Pope Francis Says Atheists Are All Right With Him

May 22nd, 2013 | Posted by jclifford in Religion - (2 Comments)

The last pope, Joseph Ratzinger, denounced secularism as a source of wickedness. Today, Pope Francis has released a statement that shows a very different attitude.

The Pope said: “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”

What the heck?!? Is Pope Francis finally going to bring the Roman Catholic Church out of the Dark Ages?

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Bernard Sanders Cites Pope Frances

May 18th, 2013 | Posted by jclifford in Economy | Politics | Religion - (1 Comments)

This week, Bernard Sanders, the socialist independent U.S. Senator from Vermont, stood up in front of his colleagues to quote the Pope.

“I don’t usually comment much on religious matters, but I was very impressed by what the Pope had to say today,” said Sanders. “Frankly, I have strong disagreements with the Catholic Church on issues of women’s rights, issues of gay rights, and a number of other issues. On this issue of what is happening economically around the world–the power of financial markets; the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else; the need for government and for states around the world to step in and protect the dispossessed; the need to understand that money unto itself means nothing unless it is being used in a way that improves the lives of all people–that is a message coming from the Pope. It is a message worth thinking about and discussing.”

Senator Sanders cited a speech Pope Frances recently made to ambassadors from Kyrgyzstan, Antigua and Barbuda, Luxembourg, and Botswana. In that speech, the Pope said:

“People have to struggle to live and, frequently, to live in an undignified way. One cause of this situation, in my opinion, is in our relationship with money, and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society. Consequently the financial crisis which we are experiencing makes us forget that its ultimate origin is to be found in a profound human crisis. In the denial of the primacy of human beings! We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old (cf. Ex 32:15-34) has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.”

One could point out that it doesn’t take money to deny the primacy of human beings. At many times in its history, the Catholic Church has used its power to demand the labor of human beings – without compensating them for their work. Money is a means that we have in society of recognizing the worth of what people do, and enabling them to transfer that worth to others.

The Pope’s aversion to money is not so much ethical as it is religious. When Senator Bernard Sanders nods his head in agreement with Pope Frances in calling money a false idol, he leads us to suspect that his own socialist rejection of money has rather religious overtones as well.

It seems to me that Bernard Sanders made a mistake in citing the speech of Pope Frances. Though the Pope’s words may be useful in advancing Sanders’s agenda among more traditionally religious groups, they weaken his credibility among the growing minority of Americans who don’t accept theological proclamations as a matter of faith.

The Catholic Church’s preaching against money doesn’t stop it from hoarding currency itself, or from spending it to try to buy the silence of the victims of its abuses. In the past, crusades against money by socialists and Christians alike have provided a justification for atrocities against the primacy of human beings.

The rejection of money as inherently wicked has not been a sustainable tactic for those who seek a just society. A more healthy approach might be for us to seek a balanced relationship with work and money, in which we appreciate money’s deeper worth, and therefore distribute it more wisely.

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Mythological Surprise: Angels Aren’t Christian

May 17th, 2013 | Posted by Truman in Religion | Shirts | Uncategorized - (3 Comments)

Angels are wildly popular among Christians. A poll a couple of years ago found that 77 percent of its American respondents expressed belief that angels exist. Michael Landon had a successful television show for years, playing an angel. Then there was the Touched By An Angel series, which was even more popular and long-lived.

messenger goddessAsk most people what an angel is, and they’ll tell you that they’re supernatural beings with wings, described in the Bible. The truth is, though, that the word “angel” doesn’t appear in the Bible once. The Bible only describes creatures called mal’akh.

Mal’akh, to European ears, doesn’t sound very friendly. It’s quite similar to words like malicious and malevolent. Mal is a prefix that Indo-European languages associate with bad intent.

So, when Christians worked to spread their religion into Europe, first through the Greeks, they encouraged the blending of the Mal’akh with something else, with a name that sounds, to European ears, much more lovely: Angelia.

It turns out that the angel is actually a pagan god… or to be more specific, a pagan goddess.

Angelia was, in pre-Christian Greek mythology, a goddess of messages. Angelia had wings, just like the angels as we visualize them today. She had, like her father, winged sandals and wings on her cap, representing her ability to move between realms such as earth and sky, moving wherever she pleased, delivering messages from Mount Olympus to the human world.

