Yep, this is where militant atheism leads….
In response to the recent revelation that a “Late-term” abortionist has been charged by prosecutors with killing seven babies outside of the womb, born alive during the sixth, seventh and eighth month of pregnancy, this is P Z Myers response:
First, never quote Mother Teresa at me — she was an evil hag who worshipped poverty, who did not help people except to encourage them to suffer more for her faith, while she lived in comfort and traveled far and wide to receive the accolades of the gullible. I would never find the words of that wicked woman persuasive.
Secondly, the standard bullying tactics of waving bloody fetuses might cow the squeamish, but I’m a biologist. I’ve guillotined rats. I’ve held eyeballs in my hand and peeled them apart with a pair of scissors. I’ve used a wet-vac to clean up a lake of half-clotted blood from an exsanguinated dog. I’ve opened bodies and watched the intestines do their slow writhing dance, I’ve been elbow deep in blood, I’ve split open cats and stabbed them in the heart with a perfusion needle. I’ve extracted the brains of mice…with a pair of pliers. I’ve scooped brains out of buckets, I’ve counted dendrites in slices cut from the brains of dead babies.
You want to make me back down by trying to inspire revulsion with dead baby pictures? I look at them unflinchingly and see meat. And meat does not frighten me.
Uh-huh. I literally don’t know what else to say without offending everybody…..
Tags: Law Moral Ethical
January 21st, 2011 at 10:31 pm
How terribly sad that he is so warped that he has reduced humanity to lumps of flesh.
I’m normally loathe to suggest demonic influences but Mr Meyers seems to exhibit a disturbing hint of eroticism as he revels gleefully in these horrific descriptions of gore, death and carnage.
Here’s an idea. Why don’t we email him to let him know that we are keeping a constant prayer vigil for him? Think he might explode in apoplexy, hope those clearing up don’t scrape his entrails into the bin…
January 21st, 2011 at 10:55 pm
Has nothing to do with atheism, let alone “militant” atheism. Has everything to do with medicine, biology, and science. Alas this is nothing I would not expect from someone whose world view is steeped and maintained in fabrications concocted by those that deny the value of science. Please!
I don’t know if you are aware of this or not but Mother Teresa was also an atheist of sorts, by her own admission. And her “suffering mills” of Calcutta are exactly what PZMyers is talking about in that email.
Another thing, something the anti-choice crowd needs to think long and hard about is that these unlicensed, non ob-gyn, abortion mills will be all the rage, as they were in the ’60s, if choice is taken away from women once again by the religious extremists.
January 21st, 2011 at 10:59 pm
There are so many religions and each one has its different ways of following God. I follow Christ:
Jesus is my God,
Jesus is my Spouse,
Jesus is my Life,
Jesus is my only Love,
Jesus is my All in All;
Jesus is my Everything.”
Mother Teresa
@Beechbum, I see your point, she really does sound like an atheist!
January 21st, 2011 at 11:04 pm
Mother Teresa – an atheist of sorts?!! That’s hilarious. I think you are having a little spot of difficulty in understanding the concept of the Dark
Night of the Soul, a description first coined by that other atheist of sorts, St John of the Cross.
I could direct you to some informative resources, but I suspect, judging by your tone, you would not be interested.
January 21st, 2011 at 11:12 pm
Whilst I have to agree with everything written in the comments, I am marginally of the opinion that I have just read the words (in the article) of the clinically ill or indeed the criminally deranged, so don’t feel inclined to mock the afflicted.
Their problems are greater than ours. Let us pray earnestly for them!
…praying….
January 21st, 2011 at 11:28 pm
@ Webmaster: I think you’ve made a mistake (which would be a first) because when I read the whole article on the Pharyngula blog it seems the polemic you quote isn’t a response to the dreadful story about 7 month abortions.
P Z Myers wrote this piece in response to the flood of emails he’s been receiving from anti-abortionists. These emails all contain lots of images of aborted foetuses, which he describes as “a common tactic used by these creatures to intimidate with horrible images.”
The dramatic and revolting piece of writing you quote concerns this use of images, and makes much more sense in this context. He’s saying that working in biology – life in the raw – is not a pretty business. None of what he says appears to have anything to do with atheism, militant or otherwise. I couldn’t find any mention – though maybe I missed it.
January 21st, 2011 at 11:36 pm
oops
January 22nd, 2011 at 1:16 am
Er yes. I think you’ve mismatched the quote there webmaster. Gruesome though the extract is, it appears to have nothing specific to say about the case of the late term abortionist.
