Violence, Marriage Breakups and a decline in morality

This is a response to Lino Spiteri's article on The Times yesterday.

Why is violence on the rise? A few days ago we had a group of people caught beating up a man while surrounded by reporters, cameras and so on. They got a paltry €60 fine. A couple of days ago a man was charged with cutting open a man's face from forehead to lips - he got just over €100. Yesterday, two men chased down a man for "flirting" with a woman who was their relative. The police arrested and charged the victim because, during the chase, he ran over and damaged a car. No mention was made of actions taken against the aggressors. This leniency for violent crimes clashes with the draconian sentences meted out to anyone caught growing cannabis - an activity that causes nobody any harm. Examples like this serve to erode the public's confidence in the courts, which in turn may lead to the more hot-headed of them to not bother with the courts to seek redress over clashes with other people, and take matters into their own hands.

As far as marriage breakups are concerned, I know of no simple answer. This of course is happening everywhere in the world. It could be a result of a more hectic lifestyle which leaves less time for one another, or a culture where the couple are more concerned with getting than with giving, or increasing financial and other stresses. Another reason of course is that there no longer is the same kind of social stigma associated with marriage breakups - especially if there aren't children involved. Of course this only means that, in the past, many couples continued living under one roof long after their marriage was ended, merely for the sake of appearances.

I certainly agree that the police should be equipped with "non-lethal weapons" to give them a middle-ground between a stern voice and a deadly weapon. However we should be careful that, first of all, most "non-lethal weapons" are in fact "less likely to be lethal weapons". Many such weapons can and do kill - so we must look beyond the manufacturers' brochures. Secondly, we must ensure that our police do not abuse of them simply because they are non-lethal. In recent times we've seen photos from abroad of police officers using pepper-spray in the faces of protesters who were seated and posing no danger to anyone.

As for the concept of God, people are simply realising that there is no link between morality and gods or church. Cases like last year's divorce referendum and the current debate on IVF have opened people's eyes to the fact that the church's morality is highly flawed - and that their own sense of ethics is superior to the church's, which remains mired in dogmatic rules based on a book of stories from the iron age. Of course it's irrelevant today. It's been irrelevant for centuries. Morality, on the other hand, is not. It's only the source of that morality that has changed.

Litany of Hate

Sometimes it seems that, when things are too quiet around here, the Gozitan bishop Mario Grech decides to stir things up a little.

Last weekend he decided to take a swipe at the family. Not just any family of course - the one consisting of one man married to one woman, with children is perfectly ok. In fact it's the only one that is a family at all according to Grech. No other relationship is a family. If the couple are unmarried, they and their children do not form a family. They're just a group of people who live in the same house - a household. Same with all single parents, all widows and widowers, all same-sex couples (with or without children), all couples who were previously married. In fact, since a critical feature of all families is "procreation" between the man and woman, and since Mary supposedly remained a virgin all her life, I suppose the "Holy Family" must now be renamed to the Holy Household, because they do not meet the bishop's qualifications for a family.

Keep in mind that this is a pastoral letter, which - if my memory serves me correctly - is read out during mass at all churches that fall under his clutches. Imagine a child hearing this declaration from the bishop that he/she and his/her parents are not a real family because mummy and daddy are not married, or a single mother who performs almost superhuman feats to feed and clothe and care for her children getting this verbal slap on the face as she is told that hers is not a family. They're just people who happen to share the same address.

However this is not merely quibbling about the definition of the word "family". Grech also insists that the state should not give equal legal/civil rights to any type of "household" that does not match his personal definition. He describes as blind those political, economical and media institutions that give equal recognition to these other "households".

Is it possible that the bishop does not have someone to go over these letters before he sends them out from his reliquary? Oh wait he does - the letter was jointly written with the chancellor, one Salv Debrincat. Nicely done chancellor.

This attempt to redefine the family to this supposedly ideal mold is an attack on every other family - and these are not a few. It is hurtful, it is wrong, and I'm sure the bishop and chancellor know this perfectly well.

In fact many may have noticed that this was not the only attack on the family carried in the same Sunday paper. On the same paper we've got other attacks from two other priests, Paul Chetcuti and Joe Borg. All are out with guns blazing, attacking the idea that a family can consist of anything other than one man and one woman with children. Coincidence? I think not. I think they are either setting the stage to undermine the cohabitation law that the government promised to table soon, or are trying to turn society against same-sex couples in order to reduce the chances of gay marriage or civil unions being introduced to Malta. In either case, this is a case of attacking and hurting and harming people - and to what avail? Will married heterosexual couples with children be happier knowing that elsewhere, a childless couple will be denied state recognition as a family? Will their marriage be stronger in the knowledge that two women or two men will never be granted the same legal and civil rights as they are? No. So why these diatribes? Could it be that the only thing they are protecting is the church's collective ego? Let these people suffer as long as the church doesn't have to admit to a mistake until it's unavoidable. Maybe after 350 years, like Galileo.

