Pope Francis' Zika & Contraception Remarks Show There Are NO Moral Absolutes

Amidst the recent uproar over "building a wall" and whether Trump is a Christian, many people may have missed an even more significant papal comment, to do with artificial birth control. To fix ideas, Pope Francis suggested  last week, on his way back to Rome from Mexico, that artificial contraception may be morally acceptable to avoid spreading the Zika virus.  In framing his answer to a reporter's question, he intimated the use of such contraception as "not an absolute evil". So ah, what? It's an intermediate evil? Or a lesser evil?

One can surely argue that if it is not an absolute evil in this case, it shouldn't be in any other. To go one better in terms of situational ethics (which is what the Pope is interjecting) he noted that in the 1960s Pope Paul VI permitted nuns in the Belgian Congo to use artificial birth control to prevent pregnancies because "they were being systematically raped."

But again, why is this ethical dispensation for a nun superior to that for a working class mother, already burdened by 4 or 5 children, who simply cannot afford one more mouth to feed (and with Repukes in charge of the House she can't expect anything more from the SNAP program) . The fact is, it isn't and hence there is no reason other than sophistry to split the issue into more and less evil parts.

In the case of Zika virus, the Pope's pronouncement was quite justified given there is now strong suspicion as well as some hard evidence (which I will get to) that Zika infections - as in Brazil- are increasing the chances for a horrific birth defect known as microcephaly. This is a condition in which affected infants are born with extremely small heads, as well as brains.  Often they don't survive to adulthood but those that do are either warehoused at enormous costs because they cannot care for themselves, OR  (if minimally functional) they end up as circus freaks (such as the several depicted in Tod Browning's 1932 flick 'Freaks', e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJVXTKkjsxA)

Does a papal dispensation,  say to a Brazilian woman whose pregnancy is threatened with Zika,  trump that for a mother - or even a single woman in the U.S.- who doesn't wish to be burdened with an unwanted pregnancy? Especially as she can expect no medical or other support from the Republicans. I don't believe so and indeed made the case in previous posts (as well as in my atheist books)  that there is no moral violation to do with the use of artificial contraception.

This is despite a number of Catholic bishops and others in Latin America proclaiming it is "immoral". Meanwhile, Francis' comments have the Vatican's dino heads ready to explode with at least one spokesman (the Rev. Federico Lombardi) forced to try to clarify (WSJ, Feb 20-21, p. A7) asserting: "the Pope was speaking of exceptional circumstances" then explaining that the pontiff meant that "in situations of grave urgency a well-informed conscience can see if there is the possibility (or not) of recourse to contraception".   But cutting through all this convoluted, qualifying bafflegab,  the point is the Pope - as Paul VI before him - did allow an exception and it only takes one to disprove the rule,  i.e. that artificial birth control is invariably "evil".

Where do the Vatican's moralists get this nonsense anyway? As a matter of theological record the anti-artificial birth control dogma was based on "natural law". The problem is that there is no genuine theological or other (scientific) basis for this antiquated belief. It rests entirely on reducing human sexuality to the state of lower animals, at the behest of their "natural" reproductive cycles. But it ignores that, unlike the lower animals, humans have the intellectual capacity and sense of novelty to introduce a vast variety of pleasure-play into their sex relations - none of which require conception. Thus humans aren't yoked to  primitive instincts to simply mount and hump at specific times.

As observed by Biologist Elizabeth A. Daugherty,  ('The Lessons of Zoology'. in Contraception and Holiness, pp. 96-97):

"Humans are free from physiologically determined sexual desires so we possess a more or less permanent sexuality from adolescence to old age."

So this lays waste to the whole natural law moral underpinning, which is more subjective moralism.

Historically, Catholic impediments to a sane birth control policy began with the misguided encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. Paul VI, the Pope at the time,  issued this document in direct opposition to his own specially appointed Papal Commission on the matter. Author David Yallop, in his book In God's Name, has portrayed Humanae Vitae in stark terms indeed, as well as its paradoxical consequences^[1]:

On a disaster scale for the Roman Catholic Church, it measures higher than the treatment of Galileo in the seventeenth century

The implicit assumption in Humanae Vitae and later Pope John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis Splendor, has been that procreation takes precedence over any other function of sexual intercourse. This is observably true in most other animals (with estrus cycles) but it certainly doesn’t apply to humans who exhibit a diverse array of sexual play.

All of which reinforces the point that there is no moral dimension to the use of artificial birth control at all, irrespective of the situation. It is a carryover from Aristotelian thinking (which permeates Church canons and dogmas) .  Julian Pleasants has observed (op. cit., p. 88) the Vatican has always been hostage to:

"Aristotelian modes of thought which tend to fix behaviors within very limited and fixed definitions and categories."

Thus, the Church once believed it "natural" that some men be enslaved because they were “unable to manage their own affairs”  (ibid.)So why be surprised when the same Church seeks to ordain all her members abide by a sexuality more fitting of lower primates?  Clearly, the Church changed its natural law position on slavery as it now needs to do so on contraception. At least the Pope's recent pronouncements on allowing exceptions to the dogma (invoking the Zika virus) allows the door to be flung wide open to finally rid  the Church of this ridiculous baggage. (And let's not forget that back in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI allowed that using condoms to prevent HIV infection "can be a first step in moralization". In fact the very act of connecting the two discloses the 'horse has already left the barn'!)

