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Do Popemobiles really protect you from bullets?

I would say that this problem of being shot cannot be overcome by the distribution of bulletproof, 2″-thick armoured glass Popemobiles: on the contrary, they increase it. The solution must have two elements: firstly, bringing out the human dimension of guns, that is to say a spiritual and human renewal that would bring with it a new way of behaving towards others, and secondly, true friendship offered above all to those who are suffering, a willingness to make sacrifices and to practise self-denial, to be alongside the suffering.

Bulletproof glass Popemobiles are against God’s laws. Worse, the manufacturers of bulletproof glass Popemobiles deliberately add tiny holes that bullets can get through, in order to cause shootings in the Vatican.

So, I wonder what the Pope’s been up to lately…

Because, you know, the Pope never makes me cross.

First of all was the story of Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, the Archbishop of Recife’s decision to excommunicate a woman who helped her daughter get an abortion. The daughter was nine. She needed an abortion because her Catholic stepfather raped her. The rapist was not excommunicated. The Vatican supported all of this, so the only way these actions make any sense is if the Vatican considers abortion worse than raping a nine-year-old girl. And that nearly makes sense, except that the girl would probably have died in childbirth, so even if you consider her twin fÅ“tuses ‘people’ you still have to be pretty warped to expect her to die for the crime of being raped. (Warped, or Muslim.)

After that, the Vatican calmed down a little and celebrated International Women’s Day, by — I know, this has to be gold, doesn’t it? — by publishing an article asking the question “What in the 20th century did most to liberate Western women?” and reaching the rather brilliant conclusion that it was probably the invention of the washing machine. Not the right to work. Not women’s suffrage. Definitely a machine that makes cleaning clothes (which clearly is Women’s Work) easier. I mean, even if that’s pragmatically true (which it isn’t) don’t say so right after you’ve okayed raping small girls.

Pope_cropped
It’s lucky the Pope isn’t at all utterly terrifying.
Creative Commons License photo credit: openDemocracy

After that piece of light-hearted batshit whimsy, the Pope decided to refocus his efforts on Catholicism’s core competency: ruining innocent people’s lives with arbitrary and idiotic dogma. This time, it’s Africa’s turn. Speaking about the AIDS epidemic there, the Pope himself, not a lackey this time, said “the distribution of condoms… aggravates the problems”. The Telegraph have found themselves a priest to defend him — and let’s mention now that I’m only inferring he’s a priest from his photo. Nowhere do they bother to actually mention that he works for the Pope, because that might be a bit too much like declaring one’s interests for the mainstream media. Their priest, George Pitcher, rehashes the same old argument I’ve heard over and over again: “that the Church’s historic teaching that chastity outside marriage and fidelity within it would prevent the spread of killer diseases such as Aids”. And this is true, but alas irrelevant, because nobody is criticising that teaching. (At least, I’m not. At the moment.) What we are criticising is the Pope’s claim that distributing condoms will make the AIDS epidemic worse. This claim is demonstrably false. It turns out that if you grow up and go with the facts instead of just making shit up, you can actually make a difference and save some lives.

The problem I have with the Pope’s speech is not that he advocated abstinence: it is that he specifically lied about something that we know works. Even if nobody acts on his advice, if they believe the epidemiological claims that he makes then they will make bad decisions and people will die.

FebruaryBiscuit

Here are my NewsBiscuit submissions for the last month. First, one that made the front page:

Now the others. Tip of the hat to anhodika for inspiring the first one and to Smudge for the headline on the second one. (Community site, see?)

Straw refuses to publish details of amendments to Freedom of Information Act

Following backlash against the scrapped publication of Parliamentary minutes from the run-up to the Iraq war, Jack Straw has announced that there will be a series of reforms to the current Freedom of Information Act. He promised reporters that the new Act would be more efficient and less easily circumvented, but he refused to divulge how this would be achieved or exactly what the proposals were.

Speaking on BBC Radio 7, he said that the new rules would stop politicians ‘publishing embarassing information in obscure places where it would be unlikely to be widely seen, such as Hansard or this show’. When asked where the information would instead be published, Straw looked puzzled, and after a pause said that the new proposals favoured openness but that the specifics of the proposals were not intended for public dissemination.

