Take Back Skepticism, Part I: The Elephant in the Room

August 6, 2011, at 11:30 pm

I was planning a short rant about some ironically irrational arguments made by self-described rationalists at the World Atheist Convention in Dublin a couple of months ago. However, events of the past two weeks have left me frustrated, angry, and a little bit sick. Since they are all connected, I have decided to discuss them together in one long post, broken into three parts for easier reading.

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Related posts:

1. Global Atheist Convention – Sold Out
2. On holidays – an update
3. Sir Humphrey would be proud…Victorian decision not to fund Atheists reads like the script of Yes Minister

I overheard a curious conversation in my local purveyor of woo food products and cheap chocolate raspberries yesterday. 

A woman at the counter had questioned the proprietors sale of Power Balance Bracelets, she’d obviously seen something about the ACCC decision (go team Skeptic and other critical thinking Australians).

The proprietors response was most interesting(unfortunately it was hard to hear without making it obvious I was eavesdropping).  He seemed to indicate there was nothing wrong with the product itself, just a problem with the wording in the advertising, that you can’t scientifically test or prove "’performance enhancing technology”.

One wonders how you can then make claims about it enhancing performance, when you can’t do the research in the first place – how do you find out it works initially?  Do you just make shit up…  oh wait

So what I am wondering is if this is just some poor retailers response, an effort to move a product that’s become unpopular or if distributors are providing suggestions in how to deal with the bad publicity?

Perhaps its time for Skeptics to run some spot checks on their local retailers?

Related posts:

1. Power Balance revealed as a SHAM, finally!
2. Sean to incur wrath of Catholic church

The Pope I mean.  Made a colossal fuckwit out of himself just as I was settling down to enjoy a rant and anger free holiday period while the fundamentalists fight a war against figments of their imagination who are attempting to destroy Christmas.

And I was getting ready to bitch and whine about the umpteenth time I have seen Ricky Gervais’ rehashed, retweeted “Why I am an atheist” missive.

GAH!

You see Pope “foot in his mouth” has gone and blamed the promiscuousness of his paedophile priests on secular society.  Check out the article below:

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI told Vatican officials Monday that they must reflect on the church’s culpability in its child sex-abuse scandal, but he also blamed a secular society in which he said the mistreatment of children was frighteningly common.

In his traditional, end-of-the-year speech to Vatican cardinals and bishops, Benedict said revelations of abuse in 2010 reached "an unimaginable dimension" that required the church to accept the "humiliation" as a call for renewal.

"We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen," the pope said.

Benedict also said, however, that the scandal must be seen in a broader social context, in which child pornography is seemingly considered normal by society and drug use and sexual tourism are on the rise.

"The psychological destruction of children, in which human persons are reduced to articles of merchandise, is a terrifying sign of the times," Benedict said.

He said that as recently as as the 1970s, pedophilia wasn’t considered an absolute evil but rather part of a spectrum of behaviors that people refused to judge in the name of tolerance and relativism.

As an avalanche of cases of pedophile priests came to light, church officials frequently defended their previous practice of putting abusers in therapy, not jail, by saying that was the norm in society at the time. Only this year did the Vatican post on its website unofficial guidelines for bishops to report pedophile priests to police if local laws require it.

"In the 1970s, pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children," the pope said. "It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than’ and a ‘worse than.’ Nothing is good or bad in itself."

"The effects of such theories are evident today," he said.

Read on

The sexual abuse of children is a society wide problem.  It’s the responsibility of each and everyone of us to look out for the welfare of others especially the young.  It is interesting to note that when conducting my mandatory reporting training at the start of this year, Ministers of Religion were still not required to attend the training before operating around children.

Related posts:

1. “Don’t listen to the Haters,”says Pope
2. Pope Benedict gives GodTube the Finger
3. News Flash – Pope Meets Irish Churchmen