What about abortion? In the same general response as the one for birth control, Francis did insist that:

"Abortion is not the lesser of two evils. It is a crime. That's what the Mafia does".

But indeed, abortion is and can often be the lesser of two evils. It is certainly the lesser of two evils if a woman, denied access to affordable contraception, has a child she can't cope with and ends up brutally beating it to death.  This actually happened here in Colorado barely a month ago  as one young woman hurled her 2 month old infant against a wall to shut it up .  Given that a two month old infant is more developed than a 4 month old fetus say, abortion is clearly a lesser evil than outright murder. (Specifically defined by our laws for killing an ALREADY born person).

In the case of this Zika virus, we have already seen in the news that a young Slovenian woman - returning from Brazil (and after having sexual relation there),  did a test for microcephaly on her return to Europe and found it to be positive.  Unwilling and unable to bear the costs of future care, she had the fetus aborted. Was she right or wrong? She was right insofar as it was far better to eliminate the primitive fetus than to, say, murder the suffering microcephalic person later.

In this case, she did one better and gave the fetus to medical specialists in Slovenia to further research into the effects of Zika virus. The researchers were also able to genetically sequence the virus from the fetal brain tissue. A step which can mightily help future projections for the spread of the disease, especially in the U.S. (predicted for the Gulf states early this summer with mosquito season onset.)

Little reported in the media (but in Europe) a post- abortion autopsy found the Zika virus nestled in the fetus' brain but in no other organs. This showed the medical team that Zika zones in on the brain . These researchers at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia found that the fetal brain was totally "devastated".  Not only was it a fraction of the proper size but it lacked the usual neural folds that enable a brain to manifest consciousness and thought. The entity - had it been allowed to be born - would have been a literal vegetable with absolutely no life quality of any kind to look forward to, and few resources to depend on from its parent.

The error made by Pope Francis  in condemning abortion as a crime inheres in committing  the "genetic fallacy",  as first described by Antony Flew ('Thinking About Thinking'). That is, arguing that because a thing is going to become something, it IS something. It would be like me picking up an acorn and claiming it's an oak tree. A   person, a human person, must have at least minimal capacity for basic cognition and rudimentary choice. It must possess a brain, at the very least, which evinces definite brain waves. Anything that doesn't is a proto-human entity, but clearly not a person. The microcephalic fetus aborted in Slovenia was such a proto-human entity - reduced to that state by the Zika virus.

Lastly, the current crop of Catholics ought to be reminded that the Church DID ALLOW abortions to be performed up until the third trimester, and until 1869. John Connery, S.J.,  a leading historian of the Church’s teaching on abortion, has been quoted as citing a long standing collection of Canon Law that “it was not until 1869 that abortion for any reason became grounds for excommunication” (See, e.g. Druyan and Sagan, PARADE, April 22, 1990)

The larger point here is that clearly, the fact the Church has already changed its doctrine on abortion shows its moral positions are malleable and not set in stone!

What this means is that the Church itself cannot be free of errors in faith or morals if it has already made one that was since covered up. Obviously, if you can alter a position, it is hardly "absolute". In his marvelous book, Infallible?, Hans Kung observes (p. 143):

" No one, neither Vatican I, nor Vatican II, nor the textbook theologians, has shown that the Church - its leadership or its theology - is able to put forward propositions which inherently cannot be erroneous."

So my point remains: there are no moral absolutes. There is rather such a thing as a provisional ethics which changes, alters in response to circumstances over time. The Church's changing moral positions are proof of it.  Conservative Catholics will, of course, object and have apoplectic reactions to this, fearing that moral provisionalism or the exercise of conscience means "licentiousness". But they are the ones who really need to expand their own purview outside the bounds of a solipsistic, self-ingratiating sanctimony.

See also:

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/08/absolutist-ethics-needs-to-be-replaced.html

'Little Sisters of the Poor' Need an Education In Artificial Birth Control

It appears the Little Sisters of the Poor - who run nursing homes here in Colorado and elsewhere- have now taken their case to the Supreme Court. What is this case? Evidently the goodly nuns have trouble with providing birth control (under the Obamacare mandate), even to secular employees who are not part of the Vatican's dogma axis and disavow its archaic belief system. So these nuns believe the mandate covers these secular employees as well, and  "forces them to violate their beliefs" to even sign a simple paper that would empower the Sisters' insurer to provide it. Are you kidding me? Seriously?

It seems to me the Little Sisters sorely need an education on the birth control - magisterium based doctrine - for CATHOLICS. In particular, that NO one is violating their cherished beliefs or dogmas if artificial contraception is provided to secular employees not bound to Catholic dogma.. All we are asking is for them to allow these workers to have the same health care benefits of other workers in the public domain.  It's called equal treatment under the law.

