How to spot a poorly written article about atheism. (1) The words ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘militant’ are used in the article without any real justification (i.e., do these words have the same meaning for our religious counter-parts, I wonder) (2) ‘Atheistic’ regimes are blamed for the worst human rights offenses (3) We’re told that secularism is an imposition rather than redressing a clear inequity.

It’s clear religious people have absolutely no idea what secularisms really mean. If it isn’t Romney trying to scare people into believing it’s a new religion being imposed by the state, it’s some close-minded Canadian journalist trying to argue militant atheism must recognize the primacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition*. Here are my favorite tropes:

True wars have been started including the crusades but wars have been started for all kinds of reasons including women – we haven’t done away with women have we?

Well, the Catholic Church did try it’s darndest during the Inquisition, with over 100,000 women burned at the stake for witchcraft. The way the Catholic Church fights against contraception, abortion rights, or even historically their right to property, it certainly feels as though full scale war is being waged on women, doesn’t it?

Did you know why we don’t execute people that are mentally ill? That goes back in the ages and was established because those not in a proper state of mind would not be able to make a proper confession of their sins and therefore killing them would also be condemning them to hell. It was seen as the compassionate thing to do.

Actually, if you were to ask most Canadians if they thought the death penalty should be re-instated in Canada, you’ll find a disproportionate number of religious people in favor of capital punishment. This tends to be a fairly universal phenomenon: highly religious people have no problem with this kind of final solution, and to claim that religion itself is the reason Canada no longer has the death penalty is just plain ignorant. This guy also seems not to really give a shit if the person who gets executed isn’t missing a chromosome, but I digress.

I believe the theory is live and let live. I can put forward my views, you can put forward yours and we can all make up our own minds. From pushing for God to be dropped from our national anthem, trying to make sure you can’t mention Easter or heaven forbid Christmas in a school to now conscience rights – trying to force doctors who have religious convictions to perform abortions against their will – there is no rest for the other side.

Ah yes, this new trope from the religious that we’re trying to ‘impose’ our secularism on others. As though removing what is already government mandated religion out of our anthem, or allowing for non-denominational holiday celebrations is automatically a threat to their advantaged position. Damn right. Secularism is about removing God from the public forum, and making it entirely a private belief again. I share his live and let live attitude, which is why I want his God out of my fucking face.

(Update: The site thankfully no longer exists, and was never web archived)

The Catholic Church has been playing at nonsense so long, they think their own bullshit doesn’t stink. How else can you explain how an octogenarian master of fantasy can say something as idiotic as this:

Practising yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter,” he told a film festival in Umbria this week, where he was invited to introduce The Rite, a film about exorcism starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as a Jesuit priest.

The Rite, as you may recall, is a movie staring Anthony Hopkins that claims to be based on a true story. Father Gabriele Amorth is the founder of International Association of Exorcists, a kind of deadly Dungeons and Dragons club that takes itself way too seriously. Amorth and his gang of weirdos think the devil is real, that science is bullocks, and finally that everything they didn’t come up with is evil:

“Satan is always hidden and what he most wants is for us not to believe in his existence. He studies every one of us and our tendencies towards good and evil, and then he offers temptations.” Science was incapable of explaining evil, said Father Amorth, who has written two books on his experiences as an exorcist. “It’s not worth a jot.

A jot, for anyone born after The First World War, means something tiny and insignificant, not unlike his pathetic opinions. Seriously, you have to shake your head in disbelief; here is a man who makes a living by pretending to exorcise demons from people claiming that Harry Potter and yoga is evil, simply because it wasn’t thought up by a 2000 year old dead Palestinian Jew. It would be sad if exorcism wasn’t so fucked up: there are countless stories of dumb people killing their friends and family doing this shit. I’ve yet to see anyone seriously fucked up after watching “Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban”, I can tell you that.

Religions are finally starting to understand that the scientific revolution, and the information age is eroding the power of their institution. It turns out that material explanations for natural processes are much more satisfying than a bunch of outdated superstitious ideas and vague promises of life eternal. A formerly religious fan who wrote to me recently put it better than I ever could:

I’ve always rebelled against those ideas [religion] but have never considered atheism nor have I ever done any kind of research on the origins of life, our planet, and the universe. Since becoming an atheist I’ve learned so much about these things. It’s really amazing how rejecting fairy tales really opens your mind to some really fucking amazing things.

