Scott Malone, Reporter - The Gazette/Reuters
Stephan: The next stories should be seen as a group. First of all they are contemporaneous reports. Second they all deal with the correlation of dysfunctional sexuality with religion, particularly conservative Theocratic Rightist religion. Media reports on individual incidents or findings, but few in media have been willing to talk about this linkage. In my view, next to the individual human distress, that is the story.
Highly religious social cohorts make controlling sexuality, particularly female sexuality, an obsessive consideration. I have chosen this selection of stories, believe me there are others, to show this problem is not particular to any one faith, and to demonstrate how it produces the dysfunctionality.
Roman Catholic cardinals
BOSTON — An annual audit of reports of sexual abuse by members of the U.S. Roman Catholic clergy shows sharp increases in the number of new claims and in the value of settlements to victims. (emphasis added)
The audit, released on Friday (May 20), showed that 838 people came forward from July 1, 2014, through June 30, 2015, to say they had been sexually abused by priests, deacons or members of religions orders while they were children, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said.
That is up 35 percent from 620 new reports of abuse a year earlier, an increase that the bishops said largely reflected a large number of claims in six dioceses that had either filed for bankruptcy or were located in states that opened windows allowing victims to sue over old cases of sexual assault.
While the bulk of the reports related to cases of abuse date back to the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, there were 26 reports made by minors of more recent abuse.
The report also found that Catholic […]
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Jay Michaelson and Maajid Nawaz, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: I consider these two stories as good news, because they are amongst the very first essays to address the real issue.
Interfaith Meeting
Another week, another bumper crop of Christian sex scandals. And it’s not going to stop any time soon.
Exposing religious sexual hypocrisy is, as the cliché goes, like shooting fish in a barrel. If you follow the right Twitter accounts, literally every day there’s a new story of religious conservative leaders philandering, downloading illegal pornography, cruising for gay sex on the down low, or, by far worst of all, sexually abusing minors or other vulnerable people.
Just this week, for example, we learned of lay pastor David Reynolds, who in addition to “discern[ing] the will of Christ through study, mutual exhortation and prayer,” to quote his former(?) church’s website, allegedly had a habit of exchanging child pornography on the Internet—with irresistible social media screennames “sweetoothcandy3”, “Ethanluvsts”, and “Luvsomecandy.”
(By the way, little details like that are themselves the “candy” of tracking religious sex-hypocrites; somehow, they always do something tawdry, ludicrous, or pathetic.)
Creepily, Reynolds also had several non-pornographic pictures of […]
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LIZ ALDERMAN, - The New York Times
Stephan: If you read SR regularly you know my conviction based on outcome data, not philosophy or ideology, that the function of the state should be to promote wellness. I believe this not only because I think it is the moral position but also because wellness policies are always cheaper, more efficient, more pleasant to live under, more productive, and more enduring.
This is a story about what is possible, and what happens when wellness becomes the first priority.
Matthias Larsson said that working six-hour days leaves him more time with his children.
Credit Magnus Laupa/The New York Times
GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN — Arturo Perez used to come home frazzled from his job as a caregiver at the Svartedalens nursing home. Eight-hour stretches of tending to residents with senility or Alzheimer’s would leave him sapped with little time to spend with his three children.
But life changed when Svartedalens was selected for a Swedish experiment about the future of work. In a bid to improve well-being, employees were switched to a six-hour workday last year with no pay cut. Within a week, Mr. Perez was brimming with energy, and residents said the standard of care was higher.
“What’s good is that we’re happy,” said Mr. Perez, a single father. “And a happy worker is a better worker.”
Read the Full Article
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Stuart Kauffman, Professor at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle - aeon
Stephan: As the United States seems to be being consumed by fear, hate, and anger in the form of Donald Trump -- who I think has a very good chance of becoming President if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic candidate -- I am heartened by what is going on in science. Since the unholy bargain in the 16th century between the Church and nascent science, in which the Church took sovereignty over consciousness (spirit) and fledgling science took physical reality, the dominant view of science has been reductionist materialism.
As time has gone on the inadequacy of that worldview has become increasingly apparent. And is now beginning to change. This essay by a prominent physician, philosopher and pioneer in Systems Biology I consider an important data point in this transformation.
Credit: Chip Griffin/Flickr
We all sense something deeply deficient in our modern civilisation. Is it an absence of spirituality? Partly. A greedy materialism beyond what we really need? Yes, we are riding the tiger of late capitalism, where we make our living producing, selling and buying goods and services we often do not need on this finite planet. We cannot see ourselves, in part blinkered by unneeded scientism.
The central framework of current physics is that of entailing laws. The central image is the billiard table as boundary conditions and the set of all possible initial conditions of position and momenta of the balls on the table. Then, given Isaac Newton’s laws in differential form, we deduce the deterministic trajectories of the balls. Our model of how to do science is to deduce new consequences, test them, accept or reject the results by diverse criteria, then retain or modify our theories. Science proceeds as Aristotle might have wished, in part as deduction.
My aim is to begin to demolish […]
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Nika Knight, Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: Another red state government, another horror show. As usual it is hard to understand how voters could have voted these cretins into office, or elected them by not voting, but they did. And they will probably do it again in November.
Michigan state legislature
While residents of beleaguered Flint face rate hikes for the city’s lead-poisoned water and Detroit sees teachers staging sickouts after lawmakers threatened to withhold their full salaries, the state treasury announced this week that Michigan businesses are to effectively pay nothing in taxes this year.
In fact, Michigan is projected to give corporations a net refund—even while it faces a budget shortfall of $460 million.
“Officials are projecting a net loss of $99 million in revenue from the state’s principal business taxes,” reported Detroit News, as corporations “effectively contribute nothing to the state coffers in 2016.”
This shortfall “should be a wake-up call for Lansing Republicans hell-bent on smothering government with cuts and miserly policy—and it shouldn’t be an excuse for lawmakers to withhold necessary help from the (mostly poor, mostly black) City of Flint and Detroit Public Schools,” argued the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press.
The cause of the budget shortfall is a confluence of recent tax code rewrites: […]
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