Tu Quoque

Literally translates from the latin as “You’re another.” An informal logic fallacy in which the arguer says that someone else is bad so criticisms against them don’t matter. Let’s put a pin in that for later.

The Southern Baptist Convention, one of the largest groups of Christianity in the United States is now under it’s own sex abuse scandal. Though this one doesn’t involve kids, primarily, so there’s that. The SBC has been accused, through reporting by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express, that 250 staffers and volunteers within their organization have committed sexual abuse of over 700 victims. Some atheist bloggers and podcasters are claiming that this number is likely higher given the theology involved that treats sex before marriage (even the non-consensual kind) as being tainting to the individual involved so they are therefore unlikely to make formal complaints. However likely that is, we can’t go by what we don’t know.

The troubling phenomenon that has emanated from this new religious abuse scandal is that one group is using it to point out that there problem isn’t just them so it’s not that bad. Or something, it’s very hard to tell what the argument here is because it’s so out of touch with everything we know about morality or even reality. What’s happening is that Catholic defenders (yeah believe it or not there are still some around), are using the SBC scandal to defend their own organization’s misdeeds. As abhorrent as that may seem to be, the defense their making is even worse. In effect they are saying “the SBC ministries have committed abuse so why are you always focusing on us?”

What these people don’t understand is that A) we can do two things and B) their thing just came out. In both cases we have religious authorities, long held (falsely) to be the arbiters of spiritual morality to be committing crimes against other people and then hiding it behind their veil of authority. That’s wrong every time and always. It doesn’t matter who is doing it, what matters is that it stops and that something happen to stem the ongoing conspiracy of coverups and abuse.

What’s interesting about the SBC revelation is that their response, so far, seems to actually be more than just pray about it. Their spokesperson has claimed that the policy going forward will be to exorcise any church that harbors a sexual predator or covers up an allegation of abuse from its umbrella. While it’s a bit less than what people have been demanding of the Catholic Church we have to understand a primary difference between the SBC and the Vatican. The SBC is a conference not a hierarchy. There is no SBC “Pope.” The money that each individual church makes does not go into a central coffer and there isn’t much more one of the churches can do to influence or direct another. A lawyer suing an SBC church isn’t suiing the entire thing, rather it’s suing one church. When lawsuits go toward a Catholic church the effect is that the entire organization is sued because they operate according to the dictates of one central authority. (I will disclaim here that this is to the best of my understanding)

We can criticize the SBC’s response but at least it’s something. It’s much more than the Vatican has decided to do and we’ve been going on 17 years since the allegation of a system wide coverup have been made public. As I write the Vatican’s response has been to call committee after committee, deny any resolutions thus far, and in their current do nothing meeting blame the “homosexual agenda” for the child rape. I suppose putting the one next to another only makes the SBC look good because the other response has been so terrible, but these days I suppose we should take what we can get.

Coverup

Well, I guess it’s time for my periodic Pope check in: and it’s never good news is it?

One thing that continues to amaze me about the Catholic Church is how out of touch they seem to be with their ongoing crisis. So, this is going to sound weird but bear with me: it’s the abuse that’s the problem it’s the response to the abuse. Do NOT get me wrong, the abuse is a problem but it’s not THE problem. Any sufficiently large organization is going to have its bad actors, even monstrous actors, it happens. It’s supremely terrible that it happens, but always there are people who are going to be vile and despicable. However, the response of the organization to the bad actors is where the organization’s responsibility lies.

When the bad actors in an organization seem to be flocking to it, or say, one organization seems to have a repeated problem then the organization should examine itself with respect to why it keeps happening and that maybe there is a reason whatever keeps happening continues.

So with the latest revelation, not the Texas one, but the sex slavery amongst nuns, we have the same problem. Pope Francis’s comments, not to be confused with the Vatican’s “clarification,” were that this was an ongoing problem, they knew about it and that it is “a path we’ve been on.” So the path they’ve been on is to correct an issue of sexual slavery amongst the women in the congregation who have taken the vows. That means that not only have they known about it, but they’ve continued to do the nothing that is quickly becoming the modus operandi as a response to these scandals. This path, whatever it is, and if it exists, is just a big nothing.

Part of me wants to think that the only reason the statement was even made was because someone found that the story was going to break ahead of time and they decided to get ahead of it. That’s almost what happened: accusations of sex abuse amongst the male clergy and the female clergy have been breaking lately. The thing is: the lowest male clergy member outranks everything but the highest female member. This is reflected in the complaint they issued back in March that they were being used as servants because of the hierarchy difference. Let’s be doubly clear–this is a power differential that is ordained, in this religion, by God. Saying no, or making complaints is a complaint not only against a superior which is difficult enough, but the religion itself. Being raised Catholic, it’s easy for me to understand the issue here, however this may be missed on others so I’ll explain the problem.

