Something else the Catholics are very touchy about

It’s not just crackers; they freak out over Mary’s virginity. A New Zealand church put up this provocative billboard to get people to discuss the absurdity of literalism:

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The Catholic Church condemned it as “inappropriate” and “disrespectful.” I think it’s funny (although it is based on an old joke), and does extract the message of the Bible from the remote and theological to something more earthy and thoughtful. And note — this was not put up by a gang of rabid atheists trying to mock Christianity, but by a sect of Christianity itself that was trying to lighten up the arguments.

You can guess what happened within a few hours of the billboard going up.

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A spokesperson for the local Catholic diocese had this to say.

“Our Christian tradition of 2,000 years is that Mary remains a virgin and that Jesus is the son of God, not Joseph,” she told the New Zealand Herald. “Such a poster is inappropriate and disrespectful.”

So? You can believe Mary had three heads and wings and gave birth to Jesus through her anus to preserve her hymen, for all anyone cares. Your delusions are not ours to defend, and you do not have the power to force everyone to stop laughing at you, as much as you’d like to be able to do that. And isn’t that what this is really about? That churches want to be able to punish you for disrespecting their sacred craziness?

Man, but Christians sure hold some silly beliefs. I’d happily desecrate this myth just like I did a cracker, except that I realized I’ve already had sex with a virgin named Mary about 30 years ago, and she won’t let me run around repeating the act now.

The devil stole Rod Parsley’s money!

That’s what he says, anyway: he’s put out a desperate call for mo’ money because he is under a “demonically inspired financial attack”. His ministry is facing a $3 million dollar shortfall. Coincidentally, he also had to make a big payout of $3.1 to the family of a two-year-old who was spanked to the point of being covered in welts and abrasions in his church’s daycare.

At last, we have identified the devil. He’s a naughty little boy in Columbus, Ohio.

European cartoonist on a rampage! Gods derided!

I had no idea cartoonists wielded such vast power. First it was the Danish cartoons that outraged the Muslim community, and now an Austrian named Manfred Deix has drawn the ire of the Catholics: the Viennese archdiocese has ‘tattled’ on him to the public prosecutor for violating the National Socialist Prohibition Act and for degrading religion (it’s in German; there is a horrible Google translation).

He has mocked the EU’s ban on crucifixes in the classroom with a cartoon that argues that the “ban shall be deftly circumvented,” and which includes a “multicultural compromise” — Jesus on a cross with a crescent and a Buddha on it, wearing robes with both the hammer and sickle and the swastika on them.

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The top right example is familiar — that’s a typical American classroom, I think.

Another one that has spurred Catholic outrage is a cartoon that speculated about just what this god we’re supposed to worship looks like, and asks, “we know the church, but just who is god?” (nudity and some scatological content in portraits of the deity…click at your own peril).

How odd that people would react with such anger at depictions of what the earnest apologists for religion are always telling us is just a metaphor. If their god really is the grand creator and maintainer of the entire universe, reducing him to a sketch in a magazine is really no more degrading than reducing him to, say, a set of stained glass windows, a liturgy, and a holy book. If he really is a cosmic being who loves everyone, I should think he’d love a cynical cartoonist as much as he does a pope. Or are they going to declare certain renditions of the deity privileged, while others are proscribed? How will they determine which vision of god are true and accurate, and therefore protected by secular law?

For more thought on these kinds of issues, read Greta Christina’s article on the great metaphor myth of religion. If religion really were an abstraction, a metaphor, a personal sentiment about a universal divinity, we’d expect a certain kind of response to satire, art, and opinion about this god-creature…and it’s not the reaction we see. The Austrian Catholic church seems to have a fairly specific idea about what kind of portrait of god you are allowed to paint — I wonder where they get their specific details?

Poor, uneducated, obese, and religious

What a horrible, sad waste of a life: Tillmon Webb injured his knee, couldn’t afford to get it treated, and sat in a recliner for 8 months, praying for healing. His saintly (and I don’t mean that in a complimentary sense) wife tended to him as he rotted to death in the chair.

“He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God,” said Webb. “And he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn’t think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people.”

I think two lives were wasted here. His wife took care of this suffering lump for 8 months — he didn’t even get up to use the bathroom, and the neighbors didn’t know she even had a husband — and this is her response after his death:

“If I feel anything right now, it’s envy for him because I wish he had taken me with him,” said Webb.

“Popular religious belief is caused by dysfunctional social conditions.” Their piety didn’t save them and didn’t alleviate their pain or their desperate conditions — it made them worse.

What did she expect? That Jesus would stop by and give her a turnip?