Straw went on to explain that while it is important that the public has a right to access information about government, that must be balanced with other concerns, such as security. ‘Of the nation?’ prompted the presenter, to which Straw replied, ‘well yes, obviously, but also of my job.’ When pressed for more information, he explained that ‘if the public know how to get information, then so do al-Qaeda, and that could pose serious threats.’ Instead, the government is set to bring in a replacement Act, whereby the public has a right to access large amounts of government information, including Parliamentary minutes and MPs’ expenses, but will not be told how to do so. He promised, however, that details of the process would be made freely available to anyone who asked to see them, as long as they submit their request in a correctly formatted letter to the new Information Commissioner’s office, whose address was also available on properly presented request.

The new Act is expected to come into force at the start of April, however Straw promised that information important to the public, such as war minutes and MPs’ expenses, would be covered by the new rules immediately ‘to aid transparency in government’.

Continue reading →

In Which a Man Who Helped a Paedophile Discusses a Former Member of the Hitler Youth Criticising a Holocaust Denier. Isn’t Christianity Lovely?

I’ve been a bit behind in my ‘Popewatch’ documentation of his every move. He recently offended a number of people when he appointed an ‘ultra-conservative’ bishop (as if there were some other kind). Apparently, this guy ‘wrote in a parish newsletter that Hurricane Katrina was an act of “divine retribution” for the sins of a sexually permissive society’, ‘warned children against reading JK Rowling’s novels about the boy wizard Harry Potter, describing them as spreading satanism’ and ‘said it was no coincidence that the Tsunami disaster had occurred at Christmas, inferring that it was punishment for “rich western tourists” who had “fled to poor Thailand”‘. All of the above is pretty shitty, but probably for the most part fairly harmless and to be expected of some part of any large religious group. What is despicable in this story is that the Pope made the man a bishop. The Pope has the power to make Catholicism a respectable, progressive religion or to make it an dangerous and oppressive cult, and he appears to have picked ‘cult’.

Before that, he… er…

Okay, I don’t know what the word for the opposite of ‘excommunication’ is. I shall use ‘incommunication’.

Anyway, Pope Ratzinger has incommunicated a former cleric thrown out of the church for being a Holocaust denier. He can’t be a priest again unless he changes his mind, apparently, but he’s still back in the church. The Pope’s explanation is that he didn’t know about his views on the Holocaust when he lifted the excommunication. Smart readers will have spotted that that story makes no sense, and the reason it makes no sense is that I made a mistake. Here, I blithely assumed that a Holocaust denier thrown out of a religious order with a professed moral authority might have been thrown out because he was a Holocaust denier, but it turns out that he was thrown out on a technicality. More bizarrely still, he has in the last hour built a bizarre simulacrum of utter reasonableness and issued this statement:

Since I see that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must look again at the historical evidence. It is about historical evidence, not about emotions, and if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time.

For a Holocaust denier to say something like that is simultaneously massively encouraging and terrifying, but given that his job is to promote belief in Jesus, a man whose historical existence is predicate on a handful of accounts of his life written decades after the event and who claims to be the son of a virgin and an invisible wizard who lives in the sky, it’s just too surreal to try to analyse further.

I had no idea this quote existed when I started this post. Every time you look into the inner machinations of any church nonsense like this appears. The whole system is so entirely unhinged that any place you choose to dig will lead to something like that pretty soon.

I mention it principally because I was surprised to read in the news that Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, a cleric I despise more than most, not least because he is complicit in the sexual abuse of children, had done something good for a change by publicly criticising the Pope for this, in a letter to the Chief Rabbi…

Dear Chief Rabbi,

I am writing to express my dismay at the effect of the Vatican decree releasing from excommunication bishops consecrated illicitly. Specifically I naturally deplore the comments made by the Englishman, Rev Williamson, in his denial of the full horror of the Holocaust.

His statement and views have absolutely no place in the Catholic Church and its teaching. Pope Benedict’s reaffirmation of this on 28 January 2009 was made very clear when he expressed ‘full and unquestionable solidarity with our brother and sister recipients of the First Covenant ’¦ May the Shoah be for all a warning against forgetfulness, against denial or reductionism, because violence against a single human being is violence against all’.