For the Catholic religion, the church is the religion. Anyone can be a heathen Protestant, all you have to do is worship Jesus as the resurrected son of God. That’s the basics, the Catholic church demands that the Church itself the believer follows as the inheritor of the legacy of Peter. Being Catholic, is being a member of the church and its divine authority. When the nuns, last year said they were being abused, that’s a huge deal. The sex abuse of the nuns is only different in action from the work exploitation but is only possible because of the seemingly permanent power differential.

They’re working on it though, without perceiving where the problem in this situation lies. Again, it’s weird to say this but the abuse is secondary to the non-response of the organization to the plight of their members…and that’s the best case scenario, because the other option is that it’s not indifference but actual malice and purposeful disregard for these women.

The Vatican’s clarification on the matter was that Pope Francis was referring to a specific group in France and not an international problem that has been going for decades. This however doesn’t make sense because the latest problem is in India, not France, and over the last year there have been reports from Europe, Africa, South America in addition to India of the same thing. Despite the Vatican’s desire to sweep this under the rug and pretend that the Pope is only confining himself to one specific incident, it can’t be the thing he was talking about.

It really is no wonder that people are leaving it in droves. They are starting to realize really the only thing the organization seems to want to protect is the organization itself.

ABD

Not really an atheism post, but it’s literally all I can think about today so, here we are.

After a very long struggle, I’m only one step away from my PhD. I have achieved the level of ABD, which for those of you not in academics means “All But Dissertation.” Yes, it’s not an official title or anything, but it’s the status when all of the course work is over, all of the fretting about committees is over, and all you have to do is write the damn dissertation. Which means, holy shit, I have to write a dissertation now.

Originally, when I first started my PhD, I was in it for political philosophy. That didn’t exactly go very far, I think that interest lasted into the second semester where it died swiftly. There was just no one in my department that was doing political philosophy and not bending it to some kind of strange Continental interpretation that I didn’t agree with or care for. The next step was ancient philosophy, which was tricky since I can’t read Greek or Latin with any kind of competence. I can pick out some words in Greek for meaning, but mostly my ability is limited to being able to phonetically read it with little understanding. Latin, I’m a bit better at, something I attribute to Catholic school, but again there’s no competency there.

That all came to a screeching halt, when my advisor on my proposed subject: Ancient Greek naturalism (Democritean and Epicurean atomism) and compatibility with free will; died. I had researched the subject for about a year and was planning to put pixel to screen when this happened. My course work was finished at this time. For those of you who are in, or have been in, academics you know how absolutely devastating this could be for one’s career. I still don’t know what happened with my one colleague for whom the late professor was also a dissertation supervisor, but his interest was only in Greek interpretation. My school has not replaced the Greek philosopher in the department, so any kind of pursuit in that direction basically means that you have to go somewhere else.

That led to a weird point. I had enough research done and a general direction that I picked a different member of the committee to be supervisor only now the subject was going to have to change. It became a compatibility of strict naturalism (the idea that only things in the natural world exist) and free will. The ultimate conclusion: no free will but it seems like we have it since the future is not predictable. I’m not going to bad mouth this advisor but he wasn’t so great at returning emails, and often one piece of advice contradicted another. For instance, he told me to write out an idea in a dialogue form just to get the general position down. So I did that. When I’m not writing academic work, or this blog, I sometimes write fiction stories. I just worked out the position in dialogue form and then sent it to him. His response was that pithy dialogues are not academic work and that I shouldn’t write them.

We changed topics. Greek Atomism posits only two things which exist: matter and void. Everything else, is a construct of matter with void in between. The problem is that the reality of the void is hard to establish, so we thought (and I should stress “We” because I was completely on board with this) that the void is interesting and no one really had set out to prove the void in a philosophical sense. I read a lot for this and had to teach myself some of the math behind the physics. It was however a dead end (of course if any of you reading this need some kind of dissertation topic take that one. The void is proven mathematically, but those proofs posit something and ignore the metaphysical issues surrounding the idea of “nothing” versus empty space). I was forcing it, and I kind of knew it.

This led to fall of 2018. I was being interviewed by a professor in the department who specialized in medieval philosophy. He wanted to know if I knew enough about the medievals that he should be on my committee. Sometimes it goes like this. Toward the end he asked about my teaching and I answered that I had this conspiracy theory course that I was teaching at a different school. As I left the office he remarked, “You should do that then, you can always find some philosophical angle in something like that.”

The issue was that no one had really come up with one. There were only a few papers on the subject that I used in the course, but the comment stuck in my mind. I then abandoned the previous subject. I spent that fall writing a thirty page topical and then emailed the chair of my department. The response was gruff, to be generous. I wasn’t supposed to do it like that: get permission first, then find people, and then write the topical. Nevertheless, he suggested someone as supervisor in late Spring and now after all of that I’ve just been approved to write the dissertation “on the identification and engagement with conspiracy theories.”

Though that title needs work.