Leo’s Varadkar’s apology following the publication of the final report of the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes proved once and for all that even those who are qualified as a medical doctor can be quite unintelligent. It would appear that Varadkar never bothered reading the final report, choosing instead to repeat the horse manure which appeared with alacrity in the Irish press and elsewhere.
Leo Varadkar is a gaff prone politician, a former and future Prime Minister (Taoiseach) of Ireland.[1] He currently holds the position of Táinste or Deputy Prime Minister. He is a former medical doctor and many people— including me — regarded Leo Varadkar as intelligent, even though on many occasions in the past, it appeared he could not be bothered using it. I was wrong, dead wrong.
In his apology Leo declared ‘this report shames Irish society entirely,’ claiming that ‘a conspiracy of shame and silence and cruelty’ helped to create a ‘stifling, oppressive and deeply misogynistic culture’.[2] All these statements are untrue and not contained within the report. Leo incorporated so many gaffs that it would take many pages to list and explain them. Accordingly, I will cite a few examples which will suffice to illustrate the point.
Leo: ‘It must not be forgotten that illegitimacy was not a social prejudice but the law of the land, a law passed in the House in 1931 by our forebears.’[3] Dead wrong again. The Legitimacy Act, 1931 allowed the status of illegitimate children to be legitimised.[4] Common Law or British law — for centuries —discriminated against illegitimate children to protect the inheritance rights of the children of an official marriage. It is a biological fact that knicker elastic loses its properties around rich and powerful men. Kings, Counts, Viscounts, Lords and most of the full gamut of the male elite, had mistresses or conducted extra martial affairs with members of the opposite sex and the same sex. Those of the heterosexual variety resulted in the birth of many children and these children were denied the right to inherit from their father.
Sometimes however, the father recognised or acknowledged his parentage thus giving his child some inheritance rights and on occasion that could amount to full inheritance. In the case of royalty, full rights were seldom granted but many recognised children got titles, elevating their social status, but seldom were they elevated to the full status of royalty. William I of England was officially known as William the Bastard, the surname was not an insult then like it is today.
The surname Fitzroy literally translates as ‘son of the king’ and one of the illegitimate sons of Henry VIII was acknowledged by him and named Henry FitzRoy. He was given the title of Duke of Richmond and Somerset.[5] He was the older half-brother of Queen Elizabeth I and had his birth status been legitimate, he would have been King of England.
The laws on illegitimacy are deeply engrained in British law and have existed for centuries. It is extraordinary that a seemingly educated man like Varadkar is steadfastly unaware of the basic facts of history.
The concept of illegitimacy did not start in 1931 and the Irish law was written — as many are today, with intellectual laziness — copied from a British law of 1926. Had Leo bothered to look up the Irish statute book, he might have noticed that the 1931 Act set out to modify the ‘Legitimacy Declaration Act of 1868’, introduced when Ireland was ruled directly from Britain. That reveals yet another buffoonish gaff when Leo went on to state that the 1931 law was ‘very much guided by the Catholic social teaching of the day’. Really! Using Leo’s brand of logic, responsibility must lie with protestant social teaching, as the British establishment have a centuries old culture which is hostile and anti-Catholic. There is no chance in hell that the British would introduce laws based on Catholic social teaching.
It is a lie to suggest that illegitimacy was enshrined in law by the Irish in 1931. It is a lie to suggest that the Act was based on Catholic social teaching. Stirring up hatred of Catholics using lies would be a hate crime in most functioning democracies.
Leo also declared us that the report shows that Ireland had a ‘deeply misogynistic culture’. However, that again is a lie misrepresenting the report and ignoring totally the stories of former residents who were complimentary of their treatment. The commission’s final report contains only one mention of the word ‘misogyny’ and this is a repeat of a lie fabricated by feminist historian, Lindsay Earner-Byrne. She claimed that the Minister of Justice James Fitzgerald Kenney ‘presented a disturbingly misogynistic approach to welfare’, presenting the unmarried mother as ‘temptress and blackmailer’.[6][7] In actual fact the parliamentary debate from 1930 was a philogynistic attempt to give unmarried mothers the right to claim financial maintenance from the putative father. The comments relating to ‘temptress and blackmailer’ were addressing issues surrounding how the law could be abused by such persons, and what safeguards could be built into the law. There was absolutely no hint in his comments that he was applying a pejorative label to all unmarried mothers. Earner-Byrne’s lie was never checked for veracity by the commission and others and is indicative of poor-quality analysis and poor university educational standards which currently pervades through Irish society.
In reality Irish society was philogynous — it loved and respected women — it gave them rights and protected them; rights men did not enjoy. Unlike in the United Kingdom, women got the vote on the same basis as men, were constitutionally protected from being forced by poverty to do work harmful to their health, which they were forced to do under British rule. It gave women the right to opt out of jury service and much more.
In another part, Varadkar broadcasts to the nation that children who were in mother and baby homes and those who were fostered out that ‘their education [was] unimportant’. Leo obviously has no memory of the ‘truancy Garda’, a policeman or policewoman tasked with finding children who were frequently absent from school.[8] Hundreds if not thousands of parents and guardians found themselves before the courts to explain such absences. Many received fines or were imprisoned. Leo of course never looked up the law to find the School Attendance Act, 1926,[9] nor did he read the part of the commission report which stated that only the Tuam Children’s Home kept children of school going age and all those who were fit to attend school, did so.
Leo’s laziness is abundantly evident in his apology, it suggests that he never read the final report of the commission — three thousand pages is hard enough to get through, even harder when it is full of complex history. He may have read parts, but he managed to miss entirely, all the evidence which would have contradicted his prejudices. His expectation to get away with lies and misrepresentation suggests that he likes to rev the engine to make noise, but he doesn’t bother to press the clutch pedal to put his brain into first gear.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying that; ‘few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.’ The Irish parliamentary system is not currently blessed with even a few people with such basic capabilities and Leo stands as the very exemplar.
People from Dublin, like Leo are called Jackeens, short for Union Jackeen. The slang term is taken from the British flag and is indicative of a culture within sections of Irish society which has a sneering contempt for all things Irish. The attitude is still today pervasive in Dublin society and elsewhere in the country. West Brits and Shoneens are among the other terms, our ancestors used for Irish people who are overly enamoured by the British, who they see as their superiors. It is a mechanism of illusory social climbing achieved by creating a psychological and snobbish affinity with their colonial masters — adopting their racial prejudices — to denigrate their fellow Irish citizens. Putting people down elevates the denigrator and creates a false sense of superiority. Superior beings assume themselves to have the right to sneer at their fellow Irish people — ‘self-loathing’ is the term often used by social researchers today. It is so deeply engrained in society that it often goes unrecognised, which is perhaps just a well for those on the receiving end.
When Leo sneered at the entire Irish nation, his opinion was nothing more than a mindless expression of the prejudices of his social environment. However, using lies which are easily disprovable to back up his sneer, shows that if he has innate intelligence, he is fearful of expending energy by using it. Moreover, he is completely ignorant of Irish history and so empowers the barstool leprechauns to install their false history in the vast empty space between his ears.
There is no shame on Irish society other than to have elected a parliament of dolts, who have not got the wit nor the inclination to acquire a half decent standard education. A parliament full of liars like Leo Varadkar who have no interest in the truth, nor have they the interests of the people at heart.
The international financial crash of 2008 caused Ireland to suffer from a political inversion — a phenomenon where the dumbest in society rise to the top.
EJ
Footnotes
[1] As part of the coalition deal, Micheál Martin steps down and Leo Varadkar takes over as Taoiseach on 15 December 2022
[2] Oireachtas, ‘Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes’.
Unlike the Rubberbandits, the ancient Greeks has brains and put them to use trying to figure out the world and the universe. One of their big intellectual quests was to attempt to find out what life actually is. Their philosophy has come down to us in the from of transubstantiation and consubstantiation of the communion host. In yet another expression of Irish ignorance, and emblematic of the poor educational standards which now pervade in Irish society, Chambers and McGlynn have involved a professor of biochemistry in their continuing sneer at holy communion.
Religion and religious people have become the latest target of the sneering Irish SPUDs. SPUDing is a time-honoured tradition in Ireland and an inherited character trait of people who have little or no social standing. For centuries, little people in Ireland tried to feel like big people by creating illusions of high social standing through putting other people down. Religion was largely exempt from the machinations of the SPUDs as almost everybody believed at one time that religion was necessary for long term redemption.