Perhaps I should add that the lifting of excommunication is only a first step towards reconciliation of the bishops concerned. None of them is yet able to exercise any office either as priest or bishop in communion with the Catholic Church.

I put this in writing to assure you of our continued understanding and friendship. In these difficult times we are called to bear witness to peace and goodwill. I like to think this is especially true of relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish Community here in Britain.

With kindest wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Cormac Card. Murphy-O’Connor
Archbishop of Westminster

…but then I read the letter and it turns out he didn’t actually say anything at all.

I can’t work out why that’s considered news. He doesn’t criticise the Pope at all (which is fair enough as he didn’t do anything wrong in this case), despite what the Telegraph may think. He basically says “I think it’s a shame that undoing a piece of beaurcracy happened to increase the number of Holocaust deniers in the church, but it’s not that big a deal. We’re still cool, right?”. Which is fair enough, but why report it?

Oh, what’s he said now?

I guess in some ways you have to feel sorry for the Pope. He’s committed his whole life to Catholicism, and he’s managed to rise to the highest possible job in the church, and now he’s discovering that he doesn’t actually do anything much but sit there and occasionally address a crowd of people who mostly won’t understand a word of it. He’s a figurehead, and (as he amply demonstrates) imaginary dead people can do that job. He’s head of an organisation that hasn’t materially changed since its inception, and probably by now everything interesting and relevant on the subject has been said by a previous Pope, so now he’s reduced to chatting nonsense. This is his spokesperson (or ‘Metatron’) talking:

In the age of the cell phone and the internet it is probably more difficult than before to protect silence and to nourish the interior dimension of life. It is difficult but necessary. There is an interior and spiritual dimension of life that must be guarded and nourished. If it is not, it can become barren to the point of drying up and, indeed, dying. Today, this is a very grave threat, and it is the most irreparable misfortune. Nations once rich in faith and vocations are losing their own identity under the harmful and destructive influence of a certain modern culture.

It’s just nonsense. It sounds like something Sarah Palin might say. It seems to mean (if anything) that having the opportunity to communicate efficiently is a bad thing because it means you spend less time sitting about on your own coming up with bullshit ideas about how you’d like the universe to work. But mostly it looks like vague twaddle designed to sound impressive without saying anything, with a couple of modern references thrown in at the start to make it seem relevant and new, even though you could replace ‘the cell phone and the internet’ with ‘quill and parchment’ or even ‘the wheel and fire’ and it wouldn’t make any less sense.

But tragically, this really is the most useful thing he has to do with his life. There are a lot of problems with the Catholic Church that by rights the Pope should be fixing, obviously, but you can’t expect him to actually do it because the entire system is designed so that nobody who will spot them would ever want or be allowed to become Pope.

I wonder if he realises how utterly pointless he is. Probably not. I expect he’d do something useful if he did.

Religious Crackpot Of The Month, September 2008

This month, I am awarding Crackpot to the Italian government prosecutors, who have really managed to pull it out of the bag by simultaneously being wrong and stupid. Not a good combination when you’re in a position of any kind of power.

Apparently, they have decided to prosecute a comedian called Sabrina Guzzanti. Her crime, such as they think it is, was this: she said in her act that within twenty years Italian schoolteachers would be vetted by the Vatican,

But then, within 20 years the Pope will be where he ought to be ’” in Hell, tormented by great big poofter devils, and very active ones, not passive ones.

The wording seems to vary between reports. I assume they are different translations. This one is from the Times. Other reports are in the Guardian (and their opinion), Chortle (where I first found the story), and loads of others, including Zimbio, whose article has this to say:

Ratzinger does a lot of pontificating…

That’s true. I also hear he’s Catholic.

They think it’s okay to punish people for mocking a bigot in a frock. Perhaps more worryingly, they also think it’s okay to punish people for mocking their President — that must make politics a risky game. It is no surprise that this law was signed by His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire (really, that’s what he called himself).

So that’s why they’re wrong. You just wait until you hear why they’re stupid…

The July rally [at which Guzzanti made the offending joke] was called to protest against alleged interference by the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Italian affairs, from abortion to gay rights, but also to attack the Prime Minister for passing “ad personam” laws to protect his own interests and avoid prosecution on corruption allegations.

