Reading Time: 4 minutes God is the ultimate ad baculum argument. By claiming to be following God’s will, religious believers can concoct rules justified not by reason, but by the threat of force.
Roman Catholicism
Posted inReligious News
Shots fired: Pope Francis goes after US Catholic hardliners
Reading Time: 8 minutes While meeting with Jesuits in Portugal, Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, lamented how ‘backward’ American Catholic hardliners are these days.
Catholicism has always been in a constant state of change. But this American faction can’t admit or allow that.
Posted inSexuality
Bleeding the church: Conservative Catholics revive the Inquisition
Reading Time: 5 minutes The Catholic church is suffering a massive priest shortage, and conservatives want to make it worse by hunting down clerical sinners so they can be purged.
Posted inCulture
Divorce is relatively recent in Ireland
Reading Time: 2 minutes When I divorced my first wife in 2008, I was expecting some blowback from friends and family. I was living in California at the time. But in Ireland, it was new. A referendum removing the constitutional prohibition on divorce was approved on 24 November, 1995. The social order of my country did not fall apart, as was […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
Treat my body like vegetable peelings
Reading Time: 4 minutes New York legalizes composting of human remains, and the Catholic church sputters in futility.
Posted inFilm/TV
Now this I gotta see: a bare-chested Mark Wahlberg getting baptized in a Catholic church
Reading Time: 3 minutes I’ve always been a fan Mark Wahlberg, formerly Marky Mark, and I think he’s one of the sexiest men on the planet. There, I’ve said it, and I won’t apologize. So maybe soon I’ll put myself through the ordeal of sitting through a two-hour long faith-based movie, Father Stu, just to see him topless in […]
Posted inReproductive rights
Catholic School’s Students Leave Anti-Abortion Rally
Reading Time: 8 minutes It wasn’t a boycott. It was an actual walkout. And almost all of the students at this surprisingly-large Catholic school participated.
Posted inGeneral
Christian Conservatives Cheer Genocide
Reading Time: 6 minutes This is the mindset that gave rise to witch trials and pogroms, to the rack and the thumbscrews, to waterboarding and burning at the stake.
Posted inGeneral
Canada’s Churches Are Burning
Reading Time: 5 minutes As more children’s graves are discovered at Indian residential schools, churches have burned and the Canadian religious right has immediately made a grab for victimhood.
Posted inGeneral
The Kamloops School: Christianity’s Cultural Genocide
Reading Time: 6 minutes In the name of Christianity, Canada’s residential schools committed a catalog of atrocities against native people.