January 22nd, 2011 at 6:32 am
I’ve no idea who P Z Myers and I can see that he is trying to shock but that second paragraph could easily have been written by a Christian vivisectionist I know to describe his work at his university. He attaches electrodes to living rats, for instance. But he’s adamant that he’s advancing both pure scientific knowledge and biotechnology in order to help his fellow humans overcome or avoid terrible medical afflictions. Quite possibly, he’s anti-abortion too. Probably, in fact, since he’s a Catholic.
January 22nd, 2011 at 1:10 pm
I’ve come to the conclusion that most atheism, at least as I see it online, is simply hatred of Christians and Christianity and nothing else. Its practitioners display no indication of thought or reason, and their reactions all make most sense if considered as hate-based articulations of convenience.
On the same logic, the British Humanist Association shrieked its glee that a Christian couple running a B&B had been done in court on the ideological crime of refusing to endorse vice under their own roof, on the testimony of informers. How can any decent person feel glad that such an evil can take place in Britain? How can anyone opposed to inquisitions on personal beliefs feel PLEASED at policemen asking about beliefs, courts deciding on orthodoxy?
If we look at atheist literature, then we read that atheists hate the idea of an inquisition, that people should be punished for their beliefs; that being an atheist didn’t make you support immorality. But of course we don’t believe any of this — it’s merely convenient for them to assert it — because we see the opposite.
Probably atheism in the days of state religion as a real and oppressive force was a different thing. Few of us could look at the Catholic Church — a mass of greedy self-seeking interests fighting in a sack — under the ancien regime without feeling disgust. But in these days, when Christianity is a despised minority in Britain, I don’t see how much atheism differs from hate-peddling.
January 22nd, 2011 at 3:18 pm
@Sophie & Simian:
Folks. The flood of email PZ Myers has received from anti-abortionists has been prompted by the issue of Dr Gosnell as PZ Myers himself has noted here:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/this_is_not_a_case_about_abort.php
And so the post I link to above is entirely framed within the context of Dr Gosnell.
I don’t make it up.
January 22nd, 2011 at 4:14 pm
@ Webmaster: Of course you didn’t make it up! I wouldn’t – and didn’t – suggest such a thing. Experience has given me the greatest respect for your integrity. I just thought you’d made a mistake, for until you provided the second link there wasn’t any apparent connection. I now understand that P Z Myers’ second post (the one that heads this page) was written in response to emails he got about the first one (the link you’ve just provided). But my comments still hold.
Any doctor working in O&G sees gory and distressing things, as do other doctors and biologists. An expelled embryo or foetus results from any abortion, whether spontaneous, medical or surgical. A D&C (scrape) after a partial miscarriage doesn’t produce results you’d photograph to show the family. But it takes a fairly stupid person to expect a research biologist like Pharyngula to be devastated by such images, let alone change his pro-choice stance. I can see why he’s annoyed.
I find it offensive when anti-abortionists show gory images as part of their argument. I notice that they never show pictures of the results of very early abortion, or of minute embryos lost within the first couple of weeks. Only the emotive ones are chosen.
I think it’s the assumption that people who support legal abortion aren’t aware of what happens that’s so irritating. We don’t think that what’s aborted in a miscarriage or an abortion is rosebud, a hen’s egg or a nothing. We know what it entails, but we still think believe that the woman has the right to decide in the first 24 or so weeks. It’s never a fun event, but it’s often the better alternative.
Suggesting that the Gosnell horror story is the result of pro-choice ideas is insupportable. The pro-choice position is woman-centred, with her well-being and safety paramount. In fact the converse is closer to the truth: if abortion became illegal there’d be more such cases, as witness the mortality/morbidity rate in places where it is illegal. P Z Myers puts it very clearly:
I have been receiving lots of triumphant mail from anti-choice people claiming vindication, that abortion is wrong, and demanding to know how I can possibly support abortion rights after hearing about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell.
…Gosnell is precisely the kind of butcher the pro-choice movement opposes. No one endorses bad medicine and unrestricted, unregulated, cowboy surgery like Gosnell practiced — what he represents is the kind of back-alley deadly hackery that the anti-choice movement would have as the only possible recourse, if they had their way. If anything, the Gosnell case is an argument for legal abortion.
January 22nd, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Hi Sophie (& Simian), Oh ignore my “didn’t make it up” comment, I’ve been going thru a little bit of a an overly defensive mode, and it’s not caused by you guys.
Sorry about that.