Blindboy Boatclub (Dave Chambers) and Mr Chrome (Robert McGlynn) in their latest comedy skit appeared alongside Prof Luke O’Neill who they questioned repeatedly on the possibility of growing little Jesuses from a communion host. The professor replies repeatedly that it was not possible. It was supposed to be a comedy skit, but there was nothing funny except their Limerick accents and they thick way in which the question was repeatedly posed to the erudite professor.
Neither O’Neill nor Chambers and McGlynn understand transubstantiation and have taken it to mean transformation. The form, i.e. bread, never changes which is why it was never named transformation. If you change the form of any object, it becomes something else, cut the back of a chair and it becomes a table or a stool. Change a round wheel into a square, and it is no longer a wheel. However, a chair and all other objects can be made from many different substances. Accordingly, it is possible to transubstantiate most objects without transforming them. However, there is more to the word substance than meets the eye.
Sub comes from the Latin meaning under or below while stance means ‘to stand’, from the Latin ‘stare’ (p. star-eh). So literally it means under a stand. Accordingly, it is close to the word ‘understand’. However, despite various speculative theories, nobody understands the literal meaning of ‘understand’, but note the ‘stand’ element. Thus, I take it to mean that you can see what is supporting the stand or stance.
The ancient Greek philosophers reasoned that every object and being is supported by a stance or in other words, a ‘substance’, is something that stands under or grounds things. The substance of a human being is life..
The word substance in ordinary language derives from the philosophical sense but in a distorted way. Phrases like ‘a person of substance’ or ‘a substantial reason’ are a good example of this distortion. In chemistry, a chemical substance is a form of matter that has constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. It cannot be separated into components without breaking chemical bonds. Today, we tend to believe that a substance is matter but clearly by examining the literal meaning of the word it points to a concept underpinning the fundamental constituent of matter. Science is based in philosophy and its early pioneers were all natural philosophers accordingly the term ‘substance’ is firmly rooted in philosophy.
To the ancient Greeks a substance was imperceptible to the senses and the parts of an object or being which were perceptible the philosophers categorised as accidents but better understood as appearances. Appearances can change leaving the substance intact and the substance leaving appearances intact.
Karl Keating uses a shirt analogy to explain it:
Its colour is not the shirt itself, nor is its shape, its soft feel, or its (freshly laundered) scent. No one thing that your senses can perceive about the shirt is the shirt itself, and no combination of such things is the shirt itself. Your senses, on their own, are not capable of knowing fully what your shirt is. They miss its underlying nature. But your mind perceives the shirt’s underlying nature because it is able to bring together the information your senses gather about the shirt, and it extrapolates from there. It perceives the “shirtness” of your shirt, and “shirtness” is more than just the shirt’s color, shape, feel, or scent. In centuries gone by, philosophers called the underlying nature of a thing its “substance” and called its outward, sensible manifestations its “accidents.” Since that last word conjures up images of colliding automobiles, let’s use “appearances” instead.
Substance be understood as the essence of a being or a thing. For example, the essence of a human is life. What is life? It is one of humanity’s biggest questions, but science has no answer and has not been able to come close to providing an answer.
Life is defined as the absence of death. Take a recently deceased corpse, it contains all the elements to make a human, but it is not human because life is absent. Today with genetic engineering which can change the DNA of cell it can only work on living cells. We can tell the difference between a dead cell and a living cell, but we have no idea what life actually is. If we knew what it was then Victor Frankenstein would have made the greatest discovery ever in human history. The only scientists ever in the history of humanity to return life to where it was absent.
Humanity for millennia has struggled to find out what life actually is. The Greeks called the psyche, the Romans the animus which we now call the soul. This is the essence of the being, our substance, which makes us human is life, it is incorporeal.
All objects have a substance, and this can be changed without changing its accidents/appearances.
When I was going to school, I was taught that the bread did not change form, what happened was that the soul of Jesus went into the communion host. Martin Luther did not like the idea of transubstantiation, so he came up with the idea that the substance of Jesus was painted on the outside of the communion host, which is called consubstantiation.
Science is limited to what the senses can perceive and a substance in the true meaning of the word cannot be perceived by the senses. Accordingly, science has its limitations, and most scientists know that science cannot investigate substance/essence and so don’t ever bother.
The Rubberbandits became corporeal thanks to the Rubberjohnnybandit who was known to haunt Limerick during the 1980s. He is thought to be the size of a leprechaun and is possessed of the amazing ability to whip a Johnny off while in use. One particular set of four victims of the Rubberjohnnybandit chose to be like the Beckhams and name their children after the circumstances of their conception, Boatclub and Chrome.
Limerick philosophers have debated substance and accidents ever since but the Rubberbandits were never allowed to be part of the intelligentsia. Although not considered intelligentsia outside of Limerick the resentment of their non-admission explains how the middle-class boys came to earn a living from sneering at the working class and all Christians.
Irish ignorance too is made from a substance imperceptible to the senses, but its accidents are palpable, injurious, toxic and smelly and as welcome as a fart in a space suit, to use the colloquial parlance of Mr Boatclub.
Dear Mr Salvioli, When miscarriages of justice occurred in Ireland, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties was strangely silent. Contrast their behaviour to the achievements of the National Council for Civil Liberties, now called ‘Liberty’, in Britain, which has been instrumental in exposing miscarriages of justice and in the release of innocent people from jail. On the other hand, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has little work to do in Ireland and so has taken to fighting with the dead, a behaviour common in Ireland due to the nation’s cultural biases and often expressed as a national self-loathing. The actions of the ICCL border on sectarian prejudice and are nearly always exclusively aimed at the catholic church. However, the most disturbing actions of the ICCL are their arguments calling for the fundamental principle of justice and human rights to be set aside.
Recently the commission of investigation into mother and baby homes has found that many of the allegations made by and/or endorsed by the ICCL were not supported by evidence.[1] A major embarrassment one would think, but the ICCL has attempted a counterattack by writing whimperingly to you at the United Nations. Their chief weapon is the anachronistic application of human rights law to the past, a time when no such rights were protected by law. An action akin to banning cars from a city centre, and then accusing drivers who drove on those streets before the ban of breaking the law and seeking to fine them or have them arrested.
The mother and baby homes scandals are primarily founded upon the issue of historical high infant mortality rates, thus bringing into play the investigative tools of science and mathematics, tools not normally available to historians. That is specialist historians with knowledge, or at least a basic understanding of pathology, aetiology and epidemiology.
These are subjects not normally taught to historians and lawyers, yet the Irish government appointed such ill-equipped people to investigate the causes of historical high infant mortality rates. When knowledge is absent, assumptions are imperative to fill in the gaps, thus facilitating the arrival at conclusions that would be otherwise impossible.
The size of the assumption is directly proportional to the size of the knowledge gap. Accordingly, the bigger the assumption the greater the distance it is in essence from reality. Consequently, the commission has made several substantial mistakes which all fall on one side in favour of the abuse hypothesis, the same side as the ICCL. However, these errors are easily exposed using current scientific understandings.
The lawyers and the personnel at the ICCL have demonstrated time and again that they have no such specialist knowledge of vintage medicine or science and are forced to base their arguments and allegations entirely on assumptions. However, in their specialist area of law, they also astonishingly wander away from the principles of good justice.
They argue for a ‘survivor-led approach’ to the evidence, effectively urging the government and observers to dismiss evidence, and accept all allegations as fact without the slightest test for credibility. The fundamental principle of justice is that allegations can only be proven if they are supported by evidence. All allegations must therefore be tested for credibility. Many of the allegations made by the ICCL and others are reliant on historical and logical fallacies, and on ‘hearsay’, a legal term, which is tightly controlled in a court setting using the rules of evidence, because of its potential to cause injustice. Moreover, the ICCL seeks to deny the accused of their rights which are guaranteed by the Irish constitution, namely, ‘equality before the law’ and ‘the right to fair procedures’.
During a previous Irish government enquiry, when scientific tools were available to subject witnesses’ allegations to impartial credibility tests, one-third of applicants were found to have provided false testimony.[2] The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes has also encountered false testimony but has failed to publicly quantify its extent. The number of such testimonies is likely to be substantial in number, judging from the many accounts appearing in the Irish media, which rely on pushing credulity to heights never before seen. Given that there are huge sums of money on offer as compensation, it is no surprise to find a lot of people are willing to chance their luck, as there is a lot to be gained and little to be lost. As in other cases, many of the accusers work on the premise that the more exaggerated their allegations, the more they will be paid in compensation. In effect, Ireland’s legal system has a long record of rewarding dishonesty, often at the expense of genuine cases made by honest persons.