Hence, the only thing being “taken away” here is the Church employer’s ability to take away secular employees’ rights to the same standard of health care as all other secular employees’ in the public or private sphere.  The Church, meanwhile, is quite free to morally legislate its own members’ do’s and don’ts to its heart’s content. NO one is taking away that right. 

If the Church sees fit to deny its own members’ as employees access to birth control or the morning after pill, or abortion, then fine. It is well within its purview. But it can’t extrapolate that to secular employees and retain tax-free status as a peculiarly religious institution.  Here's another reason this applies: Unknown to many Catholic purists, many secular hospitals have been taken over by Catholic ones. Their original secular workers (who had benefits under those private secular hospitals ) now see them threatened or removed  because of antiquated Church dogmas invoked after the corporate takeover.

Catholic employers – whether in schools or hospitals or whatever – are quite free to set whatever moral standards they wish for their OWN Church members who are employed in such venues. What they are not free to do is to set those standards for secular employees! Not if they wish to continue to receive  tax-free status from the federal state. As for violating the First and Fifth Amendments, that’s totally preposterous: there is no proscription against freedom of speech – they can spout whatever medieval nonsense that they desire. Nor is there proscription against being a witness against oneself.

One of the ignorant First Amendment arguments usually employed is that: "No one is denying the secular women access to contraception or abortion if they want it, they just don't wish to be forced to pay for drugs that violate their religious beliefs".   

The point is the "drugs" aren't doing that because they're not being used by the Catholic women who are free to follow their own mores.  They're being used by secular workers as part of the coverage promised under the ACA  health insurance plan!  And, moreover, those drugs - such as contraceptives - may well be needed for more than birth prevention (though that ought to be important enough - given too many mouths to feed can tilt a family over to food stamps, welfare).   But as Sandra Fluke noted in her testimony in March last year: e.g. 

Contraceptives can also be used to treat ovarian cysts. If this is not done, the contraceptives denied, then an ovary may need to be surgically removed- and health care costs explode beyond what they would have been.  In addition contraception is critical to limiting severe health problems such as miscarriage or stroke (which could ensue if a woman becomes pregnant).  Moreover, once one uses contraceptives then they must be taken regularly or else they cease to work.

Thus, female employees of the Little Sisters' nursing homes could be in really serious trouble if suddenly denied their contraceptive care.

Meanwhile, the Little Sisters insist they are  not imposing their faith on anyone only trying to do God's holy will and service to others (the infirm elderly in their nursing homes) but don't wish secular laws imposed which make them violate their precepts.

As for the claim of “not imposing their faith on anyone”, I am afraid the Little Sisters need to take a semantics or logic course, preferably both.  If indeed, they’re all about preventing SECULAR employees – say atheists like me – from accessing artificial  birth control- then they are indeed imposing their faith.  Besides - what if the tables were turned? How would Catholic purists and dogmatists react if a Hindu-run corporation took over a Catholic Hospital? Would such a happenstance be called a "forced conversion" or  "violation of religious liberty"? OR - would it be considered a business transaction only? Also, if the newly merged entity produced subsidiary corporations  what religious principles would rightly apply? Catholic blowhards and those like the Little Sisters of the Poor need to think such questions through before they get all sanctimonious on us.

Now, if instead they confined their faux natural law moralism to Catholic employees only, there’d be no objection. “Imposing one’s faith” means taking away rights of secular citizens– based on invoking one’s own imagined religious principles.  In other words, extrapolating their “principles” beyond their proper moral domain to take away the rights of citizens who aren’t part of that domain other than in an employee capacity.

While we’re at it, let’s take a closer look at some consequences of these principles which they profess to hold so dear. Biologist Elizabeth A. Daugherty  has asked ('The Lessons of Zoology'. in Contraception and Holiness, p. 110):

"Why do we call secondary the ends of the sexual act which have been accorded in fullness to us, and why do we call primary the end which we share with the lower animals?"

She's referring to the fact that the core of Pius XI's  original encyclical Casti Connubii was that the "sin" of artificial contraception inhered in making primary a sexual aspect that in reality is only "secondary". According to that esteemed pontiff:

"Since therefore the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature."

 
Which is irredeemable codswallop. As Daugherty notes in her chapter (op. cit.)  what the pontiff and his ilk really sought to do is reduce humans to the state of lower animals, at the behest of their "natural" reproductive cycles. In this sense, unlike the lower animals, humans have the intellectual capacity and sense of novelty to introduce a vast variety of pleasure-play into their sex relations. They aren't yoked to  primitive instincts to simply mount and hump at specific times. As Daugherty notes (pp. 96- 97):

"After ovulation, all mammalian females are under the influence of progesterone from the corpus luteum. This is a period of rapidly declining estrogenic activity which ends the sexual receptivity of the lower mammalian female, whether or not fertilization occurs.

But (in humans) marital relations continue during this progesterone -dominated period before the abrupt onset of menstruation. It is the period of lowest estrogenic activity and the progesterone-dominated period after ovulation which are known as the 'safe period' for marital relations."