Angelia was the daughter of Hermes, the god of boundaries and ritual. Hermes was the son of Zeus, the sky god, and Maia, the earth mother goddess of the Greek religion.

Hermes was the original good shepherd, and was called Christ. His herms were symbolic precursors to the crucifixes that became popular symbols of Christianity among the Greeks. The common European monuments called “market crosses” were actually dedicated to Hermes, not Jesus.

Maia was the inspiration for the Christian legend of Mary, with a role that was mythologically just about the same, mating with the sky god, giving birth to a divine son hidden in a shelter.

So, we have a pagan goddess as the original Mary, and a pagan god as the original Jesus. Now, we have Angelia, a goddess in her own right, part of the same family, with the blood of the sky god himself running through her veins.

It looks like Christianity isn’t so much an outgrowth of Judaism as a hybrid of ancient Greek religion and Judaism. Historically, that shouldn’t come as any surprise, as the people who first developed Christianity were Hellenized Jews.

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Why Are Christians Upset About The Next Day By David Bowie?

May 10th, 2013 | Posted by Rowan in Media | Religion | Video - (9 Comments)

The following is the music video for his song The Next Day. Why would we post it here? Why would you watch it? Well…

YouTube censored the video. The Catholic League and the Archbishop of Canterbury are in a tizzy of outrage about it, which shows priests hanging out and dancing around with sexy young people (which is something that apparently does happen). There’s a stigmatification, and some eyeballs, and blood.

What’s the big deal? There’s a whole lot more gore and sex in the Christians’ holy book than what’s contained in this short video. So, why ban it? Why would Christians get offended?

Perhaps they’re miffed that someone made something a bit more interesting than the tired old material they’ve been working with?

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The Sunny, Warm Judgment of Yahweh Descends Upon Rhode Island

May 6th, 2013 | Posted by Jim Cook in Politics | Religion | Sex and Gender | State and Local - (1 Comments)

Number of prominent Christian pastors who say that weather is the instrument through which God delivers His Divine Judgment regarding homosexuality: at least 6

smiling sunNumber of days since Rhode Island legalized same-sex marriage: 4

Number of warm, sunny days since Rhode Island legalized same sex marriage: 4

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When The Crucifix Was Horny

April 18th, 2013 | Posted by Truman in Religion - (0 Comments)

herm metropolitan museum of artPious literalist Christians will tell you that the crucifix is the symbol of their religion because Jesus was crucified by the Romans. That story is certainly a part of the official Christian mythology, written down and edited together generations after the supposed death of Jesus, but there’s more to the symbol of the crucifix than that.

For one thing, as a religious symbol, the crucifix predates the legendary dates of the life of Jesus – by hundreds of years at least.

For another thing, the original crucifix was horny.

What you see here has the basic shape of what we call a crucifix, but in its time, it was referred to as a herm. It was found in Greece and is estimated to have been made around 490 “BCE”. What does BCE stand for? Perhaps it’s Before the Crucifix got Emasculated.

As you can see, before the Christians got a hold of it, there was no cloth draped strategically over the crucifix, and it had an unashamed erection. It was a phallic image – to a god of commerce, sexual and otherwise.

Sex was about more than just getting it on and having a good time. It was symbolic of the fertility that is created through all sorts of commerce, when trade, literal and metaphorical, of ideas and materials is allowed to cross the boundaries between what seem to be separate entities.

Christianity wasn’t just an outgrowth of Judaism. It was the product of a regional Hellenistic culture that included recognition of the power of the deity represented by the herm – Hermes. Hermes was the original good shepherd. Hermes was called Christ before Jesus ever was. Hermes was the big brother of Jesus, with the same parents, the son of the sky god and the earth goddess Maia.

Before Jesus was crucified in legend, Hermes was the crucifix, and the snakes of fluid transformation that climbed up the crucifix tree represented by the caduceus. The difference between Hermes and his little brother Jesus is that while Jesus regarded the serpent as evil, Hermes watched the serpent undulating, traveling back and forth opposites of shadow and light. While Jesus literally flipped out at moneychangers in the temple, Hermes had the depth to see the sacred quality of their trade, uniting sex, money and enlightenment. Hermes was a trickster, but Jesus saw only the straight lines in life, and was not described in his surviving legends as having laughed, even once.