Our constitution says that the church has the duty to teach what is right and what is wrong. This pastoral letter shows that the church is either incapable or unwilling to perform this duty. Somewhere along the way, the church has lost track of what is right and what is wrong - if they ever knew - and the time has come to get rid of this article from our constitution and establish a proper wall of separation between church and state.

Marijuana - Legalise or not?
Information Collection
Websites in Malta have recently been inundated by news and opinions about marijuana and Malta's harsh sentences meted out to those who use it. This was triggered by the 11-year sentence to Daniel Holmes for having two plants in his house in Gozo. The emotionally-loaded comments posted by both sides reminded me of the Divorce War in Malta. Just as divorce had been linked with everything from family breakdowns to earthquakes and weeping madonnas, it seemed to me that the same thing was happening here.

So, just as I did with divorce, I decided to find things out for myself. Fortunately, there is a flood of information available - more so than in the case of divorce since the divorce issue had already been settled long ago almost everywhere else.

Here is a page with the best material I found. I have tried to keep everything objective - I included both pages for and against legalisation - but I'll say up front that what I found led me to conclude that marijuana should be legalised.
I will be updating this page with more information as I find it.

Reports, Studies and Articles
Global Commission on Drugs Policy Report
This commission studies the impact on drugs and comes up with a set of proposals for formulating drug policies. The commission recommends "End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others", and "Encourage experimentation by governments with models of legal regulation of drugs ... This recommendation applies especially to cannabis ..."

What can we learn from the Portuguese Decriminalization of Illicit Drugs?
This report from the British Journal of Criminology describes the result of Portogal's decriminalisation of ALL drugs in 2001. From the abstract: "It concludes that contrary to predictions, the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding." (click the "Full Text" links for the entire report - payment required).


Time Magazine: Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?
"The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled."

Cannabis and Cannabinoids (US National Cancer Institute)
This website describes findings about the use of cannabis for the treatment of cancer. The above link is quite technical but there's another link on the page with simpler information for patients. This page describes how cannabis is effective both in attacking the cancer itself, and in alleviating the side-effects of chemotherapy.

Videos

1. Clearing the Smoke - the Science of Cannabis
This is a full-length documentary produced by the PBS in Montana, USA. 

2. When we grow, this is what we can do

3. BBC: Cannabis: What's the Harm? (part 1 of 2)

4. National Geographic: Marijuana Nation (part 1 of 5)

How generous is the church really?

In response to the recent report that the church is broke and getting broker by the minute, lots of people have spoken out in defence of the church, saying how it takes care of the old, orphans etc. However when I looked at the accounts published recently I was struck by the fact that these actually form a very small percentage of the church's expenses. In fact, the Pope's visit of last year cost 6.6 times as much as all children's homes combined.

The church's income comes primarily from donations, collections etc. I wonder whether the people making the donations are thinking that they are donating towards orphanages and homes. Do they know that, if they donated €50 last year, €2 from that went to finance the pope's visit, compared to the 30 cents that went to children's homes, or the 38 cents that went to old people's homes?

The church is not generous. Nor is it ungenerous. The church is an organiser - it collects money and redistributes it. The generosity comes from the Maltese people - they're the ones who earned the money. They hear of poor people and they donate. They donate to a church charity just as they donate to L-Istrina and to the Inspire foundation and other worthy causes.

If I found out that one of the secular humanitarian charities I donate to spent €1 million out of a grand total of €26 million to send their CEO on a trip somewhere, I'd immediately stop patronising them because I'd feel that they had betrayed their mission. If they spent 1.5 times as much on the media as they spend on the homes I'd say they have their priorities wrong.

I'd also say that if someone wants to help the needy, there are better entities than the church to ensure that your money is primarily used for that purpose.

Creationism: why it is dangerous

Some time ago I went to observe a presentation given by a creationist from the UK. I did this out of concern about the first signs of this phenomenon in Malta. Some people don't see any problems with creationism. It's just a belief, they say. I would like to point out why creationism is a dangerous phenomenon.