This then, is what the Catholics'  “rhythm method” (of  Ogino-Kaus)  seeks to do: establish the "safe period" for a particular woman and then ordain that this is the time to safely have sexual relations if one wishes to not have any kids. The trouble is, it requires meticulous temperature taking at various times during a cycle to establish where that safe period begins and ends, and often this will be for no more than 10 days or so in a given month. Presumably, the couple is quite happy to do without sex the other two thirds of the time!

Thus, the moralizers of the Vatican and their moral accomplices (such as these Little Sisters)  are actually demanding that married couples act UNNATURALLY, since as Daugherty observes (ibid.):

"Humans are free from physiologically determined sexual desires so we possess a more or less permanent sexuality from adolescence to old age."

Indeed! But the Church and its robed minions (and now evidently younger acolytes in colleges)  seek to dictate that despite being sexual or having sexual desires from adolescence until old age, her members are only free to discharge those desires under certain limited times and limited conditions. For example, teens who have such exploding desires on account of their hormones are warned they cannot even masturbate to relieve themselves because those organs are only allowed to morally function in the state of marriage. Then....once married, the couple is informed they may gratify their mutual sexual desires only if they are open to conception....that is, unless they use the rhythm method.  Anyone not see a pattern here?

But once more, my gripe is not so much the Vatican roping  in its own flock’s gonads, but seeking to rope in the gonads of secular employees working at their schools, hospitals etc. (And please don’t anyone tell me “They can get another job!” – NO, not in this low aggregate demand, high unemployment environment. That’s like telling a guy who’s been denied food stamps (and on his last legs)  to go jump off a roof, then he won’t need them!) Besides, would Catholics tell Catholic employees to just "get another job" if their hospital was taken over by Hindu owners? I doubt it!

Julian Pleasants has observed (op. cit., p. 88) the Vatican has always been hostage to:

"Aristotelian modes of thought which tend to fix behaviors within very limited and fixed definitions and categories."

Thus, the Church once believed it "natural" that some men be enslaved because they were “unable to manage their own affairs”  (ibid.)So why be surprised when the same Church seeks to ordain all her members abide by a sexuality more fitting of lower primates?   However, be that as it may, we MUST express surprise (and outrage ) when the Church and its enablers like the Little Sisters seek to impose that same sexuality on secularists. That is simply unacceptable.

The abiding question for me is:  Why have these nuns not been properly educated on the matter of artificial birth control? And while we’re at it, one ought to remind them that the birth control proscription has never been stated ex Cathedra so it’s not infallible. It is proposed under the Magisterium or Teaching Office. As one honest padre once confided to me: "You are free to use your own conscience in this regard, since the teaching isn't binding."

 Perhaps the best solution to the Little Sisters'  moral dilemma is one proposed last week by a Denver Post writer: Hire only physically fit elders for the nursing homes, who no longer have need for birth control. It would solve two problems: provide jobs for seniors who are money tight and may need more, and obviate the need to continue with these court cases.

It's "win - win"!

Birth Control Must Figure Into Any Papal Encyclical On Climate Change

Pope Francis is preparing an encyclical on global warming-climate change. If it is to mean anything it must allow provisions for birth control, not merely adjure people to consume less.

The news (Denver Post, June 12, p. 13A)  that Pope Francis is now finishing a papal encyclical on global warming has conservatives - Catholics and non-Catholics alike- fretting on the implications. Republican conservos, as is their misguided wont, fear the pontiff conferring benediction on the validity of human -caused climate change which they regard as a "hoax". Catholic conservatives are terrified because it inevitably interjects the issue of the world's growing population - a basic generator of CO2. They fear that any acknowledgement of climate change - especially traced to humans- leaves the door open to accepting the UN agenda that universally gives women access to artificial contraception and abortion.

Since both are claimed to violate Catholic moral tenets, this would be unacceptable. Never mind that before 1869, the Church allowed abortion up to the end of the first trimester. John Connery, S.J. a leading historian of the Church’s teaching on abortion, has been quoted as citing a long standing collection of Canon Law that “it was not until 1869 that abortion for any reason became grounds for excommunication” (See, e.g. Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, PARADE, April 22, 1990).

The larger point here is that clearly, the fact the Church already changed its doctrine on abortion shows its moral positions are malleable and not set in stone!  What this means is that the Church itself cannot be free of errors in faith or morals if it has already made one that was since covered up.

As for birth control, let's not forget that the Papal Commission set up by Pope Paul VI advised that he alter the Church's stance to allow artificial contraception (cf. Contraception and Holiness- The Catholic Predicament, Collins Publishers, UK, 1964. ) Despite that, Paul rejected his own Commission opting instead to adhere to Vatican hardliners like Joseph Ratzinger.

All this is germane given that how Francis deals with the inexorable population growth as it affects the environment, has to be one of the key questions to be answered when the encyclical, 'Laudato si, on the Care of Our Common Home' is released June 18.

As I noted in earlier posts, over-population is at the root of all the problems, including fouled water, polluted air and soil, melting glaciers, severe crowding - not to mention mass panic migrations (such as  seen this past week to Europe).  There are UN estimates that project a global population of 10.9 billion by 2100. If, however, women - mainly in the poorest nations and without access to contraceptives -  have even 0.5 more offspring each than projected,  that 2100 estimate could turn into 12.3 billion or even 15.8 billion.  See e.g.