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GOP Illinois Congressional Candidate Suggests Family Is Only For Christians

March 9th, 2013 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Religion | Republicans - (6 Comments)

Paul McKinley, the Republican candidate to replace Jesse Jackson Jr. as the U.S. Representative for the 2nd congressional district of Illinois, presents himself as a family man. “As your congressman, I will support the family institution in every way, at every level,” McKinley says.

The truth about McKinley’s family values is not so unequivocal, however. McKinley actually supports the family institution only in some ways, only at some levels. McKinley only supports those families that conform to his particular beliefs. He only proposes to represent the family values of Christian constituents, leaving everyone else out in the cold.

“I stand by my principles as a Christian man, and will govern to the best of my ability by those standards,” says McKinley, but where does that leave the rather sizeable minority of residents of the 2nd district of Illinois who are not Christian? Does Paul McKinley believe that non-Christians should submit to Christian religious codes on marriage, or does he simply expect non-Christians to abstain from forming families?

The truth is that Paul McKinley doesn’t even represent the family values of all Christians. Many Christian churches and individuals, for example, support abortion rights and legal equality for same-sex marriage. Paul McKinley refuses to acknowledge these versions of Christian family values, however, and has pledged opposition to them.

Once upon a time, Americans largely believed that there was only a single set of standards for what families ought to look like – a unified “family institution”. That’s not how Americans are living today, however. Our society incorporates diverse cultural perspectives, and it isn’t the legitimate role of anyone in Congress to try to give special preference to any one of those perspectives, especially not on the grounds of personal religious belief.

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A Vatican Of Bad Fish

February 22nd, 2013 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Ethics | Religion - (3 Comments)

Ten days ago, I wondered what could be the real explanation for Joseph Ratzinger deciding to become the first Catholic Pope in over 600 years to resign rather than die in office. Given that his predecessor had made a conspicuous point of staying in office, publicly visible, throughout a gruesome decline into death, Ratzinger’s claim that he was abandoning the position of papal infallibility simply because he was feeling tired didn’t ring true at all.

Now, the real story behind the end of the reign of the man who went by the pen name of Pope Benedict XVI. Vatican insiders are now dividing into camps, fighting for control of the Catholic Church, control over who gets to be the next pope. It is in this light that revelations about the actual circumstances of Ratzinger’s decision to resign are starting to leak out of the Vatican.

A report that came out yesterday revealed that Ratzinger’s official story about resigning due to the gradual effects of aging were a smokescreen. Italian newspapers are now reporting that Ratzinger chose to quit the papacy hours, if not minutes, after he was confronted by a group of elderly cardinals who had documented, in a 300-page leather-bound report, a network of extreme financial corruption within Ratzinger’s administration of the Vatican. The report also detailed how, at the same time that the Roman Catholic Church was bankrolling political campaigns in the United States to try to prevent the legalization of same-sex marriage, significant numbers of the top priests in Rome had organized a system for providing each other with partners for brief homosexual affairs.

The report named names, providing, as La Repubblica put it, “an exact map of the mischief and the bad fish”.

cardinal corruption

Who might the biggest of the bad fish be? It’s significant that some sources within the Vatican suggest that the fighting currently taking place between factions of cardinals is centered over how to elect “a pope immune to blackmail”, implying that the current pope, and some of the people considered likely successors, are not immune to blackmail.

Every human being, Catholic and non-Catholic, has weaknesses. Not every human being, however, belongs to an organization that claims to have an exclusive link to the creator of the universe and a moral code that is indisputable. Making such outrageous claims of moral superiority makes the Catholic Church the legitimate target of extra attention when the truth about its moral failings is exposed.

The theology and liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t seem to have been effective in purging the weakness of financial greed from its top leaders. Revelations of that systematic weakness make it difficult for members of the Catholic laity to tithe quite so generously in the future.

What’s worse for the rest of us is that we all, Catholic and non-Catholic, have been forced to endure the ungracious restriction of sexual self-determination maintained in American law at the insistence of a free-spending Catholic church led by people who seem to have believed that the suppression of homosexuality should only apply to others than themselves. It’s the top priests in Rome who seem to have been the worst “cafeteria Catholics”, doing whatever the hell they wanted while sternly lecturing the rest of the world.

If anything positive is likely to come of the meltdown of credibility in the Vatican, it is that Americans will finally allow their own values of equality, liberty, acceptance of diversity, and government free of religious interference to lead the United States toward a legal system less influenced by medieval prejudice.

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