Compassion for Sperm, but not for People
(Image from Davies General Store)
Sane Blog says it best:
As reported in this CNN article, the pope has reaffirmed the catholic position on birth control. It is difficult to imagine a single policy which has been responsible for ensuring more poverty of women, disease and the blocking of development in Africa and other impoverished nations of the world. The catholic church does not love preventing suffering - the catholic church actually loves suffering.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Suffering brings you closer to God. Or something.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:53 am
I don’t know any Catholics who don’t use birth control. Then again, most of them also refer to the current Pope as “that damn Nazi”, so…yeah.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
I have a Catholic friend who loves Monty Python. When the topic comes up, he sings the “Every Sperm is Sacred” song. So yeah, he’s cool.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
In the U.S., Catholics use contraception at the same rate as non-Catholics. But where the Roman Catholic church has influence over laws, contraception, abortion, and even medical care after miscarriage can be difficult or impossible to get. The kindly and compassionate people who made abortion illegal in Nicaragua are responsible for the deaths of about 80 or 90 women so far and at least one woman has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for having an abortion. See Wikipedia:
May 13th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
I wouldn’t say they “love suffering,” just that they care more about their stupid dogma than the effects it has on people. I’m not talking about ALL Catholics, just the fundie ones. Unfortunately, one of those fundies somehow became Pope.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Monado — I’m trying to follow the illogic that is not providing care for a hemorrhaging patient because there is a ban on abortion. It doesn’t flow for me. Are they worried they will be arrested for breaking the no-abortion law if treatment for a miscarry might look like a covered up abortion and “better safe than sorry” (for the doctor)? I don’t get it…
May 14th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Witch trials, anyone? The Inquisition? It’s taken 400 years, but the Catholics (and fundies of every stripe — the Catholics don’t have a monopoly on medieval ignorance) have managed to work their way back to the good old days. Underlying this whole cesspool is the central tenet of the entire bible — women are the cause of all evil. Over the centuries patriarchy-minded assholes have cobbled together the ignorant, anti-female rantings of Bronze-Age goat herders and turned them into a load of dogma that has cost the lives of thousands upon thousands of women (and men and children, too; but it’s all the fault of Eve). According to the teachings of the bible, women are weak, inferior creatures whose bodies ooze disgusting fluids and whose presence is tolerated only because they are convenient slaves, sperm receptacles, and producers of (male) heirs. Hence the horror in Nicaragua…coming soon to a neighborhood near you!
May 14th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Parrotlover,
I think this heinous attitude toward hemorrhaging women is pretty simply summed up from the Catholic point of view: when a woman’s only function in life is producing babies, anything that comes from her vagina that is not a baby is a sin. It’s a waste of “potential” life. A woman who is bleeding is not fulfilling her God-given purpose.
Without sophisticated medical tests, it’s pretty difficult to tell when a woman of childbearing age is having an unusually heavy period or is suffering an early miscarriage. All sorts of hormonal problems can cause DUB (dysfunctional uterine bleeding), without any fetal hanky-panky being involved. In older women, hypothyroidism and uterine fibroids can cause hemorrhaging. But by going back to medieval standards of medical practice enforced by the church, the doctors are just playing it safe by treating all women as potential lawbreakers (and sinners).
May 15th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Sue Blue - I think you are giving the Abrahamic religions a pretty good break when you say “thousand and thousands.” I would say millions or even billions. \
It strikes me as so hypocritical when you hear news reports about a woman being killed for looking at a man the wrong way in a radical Muslim country and all the home-grown Christians scoff at that thinking “what a terrible religion, we’re so much better” when they don’t realize they are RIGHT THERE with them. They may not go apeshit when a woman flirts with a certain man (but some do when the man is of a different skin color), but they apparently have no problems watching a woman die during childbirth (as you just pointed out). Is there really THAT much of a difference?
May 15th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Unfortunately, a lot of Catholic doctrine only adds to the natural misogyny of some parts of the world. In the wrong hands it’s as bad as radical Islam, since it’s used as an excuse to control and subjugate rather than help.
My stepfamily are almost all Catholic, but they’re also very Irish and pretty sane about it. They’ve come to the consensus that the current Pope had to have somehow cheated to get elected — of all the candidates who had been up for it, he was arguably the worst. My grandfather (who fought in WWII) is admittedly somewhat prejudiced about Germans in general, and the fact that old Popletine was a Nazi youth has pretty much led my grandfather to divorce himself from all things papal, though he still calls himself Catholic.
