Author: Ophelia Benson

The Vatican is different from you and me; it has an eccentric way of ordering its priorities – a way so eccentric that it passes human understanding.

It has this secret tribunal, you see, which it has only now decided to open to the public, or rather to that portion of the public known as ‘the faithful.’ This secret tribunal ‘handles confessions of sins so grave only the pope can grant absolution.’ Ooh – the pope’s a busy guy, so they must be some truly grave sins then. (But then, ‘sin’ is a silly idea, and the Catholic church’s ideas of what sin is are also silly – but still, the pope is a busy guy, so they’re not going to get things too backward, surely.)

By lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding the tribunal’s work, the Vatican hopes to emphasize the fundamental role the sacrament plays in saving souls, the Vatican’s No. 2, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said in a paper delivered at the conference. “Today it seems as though the sense of sin has been forgotten,” he said.

The sacrament saves souls, and if souls are not saved, bad things happen, though the bad things happen to souls, not bodies, so whether what happens has anything to do with actual burning or not is not altogether clear, at least not to me. But that’s okay, because people who believe it are bound to be scared in some way, and that’s the important thing. It’s very worrying when the sense of sin has been forgotten, because then people don’t have this pervading but nebulous sense of anxiety and worry and dread in case they are commiting ‘sins’ without knowing it.

Confessions of even the most heinous of crimes and sins — such as genocide or mass murder — are handled at the local level by priests and their bishops and are not heard by the tribunal. Its work involves those sins that are reserved for the pope — considered so serious that a local priest or bishop is not qualified to grant absolution, said Cardinal James Francis Stafford, an American who heads the Apostolic Penitentiary. These include defiling the Eucharist, which Catholics believe is the body and blood of Christ. Stafford said this offense is occurring with more and more frequency, not just in satanic rites but by ordinary faithful who receive Communion and then remove the host from their mouths and spit it out or otherwise desecrate it.

Read that carefully. Then read it again. Then again. The Catholic church actually thinks that spitting out a cracker is a more serious ‘sin’ than genocide or mass murder.

I thought I already knew how horrible the Vatican is, but it just isn’t possible to know, is it; they keep so much of their horribleness a secret. I should have known – I did know they put Montaigne’s book on the Index partly because he was against torturing heretics before killing them, and said so – I did know how they treated Irish children until shockingly recently – I did know they tell credulous people that condoms don’t work. And yet, I still didn’t know. They take spitting out a cracker more seriously than genocide. And they mean it.

Denialism and death threats.

A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States. But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats…[Offit] is also the co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills 60,000 children a year in poor countries.

So…Paul Offit collaborated on the invention of a vaccine that if implemented can save the lives of at least 60,000 children a year in poor countries – and yet ‘antivaccine activists’ think he’s evil and some think he should get death threats. That’s odd.

“[A] few years ago this ceased to be a civil scientific discourse and became about crucifying individuals,” said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, who says he has had threats against his children.

Vaccines prevent lethal diseases – yet people get so angry about a non-existent link between vaccination and autism that they want to kill or at least threaten people who are working on vaccines. That’s deranged.

Of course, having grown up in a world where lethal contagious diseases, apart from AIDS, are no longer commonplace, they don’t know what it’s like to live with the constant risk and sometimes reality of cholera, typhoid. TB, polio – and measles. But if they’re going to become activists on the subject, then they ought to find out what it’s like. It’s not all that difficult.

Many doctors now argue that reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby with the same indifference they do Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers and those claiming to have proof that NASA faked the Moon landings.

In other words reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby like whack jobs.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Excuse me – I can’t help it.

The Pope has instructed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition, to draw up a new handbook to help bishops snuff out an explosion of bogus heavenly apparitions. Benedict XVI plans to update the Vatican’s current rules on investigating apparitions to help distinguish between true and false claims of visions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, messages, stigmata (the appearances of the five wounds of Christ), weeping and bleeding statues and Eucharistic miracles.

Well yes, certainly, of course; one can quite see why he would. Only…is it really, actually, genuinely possible to distinguish between true and false claims of visions and stigmata and the like? Or are they much of a muchness? Oh no, surely they have a method; they can’t be just gesturing at the air.

