Happy Meal Game: Find the Blasphemy
A bunch of Catholics in France are offended by this image:
BillDo Teaches Us About Moral Absolutes
BillDo in his
1998 annual report:
March 25
Comedy Central’s “South Park” continued its notorious Christian-bashing, with an episode that linked Christians to Nazis as oppressors of homosexuals. In a segment describing homosexuality throughout history, the character “Big Gay Al” interrupted his commentary to say, “Uh-oh, look out, it’s the oppressors—Christians and Nazis and Republicans.” The scene showed Hitler with a Catholic priest to the right and a Republican on the left—the priest waving a cross, the Republican an American flag.
George Soros, the billionaire left-wing Bush-hater who funds the website (MoveOn.org has compared Bush to Hitler)
Want a sample of his politics? In 2005, McCourt took part in a rally, ‘The Call to Drive Out the Bush Regime,’ that compared the Bush administration to Hitler’s regime.
BillDo in his
2008 annual report:
Bill Maher continued his non-stop assault on Catholicism in 2008 by lashing out several times on TV and in movies. After he mocked Transubstantiation early in the year, I said on TV that I would love to step into the ring with him in Madison Square Garden so I could “floor him.” The comment was made in jest, but he kept repeating it all year, feigning victim status. His rant against the pope, made just before the Holy Father visited the U.S. in April, included a comment calling Pope Benedict XVI a Nazi. He apologized (sort of) after we went after him.
So I think the lesson is clear: comparing people to Hitler or Nazis is
unacceptable, and rightfully causes outrage. Right?
CBS/SHOWTIME AIRS NAZI-LIKE ASSAULT
Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on last night’s edition of Penn & Teller’s show. The program aired on Showtime which is owned by CBS:
The Nazis couldn’t have done better.
Ah, but that’s different, isn’t it? Behavior that’s completely
unacceptable in one set of circumstances may be okay in another.
Right, Bill?
Moral relativism is not only an intellectually bankrupt idea, its real-life consequences can be deadly.
…Not until our society comes to accept
what the Catholic Church teaches—that there are moral absolutes and that all
life is sacred—will we turn the corner.
What I’m a little bit tired of is the same kind of cruel caricature. And I love the way the movie ends. You know, here we have this idea that moral absolutes are bad. We need gray areas. Oh, really? Let me tell you something, Brian, you made this movie. Millions of people have lost their lives in the last century because of selling the idea that there are no moral absolutes. If there are no moral absolutes, we are back to different strokes for different people. We put pizzas into ovens in this country, they put Jews into ovens in Nazi Germany. Yet, that may not have been your intention, sir, but you’re selling an idea which is toxic.
Pope Benedict XVI knows that a society absent moral absolutes is capable of great evil. His homily on the "dictatorship of relativism" owes much to John Paul II’s encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, one of the most brilliant statements ever written on the relation between morality and liberty.
Hm. Maybe BillDo should learn how to delete embarrassing archives from
his site.
Or maybe the lesson to be learned is that pointing out Billy-boy’s
hypocrisy is like walking up to a barrel filled with slow-moving fish,
with a rocket launcher bolted to the side and aimed straight into the
barrel, and only someone with too much time on his hands, like me,
would bother to actually pull the trigger.
More Catholic Idiocy
While in Israel, pope Benny
said:
“Those deeply moving encounters brought back memories of my visit three years ago to the death camp at Auschwitz, where so many Jews – mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, friends – were brutally exterminated under a godless regime.”
Yeah, “godless”.
Now, I’m no historian, and my knowledge of religion in Nazi Germany
comes from such places as
Wikipedia
and
The Straight Dope,
and it looks as though the situation is about as clear as mud: yes,
there were people like Martin Niemöller, but there were also Catholic
priests and bishops who didn’t seem to have a problem with the Nazi
regime. And Hitler certainly paid lip service to religion a lot. And
as far as I know, no one was ever excommunicated for participating in
the Holocaust.
Oh, and, of course, there’s the matter of Benny’s own membership in
the Hitler Youth.
At any rate, the situation is certainly nowhere near as clear as “Nazi
Germany was a godless regime.” In fact, one could easily make the case
that Nazi Germany (and the Soviet Union) had a lot of the uglier
aspects of religion: cult of personality, adherence to dogma, sworn
fealty to the authorities, and so forth.
But maybe The Ratz is simply using the word “godless” as synonymous
with “evil”. In which case, I hope he won’t mind if I use “Catholic”
as a synonym for “pederast”.
On a lighter note, Jesus and Mo
informs us
that Catholics have
condemned
reiki
(aka magic massage):
But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine in late March dismissed reiki as superstition incompatible with Christian belief or scientific teaching, and said it is inappropriate for use in Catholic institutions, including hospitals, retreat centers and schools.
From the Catholic Committee on Doctrine’s
Guidelines for Evaluating Reiki as an Alternative Therapy:
[F]rom the time of the Apostles the
Church has interceded on behalf of the sick through the invocation of
the name of the Lord Jesus, asking for healing through the power of
the Holy Spirit, whether in the form of the sacramental laying on of
hands and anointing with oil or of simple prayers for healing, which
often include an appeal to the saints for their aid.