It’s somewhat amazing to me how many people will identify themselves as adhering to a certain faith without, in fact, doing so. They may practice and appreciate a few aspects of that religion while mostly ignoring the rest (something the fundies would just find intolerable), yet, whether it be out of habit or some other reason, they still say, “Oh, I’m Catholic” or “Oh, I’m Jewish”. It’s like they don’t realize that what they really are more than anything is agnostics; they have faith, it’s just something slightly more tailored to their own feelings and instincts than conventional dogma. I wish I could find someone to ask about that who wouldn’t misunderstand the question and wind up really offended.
May 15th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
It’s my humble opinion that a lot of christians — regardless of denomination — would not be christians if they really bothered to study the Bible. It’s always interesting to hear the wheels churning and see the smoke come out of the ears when they are confronted with the obscenities of Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the blatant contradictions concerning the birth, lineage, and life of Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels (one question I always ask is why Jesus’ patrilineal ancestry is traced through Joseph back to Abraham and even to Adam when he supposedly was born of a virgin by way of the holy spirit). And let’s not even get into the sheer impossibility of the whole Noah’s Flood myth, and why a supposedly perfect, omnipotent Being didn’t just wave a hand and restore his creations to perfection instead of killing them all. I think that most people who consider themselves christian only do so for social reasons or force of habit, and the ones who are really into it are just delusional.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
That’s exactly why I couldn’t be one. I didn’t have to read much of the Bible as a child to go, “Wait, okay, that bit’s impossible, this bit’s unlikely, and that’s just plain STUPID.” And because there were things I flat-out couldn’t believe, I wound up unable to believe in any of it, and gave up trying.
For a while, when I was still trying to reconcile the idea of a Christian God, I wondered if we weren’t some kind of experiment gone horribly wrong that he’d just given up and abandoned. I eventually gave up on that, too, and just went along with whatever odd convinctions resonated with me. How the hell anyone could read the Bible and not think it was a myth, I don’t understand (then again, I don’t get Mormonism or Scientology, either, but there are plenty of people gullible enough to fall for both). I actually tried reading the Book of Mormon once, too, and couldn’t get over the poor attempt at Bible-speak, let alone the complete ridiculousness of the book itself. (I’ve read that Joseph Smith was both a convicted con man and a schizophrenic, and while I don’t know how true either is, neither one would surprise me.)
May 17th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
When I was growing up as a Seventh Day Adventist (creepy, huh? Whenever you hear of some weird off-shoot cult in the news, they always seem to be associated with the Seventh Day Adventists), I would get kicked out of sabbath school regularly because I just couldn’t quit questioning and have “faith”. I really think there must be a genetic susceptibility to religious faith, and I just didn’t have it. In one memorable incident during a discussion about Genesis, I asked why men have nipples. I was serious. If men were created first, and women second, and women had breasts with nipples so they could feed babies — why the bullseyes on men’s chests? Did god just sort of back off when he was molding Adam out of clay and say, “Hmm, something’s not quite right…needs a little something there…wait! I know! Nipples!” I was about nine. You’d have thought that I’d been caught putting the Adam and Eve figures in naughty positions on the felt board.
And I could never resist asking why God felt he had to make woman out of a man’s rib. Did god make men with an extra rib — and if so, why? If not, then men should have one less rib on one side, right? All I was asking for was a little bit of logic, some consistency, and real answers to what I thought were legitimate questions. And all I ever got was raised eyebrows, condemnation, and lectures on having this thing called “faith”. To me it was just a synonym for “gullibility”.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Heee, I had the nipple question, too — finding out that every embryo starts off as female made me laugh like hell, since it meant I could say “Does that mean EVE really came first?” I was a terrible child.
At least I never got the ‘faith’ lectures. My stepfamily is religious, but my mother is an agnostic, and that’s pretty much how she raised me — the whole “If you think it’s stupid, there’s no point in trying to believe in it” school of thought. Pretty much what I’m doing with my own kids, too.
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I got faith lectures all the time. I spent all of 7th and part of 8th grade in a Baptist school, because my parents thought it would “teach some respect”. I had a habit of questioning authority, instead of blindly obeying and accepting, and that vexed them to no end.
Well, I didn’t fare well at this school. I kept getting in trouble because of my lack of gullibility, and the fact that I didn’t act like a “lady”. Whenever something broke or got vandalized, I was the one blamed, though they could never prove it. They’d also tell me regularly that, since I was born on Halloween, I was going to hell when I died. As punishment, the principal would lecture me with bible verses, as if it should have some profound effect on my “delinquent, ungodly behavior”. Me being me, I’d always question it. I’d always point out what didn’t make sense, and ask him for proof that this “god” feller was real.
Every time, he’d point to the bible. That was his proof. Most of the delusional asshats I’ve asked answer that way. I was expelled from that hellhole a few months into 8th grade for being “weird”. I shit you not.