Unlike its neighbouring countries, Ireland has a compensation culture that is so pervasive and the awards so high, that the country’s insurance costs are astronomical. It has become so problematic for society, that the government has recently gotten the Irish judiciary to agree to new guidelines to reduce the amount given in financial settlement of personal injury claims.[3]
Nonetheless, the courts are full of compensations claims with a not insubstantial number of cases based on allegations that range from the mistaken to the fraudulent. There is little to mitigate against such claims, as judges are inclined to give the benefit of any doubt to the plaintiff and law firms are more than willing to advertise their services on a ‘no win, no fee basis’. The substantial financial sums on offer produces a level of temptation for people which not only outweighs or blinds them to the potential losses, through the awarding of costs against them, but it encourages a substantially higher number of people to take a chance. After all, if Johnny and Mary down the road could get €150,000 and appear to be perfectly okay after their accident, why can’t we get my hands on easy money.
Despite the allure of vast sums in compensation, many people who are former residents of mother and baby homes have testified to the commission about the many good aspects of the homes and of their good treatment. Their voices have not been heard over the cacophony of the wild and the lurid claims, which are the only type appearing almost daily in the Irish media.
Allegations like those discussed at the Irish houses of parliament where several parliamentarians stated unequivocally that women starved babies to death. First, it was alleged to have occurred at the Protestant run Bethany home and later applied to all Catholic-run homes. All allegations were reliant on an ignorant and inept interpretation of the medical term ‘marasmus’, which appeared on a small number of death certificates.
Death due to this exact cause occurred at all of the nation’s maternity hospitals in the past. Accordingly, it would be an imperative of justice that a commission of investigation be established to bring to bear scrutiny on these hospitals and also on the Irish Medical Council and on An Bord Altranais, respectively, the regulatory bodies for doctors and nurses.
If the same evidence that is used to accuse women of murder and abuse can be found at all maternity hospitals, then the singling out of Christian run institutions would in itself be a cause for concern. One would reasonably expect an organisation like the ICCL would be at the forefront in sounding the alarm about the potential for injustice and the breach of the human rights of the accused.
The ICCL citing the commission’s final report wrote that ‘babies and young children were reported to have died from malnutrition, a form of neglect.’ The Commission state:
33.5. Some commentators have concluded that infant deaths which occurred in mother and baby homes due to marasmus indicates that infants were neglected, not appropriately cared for, and/or wilfully starved to death in these institutions.
However, marasmus was a frequently cited cause of infant deaths in institutional, hospital and community settings in early twentieth-century Ireland. The Commission considers it unlikely that deaths in hospitals and family homes were due to wilful neglect and so cannot conclude that the term marasmus denotes wilful neglect in mother and baby homes. The more likely explanation is that marasmus as a cause of death was cited when an infant failed to thrive due to malabsorption of essential nutrients due to an underlying, undiagnosed medical condition.
Accordingly, this lack of balance is strong evidence that the ICCL has not the skillset to investigate matters historical not to mind matters medical, but more importantly, it demonstrates that they have no commitment to ensuring justice prevails. What about the justice for those who were falsely accused of murder, they may be dead now, but what kind of ‘rights advocacy’ organisation thrives on, and promotes injustice?
The ICCL’s arguments under the following headings are equally not supported by the evidence and were mostly dismissed by the commission of investigation.
· Arbitrary Detention
· Violations of the Right to Life
· Torture and Ill Treatment
· Modern slavery or servitude or forced labour
· Enforced Disappearance
· Violation of Private and Family Life Discrimination
It might seem obvious to state, but the allegations made by the ICCL have been subjected to a seven-year-long investigation by a government-appointed commission, which after examining one million documents found no evidence to support most of their allegations. Consequently, the ICCL might see it as a survival imperative and to maintain their credibility have to seek to rubbish the commission’s findings. A more competent organisation might admit its mistakes and concentrate on the commission’s findings which may be close to matching their allegations, but such aptitude is hard to find in Ireland.
The Irish nation has a remark for the intellectual failings of the Irish elite which goes ‘only in Ireland’. Only in Ireland could there be a ‘human rights organisation advocating for actions which run contrary to the principles of justice, do so in the name of justice, and get away with it. The ICCL would be better renamed the Irish Council for Civil Loathing because that is their modus operandi. They, like many of their compatriots, are prisoners of cultural artefacts inherited from their impoverished ancestors, who were so deprived of social advancement, took to the denigration of others to create illusions of social superiority.
Denigration combined with the ‘colonial mentality’ has left the Irish nation with a set of self-loathing biases, which the Irish often pass off as self-deprecating humour. However, one has only to look at its malignant influences to see the real-world consequences for the nation.
No politician has to date, apologised for making false allegations of starvation against the women who managed and worked in the mother and baby homes. Not one.
Like the ICCL, many of the scandal propagating politicians have posited further scurrilous claims and continue to do so even after they were dismissed by the commission of investigation. The reason for their actions is simple, self-loathing, it is important to a large portion of the Irish nation, who use it to create illusions of social superiority and are naturally reluctant to have their notions of self-worth destroyed by evidence. Accordingly, they will support anyone who advances their prejudices and ignore those who might challenge them.
The ICCL uses presentism with alacrity to promote its agenda. Presentism is the anachronistic use of present-day perspectives to analyse past events. It usually results in the castigation of the past’s decision-makers who made wrong decisions because of not using information that belonged to their future.
The supreme irony of using presentism is that the former residents who were born or raised in institutions were the result of a crisis pregnancy and in this age, it is likely they would have been killed before their birth. Irish women produced a minimum of 181,434 unwanted children in the thirty-five-year period between 1982 and 2017 inclusive. The figure includes 15,094 children who were given up for adoption.[4]
In a corresponding thirty-five-year period, while the Tuam mother and baby home was open from 1925 to 60, Irish women produced 64,290 illegitimate children and 13,431 of these souls were lost due mainly to rampant levels of dire poverty.[5]
The number of births in both periods was remarkably similar 2,199,777 compared to 2,187,967 for the later period. Compare the sad loss of 13,431 infants to the 166,340 children who were aborted before birth and we can begin to see what period of history the baby holocaust belongs to.[6]
It is a mark of insanity to suggest that all the illegitimate children born in the early period were wanted by their mothers. It is a sad fact of life that many babies were unwanted by their mothers then and now. Witness accounts, within the commission’s report, stand as testimony to the efforts made by several mothers who self-harmed in order to cause the loss of their baby.
Moreover, when these children grew up and went in search of their birth mother, it would be the height of insensitivity to reveal to such a person that they were in reality, an unwanted child. Accordingly, and with compassionate intent, they are told that they were a wanted child, but nefarious forces made the mother give them away. It is a story that saves face for the mother and provides comfort for the abandoned child, but it is not necessarily a true version of events, no matter how much people want to believe it.
The issue of unwanted children remains very much with society today, only the method of dealing with the issue has changed. Throughout recorded history, humanity has created vast numbers of unwanted children and it continues to create such children today. Alas, thanks to an unlucky technicality, human rights lawyers are deprived of much business, due to the now commonly accepted precept that human rights only begin when a child makes it out alive from its mother’s womb. If those who are not that fortunate are counted as unwanted children, then it puts a more rational perspective on history.
All societies where poverty is high have higher mortality rates than more affluent societies. Infant mortality rates have been correlated with poverty for decades but only in the last three decades has the causal relationship been definitively established. The United Nations are very well aware of the influence of poverty on mortality rates and appears in what must be thousands of official publications and through its agencies like the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, which estimates that:
On current trends, that 56 million children under age 5 will die from 2018 to 2030, half of them newborns. […] while children from poorer households in low-and-middle-income countries remain disproportionately vulnerable to early death – under-five mortality rates are, on average, twice as high for the poorest households compared to the richest.[7]
How can the United Nations not be able to join the dots with its own information and think it can have any semblance of credibility? The Irish nation was once a deeply impoverished society with high infant mortality rates which were directly correlated to the levels of poverty. The commission has noted that infant mortality rates at their highest during the 1930s and 1940s.
The 1930s was a time of great social deprivation across the globe. ‘Hunger marches’ took place in the richest country in the world, Britain, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against their living conditions. In the 1940s, Ireland was hit by a supply crisis which caused food shortages and hit the country’s poorest people the hardest. The catholic church in Dublin provided the city’s poor people with 8 million meals per year, saving tens of thousands of lives.[8] Yet, they get no credit thanks to Irish ignorance of their own history.
