Blog Against Theocracy: Pottersville Style

“It is courage the world needs, not infallibility…courage is always the surest wisdom.” - Wilfred T. Grenfell

As with Saints Nicholas, Patrick, Valentine and so many others, the immortal story of Christ's execution for our sins and rising from the dead a few days later has somehow been perverted into an orgy of eating, drinking, buying presents and candy for people we hardly know and having egg hunts. Even the President, a self-professed Christian, gets in the act every year by hosting an Easter Egg roll on the White House's front lawn.

And what better way to give a pastel dye-stained middle finger to organized religion than to Bowdlerize it?

We are the people of the United States of America, misinformed, apathetic yahoos in a retroactively Christian nation that nonetheless never caught on to the fact that if Jesus was crucified on Good Friday and resurrected to move back in with Daddy on Easter Sunday, then it was two days and not three. We are a people who indulge in St. Patrick's Day revelry without once stumbling across the irony that the man who brought literacy to Ireland also, according to Thomas Cahill, tried to impose a strict morality that the Irish conditionally accepted or rejected according to the whims of their libidos. Instead, we've retroactively turned him into a 5th century pest exterminator and an excuse to puke green beer into our sewers.

So what would St. Patrick, a refugee from the excesses and perversions of the Roman Empire, have to say about the Vatican using Easter Mass to cover its fat, pasty butt by poo-poohing "petty gossips" and blaming whistleblowers and even the victims for casting aspersions on the so-called dignity of the Vatican and the Holy See Not?


My suspicion is that the uptight, ultra conservative Patrick would go postal and rid the Vatican of the self-serving snakes that infest it. The celibate Patrick also would've gotten medieval on all the remaining priests who ever diddled small children and fed their family jewels to the wolves as we gleefully feed hard-boiled Easter eggs to our kids.

WWJD? I also submit that the otherwise pacifistic Jesus Christ would've been less than impressed with the Vatican's butt-covering and insistence on His vicar's infallibility instead of taking real steps to ensure this sort of thing never happens again, that victims aren't shamed into more enabling silence. The very fact that the Vatican has known about pedophilia in its ranks since at least 1952 yet did not surface until a full half a century later in Boston is proof of how reluctant the victims were to begin with to come forward.

The religious right wing backlash is as predictable as political right wing backlash. "How dare you?" "We're the victims, here!" "They're just in it for the money and publicity!" "The Devil made them blow the whistle on us!"

When you consider how many more people have died in the name of one imaginary god or another, moreso than disease or famine combined, a thinking, enlightened person must come to the conclusion that all organized religion is evil and corrupt at its core. Human history informs us that religions can be divided into two camps: Those who kill for their sky wizard or be killed for it.

Every religion from its start was begun as a way of imposing the will of the few on the many, eventually amassing fortunes and at times immense political power. It is primarily a behavior modification tool, a way to keep the masses from realizing how truly fucked they are in this world by diverting their attention to a nonexistent afterlife.

It doesn't matter of you're talking about Judaism, Islam, Catholicism or the various Protestant faiths: They are all evil, deal in fairy tales and seek to control us in one way or another while extorting money to subsidize their evils.

But these days the Roman Catholic Church are the bad guys and were it not for the heinous crimes of which it's guilty and the youth of its victims, it would be amusing to pass the popcorn and see how Bill Donohue of the Catholic League or Cardinal Sodano or the Pope himself tries to spin the latest allegations.

So if you want to keep undermining your precious Christianity, America, then keeping drinking your green beer, dyeing your eggs and celebrating the birth of Christ at Wal-Mart's toy aisle.