CORI BULLETIN & Skeptics’ Digest
For the Members of Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry
Founded by Ann Pratt in 1996 | Volume10 | Issue 5| MAY 2005
Our 10th Year of Bologna Detection! 
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“What you think you know - may not be so.”
Skeptics’ Forum – The Public Is Welcome
MEETING: Saturday MAY 7 at 11 AM . . .
(NOTE: This is one hour later than usual.)
LOCATION: Hilliard Branch Library
- 4772 Cemetery Road, Hilliard, OH
TOPIC: Video Presentation: BIZARRE PHENOMENA!
SPEAKER: After viewing the tape, a roundtable discussion will follow. BUSINESS: Follows discussion.
LUNCH: Follows Meeting; attendees are invited to gather at a nearby venue.
IN THIS ISSUE:
Pre-enlightenment Theologies in the Modern World
RATIONALLY SPEAKING: Massimo Pigliucci on papal selection in a troubling time for the Church
EDITORIAL: Bishop Spong’s crusade to make Christianity relevant to the 21st Century
COMMENTARY: CORI Founder Ann B. Pratt – The Abortion Question (Reactions to Massimo)
FALLACIOUS ASSAULTS: Ned Flanders takes science to task!
MINUTES: There are no Minutes for the April Meeting.
QUOTE / UNQUOTE
"Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat." [John Morley]
"A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular." [Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.] 
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ARTICLE: Habemus Papa!
Or, rather, they (the roughly one billion Catholics of this planet) now have a new Pope, former German cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as Benedict XVI. As a former Catholic (sort of) and an Italian who grew up not far from the Vatican, I followed the American media frenzy over the death of John Paul II with much interest, although the whole coverage by CNN and company struck me as rather odd. It is true that Catholics still make up a large fraction of Americans (and they vote based on some – but apparently not others – of their beliefs, as John Kerry discovered when it turned out that abortion is a moral issue, but war somehow isn't). Still, only 20% of American Catholics actually claim to closely follow the dictates of any Pope, and the US media usually pays little or no attention to what the self-described infallible sage from Rome says or does. No, the media frenzy was really just another example of celebrity worship, no different from the coverage of Michael Jackson's trial or the ever-fascinating saga of who Brad Pitt really goes to bed with.
That said, what ought we to think about the just departed Pope, Carol Wojtyla? As a scientist, I can't really complain that much about him. He managed to officially pardon Galileo (almost four centuries later, but hey!), though he refused to apologize for burning Giordano Bruno at the stakes. John Paul II also wrote a letter to the Pontificial Academy of Sciences in 1997 advising Vatican scientists (and Catholics at large) that the Church doesn’t have a problem with the scientific theory of evolution (that didn't help me much when I was living in Tennessee, since most of the local creationists would simply retort that the Pope was wrong and sure to go to Hell, which I'm confident would have come as shocking news to the man from Poland!).
On the other hand, Wojtyla was certainly a very conservative Pope, even by the standards of the Catholic Church as they had evolved since the Second Vatican Council. John Paul II refused to consider a larger role of women in the Church, actively campaigned against the use of contraceptives worldwide (Church officials on the ground in Africa have been accused of lying about the effectiveness of condoms to prevent AIDS, just to promote their senseless “abstinence only” policy), not to mention of course his opposition to gay rights and abortion. While one can surely expect the 2000-year old institution based in Rome to fighting a rear-guard war against human progress, it seems to me that a man indirectly responsible for the death and suffering of millions around the globe should hardly be considered for a fast-track to sainthood! Indeed, there have been many dissenting Catholic voices, even within the Roman Curia, against the strictness of Wojtyla's views.
Which brings us to Benedict XVI. Although Ratzinger chose his name with the intent of being conciliatory (Benedict the XV inherited a highly divided Church at the beginning of the 20th century, with progressives once again pitted against conservatives, and did his best to bring about a reconciliation), he isn't exactly known as a moderate within the Vatican. On the contrary, Ratzinger served under John Paul II as head of the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” a position that allowed him to punish a score of “liberals” within the Church. According to the New York Times, one of Ratzinger's comments on his role as defender of Catholic orthodoxy was that “The Pope told me that it is my biggest religious obligation not to have my opinions.” How sad. And yet, how remarkably apt to capture not just Ratzinger's position, but the whole idea of the Catholic Church: not only there is one invariable truth, but nobody else can access it other than the highest ranks of the Church itself. It is precisely this sort of attitude, of course, that started the Protestant Reform and brought about a major schism among Christians, a schism that Benedict XVI is highly unlikely to help heal.
