Yesterday, I spent the day finishing out my term as Minority Election Inspector in a Catholic dominated town. This gave me the opportunity to talk to local Catholics. Apparently out of the nine Catholic Churches in the area, at least four and maybe as many as five are closing. My fellow officials were upset about this, but me, not so much.
Tag Pope
Don’t get me wrong, I think Pope Francis is a huge improvement from Pope Palpetine Benedict. Francis is a much nicer guy and I like how he pretends that he is concerned about the poor. However, when it comes to the actual policies of the Vatican and the Catholic Church, nothing has really changed at all.
When you first think about Pope Francis and President Obama, you might not think they have much in common aside from holding a position of leadership and tremendous power. Upon careful inspection however, they do seem to share quite a bit in common.
As an atheist, I think religion is all a bunch of bullshit and yet when religious believers claim that someone can’t get into their imaginary Disney World or will be tortured in their imaginary Guantanamo, it still bothers me. Yeah, I know it is all bullshit anyway, but like all things it is the thought that counts. So let’s have fun with that.
It seems that the Catholic Church has resurrected something other than Jesus in a cracker. They are bringing back indulgences. That’s when the Church extends your imaginary life a little bit in Purgatory in exchange for your bribe… or in this case, following the Pope on Twitter during some religious youth conference.
It is no secret that the Huffington Post Religion Section is hostile toward atheists. Some atheist bloggers even refuse to share HuffPo articles in protest of that hostility. That’s totally fair, but I want to come at it from the opposite angle. I want you to share atheist articles from HuffPo… a lot.
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The Bible contains a lot of extremely silly and ridiculous claims and unless you are a diehard Bible literalist, that should be pretty obvious. When religious believers come face to face with these silly and ridiculous claims of their religion, they typically fall back to the old, “that part is a metaphor” card. Let’s examine that briefly.
For starters, I would like to inquire about this so called “metaphor.” What exactly is the claim a metaphor for, exactly? I mean when Jesus says that it is better to pluck out your eye and chop off your hand rather than to steal or feel lust, he prefaces it why saying that it is better to lose these body parts than to have one’s soul tortured for all eternity. So what exactly is that a metaphor for? Maybe that wasn’t one of those metaphor parts of the Bible?
There is an atheist meme that states that any part of the Bible that contradicts science or is just blatantly ridiculous is obviously a metaphor. Basically, this meme is making light of the ever sliding scale of biblical credibility.
The old “metaphor” card seems to be the new “God of the Gaps” excuse. It seems that as time goes by and our scientific understanding of the universe grows, there also seem to be more and more metaphors in the Bible. Funny how that works out.
Who would have guessed that the man in the funny hat is just a figure head? Over the last week or so, we learned that the Pope isn’t in control of the Vatican and that what he says isn’t infallible… okay we already knew that second part.
Days after the Pope implied that good atheists are welcome in Heaven, the Vatican Secretariat of State allegedly Tweeted, “Intolerance against Christians, especially in the name of ‘tolerance’, should be condemned publicly.”
Yesterday, the Pope made the news again by calling for an end to the “cult of money.” This Pope is very different from the last Pope in that he actually cares what people think about him and he has made a concerted effort to give the appearance of being humble. The media seems to have bought into this narrative. Make no mistake the Pope’s humility is as fictional as the deity he worships.