So your plan is to arrest anyone who points it out under “ad hominem” laws? That will work.

Three years ago Ms Guzzanti released a widely praised film, Viva Zapatero!, about the suppression in 2003 of her late night show RAIot in which she had satirised the Italian Prime Minister. At the 2005 Venice International Film Festival Viva Zapatero! was given an ovation.

Just you watch how well that works.

In Related News, the Pope Criticised Badly Drawn Boy for Having a Silly Hat

It’s a bit old now, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to blog as part of my apparently ongoing project to document and mock everything the new, crazy Pope says and does wrong from the moment of his appointment to shortly after the moment of his death, after which (much as he thinks otherwise) he will not say or do anything.

He was not-very-recently scheduled to give a talk, on the subject of… er… nothing very much, at La Sapienza university, but the talk was cancelled after large numbers of scientists complained. They said the Pope shouldn’t be allowed to talk at a now-secular (the university having been founded by an earlier and probably saner Pope) research institute after What He Said About Galileo. Eventually the talk was reorganised for a later date, and the Pope tried to claim the triple-whammy of association with the university, victim, and victor. Personally I think he came out of the whole thing looking like a twat, but then that’s much the way he went in so no harm done.

For those who missed it, the now-pope, 17 years ago and long before he was pope, defended the Catholic Church’s treatment of Galileo way back when. (For those who missed that too, Galileo pointed out that the Earth orbits the sun and not the other way around. The last Pope, John Paul II, was happy to admit Galileo was right, as to be fair is the new one, but where Benedict XVI loses my respect is that he condones the actions of the Church at the time when they banned all his books, forced him to recant and locked him in his house until he died.)

Of course, the Church was quick to leap to Ratzinger’s defence:

The Vatican has dismissed some of the protestors [sic] as anti-clerical activists, and have said that others have misunderstood Benedict’s remarks, made 17 years ago.

…

As Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict said that Galileo had turned out to be correct about the earth revolving around the sun, and that subsequent biblical scholarship had rejected literalist readings of texts that had been taken by the Church to deny this.

Nevertheless, he said, Galileo had been dogmatic and sectarian in his statements at the time, and the Church authorities had acted reasonably given the levels of knowledge available then.

So, his defence is that Galileo, though now-demonstrably and -clearly right, was too dogmatic for the Pope. So they banned his books and humiliated him and locked him in his house for questioning their beliefs, but that’s okay because he was a tad dogmatic. In any case, “the levels of knowledge available then” were the same as the levels of (relevant) knowledge available now: there was no proof that the sun orbitted the Earth. As such Galileo was surely perfectly free to doubt it, yes? No. It’s as if the Pope believes that the Church is free to demand that everyone follows their thinking on any issue right up until the moment that it can be definitively proved wrong and everyone agrees. Another fun paragraph from that article is here:

Nevertheless, there is no doubt but that the Vatican is extremely embarrassed by the incident, which will strengthen the hand of those who argue that religious belief and scientific enquiry are incompatible – a view rejected by those involved in science-theology conversations, but spreading widely among non-specialists.

That reads like it was written by one of those strange people who study theology as if it was a proper subject. The incompatibilities (or lack of them) between science and religion is a philosophical area — we can’t prove it. Sure, it’s easy to point out that science is based around the idea of questioning all knowledge and demanding proof of all claims, whereas religion is based around the idea of believing what you’re told, preferably without any proof, but some people will say that they don’t accept that and even though they’re obviously wrong, they’re not demonstrably wrong. They just have to chase you back until you hit an assumption (say, “logic holds” or “the universe exists”) and declare their assumption equally valid.

And I just bet that they’re using the phrase “non-specialists” to mean “atheists”. That’s what it usually means in this context: it’s the mindset that thinks you can’t disprove religion without studying it for years. It’s a bit like saying “you can’t prove Ï€ doesn’t equal four without checking every decimal place”. After all, the view they ascribe to “non-specialists”, “that religious belief and scientific enquiry are incompatible,” is the view held by Richard Dawkins, the esteemed biologist, professor for the public understanding of science, and author of The God Delusion. I think it’s fair to call him an expert in the field.