The latter pointing to a certain 'Soylent Green' world. Meanwhile, Adrian Rafferty of the University of Washington, publishing in a recent issue of Science, computed there's an 80 percent probability that world population - now 7.3 billion - will increase to between 9.6 billion and 12.3 billion by 2100

All this means that the Pope, if he is serious, cannot ignore or dismiss the adverse role human over -reproduction plays in contributing to a host of problems - including mass poverty and the greenhouse effect. In the case of the first, we note too many people outstripping the resources to provide for them - especially in places like Africa - which at its current rate of reproduction could see 5 billion people by 2100.

 Clearly also, the pollution of the atmosphere* in tandem with the accelerating greenhouse effect, can be laid at the feet of too many people on this planet - each needing food, air, water and energy from the time of birth.  The more people generated the more CO2 produced as a result of their gobbling resources and assorted carbon footprints. While the latter are greatest in the West, because our societies are based on consumption, the lesser footprints also matter in the sense that wars, tribal unrest and religious wars can result in millions fleeing their home nations and disrupting the balance of life in those countries fled to.

The most salient point for the pope is that the existing mass of 7.3 billion humans is currently gobbling the equivalent of 1.6 Earths each year. This is clearly unsustainable and one of two things must happen: humans must cut their numbers radically - preferably by cutting birth rates, or those uncontrolled  numbers will overwhelm the existing resources leading to mass starvation and destitution.

So artificial birth control, and yes - abortion too (if the birth control fails) must be available for a world teetering on the brink of catastrophe.. Failure to acknowledge this will mean the encyclical will be essentially a still born, sterile document - all form and no substance.
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* New research has found that natural gas "flaring" at frack sites has added pollutant emissions to the atmosphere equivalent to "77 million cars". The noxious substances entering the atmosphere include:  carbon monoxide, benzene, and volatile organic compounds. (EOS: Earth and Space Science News, Vol. 96, No. 10, p. 5)

'Fellowship of Catholic University Students' (FOCUS) Is Out to Lunch on ACA

Would one of the FOCUS women rather be emulating this secular teacher at a Catholic HS, or accepting an unplanned pregnancy because of a rat bastard doing a "roofie-rape"? Inquiring minds want to know!

According to the news in yesterday’s  Denver Post (‘Suit Filed Over Birth Control’ p. 2A), a Catholic college group (FOCUS – or the Fellowship of Catholic University Students)  plans to challenge  the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act health coverage mandate on the basis of its “forcing religious employers to offer sterilization and contraceptive services, and abortion-inducing drugs for employees.”

 

Mouthpiece Mike Norton of the “Alliance Defending Freedom” (a fulsome name if ever there was one) bloviated yesterday that:

 

“Faith-based organizations should be free to live and operate according to the faith they teach and espouse.”

 

Adding:

“If the government can fine Christian ministries out of existence for keeping their faith there is no limit to what freedom they can take away.”

Of course, this is absolute nonsense. There is no attempt whatsoever to “fine Christian ministries out of existence” – only to have them adhere to the standards of all other employers in the public sphere. If then the Catholic Church operates as an employer in the public sphere – never mind it’s a religious institution – then it’s bound to adhere to public standards pertaining to the Affordable Care Act, which all other public employers at other institutions, corporations are also bound to accept.

Hence, the only thing being “taken away” here is the Church employer’s ability to take away secular employees’ rights to the same standard of health care as all other secular employees’ in the public or private sphere.  The Church, meanwhile, is quite free to morally legislate its own members’ do’s and don’ts to its heart’s content. NO one is taking away that right. 


If the Church sees fit to deny its own members’ as employees access to birth control or the morning after pill, or abortion, then fine. It is well within its purview. But it can’t extrapolate that to secular employees and retain tax-free status as a peculiarly religious institution.  Here's another reason this applies: Unknown to many Catholic purists, many secular hospitals have been taken over by Catholic ones. Their original secular workers who had benefits under those private secular hospitals now see them threatened because of antiquated Church dogmas invoked after the corporate takeover.

According to the Post (ibid.):

“The legal group filed a lawsuit in Denver district court on behalf of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students- a non-profit organization founded in 1998.”

Here's some more of the folderol in their statement(ibid.):

“The (ACA) mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as well as the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.”

Which, again, is total bollocks. There is no such violation because Catholic employers – whether in schools or hospitals or whatever – are quite free to set whatever moral standards they wish for their OWN Church members who are employed in such venues. What they are not free to do is to set those standards for secular employees! Not if they wish to continue to receive  tax-free status from the federal state. As for violating the First and Fifth Amendments, that’s totally preposterous: there is no proscription against freedom of speech – they can spout whatever medieval nonsense that they desire. Nor is there proscription against being a witness against oneself.

