Eye of the beholder

The other day, this comic was posted on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Would you believe those crazy conservatives at the National Organization for Marriage — those blinkered bozos who think letting gays marry will destroy the fabric of society — posted it on their forums?

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It’s rather strange — the comic shows a bunch of kids who are aghast at the weird old fashioned way babies used to be made. The humor in it is that you have to realize that they aren’t at all horrified by their technology, but find the old ways incomprehensible. It’s actually mocking the rigid antiques, but NOM just thought it was saying something awful about future developments. Today’s comic is on the same theme.

Zach Weiner handled it beautifully. It turns out the NOMers were hot-linking the image, making it easy for the SMBC crew to swap in a new image promoting equality, so the NOMers discovered a liberal message from Thomas Jefferson and a rainbow tainting their blog.

I’m smarter than that. I am not hot-linking the image at all, so Weiner won’t be able to change it on me when he discovers that I have a very different interpretation of his cartoon.

It’s obvious. The cartoon is telling us that in the future, scientists will resurrect, or build robot duplicates of, Isaac Asimov to teach our children about sex ed. I, for one, welcome our Asimovian sex instructors, and am pleased that Zach Weiner won’t be able to modify the illustration above to praise Arthur C. Clarke, instead. Neener neener.

The Papacy Pastiche

So, you know, I had this idea for a novel. I started it, but I’ve since discovered that jewel-like prose and engaging story-telling is a little bit hard, and when I couldn’t finish the whole thing over lunch, I’ve sort of given up. But then I had another brilliant idea! I’ll put up the first significant piece of the story, the really really important part, and let you people finish the rest for me. Just post the subsequent chapters in the comments, and I’ll splice them together and publish them and make a million dollars, and even more when I sell the movie rights. I’ll be sure to include your names somewhere in the endnotes.

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Who would want them?

What an odd news item: there is a rule that the Pope can’t be an organ donor. My first thought was ick — he’s rather decrepit, and if I ever require an organ transplant, I’d rather the source were a young, stupid motorcyclist who doesn’t wear a helmet. The Catholics have other reasons, though.

Vatican officials say that after a pope dies, his body belongs to the entire Church and must be buried intact.

That’s rather morbid and weird. Why bother? It’s not going to be intact for long, and it’s actually going to belong to the worms and bacteria.

But it’s this part that blew my mind.

Furthermore, if papal organs were donated, they would become relics in other bodies if he were eventually made a saint.

I would never have thought of that. Ever. That’s really twisted. What about blood transfusions, then? A few popes are known to have fathered children, too—are they and their descendants actually considered holy relics, too?

I also had this brilliant idea for a cheesy serial-killer thriller novel, too. Pope after pope murdered and butchered, and the killer implants bits and pieces into himself…and then a team of ninja jesuits is commissioned to defend the murderer from the secular police, since he is after all now a sacred artifact of the Catholic church. Conflict! Car chases! Long abstract discussions of the nature of good and evil! Halberd-wielding fanatics vs. Carabinieri with machine guns! Evil madman manipulating the church while preying on it at the same time! Papal gore! And then, in a triumphant ending, a courageous atheist cutting through all the bullshit and taking out the killer while making some sardonic one-liner! “Nothing is sacred, meatsack!” BAM!!!

If you steal my idea, I want royalties.

Men’s Rights! Circumcision! Alimony! Child Support! Golddiggers! Have sex with me and raise my babies!

The misogyny thread is suffering from bloat, so I’m lancing it and allowing the pus to drain here. Continue your discussion, gentlemen. Any of the topics listed in the title are perfectly acceptable.

Ladies, I recommend you wait outside. While the discussion may revolve entirely around your behavior and access to your ladyparts, your opinions will not be wanted and will be ignored anyway.

Creepy priest and a church with creepy priorities

Thomas Euteneuer was an up-and-coming star of the Catholic priesthood: he was a charismatic fellow who appeared on radio and TV and other media to fight for the dogmatic Catholic position on just about everything. He was a crusader against homosexuality, against sex outside of marriage, against contraceptives, against abortion. He was also an official Catholic exorcist, which tells you right there that he was batty all the way through.

But then he was suddenly dismissed from his position on the board of an anti-abortion group, stepped down from one diocese and was transferred to another, and went quiet. There was a conspiracy of silence to keep his crimes, whatever they were, hidden away. That has changed recently, thanks to constant pressure from many angry Catholics, and a few statements have emerged from the church and from Euteneuer himself. They don’t clarify much, and in fact leave me even more curious.

What we know is that whatever Euteneuer did, it was dire — you can rape children in the church and the wheels of Catholic justice turn slowly, but Euteneuer did something that got him whisked out of the public eye surprisingly abruptly.

Whatever it was, it had something to do with his job as an exorcist.

The circumstances that led to my departure from HLI were related exclusively to my own decisions and conduct within the ministry of exorcism that I carried out independently from my responsibilities at HLI.

Hmmm. Curious. Even curiouser, his crime was sexual.

My violations of chastity were limited to one person only, an adult woman;

The violations of chastity happened due to human weakness but did not involve the sexual act;

We also have some other accounts that suggest these events occurred multiple times.