In anticipation of any argument put forward to the contrary by a devotee of the ‘dismal science’, let me point out that GDP per capita is no measure of individual well-being, just ask Joseph Stiglitz et al, but is often used by the self-loathers to insinuate that things were not that bad in Ireland.
However, when wealth distribution is factored in, the true picture reveals itself. In 1931 a staggering 81% of the population of Ireland had no measurable wealth. 1% of the population controlled 59% of the nation’s wealth. The legacy of colonial rule did not disappear overnight. Post-independence, Britain placed a financial burden on the Irish nation which was greater than those imposed on the Germans due to the war reparations post WWI. These payments were known as the ‘land annuity’ and ‘RIC pensions’. In 1932 the Irish government attempted to halt the British financial drain of the Irish economy by withholding the land annuity payment. At that time, they amounted to a staggering 14% (£4,764,767) of the nation’s total tax income of £35.5million.[9]
Britain retaliated by placing tariffs on Irish goods, a time now known as the ‘Economic War’. It placed great hardship on the Irish population and in particular on the poor and infant mortality rates remained high. In 1938 the trade war ended with the Irish government paying out £10 million in a final settlement. However, only a few years later, the British again carried out an economic attack on Ireland, through the withdrawal of vital supplies, in reprisal for the country refusing Churchill’s invitation to join the war on the side of Britain.[10] As a former colony, the Irish economy was left heavily dependent on exports and imports from its former colonial masters. The British Historian Bryce Evans puts it more dirrectly writing that Britain used ‘hunger as a weapon of war’ against Ireland during the 1940s.[11]
There is absolutely no question that poverty was rampant in Ireland and that government efforts to solve it were hampered by external forces and events. There is equally no doubt that poverty was the main cause of high infant mortality rates. It is however ignored in the commission of investigation’s report due to ignorance, despite the issue jumping out from its pages.
Returning to the ICCL, Michael Feichín Hannon was convicted in 1997 on charges of sexual assault had his conviction was declared a miscarriage of justice on the 27 April 2009. The three-judge court, in granting the certificate, described the case as ‘alarming and disturbing’ and said an entirely innocent man was convicted by a jury. His accuser, a young girl, had found God as an adult and as a result, admitted to making up the whole story.[12]
In 1999, Nora Wall became the first woman to be convicted of rape in the history of the Irish state. She was also the first person (male or female) ever to receive a life sentence for rape. The rape occurred 20 years earlier at a time when she was working as a nun at an orphanage. She held open the legs of a twelve-year-old girl in her care, to facilitate her rape by a male employee of the same orphanage. It turned out to be Ireland’s first case of a conviction based on repressed memories, an entirely concocted story, made by a woman with mental difficulties. Nora Wall was released from prison after serving only four days of her life sentence. It was the fortunate result of evidence emerging into the public domain, which should have been kept hidden from public view, as stipulated by Irish law. Her conviction was certified as a miscarriage of justice in 2005.[13]
In both cases the ICCL, founded in 1976, was silent. It made no comments on what improvements might be made to the rules of evidence and/or to court procedures to protect innocent people from false accusations and propose strategies that would make such miscarriages of justice less likely to happen again in the future.
In the parlance of the UN, there is no evidence that as a result of these miscarriages of justice that the ICCL has advocated or campaigned to:
Prevent the recurrence of crises and future violations of human rights.
Promote truth and memory about past violations;
Reform the national institutional and legal framework and promote the rule of law in accordance with international human rights law, and restore confidence in the institutions of the State;
Ensure social cohesion, nation-building, ownership and inclusiveness at the national and local levels; and promote healing and reconciliation;
The ICCL not only does not live up to these ideals but has actively promoted untruths and unlike the women it attacked, or the organisation to which they belonged, it seems that they have never protected a single human right nor prevented the abuse of any person’s rights.
The ICCL press briefing on the report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission dated March 2021, is chiefly remarkable for its reiteration, as fact, all the allegations which have been disproven or found not to be supported by the evidence by the commission of investigation. [14]
Just take one exemplar, the ICCL state emphatically that women were detained against their will, yet in reality, women had to apply to get into a mother and baby home. Taking my earlier point about stretching credulity, think about how many people are currently standing outside Mountjoy Jail in Dublin applying to get it.
Human rights lawyers cannot in reason or logic base their opinions on false allegations nor can false or dubious allegations be used to attack innocent people, dead or alive. Such would be representative of a significant failure in the intellectual tradition of humanity.
Dubious allegations might be easily revealed when they bear all the hallmarks of misogyny, it was women who starved babies to death, women who abused children, women who abused mothers, women who trafficked babies, women who kidnapped women, women covered up abuse, women perpetrated a holocaust against babies, ad inf.
One simple question exposes the falsity of the allegations, what benefit would accrue to these women for their actions and what would outweigh the risks. Risks like their imprisonment, castigation, dismissal and excommunication. When rational investigative questions are asked, the road to the truth begins to thaw out and the myths unravel, but why have these questions not been asked by the Irish media, the ICCL and more importantly, by the United Nations.
Irish universities have been engaged in ‘grade inflation’ for the last number of decades. That is the practice of making exams easier for students to gain higher marks, thus creating the illusion of improving standards of education. It works to fool politicians, but the multinational corporations based in Ireland are not impressed with the Irish educational system and have made their dissatisfaction known directly to the Irish government. The top executives of Google, Hewlett-Packard and Intel met with the Minister of Education, Bat O’Keefe in 2012. He was told that Irish graduates do not have the level of skill their qualifications suggest.[15] Despite promises, no corrective action appears to have been taken to date. In recent weeks the OECD has also castigated the Irish education system. Dr Andreas Schleicher stated:
Just 15 per cent of Irish 15-year-olds can distinguish fact from opinion in a reliable way. So, you know, what value is literacy, if you can’t navigate ambiguity? If we can’t manage complexity? [16]
As the output of ICCL seems to evince the same inability that afflicts young adults, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that problems unique to the Irish education system, could be a contributing factor in the apparent lack of skills and abilities at the ICCL.
Natural justice demands that the United Nations should at least subject allegations to a test for veracity rather than gullibly accepting the word of accusers, including that of self-appointed watchdogs. Notoriety seeking is prevalent among individuals today and it, along with groupthink can occur in any organisation or social group, and each malady has the potential to be one of the progenitors of injustice and human rights abuse. These malignant effects always need to be mitigated through competent evaluation of BOTH sides, especially the contrarian viewpoint which should always be sought out and given a fair hearing. Leave the one-sided arguments to the Irish, and let them engage in their time-honoured pastime of self-loathing, and not drag the United Nations down to their level.
The commission of investigation into mother and baby homes was led by a judge, a barrister and a historian. They were not wrong in all their findings, but their reports contain many errors due to inadequate controls for cultural biases, cognitive biases and a lack of expertise in statistics and medicine. Many of its conclusions will not withstand rational investigation as they are riddled with presentism, statistical fallacies and prejudice.
The Irish nation is badly served by its élite, so we would all welcome a UN investigation, but only if carried out by people with a strong commitment to impartiality, empowered with strategies to control for prejudice, cognitive bias, and has expertise in history, science, historic medicine, statistics and placing historic events in their correct historical context. On request, I can supply comprehensive details of what the commission got wrong and what it got right.
The Christian churches, supported by the Christian community, has been in the business of saving the lives of unwanted children for nearly two millennia. For all of that time, not one institution has been accused of operating a baby-killing facility or a post-natal life abortion service. Such flights of imagination can happen… only in Ireland.
It is time to wake up and smell the manure.
Finally, I provide more detail on all the arguments I used here in my new book and e-book.
The book’s epigraph is a quote by Albert Einstein:
‘Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.’
Einstein did not have the ICCL in mind, but he provides a good explanation of what might underpin their thoughts and actions.
Eugene Jordan, BA BSc MinfoTech,
Science historian.
References
[1] Commission of Investigation, ‘Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation Final Report’.
[2] Broadsheet, ‘Confabulation, False Memories And Conspiracy Theories’.
[3] Correspondent, ‘New Guidelines on Personal Injury Awards to Take Effect “within Weeks”’.
Once upon a time in a land of little people, officials were employed by the country’s health services to create fairy tales. Disney have a long history of taking European folklore and turning into a magical cinematic experience. The HSE on the other hand, employ more creative methods using the tradition Irish game of ‘Pin the Tail on the Leprechaun’. A picture of a leprechaun is pinned on to a wall chart, which can pivot so words and phrases can be chosen at random, all with crackpot notions.
