Religious people can't tell right from wrong

In recent years, we saw Roman Catholic church abandon orphans rather than allow gays to adopt. They simply closed various adoption agencies. The hell with the kids; it's more important to hate gay people. It's a moral issue, doncha know.

Well, now the Baptists are on board with this tactic. Joe Jervis tells us that a Baptist church expelled an AA group because it feared opening its doors to them would open them wide for gay weddings. As if that was even a possibility. So: the hell with AA and helping alcoholics. They'd rather hate gay people.

Isn't it odd how religions that profess to be the only arbiters of morality cannot tell right from wrong? Gee, I wonder why. Could it be that there's no god, and these folks are just flailing in the wind and being vicious because they enjoy it? Hmmmm.

Generation W

There's a great article today in the Times, and it's source is surprising. I've often railed against "The Stone", the NYT's usually simpering philosophy column, but today's column by Peter Ludlow is spot-on. It's about "Generation W", the US population group that came of age in the time of Wikileaks. It's called "The Banality of Systemic Evil". Here's a taste.

Chelsea Manning, the United States Army private incarcerated for leaking classified documents from the Departments of Defense and State, felt a similar pull to resist the internal rules of the bureaucracy. In a statement at her trial she described a case where she felt this was necessary. In February 2010, she received a report of an event in which the Iraqi Federal Police had detained 15 people for printing “anti-Iraqi” literature. Upon investigating the matter, Manning discovered that none of the 15 had previous ties to anti-Iraqi actions or suspected terrorist organizations. Manning had the allegedly anti-Iraqi literature translated and found that, contrary to what the federal police had said, the published literature in question “detailed corruption within the cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government and the financial impact of his corruption on the Iraqi people.”

When Manning reported this discrepancy to the officer in charge (OIC), she was told to “drop it,” she recounted.

It's a great column. Go read it.