Can you bear yet another case of religion-rationalized child abuse?

Over three months in 2006, as her five children grew more emaciated and listless by the day, Estelle Walker made no move to find a job, no effort to scrounge up a meal, her kids told a jury yesterday.

“We were supposed to wait for God to provide,” said Walker’s oldest daughter, now 21. “And that’s what we did.”

At one point, the daughter said, she and her siblings went 11 days without food. When police were at last summoned to the Sussex County cabin by neighbors, investigators found the children so malnourished they had difficulty talking.

You would think that after watching her own children waste away for months, she’d realize that god will not provide. Never has and never will.

God is a sockpuppet

So true and so hilarious: a study has found that god speaks with a remarkably egocentric voice. In tests that asked people what god’s opinion of various matters was, the unsurprising discovery was that it was the same as the individual’s opinion — and of course every person’s opinion was different. You’d expect some consistency if they were all hearing god’s word, you would think!

It fits with the typical vision of the sockpuppeteer, too: the loser whose opinions are indefensible, so he invents an army of aliases to agree with him. And what more powerful sockpuppet could there be than to have your arm up a god’s butt?

An Australian double standard

In March, there’s going to be a massive atheist conference in Melbourne, Australia. It’s going to be excellent, with speakers being brought in from around the world, and with mobs of delighted godless Aussies gathering to celebrate and discuss secularism (I know some of my readers here will be there!) Reasonably enough, the Atheist Organization of Australia has asked the government to chip in and help them do it right with a request for about a quarter million dollars. The government has been dragging its feet, though, punting the request about and making no promises.

Now you might say that times are tough, the economy is down, the government might just be strapped and is cutting corners. In that case, I’d say, OK, we atheists have to do some penny-pinching too, it’s only fair.

But then how to explain the fact that the Australian government just blithely handed over $2.5 million for a religious conference? And has flatly rejected the bid for funding from the atheists?

Government spokesman Luke Enright said: “The decision not to fund this event has nothing to do with religious ideology – the convention just doesn’t meet the criteria required to receive government funding”.

What’s the Australian word for “bullshit”, people?

Pile it higher, Australians!

Reverend Tim Costello, a patron of the world’s religions event, said it was important to support the forum, as “90 per cent of the world is deeply religious”.

“In a global context, most of the world is profoundly religious, and there literally can’t be peace without religious peace,” Mr Costello said.

Have you ever noticed that Christians like to count Communists as atheists when recounting the evils done in the name of that ideology, but whenever they make the argument from popularity, as Costello is doing here, they suddenly forget the Chinese? It’s very strange.

I also think he’s lying. A majority of the world is casually religious, not deeply or profoundly. I’d go further: most of the people in this world are stupidly religious, with ingrained beliefs that they did not acquire through thought or study, but through regular indoctrination from childhood on.

We also will not have peace through religion. Religion is arbitrary, false, and unverifiable; it is a body of ideas with no empirical restraint, that can be freely invented, and in the worst cases, inspire dangerous fanaticism. We will not have peace while religion is uncaged.

It does not matter, though. The fact that atheists are a minority does not argue that they deserve no consideration at all. I thought this was a well understood principle; the danger in a democracy is the tyranny of the majority, and safeguards have to be put in place to protect the rights of minorities. Since Costello is a “reverend”, unfortunately, that probably means he’s an ignorant ass who has never learned anything that matters.

Try not to think Catholic thoughts today, if you can help it

I know, it’s Thanksgiving in America, and I’ve already been curmudgeonly enough for you—but I have to do you the favor now of ruining your appetite with this tale of institutionalized child abuse in Ireland. It involves the Catholic Church, of course (and isn’t that unsurprising ennui just another indication of Catholicism unsavory reputation?).

Authorities enjoyed a cosy relationship with the Church and did not enforce the law as four archbishops, obsessed with secrecy and avoiding scandal, protected abusers and reputations at all costs, the report said..

Hundreds of crimes against children from the 1960s to the 1990s were not reported while police treated clergy as though they were above the law.
 

In a three-year inquiry, the Commission to Inquire into the Dublin Archdiocese uncovered a sickening tactic of ”don’t ask, don’t tell” throughout the Church.

”The Commission has no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities,” it said.

”The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up.

There is one bright spot of common sense.

The inquiry, headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, said the hierarchy cannot claim they did not know that child sex abuse was a crime.

That’s good to hear. The spectacle of a gang of gruesome old sanctimonious virgins looking befuddled and trying to claim, “We had no idea that buggering children was a bad idea, your honor” would be a bit much to take.