As with the donkey version, blindfolded game players attempt to pin the tail as close to the leprechaun’s behind as possible. The pin invariably lands on a words or phrases, which are then used to produce random sneers and slurs, wound into a spiral of deceit and cast upon oneself and others. It is self-deprecating, self-loathing, small-minded black humour, written with the intent to give a sense of self-worth to people who feel worthless. A sense of self-importance gained the expense of others through gasbagging.
The report of the commission investigating mother and baby homes tells the story of the saga. ‘It appears that, in October 2012 two documents described as a file note and a draft briefing paper were circulated among senior HSE staff. […] These documents contained a number of allegations regarding Bessborough mother and baby home and the Tuam home.’
In other words, senior HSE staff filled a gigantic gasbag with crackpot notions taken from the leprechaun’s behind…
A database of 1,000 names of children existed who were sent abroad for adoption.
Death records of children were falsified to hide illegal adoptions.
Children were held in the homes longer than necessary for financial reasons.
Letters were sent to parents asking for money for children who had died.
Tuam and Bessborough charged a fee for the upkeep of children to both adoptive parents and the birth parent.
Women who gave birth were discharged to a Magdalen institution.
Money was claimed from the government for mothers and children after they had left the home.
The ‘trafficking’ of babies was facilitated by doctors, social workers and others, some of whom could still be working in the system.
The commission of investigation comment: ‘details of the document were repeated many times including during a Seanad debate of 17 May 2017. It appeared to be accepted by commentators and politicians that the allegations and suppositions made in these documents were statements of fact.’
HSE Mission Accomplished, politicians, journalists, bloggers et al., became shivers in search of a spine, the buck-leppin leprechauns went a buck-leppin, the shillelaghs waved menacingly, thumping anyone and everything in range, jigs were danced and the magic mushrooms passed around. There was ballyhoo from Ballymaloe to Timbuktu. Mouths frothed without the need for beer, and dung of all types was flung at their own ancestors and themselves.
What a session, you should have been there, the crack was 90… euros, there was no hangover suffered the morning after, no sense of shame and no apology.
In evidence to the commission, the HSE official [the witness] who prepared the document said she “could only recollect finding two photographs which appeared to be passport photographs for children being adopted to the US”.
The report added:
With respect to the allegation that there was ‘more than one letter asking for money for an infant who had been discharged or died’ the witness stated that she had no recollection of finding more than one letter if even one letter. The witness stated that she did not come across any evidence of trafficking of babies and in relation to the phrase ‘it must be that it was facilitated by adoptive social workers’ stated that ‘I don’t know what that is alluding to’. The witness had no memory of seeing evidence relating to nuns claiming for a dead baby. The witness had found no evidence of trafficking of babies. The witness did have a memory of reading a letter from a couple who had gone back to America with their adopted child saying that they would send money on to ‘the nuns’. The witness remarked ‘I certainly didn’t see any evidence of vast sums of money being passed over, you know parents being groomed to have children in order to … for prospective adoptive parents’.
Disney could never create as much magic as the Irish, no other nation has the imagination nor the inclination to live within the imagination, and no one else needs to feel alive by fighting with the dead. Reality, honesty, and integrity are not the values of ‘senior HSE staff’, nobody expects high standards and none are achieved.
America’s most popular science writer was a lousy historian! Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was a revered and immensely popular public figure around the time of the Space Race. He was a gifted communicator whose mass appeal arose from his style, skill and ability to bring his audience on a journey of the imagination, regaining their childhood sense of wonderment. Sagan took the pilots seat of a NASA built imagination-mobile and brought his assemblage into space on a magical and inspirational journey, well beyond the moon and into deep space.
They imagined all the possibilities of space travel and wondered what kind of life forms they would encounter. In reality the journey, while looking into the future, the machine actually took travellers back in time to rediscover their love of childhood fairy tales.
Before blast off, Sagan went back in time to produce a version of history which can be labelled false history. In Sagan’s fairy tale, science was cast as Little Red Riding Hood, religion as the Big Bad Wolf and himself as the Woodcutter.
Scientists in general are never very good at doing history, but Sagan liked to label himself with the respectability of agnosticism. However, his actions and arguments were mostly about promoting atheism, an anathema to agnosticism. It begs one big question, why does atheism need create and believe in myths?
Carl Sagan worked as an advisor to NASA from its beginning and throughout the time of the space race. He organised the first physical message to be sent into space on the space probe Pioneer 10 and on later Voyager missions.
Carl Sagan poses with a model of the Viking Martian lander at Death Valley.
The public came to know him through staring in many TV series and debates and writing many books on the subject of science and the importance of space exploration. He brought style and poise to a potentially boring subjects, converting the esoteric language of science into everyday parlance, removing its complexity so that it could be understood by general audience. Using these skills, he captured the public imagination, and inspired an entire generation, not only of the American people, but people worldwide.
However, the old saying that ‘all that glitters is not gold’ comes to mind. Sagan perceived science to be under threat, and set about attacking who he thought was its enemy, religion. To mount his defence, Sagan used ancient history and the history of science to attack religion.
He was not the first scientist or science aficionado to attempt this, but like most similarly motivated people, he to achieve their aim, they had to leave a lot of information out of the real history of science. Not being familiar with the subtlety of history, made significant blunders. To avoid all blunders Sagan offered this advice to his followers and how to avoid getting ‘suckered’, writing,
Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us – and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. – Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection
In this present day in the era where ‘fake news’ takes precedence over mundane truth, it can be justifiably argued that we have become a nation of suckers, and we love our charlatans. Alas, it is a statement which is not just true of Ireland in the 21st century. Sagan’s comments date from 1995, the year before his death, and demonstrate that the rising tide of ignorance is not just a present day phenomenon, but one which has lasted decades. It continues to rise unabated despite, or in spite of, the increasing levels of educational attainment. I am alluding of course to the increasing number of people who hold University parchments. Qualifications which it would appear, provide no inoculation against the pestilence of ignorance. This may account for why so many falsehoods endure for decades but we must also take into account that lies are made from sweet cake, while the truth is just plain bread without butter.
Sagan himself, despite winning many awards and being lauded for his efforts to bring science to the masses was fairly ignorant of history. Believe it or not I am being kind in using the word ignorance because if he had competent knowledge, and still made the same claims, it would expose much more sinister motives. Chiefly of which was to manipulate the opinion of the general public. Accordingly, and as we shall see, like most propagandists using history to promote their own agenda, Sagan’s version of historical events is untrustworthy at best and false history at worst.
Eratosthenes working out the arc of the meridian.
Sagan is to be lauded for his invention of what he called the Baloney Detector. Simply, it is a series of questions one must ask before accepting new information or in reassessing current and old information. The method has a lot of merit but it is a great pity that Sagan did not point his Baloney Detector at his own claims, it would at times, have gone off the scale. Consequently, his historical work would have been much improved.
In his book the Cosmos and television series of the same name, Sagan set out to bring science to the masses and started off explaining science from its very beginnings, using science history. One of the stories he starts with is that surrounding the measurement of the circumference of the earth, Sagan wrote of the ancient Greek mathematician:
Eratosthenes’ only tools were sticks, eyes, feet and brains, plus a taste for experiment. With them he deduced the circumference of the Earth with an error of only a few percent, a remarkable achievement for 2,200 years ago. He was the first person accurately to measure the size of a planet.
That is a claim which no competent historian can make but his audience has no idea that the claim is not based on evidence nor scientific evidence. Eratosthenes did try and measure the circumference of the earth and brilliantly came up with a measurement of 250,000 Stades. There is only one big problem, nobody today knows what the actual length of a Stade was or which one Eratosthenes was using. Accordingly we have to try and estimate what the length of a stade actually was.
The mathematical association of America website has an article which tries to work out the length of the various types of stades in use in antiquity and argues that there were in fact four different stades. It states,
Using these four stades, modern approximations of Eratosthenes’ 250,000 stades can be obtained. Below, the modern equivalent of 250,000 stades is given for each type of stade. Also given is the percent difference from the modern accepted value for the equatorial circumference of the Earth, which is approximately 40,075 kilometers
Type of Stade
Modern Equivalent Stade Length
Stade x 250,000
Percent Difference from Modern Circumference
Olympic
176.4 meters
44,100 kilometers
0.1
Italian
184.8 meters
46,200 kilometers
0.153
Babylonian-Persian
196.1 meters
49,020 kilometers
0.223
Phoenician-Egyptian
209.2 meters
52,300 kilometers
0.305
Here again the mathematicians have got it slightly wrong, note they gave a figure for the equatorial circumference. Eratosthenes using the method of shadows cast by sticks (gnomon) could not possibly be measuring equatorial circumference. It is was the pole to pole circumference he was measuring, which we now take to be 40,007 km which is 68km shorter due to the bulge at the equator.
