No-platform the pope

Hot news – the pope will address Congress.

Pope Francis will become the first leader of the Catholic church to address the United States Congress.

Francis will stop off in the Capitol on Sept. 24 during his week-long tour of the U.S., and speak to a joint session of Congress. House Speaker John Boehner announced the news in a Thursday morning tweet.

Why. Why will he do that. Why will the pope address Congress.

Why? Why was he invited?

Congress is the government. It’s a secular government. The pope is the head of a religious institution, and a very wicked reactionary woman-hating child-raping lawbreaking religious institution at that. Why invite him to talk to a major branch of government? Why break the long precedent of not inviting popes to address Congress?

This pisses me off. I don’t want our government sucking up to the Catholic church. It does that way too much as it is.

Down with the pope.

Update to add (on Harald’s excellent advice):

Equine contributions

So now that you know how to conduct yourself if you have the audacity to go out in public, let’s turn our attention to Congress and the pope. Congress has asked the pope to come along and talk to them next time he’s in town, officially.

Congressional leaders have invited Pope Francis to address a joint session of Congress during his expected visit to the United States next year.

He’s planning to come over in September for a conference on families. Because that makes sense, right? Having an officially celibate cleric participate in a conference on families? They should invite him to a conference on early childhood development, too; he could explain the benefits of being raped by the priest and watching nobody care. [Read more…]

What’s happening to the fucking Pope?

We hear a lot about people going out looking for things to be offended by. Sometimes that’s not what’s going on; other times it is.

One of the latter is when an editor shouts across a noisy newsroom, responding to a delay in production, “can anyone tell what’s happening to the fucking Pope?” and a Catholic employee brings a claim in the Employment Tribunal for harassment and victimisation on the grounds of his religious belief. [Read more…]

Go, Joseph, and tweet-sin no more

Kevin Smith of CFI-Canada did another “Ask the Experts” for the Ottawa Citizen – this one on the burning question, “What are your ‘spiritual’ New Year’s resolutions?”

Dam’ fool question. To be nicer to my fellow humans? To see more spooky things? To be a better dualist?

Kevin hints at a similar sort of doubt, but then gives them a reply anyway.

My motivation comes from an unlikely source: the Pope. God’s deputy has taken up  Twitter, and he’s surprisingly adept at pontificating in 140 characters or less.  Recently, he committed what I consider his first tweet-sin, when he charged  atheists with denying human dignity. He wrote, “When you deny God, you deny  human dignity. Whoever defends God is defending the human person.” [Read more…]

What dialogue?

The pope has his message of peace for the new year all written and typed up and translated and posted online. The pope is way ahead of the game! The pope can kick back and watch some football.

Well it won’t have been very difficult. It doesn’t break any new ground. Somebody could have put it together by cutting and pasting from previous messages of peace for the new year.

It’s not very rich in what you might call self-awareness or self-knowledge.

In addition to the varied forms of terrorism and international crime, peace is also endangered by those forms of fundamentalism and fanaticism which distort the true nature of religion, which is called to foster fellowship and reconciliation among people. [Read more…]