There are good reasons to think that Ratzinger has been chosen to succeed John Paul II because the august cardinals debating inside the Sistine Chapel had no idea of where the Church should go, and just wanted to buy some time (they are supposed to be inspired directly by God, but it seems that even the Almighty needed five rounds of voting to make up His mind). On the one hand, North Americans, and especially Europeans, have been abandoning the Church precisely on the ground of the kind of strict orthodoxy enforced by John Paul II and, likely, by Benedict XVI. Most Catholics in Western countries seem to feel an increasing cognitive dissonance between the realities of a complex multi-cultural society and a set of teachings that has hardened over two millennia. Then again, the Church has been growing especially in South America and Africa, where evangelical Christians and ultra-orthodox Catholics have been making the fastest gains in terms of converts. Thorned between choosing a liberal Pope to recoup some of the losses in Europe and the US, and an even more conservative one to help the expansion in the new territories, the college of cardinals went for the safest choice: an old Pope (Ratzinger is 78), who will maintain the same course established by John Paul II for a few more years. After that, God will provide. Or will She?
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Correspondence:
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New Yorker
Editorial - Christianity Must Change or Die!
by Rev. Art Hites
Christianity? Whatever our life-view, we have recently watched the transition within the papacy and have been made aware of the tensions that could indicate future confrontation between old theology and modern, particularly between the dictates of the Roman hierarchy and the increasingly restless Adherents in the U.S. and Europe. An ongoing clash between anti-modernist Anglicans and their less orthodox American Episcopal counterparts threatens to become a full-blown schism. In the Roman Catholic Church, as in the Anglican Church, areas of future growth are among fundamentalist third and fourth world nations.
John Shelby Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ, for more than twenty years and is one of the leading spokespersons in the world for an open, scholarly, and progressive Christianity. Bishop Spong has taught at Harvard, and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkely, California. He has also lectured at universities, conference centers, and churches in North America, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific. He is the author of 15 books including the bestselling Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin, Liberating the Gospels, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and his latest book The Sins of Scripture. He may be one of the major change agents in modern Christianity. The following piece is from an e-mail Question and Answer service that is available by subscription from Bishop Spong’s publisher. 
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Bishop Spong
Q & A
Martha Jo from Albany, CA writes:
"I have been thinking a lot about the schism currently involving the African Church and our Episcopalians in this country. I remembered when I was in seminary, we were always collecting old theological texts and shipping them off to Africa. We should have burned those books and bought brand new texts and sent those instead. We are now getting back what we sent to Africa - outdated 19th century theology."
“Dear Martha Jo,
Your idea has far more credibility than many people think. There is nothing quite so dead as a dated theological book. At the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Bishops in 1998, I did a radio interview with an African bishop who told me that the "Library" for his theological training consisted of about 50 books, all of them published in the 1930s. He was totally unfamiliar with the names that have shaped the theological enterprise in the last half of the 20th century in both Protestant and Catholic circles. When you add to this the fact that those motivated to become foreign missionaries tend to be "theologically certain," that is, they believe fervently that they possess the saving truth that if not shared with the people of the world "who know not Christ," those peoples' "lostness" will be forever a burden that their missionary consciences will have to bear, then you can understand another dimension of the present dilemma.
In my small study group at this same Lambeth conference was a Nigerian bishop who made Jerry Falwell look like both a flaming liberal and a scholar. This is not to denigrate this particular gentleman, whose sincerity and devotion were both exemplary; but it is to say that education is not equal the world over and inevitably those, who do not know the larger picture, are crippled because they also do not know that they do not know. That is the most profound ignorance of all and it deeply affects the fundamentalists of this world.
However, one caveat that needs to be added is that we must not think of Africa or anywhere else as monolithic in the way its people think. The three strongest voices for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people, heard at this conference, were all African Anglicans. They were: the Archbishop of Central Africa Khotsu Mkullu, the Archbishop of Capetown Njongonkulu Ndungane and the retired Archbishop of Capetown, Desmond Tutu.”
