I had put this one paragraph from Sam Harris' book, "The Moral Landscape" in a Twitter post a while back. I felt it would be a shame to leave it out of the blog, seeing as how I've already spilled some of the book's awesomeness here.
""Consider the Catholic Church: an organization which advertises itself as the greatest force for good and as the only true balwark against evil in the universe. Even among non-Catholics, its doctrines are widely associated with the concepts of "morality" and "human values". However, the Vatican is an organization that excommunicates women for attempting to become priests but does not excommunicate male priests for raping children. It excommunicates doctors who perform abortions to save a mother's life ----even if the mother is a nine year old girl, raped by her stepfather and pregnant with twins----but it did not excommunicate a single member of the Third Reich for committing genocide. Are we really obliged to consider such a diabolical inversion of priorities to be evidence of an alternative "moral" framework? No. It seems clear that the Catholic Church is as misguided in speaking about the "moral" peril of contraception, for instance, as it would be in speaking about the "physics" of Transubstantiation. In both domains, it is true to say that the church is grotesquely confused about which things in this world are worth paying attention to."
-Sam Harris, 'The Moral Landscape'