But they’ve decided what’s true and anyone who disagrees obviously just hasn’t studied hard enough. Damn those dogmatic astronomers!

Breadwatch

The Catholic Church does a lot of things that are bad, but it also does some good. One of those things is that, particularly since the new Crazy Pope took over, it provides a never-ending stream of examples of all the bad things religion does. Here’s the latest one, and it might be the stupidest yet. This is what the Pope intends to do about the paedophilia scandals in the church (from the Guardian):

The Vatican has called on Catholics to atone for the sex abuse scandals that have engulfed their church in recent years by taking part in what may be the largest global prayer initiative ever seen.

Cardinal Cláudio Hummes told the Vatican’s official daily, L’Osservatore Romano, that every diocese in the world should name a priest to work full-time on the arrangements for the “perpetual adoration” of the eucharist. This would involve parishioners taking turns to keep a round-the-clock vigil in front of a consecrated host representing the body of Jesus.

The initiative has all the hallmarks of the thinking [sic] of Pope Benedict, and would certainly not have been launched in this way without his full support.Hummes, the head of the Vatican ministry for the clergy, said a letter had gone to “dioceses, parishes, rectories, chapels, monasteries, convents and seminaries” calling on them to organise groups of “adorers”. The aim was “to make amends before God for the evil that has been done and hail once more the dignity of the victims”, who had suffered from the “moral and sexual conduct of a very small part of the clergy”. He did not indicate how long he saw the adoration continuing.

The Times said a little more:

Cardinal Hummes said that the aim was to put a definitive stop to a scandal that … [he said] was exceptionally serious, although it was probably caused by ‘no more than 1 per cent’ of the 400,000 Catholic priests around the world.

So that’s okay, then. Thousands of children have been abused, but the Pope has a plan. He’s going to have “a round-the-clock vigil in front of a consecrated host representing the body of Jesus*”. He’s going to ask people to watch bread. I can see that helping a lot, presuming it was the bread that was abusing all those children.

Partly I object to this because it’s moronic, but to be honest, that doesn’t matter. This represents a huge number of people who are, in all probability, going to do as he asks and keep a close eye on baked goods and think they’re helping. Not only is that time that could be better spent actually doing something, but by creating the (not very realistic) illusion of action it will discourage those people from really taking any in their remaining free time.

And to a point you have to respect it, because if the Pope really does believe that looking at food will solve the problem then he’s doing exactly the right thing, but then, if the Pope really does believe that looking at food will solve the problem, then he’s an idiot, so don’t feel you have to respect him more than you would a cucumber. That would mean he thinks that an all-merciful and all-powerful God will refuse to do anything about a spate of paedophiles in his own organisation unless enough people sit around “adoring” him for long enough. How many high-ranking Catholic officials have failed to point out how absurd that is?

It’s hardly worth sitting here trying to make the Pope look stupid. It’s like trying to make fire look warm.

He even has a silly hat.

*…or as the Pope would have it, a consecrated host which is the body of Jesus.

Pope Speaks Out Against Middle East Peace Talks

According to the Pope, “spe salvi”.

This is the title of his latest infallible rant, and is a small nugget of Latin taken from the Bible, where it means “in hope, we are saved”, apparently. (As is my way I’ve linked there to the full rant, not the little snippets in the news.) So what does the Pope have to say for himself this time? Let’s take a look.

Here’s some from section 42, in-keeping with the Christian tradition of numbering all text:

The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is’”in its origins and aims’”a type of moralism … If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope.

Here, the Pope explains that mankind should not try to deliver justice or alleviate suffering. Presumably he thinks all laws should be repealed, all governments shut down, all charities disbanded (which would be a cunning way out of the Amnesty International-shaped hole he dug himself into all those months ago), and all peace talks immediately halted: they are presumptuous, after all, and grounded in the intrinsically false idea that mankind can and must create its own justice.

He really would rather live in the middle ages, wouldn’t he? He’s essentially saying that we should just sit back and watch the world go to hell in a handcart while we sit around being insufferably pious until the biblical “Last Judgement” rolls around and we all get to live forever in paradise. Which to be fair sounds like a terrific plan as long as we can rely on the eternal paradise bit actually happening.