 

One of the ignorant First Amendment arguments usually employed is that: "No one is denying the secular women access to contraception or abortion if they want it, they just don't wish to be forced to pay for drugs that violate their religious beliefs".   The point is the "drugs" aren't doing that because they're not being used by the Catholic women who are free to follow their own mores.  They're being used by secular workers as part of the coverage promised under the ACA  health insurance plan!  And, moreover, those drugs - such as contraceptives - may well be needed for more than birth prevention (though that ought to be important enough - given too many mouths to feed can tilt a family over to food stamps, welfare).   But as Sandra Fluke noted in her testimony in March last year: e.g. 

Contraceptives can be used to treat ovarian cysts. If this is not done, the contraceptives denied, then an ovary may need to be surgically removed- and health care costs explode beyond what they would have been.

Contraceptives are also key in limiting severe health problems - such as miscarriage or stroke - which could ensue if a woman becomes pregnant. Moreover, once one commences use of  contraceptives then they need to be taken regularly or they don't work - an educational point that had to be reinforced on dimwit Repukes during their 2012 'war against women'.

 

Meanwhile, we also behold this drivel from John Zimmer – FOCUS VP -  that:

“FOCUS sincere religious beliefs forbid it from providing insurance coverage that includes birth control for its employees, it says: ‘ As Catholics we do not impose our faith on anyone but propose to others the life-changing power of God’s love.”

 

But as I noted in my recent book (‘Beyond Atheism, Beyond God’), humans with their limited neural capacity aren’t in any remote position to define or know “God” since the noun (G-o-d) isn’t the same as the entity. Since the entity is supposedly “infinite” then no finite brain can comprehend it. The best it can do is forge approximate god-concepts which are relative, limited and subjective.  Hence the term “God’s love” is totally meaningless other than on a subjective level. It’s vacuous verbiage because if one can’t comprehend “God” one surely can’t comprehend any “love” derived therefrom.  And by extension one is proposing to others nothing more than one’s own ideations as internally subjective lingo.  As Philosopher Joseph Campbell put it (The Power of Myth, p. 56):

 

“ 'God’ is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known..”

 

All of which reinforces the point that when people use the word G-o-d they’re not talking or writing about an actual entity but a limited construct or ideation configured as a noun, which we call a God concept. People BELIEVE they are referencing the real entity by use of the noun but they are deluding themselves. It would be analogous to me going to a restaurant – seeing a ‘steak’ picture on the menu – then tearing the image out, consuming it and asserting I’d eaten a ‘steak’.  Any such pretense would ordinarily earn one a fast trip to the loony bin.

 

As for the claim of “not imposing their faith on anyone”, I am afraid FOCUS’ collegians need to take a semantics or logic course, preferably both.  If indeed, they’re all about preventing SECULAR employees – say atheists like me – from accessing artificial  birth control- then they are indeed imposing their faith.  Besides - what if the tables were turned? How would Catholic purists and dogmatists react if a Hindu-run corporation took over a Catholic Hospital? Would such a happenstance be called a "forced conversion" or  "violation of religious liberty"? OR - would it be considered a business transaction only? Also, if the newly merged entity produced subsidiary corporations - what religious principles would rightly apply? Catholic blowhards and tools like FOCUS need to think such questions through before they get all sanctimonious on us.

 

Now, if instead they confined their natural law moralism to Catholic employees only, there’d be no objection. “Imposing one’s faith” means taking away rights of secular citizens– based on invoking one’s own imagined religious principles.  In other words, extrapolating their “principles” beyond their proper moral domain to take away the rights of citizens who aren’t part of that domain other than in an employee capacity.

 

While we’re at it, let’s take a closer look at these principles which they profess to hold so dear. Biologist Elizabeth A. Daugherty  has asked ('The Lessons of Zoology'. in Contraception and Holiness, p. 110):

"Why do we call secondary the ends of the sexual act which have been accorded in fullness to us, and why do we call primary the end which we share with the lower animals?"

She's referring to the fact that the core of Pius XI's  original encyclical Casti Connubii was that the "sin" of artificial contraception inhered in making primary a sexual aspect that in reality is only "secondary". According to that pontiff:

"Since therefore the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature."

Which is irredeemable codswallop. As Daugherty notes in her chapter (op. cit.)  what the pontiff and his ilk really sought to do is reduce humans to the state of lower animals, at the behest of their "natural" reproductive cycles. In this sense, unlike the lower animals, humans have the intellectual capacity and sense of novelty to introduce a vast variety of pleasure-play into their sex relations. They aren't yoked to  primitive instincts to simply mount and hump at specific times. As Daugherty notes (pp. 96- 97):

"After ovulation, all mammalian females are under the influence of progesterone from the corpus luteum. This is a period of rapidly declining estrogenic activity which ends the sexual receptivity of the lower mammalian female, whether or not fertilization occurs.
 

But (in humans) marital relations continue during this progesterone -dominated period before the abrupt onset of menstruation. It is the period of lowest estrogenic activity and the progesterone-dominated period after ovulation which are known as the 'safe period' for marital relations."

