It's on the news that a priest was stopped at the exit of the Milano-Torino autostrada with a blood alcohol level of 0.08% (the legal limit in Italy is 0.05%) and had his licence taken off him. He had to call “friends and family” to come and take him home.( Read more... )

[BPSDB]Good news and bad news: Ben Goldacre has won an internet against AIDS-denier and vitamin-pill mercenary Matthias Rath, while Sabina Guzzanti apparently faces up to 5 years in an Italian prison for insulting the pretentious old idiot who runs a big house in Rome where lots of men live together.( Read more... )

From the 3^rd September 2008 daily edition of The Roman Observer. The translation is my own, and in cases where I couldn't understand the Italian I've tried to render the English similarly incomprehensible. I will claim, in the case of inaccuracy, that my translation is divinely inspired or something. I'm publishing the full text because I doubt that there's going to be any other way to get hold of it after the end of today.

I wonder about the applicability of the new list of “social sins” supposedly introduced to make the confession more relevant, and thereby essentially modernizing the catholic church's reactionariness. But how many of the faithful would go to church to confess that they have done some sort of reckless genetic manipulations? Does the sin of pollution include the way that the Camorra have ruined Napoli? It's probably useful to remember what the seven original deadly sins are for; they are all natural and beneficial human urges taken to unhealthy or antisocial extremes.

It's all over the news (and Gimpy's Blog and badscience.net and Jesus and Mo and JREF) that molecular biology is now considered a sin, along with pollution and drug abuse and that, but it seems the text of Nicola Gori's interview of Gianfranco Girotti is only available in Italian, and even that not from the website of L'Osservatore Romano, where this was published in the daily Italian edition of the 9^th of March. I'm going to try to translate the whole thing eventually. Please point out anything which could be rendered better, but don't blame me for not making sense or misrepresenting. Text is liable to change without notice as I discover errors, but the more I study it the more I feel that it doesn't make a huge amount of sense in Italian either.

In conversation with the regent of the Penitentiary at the conclusion of the course for confessors

The new forms of social sin

by Nicola Gori

Genetic manipulation; environmental pollution; social inequality; unsustainable social injustice: these are the new forms of sin facing us on the horizon of humanity, almost as a corollary to the unstoppable process of globalization. A new test also for a ministry, that of the Apostolic Penitentiary, which works hard to reaffirm even its own role in times in which there is less perception of sin itself. Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, bishop regent of the Penitentiary, speaks of it in this interview given to L'Osservatore Romano, the day following the conclusion of the course for confessors.

So there's another thread at badscience.net and it drifted into a discussion about how scientists with religious beliefs can reconcile the two things. I'm with J. B. S. Haldane, who said

“My practise as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.”

I'm going to try to summarize my position and respond to other viewpoints by paraphrasing rather than quoting anyone else's contributions to the thread, firstly to make it more self-contained and easier to follow, and secondly not to take anyone else's words out of context without asking. They can always add a comment if they really want to. Or set up their own blogs. And you can check my sources.

... but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Alternative title: Science pwns not-science

There's an article in Science (pdf): Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science. Science 316 (5827) 996-997 (2007). Here are some things which it says.

... apart from his own children, who are obliged to call him "uncle".

Saturday was “Family Day” in Italy, with Piazza San Giovanni in Rome filled with protesters (and many their children) against new laws which will give greater rights to unmarried couples. A counter protest, supporting secularism of the state in Piazza Navona, wasn't as well attended as the one in Turkey.

The protest against laws giving rights to unmarried cohabitants was supported by The Vatican, which is a big house in Rome where hundreds of single men live together.

I once had a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses turn up on my doorstep while I was at home recovering from some sort of stomach virus, and I had a go at debating with them in Italian. Their line is “long” creationism - that God created the world in seven “periods of time” not literally seven days. But anyway that he created everything exactly right for our benefit (including presumably for example the malaria mosquito and sickle-cell anaemia) and their argument involved considering a stone: if you watch a stone for long enough it just turns to sand, going to a state of more disorder (that's thermodynamics) so the creation of order, i.e. life, must have come from some agent, i.e. God. Didn't they know any geology? Don't they know that if they watch the sand for long enough it'll get buried and turned into rock again?

What is it with some people, that they can suspend their critical reasoning faculties so easily without appearing to notice?

Professor Lord Mr. Dr. Robert Winston has attacked Richard Dawkins's “"patronising" and "insulting" attitude to religious faith,” according to the Guardian.

I've only read Dawkins's first three books,^{1, 2, 3} although I've seen his recent TV programs (I don't think it was really fair of him to open his discussion with Pastor Ted “I am a deceiver and a liar” Haggard by comparing his service to the Nuremberg Rally). I understand how his tone can be considered a bit too confrontational but I have the feeling that ever since he wrote, in The Selfish Gene, that evolution was the first explanation of the existence of man (see the “save your stamp” endnote) which made any sense whatsoever he's been getting mail from christians and he's fed up of it. I don't really know any of Daniel C. Dennett's work either but I've read all of Steven Pinker's stuff and his attitude appears to be “if it makes you feel better I don't really mind you being religious”. If any of them appear to adopt an arrogant anti-religious tone I think it's an unfortunate reaction against the arrogant pro-religious “you're going to hell, unlike me” tone they sometimes get confronted with. Look at the comments here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/debate/letters/article1368831.ece.

However, where Lord Winston says “there is a body of scientific opinion from my scientific colleagues who seem to believe that science is the absolute truth and that religious and spiritual values are to be discounted,” I think he's missing the point: religious and spiritual values are something created by the human mind within the framework of evolutionary psychology. As such they are valid (in the sense that they need to be taken seriously) because they are part of what makes us human. (It's too hard to study the whole mind from a reductionist physics point of view though.) Religious types would have us believe that these things are valid because they “come from God” in some unspecified way. He's a bit close to the “atheists don't have morality” line of argument, as if morality was invented by God rather than the other way around.

It doesn't look so good for the morality of religion anyway: Church accused of abuse cover-up; Sexual Abuse in Christian Homes and Churches; Deuteronomy 21:18-21. So give it a rest with your atheists are evil (clip of Dawkins on the Bill O'Reilly show) argument, please.