Confused and afraid, the Church has only one “solution” for the problem: bringing it back to the love of Jesus, and making people understand that only their institution can properly hand out tickets to the magical playland in the sky. They worry about an increasingly secularized world, combined with a weak-sauce form of spirituality that lacks the important tithing they cherish so much. As membership continues to slide, no doubt they see the writing on the wall.

Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York seems to understand that there’s a serious problem:

They [churchgoers] drift from her, get mad at the Church, grow lax, join another, or just give it all up,” he said, according to a text of his remarks posted on the Conference’s website (www.usccb.org). If this does not cause us pastors to shudder, I do not know what will. The reasons are multiple and well-rehearsed — and we need to take them seriously. The Church we passionately love is hardly some cumbersome, outmoded club of sticklers, with a medieval bureaucracy, silly human rules on fancy letterhead, one more movement rife with squabbles, opinions, and disagreement.

I totally agree. The Church is so much more than cumbersome, outmoded, silly and filled with squabbles and disagreement. It’s also a criminal organization that’s sheltered pedophiles and child rapists since its inception, been responsible for some of the most brutal genocides and massacres in our species history (Just ask the Cathari how they feel about the Church. Oh wait, you can’t, since they slaughtered them all), and still to this day continues to spread death and misery over their stupid objection to contraception.

With all the bad press they’ve been getting recently for harboring child-rapists, continuing their campaign to prevent contraceptive use in AIDS-ridden Africa, and saying generally hateful things about gays, the Vatican is looking for a bit of good news. Their deliverance has taken the form of a disfigured young boy, saved from the clutches of death by medical science and a combative immune system. His parents happened to be Catholics, and the child’s “miraculous” recovery was seen as an opportunity to thank the wrong people for saving their son.

Catholics believe in the ability of dead people to intervene in prayer. Often this is referred to as “intercessory prayer”, a kind of bureaucratic way of talking to God. Because you’re a worthless ant, someone dead but far worthier of God’s love can attempt to compel this capricious entity to be merciful. In the case of Jake Finkbonner (yes, that’s a real last name), this apparently involved him being saved from one of God’s loving flesh eating viruses.

At the trauma unit at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Craig Rubens, a pediatric infectious disease specialist, instantly suspected a flesh-eating bacteria called strep A. It was consuming Jake’s face with terrifying speed.

“It’s like lighting one end of a parchment paper,” he says, “and you just watch it spread from that corner very fast, and you’re stamping it on one side, and it’s flaming up on another.”

Dr. Richard Hopper, chief of plastic surgery at Seattle Children’s, had never seen a case so dire.

“It’s almost as if you could watch it moving in front of your eyes,” he says. “The redness and the swelling — we would mark it and within the hour it would have spread another half-inch.”

While surgeons struggled valiantly to save Jake’s life, his parents busied themselves with superstitious nonsense.

“Donny and I went off to the chapel and just surrendered Jake back to God,” she recalls. “We just said, ‘God, he is yours. Thy will be done, and if it is your will to take him home, then so be it.’ “

Jake is of Native decent, so the local priest instructed his parents to pray through a dead Mohawk nun by the name of Kateri Tekakwitha. Born in 17th century America, Kateria had horrible scars from small pox (brought on by God’s love no doubt), and took an interest in Christianity, fleeing to a convent in Quebec. Her faith took on a masochistic element; she would often perform acts of self mortification such as sleeping on thorns or cutting herself while praying for the salvation of her people. This insane woman, who died at the age of 24, would later become the subject of Leonard Cohen’s second novel, Beautiful Losers.

And guess what? The doctors pull it off, and the kid gets a new lease on life:

Surgeon Richard Hopper says after two weeks and a dozen surgeries, the team of doctors had little hope they could get ahead of the bacteria. And when they realized they did, he says, it was breathtaking.

So where exactly is this fucking miracle, you ask? It seems pretty clear that the surgery worked, and yet purveyors of nonsense are tripping over themselves trying to congratulate a confused and isolated nun who died over 3 centuries ago. Congratulations, guys: you’re all fucking geniuses.