Father [reportedly] admitted to having ‘an inappropriate relationship’ with an employee in his letter of resignation [and] a second woman [apparently] came forward to say that Father had engaged in sexual activity with her — not intercourse, but close to it — while he was performing some type of exorcism prayer(s).

Catholic prayers must be kinkier than I ever imagined. I admit it, I do have a somewhat dirty mind, but looking at that list of admissions, I am totally stumped about what Euteneuer actually did … which is actually amplifying my imagined creepiness of whatever it was. I’d speculate further except that there is a victim involved: as much as Euteneuer may deserve some contempt, the victim deserves some respect.

Which brings me to the really weird part. Everything I’m reading about this situation contains these insistent declarations that the act involved an ADULT! WOMAN! Even the Catholic bishop’s statement about the case emphasizes this.

Euteneuer has been undergoing intensive evaluation and counseling to address admitted inappropriate crossing of adult heterosexual boundaries on the occasion of carrying out his priestly ministry.

See? ADULT! and HETEROSEXUAL!

This bugs me. It’s like they’re saying, “At least it wasn’t gay sex, and it didn’t involve a child.” They’re trying to reduce the magnitude of whatever perversity was committed. And it’s as if they’re reassuring everyone that it wasn’t that awful homosexuality was committed.

And weirdest of all, it’s as if they’re saying that because a woman was the victim, it wasn’t so bad. Women are the designated victims; oh, sure, it’s not good that he was abusing a woman, but it would have been even worse if a man was hurt.

And then there are the people rushing to defend this priest…by attacking the victims.

I think these women are shameful. Their attack will probably backfire on them. They are possessed with evil and it seems that they are getting worse whenever someone disagrees with them. They seem very vindictive in character and self righteous. They don’t seem credible to me.

I have known Fr. Tom personally for more than 13 years and I can assure you of Father’s devotion to the unborn. I have never seen him falter in his ministry as a priest. Being exposed to demons is not an easy thing. Sometimes the demons will purposely twist the bodies of their victims that will have their sexual parts touch the one who is trying to remove the demons. This, I am sure must have happened several times to Father Tom. Many of the women who are possessed also have other mental problems like ADHD and Bi-polar and these people lie very often just to get attention.

Even when the church acts quickly to stop a predatory priest, they just can’t do it right. It’s all those demon women and their wicked ways.

The Nature of Existence

I forgot to mention that I did attend the local screening of The Nature of Existence, the new movie from Roger Nygard in which he traveled the world asking various people grand questions about the meaning of life, etc. It was entertaining, and it is subtly subversive of religious views, so I will recommend it. But I do have a few reservations that I was also able to bring up in the Q&A after the movie.

One thing that was alarmingly obvious when watching it is that almost all the gurus and authorities and religious figures that he interviewed were male. There were exceptions — the 12 year old daughter of his neighbor (who was an unrepentant atheist, and I thought the most sensible voice in the whole movie), a lesbian priest, the wife of a pastor — but otherwise, this show is one long sausage-fest. When I pointed this out, Nygard was apologetic and recognized that this is a significant omission, but explained that he simply hadn’t noticed when he was filming the material. Isn’t that the whole problem, that we’re oblivious to these omissions of half the population of the planet?

Another problem was actually a tactical decision, and I can actually understand why it was done this way. All of the interviews were friendly; Nygard made a conscious decision to be entirely non-confrontational and just allow the interviewees to speak without criticism. It’s a policy that opened doors and allowed him access, and encouraged the people to speak at length. I can’t imagine him making this movie any other way, but still…there were parts where the lack of a critical interrogation meant the subjects were able to effectively hide the more hateful parts of their beliefs. For instance, he interviewed the odious Zakir Naik, the Muslim fanatic who thinks it is a religious obligation to kill opponents of Islam (apostates should merely be imprisoned), and who also considers homosexuality grounds for execution. He also interviewed pompous ol’ Orson Scott Card, and his raving homophobia was left unexposed.

So I was left with rather mixed feelings. The movie only illuminates the middle ground of religious belief, and while it exposes the absurdity while avoiding being judgmental, it also manages to bury the worst aspects of religion. That’s tactically sensible and I consider it an overall good because it will get the movie watched by more people, but man, it’s not my style, and it sort of grated on my nerves. It was nice. I kept waiting for something to explode.

Poor Vatican

The Pope must be wearing ratty, ragged underwear under those silk robes; all the fancy gold statues in the Vatican must be gilt over rotting wood; the famous paintings are all cheap reproductions. The place must be on the verge of economic collapse. At least, that’s what I assume must be the case, since the UK government paid for the Pope’s visit out of Department for International Development funds, a part of the budget that is normally earmarked for aid to “war-torn or fragile states” as part of a commitment to fight global poverty.

So the Vatican must be sort of like Somalia. I had no idea they were in such a dire state.

I’m a middle-class kind of guy who is doing all right economically right now. But I think next time I visit Minneapolis I’m going to get my gas money by beating up some homeless folk, and then I’m going to eat by crashing a soup kitchen…oh, and I’m bigger than those scrawny half-starved old codgers, so I’m going to demand double helpings of everything. Don’t think badly of me, I’ll just be trying to live up to the Catholic ideal.