First however I should clarify what I mean by creationism. All Christians and most religious people believe that God created the universe, and technically this is creationism. However the creationism I have in mind, and the creationism presented by this visiting speaker, is the belief that the entire universe, including the world and every form of life on it, was created over a literal 6-day period, approximately 6000 years ago. It generally includes the belief that, some time after this, the entire surface of the planet was completely covered by water, drowning every living thing except for the contents of one large boat, and that it is from the animals and humans that were on this boat, that all life on earth today is derived, from kangaroos in Australia to polar bears at the North Pole, from tigers in India to grizzlies in the US, from Inuit to Somalis to Nepalese.

Most Christians do not believe these things literally of course, but there is a strong lobby in certain parts of the world, notably the United States. It is from here that most creationist churches hail, and they have established "missions" around the world - including Malta - to spread their particular beliefs.
I'm all for religious freedom, but most religious beliefs are relatively harmless. Creationism is different. Consider for a while how many areas of science are contradicted by creationism: It explicitly contradicts evolution, which is a fundamental area of biology. It contradicts geology due to its insistence that the entire world is 6000 years old. It contradicts cosmology, since it insists that nothing can be more than 6000 light years away. It explicitly contradicts the big bang and the age of the universe. It contradicts radiometric dating, especially carbon dating. It even contradicts local prehistory - the age of the early megalithic temples would have to be rewritten, not to mention Għar Dalam and other remains.

Now, if someone is a pensioner, they can believe anything they like about the above and it's unlikely to affect their lives. If he or she is an adult with an established career that does not involve any of the above areas, they are unlikely to be affected either. However children are a different matter. Creationism contradicts almost all branches of science, which means that children would be denied a very important part of their education - education that ultimately translates into good potential careers, such as medicine, microbiology, physics, several areas of engineering and many others. After all, when people go to a doctor they want someone who believes in medicine, not someone who insists that the bacteria cannot possibly be evolving a resistance to antibodies.

These problems caused directly by denying science is only one aspect of the dangers of creationism. In the United States and other places, a more insidious danger is becoming more obvious. Creationism has created an atmosphere of "us versus them" between students and teachers. Students, especially teenagers, are already naturally inclined to rebel. When they are getting constant encouragement from their parents and priests to reject and ridicule the science that their teachers are trying to explain, this attitude affects all areas of education, and educational levels plummet across the board.

Of course, even creationists have abandoned several arguments they used to use, and steer clear of others. The creationist organisation "Answers in Genesis" has a webpage containing arguments that they feel are so discredited that their use is actually detrimental to their cause, and no creationists today argue that the world is flat. And yet, the Bible implies this in Matthew 4:8, where we have a mountain which is so high that you can see the entire world from it. Similarly, few Christians today literally believe that rainbows were placed there by a god who might otherwise forget his promise and drown everyone in the world again. Today we know a thing or two about optics, refraction, water droplets and so on, so we accept rainbows for what they are - colourful, beautiful but quite natural phenomena.


The problem with creationism is that it imposes a strict precondition on knowledge. Everything has to agree with a literal interpretation of every part of the Bible. Any evidence that does not is rejected, or must somehow be reinterpreted to fit. Rather than going for the most obvious and reasonable explanation, one must go to extreme lengths to fit the Biblical account. A simple example is, how did all the animals from the ark get to the various places around the world without leaving any individuals behind - no koalas or walruses in the middle east for instance. When asked what did the lions eat in the ark, some will even insist they were vegetarians back then. After all if you only have two gazelle you can't afford to let the lions run amok.

With science, by comparison, one starts with the evidence, and finds explanations to match. If the evidence is not what you expect or want to find, you have to accept that and revise your expectations. Just a couple of days ago as I write this, scientists working at CERN and Italy published preliminary results that indicated they may have seen a particle exceed the speed of light. This discovery, if confirmed, is shocking and will bring a significant chunk of physics crashing down, because they are based on the premise that nothing, nothing, can exceed the speed of light. And yet as this news sent shock waves through the entire scientific community, there is no sense of animosity. Certainly many have expressed doubts and speculated that we might still discover that it was some kind of mistake in the measurements, but if it is confirmed, then the affected areas will be revised or, if necessary, discarded and rewritten.

It is this willingness to admit to mistakes and correct them that sets science apart from creationism. By starting off with the assumption that they cannot possibly be mistaken in their, creationists attack the evidence and resist learning anything new.

Some comments following Xarabank's homophobia feature

The Bible is a thick book and it contains verses to support and oppose any position you care to choose. Slavery? It's accepted - even in the new testament - as well as condemned (especially when the Hebrews were the slaves). There are verses about forgiveness and love, as well as violence and destruction.