[…][A] Catholic who puts his or her trust in Reiki would be operating
in the realm of superstition, the no-man’s-land that is neither faith
nor science.
(emphasis added)
Clearly, “faith” here means “the good kind of superstition”.
iReligion 2.0
The Telegraph
reports that
Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of Ireland’s Roman Catholics, has urged social network users to start sending daily prayers by text, Twitter or e-mail.
This, of course, could be the start of something huge: if tweeted
prayers are as good as spoken ones (contest for the comments section:
condense the Lord’s Prayer into 140 characters), then the sky’s the
limit.
Imagine: you add a dinner date on your PDA. When it gets added to your
calendar server, it sends a request to the Catholic church’s server,
with the XML equivalent of “forgive me, father, for I have committed
gluttony”. The church’s expert system analyzes this request behind the
scenes, and responds with something like “say five Hail Marys”
(properly encapsulated in XML, of course). Your home computer then
schedules a time to tweet five Hail Marys while you sleep.
At MyVatican, you can view your history confession, schedule
preemptive penance, friend saints and other intercessors, buy relics
at the online shop, and follow your favorite priests as they get
shuffled from one parish to the next.
What would be really cool would be if they wikified the
Catholic Encyclopedia.
Though I assume that [citation needed] would be
replaced by [must be taken on faith].
Catholic Clergy Have Their Own Psychiatric Hospital?
Today’s Post
reports:
A Silver Spring psychiatric hospital that specializes in treating Catholic clergy has been cited for problems that are “serious in nature,” according to a report from Maryland health officials who investigated the facility after a patient drowned himself in a bathtub there in January.
[…]St. Luke, which sees about 600 people a year, almost all of them priests and nuns […]
The thrust of the story is about poor conditions at the hospital, it
being ill-equipped to deal with suicidal patients, and so forth. Which
is a scandal, but not what caught my attention, which was:
There’s a psychiatric hospital that specializes in priests and nuns?
Seriously?
There are hospitals that specialize in soldiers, like Walter Reed. And
I imagine there are psychiatric hospitals that specialize in police
officers and firefighters. But clergy? Really?
If it’s that stressful a lifestyle, then maybe they should rethink how
they’re doing it.
Indian Stupid Burns Like a Hyderabadi Biryani
First, the Telegraph has a
story
about an Indian nun’s book about sex in the church:
The book by the former nun reveals how as a young novice she was propositioned in the confession box by a priest who cited biblical references to “divine kisses”. Later she was cornered by a lesbian nun at a college where they were teaching. “She would come to my bed in the night and do lewd acts and I could not stop her,” she claims.
When she was sent to Bangalore to stay with a priest known for his piety, he lectured her about the need for “physical love” and later assaulted her.
To steal a line from
Monty Python,
“may I take this opportunity of emphasizing that there is no sex in the Catholic Church. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit”.
The article concludes with a spokesman who dismisses the nun’s claims:
“How far what she says is well-founded I
can’t say, but the issues are not very serious. We’re living with
human beings in a community and she should realise this is part of
human life,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
(emphasis added.)
Oh, the irony! If the Catholic church would only realize that yes, sex
is part of human life, and would allow its priests and nuns to get
laid every once in a while, maybe there’d be less of this sort of
thing, to say nothing of child abuse.
(Cue BillDo in 3… 2… 1…)
The second item concerns an
op-ed piece
that appeared in
The Statesman in India.
The piece by Johann Hari argues that while people deserve respect,
ideas don’t. And that a recent UN resolution to avoid criticizing
religion has the effect of shielding human-rights abusers.
He and his editor have since been
arrested
for “hurting the religious feelings” of Muslims. You can’t make this
stuff up.
The Statesman’s
letters page
includes a letter entitled “Denigrating Islam”. Among other things, it
replies to Hari’s original contention that
I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a
“Prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and
ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t
follow him.
with
Hari has made some vulgar remarks about the marriage of the Prophet with young Aisha, which incensed and hurt many readers of The Statesman. Muslims regard the pious wives of the Prophet as their mothers and hold them in high esteem.
Aisha, was not 9 but 10 years of age when she was married to the
Prophet, but came to live with the Prophet much later. It was after
attaining puberty when she was more than 15 years of age. Following
the Arab custom at that time, her father Abu Bakr, the first caliph of
Islam, proposed this marriage to cement his close relationship with
the Prophet.
Oh, so instead of a 53-year-old man fucking a 9-year-old, it was
actually a 58-year-old fucking a 15-year-old. I guess that’s supposed
to make it all right.
I’ve heard Christian apologists make similar excuses for the Old
Testament atrocities (e.g., by saying that Leviticus sets rules on
what you can and can’t do to a slave; which presumably makes it okay
to own human beings as chattel). I’m sure the fact that their Muslim
counterparts use similar arguments says something profound about the
ecumenical brotherhood of man or something. I can’t help imagining a
crowd of Christian and Muslim fanatics hand in hand with torches and
rakes, singing Kumbaya while marching to punish the heretics who would
disrespect their imaginary BFFs.