So why do we care about the Vatican’s position on science, anyway?

The Vatican has a chief exorcist. There is an International Association of Exorcists. They believe Hitler was possessed by a demon and tried a long-distance exorcism. Oh, and Harry Potter is evil.

Adolf Hitler and Russian leader Stalin were possessed by the Devil, the Vatican’s chief exorcist has claimed.

Father Gabriele Amorth who is Pope Benedict XVI’s ‘caster out of demons’ made his comments during an interview with Vatican Radio.

Father Amorth said: “Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.”

Shouldn’t people be ashamed of being, for instance, the official Vatican astronomer, and having to be in the same category with these witch doctors?

(via The Indigestible)

Help Wal-Mart tread the path of righteousness

Wal-Mart has a policy in place to protect its customers from the obscenity and wickedness that writers put into books, yet they still have a few books on the shelves that are terribly indecent—one must assume that their censors are simply too busy to have read them to determine the unpleasantness of their content. In order to help them become more consistent, I urge everyone to sign the petition asking that one of these unsavory texts be removed immediately.

(via Aaron Kinney)

I recommend this as an entrance exam for the priesthood

Maybe it would have been more sensible to start with the water-and-wine trick, and later work up to the walking-on-water finale.

A priest has died after trying to demonstrate how Jesus walked on water. Evangelist preacher Franck Kabele, 35, told his congregation he could repeat the biblical miracle. But he drowned after walking out to sea from a beach in the capital Libreville in Gabon, west Africa. One eyewitness said: “He told churchgoers he’d had a revelation that if he had enough faith, he could walk on water like Jesus. “He took his congregation to the beach saying he would walk across the Komo estuary, which takes 20 minutes by boat. “He walked into the water, which soon passed over his head and he never came back.”

The apostate kidney

What a strange story: a woman donates one of her kidneys to another woman in need. Later, the recipient leaves the Christian faith. Now the donor wants her organ back.

Smith was aghast when she heard of the conversion, and she quickly wrote a letter asking Felks to re-convert to Christianity or return the organ, saying it was donated under false pretenses.

“I feel helpless,” she says. “Part of my body, my DNA, is stuck inside a person who’s going to hell.”

There’s some freaking weird theology going on here. Does she think her DNA is going to be assumed into the afterlife? Do spirits have DNA? Do you need a kidney as an angel?

She also has some strange anxieties, since the recipient is a pagan.

Smith suffers nightmares of her former organ filtering “strange Asian teas, pig blood and witch doctor brews in Africa,” she says. She wonders if the Lord really wanted her to donate the kidney, or if she acted on a “triple-espresso high” she had that morning. She is also concerned that when her body is resurrected, it might be incomplete.

That’s tragic. The kidney is also missing the opportunity to filter the body and blood of Christ, transforming Jesus’ protein into urine. Oh, to never again deaminate the amino acids of the God of Abraham, to never again extract Jesus’ sodium ions, and to have to settle for filtering the ichor of little animist gods…what a sad fate.

I don’t know about this bodily resurrection thing. I would think that running a little lapsang souchong through the ol’ nephric ducts is small potatoes compared to being perfused with embalming fluid and later rotting into a putrid film of bacterial goo. Apparently, the Holy Ghost can reanimate that, but foreign tea is going to have It scratching It’s immaterial and invisible Head.

The theological absurdity goes on.

“I’m all for spiritual curiosity,” she says, “but you’ve got to settle these things beforehand. My kidney belongs to Christ. It will never be Pagan.

Hmm. Yes. Various organs in your body all make intellectual and emotional decisions about what religion they should follow. Personally, I’ve had my organs all committed to different and appropriate philosophies: my colon is a good disciplined Calvinist, my lungs are Breatharians, my right forefinger is an acolyte of the cult of Macintosh (*click*, praise Jobs!), and my penis is observant of some hysterically hedonistic faith which doesn’t require much in the way of intellectual expression. My brain, however, is godless.

Smith’s brain is definitely fundamentalist Christian: inert, uninformed, and irrational.

(via God is for Suckers)

P.S. Some people aren’t getting it. The article is satire, although if you do think about it, there is some weird stuff going on with this whole idea of an afterlife.

The Catholic Church retreats into the darkness, again

George Coyne, the Vatican astronomer, has been sacked. Red State Rabble and John Wilkins speak out on it.

They cite one source condescendingly claiming that Coyne “appointed himself an expert in evolutionary biology,” while Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute (speaking of unqualified gits appointing themselves the status of ‘expert’) calls Coyne an “evangelizing Darwinist,” and blames his fall on his radical theology. It seems to me that Coyne was actually a highly qualified scientist who was well-informed about the general principles of science, and who informed the Vatican about the actual status of the discipline of evolution within the domain of science. What this represents is a case of Catholicism once again rushing to bury its head in the sand—they can’t have someone who honestly represents the uncomfortable facts of science speaking out, after all. I’m sure his replacement will be better steeped in the dogma, will confine himself to a much less forthright position, and appreciates theology more than the science.

I hope George Coyne uses the freedom from one set of duties to reconsider that religion thing. It must be hard to serve two masters, especially when one is about enlightenment and knowledge, and the other is about ignorance and dogma.