This then, is what the Catholics'  “rhythm method” (of  Ogino-Kaus)  seeks to do: establish the "safe period" for a particular woman and then ordain that this is the time to safely have sexual relations if one wishes to not have any kids. The trouble is, it requires meticulous temperature taking at various times during a cycle to establish where that safe period begins and ends, and often this will be for no more than 10 days or so in a given month. Presumably, the couple is quite happy to do without sex the other two thirds of the time!

Thus, the moralizers of the Vatican are actually demanding that married couples act UNNATURALLY, since as Daugherty observes (ibid.):

"Humans are free from physiologically determined sexual desires so we possess a more or less permanent sexuality from adolescence to old age."

Indeed! But the Church and its robed minions (and now evidently younger acolytes in colleges)  seek to dictate that despite being sexual or having sexual desires from adolescence until old age, her members are only free to discharge those desires under certain limited times and limited conditions. For example, teens who have such exploding desires on account of their hormones are warned they cannot even masturbate to relieve themselves because those organs are only allowed to morally function in the state of marriage. Then....once married, the couple is informed they may gratify their mutual sexual desires only if they are open to conception....that is, unless they use the rhythm method.  Anyone not see a pattern here?

 

But once more, my gripe is not so much the Vatican roping  in its own flock’s gonads, but seeking to rope in the gonads of secular employees working at their schools, hospitals etc. (And please don’t anyone tell me “They can get another job!” – NO, not in this low aggregate demand, high unemployment environment. That’s like telling a guy who’s been denied food stamps (and on his last legs)  to go jump off a roof, then he won’t need them!) Besides, would Catholics tell Catholic employees to just "get another job" if their hospital was taken over by Hindu owners? I doubt it!
 

Julian Pleasants has observed (op. cit., p. 88) the Vatican has always been hostage to:

 

"Aristotelian modes of thought which tend to fix behaviors within very limited and fixed definitions and categories."

Thus, the Church once believed it "natural" that some men be enslaved because they were “unable to manage their own affairs”  (ibid.)So why be surprised when the same Church seeks to ordain all her members abide by a sexuality more fitting of lower primates?   However, be that as it may, we MUST express surprise (and outrage ) when the Church and its enablers like FOCUS seek to impose that same sexuality on secularists. That is simply unacceptable.

 

The abiding question for me is: Why would 21^st century college students, embedded in a bunch like FOCUS,  be yoked  to Aristotelian modes of thought they seek to impose on their more enlightened peers or secularists? Maybe they are jealous they themselves never broke free of their mental chains to see just how limited they are by the Vatican’s nonsense. And while we’re at it, let me remind them that the birth control proscription has never been stated ex Cathedra so it’s not infallible. It is proposed under the Magisterium or Teaching Office. As one honest padre once confided to me: "You are free to use your own conscience in this regard, since the teaching isn't binding."

 

As for abortion, the FOCUS groupies ought to bear in mind that John Connery, S.J,  a leading Catholic historian,  showed that up to 1869 the Church’s Canon Law had historically held abortion to be murder only subsequent to the end of the first trimester.[1]  The interesting thing is that for the bulk of Church history the practice of abortion was allowed, at least up to the first three months of pregnancy. More interesting is that the doctrine of papal infallibility was pronounced in 1870. Could it be that the latter doctrine was introduced to back up the Church’s change in its moral position on abortion? If so, one wonders who really controls the Church, the Holy Spirit-  as is so often claimed-  or zealous prelates in positions of high power who fear relinquishing vise-like grips on their congregations[2]?

Oh, one also wonders if they still teach critical thinking at Catholic universities, as Loyola did in the 1960s - even encouraging atheists such as Jean -Paul Sarte to lecture us on existentialism! To see FOCUS' antics is to wonder if critical thinking went the way of the Dodo - at least in the universities that harbor FOCUS outlets!

---

[1] Sagan and Druyan: PARADE, (April 22, 1990), 6.

[2] And  (most recently), nuns, mainly belonging to The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which was issued a reprimand by the Vatican for straying outside the purview of Church teachings – especially after they defended the inclusion of contraceptive services in Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The Vatican has also censured Sr. Margaret Farley (of Yale Divinity School) after publication of her book, ‘Just Love’. Farley evidently stepped on Vatican toes when she justified artificial contraception as well as masturbation within marriage as an aid to preserving fidelity.

 

Give This Pope A Hand!

Let me say up front – as I have in past posts- that I like this new Pope a lot! He has in the space of a brief time, swept away more pennyante bollocks and malarkey from the Catholic Church than John XXIII did in his whole papacy. He got my vote early for asserting – and more than once- that atheists can "be there at the end", so long as they live moral lives. (Not that I believe there’s an "afterlife", but it’s always good to know there’s an ‘escape hatch’ in case I am wrong!)

Now, according to a front page story in The Washington Post, Pope Francis has come out full square against “small minded rules” dogging the Church – but which most of us know were put there to keep her “children” under firm control and on a short leash. In an interview with Jesuit publications released Thursday, Pope Francis set the framework for his papacy, calling for reform of both the attitude and the structure of the church, and “chided what he saw as the tendency of some church leaders to focus on ‘small-minded rules’ and instead insisted that “the church’s ministers must be merciful.” Francis said, “the people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.” I ‘ll second that!

