended to by people like secular philosophers.

9. The Video: Bill O'Reilly Interviews Richard Dawkins

Comment #34312 by Teapot_Believer on April 23, 2007 at 7:17 pm

I'm so tired of that old and worn-out Stalin/Marx/Hitler argument. It seems that most Americans are conditioned to associate Atheism with bad morals. This is not the case here in my country, where the religious right led by Augusto Pinochet killed several left-winged priests in the 80's.

10. 160,000-year-old jawbone redefines origins of the species

Comment #25490 by Teapot_Believer on March 13, 2007 at 5:05 pm

Now I'd like to know what creationists will say about this finding.

Pardon my ignorance, but how do scientists calculate the age of a fossil? What instruments do they use? Are they completely reliable (free from errors)? How do they use them?

11. US Congressman Holds No God-Belief

Comment #25375 by Teapot_Believer on March 12, 2007 at 6:16 pm

No doubt it takes "balls" to acknowledge a condition that is conterclockwise to people's mindset and that may seriously risk your career.

12. Response to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris

Comment #25202 by Teapot_Believer on March 10, 2007 at 10:35 pm

You guys have been completely rebutted this Muslim's rhetorical masterpiece. Now I'd like to add something else.

I think it's becoming increasingly common these days those statements and associations between atheism and Communist acts of genocide as a way to undermine nowadays' arguments for disbelief in God. However, you'll notice that right-wing bigots are not exempt from this phenomenon if you have a look at the Southamerican history of the twentieth century. Two clear examples of this are the coups carried out by Videla in Argentina and Pinochet in Chile.

The main thrust of these was to "liberate" the country from the Communist clutch. However, these dictators achieved their goals by killing thousands of people. Do the means justify the end? According to right-wing people and to some part of the Catholic church, they do. For example, Catholic priest Raúl Hasbún Zaror said "May God forgive the enemies of Pinochet" when the dictator died last year. But my question is "Will God forgive Pinochet (a devout Catholic) for the crimes committed during his regime?".

What did the Catholic church do during this period? I strongly think that it closed ranks with Pinochet's regime and looked the other way. I once listened to a sociologist or anthropologist on the radio who claimed that dictatorial governments deploy religions as a tool to legitimate their acts and to improve their image.

This phenomenon took place in several Southamerican countries with the aid of the CIA. Therefore, I think that God believers are not free from error.