The nerve of the man to accuse atheism of being “intrinsically false” when he believes an invisible wizard from space is going to individually judge everyone in the world and actually physically resurrect all the ones who’ve obeyed his arbitrary set of rules to live forever in an earthly paradise to which, presumably, the second law of thermodynamics does not apply. He criticises Marxism when his proposed solution is to sit back and do absolutely fuck all about the injustices and suffering in the world (many of which are created by his own organisation) and let an imaginary sky fairy fix everything with his magic wand.

I honestly think the Pope is one of the most dangerously insane human beings alive today.

Somebody explain to me why Catholics still exist. I can’t imagine what justification could possibly be given for supporting, even implicitly, this dangerous organisation when there are so many flavours of Christianity which don’t require you to listen to a word of the tripe spewed by the Vatican City.

Personally, I think Italy should demand the country back. Even if the Vatican refused, I think it’d be a pretty easy place to take by force.

Religious Crackpot Of The Month — July 2007: Ceci N’est Pas Un Pope.

The next person who tells me religion forms a basis for morality gets a punch in the face. Well, no, that’s almost certainly not true, but if they do, I feel it will be justified. This month’s Religious Crackpot Of The Month award goes to the entire Vatican, who are increasingly mad and incredibly dangerous.

Religion forms a basis for rules. Rules can be good or bad. But they aren’t morality. It’s not “moral” to be good to avoid burning forever in hell; it’s selfish. It’s not “moral” to obey some rules to gain access to some paradise afterlife; that’s selfish, too. The religious argument, though, says aha, but you see God created the universe and He gets to decide what’s Moral and what’s Immoral. Therefore, it reasons, if you obey the rules God laid down, you will be acting Morally, and if you don’t, you won’t.

This is slightly stupid, because there’s no actual logical connection between creating the universe and morality. You can’t get from one to the other. It’s also stupid because the rules that religions preach now are, even if we’re generous and grant religion the rather absurd assumption that whoever they believe vreated the universe actually did write their holy books, nothing like the originals. They’re not God’s Word; they’re Chinese Whispers.

Evolution doesn’t favour the most accurate forms, or the most true or the nicest. It favours the ones that survive best. And evolution is an inevitable consequence of any system that allows something to mutate, reproduce, and pass changes onto its offspring. So when a book is copied out, changes are introduced in every generation. When a religion is passed on by word of mouth, changes are introduced. When a text is translated, errors creep in. and all these little changes add up over time, and eventually you end up not with the an accurate reflection of any original work, God’s word or otherwise, but with a very powerful meme which is very good at getting itself passed on, very good at deflecting argument, and very good at sticking in your brain. There is no requirement at all for it to do anything else, so generally it doesn’t.

Of course, it will always keep something moral back, like “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. But not because it’s “moral” or “right” or “God’s Word”. It’s because that’s a good survival trait — it allows people to say things like “this idea forms a basis for morality; look, it preaches not killing”. Big whoop. So does Shazanity.

But I can forgive all that. You can believe that, and I won’t think less of you. It’s very hard to break out of something like religion, and some people get enough support and happiness out of theirs that it might not be a good idea anyway. They’re in a symbiotic relationship with the viral meme that is their religion. What I really don’t understand is Roman Catholics.

Now, as I understand this, and I used to be one and now I have a keen interest in them so I like to think I know at least as much about Catholicism as the average Catholic, a Roman Catholic is basically the same as any other Christian except that in addition to the Bible, they also believe a whole stack of other dogma churned out be the Vatican. For example, they have to believe that God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are simultaneously three distinct entities and one single entity. This creates a problem, because if you apply set theory, which I’m given to understand is ultimately the root of all mathematics, then you can start from that premise and prove quite trivially that three equals one*. (Mathematics is important to Catholicism because without it Pope Pius I was the same person as Pope Pius III, and that’s just confusing.) So Catholics also have to believe a second bit of dogma brought in later, which explains it away as a “Strict Mystery”. A Strict Mystery is one that is so mysterious, it’s impossible to understand unless you’re God (or an idiot). This, of course, makes no sense either, and doesn’t really explain anything at all even if you assume it’s true, but that’s okay, because it itself could be a Strict Mystery.