No one knows for sure which one of these measurements Eratosthenes was using, accordingly, emphatically choosing the closest value to the known actual value is a course of action only open to charlatans or those mislead by charlatans. Impartial historians have to show that there was a variation and that Eratosthenes may have come close to a fairly accurate measurement or he may not have done. Readers of history are entitled to be informed and it is the first duty of a historian to report historical events setting them against their correct background.
The internet is confused as to whether Gene Roddenberry was inspired in his name choice by this Jean Picard or a more recent Swiss scientist of the same name but spelled with two ‘c’s. However, the other claims are true.
The first person in history to be recorded as accurately measuring the circumference of the earth is Jean-Félix Picard ✝1682. He measurements tanked during a survey in 1669-1670 were a mere 0.44% of todays accepted distance. The Picard mission launched in 2010, an orbiting solar observatory, is named after Jean-Félix. As we will see later, there might be a very good reason for why Sagan chose to ignore this fact and this scientist.
Sagan’s work is full of extraordinary claims which, I surmise these days, would have most people laughed off the stage.
When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains.
Aren’t we brilliant! We had the brains to invent our brains. An emphatic statement for which there is no evidence to support it, scientific or otherwise.
Single-celled plants evolved, and life began to generate its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free-living forms banded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions.
Here again is another bald statement but even though he claims ‘sex was invented’, he declines to name the inventor! But goes on to write,
Sex seems to have been invented around two billion years ago.
Sagan goes back into history to validate his beliefs and he chooses the usual canards including the Galileo story which he repeats or adds in a number of his own falsehoods. I will cover this in separate essay, as the true Galileo story is much more interesting than the fallacy we have all been thought to believe in school.
The biggest canard of all used by Sagan is what is known in historiography as the ‘Conflict Thesis’, a discredited 19th century theory that religion and science are incompatible. Any historian with knowledge of science history knows that modern science grew out of Christianity.
We do not have to rely on inferences, Sagan himself tells us directly that the Christians hated science and one of histories he used to support this opinion was the Hypatia story. A renowned female philosopher, astronomer and mathematician who murdered by a Christian mob in AD415 in Alexandria, Egypt.
Hypatia’s work was destroyed in the Alexandrian library when the Christians hating science burnt down the building.
Sagan’s version of the story carries a number of blunders which an unsuspecting audience would not be able to spot. Firstly, there was no science in the 5th century AD, especially not science as we understand it today. Accordingly, using the term is an anachronism, a term which Sagan did not use in his book but used the term in the Cosmos TV series.
The great library of Alexandrian burned down c. 150 years before the Hypatia incident, along with a large section of the city, during a civil war at the time of the Emperor Aurelian. In one of his TV documentaries Sagan visits what he thinks is the only remaining part of the Alexandrian Library called the Serapium, this building was standing in Hypatia’s time but was closed by the Emperor Theodosius I in AD391 and was not a library. Sagan’s statement that the building was burned down by Christians hating science is a total fabrication.
Hypatia was indeed killed by a Christian mob not because of her scholarship but because she was closely associated with, and was an advisor to the roman governor of the area, Orestes. There had been severe tensions in the city with a complex political battle for supremacy among the Christians, other denominations and their Roman rulers. Tensions spiralled unabated and went into overdrive when a Christian monk named Ammonius tried to assassinate Orestes, hitting him on the head with a rock. Orestes survived suffering only a bleeding head wound but Ammonius was captured, tortured and executed. It appeared to the Christians that Orestes was anti-Christian and that Hypatia was turning Orestes against the local bishop. It was these tensions which led to the death of Hypatia. The actions of the mob were deplored by many Christians at the time and we would know nothing of the incident for it only survives in one account, written by a Christian.
However, we can be 100% sure that Hypatia was not killed because Christians hated scientists, it is a myth entirely fabricated by Sagan as a pillar to support his beliefs. If Sagan had a scientific mind he did not use it when it came to separating historical fact from historical fiction. Neither did he switch on his Baloney Detector and point it at his own work but later on I will do exactly that.
First we have to as the question, why? Why would Sagan tell a story and make false claims and why do these stories continue to be believed, even by people who claim to have scientific minds or at least have adopted scientific thinking?
Sagan continues to be admired to this day and his supporters believe in the many myths he propagated, and have accepted them religiously, without any examination and without subjecting them to the de rigueur of science. That is despite the fact that many of them claim that their beliefs are based on science, and as science is now held to be superior to all other methods of investigation they feel justified in claiming that their beliefs are superior to all others. However, it should be noted that it is not possible to base one’s beliefs entirely on science and ascribing powers to science which it does not possess is termed ‘scientism’.
Sagan certainly influenced my views in my youth and a great many more young people were inculcated with scientism and it continues to this very day, unabated. It is extraordinary that the blindness caused by scientism in its beholders goes unnoticed by themselves. It is a system of belief and claims based thereupon are easily debunked by scientific thinking. Thus evincing that holders of scientism cannot think scientifically, but think the can. There is an old insult in Ireland, which goes ‘if I want your opinion, I will give it to you’, and clearly many people have been given their opinion and have not subjected their opinions to any kind of critical evaluation.
Asking a simple probing question reveals much more than meets the eye. Why should so many people believe in such obvious falsehoods and what psychological need does such behaviour gratify?
We all have beliefs, especially beliefs learned early in life, which we have not subjected to any intellectual evaluation. They can be personality traits, prejudices, stereotypes and many more, both good and bad, learned from parents and peers. We also have a need to be loved and valued and as we are hierarchal animals our image of our social standing is highly important to our mental health and is inextricably linked to our self-esteem. Self-esteem refers to a person’s overall sense of his or her value or worth. It can be considered a sort of measure of how much a person ‘values, approves of, appreciates, prizes, or likes him or herself’. Self-esteem is a similar concept to self-worth but with a small but important difference: self-esteem is what we think, feel, and believe about ourselves, while self-worth is the more global recognition that we are valuable human beings worthy of love.
Low self-esteem is a major cause of mental illness but the mind has a strategy to combat feelings associated with low self-esteem. It simply creates an illusion of higher social standing than exists in reality. Accordingly, if we have higher social standing and this is not possible in reality the mind creates a sense of social elevation through the denigration of other individuals or groups of individuals.
Demitri Mediev honours the victims of Stalin. 12 to 18 million people were killed in a forced conversion to Atheism.
The position we see ourselves holding within the hierarchy means that we have individuals or groups which are both above and beneath our level. Viewing people as being beneath our level elevates us to a higher social plane and the more people beneath us the higher we think we are. Due to Ireland’s long history of enforced ancestral poverty and consequent impossibility of upward social mobility, the Irish have a long tradition of illusory superiority, which has many manifestations but probably the best known is begrudgery.
It is not just a type of jealousy of other people’s achievements, that achieves nothing psychologically, but denigration achieves the psychological illusion of upward social mobility and achieves a consequent rise in self-esteem and self-worth.
All religions hold that their beliefs are superior to those of other religions. There would be no point in holding them if one believed them to be inferior. Belief superiority ranges in scale from mild to severe but the level of severe, it becomes belief supremacism, a highly dangerous psychological phenomenon, which causes individuals and groups to escalate beyond sneering up to discrimination and in extreme cases, dehumanisation.
Consequently, it creates the illusion in the mind of sufferers that they have been conferred with the right to make life and death decisions regarding dealings with inferior sub-human beings. Belief supremacism occurs naturally as well as being uncalculated deliberately by ruling classes in order to get the masses to fight. It was behind the holocaust, present day mass shootings, suicide bombings, racism and the full gamut of man’s inhumanity to man. It has nothing got to do with religion and everything to do with personal beliefs, whether they were inculcated, occur naturally or acquired through mental illness.
Sagan and his supporters use belief superiority, which is evident through their denigration of the beliefs of others. The level of denigration has an undoubted inverse relationship with a person’s image of their social status and when combined with a belief in myths achieves the exact opposite of the image they are trying to project in the minds of impartial observers.