[A]nyone who claims to have seen an apparition will only be believed as long as they remain silent and do not court publicity over their claims. If they refuse to obey, this will be taken as a sign that their claims are false. The visionaries will then be visited by a team of psychiatrists, either atheists or Catholics, to certify their mental health while theologians will assess the content of any heavenly messages to see if they contravene Church teachings.

Ah good! That’s a good method – that should definitely weed out the bogus claims, because Church teachings are the infallible checking mechanism for telling Up from Down, gold from dross, wheat from chaff, wine from vinegar, and heavenly from not so good.

If the visionary is considered credible they will ultimately be questioned by one or more demonologists and exorcists to exclude the possibility that Satan is hiding behind the apparitions in order to deceive the faithful.

Yes but…how does that work? What questions are there that demonologists and exorcists can ask that would reveal Satan hiding behind the apparitions? Isn’t Satan clever enough to answer their questions in such a way that they can’t spot Satan hiding? Oh well, I shouldn’t ask such questions, demonologists and exorcists are professionals and they have techniques and tools and skills that they learned and got degrees in, so I’ll just bow deferentially and go eat lunch.

The Vatican is in TRUB-BLE . The Dutch Foreign Minister is going to YELL AT IT. It might have to GO TO BED WITHOUT ANY DESSERT. HA ha ha HA ha.

The Vatican envoy to the Netherlands, we learn with enormous pleasure this weekend, is about to receive a well-deserved arse-kicking from Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister, Maxime Verhagen…[T]he envoy – Monsignor François Bacqué – has been called to a meeting to explain the Catholic Church’s stance on sexuality and marriage, and answer charges the Church opposes gay rights…LifeSiteNews said that, in December, the Vatican was attacked in the international press for refusing to endorse the UN motion claiming to “decriminalise homosexuality”…The Vatican’s representative at the UN, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, said in December that although there was agreement that persons with homosexual inclinations should not be subject to arrest or other forms of unjust discrimination, the motion would lend support to the movement to create homosexual “marriage” or other legal recognition for homosexual unions.

And therefore the Vatican is content to keep the criminalization of homosexuality, in other words the Vatican has presumptuous intrusive trivial unwarranted objections to homosexual marriage and therefore it wants homosexuality to go on being a crime. In other words the Vatican prides itself on being pointlessly bigoted and having contempt for human rights.

The Vatican also opposed the use in the document of expressions such as “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” saying they are not defined in international law but are only cultural concepts promulgated in the media and the homosexualist political movement.

Ah! Ah yes – so they are! Whereas the Vatican’s concepts are…what, exactly? They’re not concepts but truths engraved in nature? Edicts ratified by the seldom-seen but always groveled-to absentee deity? Well no doubt the Vatican would like to think so, but guess what, the Vatican’s rules and regs and refusals and foot-stampings are ‘only cultural concepts’ too, promulgated in the Vatican press office and the Catholic political movement. They’re made up. They’re not based on anything. They’re bullshit. I oppose the use of such expressions as “Holy Father” and “Holy See” and “Vatican envoy” because they’re just cultural concepts promulgated by a bunch of reactionary obscurantist deeply mistaken men in robes.

So is the BBC a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Church of England or god’s favorite offspring or what? What’s it playing at?

The BBC has been forced to apologise to an acclaimed psychologist and writer after editing her derogatory comments about religion so that a radio programme broadcast “the opposite” of what she had said…[Dorothy] Rowe, best known for her work on depression, had attempted to comment on the subject proposed by the programme’s producer: “Why so many people want to believe in God and search for faith.” But she was aghast to hear how her words were eventually used…She said the interview “sounds like I am giving unqualified praise to religious belief. There is no mention of what I talked…about at length, that religious belief can cause immense misery. I often summarise this with: ‘The church keeps me in business’.”

What happened…someone’s foot slipped and all the critical parts got accidentally erased?

The row has provided ammunition for secular critics who accuse the BBC of using its programmes to promote religion. Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, who was interviewed for the same programme as Rowe, said: “I gave a long interview, but when I listened to the finished product it contained just a couple of very brief soundbites from me which were not representative of the thoughts I had expressed…This programme was the most blatant piece of religious propaganda I have heard for a long time.”

Sad, isn’t it. The god-huggers want the rest of us to shut up about god, so they start distorting the evidence, so we get more irritated than we were before, so we make more noise, so they even more desperately want us to shut up, so they distort the evidence in even more brazen (and stupid) ways, and round we go.