And they you have Limbo. Now Limbo is very confusing. It was widely publicised a bit ago that the latest Pope, who was a Nazi, abolished Limbo, the traditional resting place of unbaptised babies. This meant that all good Catholics who read this had to immediately stop believing in Limbo. But it had been publicised weeks before that he was going to do that, so what were Catholics supposed to believe in the meantime? But the worst part of this is that these reports aren’t true. In real life, the new Pope, who wasn’t really a Nazi, issued a Papal Bull to the effect that Limbo may or may not exist. The Vatican doesn’t know, because the Bible doesn’t say, and of course anything that the Bible doesn’t mention may or may not be true and you can’t prove it, because only the Bible is proof of anything. (You know, the Bible, or anything the Vatican says, because of Papal Infallibility, which was introduced by the Vatican in– hang on.)

But that’s the point: it’s all just rules. Rules don’t define morality. And as if proof were needed, here it is.

This blogger is rather understandably annoyed because not only did some bastard kill two employees of an abortion clinic in the name of his religious “morality”, but now there is a group of people who frankly are at least as bad intent on worshipping him as a hero and re-enacting the murders. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we now have to put up with the Vatican asking all Catholics to boycott Amnesty International. Why? Because they think women should, in some situations, be allowed abortions.

(Now, far be it for me to apply common sense to any of this, but it would seem to me that if aborted foetuses go to Limbo, where they get “natural happiness”, that’s not so very bad. Frankly it’s probably better than most of them would get if they lived a normal life and God Judged them. Really, abortions are selfless acts, with one doctor accepting an eternity in Hell to save a load of foetuses.)

But more to the point, what may or may not happen to foetuses, or for that matter, people, after they die is something of a mystery. It’s really impossible to know, at least, not when you’re alive. What happens in Iraq to people very shortly before they die is a matter of well documented fact. And anyone who read the excellent article in the Times should know what happens in Guantanamo Bay. Amnesty fight these causes, and need money to do that, but the Vatican just mindlessly applies a bunch of rules it invented to everything, with no common sense or compromise or thought of any kind. They spot Amnesty going even slightly against one of those made-up rules and they immediately announce that all the extra suffering, totrure and killings it will cause don’t matter and that all that matters is that Catholics teach Amnesty that God is not to be fucked with. It shouldn’t need stating that boycotting a charity aimed at, and successful in, preserving and standing up for human rights, based on your flimsy interpretation of a book written centuries ago claiming to be the work of God is an utterly abhorrent way to behave. (The same applies to the whole condoms-are-bad-oh-no-AIDS debacle.)

This week, the same Pope has just made an announcement that non-Catholic churches are somehow “not proper churches”. This means, logically, that non-Catholic denominations of Christianity aren’t proper Christianity. Naturally, that’s what Catholics would believe anyway, at some level, so we’ve learned nothing from this but it has still made people angry. Why did he say that? What use was it? Sometimes I think hegoes looking for a fight.

I generally allow religion its follies because they are harmless and because it’s just easier that way. But a number of people who are very important to me are heavily involved in Amnesty, and a number of other people who are also very important to me are Catholics. So I’m rather forced to form an opinion. And my opinion, or rather, the plain simple fact of the matter, is that whether or not Amnesty is right, the Vatican is wrong. So here’s the deal: anybody who refuses to support Amnesty because it conflict with their Catholic beliefs is no longer my friend. It really is that simple. I’m not, as a rule, friends with people who behave abhorrently. If you find yourself in that category, do not attempt to change my mind. Attempt to change your own mind, because it is your mind which is defective. (Anybody who considers themselves a Catholic but finds themselves forced to disagree with things the Vatican says probably ought to take a long look and decide if they are then, by any reasonable definition, a Catholic, or just a Christian whose nearest church happens to be a Catholic one.)

But I’m not going to sit there in conversations any more and act as if this kind of thing is okay. The next person who tells me they are a Catholic is going to get asked if they support Amnesty. Because it’s the difference between “I like to wear white clothes and have bonfires” and “I am a member of the Klan”.

*First,define a set of the father, the son and the holy spirit. This has a cardinality of one. Then one-to-one map it directly to the set of Chipmunks (Alvin, Simon, Theodore) which has a cardinality of three. This proves one equals three. Apparently.