January 22nd, 2011 at 4:33 pm
@ Webmaster: S’Ok. As I just posted, I never thought you had. It would be beneath you.
January 22nd, 2011 at 4:51 pm
@ Richard #: You write “I’ve come to the conclusion that most atheism, at least as I see it online, is simply hatred of Christians and Christianity and nothing else. Its practitioners display no indication of thought or reason, and their reactions all make most sense if considered as hate-based articulations of convenience.”
If you can stand by that in the light of Simian’s courtesy and his reasoned, thoughtful posts I can only assume you haven’t been paying attention. In the year or so that I’ve been participating here I’ve often felt quite ashamed of nasty or unbalanced sounding posts by self-declared Christians. They seem such a poor advert for our faith. The few atheists or agnostics who take part regularly are far too often more moderate and humane than some of the fundies.
January 22nd, 2011 at 4:51 pm
@ Roger Pearse: Sorry, I wrote Richard, meant Roger.
January 22nd, 2011 at 6:39 pm
Thanks Sophie.
One of the problems I and others face as an atheist debating on a Christian blog is that if I make a point which is unpopular I can be accused of being a militant atheist who hates Christians (I have been told as much a number of times) whereas a Christian making an equally forceful point is congratulated. It’s a bit like playing an away match with a partisan crowd. Fortunately there is a referee (the webmaster) and most ‘players’ believe in fair play.
It sometimes makes intelligent debate difficult, and means I have to be particularly sensitive to this if I’m to get my point across. It’s not easy when, having spent quite a while carefully composing a measured comment, it becomes clear that someone either has not read it carefully, or appears to choose purposely to misunderstand.
And Roger – for every atheist who shouts abuse from the rooftops there are very many more who do not, and have no intention of doing so. Just as there are many different brands of Christianity, so there are many nuances of atheism.
Sadly it is only the sensational statements that grab headlines. And that’s partly why people do it. Strange as it may seem, until very recently it was almost impossible for an atheist to make their voice heard at all in the UK. Even now, when lless than 50% of the population of the United Kingdom now regard themselves as Christians, and by my calculations no more than about 5% of the population regularly attends Church, it seems that Christians believe they have a right to be the sole arbiters of ethics and morality.
We do not ask for special privileges, (as some religious people do). We just ask to be treated fairly, so long as we do not break the law. Most of us, myself included, have absolutely no intention of trying to get rid of religion. We understand that for many people it is central to their lives, and that’s not a problem.
It is when religion tries to step outside the law, or demands special treatment that we get frustrated and annoyed. Hardly surprising that we sometimes do get angry.
January 23rd, 2011 at 7:35 am
The letters are published in a book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, and are edited by the Rev Brian Kolodiejchuk (2007). I highly recommend the book for it contains the following and many other insights.
“I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?”
She even admitted that she had begun to doubt the existence of heaven and God.
Mother Teresa’s ’40-year faith crisis’ – Telegraph http://bit.ly/goftWO
Although she publicly proclaimed that her heart belonged “entirely to the Heart of Jesus”, she wrote to the Rev Michael Van Der Peet, a spiritual confidant, in September 1979 that “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves [when praying] but does not speak.”
Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith – TIME http://bit.ly/g50TcR
In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the “dryness,” “darkness,” “loneliness” and “torture” she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God.
From my own reading of the afore noted book:
“Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love — and now become as the most hated one — the one — You have thrown away as unwanted — unloved. I call, I cling, I want — and there is no One to answer — no One on Whom I can cling — no, No One. — Alone … Where is my Faith — even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness — My God — how painful is this unknown pain — I have no Faith — I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart — & make me suffer untold agony.
So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?”
— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated
Who she was as a public figure concealed who she was in reality at least for some 40 years. It may be that your definition of atheism is wildly different or maybe I’m sensing some defensiveness.
As an atheist and scientist, I follow the evidence, actual evidence, were it leads. As a theologian for more than 45 years I also know what some of you think and how you think at least as well as I understand Mother Teresa’s plight. With that in mind, the comment above was meant to show this author that a) PZMyers’ comment was about biology not abortion, i.e. you’re not going to get under his skin with biology, and b) religion causes more suffering than is possible to imagine with its non-evidenced dictates and dogmas. Those of us who live by the evidence are not going to make claims we can’t support; maybe some should remember the other three fingers when they convict.
January 23rd, 2011 at 8:56 pm
Thanks for that Beechbum. Interesting!
The lack of immediate response is I think perhaps because people have been too busy discussing homosexuality on other threads. Always draws the crowds. Anyone would think it was something new!