That is an important point, there is safety in numbers and groupthink and the illusory truth effect comes into play. The latter is the scientific name for the phenomenon encapsulated in the old adage ‘repeat a lie often enough and it will become the truth’. The term Groupthink also arises out of the scientific investigation into the observable tendency of groups of well-intentioned people to make extraordinarily bad decisions.
Whatever about his followers, one could argue that Sagan had a high social standing and therefore not using denigration to improve his social rank. However, all is relative and even those of high social status need denigration to maintain and prove to themselves their own superiority as evinced through elitism or snobbery. However, while a little bit of elitism is evident in his writings and broadcasts, what is more evident is insecurity in large amounts. It is the motivation which he sees that science is under threat and the chief protagonist as Sagan saw it, was religion.
I have observed myself that when ordinary Americans engage in a battle of political ideologies, of which there really are only two (Republican or Democrat), neither side cares to present their case as truthfully as possible. They load their weapons with all the balderdash each side can muster and engage in battle for supremacy, not by exposing the lies of the other side, but shooting back with lies of their own. The objective is to win and put the other side down, and while the intent can be extremely hostile, it is passive aggression. Meaning that they can be quite hostile underneath the surface but appear to be quite pleasant.
I am not sure if it is a cultural bias but we can observe that when Sagan could find no scientific evidence to bolster his beliefs, he simply created them or consciously or subconsciously took the word of a charlatan and passed it off in the guise of truth.
In my youth, a time when I believed the claims of Carl Sagan, I had an interest in history but had not studied is seriously until many years later. That is a crucial point, I had not the knowledge to at that time to know that Sagan was preaching false history. Such a style of argument is relatively common, a fallacy called the ‘Appeal to Ignorance’. This is not necessarily ignorance of the audience, just using evidence they have no access to or presenting evidence that the audience cannot examine.
Many years later, after I had long forgotten about Sagan, I met a new acquaintance who was to put it mildly, was then and remains, vehemently atheist in his views. He was scathing about religion and took aim at Christianity in particular. What struck me most about his attitude was that despite atheism being an unorganised group, he was pedalling the exact same narrative as many other atheists. After a while, it became clear he was simply repeating the false claims which Sagan had crated or used, and these can be found in writings of many other atheist writers. Fortunately by this time, I had spent many years studding history at a high level and I knew that some of his expressed beliefs were not based on historical evidence but on popular false notions.
The European output of books rose through the medieval period
To cite one example, it is a common belief among atheist that the medieval period was a dark age. In fact nothing could be further from the truth, it was a time when our modern civilisation was founded and represents a time of great progress, in ethics, politics, engineering, science, literacy, learning and many more. Today, no competent historian uses the prejudicial term Dark Ages as a label for the Medieval Period. Nowadays, it exposes ignorance and draws derision.
Needless to say Sagan did much to popularise the myth of the Dark Ages and much of what Sagan claimed has been written into the Atheists’ Bible, hence the homogeneity in belief of what should be a disparate unorganised group with equally disparate views and beliefs.
This homogeneity of belief is evident in atheist attacks on religion and religious people. On nearly every online forum where atheist are present, they battle for supremacy using the same old lines and arguments. For example, ‘I support your right to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden’. ‘The church of the flaying spaghetti monster’, beliefs in a ‘sky god’ and of course the biggest canard of all, ‘I base my opinions on science’ or ‘atheism is a lack of belief’. If such a creature who lacks belief actually exists, they would have no reason to engage in belief superiority and would have no reason to write books, blogs, forum posts, ad inf. denigrating religion and religious people, sometimes in a manner reminiscent of sectarianism.
Belief superiority is a feature of all religions and the belief that god does not exist is a religious belief, because it is not supported by any scientific evidence. When all the thinking is joined up, it reveals unequivocally that Atheism, like Buddhism, is a non-theistic religion.
The history of science is a highly specialised area within the domain of history and as science arose out of natural philosophy it is difficult for beginners the get their head around the history of philosophical thought. The upshot is that there are very few historians working in the area and the public have little interest in reading anything other than sexed up stories. Quality science history has not yet made it into the public consciousness, consequently it has been relegated to the lower orders by charlatans promoting their agendas using false history.
Portrait of Johan Kepler by an unknown artist, 1610
The story of Johan Kepler (✝1630) is one such example. Kepler building on the work of Tycho Brahe discovered that the planets moved in an elliptical orbit not circular as had been believed up until that time and after. Sagan devotes a lot of time to writing a history of science which is not only peppered with falsehoods but also uses paltering. Paltering is telling the truth but telling it in such a way as to mislead the audience. One of the classic tools of paltering is to leave out important information, an action which is most often termed ‘lying though omission’.
As a science historian, I am always disappointed when I come across so called scientists using the history of science to create false and misleading claims, which by their very nature, demonstrate that if they are possessed of a scientific mind, they certainly spare its use when it comes to history. Consequently they are, as Sagan put it, ‘suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.’
As promised let me now kick start Sagan’s Baloney Detector.
In 1620 when Kepler’s mother was accused of witchcraft Sagan wrote,
Kepler rushed to Württemberg to find his seventy-four-year-old mother chained in a Protestant secular dungeon and threatened, like Galileo in a Catholic dungeon, with torture.
The claim that Galileo (✝1642) was detained within a Catholic dungeon is a blatant falsehood. While in Rome awaiting his trial, Galileo was housed in a luxurious apartment overlooking the Vatican gardens. He was accorded a valet, and another servant to look after his food. His food was brought from the Florentine embassy, which employed one of the best chefs in Rome. Galileo was never threatened with torture but Sagan, if he knew the truth could not let it appear before his audience, for fear it would considerably undermine his arguments. More expert propagandists would have used paltering to avoid the inevitable derision which comes from being caught out in a lie. Having stated that, I am not accusing Sagan of deliberately lying. It is more likely he was just repeating the lies of earlier commentators, accordingly it means that he certainly did not have the knowledge to able to spot the falsehoods nor would it appear did he use ‘intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage’ to avoid becoming a ‘sucker’.
Getting back to Kepler, Sagan tell us that, ‘among the many scapegoats chosen were elderly women living alone, who were charged with witchcraft. Kepler’s mother was carried away in the middle of the night in a laundry chest.’ Sagan provides no reference for the ‘laundry chest’ and a Google search results for it all point back to Sagan as the source for this story embellishment. While the scapegoating of women is true, Sagan uses paltering to mislead his audience into believing that it was only women who were persecuted. In continental Europe most victims of the early modern witch craze were men, very often priests.
At no point in the Kepler story, as told by Sagan, is mention made of Kepler’s most enthusiastic scientific supporters, and reference to them many present day writings is also hard to find. Kepler was not a wealthy man and could not afford to buy a telescope to carry out his scientific work. He was gifted his first telescope by the Jesuits thanks the support of a Jesuit Priest and scientist named Paul Guldin ✝1643. Kepler corresponded with him in maters both scientific and religious. Guldin asked another Jesuit priest, Nicolas Zucchi ✝1670, who was a telescope maker to gift Kepler one of his telescopes.
Today, there are 3 basic types of telescopes in use: Refractor, Reflector and Cassegrain. (radio telescopes are reflectors) A Refractor telescope uses lenses, a Reflector uses mirrors and a Cassegrain uses both. The first reflecting telescope was designed and built years before Isaac Newton was born. However, popular science history, particularly within the Anglophone, fraudulently credits its invention to Newton (✝1727). Newton did design his own type of reflecting telescope but he was not the invertor and neither was Galileo the inverter of the telescope, as has also been claimed many times.
The present day Refracting telescopes are based on Kepler’s design but he could not afford to build an example. The invention of the present day Reflecting telescope is credited to Marin Mersenne ✝1648. Mersenne never built such a telescope, like Kepler, he proposed it theoretically and based on his theory, Nicolas Zucchi built an early version. It was crude due to the lack of mirror technology at the time but it demonstrated that a telescopic effect could be achieved using a combination of parabolic mirrors and lenses instead of just lenses. Mersenne’s designs featured a strong telephoto effect which is critical to modern photographic lenses. Bonaventura Cavalieri ✝1647 also mathematically suggested designs for reflecting telescopes.
The first recorded construction of a Keplerian telescope is achieved by Christoph Scheiner (✝1575) in AD1617. Sometime around 1625, Scheiner introduced a single erecting lens to the Keplerian telescope to produce an erect image. Twenty years later in AD1645, Anton Maria Schyrle de Rheita ✝1660 used a two element erecting couplet to produce a practical terrestrial telescope with an erect image and acceptable magnification and field of view. Accordingly, de Rheita is today credited with the invention of the terrestrial telescope.