Gaydar Gordon is good at selecting verses he likes at times while also insisting he agrees with it from cover to cover, insisting on context (and then inventing the context himself). He uses the Bible as a weapon and as a lure.

The Bible is not a source of morality. WE are the source of our own morality and then some people select verses from the Bible (or Koran, or other scriptures) to support that position and give it legitimacy. Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of this is shown in the film The Ten Commandments. The director was a devout man, but clearly he was not happy with the bit where "God hardened Pharaoh's heart" repeatedly and then punished the people of Egypt for it. So he invented a character that's nowhere in the Bible - "Nefertiri", a woman who hardened Pharaoh's heart instead because of her jealousy and malice. Essentially, although he might not have seen it this way, he judged the Bible based on his own sense of justice - and found it lacking.

The Bible in English and Maltese has lots of verses about homosexuality, although many of these references are not to be found in the original ancient Greek texts. There are no references to lesbianism anywhere, and the only clear condemnations of male-male sex are found in the same part of the Bible that also condemns eating pork, wearing mixed fibres, planting different crops in the same field, and so on - things that are no longer followed by modern, mainstream Christians (including Gordon's). No reasonable explanation is given as to why the verses condemning homosexual sex should remain "valid" while the verses that prohibit eating octopus or oysters are not, or why it's now ok to plant two crops in the same field. Jesus never spoke a word against or about homosexuals, although he spent quite a bit of time talking about judgemental people.

Of course some "famous" verses that are used against homosexuality are rejected by the Bible itself. Top of the list is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Few know that later in the Bible (Ezekiel 16:49-50), there is a list of the 5 sins that brought about Sodom's destruction, and homosexuality (or indeed any sexuality) is not among them. Arrogance and pride, on the other hand, were. Romans 1 in the new testament is rather odd - Paul describes observing a group of people who, despite being taught about Jesus, insisted on worshipping idols. As a result, God made them gay. Now that's a bit odd isn't it? God miraculously making people sin even more? Most likely what Paul observed was an orgy that was part and parcel of religious groups who clearly didn't have the word "prudery" in their dictionary. Still it's amusing to imagine the expression on his face when he saw everyone fling their togs off and engage in this romp. In other new testament verses, Greek words like arsenokoites were rendered as "homosexuals", although in other texts it means male prostitutes. The word "malakos" literally means soft, and can mean both physically soft as well as someone who refuses to defend against an aggressor. That was translated as "effeminate".

We can't go back in time to ask what they meant exactly. We don't have the other side of the conversation - remember that these were letters, and each one was addressed at a specific group of recipients in a specific place. They were never intended as a general guide for everyone.

What we're left with is our own innate sense of justice and our capability of reason. It is through our reason that we must achieve a sense of morality, not by relying on a collection of writings that were written in a different time and for people living in very different conditions. Such a book can provide insights, but we must still use our minds to apply this to our modern world, and sometimes that means abandoning something that used to be a pillar of civilisation. That's how we got rid of slavery and burning witches. That is how we'll get rid of homophobia.

The evil church of Malta

If there was any doubt left about the evil nature of the Catholic church, it should have been dispelled by its actions during the divorce campaign, with the bishops rubbing salt into the wound by issuing an apology after it was too late to affect the results - although MaltaToday bravely decided to risk legal consequences by publishing it despite the embargo.

If you apply the Catholic Church's own rules on confession to this apology you'll see their hypocrisy. It's like someone is involved in planning a robbery and omits to mention anything to the priest at the confession until after the robbery is completed. Would the confessor consider that as a genuine confession of someone who is sorry for what he did?

The bishops could have published the apology on Thursday. The fact that they didn't means that, despite knowing the harm that they were doing, they intentionally let it continue until it was too late, then apologised after. Is that a real, genuine, heartfelt apology or is it damage control?

I have no doubt that many people will still follow the church, just as there are people who still follow Angelik despite knowing he used his own blood and kitchen oil on the statue.

Malta's greatest enemy at this point in time is the Roman Catholic Church. It has many Maltese people blinkered so that they cannot see the chains that bind them. I only hope that in this dirty campaign, some blinkers fell off.

It is clearer now than ever before that the constitution of Malta, which entrusts the Catholic church with teaching which principles are right and which are wrong, needs to be revised. The church has shown time and again that it does not deserve this honour. For any entity to teach morality it must first practice what it preaches.

The church has shown its true face. It's all smiles and warmth when things are going its own way, but when the going gets tough, even the Sicilian mafia can learn a thing or two from these men of the cloth.