- [John Shelby Spong]
I find it interesting and hopeful that Bishop Spong insists that Christianity must address the needs of rational, educated humans living in the modern world or die. He finds literalist interpretation and teaching of biblical texts to be harmful. He steps out in front and encourages skepticism toward biblical accounts that defy the known laws of science – even toward the centerpiece of Christian dogma – the Resurrection, or toward the Creation myth – all the while celebrating the ways in which the metaphors of familiar scriptures can inform modern readers. In another exchange, Spong finds no value in the traditional theistic concept of God.
“I regard Job as one of the special and insightful books of the entire Bible. However, I do not think that Job addresses the theological issues raised by the tsunami. Job and his comforters are still stuck in a theistic definition of God so they seek to make sense out of life's tragedies without sacrificing theism. I no longer think that is a possibility. Once you define God as a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside the world but capable of intervening from time to time to reward or punish, then you must spend great amounts of time seeking to explain why God did this or did not do that. That is the Job debate and it ends (unsatisfactorily) … ‘Is God in charge?’ Is there a Being who has the power to direct the affairs of history? I believe most contemporary theologians are prone to say, ‘No’.
Are (you) saying that at worst, there is no God or if there is, it doesn't matter because God has no power? That is what drives us to recognize that theism, as a definition of God, is a human creation and that the time has come for us to lay our creation aside and to move beyond it into a radically new theological quest … Can one be a Christian without being a Theist?” - [John Shelby Spong]
“What the mind cannot believe the heart can finally never adore ...”
- [John Shelby Spong]
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COMMENTARY: The Abortion Question: Reactions to Massimo Pigliucci’s “Abortion – A Philosophical Approach”.
By Ann B. Pratt, Professor Emerita, Psychology, Capital University; Founder, Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry (C.O.R.I.)
[Ed.] In the December 2004 Bulletin Massimo Pigliucci presented a philosophical approach to the abortion dilemma, stating: “ … while there is very little question that by performing an abortion we are in fact killing a biological being that belongs to the human species, it is an entirely different -- and much more difficult to defend -- proposition to say that we are killing a person …” Here’s the link to the entire column:
http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/~massimo/rationallyspeaking/RS04-10-personhood.html
Dr. Pratt: Some fascinating musings on the abortion controversy, by Dr. Pigliucci, first written in November 2004, appeared in the CORI Bulletin for December 2005 (pp. 4-6). Here are some musings of my own, for what they are worth.
First, let us briefly review Pigliucci’s basic position. He argues that the abortion debate is only superficially a biological (scientific) question. Right-to-lifers hold that a living foetus is “a human being”- thus abortion is murder any time after conception. Abortion-rights advocates hold that a woman’s reproductive rights are violated if she is not granted the option of choosing to end a pregnancy, or to allow the new organism to develop normally and came to term.
Pigliucci’s point is that both stances are arbitrary. Those who take either position must select a biological event – such as when a heart starts beating or a viable foetus, or the capacity to feel pain. There is no convincing reason to select one event over another.
Thus, Pigliucci arrives at the conclusion that being a “human being” entails the concept of personhood, and that concept is, inevitably, a sociological and philosophical matter. Hence, we leave the scientific realm and enter the realm of values.
According to Pigliucci, we enter the realm of values (philosophy) because philosophers see the necessity of protecting the personhood of the foetus. That foetus may develop during life into someone who writes a symphony, or creates a useful invention. Even if no creative act comes into being, the person may be a good citizen or parent, and that is important, too.
Now, I am an academic psychologist not a philosopher. I claim no expertise for my outlook. Pigliucci’s stance, however, has the ring of authority to it. I do not say the “ring of truth,” for my professional training insists that “truth” is an empirical affair.
To sum up: Pigliucci’s judgement utterly convinces me. But, what of the main issue-- “Lifers vs. abortion rights? Here is where I come down. On philosophical grounds abortion is murder – unforgivable. “Most religionists subscribe to that tenet.” At the same time, I would not deny a woman the right to end her pregnancy. She is a “person, too.” I am not wise enough to condemn her if that is what she decides to do. God is her judge, not I. I am quite aware that the position I have taken is self-contradictory! I have no remedy for that. I am most interested in CORI members’ views.
If you care to continue the conversation regarding abortion, please send an article by e-mail, if possible, to the editor of this newsletter; if you would like to drop a note to Ann B. Pratt, her address is: 33554 Wolf Hill Road, McArthur, OH 45651.
FALLACIOUS ASSAULTS
Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends. There are some things we don't want to know. Important things!
[Ned Flanders, publicly pious neighbor of Homer Simpson]
Be seeing you . . .