Today the Cassegrain design is the basis for many of the most famous twentieth century telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope and the 200 inch Hale Telescope on Mt. Palomar.
There is a very good reason why these astronomers and scientists do not get a mention from Sagan. Can you think of what it might be?
For balance, Sagan he had a number of achievements in science. By all accounts his best talents were not as an experimental scientist, rather he was an ideas man or a liaison person between the sciences. In keeping with the notion of him as an ideas man, his greatest scientific achievement came as a result of studying radio waves from Venus. He hypothesised that it had a high surface temperature but it would be up to others to prove this correct and it subsequently was. It is not unfair to say that his scientific achievements mainly came through speculation but as an astrophysicist, his speculations were better than most and these speculations, in turn, aroused interest in others who went on to make discoveries.
I am reminded of Sigmund Freud (d. 1939) who is regarded as one of the most influential psychologists in history, not because all his theories were proven correct and ground-breaking, but because he caused thousands of research projects to be instigated by people who wanted to prove him wrong. There is no doubt that Carl Sagan was influential and that points to his real genius which was as a brilliant communicator, perhaps the best science has ever had.
In 1994 he was the recipient of the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences for distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare.
The citation for that award begins…
‘Carl Sagan has been enormously successful in communicating the wonder and importance of science. His ability to capture the imagination of millions and to explain difficult concepts in understandable terms is a magnificent achievement.’
The American Planetary Society website has the following entry
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Dr. Sagan was the author of many bestsellers, including Cosmos, which became the best-selling science book ever published in the English language. The accompanying Emmy and Peabody award-winning television series has been seen by 500 million people in 60 countries. He received 20 honorary degrees from American colleges and universities for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the environment. His research speculations led to the discovery of the surface temperature on Venus.
The planetary society was co-founded by Sagan in 1980 to counter act the NASA budget cuts coming from government by demonstrating the popular appeal of science.
Anyone who reads the Cosmos will be forgiven for thinking it is not a science book but a history book, especially at the start. It does eventually turn into a descriptive science book it is peppered with historical mistakes and omissions of significant information. There is no doubt that Sagan wrote his own version of history to promote his agenda.
What is the evidence for his agenda?
A present day Cassegrain Reflecting Telescope
All the great telescope scientists mentioned earlier had one thing in common, Christopher Scheiner, Laurent Cassegrain, Anton de Rheita, Bonaventura Cavalieri, Nicolas Zucchi and Marin Mersenne were all Roman Catholic priests. Sagan could not mention that fact, nor could he laud the great scientific advances made by church people, for it would blow his atheist agenda out of the water.
Sagan’s crediting of Eratosthenes with the achievements of Jean Picard may also be due to the fact that Picard was also a Roman Catholic Priest.
Also a man who gets no mention is Georges Lemaître (✝1966), the first person to come up with what we now call the Big Bang Theory. A derogatory term coined by atheist scientist Fred Hoyle who believed in a steady state of the universe rather than the now universally accepted view of an expanding universe. Lemaître’s work was published under the title of ‘The Theory of the Primeval Atom’. It was ridiculed and written off by Hoyle as the Big Bang theory, but thanks to one of those great quirks of history, Hoyle’s name now enjoys some fame which would have otherwise been a lot less.
Einstein too, while not taking exception to the mathematics of Lemaître’s theory, refused to accept that the universe was expanding; Lemaître recalled his commenting ‘Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious’. Einstein later recanted, accepting the idea of an expanding universe which helped the Big Bang Theory and Lemaître get fast recognition.
Hardly anyone to day outside genuine science and science history knows the name Georges Lemaître but he is lauded in high places. In March 1934, Lemaître received the Francqui Prize, the highest Belgian scientific distinction, from King Leopold III. He was proposed for the prize by Albert Einstein and two others. The European Space Agency named each of their five Automated Transfer Vehicles in honour of famous science personalities.
ATV-1 Jules Verne
ATV-2 Johannes Kepler
ATV-3 Edoardo Amaldi
ATV-4 Albert Einstein
ATV-5 Georges Lemaître
You have probably guessed by now that the reason I include a mention of Georges Lemaître is that he too was a Roman Catholic priest.
One of the great false histories of all time is encapsulated in the notion that the Catholic Church hated science. Nothing could be further from the truth. The oxygen which gives life and sustains this myth is its usefulness in supporting belief superiority. Through denigrating other people’s beliefs and belief systems it creates the illusion of superiority for the holder.
Belief superiority can be found in histories thought in school. Protestant children are brought up to believe that Catholics are backward which is the very reason that the protestant religions exist. Information which is learned early in life is seldom revaluated as an adult, which is why the likes of Prof. Stephen Hawking, Prof. Brian Cox, Dara Ó Briain, the Irish comic and sometimes science presenter, have all promoted this anti-Catholic myth. It is therefore safe to draw the conclusion that their science skills and knowledge set have not been used to validate their historical knowledge. They have simply not done as Sagan asked people to do, which was to use their ‘intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage’ to prevent themselves from becoming ‘victims of the next charlatan who comes along’. There have been many charlatans spreading false information throughout the history of science, and we know who they were and what their false claims were.
Einstein (d. 1955) is reputed to have said that, ‘it is easier to crack an atom than a prejudice’.
Prejudices are highly resistant to rational influence and that is evident in the prejudice known as ‘Conflict Thesis’. A discredited theory, first postulated a mere 150 years ago, which holds that science and religion are in conflict. This first was John William Draper (✝1882) who contended that there was the human intellect on one side and compression on arising out of faith and human interest on the other.
Draper’s claims were easily dismissed as polemical but the claims of Andrew Dixon White (✝1918) endured a while longer. Dixon was co-founder of Cornell University, which many years later, employed as a lecturer none other than Carl Sagan. The slightly lingering endurance of his false claims was due to its appearance as genuine scholarship.
No competent or genuine science historian believes that the ‘Conflict Thesis’ is valid. Yet it endures, thanks to full menagerie from bloggers to dolts, to all sorts of charlatans and scientism. All attempt ion to create illusory superiority for purposes of psychological social elevation. ‘Mine is bigger than yours’ is at the very heart of human hierarchal rivalry.
One final canard to debunk is the claim that Galileo was the first to point a telescope at the heavens. He could have been but it is impossible to prove one way or the other. The gaping holes of uncertainty can be disguised by anyone with a tarpaulin to trap the unwary. When people are caught by the balls, their hearts and minds usually follow.
Galileo was a great man for taking the credit for himself even when it was not due. His was very quick to publish and got his discoveries into the academic and public domain quicker than others. He was also vicious in his attacks on people whom he disliked or disagreed with, and this tendency lost him a lot of friends and supporters.
Simon Marius (✝1625), a Dutch astronomer claimed to have discovered the moons of Jupiter about a month before Galileo. Galileo, as was his custom, blew a fuse and called him a ‘poisonous reptile’, and an ‘enemy of all mankind. In 1903, a jury in the Netherlands looked into to the question and concluded that Marius had independently discovered the moons of Jupiter about the same time as Galileo. Who takes the credit today?
As you probably know from your school days, Galileo named the moons of Jupiter, Cosmica Sidera (‘Cosimo’s stars’), in honour of Cosimo II de’ Medici the grand-duke of Tuscany, kissing boots to get patronage. At the grand-duke’s suggestion, Galileo changed the name to Medicea Sidera (‘the Medici stars’), honouring all four Medici brothers. Today however, the moons are not known by those names, instead they are called Io (p. eye oh), Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. These are the names given to them by Simon Marius.
Sagan might have very little knowledge of history, in which case we can almost forgive him some of his many errors but what if he had good historical knowledge, it would mean that he was deliberately trying to mislead people. One thing we know for sure in the whole historical Sagan saga is that, there are many people out there who worship him as a god. His devotes worship him religiously and with so much trust that they have not bothered to switch on his baloney detector or demonstrated scientific thinking. Sagan himself said during a televised debate in 1988,
The essence of religion is not to change anything. The supposed truths are handed down by some revered figure and no one is supposed to make any progress beyond that because all the truth is thought to be in hand.
If Sagan is right, and all truths are in hand, why then do the Christians have a mystery of faith, celebrate the Seven Glorious Mysteries. To them, God is a mystery, the holy trinity is a mystery and so too is the church itself. Mysteries by definition are not truths, supposed or otherwise.
If people believe ‘the supposed truths are handed down by some revered figure’, and judging from the actions of his followers, that would make Sagan the patron saint of scientism.