The pontiff added:

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

The scientific Materialist concurs with this, labeling such reactions to assorted minor acts as emotive moralistic trivialization. If such moral trivialization is permitted to metastasize into law then we describe it as moralism, For the most part, moralism isn’t founded on species survival but on an unsubstantiated and subjective belief in a uniform human sensibility to external stimuli. In this way it becomes the conscious vehicle of behavior modification, used by any group with political or economic power.

Nor, may I add, is it necessary to belabor sexual issues, as if one is a single-minded obsessive authority, especially when so many in the Church’s hierarchy are guilty of covering up real sexual crimes, i.e. priest –practiced pedophilia. And yes, that’s one reason I’ve no respect for Ratzinger, and very little for Pope John Paul II, and certainly not making him a “saint”. He wasn’t. Nor is there any proof he met the saint standard on even one “miracle”.

So, Francis is totally correct in advising his underlings to back off and not become so obsessive, because when they do they inadvertently turn the spotlight on their own acts – or absence of what they should have done when thousands of trusting kids were being abused across the globe. Clean up your own closet first, then you can seek to clean up others! (Advice I also proffer to nations who believe they are exceptional, 'holier than thou' moral stalwarts when they are not!)

One of the many factors that drove my departure from the Catholic Church, then onward to atheism as a college student at Loyola, was the litany of small-minded “rules” that almost entirely focused on sexual acts. There were piddling proscriptions against: “impure thoughts”, “looking at impure pictures”, “committing impure acts” (i.e. “jerking off”), and later – as an adult- there was the bogey of artificial contraception (defined as “mutual masturbation” by the Church’s throwback, residual Inquisition, i.e. the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the no-no of abortion.

In my new book, ‘Beyond Atheism, Beyond God’, I put all these acts under the category of third rate moralism not any actual morality. (My new book can be purchased at: www.quantumbeing.net)

A classic example that highlights the moralizing instinct in humans was described by Dacher Keltner and presented to his students to gauge their level of moral revulsion. Keltner presented them with the case of a man who goes to the supermarket each week, purchases a packaged chicken and then takes it home for sexual relations, before cooking and eating it. (Keltner: , Born to be Good – The Science of a Meaningful Life,, 46)

Keltner reported that after his posed example he observed the students to “react with the full blown Darwinian-Jamesian emotion of moral disgust written across their faces". (ibid.) The nature of the reaction, presumably, discerned an innate moral right to judge, said to be inextricably bound to the “moral gut.” Keltner’s examples include moral philosophers (e.g. Jonathan Haidt) that “prioritize the moral gut”. In other words, millions of years of human evolution have embedded such disgust –revulsion reactions into us and we ought to heed them as a criterion for moral judgement when aroused.

But why? To the scientific Materialist one is then allowing emotions to rule and if these are codified into law many nasty consequences can ensue. In the case of the man abusing his purchased chicken, Keltner expressed relief to report that - after their initial disgust - the students agreed the behavior could be placed in the category of a personal perturbation or even idiosyncrasy. And so long as practiced in the man’s own home – presumably with blinds drawn – there were no laws broken. Oh, it would also be best if he had no dinner parties featuring abused chickens!

Obviously, and clearly, one can make the same case for an adult (or youth) “jerking off”, “having impure thoughts” or practicing artificial contraception as a married couple. None of these reach the standard of “severe moral transgressions” as the Church’s moralists have expounded, and certainly if they’re claimed to –they blow all moral consistency into a cocked hat. The moralists are then left to rationally ponder how the hell they can weigh a single jerk off, say, against slaughtering 15 people with a Bushmaster .223. If they say both offenses merit ‘Hell” they are all certifiably insane and their moral laws descend to inchoate horse manure.

As for the Church’s moral minions railing against abortion, Anne Druyan and the late Carl Sagan pointed out that John Connery, S.J, ( a leading Catholic historian), showed that up to 1869 the Church’s Canon Law had historically held abortion to be murder only subsequent to the end of the first trimester. (Sagan and Druyan: PARADE, April 22, 1990, 6.)

The interesting thing is that for the bulk of Church history the practice of abortion was allowed, at least up to the first three months of pregnancy. More interesting is that the doctrine of papal infallibility was pronounced in 1870. Could it be that the latter doctrine was introduced to back up the Church’s change in its moral position on abortion? If so, one wonders who really controls the Church, the Holy Spirit as is so often claimed or zealous prelates in positions of high power who fear relinquishing vise-like grips on their congregations.

As for that doctrine itself, Theologian Hans Kung, for example, observed the following ( Infallible? An Inquiry, 143.

….no one, neither Vatican I, nor Vatican II, nor the textbook theologians, has shown that the Church - its leadership or its theology - is able to put forward propositions which inherently cannot be erroneous.

The true fact, then, is that all the minor proscriptions – such as against assorted sex acts the prelates and hierarchy keep yelping about – are only violations of the Magisterium or teaching office. In other words, as one brave Loyola padre once confided to me: they are meant "to be offered as advice, not absolute moral laws." This is something the remaining Catholics, especially in the U.S., would do well to bear in mind.